The Famous Heroine/The Plumed Bonnet (58 page)

She always smiled at their servants. She always said please and thank you. She always sounded genuinely grateful for their service. She often asked the servant—by name—about a particular detail of his or her health or of his mother’s health or that particular item he had been looking to purchase. She knew each of their servants personally, he was sure. His mother would be alarmed. He was charmed.

“Alistair,” she said, turning her smile on him, “you are to be captain of one of the cricket teams this afternoon. You did know? I did remember to tell you?”

“No, actually, my dear,” he said. “Are you sure you would not prefer to do it yourself?”

“No.” Her smile was almost a grin. “I have to be busy about other things. I have to make friends of a few women by awarding them prizes for their embroidery and netting and cake-making and so on, and make a few dozen enemies at the same time.”

He had never joined in the cricket match, which was the highlight of the day for many of the men. His mother had not considered that it would be dignified for him to do so.

“Very well, then,” he said. “But if you
do
decide to play, it must be on my side. A husband’s orders.”

It was the only command he had given since their wedding, even in joke.

“And you must give the prizes in the village this morning,” she said. “Will you, Alistair? It is not fair that I judge the contests and award the prizes. And I am sure the winners will be far prouder of themselves if their prizes are presented by the Duke of Bridgwater himself.”

Good Lord! “Very well, my dear,” he said. “If you wish it.”

“Oh, Alistair.” She leaned across the table toward him, her face eager and animated. “There is to be dancing about the maypole. Why is dancing about a maypole so much more magical than dancing anywhere else? I used to love it of all things when I was a girl. I remember Mama being doubtful and thinking perhaps it was not quite proper for the vicar’s daughter to join in, but Papa said I might. I would have
died
if it had not been allowed.”

He had to resist the impulse to lean back slightly. He was dazzled. She was as excited as a girl. She was
enjoying
this. His mother had never enjoyed it. She had treated it as one more duty that must be perfectly executed.

“Alistair,” Stephanie said, “give me your opinion. Will it be undignified for the Duchess of Bridgwater to dance about the maypole?”

His mother would have an apoplexy. So should he.

“Not unless it is undignified for the Duke of Bridgwater too,” he said. “I intend to dance about it with you, Stephanie. I hope it does not coincide with the cricket match?”

“Oh, no.” She laughed. “There have to be men to dance. It is to be afterward. Before the ox roast. And then the dance. I can scarce wait. I have never danced out of doors during the evening before.”

“There is a breeze to ruffle your coiffure,” he said, “and stones to cut against your slippers, and night chills to raise goose bumps on your arms.”

She laughed. “And stars for candles,” she said.

“Yes.” There was a curious ache about his heart. “And stars for candles, my dear. We will dance beneath the stars. We will
waltz
beneath the stars. Shall we?”

“Yes.” Her hand came half across the table to him, but she had drawn it back before he could cover it with his own.

“I must fly,” she said, getting to her feet before he could rise to draw her chair back for her. “I promised to be in the village early.”

“Before eight o’clock?” he said.

She laughed. “Is it that early?” she said. “But I still have to change my clothes and have my hair dressed. No respectable lady can accomplish those tasks within half an hour, you know. Will you ride with me, Alistair? Perhaps I will need advice on some of the judging.”

“I am the world’s foremost authority on embroidery,” he said.

She laughed.

“But I will come, of course,” he said.

He would go anywhere in the world she cared to ask him to go—if she would but go there with him.

HERE WAS A STRANGE, HAPPY, CAREFREE FEEL TO THE
day, even though there was so much to do every minute of it and there should have been so much anxiety that something would go wrong. There was an excitement about the day, a sense of a turning point. Everything since her marriage and her coming to Wightwick had been leading up to this day, Stephanie realized. It was as if there had been a tacit agreement between her and her husband to postpone their personal problems until after the summer fête. To postpone any decision.

Tomorrow loomed like a great empty void in her life. She could not look beyond today. And while she lived today, she did not want to look beyond. It was such a very happy day.

She moved several times during the course of the day between the village and the park and house, sometimes with her husband, sometimes alone. She wanted to be everywhere at once. She wanted to miss nothing. She judged the ladies’ and the children’s contests, then smiled and applauded while her husband presented the prizes. She switched roles with him during the races and complained to him that judging races was very much easier than judging who had baked the best currant cakes.

She even joined in one of the races, when there was an odd number of children wishing to participate in the
three-legged race. She partnered a thin, timid little girl, and they narrowly won the race when the leaders-by-a-mile fell in a tangled heap just before the finish line and could not untangle themselves in time. Stephanie hugged her partner, laughing helplessly, and waved cheerfully to the rather large crowd that had suddenly gathered. She threw a half-laughing, half-defiant glance at her husband, and realized that just a month before she would have been horrified by her own behavior and would have been vowing never to behave thus again.

She coaxed her husband into buying her six lengths of gaudy ribbon from a peddler’s stall in the village and then tied them into the newly washed, newly combed hair of the six young daughters of one of the poorer tenants. She drew him toward the tent of a gypsy, whom she suspected was no gypsy at all, insisting that they have their fortunes told. But at the last moment, after he had acquiesced, she changed her mind.

“No,” she said, “not the future. This is today, and it is such an enjoyable day. Let us not find out about the future, even in fun.”

“No,” he agreed. “Let us enjoy today, my dear.”

He too knew that tomorrow all might change.

