“Aunt Christine!” it screeched at the top of its lungs, and a young boy came tearing across the churchyard from the direction of the vicarage garden, a ball clutched in one hand, and hurled himself at Mrs. Derrick, who whooped with delight and swung him off his feet and around in a large circle, laughing up at him as she did so.
“Robin,” she said, “you have escaped from the garden, have you? Mama will have your hide, and Papa is already frowning at you.” She rubbed her nose across his as she lowered him and set him back on the ground. “But what a delightful greeting!”
The vicar was indeed frowning quite thunderously. A lady who must be the vicar’s wife—and therefore Mrs. Derrick’s sister—was beckoning urgently and quite ineffectually from beside the vicarage, and a young girl and boy, both older than Robin, were hurrying toward the group, clearly with the intention of hauling their youngest brother back home.
But a number of the ladies, who were doubtless bored silly with the graves, exclaimed with delight and admiration over the lad, whose blond curls and chubby cheeks set him closer to infanthood than boyhood. And one of the Culvers snatched the ball from the child’s hand and teased him by throwing it to his twin over the boy’s head. The second twin threw it back. The child giggled and shrieked as he tried to intercept its passage over his head.
The whole unseemly scene would have been over in a few moments. One of the twins would have given the ball back and ruffled the child’s hair. The ladies would have tired of their raptures over the child’s prettiness, the vicar would have said something suitably quelling to his youngest offspring, and the brother and sister would have taken an arm each and marched the child back where he belonged.
But Mrs. Derrick forgot herself—again. It appeared that she actually
liked
children and could descend to their level at the slightest provocation. She launched herself into the game, all flopping bonnet brim and fluttering sash ribbons, and caught the ball as it flew over her nephew’s head. She was laughing gaily.
“Here, Robin,” she called, backing up with a few running steps, heedless of the fact that she was providing her audience with a shocking glimpse of her ankles, “catch it.”
The child missed, of course—his hands met each other with a resounding slap as the ball sailed on through. But he darted after it, caught it up in one hand, and tossed it back to his aunt. Except that, with a child’s lack of coordination, he threw the ball straight up . . . and up . . . and . . . It did not come down again. It lodged itself very firmly between a branch of the yew tree and the trunk and stuck there.
The child showed every sign of bursting into tears, his father uttered his name with ominous displeasure, his brother invited him to see what he had done now, his sister called him a clumsy clot, Mrs. Derrick took a step closer to the tree, and Anthony or Ronald Culver—it was virtually impossible to tell them apart—went up it.
Even then the scene might have been over soon—and really it was the fault of both Culvers that it had been prolonged in the first place. But though the one twin rescued the ball with no trouble at all and tossed it down to the ground, he could not so easily rescue himself. Somehow a sturdy twig had lodged itself up the back of his coat, and he was stuck fast.
Ronald—or Anthony—Culver would doubtless have gone to the rescue. But while he wasted precious seconds crowing derisively at his twin’s plight, someone else went up to the rescue instead, and it was very apparent that this was not the first tree Mrs. Derrick had climbed in her life.
Wulfric watched with pained resignation as she put her hand right up under Culver’s coat and wrestled the twig free. It was a massively vulgar display despite the laughter with which it was enacted—and she had shown a considerable amount of leg on the way up.
Culver swung himself to the ground and turned gallantly to help his rescuer down after him. But she waved him away and sat on the lowest branch to jump down instead.
“I always seem to forget when I climb trees,” she said merrily, her bonnet slightly askew, her curls in a riot beneath it, her cheeks flushed, her eyes bright, “that I have to come down again. Here goes!” And she launched herself downward.
She came.
Part of her skirt did not.
There was a loud tearing sound as another offending twig tore it from bosom to hem all down one side.
