Nathaniel bowed to Lavinia and then turned his attention to Sophie. She had changed, he noticed in the second or two before he bowed to her. She was wearing a light sprigged muslin dress—new, he thought, and made to enhance her figure rather than disguise it. She must have had her hair cut. It was not short, but it was dressed prettily in a style that allowed for loose curls. Her face was fuller—she must have put back on the weight she had lost during those stress-filled weeks in London. And her eyes were large and luminous.
“Sophie,” he said, bowing to her. “How are you? How lovely it is to see you again, my dear. You are looking well.”
“Nathaniel,” she said. She did not say anything else. She smiled and gazed back at him.
She really was looking well. Any faint hope he had had that she might have regretted her rejection of him and have been looking faded and unhappy as a result died. How ridiculous of him. Had he really been hoping that?
“Oh, it is you, is it?” Lavinia had been saying to Eden.
“It is I,” Eden agreed, “stepping into your rustic idyll, Miss Bergland. But have no fear. I shall be stepping out of it again as soon as I have greeted Sophie and spent the obligatory half hour with the two of you, conversing about the weather and the health of every acquaintance we have in common.”
Those two had the most extraordinary verbal exchanges, Nathaniel thought, becoming aware of them as Eden was turning his attention to Sophie and greeting her with a great deal more warmth and courtesy.
And so they sat, the four of them, surrounded by the sight and perfume of roses and other summer nowers, with a blue sky above them and the warmth of the August sun beaming down on them, conversing about very little more than Eden had suggested. They were all very agreeable. They all talked and smiled.
Half an hour after their arrival he and Eden took their leave. The ladies walked with them to the gate, Sophie with Eden, Lavinia with Nathaniel. They parted with bows and curtsies and smiles.
“Well,
that
is over,” Eden said, sounding as relieved as Nathaniel felt. “She is in remarkably good looks, I must say.”
“Yes,” Nathaniel said. “Yes, she is.” He still could not believe that she had hidden her beauty so successfully for so long behind the dark, unfashionable, ill-fitting clothes and the heavy, unbecoming hairstyle and the cheerful, comradely expression. “She is, in fact, quite beautiful.”
“I did think,” Eden said, “that perhaps she would have discovered that living alone in the country did not suit her after all.”
“Yes,” Nathaniel said with a sigh, “I thought the same thing too.”
“I wondered if she would have lost some of her bloom,” Eden said.
“She has not.” Indeed, Nathaniel thought, she had bloomed gloriously, though she must be close to thirty years old. He wondered what she had been like before she married Walter. Had she been like this then? Had she ever before been like this? Or was it something quite new?
Eden chuckled. “I suppose,” he said, “I hoped she would have. It is somewhat lowering to know that one has had no affect whatsoever on a female even when one has no wish to have any affect.”
Nathaniel’s hands had curled into fists at his sides. What was this?
“She is not for you, Ede,” he said stiffly. “Hands off if you know what is good for you.”
“Eh?”
Eden stopped walking—they had just left the village behind them and had turned onto the tree-lined drive-way to the house. “What the devil? She is of age, Nat.
If
I were interested.
Which
I am not. Heaven forbid. I have some sense of self-preservation.”
“Sorry, Ede,” Nathaniel mumbled. “We are a sorry pair, are we not? About to come to fisticuffs over a woman who has made it very clear that she wants neither of us.” He laughed and started to walk on.
Eden caught up to him and they walked in silence for a while. Then Eden cleared his throat.
“Just for the record, Nat,” he said, “about whom were we talking back there?”
“About whom?” Nathaniel frowned. “Why, about Sophie, of course.”
“Ah,” Eden said. “Quite so. Yes, indeed. She is in good looks. She has done something with her hair.”
What the devil? Nathaniel was thinking. Ede had been talking about
Lavinia?
He might have felt amused if he had not been inwardly grimacing over what he had just revealed about his feelings for Sophie.
How would he ever be able to call upon Lavinia in the future without feeling the presence of Sophie there—even after she had gone? She would be at Bowood too a few times. His home would be haunted by her presence for a long time to come, perhaps for the rest of his life.