She watched the cricket game and cheered unashamedly and partially for her husband’s team. He was a talented player, as she soon discovered with interest. His steward, who came to stand beside her for a few minutes, informed her that His Grace had been on the first eleven while at Oxford University. That was one thing about himself he had not told her.

“You should have played at Richmond that day,” she said accusingly when the game was over.

But he merely smiled and drew her arm through his. “When our children reach a suitable age,” he said, “we will scrape together enough children from the neighborhood
to make up two teams and we can captain one each.”

“Mine will humiliate yours,” she said.

“Yes, probably,” he agreed pleasantly. “It
is
humiliating to know that one has completely annihilated another team and made them feel quite inept.”

She looked sidelong at him to find that he was doing the same to her. She did not miss the assumption they had both made about the future. She wondered, as she had done several times during the past week, if she was with child. There was a definite chance, though she was always so irregular that it was impossible to know for sure. It would be foolish to hope yet—or to dread.

Usually after the cricket match, most people relaxed or strolled in the park until it was time for the feast to begin. Only the young people headed back to the village for the maypole dancing. But this year word had somehow spread that the Duke of Bridgwater and his new bride were not only planning to attend the event, but were themselves intending to dance.

No one had ever seen a Duke of Bridgwater or his duchess or any of his family dancing about the maypole. No one could quite imagine it. Everyone needed visual evidence to believe that it could possibly happen. And so late in the afternoon the main street of the village was crowded with people, and the village green was surrounded by a milling, curious, laughing throng.

Stephanie took off her bonnet and her gloves and set them aside with her parasol. There was a smattering of applause, and one brave anonymous soul whistled. Her husband took off his hat and his coat, as he had done for the cricket match, and rolled up his shirt sleeves to the elbows. He eyed the maypole and its many-colored ribbons with some misgiving, Stephanie saw.

But he knew the steps, as he proved as soon as they and the other dancers had all taken a ribbon in hand
and the violins began to play. The crowd ringing the green clapped and stamped in time to the music. Only once did the ribbons become snarled and the music pause for a few moments. The crowd jeered good-naturedly. Stephanie smiled as her husband laughed, apologized abjectly, untangled the ribbons, and laughed again.

If she closed her eyes, she thought, as she performed the intricate patterns of the dance, concentrating on both her steps and the movements of her hand with its green ribbon, she could almost imagine herself back in her girlhood, in that golden time before all the harsher realities of life had intruded. She could picture her mother smiling, her father clapping to the rhythm and nodding encouragement to her. She could picture Tom whooping with enthusiasm and catching the nearest pretty girl about the waist when the dancing was finished and twirling her about.

But this was not her girlhood. She turned her head to watch her husband, who was grinning and lifting his arm higher as one of his tenant’s young daughters stepped with her ribbon beneath his and around him. Stephanie was doing the same thing with the man closest to her. She smiled at the man, and he smiled back—a smile of warmth and admiration and respect.

This was not wrong, she thought. It was not undignified. She was glad she had decided to do things her way, though she would always be grateful for the training her mother-in-law had given her. She was glad she was free. She was glad she had found out in time that she need be no slave to an obligation that could never be repaid.

He might have held her in thrall for the rest of her life. She would never have known. There would have been no danger of his secret ever being disclosed. No one but Alistair had known.

What a great and wonderful wedding gift he had given
her, she thought so unexpectedly that she almost lost her step and almost dipped her ribbon when she was supposed to raise it.

The dancers were treated to enthusiastic applause when the dancing was over.

“My mother,” the Duke of Bridgwater said when they were walking back to the house to prepare for the evening festivities—they had not brought the carriage this time—“will suffer an apoplexy if, or when, she hears about this, Stephanie. She will believe she failed utterly with you and that I have fallen into bad company.”

Oh, my dear, make him happy. He is so very dear to me, my son
.

Stephanie could almost hear her mother-in-law say those words, as she had done on her wedding day. One rare glimpse behind the armor of dignity and propriety and grace the dowager duchess had worn perhaps all her life. Stephanie was not so sure her husband was right. But right or not, he sounded quite uncontrite.

“Alistair,” she said, “there is nothing as exhilarating as dancing out of doors, is there? And look, the sky is still quite clear of clouds. We really will be able to dance beneath the stars tonight, will we not?”

She was even, she thought, beginning to be able to contemplate the prospect of tomorrow coming. But she would not let her thoughts dwell on it yet.

I
T WAS A
day in which great happiness had warred with desperate depression.

He could not remember a day he had enjoyed so greatly. A day in which he had felt so free or so uninhibited by his rank and consequence. Or so in love.

She had changed in the month since their marriage. It was only today, looking back on the month and considering
the month preceding it that he realized how different she was. All the stiffness and timidity and seriousness and submissiveness had disappeared. In their place was a warm, charming, fun-loving woman who seemed to know by some inner instinct how to deal with people.

She said and did all the things that should have lost her the respect of both her peers and her servants—according to his mother’s rules. And yet the opposite seemed true. He suspected that even after just one month she was adored by everyone who knew her. And yet he had seen beyond any doubt that it was she who commanded his home, not either Mrs. Griffiths or Parker.

And he, of course, was no exception. He adored her too.

He understood the change in her. He understood that during this month he had had the privilege of becoming acquainted with the real Stephanie Munro. He understood that during the month before their marriage she had been awed into trying to change herself so that she would be a worthy duchess for him. She had thought at the time that she owed him everything.