Charity Begins at Home (34 page)

Tristan refused, however, to don St. George's chainmail vest and helmet with visor. "I'll wear it this evening if you insist. But I'm not going to wear armor at high noon in June!"

No gentle reminders that St. George would not be so craven had the least effect, especially when the squire added his objections to a dress rehearsal. Even Molly, who was to play the king's daughter, said her gauzy costume might be damaged or dirtied if she put it on early. So Charity gave up the idea of a true dress rehearsal. One size of armor probably fit all, and if it didn't, Tristan had only himself to blame.

He did well enough, after all, without the chainmail, though in his buckskins and loose shirt he looked more a corsair than a knight. Though he recited his promise to save Princess Molly in an inappropriately ironical tone, Tristan took a good swath with his saber when he pretended to cut off the dragon's head. His nephews cheered, the squire-king applauded, and Princess Molly swooned.

"Very nice," Charity called out. "Now pretend to pick the head up on your sword and walk toward the bonfire. Everyone will follow you in a parade. Be sure and shake the head about as you go, for I've stuffed peppermints in there for the children to grab."

"You mean I’m going to have little wretches like these—" Tristan indicated his excited nephews, "digging around at my feet? You won't mind, I hope, if I leave off my best boots."

"When do I throw my arms around my rescuer?"

Molly threw a coquettish glance at Tristan, who accepted it with a smile and an outstretched hand.

"Not now!" Charity caught Molly's arm as she rushed past. "The king must give his final speech and then the dragon must dance around headless, and then perhaps—but no need to bother in rehearsal."

Charity turned to meet Tristan's amused glance and suppressed an answering smile. He was teasing her with his ironic loverlike speech to Molly. He was sending her a message, and if she couldn't yet translate it accurately, she thought it held good tidings. It certainly wreaked havoc on her heartbeat.

His easy manner was a contrast to that of the squire and even Molly, who treated her with the exaggerated civility one offers a recovering invalid. Three days after that meeting in the church, Charity felt like an alien in her own village. The ordinary pleasantries seemed forced, and she felt people were going out of their way not to ask her for help. Even Jacob and Crispin, who had been her friends all their lives, acted awkwardly around her, as if they thought she might blame them.

But Tristan was Tristan, her friend despite it all. He had never really been part of this village or part of her past, and so he didn't see her as a fallen angel, or whatever in was her neighbors saw when they looked at this new Charity. Every day, just when she had run through the few tasks left to her now that Mrs. Williams led the committee, he bore her off to show her some improvement he had made in the whale painting or asked her to take him to the prettiest spots in the countryside. He was starting, he said with grin, a series of English paintings and thought a landscape might be in order.

Each time he asked for her opinion on a possible landscape vista or made her laugh at some scandalous gossip about her favorite artists, she felt less like the parish pariah and more like herself again. She thought she might never regain that sense of utter belonging, but she no longer felt so disoriented at its loss.

Even now, when he professed that he had to finish a painting before the festivities began, he lingered beside her. Sheathing his wicked saber, he reminded her to practice her Italian.

"But Tristan, do I truly need to learn how to abuse coachmen and haggle with vendors before I learn more of the grammar?"

His smile flashed and that slight accent deepened, as it always did when he told her about Italy. "Before you learn aught else."

He couldn't kiss her here on the village green, but he bent toward her as if he would like to, and she waited breathless for him to say something significant. But he only tickled her under the chin and said, "When you are in Naples and Rome, you will understand why I started your lessons at that point."

When he said that, she could almost imagine it, a future away from this village, a future that involved travel and adventure and arguments with Italian hackney drivers. Miss Falesham, her old schoolmistress, had written recently, indicating her desire to sell her school and retire to a nomadic life. And, oh—oh, there were other possibilities. She wondered what Tristan would say next winter if she arrived unannounced at his villa in Ferendisi . . . But this was no time to consider such a future.

Not that she was consumed with details. Her Midsummer duties had been reduced to making sure the St. George play and the children's performances would not shame the parish. Out of some mingling of pride and penitence, she had not interfered in anything Mrs. Williams had decided in these last few days. Mrs. Hering, out of solidarity or perhaps only spite, was being just as reserved, and poor Mrs. Dalton and Mrs. Williams were near frantic.

Fortunately, she thought as Tristan and his gamboling nephews departed, her extensive early preparations had left little for the others to do on this last morning beyond booth set-up and personnel assembly. Already the men of the parish had laid the kindling for the cooking fires that would flame across the vicarage lane and set up the spits to roast the suckling pigs. The Hering boys had assembled a makeshift stage at the edge of the green for the plays, leaving plenty of room for the audience to sprawl on the grass. Charity had decorated the platform with laurel boughs and other greenery, so that all was in readiness for the evening performance.

Unfortunately Charity's own idleness meant she had all too much time to contemplate the sharp turn her life had recently taken and to worry if she was headed the right way—and if Tristan lay in that direction.

Since that very moment when she so firmly set him free, she had known only ambivalence. Her emotions darted more erratically than the fairies; she could hardly trap them long enough to identify them. Remorse, yes, for causing pain when she should soothe it. Desire, yes, to have him in some elemental way, joyously, without all the hesitation and regrets. Fear, yes, always that, fear not that he didn't know her, but that he knew her too well. And hope? Yes, that too had escaped from her Pandora's box. But she wasn't ready yet to discover exactly what it was she was hoping for.

Idle hands, she told herself, are the devil's workshop. So she surveyed the green to find a task that needed doing. Ah, there was one. The flower beds at each corner should be weeded before half the county saw the village in disarray. She knelt down and attacked the weeds as if they were her own unruly thoughts. Just yank them out and toss them on a pile, she told herself. But while her hands obeyed, her mind didn't. It kept dwelling on her last encounters with Tristan, on her impulsive revelations, on his quiet sympathy, on the trust and ease she felt in his presence—and the danger.

