Chapter 2 #2
She leaned nearer the window, praying to be proven wrong as she peered at the signage of an inn as they passed.
The Brown Boar Inn was well known to her.
Hadn’t they stopped there for a bite to eat on every journey to Hartwell?
Perhaps we are only passing through. Perhaps we must go this route to get to their ultimate destination.
Oh, how she prayed those desperate pleas might prove true!
It was too close. The chance of seeing him—of him seeing her—it was too great. What if, after all the care she had taken to keep her identity concealed for all these years, she had suddenly been offered a position in the same county, in the same small hamlet, where Oliver lived?
Whenever Mrs. Baxter offered a position, Lydia's first question was never the salary nor the family, but the county.
There were places she had deliberately avoided for twelve years.
Places where memory lingered too readily and where an unexpected encounter might undo the life she had spent so many years constructing.
She had declined excellent situations rather than venture too near them.
Was it foolish of her to have assumed that Mrs. Baxter would apply those rules without her having specifically demanded it on that occasion?
She would never have accepted the offer of employment had she known it might jeopardize her anonymity, the disguise that she’d worn for so very long it felt more like her true identity than that of the girl she’d once been.
The carriage rounded another gentle curve.
A small stone bridge crossed a narrow stream, and beyond it stood an ivy-covered chapel that she knew only too well.
Abandoned since the reformation, stripped of anything of value, it was little more than a ruin.
But she’d gone there with Oliver. Countless times.
They’d slip away from the inn as their families traveled to Hartwell to make wedding plans and to redecorate his house to their standard.
And they’d walk amongst the fallen stones and occasionally slip from view long enough for a stolen kiss.
She gulped in air and grew lightheaded as she was unable to expel it.
Her lungs had seized entirely. Panic. It was nothing but pure panic which had her in its thrall.
Is it? The tiny voice whispering in her head would give her no peace.
Because it wasn’t simply panic. It was grief.
It was pain she’d buried so deeply for so long that she feared it would overwhelm her entirely given a single opportunity.
Lydia closed her eyes, forcing herself to relax, forcing the tension from her body until at last she exhaled sharply with a loud whoosh.
Then as they passed through the village, just beyond it, the road forked and the carriage turned left.
All other possibilities were forfeit at that point because that road had only one possible destination. Hartwell Hall.
Try as she might, she could not force herself to sit back, to not greedily drink in the sights that should have been hers daily.
And when the carriage turned off the lane onto the pebbled drive leading to the house, she took as much of a steadying breath as she could muster.
There was a strange kind of calm that came with the notion that what was about to occur was inevitable.
She would do this. She could get through this.
After all, she’d gotten through so much worse.
Lydia allowed her gaze to pan the scenery.
At first she thought the color a trick of the light.
A faint haze of violet lay across the hillside, so delicate it scarcely seemed real.
But as the horses continued steadily forward, the color of those blooms deepened.
Row upon perfect row of lavender plants spread away from the road, the breeze carrying the unmistakable scent through the open carriage window.
Not a garden, she thought. It was a crop.
Acres upon acres of lavender stretched out before them.
Even had she not recognized the scenery, she would have known.
Hartwell lavender was much in demand. On her pittance of a governess’ salary she could not afford to purchase it, but that didn’t alter the fact that many a maid had spent their last guinea to have the small luxury of clean-smelling, sweetly scented clothing.
He’d often complained about his mother’s obsession for her lavender plants.
And then he’d done something that was uniquely Oliver.
He’d found a way to make it work, to use that to salvage his estates.
Would he still have done that had they married?
The idea that her sacrifice might have been for nothing struck so deeply it felt like a blow.
But then she quickly dismissed it. There was no point in second guessing things she could no longer change.
The only option available to her was to move forward, and that meant confronting all that she’d walked away from so long ago.