Simply Love (14 page)

                  

There were no servants resident at TÅ· Gwyn. Sydnam did see to it, though, that the garden was regularly tended and the house aired and cleaned. As the Duke of Bewcastle's steward he would have done so even if he had had no personal interest in the property. But perhaps he would not have come so often in person to see that the work had been done.

He drove the gig into the stable block, unhitched the horse, and gave it oats and water while Miss Jewell looked on—he had declined her help. He left the picnic basket where it was—they could decide later where they wanted to take it.

He felt curiously reluctant to take her into the house. Or perhaps it was just the opposite. He badly wanted to show it to her, but he wanted the time to be right. When they first arrived, he was still feeling somewhat discomposed after the incident at the stile, when he had almost kissed her. What a horrible faux pas that would have been. Even as it was he had felt her withdrawal and had been powerfully reminded of how foolish it would be to allow himself to fall in love with her.

Sometimes, because they had grown to be friends, because he was generally so comfortable in her presence, he forgot that there could never be anything
but
friendship between him and any woman.

For the present he did not want to be alone inside any building with Miss Anne Jewell, who looked more than usually appealing today in her sprigged-muslin high-waisted dress and her floppy-brimmed straw bonnet, both trimmed with blue ribbons, though he had seen both before on a number of occasions. And she was looking bronzed and healthy from her weeks at Glandwr, though she might be less than delighted if he remarked upon the fact—ladies generally did not like to have bronzed complexions. He did not believe he would ever forget the sight of her, standing on the bottom bar of the gate as it swung open and looking up to laugh at him, like a carefree girl.

It had torn at his heart.

He took her walking about the park, along the rustic trail through the trees, across the open meadow, avoiding sheep and sheep droppings, admiring the daisies and buttercups and clover that were absent from the more carefully cropped lawns above the ha-ha, across the lawns themselves, first to the back of the house, where rows of vegetables grew even though the house was empty, and then to the front and the colorful flower beds, in which he was pleased to observe that there were no weeds, and the rose arbor.

He was glad to sit down there—his right knee was aching after walking almost nonstop for more than an hour. The air here was heavy with the perfumes of dozens of roses that grew in beds and trailed over trellises. He could hear the low droning of bees.

She did not sit down, though. He would not have seated himself if he had realized it, but he did not get up again. He sat and watched her as she bent over the rose beds to take a closer look at some of the more exquisite blooms, to touch them lightly, to smell them.

She looked contented and relaxed, he thought. She looked as if she belonged here as he belonged…

He did not know how he would be able to support the disappointment if Bewcastle should refuse to sell to him. He did not believe he would be able to remain in this part of the world. It was an alarming thought, since there was no other part of the world he wanted to be.

But if he
did
ever live here, if he ever sat here again on another hot, drowsy summer afternoon, he would be alone.

There would be no woman beautiful among the flowers.

“You may cut some roses if you wish,” he said, “and take them back to Glandwr with you. I can fetch a knife from the house.”

“They would wilt,” she said, turning toward him. “I would rather leave them here in their natural setting to live out the natural span of their lives. But thank you.”

He stood as she approached him and then sat again after she had seated herself. But he should have moved over, he thought belatedly. She was seated on his blind side. He was not usually so clumsy.

“When I was forced to leave my employment as Lady Prudence Moore's governess,” she said, “I moved into a small cottage in the village of Lydmere. I eked out a living by giving private lessons, though I was also forced to accept the financial support Joshua offered me. I had my few pupils and my young son to keep me occupied almost every moment of every day. But I was still very aware of my aloneness. When I shut the cottage door behind any pupil who happened to come, there were just David and me. I sometimes found it…hard.”

“It was a good thing for you, then,” he said, “that you were eventually offered employment at a boarding school.”

“Yes,” she said, “it was the best thing that had happened to me in a long while. Do you like living alone?”

“I am never quite alone,” he told her. “There are always servants. I almost always have friendly relations with them, especially my valet.”

He could not see her unless he turned his head right about. He felt at a distinct disadvantage.

“Will you like living alone here?” she asked him. “Will it bring you the happiness you crave?”

Just an hour ago, when they had stopped in the gig at the top of the hill, she had assured him that he could be happy here. During the past hour they had walked with a spring in their step and talked and laughed and sometimes been comfortably silent with each other. They had been warmed by sunlight and summer. When had melancholy descended upon them both?

He had been trying all afternoon not to think about the fact that this was her last day at Glandwr—that tomorrow she would be gone, that everyone would be leaving before another week had passed. At first he had counted days in his eagerness to have them gone again. Now he was counting days unwillingly and for a different reason. But for Miss Anne Jewell he had just run out of numbers. He thought ruefully of all the wasted days when he had not seen her. But even if he had been with her every moment of every day, this would still be the last one.

“My life will be what I make it,” he told her. “That is true for all of us all the time. We cannot know what the future will bring or how the events of the future will make us feel. We cannot even plan and feel any certainty that our most carefully contrived plans will be put into effect. Could I have predicted what happened to me in the Peninsula? Could you have predicted what happened to you in Cornwall? But those things happened to us nevertheless. And they changed our plans and our dreams so radically that we both might have been excused for giving up, for never planning or dreaming again, for never living again. That too is a choice we all have to make. Will I be happy here? I will do my very best to be—
if,
that is, Bewcastle is willing to sell to me.”

“What
were
your dreams?” she asked him.