He had become, in fact, the sort of friend she had always tried to be herself. But he was also fast making himself indispensable, and that was not a very friendly thing to do. In fact, if he kept this up, he could very well break her heart.

That heart leapt when she heard a phaeton drawing up in the adjacent road. But the footsteps that came up behind her then were not quick and light like Tristan's. Only Francis walked across a green as if he were pacing off the length of a barley field.

"I'm going to Dover this morning. I'll stop off at the jeweler's and get your chain fixed if you like."

Charity sat back on her heels and considered her brother. He was buttoning his plain dark coat over an unprecedentedly fashionable cravat. She thought of teasing him but resisted. He looked too tense to take it in the proper spirit.

"Tristan promised to make Lawrence take care of the repair. So that's one less stop for you to make."

"I was planning on stopping there anyway." He paused, waiting for some response from her. But she was too preoccupied to decipher his message. Eventually he added, "Braden's a bit weary of Lawrence's antics, I expect."

Charity picked up her pile of weeds and shook it, dislodging the topsoil from the roots. Then she brushed the dirt back into the plot. "Lawrence's antics would weary a saint. Tristan does his best, but he's had no experience at this. He alternates between sternness and sympathy. Lawrence needs consistency, I think."

"Lawrence needs a father," Francis said abruptly. "And Jeremy, too. They've never had one to speak of. Braden does his best, but he's only an uncle, and he'll be leaving eventually. They need someone who will stay. And so does she."

Charity stripped off her gloves and rubbed at her eyes. Surely they were filled with sawdust to have been blind to this. "That's why you're visiting the jeweler's. Francis, I never dreamed—"

He jutted out his chin, but his words were more defensive than defiant. "You are thinking that I am aiming rather high."

"I am thinking no such thing. Why, Anna would be lucky to have a man like you, so good and true and intelligent."

Francis was too sensible for false modesty, so he discarded it. "Well, I thought so, too. If I didn't, I would never dare to approach her." Francis paced off a few more rows of barley with renewed purpose. "She'll realize that this is for the best. Lawrence will be able to grow up on his own land, or next to it, anyway, and I can manage it for him until he's of age. I can manage her affairs, too. From what Tristan has said, they're in a sad state. And I've experience enough rearing boys to handle hers."

His case sounded completely persuasive. Anna would see that Francis would make the perfect husband, efficient, cheerful, faithful. The perfect husband . . .

Something Tristan had said echoed in her mind. "Francis, are you auditioning for the role of Early Christian Martyr?"

He turned stiff and forbidding as he always did when his pride was stung. "I don't see the need for levity."

"I only mean that it seems you are sacrificing yourself, taking on a mismanaged estate, rearing two neglected boys, rescuing Anna from her own folly."

Francis nodded. "Yes. And, as you say, if she is sensible, she will agree that her best course is to marry me."

Charity sat back on the walk and drew her knees up under her gown Indian style. The she regarded her dear, deliberate brother, restlessly prowling the path. They were so much alike and so quick to make the same mistakes. "But Francis—"

"But Francis what?" Not one to waste a moment, Francis checked his purse to make sure he had enough for a suitable betrothal ring.

He was too confident. Anna must admit she had no rational choice but to marry him. Charity foresaw a temptation to fate.

"But Francis, what do you want?"

Annoyed, he stuffed the purse back in his pocket. "What do you mean?"

"What are you going to get out of this marriage? Besides the rewards of a job well done. Why do you want to marry Anna?"

Francis flushed and looked away. "I don't know what difference that makes."

"Have you ever proposed marriage before?"

Sulkily Francis dropped onto a stone bench and crossed his arms over his chest. "No."

"Really?" Charity made a disappointed face. "When you were first at university, Mama worried that you would offer marriage to that acrobatic performer you met at Astley's Circus. She said acrobats know how to ensnare a man." With their legs, in fact, her mother had said.

"I wasn't so foolish even when I first went up to Eton! I didn't need to offer marriage, for one thing, and for another—well, I just couldn't imagine introducing her to my mother and my sister."

"I would have thought you very dashing indeed," Charity said.

"Mother would not have agreed. But I needn't point out that even she would find nothing ineligible about Lady Haver."

She let this pass. "No proposals made. And how many have I received?"

"A couple dozen or thereabouts. I've lost track. So?"

"You must agree then I have a deal more experience in this proposal business than you have."

More than most men, Francis could acknowledge superior wisdom in a woman, even his sister. But this he couldn't concede. "I can't imagine you know better than I what a proposal should sound like, since you've never heard one that pleased you."

Charity pulled her gloves back on and returned to her weeds. "That's so. All I heard from my prospective husbands was how helpful I would be." She yanked viciously only to realize she had denuded the lavender patch. "And apparently all you mean Anna to hear is how helpless she will be."

Francis rose to pace again. "You know that's not what I mean."

"I do know." She replaced the abused plant and tamped the dirt down around it. "I know that you have your own selfish reasons for wanting Anna. But she has never seen you fight for the last raspberry tart, so she will consider you a martyr rather than a man."

He gave this the consideration it deserved and finally allowed, "Well, I don't want her to think that. I do have my own reasons."

"What? Oh, I know she is beautiful and all that. But she always has been, and you've never paid her the least attention."

"I would never pay attention to another man's wife," Francis said, head held high, "not that sort of attention, anyway."

"Francis, will you cut line? There's more involved than the absence of Kenny. Anna is no mind reader. You must tell her why you want her." Even as she spoke, she knew she had been as guilty as he, assuming that a lover should not have to explain such things.