Chapter Thirteen #2
Until at last Angus was sitting in the sofa and Rachel was sitting on his knee, his arms were round her and hers were round his neck, and a pensive peace descended.
‘So you’re Sir Angus Tullamore now,’ Rachel said at last.
‘If you marry me, you will be Lady Rachel Tullamore.’ A baronet was deemed a commoner, so Rachel, being of higher rank, would keep her natal title.
‘“If” I marry you?’
He closed his arms, giving her a little squeeze. ‘You haven’t said you will, yet. But I have my own fortune now, enough to keep you properly, in the style you deserve.’
Rachel rather wanted to ask how much the fortune was, but felt it would be indelicate. Instead she said, ‘So you won’t have to work for Mr Cowling any more?’
‘Oh,’ he said, and loosened his grip enough to look at her. ‘I won’t have to, but if you don’t mind very much, I would like to. I’m accustomed to working. I don’t think I’d be happy without something to do. But it would be a different working arrangement. If, indeed, he’ll take me back.’
‘Why wouldn’t he?’ she said, with motherly indignation that made him smile.
‘Because I left him in the lurch – went off with no notice and nothing but a telegram. I’ll have to go and try to make everything right with him.’
‘Go? Not now – not yet?’
‘No, next week. Lady Stainton has asked me to stay until Monday, so we’ll have the weekend together.’
‘I don’t want you to go away.’
‘I’ll come back. I’ll always come back, Rachel,’ he said, looking seriously into her eyes. ‘Will you marry me?’
‘Oh, yes, of course,’ she said, with a grin and a hug that were more fifteen than twenty-almost-twenty-one. ‘And the good thing is that I’ll be of age in two weeks and no-one can stop me any more. Can we get married straight away?’
‘We can. But think about it for a moment. Don’t you want a nice wedding, with a fine wedding-dress and guests and a grand wedding-breakfast afterwards? All that will take time to arrange.’
She was going to say None of that matters, but stopped and thought, and said more honestly, ‘Well…I rather would. Not terribly grand, but nice.’
‘And it will take time for me to find a house suitable to bring my bride home to.’
Her face lit. ‘A house! Oh, it will be fun to hunt for one! I love looking at other people’s houses!’
‘And of course your birthday is in August and everyone will be away. It might be a sorry sort of wedding if we had it in August.’
‘I do want everyone to come,’ she said wistfully. ‘Perhaps…What do you think about October? People will be back by then. Early October.’
‘It will be hard to carry on not being married to you for two more months, but I think that’s a wise idea.’
Her expression grew suddenly grave, and she looked into his face searchingly. ‘You won’t change your mind? You really have forgiven me for behaving badly?’
‘Hinny, it’s me who needs forgiving. I was an arrogant ass. I won’t change my mind, but I’m afraid you might.’
‘Never!’ she declared. And then she sighed, but it was a contented sigh. ‘It was always you, Angus. I only ever loved you. Anything else was just silliness. I want to be married to you and be with you for always.’
The only possible response to that was more kissing.
Kitty intercepted Giles when he came in at the day’s end, to make sure that she was the one to break the news to him tactfully. He had been in a strange mood lately, and she wasn’t sure how he’d take it.
Giles felt irritable at being waylaid, when his intention had been to slip unseen up to his room and ring for a bath.
Even though he had long been anticipating it, the telegram from Market Harborough had unsettled him.
A girl! Somehow he found that more upsetting than if it had been a boy.
He and Kitty had no daughter, though she had sometimes spoken wistfully of wanting one.
But a girl baby would surely grow up to look like Nina, so leave no room for speculation.
Now it was actually here, he found that he didn’t want anything to upset its life, or Nina’s.
Things were what they were; he and Nina could not be together.
In that case, better that she had a full life with Cowling, a proper marriage and children.
He hoped Cowling was a real husband to her.
One day, perhaps, it would be possible to be in the same room again with her, but for now it was better they did not see each other.
He believed she felt the same, for there had been little contact between her and Kitty since Christmas.
Perhaps she and Kitty would drift apart, now they both had children.
Perhaps that was for the best. But he’d had to get out of the house every day, and walk and ride and work until he was tired, to drive the thought of Nina from his mind… Nina and the baby…
He was afraid, when Kitty stopped him and insisted on taking him into the ante-room to talk, that it was the Cowlings she wanted to talk about.
