Someone perfect, p.19
Someone Perfect, page 19
“I thought you were with Maria,” he said.
“I was,” she told him. “One of the gardeners gave a large group of us a very interesting tour of the greenhouses. He knows everything there is to know about all the plants, including the countries from which they all came. Everyone went their own way after that. Maria’s Yorkshire aunts and uncles went off to sit in the summerhouse. I was going to suggest that Maria come here with me to relax for a while, but before I could say a word she decided to go after them and wanted me to go with her. She asked them about her mother and insisted upon the truth as they knew it. It was an uncomfortable conversation for them all, but I believe it is going to help enormously. I left them hugging one another and shedding tears.”
“Ah, reconciliation,” he said. “It is what I hoped for. Though there was always the chance the opposite would happen and they would all part forever after a bitter quarrel.”
“I do not believe that will happen now,” she said. “I believe Maria has discovered a family who will stick with her in the future. Poor thing. She loved her mother very dearly. But I think she is beginning to understand that the countess was not always perfect.”
He gazed at her while Captain nudged at his hand in the hope of being petted. Justin obliged him.
“I did not meet her,” Lady Estelle said, her eyes steady on his. “But I think she must have been an unpleasant woman. I cannot imagine any other mother refusing help from professional nurses who had been sent to her, no doubt at considerable expense, and insisting instead that she be tended exclusively by her very young daughter. Maria was barely nineteen when she died.”
What could he say? He chose to say nothing.
“I am sorry,” she said, smiling fleetingly. “It is none of my business—as usual. But I have interrupted your musings. I ought to leave you to them and continue my walk.”
“I made it your business, Lady Estelle,” he said, smoothing his hand along Captain’s back, “when I asked you to come here as a companion for my sister. I will say this much. I was badly hurt when my father remarried. Perhaps children always are under such circumstances, but—”
“No, not necessarily,” she said. “How old were you?”
“Thirteen,” he said.
“I was seventeen when my father married my stepmother,” she said. “There were complications in their courtship and they broke off their betrothal and went their separate ways. Bertrand and I had to work very hard to bring them back together and get them to marry each other on a Christmas Eve. We did it because it was obvious to us that they were painfully in love with each other, and because our father would never have been happy without her. And because his happiness mattered to us. I will always love my mother, though I have no conscious memories of her. But I adore my stepmother. Children are not always resentful of the second marriage of their surviving parent.”
“My father and mother were very close,” he said. “There was affection and laughter in the house when I was a child, and I was included in it. They made me feel that I was their most prized treasure. I thought my father would go insane after she died. I thought he would never be happy again. After three years he was just beginning to pull himself back from the brink. But when he went to London for the parliamentary session and came back with a . . . a girl not quite five years older than me and announced that he would be marrying her within a month, I thought I must be in the middle of a bizarre sort of nightmare. I was biased against her, of course. I will admit that. But no matter how hard I tried, I could not understand why he was doing it. Apart from the fact that she was extraordinarily lovely, that was. But it seemed so unlike my father to be bowled over by just that. It seemed to me that she lacked character and . . . and anything else that could possibly interest him. I was terribly hurt. We had been closer than ever since my mother’s death. He had promised to return from London just as soon as he possibly could. We were going to go to Cornwall, he to spend time with his sisters and brothers-in-law, I to frolic with the cousins. We had been planning it since Christmas. But . . . Well, I felt abandoned, forgotten, pushed aside for someone who was more important to him, though I could not for the life of me understand why. It hurts to lose faith in a parent you have always looked up to as perfect in every way.”
“The story Lady Maple told a few days ago about the first meeting of your father and stepmother was new to you?” she asked.
“Entirely,” he said. “But it explained . . . everything.” And he did mean everything. Even the way it had all ended between him and his father. For before all else, his father had been an honorable man. An honorable man married a woman whose reputation he had compromised, even if he had been tricked into doing so. And an honorable man defended his wife at the expense of all else. Even his only son.
“Yes,” she said. “I suppose it did.” She moved as though she intended to rise.
“Stay awhile,” he said.
She settled back against her cushion.
She was wearing some perfume. Something floral. Gardenia? It was not a harsh scent, though, as many women’s perfumes were. It was soft and subtle. It seemed part of her. He had not consciously noticed it in the summerhouse or when he stood with her in one of the twin sitting rooms in the state apartments, but he must have done so unconsciously.
“When you were banished from here,” she said, “you did not take a fortune in jewels with you. Presumably you had nothing or next to nothing. You were gone for a number of years. Where did you go? What did you do?”