How would he bear it?
An invitation to take tea at Bowood Manor was delivered the following morning. Sophia would have been quite happy to make some excuse if Lavinia had been so inclined. But Lavinia was of the opinion that it might be discourteous not to go.
“There are some social niceties that even I cannot ignore, alas,” she had said with a sigh.
She had done a fair deal of sighing since Sophia’s arrival, especially since the visit of the afternoon before. They had both agreed that it was very civil of the gentlemen to have called, though if they had come because they thought male company essential to female happiness, then they were sadly mistaken. But Lord Pelham had always struck Lavinia as one of the most conceited gentlemen of her acquaintance—he thought altogether too much of the power of those blue eyes of his. And Nat always thought he must call on her at least once a day lest she fall into some dreadful indiscretion out of which she would never be able to fall out again without his assistance.
They had spent the rest of the evening assuring each other, as they had been doing since Sophia’s arrival, that living alone and independently of male interference was really heaven on earth. At least that was what they seemed to imply, Sophia thought, even if they did not use those exact words. It was almost as if they had to reassure each other so that they would conyince themselves.
Lavinia, Sophia had come to suspect, had a strange fondness for Eden, even though the two of them could scarcely be civil to each other. He was, Sophia guessed, the gentleman about whom Lavinia had been unhappy during that last meeting in London. Poor Lavinia. It did not seem likely that Eden shared her feelings. He was, Sophia feared, un catchable.
They walked to Bowood, the weather being fine, though not as lovely as the day before. But the park and the house did not need the enhancement of blue sky and sunshine in order to appear splendid indeed to her eyes. The park was all woodland and green lawns. If there were flower gardens, they were at the back. The house itself, solid and imposing even if not one of the more massive mansions of England, was at the top of a steady rise. Below the slope to one side of it was a lake, shaded by willows and sturdier oaks.
And it all might have been hers, she thought with a heavy heart as she approached the house. She might have been mistress of Bowood.
Nathaniel’s sister Margaret, Lady Ketterly, received them on their arrival and took them to the drawing room, where they were served tea and Sophia was introduced to other houseguests and to the other sisters. Edwin and Beatrice were there too, of course, as were Sarah and Lewis. Moira and Kenneth, who had arrived the day before, came to speak with her. She felt less awkward than she had expected to feet—until Nathaniel appeared in the room.
Was he too feeling aware, she wondered, that she might have been mistress of all this? Or had his two offers of marriage been forgotten since they had been made out of a sense of honor and obligation? Perhaps he did not feel the awkwardness at all. Certainly he had shown no sign of any yesterday at Lavinia’s. He had even called her my dear in that kindly, friendly tone he had always used.
And then he was at her side, smiling at her.
“Sophie,” he said, “would you like to see the house after tea? I have not given Moira and Ken the guided tour yet either.”
She could feel herself flushing. But there could be no harm in it if Moira and Kenneth were to come too. And she did, perversely, long to see the whole of the house, to store away memories so that she would be able to picture him here—so that she would be able to torture herself with details.
“Thank you, Nathaniel,” she said. “I would like that.”
But Moira and Kenneth, when applied to, explained that they had promised to walk back to the rectory with Edwina and Valentine. Eden was going with them.
“We will take Lavinia too, if she will come,” Moira said. “I long to see her cottage. Margaret says it is very picturesque.”
“Oh,” Sophia said quickly, “perhaps I should go too, then.”
“I believe, Sophie,” Kenneth said with a grin, “that Nat’s nose will be severely out of joint if we all desert him. You must stay and be suitably impressed with the house. We will see it later, Nat.” He winked at his friend.
Sophia looked at Nathaniel in some dismay.
“I will walk back to Lavinia’s with you later, Sophie,” he said. “Please do stay.”
It was true, she thought. There was no awkwardness in his manner at all. Had she hoped there would be? That what they had shared in the past would at least have made him a little embarrassed with her? He had probably almost forgotten about that too, or at least had relegated it to the category of unimportant memory. He could hardly, after all, remember every woman with whom he had ever lain.