He listened impatiently, preparing exit lines in his head.
But it turned out to be Rachel and Angus, and his impatience turned to relief and then to amusement as she unfolded the whole tale.
‘All that time and effort spent in strife and conflict! Mother and Sir Gordon might just as well have come to terms in the first place,’ he exclaimed, when she had finished.
‘It isn’t funny, Giles,’ Kitty said reproachfully.
‘But it is! Mother wouldn’t have Rachel marry a mere baronet’s son, and Sir Gordon wouldn’t have Angus marry a girl without a fortune.
Folly and vanity! Now he’s dead, Mother’s married and gone, and the marriage will go ahead anyway.
Unless Angus comes to his senses and realises he could do a great deal better than my silly sister. ’
‘Oh, don’t say that!’ Kitty breathed. ‘If you’d seen how happy Rachel was to see him! She’ll be a good wife to him, now she knows how much she loves him.’
‘Now he’s come into a fortune,’ Giles amended. ‘Well, no need to find a dowry for her, then – he can take her off my hands for nothing.’
‘I wish you would be a little pleased,’ Kitty complained.
He patted her arm. ‘I am pleased – and relieved. I hope they will be very happy. When are they planning to wed?’
‘The first week of October – and, Giles, this is Rachel’s home. Girls get married from their home.’ She looked at him anxiously.
‘Of course she can have the wedding here. Do you think I would deprive you of the pleasure, little wife? I will give her away, as head of the family, and Mrs Terry shall make the wedding cake. She shall have four white horses to draw her carriage to church, and a wedding-breakfast to remember afterwards. I’ll even pay for it all.
When it comes down to it, he’s taking her off my hands, and the wedding will cost less than her keep for the next forty years. ’
‘You’re very unkind,’ Kitty rebuked him, but she was laughing now. Then her eyes widened. ‘Oh dear, I’ve just had an alarming thought: we’ll have to ask your mother to the wedding, won’t we?’
‘An even more alarming thought,’ said Giles, ‘is that she might accept.’
When Alice arrived in the stableyard, Josh greeted her with the sour look laced with pleasure that usually accompanied his delivery of bad news.
‘Pharaoh’s got a bit of heat in his near fore. You’ll have to rest him today, if you don’t want him dead lame.’
Alice went straight to her horse, found him tied facing outwards in his stall. He whickered a greeting when he saw her, and nuzzled her shoulder as she bent to feel the leg, and found, yes, a warmth in the cannon.
Josh, standing behind her, said with satisfaction, ‘Told yer!’
Alice stood, feeling guilty. She had been riding him hard almost every day. ‘What did I do to you, old boy?’ she murmured, stroking his nose. He nudged at her and sighed deeply. ‘What are you doing for it?’ she asked.
‘Only just found it,’ Josh said. ‘I’ll take him out and soak it in a bit, and put a bandage on. Then we’ll see.’ In a kinder voice he said, ‘Why not take Queen Bee? Save me exercising her later.’
Bee was fresh, threw her head about and shied at ghosts in hedges.
Alice drove her into a canter up the hill to ‘take the ginger out’, as Giddins, who was groom to her and Rachel when they were little, used to say.
She didn’t like riding Bee very much – the mare’s cadences were not good like Pharaoh’s, and she lurked behind the bit, which made controlling her shying difficult.
Alice could understand why Giddins had always insisted she was well exercised before her mother took her out.
She supposed it was a sort of tribute to her horsemanship that Josh felt she could ride Bee with the ginger still in.
At the top of the hill she turned along the crest and settled into a walk and her thoughts.
She was feeling disturbed because Richard had read out an item from the newspaper at breakfast about an excursion bus crashing on the notoriously steep Handcross Hill, killing ten people and injuring twenty-six.
‘It seems to be a bad year for public transportation,’ he commented.
‘It’s not two weeks since that rail crash at Salisbury. ’
A fast train had derailed while running through Salisbury station, killing twenty-four passengers and four railwaymen.
‘And our own crash is still fresh in the memory. One hardly dares leave the house, these days, for fear of runaway machinery.’ He had nodded at Alice and said, ‘You’re wise to stick to horses.’
It was four years since Richard had been involved in a motor smash, but his arm would never be quite right again, which perhaps explained why the item had caught his attention.
But it had brought back memories for Alice, and she rode Queen Bee automatically, her mind troubled, filled with unwelcome images.