Chapter Five Under the Bridge
CHAPTER FIVE
Under the Bridge
At seven twenty-eight the following morning, Mary Beth discovered that better boots did not improve Ambrose Tavener’s disposition.
They merely deprived him of one complaint.
He stood at the foot of the terrace steps with a rolled survey sheet beneath one arm, his coat buttoned against the gray morning and an expression that suggested he had already found three things wrong with the day.
His gaze dropped to her feet.
Mary Beth stopped on the final step.
“Well?”
“Those are better.”
“That is the warmest compliment you have paid me.”
“They may keep you from sliding down a quarry face.”
“And there it is. The romance is gone.”
Something moved at the corner of his mouth.
Mary Beth pretended not to see it.
The rain had stopped during the night, but the estate still wore the storm. Water clung to the yews. The gravel was dark beneath their feet. Beyond the lawns, low clouds pressed against the moor until the distant hills seemed to have been erased.
Ambrose unfolded the survey sheet on the stone balustrade.
“The lower quarry is here.” He touched a point southwest of the manor. “If the old records are right, the north wall was originally built from that bed. If the stone is still sound, we can match the existing work closely enough that the repair won’t look like a patch from the road.”
“We?”
His attention shifted to her.
“You are determined to come.”
“You invited me yesterday.”
“I agreed under pressure.”
“I lowered breakfast by half an hour.”
“Exactly.”
Mary Beth pulled on her gloves.
“Lead on, Mr. Tavener.”
His eyes lingered on her for a moment before he rolled the map again.
“Stay where I can see you.”
She smiled sweetly. “You do make invitations sound irresistible.”
They crossed the south lawn and followed an old cart road into the trees.
The lower quarry had been closed for more than twenty years.
Mary Beth remembered it from childhood visits to Blackthorn, before marriage had made the estate her home and widowhood had made it hers.
Even then the place had felt abandoned: a wound in the hillside half healed by moss, fern, and ash saplings.
The track descended gradually at first, then steepened as it entered the wooded hollow. Rainwater ran in shallow channels beside the wheel ruts. Here and there, old stone blocks lay under nettles where quarrymen had left them decades earlier.
Ambrose walked ahead, testing the ground with the iron-shod end of a survey staff he had brought from the work site.
Mary Beth watched his shoulders move beneath his coat.
This was becoming a habit she did not admire in herself.
“You are staring again,” he said.
She nearly stepped into a puddle.
“I beg your pardon?”
He did not turn.
“You stared at my sleeves yesterday. Today it appears to be my back.”
Mary Beth felt heat rise beneath her collar.
“You have an extraordinary opinion of yourself.”
“I have eyes.”
“In the back of your head?”
“No. But you become very quiet when you’re guilty.”
“I am rarely guilty.”
“That wasn’t the question.”
He glanced over his shoulder then, and the amusement in his face was unmistakable.
Mary Beth lifted her chin.
“I was considering whether a man who criticizes ladies’ boots for a living can truly call himself an engineer.”
“Much better.”
“What is?”
“The lie.”
She almost laughed.
Almost.
Instead she walked past him.
Ambrose caught her elbow before she had taken three steps.
Mary Beth’s attention dropped to his hand.
His hand dropped away before she could comment.
“Old drainage cut,” he said, pointing to a depression hidden beneath leaves. “Two feet deep at least.”
She peered at it.
“I saw it.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“I was about to.”
“From the bottom?”
She gave him a look.
Ambrose moved ahead again, but she heard the quiet sound of his laugh.
The quarry opened before them twenty minutes later.
A steep wall of gray-brown stone rose from the hollow, banded by decades of weather. Birch trees had rooted along the upper edge. Rubble covered the floor, softened by moss and grass. The old cutting face still showed the straight marks of iron tools in places where frost had not broken them away.
Mary Beth stopped.
She had forgotten the scale of it.
Ambrose had not.
His entire manner changed.
The teasing disappeared. He crossed the floor slowly, studying the exposed beds, crouching to examine fallen pieces, scraping lichen from one block with the edge of a small knife. He struck two stones together and listened to the sound. Then he looked up at the face again.
Mary Beth watched him work.
There was something intimate in competence.
Perhaps that was the danger of men who knew exactly what they were doing. They made certainty look like strength rather than arrogance.
“Good?” she asked.
“Possibly.”
“That is not a word likely to inspire creditors.”
“It isn’t intended to. Stone doesn’t improve because I flatter it.”
He handed her a broken piece.
“Look at the grain.”
Mary Beth turned it in her gloved hands.
It was finer than the stone from the upper wall, but the color was nearly exact beneath the weathered surface.
