Chapter Four The Gamekeeper #2
She remembered him smiling at her across a field of red flags, as if her stubbornness were not a defect he intended to correct but a fact he had somehow begun to enjoy.
That was the thought she carried upstairs to change before luncheon.
And it was precisely why, when the clock approached two, Mary Beth went to the west office prepared to answer a question Ambrose Tavener had not yet decided whether he had the right to ask.
The west office smelled of leather bindings, dust, and the faint mineral damp common to rooms that had been built before anyone thought ventilation a moral necessity.
Mary Beth had spent enough of the afternoon there to find three sets of contractor accounts from the period Ambrose wanted. She arranged them on the long table beneath the windows and told herself that the fact she had chosen to work before he arrived had nothing to do with the morning.
It had everything to do with the morning.
At two precisely, Ambrose entered.
He had put his coat back on. Mary Beth regretted this and was annoyed at herself for regretting it.
“You found the ledgers,” he said.
“Three years of them.”
“I asked for the drainage accounts.”
“And I decided you wanted the surrounding works as well.”
He approached the table and opened the first volume. “Did you?”
“You are welcome.”
For twenty minutes they worked without discussing anything except stone, tile, wages, cartage, and the extraordinary Victorian talent for making simple expenses unreadable.
Ambrose found the clay-pipe installation in an 1859 account, then found a later payment for repairs that had apparently been made without any accompanying plan.
Mary Beth leaned over his shoulder to read the narrow handwriting.
“There,” she said. “Two laborers for six days. Three loads of stone. No mention of pipe.”
“Because they repaired the wall, not the cause.”
“Again.”
“Again.”
“You sound personally offended.”
“Bad work offends me.”
“A useful prejudice.”
“One of several.”
Mary Beth straightened.
The word carried an edge.
It was small enough to ignore and sharp enough that she chose not to.
“And what are the others?”
Ambrose closed the ledger.
“That was not what I meant.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Then perhaps you should say what you did mean.”
He was silent for a moment.
Outside the window, a cart rattled across the distant yard. Somewhere in the house a door shut. The sounds only made the quiet inside the office more deliberate.
Ambrose rested one hand on the ledger.
“The man this morning had heard a story.”
“Yes.”
“So had two others.”
Mary Beth’s expression did not change.
“How efficient.”
“I stopped the conversation.”
“Then your authority has benefits.”
“I didn’t stop it because I thought you needed defending.”
That surprised her.
Ambrose continued. “I stopped it because they were being paid to dig a drain, not inventory your bedchamber.”
Mary Beth almost smiled. “That is less chivalrous.”
“Good.”
“You disapprove of chivalry?”
“Usually when it is offered to a woman who hasn’t asked for it.”
The answer landed somewhere she had not protected.
Mary Beth moved to the window.
“What did they tell you?”
Ambrose did not pretend not to understand.
“That after your husband died, the gamekeeper began entering the house by the rear passage after dark.”
“He never entered by the rear passage.”
Ambrose’s brows rose slightly.
Mary Beth turned from the window.
“He used the garden door.”
Silence.
She watched Ambrose process the correction.
He neither laughed nor looked shocked.
Most importantly, he spared her the male expression she knew too well: fascination disguised as moral concern.
He merely waited.
It irritated her more than outrage might have.
“You asked,” she said.
“I did.”
“And now you know.”
“Part of it.”
Mary Beth’s chin lifted. “Do you require dates?”
“No.”
“Names?”
“No.”
“A confession?”
“I haven’t accused you of anything.”
“Everyone accuses a woman before asking whether she considers the act a crime.”
Ambrose leaned back against the table, arms loose at his sides.
“Do you?”
“Consider it a crime?”
“Regret it.”
Mary Beth looked at him.
There was no challenge in his face. No invitation either. He had asked the question as plainly as he asked whether a culvert had been cleared.
That made the truth easier.
“No.”
The word entered the room without trembling.
Mary Beth had said it silently many times.
She had said versions of it to herself while fastening earrings before dinners where women would whisper.
She had said it once to Benedict when he had referred delicately to her ’difficult years.
’ But she had rarely said it this simply to a man who knew exactly what she meant.
“My marriage was respectable,” she said. “It was also lonely. My husband was not cruel. He was not faithless. He was simply a man who regarded affection as something best expressed by making certain the roof did not leak.”
Ambrose glanced toward the ceiling. “A respectable standard at Blackthorn.”
She gave him a look.
“That was almost a joke.”
“I am expanding my skills.”
Mary Beth’s mouth betrayed her for a moment. Then she continued.
“When he died, everyone expected grief to make me decorative. Black dress. Lowered eyes. Quiet dinners. A suitable interval before I became useful to society again.”
“How long was suitable?”
“Apparently forever, if one asked his sister.”
Ambrose’s mouth moved.
“The gamekeeper was a widower,” Mary Beth said. “He was kind. He never lied to me. He never pretended that what passed between us was courtship.”
Ambrose’s face remained unreadable.
“It lasted several months. Then he left the estate to marry a woman in Durham whom he had known before coming to Blackthorn. I wished him well.”
“Were you in love with him?”
Mary Beth considered the question.
“No.”
“Was he in love with you?”
“No.”
“Then at least neither of you was confused.”
She stared.
“That is all you have to say?”
“What would you prefer?”
“I don’t know.”
“Condemnation?”
“It would be familiar.”
“Then you don’t need mine.”
Something tightened low in Mary Beth’s chest.
She moved away from the window because standing still suddenly felt unsafe.
“You are remarkably calm for a man who has just confirmed one of Yorkshire’s favorite scandals.”
“I grew up among quarrymen.”
“And quarrymen are famously liberal concerning widows?”
“Quarrymen are famously occupied.”
She laughed.
Ambrose did not.
His gaze remained on her, steady and disturbingly direct.