The Slightest Provocation

Chapter Twenty-eight

“Well,” Kit said, “your family’s produced another one, haven’t they? Despite all my sister-in-law’s best efforts.”

They’d taken the curricle, after sending Fred and Elizabeth home to tell Jessie that Fannie had a cold and would be remaining at the Halseys’ for another day or two, with Miss Kimball to nurse her and Lord Ayres to bring them back when she was well again.

“Elizabeth was wise,” Mary said, “to hide Miss Kimball, and Cathy was an excellent, discreet choice. Oh, dear, and now I truly must find a way to help raise funds for a village cistern…”

“Cistern?”

Ah yes, she’d never explained about the cistern. Not too difficult to sum it up, though, for it seemed he’d learned a bit about engineering in the course of his military career.

“I’m no expert.” He’d knit his brow, rather engagingly, she thought. “But I think I know what one would inquire of an expert, and how to frame the questions.”

His face changed just then, in response to a traveler coming in their direction. “Ah, good evening, Mr. Greenlee,” he called.

The carpenter was returning from Grefford astride a small, neat cob, his long legs rather dangling down the horse’s sides. She’d never paid the man much attention-well, why should she? So many people lived and worked on the Stansell estate-but now she remembered Kit’s childhood story about the stallions in the paddock. Clearly a kind man, and rather nice-looking as well now that she noticed. Spare, sinewy, even at his age-she chided herself for the condescending tone of that.

Not a very inquisitive man, though. No bothersome questions about what they might be doing out here in the rain: he simply wished them a pleasant evening and hoped the weather might clear.

“Well, then, Lord Christopher and my lady, I’ll be on my way…” Putting his broad-brimmed hat back on his head, and taking the reins in a long, graceful hand with elegantly squared-off fingers. Callused, of course, from his work, but…

A great many things had come clear in a very short time.

Good night and Godspeed.

And the very same to yourself, Mr. Greenlee.

“Well,” Mary said a few moments later, “if the wishes of our near and dear ones can count for anything…”

She stopped then, blushing for the strangeness of referring to the estate carpenter at Rowen as near and dear.

“It’s all right,” Kit said. “I know.”

“How long have you known?”

“Not very. Only since I came home this time. No one told me; it simply was apparent, as it was to you just then. He’s a very good man, you know, and he’s helped me with little things whenever he’s had the opportunity. One comes to know a certain sort of thing, it seems, when one is ready to know it. And I… I rather like knowing it’s he, odd as it must sound.”

She tried to get another look at the man from over her shoulder. But the road had curved away.

“Though I could have wished to get some of his height,” Kit said now.

“He’s on his way to Rowen. To the dower house, do you think?”

“I believe that’s possible, yes.”

They were silent then, for some time afterward, thinking of the past’s hold on the present-their thoughts then turning to less pleasant future eventualities, if they weren’t able to stop the young couple and turn them back.

They tried two inns just the other side of Grefford, but no one answering to the couple’s description had been seen at either of them-though at the second inn, they did have the dubious pleasure of barging in on another eloping pair. Both times, Kit’s aristocratic preening helped them secure the landlords’ cooperation-thank heaven, Mary thought, even as she wondered what Mr. Greenlee would have thought to see it.

“Ayres won’t drive all night,” Kit said. “They have to be at an inn along the way.”

Mary was less optimistic. “Unless they’ve taken a less direct route, to hinder us from finding them. Perhaps he has a friend he plans to stay with.

“If they do marry,” she said more softly, “I shall never forgive us for having a hand in it.”

“Not very good for us, then.” His voice was equally soft, even as he urged the horse forward along a road that was becoming muddier.

“But at the very least you will have to forgive yourself,” he told her some minutes later. “Not entirely, and never in the very small hours of the morning when you wake-but day by day, to get through it.”

She was silent and so was he, for a time.

“A man died because of me.” His voice betrayed no emotion. “In Spain. And another man lost his leg. Because of me and in some sense because of you too, me being so keen on dying grandly in battle, to prove… I don’t know what anymore… to prove something to you about my greatness of spirit and how much you’d lost by not appreciating me more. To make you mourn me and hate yourself forever.”

His first time actually fighting, he told her. Heedlessly bold in the face of an ambush.

“The time I got that extravagant wound. I never thought I’d be telling you…”

He did so in a very few words, against the dripping rain and rustling trees, how his younger self had charged into combat, stupidly, needlessly, like so many reckless young Englishmen, in duels or on the battlefield. Happened all the time.

Except it shouldn’t happen when the gentleman was an officer, entrusted with responsibility for others. Too bad he’d learned this lesson so belatedly. Half-delirious from his own wound, helpless to stop his ears against the cries, the sawing of bone. He hadn’t started out caring about anyone but himself, but when one heard a man scream like that…

She laid her hand on his forearm. “And afterward?”

“Not much to say,” he told her. “Duty. The dull business of trying to make it right when you never really can. The man who died had four daughters. I’ve tried to help his widow; the hardest thing to bear is her gratitude. And I did try to be a better officer, to remember what’s more important than glory. To get on with things, you know.”