“This came from the same bed?”
“I think so. The upper courses at the north wall have twenty or thirty years more exposure than this face, but the mineral pattern matches.”
“What does that mean for the repair?”
“It means you may own your solution.”
Her eyes met his.
“The quarry belongs to Blackthorn.”
“Yes.”
“And the stone?”
“Also Blackthorn’s. Unless some long-dead lawyer has performed a miracle in the mineral rights.”
Mary Beth smiled. “Dead lawyers at Blackthorn have performed stranger miracles.”
He took the stone from her.
“I need to test several beds and make certain we can reopen a small section safely. We won’t take much. Enough facing stone to match the old wall. The interior can use sound rubble from the collapse once it’s sorted.”
“And the cost?”
“Less than hauling matching stone from Leeds.”
“Considerably?”
“Enough that you may forgive me for criticizing your boots.”
“I had not realized forgiveness was for sale so cheaply.”
“It depends upon the boots.”
The first drop of rain struck the back of Mary Beth’s glove.
Then another darkened Ambrose’s shoulder.
His attention went to the quarry mouth.
“That wasn’t supposed to arrive until afternoon.”
Mary Beth followed his gaze. “Do engineers arrange the weather now?”
“Only the competent ones.”
Thunder rolled somewhere beyond the ridge.
The humor left Ambrose’s face.
“We’re leaving.”
“We have only just arrived.”
“We have enough to justify a crew inspection. I don’t need you beneath a quarry face during a storm.”
“You don’t need me beneath a quarry face at all.”
“Correct.”
The rain strengthened before they reached the old cart track.
Within minutes it became a sheet.
Mary Beth gathered her skirt in one hand and followed Ambrose uphill. Water dripped from the brim of his hat and ran down the back of his coat. The path they had used on the way down began turning to brown slurry beneath their boots.
Lightning flashed pale behind the trees.
The thunder came almost immediately.
A flash of lightning whitened the trees, and Ambrose halted.
“Not the high path.”
“What?”
“We’re too exposed on the ridge.”
He pointed through the trees toward the beck.
“There is an old bridge below the east track. Stone arch. We shelter there until the worst passes.”
Mary Beth knew the bridge. A narrow estate road crossed the beck there before the newer carriage route had been built farther upstream. The bridge was broad enough for wagons, its single arch high above the usual waterline.
Today the beck was already swollen.
They reached it at a run.
Ambrose went down the bank first, then turned and held out his hand.
Mary Beth studied it.
Rain streamed from his hat brim.
“This is not a philosophical debate,” he said.
She put her hand in his.
His fingers closed hard around hers.
The bank was slick. Mary Beth descended sideways, boots sliding over wet grass. Ambrose braced himself and guided her beneath the arch.
The sound changed at once.
Rain drummed on the bridge above them while the beck rushed over stones below, brown and white and fast. The arch gave them a narrow strip of dry ground on one side, scarcely six feet deep before the bank rose sharply behind them.
Mary Beth leaned against the stone and caught her breath.
Ambrose removed his hat and shook water from it.
She began to laugh.
He stared at her.
“What?”
“Your face.”
“What is wrong with my face?”
“You look personally betrayed by the weather.”
“I was promised three dry hours.”
“By whom?”
“A barometer.”
Mary Beth laughed harder.
Ambrose tried to remain stern.
He failed.
The laugh that escaped him was brief, but it changed the space beneath the bridge. For a moment they were simply two wet people hiding from a storm rather than Mrs. Blackthorn and the contractor she had employed.
Mary Beth pushed damp hair away from her cheek.
Ambrose’s smile faded.
His gaze followed the movement.
She became aware of everything at once.
The wet fabric clinging to her sleeves.
His coat dark with rain.
The narrowness of the shelter.
The fact that no one could see them from the road.
The fact that no one knew precisely where they were.
Mary Beth had spent years discovering how quickly solitude could become permission if two people wanted it to.
Ambrose seemed to be discovering the same thing.
He turned away first.
“You’re cold.”
“I am wet.”
“You’re shivering.”
“I object to the distinction.”
He shrugged out of his coat.
“Ambrose—”
“Take it.”
“You need it.”
“I am wearing twice as much wool as you.”
“That is because men are permitted sensible clothing.”
“Then consider this a temporary victory for women’s rights.”
Before she could refuse again, he settled the coat around her shoulders.
The coat was warm from his body, which made the kindness far more intimate than she wanted it to be.
Mary Beth closed her hands around the lapels.
The coat smelled faintly of rain, clean wool, stone dust, and something that belonged only to him.