Wulfric was certainly not the closest to her. He
was,
however, the first to reach her. He stood in front of her to shield her from view and kept his eyes steadily on a level with her face. Afterward, it seemed to him that he might actually have stood
against
her. Certainly he could remember her body heat and the smell of warm sunshine and woman. He shrugged as quickly as he could out of his coat—not an easy matter when it had taken all his valet’s considerable strength and ingenuity to get him into it earlier—and held it open against her while she did the best she could to gather the torn sides of her dress together.
He gazed grimly into her eyes. She
laughed
back, though her cheeks were more rosy than her exertions would account for.
“How utterly, spectacularly mortifying,” she said. “Do you wonder that I often embarrassed myself before the
ton,
your grace?”
He did not wonder at it at all.
There was a great deal of noise and fuss behind him, Wulfric was aware as he raised his eyebrows but did not deign to reply.
“Christine,” the vicar said above the general hubbub, “I would suggest that you remove to the vicarage and allow Hazel to see to you.”
“I will do that, Charles, thank you,” she said, her eyes all the while laughing into Wulfric’s. “I am just not sure it can be done decently.” She was clutching the sides of her dress with both hands, though it was obvious that
ten
hands would have been more effective.
“Allow me, ma’am,” Wulfric said, wrapping his coat around her to cover her from the waist down and trying at the same time not to touch her and cause her further embarrassment—he assumed that she
was
embarrassed, as she well deserved to be.
But it was no good. It was almost immediately apparent that there was no way she could walk the distance to the vicarage without exposing far more of herself than the ankles and leg she had displayed while in the tree.
“Hold the coat,” he instructed her.
As soon as she had done so, he stooped down and swung her up into his arms. Without a word or a glance in anyone else’s direction, he strode off toward the vicarage with her, wondering how on earth he had got himself into such an uncharacteristically ridiculous situation. A path opened for him—but that at least was not an unusual occurrence.
He was feeling decidedly out of charity with the world, especially the part of it he carried in his arms.
The children were cavorting along beside them, the little boy excitedly telling his brother and sister what had just happened as though they had not witnessed it for themselves. He did a fair imitation of the sound of tearing muslin.
“Oh, dear,” Mrs. Derrick said, “I must be very heavy.”
“Not at all, ma’am,” Wulfric assured her.
“You look downright morose,” she said. “I suppose you have servants who usually do things like this for you.”
“Ladies do not usually jump out of trees, tearing their dresses to ribbons in the process, in the vicinity of either me or my servants,” he said.
That silenced her.
They were at the vicarage a minute later. Her sister had had the presence of mind to possess herself of a large white tablecloth, which she wrapped about Mrs. Derrick as soon as he set her down on her feet in the kitchen inside the back door. A cook or housekeeper blessed her soul and returned her attention to whatever she was cooking over the fire.
“There goes my second-best muslin, Hazel,” Mrs. Derrick said. “I
will
mourn it. It was my favorite, and it was only three years old. Now my third-best will have to be promoted and my fourth-best will become third and last.”
“Perhaps it can be mended,” her sister said with more optimism than sense. “But in the meanwhile Marianne will run along to Hyacinth Cottage to fetch you a clean dress to wear back to Schofield. All of mine will be far too large for you. Marianne, go and ask Grandmama or Aunt Eleanor to send something, will you? In the meantime do come upstairs, Christine.”
It was then that Mrs. Derrick remembered that she had not presented him and rectified her error.
“This is the Duke of Bewcastle, Hazel,” she said. “My sister, Mrs. Lofter, your grace. And I suppose I ought to have asked you first if you wished for the introduction, ought I not? But it is too late now.”
Wulfric bowed and Mrs. Lofter, looking suddenly terrified, fluttered into an awkward curtsy.
“You would probably like to be on your way to the inn with the others,” Mrs. Derrick said to him, wriggling about inside the tablecloth and bringing out his coat to hand to him. “Please do not feel obliged to wait for me.”
“I will do so, nevertheless, ma’am,” he said with a stiff inclination of his head. “I will wait outside and then escort you to the inn.”