What a humbling and humiliating thought!
“Thank you,” she said.
“Nicely done, Ken,” Eden said as the six of them set out on the walk to the village. The Reverend Valentine Scott and his wife strode on a little ahead of them. “I doubt they even suspected.”
“Thank Moira,” Kenneth said. “She has a more devious mind than mine. But getting them alone together amidst these hordes is no easy matter.”
“I am really not sure anything can be accomplished anyway,” Eden said, “unless she can be made to feel the same way as he obviously does. It seems doubtful. Good old Sophie would probably not recognize a romantic situation if it punched her in the nose.”
“But looking at it from a female perspective,” Moira said, “one can see quite clearly that he is well-nigh irresistible. He has the loveliest smile.”
“Irresistible,
Moira?” Kenneth was looking down at her with raised eyebrows.
She tossed her glance to the sky. “To those ladies who have not already succumbed to the charms of someone even more so, of course,” she said.
“Of course,” he agreed, and they grinned at each other.
“Pardon me,” Lavinia said sharply, “but do I understand that I have somehow become involved in a
plot?
Are you by any chance trying to get Nat and Sophie matched up?”
Eden sighed. “I should have warned you,” he said, addressing Moira and Kenneth, “not to say a word in present company. Men, to Miss Bergland’s way of looking at the world, were created merely as a punishment to be imposed upon ladies by other men. And since Nat is the man who has oppressed her with his guardianship for years and Sophie is her friend, she will doubtless have a fit of the vapors at the very idea of trying to promote a match between them.”
“Do
you
have fits of the vapors, Lord Pelham?” Lavinia asked. “Must
I
merely because I am a woman? Do try not to be ridiculous.”
Moira laughed. “You asked for that, Eden,” she said. “Bravo, Lavinia.”
“Actually,” Lavinia said, “Sophie
does
have a fondness for Nat. More than a fondness, I suspect.”
“She does?” Eden and Kenneth spoke together.
“She was severely discomposed by his visit yesterday,” Lavinia said.
“Sophie does not become discomposed by visits from her friends,” Kenneth said, frowning. “But she was disturbed by Nat’s?”
“But it is a harebrained notion to draw from that mere observation the conclusion that Sophie is fond of him,” Eden said.
“Thank you,” Lavinia said curtly. “I have better evidence than that, sir. She has one of Nat’s handkerchiefs.”
“By Jove,” Eden said, smiting his forehead with the heel of one hand. “Proof positive. What better evidence could any man ask? She has his
handkerchief.”
“Ignore him, Lavinia,” Moira advised, still laughing. “He is being quite ill-mannered. Do tell us more.”
“I called on her in London just before she left for Gloucestershire,” Lavinia said. “Almost everything was packed, but there was a handkerchief lying on the arm of a chair. I picked it up absently and held it in one hand, hardly seeing it until Sophie said that her father’s name was George. She was indicating the handkerchief, and sure enough there was a letter G embroidered across one corner. But the shape of the letter was very distinctive. It was the same as Nat has embroidered on all his handkerchiefs and printed on his ring. It was Nat’s handkerchief. It was nothing in itself, perhaps. But if it really was nothing, why did she make up that story about her father and then snatch it away from the arm of the chair after I had set it down and put it into her pocket?”
“Why indeed?” Kenneth agreed.
“It would appear that old Nat has some hope yet, then,” Eden said. “Is this the lowest level to which we can sink, Ken? We have become nothing better than
matchmakers?”
“Sophie and Nat.” Kenneth was shaking his head. “It still does not quite seem possible.”
“Well I think they would be quite perfect together,” Moira said with some spirit. “They are both amiable and kind.”
“And Sophie really is in good looks,” Eden said. “Nat remarked on it yesterday and I took a good look today. One might even say she has gone into a second bloom.”
“How delightful!” Lavinia said. “A woman is only eight and twenty years old and yet when she is looking handsome she must be in
second
bloom.”
“It is when one talks of third blooms that offense might be taken,” Eden said.