He had never mingled his worlds. Wes and Hilda had known nothing of his life here. They had not even known until he got word of his father’s death that he was heir to an earldom. All they had guessed was that he was a gentleman by birth, down on his luck. No one in this world, not even his aunt and uncle, knew about his other life. They knew only that he had survived and that three or four times a year he had gone to pick up the letters they had written or forwarded to him and had sent them a brief note to acknowledge their receipt. He had been thinking earlier of a plan that would bring his worlds together, but it had not yet taken definite shape in his mind and perhaps never would. It might be preferable to leave well enough alone.
Was he now to bring those two worlds together simply by answering the questions this woman had asked him? This woman who less than a week ago had refused his offer to make her his countess? This virtual stranger?
“I went,” he said. “I had a choice of four directions and infinite subdirections within each. I went west. I stayed at inns and ate at taverns for a week or so while reality set in. There was no going back home. Ever. Not while my father lived. There was no home. There was no replacement for the little money I had. There was no income.”
“You had no friends to go to?” she asked. “You would not—or could not—go to any of your relatives? There was no chance of genteel employment—perhaps in London?”
There had been possibilities. He had had a few friends who might have helped. His uncle Rowan would have recommended him to some employment suited to his education and background. His aunts and uncles in Cornwall would almost certainly have taken him in and pointed him in the right direction if he had told them he wished to earn his way. He had chosen instead to go his own road—quite literally.
“There was a matter of pride and some stubbornness,” he said. “And despite all the pain I was feeling, I had an image of myself as a young adventurer striding off into the world and into the future to make his fortune.”
“And did you succeed?” she asked.
“I made my future,” he said. “One really has no choice over that, short of ending it all. I never considered taking my life. I worked wherever I could, and pride—as well as necessity—led me to take anything I was offered. It was never anything even remotely attractive. The respect with which I had been treated as a matter of course for the first twenty-two years of my life meant nothing when I stepped out of my own . . . bubble. It was in fact a cause of ridicule at best, of vicious hostility at worst. I was considered good for nothing—and was told so. I swept out taverns and cleaned latrines. I fed pigs and mucked out their pens. I worked in a coal mine until there was a cave-in along one of the underground tunnels—I was in the other at the time. I worked on a dock, loading and unloading freight. I could go on and on. Some jobs lasted a few days, others a few weeks. I slept wherever I could, sometimes under a solid roof, sometimes in a barn or beneath a hedgerow. After two years I met the man who was to become my best friend.”
“The one who broke your nose,” she said.
“Yes. Wes,” he said. “Wesley Mort. He was and is a foreman at a stone quarry. After he had knocked me to the tavern floor and I was only semiconscious, he voiced his contempt for me and all men of my class and told me that if I wanted to be a real man I could come and work for him. Which I did two days later, much to his astonishment. I worked for him for four years, until I heard about my father’s death and came back here. He was not easy on me. Quite the contrary. He gave me all the most brutal tasks during the first year or so and kept me at them for longer hours than he kept anyone else—because I was slower and worse than useless, in his stated opinion. I earned nothing for the extra time I put in.”
“But he became your best friend?” She had set an elbow on her knee and had her chin propped on her hand. She was looking slightly amused, Justin thought.
“He kept his end of our bargain and stopped calling me Mr. La-di-da after the first week,” he said. “Ever after I was Juss. He worked as hard as I did, I must explain, and considerably harder until I toughened up. I lived with him and Hilda, his woman. I shared a loft with his brother, Ricky. I taught Wes to read and write, though he still gets frustrated at the slowness with which he does both. I used to tell Ricky stories, and Wes and Hilda would often listen, though Wes pretended not to. It was beneath his dignity to take delight from an imaginary world. We made a wagon between us, and both Wes and Hilda had the use of my horse to pull it.”
“Ricky was a child?” she asked.
“He is a few years younger than I am,” he said. “But his mind is that of a child. When I went to Wes’s house to get work, it was Ricky who invited me inside for a bowl of Hilda’s soup to make me feel better. Then he showed me his loft and decided it was large enough for the two of us. Hilda put up a curtain to divide the space in two.”
“And that is where you lived for four years,” she said.
“And for a couple of months each year even now,” he said. “The Earl of Brandon becomes Juss Wiley, stone hewer, twice a year and is happy again.”
He gazed at her, his eyes and his whole face deliberately blank. He had not told anyone else these things.
“You love them,” she said.
“Yes,” he said curtly. “There were no deductions from my wages, by the way, for room and board.”
“And I suppose,” she said, “you did not charge for the reading and writing lessons or for the use of your horse.”
“It did not occur to me,” he said. “Perhaps I ought to send a bill.”
She had a way of looking. It was not exactly a smile. It was a . . . warmth. As though she smiled inside but chose to keep most of it to herself. But some spilled over into her eyes and onto her face nonetheless. She was looking that way at him now.