Though why he had made that decision he did not know since she had lived most of her life in this village and could doubtless find her way to the inn blindfolded. He waited for all of half an hour, first struggling into his coat as best he could without the services of his valet, and then making desultory conversation with the vicar while the older boy galloped around the garden with the younger one on his back.
When she came outside, Mrs. Derrick was wearing a pale blue dress that looked, closer to the seams, as if it might have been royal blue when it was new. There was a skillfully done but still quite noticeable patch close to the hem, perhaps denoting the fact that this dress too had once been the victim of an accident. Her curls had been freshly brushed and her bonnet put on straight. Her cheeks were rosy and shining, as if she had just doused her face in water.
“Oh, dear,” she said, looking at him, “you
did
wait.”
He made her a curt bow. How, he wondered, did such a shabby creature contrive to look not only remarkably pretty but also vibrant with life?
She turned and poked her head back into the kitchen.
“I am on my way,” she called. “Thank you for sending up water and soap, Mrs. Mitchell. You are a dear.”
Was she talking to the
servant
?
Her sister came outside and the two of them hugged each other. Then the children came running up and had to be hugged in their turn, though the older boy held out his right hand self-consciously instead and she shook it, laughing as she did so. She shook hands with the vicar and pecked him on the cheek. And then they all—every one of them—trooped around the house to the front garden in order to wave her on her way to the inn, which was all of a two-minute stroll distant.
It was a remarkable display.
“I never know quite how I manage to get myself into such ghastly scrapes,” Mrs. Derrick said, having taken the arm he offered. “But I do. I always have. Hermione, who tried to make me into a perfect lady after my marriage, despaired of me. Oscar came to believe that I did it deliberately just to shame him. But I was always quite innocent.”
Wulfric did not comment.
“Of course,” she said, “if I had waited I daresay Anthony Culver would have gone up the tree to the rescue. Do you think?”
“I do indeed think, ma’am,” he said curtly.
She laughed then. “Well, at least,” she said, “none of Melanie and Bertie’s guests will forget me in a hurry.”
“I daresay, ma’am,” he agreed, “they will not.”
They entered the inn then, and she was soon surrounded by a group that included Justin Magnus and his young sister and the Culver twins. They all hailed her as some sort of heroine, albeit a rather comic one. There was a great deal of laughter within their group. And she laughed right along with them. At least, Wulfric conceded, she was a good sport.
But no, he decided when that interminable morning was finally over, Mrs. Derrick simply did not know how to behave. And if she was to be believed—and he had previous evidence that she spoke the truth—the disaster of the yew tree was not even entirely unusual with her.
He would be very careful to keep his distance from her for what remained of the house party.
And yet, while all the other young ladies quickly became almost indistinguishable from one another in his mind, it was of Mrs. Derrick that he found himself thinking altogether too much. She had fine eyes and a pretty, good-humored face—even if it
was
somewhat marred by sun bronzing and freckles—that could turn to dazzling beauty when she laughed or was engaged in some strenuous activity. She had trim ankles and shapely legs and a nicely rounded figure.
And he was not by any means the only one who noticed. She quickly became a favorite with most of the other gentlemen. It was hard to explain her appeal, since she was neither elegant nor refined—nor young.
But there was that sparkle about her, that sense of fun, that bright vitality, that . . .
She was sexually appealing.
She was also, he understood, as poor as the proverbial church mouse. He had learned from a casual question posed to Mowbury that her husband had dissipated his fortune during the last few years of his life with excessive gambling and had left his widow quite destitute when he died in a hunting accident on Elrick’s estate. Elrick had apparently taken care of his considerable debts but not of her. And her
second-best
day dress—the one that had been ripped beyond repair—had been
only
three years old. She had very few others.
It did not amuse Wulfric to discover himself drawn to a woman who had
none
of the attributes he found admirable in women. It positively disturbed him to find himself wondering what it would be like to bed her. He was not in the habit of looking upon ladies—or any woman, for that matter—with lascivious intent.
But he was drawn to Mrs. Derrick.
And he
did
wonder.