“Yes,” she said, “to get on with things.”

“The Portleigh Arms is up ahead,” he said a while later. “Do you remember?”

An absurd question.

In any case they’d be able to change horses. The place had once had a good stable; it was the best of the local inns for some miles.

“They might have stopped the night here.” Mary essayed to control the quaver in her voice. “Of course,” she continued, “they’d ask for separate bedchambers.”

“As we did,” he said.

For all the separate bedchambers had signified.

Telling her hadn’t been so awful as he’d feared. Natural, somehow matter-of-fact. She knows the worst of me now, he thought. And in truth the telling seemed to have freed his mind, to drift among memories of another elopement.

Smiling at each other, downstairs in the bar of the Portleigh Arms. Drinking wine-it hadn’t been good wine; not that they’d have known the difference. Hurrying up the stairs, retreating to their chaste separate bedchambers. Somehow he’d forgotten to bring a dressing gown. Tiptoeing barefoot in his shirt and drawers, down the corridor to her room. Knocking so softly-terrified of being found out, believing as he had that anyone would care.

She’d opened her door at the first rap of his knuckles. Equally terrified, she’d fairly pulled him inside.

They’d stared at each other, he in his shirt, she in a high-necked night rail. Pretty thing, almost nunnish, austere white folds from her shoulders to her very white bare toes curled against the cold of a painted wood floor. So far as he could recall, she’d only worn it that one time, as though-once the vows were pronounced and they were therefore adults-he wouldn’t have found it provocative enough. He’d never asked about it; in future he’d be clearer about what he liked.

If there really were to be a future for them. If that vastly silly other elopement they’d helped set in motion could be stopped. If it truly were possible to get on with things. Together.

They’d reached the Portleigh Arms.

Cursing himself for having ever cast his eye upon the troublesome Miss Grandin, he helped his wife down from the box and kissed her cheek.

She smelled of wet wool. Her short upper lip trembled, and her hair fell into tighter curls than usual on her forehead.

“I’ll see about getting a new horse,” he said, “and then I’ll follow you in.”

She nodded.

“Courage,” he whispered.

But she’d run across the yard and had already pushed the front door open.

Courage, he repeated silently.

She loved coaching inns: a fire in a dim room, the variety of accent and countenance, paths crossing and destinies conjoining, if only for an exchange of compliments or a flirtatious glance over a glass of awful claret. In the mornings people were rushed and rather cross. But at night, especially if she had friends or a footman about, she loved to nod to interesting-looking strangers, wonder about their lives and fortunes, and (keeping a little silver knife tucked in her sleeve) act the woman of mystery.

Tonight, however, she wanted no mystery at all. No surprises, no adventures. Only an untouched Fannie Grandin.

The bar was mostly deserted. No one but a few men in their cups, one of them telling a long story to the young woman who was stifling a yawn and hoping there’d be something in it for her.

No Fannie, and no Lord Ayres either. She’d have to speak to the landlord. Turning quickly, she tripped over an uneven stone in the floor. Which caused her to bump her hip against a table, mutter an impolite word, and suddenly feel every eye in the room fixed upon her. No silver knife up her sleeve tonight-she backed away carefully, hoping that Kit would be along soon.

Wait. Every eye in the room wasn’t fixed upon her. One head was turned away. The pillar to her left must have blocked her view at first. But just a few steps from where she stood, a head of luxuriant black hair shed its lavender scent and was turned resolutely toward the wall.

She’d eviscerate him.

Grasping each well-tailored shoulder, she found herself overwhelmed by the smell of raw beef commingled most unappetizingly with the lavender. She began to giggle even before quite comprehending what was so wondrously funny.

Lord Ayres turned languidly in his chair, to stare at her with one moist violet eye, the other hidden by bloodstained fingers grasping a large slab of meat, juices thinly trickling into a fold of his cravat.

“Well you might laugh,” he muttered.

Kit had appeared at her elbow. “Raw potato is surprisingly effective,” he told the young man (just a bit too solicitously, in Mary’s opinion), “and rather easier on the linen.”

“And Fannie?” she demanded. “Where’s Fannie, you pomaded ninny?”

Ayres grimaced. “Sleepin’, I daresay. Cool as a cucumber, that one is.”

Kit waited downstairs while the landlord took Mary up to Fannie’s room. They found her sprawled across her bed, seemingly quite absorbed in Debrett’s.

“Thank God you’re safe.” Mary had hoped to hug or in some way to comfort her, but found herself constrained to do so.

“Of course I’m safe,” the girl replied. “It’s been years since I learned that move out of Mendoza’s Modern Art of Boxing, but one doesn’t forget.”

A few tears glimmered on her eyelashes. “You’ll think I’m an utter fool,” she added more quietly.

“No, no. Oh, of course not.”

Except for her book and a silver-handled hairbrush, it didn’t seem she’d unpacked anything. The landlord picked up her valise, rather as though he were afraid of her.

“Is he here with you?” she asked while she buttoned her pelisse.