He turned his head then until he could see her. She was sitting slightly sideways on the seat, facing toward him, and she was gazing at him with large eyes made smoky by her long lashes and the shade of her bonnet brim. She was apparently gazing quite deliberately at his bad side. He could have suggested that they change places, but he would not do so. It would be safer thus. He would be constantly reminded that she had shrunk from him up there at the stile—yes, that was exactly what she had done—and that he must not allow his feelings for her to stray beyond friendship.

“They were reasonably humble ones,” he said. “I wanted to paint. I wanted a home of my own and a wife and children. No, let me be perfectly honest, since you have asked. I wanted to be a
great
painter. I wanted to be displayed at the Royal Academy. But there were choices, you see—there are always choices. I also wanted other people to see that I was as brave and as manly as my brothers. And so I talked my father into purchasing a commission for me. And the more my family protested that it was not the life for me, the more stubbornly I insisted that it was. Now I must live with the consequences of the choice I made. And I will not call it the wrong choice. That would be foolish and pointless. That choice led me to everything that has happened since, including this very moment, and the choices I make today or tomorrow or next week will lead me to the next and the next present moments in my life. It is all a journey, Miss Jewell. I have come to understand that that is what life is all about—a journey and the courage and energy always to take the next step and the next without judgment about what was right and what was wrong.”

“Were you as wise before your injuries?” she asked him.

“Of course not,” he said. “And if I am alive ten, twenty years from now, the words I have just spoken will seem foolish to me or at least shallow. Wisdom comes from experience, and so far I have had only twenty-eight years of it.”

“One fewer than me,” she said. “You are younger than I.”

“What were your dreams?” he asked her.

“Marriage to someone for whom I could feel an affection,” she said. “Children. A modest home of my own in the country. I did achieve at least a part of my dream. I have David.”

“And did you have a potential husband picked out?” he asked her.

“Yes.”

He would not ask the next question. The answer was all too obvious. The man, whoever he was, had abandoned her after discovering that she was with child by someone else.

Was he someone from Cornwall?

“But you are right,” she told him. “We have to continue with the journey of life. The alternative is too terrible to contemplate.”

He was uncomfortable with the silence that ensued. He could tell that she had not moved. She must still be sitting sideways beside him, then. He could simply have got up, of course. He still had not taken her inside the house. But some stubborn part of himself kept him where he was. Let her look her fill. It was not as if she had not seen him before.

“It is not a pretty sight, is it?” he said abruptly at last—and then could have bitten his tongue out. What could she possibly say in response to such self-pitying words except to rush into uttering foolish lies to console him?

“No,” she said. “It is not.”

The words amused more than they hurt him. He turned his head about again and smiled at her.

“But it is part of who you are to those who know you now,” she said. “That cannot be avoided, can it, unless you become a hermit or wear a mask. I daresay that for you it is a terrible thing to be blind on the one side, to have no arm, to be unable to do many things you once did without thought. And it must be a terrible thing to look in a mirror and remember how you once looked and will never look again. You were extraordinarily handsome, were you not? You still are. But those who see you now—especially, I suppose, those who did not know you before—soon become accustomed to seeing you as you are. The right side of your face is not pretty, as you say. But it is not ugly either. Not really. It ought to be, perhaps, but it is not. It is part of you, and you are a man worth knowing.”

He laughed, his face still turned toward her. Truth to tell, though, he was deeply touched. She was not, he sensed, speaking just to console him.

“Thank you, Miss Jewell,” he said. “In all the years since this happened, I have never found anyone, even my family—
especially
my family—willing to speak so frankly about my looks.”

She got to her feet suddenly and went to stand by one of the trellises over which roses grew. She bent her head to smell one particularly perfect red bloom.

“I am sorry,” she said, “for what happened earlier.”

A number of things had happened earlier. He knew to what she referred, though.

“It was my fault,” he said. “I ought not even to have thought of kissing you.”

But he had
not
thought about it. That was the whole trouble. If he had, he would not have come so close to doing it. He would have released her hand as soon as she regained her balance and moved away from her.

She turned her head to look at him.

“But it was I,” she said, “who almost kissed
you
.”

Her cheeks suddenly flamed.

Ah. He had not realized that. But she had stopped herself—and now felt that she owed him an apology. He looked down and brushed a speck of dirt from his breeches.

Once, three weeks or so ago, she had set her fingertips against his cheek—and then removed them as if she had scalded her hand.

Today she had almost kissed him—and then moved jerkily away.

He was aware suddenly that she was standing in front of him. He looked up at her, prepared to smile and suggest that they go and look at the house. But her eyes were huge and deep, giving him the curious impression that he could see right through to her soul. And she set her fingertips again just where they had been that other time.

“You are not ugly, Mr. Butler,” she said. “You are not. Truly you are not.”

And she bent her head and set her lips against the left side of his mouth. They trembled quite noticeably, and he felt her breath being released in awkward little jerks against his cheek. But she did not give him just a token little peck of a kiss to prove that she had the courage to do it. She kept her lips where they were long enough for him to taste her, to want her with a yearning so intense that he gripped the arm of the seat almost hard enough to put a dent in the wood.

When she lifted her head, she looked down at him again in that peculiar way she had of focusing on both sides of his face. Her eyes were swimming with tears, he noticed.

“You are
not
ugly,” she said again almost fiercely, as if, perhaps, to convince herself.

“Thank you.” He forced himself to smile, even to chuckle. “Thank you, Miss Jewell. You are very kind.”

He understood fully what it must have cost her to touch him thus. But she was a woman of some compassion. It was not her fault that he felt bleaker than he had felt in a long, long while.

She had tasted of sunshine and woman and dreams.