“Yes.”

“Yes, I expect he would be.”

They waited in silence while Kit brought the carriage around.

Mary unfurled an umbrella to give to Fannie, as the curricle’s small backseat was open to the elements. And when Kit tried to help her in, the girl shook her head and climbed lightly in by herself.

At least the drizzle had eased off a bit.

“I could exchange places with her if you’d like,” Kit said. “She’d be drier up here, and you could comfort her. Of course, you’d have to drive, and I’d be a tight fit back there.”

“I don’t know as I’d be comforting her. She’s chagrined by the strength of her own sentiments, not to speak of having exposed them, though I daresay it’ll be the making of her. Which doesn’t mean we haven’t also acted awful fools. One can’t sneak about as we have-or one shouldn’t anyway, with younger people about. At a certain point, it seems, one needs to do rather better.”

“I expect so,” was all he said.

“I should like to drive, I think,” she said now. “I’m not the most skillful person with the ribbons, but I can keep us on the road.”

She rested her head on his shoulder for a moment before taking the reins from him.

The rain had become more intermittent, the wind tossing the clouds before it. They sang to pass the time, merry songs, sad songs, the heartbreaking one about the weaver who tried to shield his lover from the foggy dew, and the passionate shepherd’s song as well. And gradually, disjointedly, they found themselves telling each other things, odd bits and scraps they’d picked up during their years apart.

“A woman can’t be tested as a man is in battle,” she said. “But while trying to negotiate between pleasure and scandal, one does a bit of self-examination, considers whose opinion is important and whom one is willing to send to the devil.”

He nodded, the faces of a few London gentlemen flashing across his mind’s eye.

“I expect that must have been a useful exercise,” he said. “Well, I might have found it useful anyway, after being in such a confusion of intimidation by people who had certain advantages of unambiguous parentage…”

“And I,” she said, “of not knowing how to help you, and of… of fearing that you’d regretted marrying a brewer’s daughter…”

“A most generous brewer,” he reminded her, “who kept us in such fine style so that we had very little to do but confound our senses with exotic substances and lovemaking…”

She was silent for a moment. “Almost as though we could be alone in London, as we had been at the hermit’s hut-in a private world, with no responsibilities or connections or frighteningly worldly people for me to face.”

“Very romantic,” he said.

“Very much not like a marriage,” she said. “Though one wouldn’t want a marriage to be dull or too responsible or socially connected or proper. I mean it wasn’t all bad…”

“The lovemaking, for example…”

“I think we can agree that the lovemaking…”

“But yes, it was a great befuddlement,” he said, “that one didn’t seem to know how to straighten out, as dearly as one wished to. One wanted to apologize, you know; one does apologize. No, what I mean to say is that I apologize, most heartily, Mary. It’s just that one thing would get tangled up with the next. I mean, there wasn’t any one thing, you know, any single slight or misunderstanding…”

“I do know, Kit. I know exactly. And I’m sorry as well.”

“But let’s sing some more,” she said, after some silent minutes had passed. “Here, take the reins. I’m going to teach you a strange dark one Lord Byron wrote.”

And our days seem as swift, and our moments more sweet,

With thee by my side than with worlds at our feet.

But they should have been approaching Grefford by now. Or at least have seen some landmarks-the road to Silverwye Farm, a familiar stand of giant beeches. It was awfully dark; Oliver and the men of the reform societies had chosen a moonless night for the insurrection that wasn’t going to happen. And with the clouds shifting so quickly, you couldn’t depend on the stars to guide you.

“Do you suppose,” Mary asked, “it could have been that road we passed, going over to the left about an hour ago, when the wind was so blustery, and we were, ah, rather clutching one another for warmth?”

Kit shrugged and flicked his whip over the horse’s left flank.

“But there’s no point going any faster, is there,” she continued (rather reasonably, she thought), “if we don’t know where we’re going?”

He glowered, and she decided that he must agree that they were quite lost.

“And I suppose I don’t dare suggest that you might have asked that old gentleman in the dogcart, whom we passed perhaps half an hour before we came to that turn…”

He gave a low growl of warning.

“No, I thought not. Well, at least the rain has let up for a while…”

Her optimistic utterance (not surprisingly to anyone who’s ever been lost on a dark country road) worked like a wizard’s charm to illuminate the sky with a long, forked flash of lightning, followed by an impressive roll of thunder.

She shrugged her shoulders in apology and tried a timid smile, before pulling her red wool hood around her face as fat raindrops splashed down her cheeks.

Absurd to argue about it. Though she might have appreciated the slightest recognition on his part of how silly he’d been not to verify the direction.

Instead of that familiar I-know-I’m-wrong-and-don’tyou-dare-tell-me-about-it glint lighting up his eye.

No use arguing. Surely she could rise above it.

The rain beat down harder.

“Would it truly have been such a humiliation merely to ask…?”

But wait. Faint light through the trees. An inn? He turned a sheepish face to her and kissed her.

“Yes, I should have asked directions. But a gentleman doesn’t like to, you know.”