“What?” he said.
“I bet his bill would be larger,” she said.
“Undoubtedly,” he said. “Wes is as hard as nails. Or as a boulder. But yes, I love him.”
“And this,” she said, “is why you are so . . . large?” She seemed to have taken herself by surprise with her question. Even in the shadowed light of the cave he could see that color had flooded her cheeks.
He opened his hands and looked at his palms. There were still calluses at the base of each finger. His badges of honor. And the hands themselves were larger than they had once been. No longer the hands of a gentleman. He closed his fingers into his palms.
“I am sorry,” she said. “It was not intended as an insult. You looked very . . . frightening the first time I saw you. It did not help, I suppose, that I was sitting on the riverbank and you were on horseback and Captain looked as though he was coming for my throat.”
Captain woofed.
“You ought not to have been there alone,” Justin said.
“Now you sound like my aunt,” she told him.
“Not your brother?” he asked her. “Did he not scold you?”
“I did not tell him,” she said. “He would have scolded, and I would have been forced to quarrel with him and accuse him of sounding like our aunt.”
“The one who raised you,” he said. “What is she like? Apart from the fact that she did not approve of dogs as pets.”
“She was very strict,” she said. “Very proper. Very pious. Very a lot of upright, moral things. She has a strong sense of what is right and how a house should be run and how all the people in it ought to behave, both family and servants. She ruled my uncle and my two cousins and Bertrand and me. Bert was brought up to be a gentleman. I was raised to be a lady. We were raised to value church and prayer and morality. We were never told that our father was a rake and a ne’er-do-well. We were taught to respect him. But whenever he came to visit, he felt his sister-in-law’s disapproval and agreed with her unspoken condemnation. He has told us so since then. He thought we were in the best possible place with the best possible people, and he never stayed for longer than a few days at a time. He did not want to contaminate us with his presence. It did not help that we were taught to be quiet except when spoken to. We stayed quiet when we were with him, waiting for him to speak with us, but he never spoke except to ask a few stilted questions that could be answered with a monosyllable. Our father believed we hated him and wanted him to go away. So he went.”
“I am sorry,” he said.
“You need not be,” she told him. “We did have an excellent upbringing. And we were loved, as I believe I told you before. Strict discipline does not necessarily preclude love, you know.”
“But you longed for your father,” he said. It had shrieked through every word of her account of her childhood. Or perhaps more through the look on her face and the tone of her voice than through her actual words. She and her brother had been reconciled with him, but much damage had been done them anyway.
“I am so thankful,” she said, “that he did not die before we had a chance to get to know him properly, to understand him and why he behaved as he did, to be fully . . . restored to him.”
He patted his dog’s head and gazed at her. Captain turned his head to pant in his face. His breath was not exactly sweet.
He watched Lady Estelle swallow. “I ought not to have said that,” she said. “It was insensitive. You were not as fortunate as we were.”
“My father was ailing for several months before his death,” he said. “I do not believe he ever asked for me or tried to send word to me.”
“Would there have been any way for him to contact you?” she asked.
He shook his head.
“How did you hear of his passing, then?” she asked.
“My aunt and uncle knew where to send letters,” he said. “Though it was often weeks or months before I got them.”
“Mr. and Mrs. Sharpe?” she said.
He nodded. “They wrote me of his death.”
She clasped her arms about her legs and lowered her head until her forehead touched her knees. “Is that where the worst of your pain is?” she asked him.
It was not perfectly clear what she meant by that. But he understood her to mean the fact that his father had apparently stuck by the decision he had made that day when he banished his only son. Even when he was dying he had stuck by it. There had been no olive branch, no offer of reconciliation.
It was a pain so deep that he never, ever thought of it. It would, he knew, be unbearable if he allowed it to intrude upon his conscious mind and take up residence there.
“You are mistaken, Lady Estelle,” he said. “That was all a very long time ago. There is no pain.” He set his head back against the stone wall. The sound of the waterfall somehow sealed them in here as though the rest of the world no longer existed. “I suppose I am neglecting my guests. Is it teatime? Past teatime?”
“I have no idea,” she said, lifting her head. “But I believe everyone can fend for themselves. And Maria is probably back at the house to see to it that no one starves.”
He got to his feet anyway, careful not to straighten up and bang his head on the low rocks above it. He held out both hands to help her up. She looked at them before setting her own in them. Hers were slim, long-fingered, smooth-skinned. A lady’s hands, half lost in his own. Hands that aroused his masculine protective instincts, though she did not strike him as the sort of woman who craved or even welcomed male protection. She was no one’s typical image of a helpless female. Generalizations were useless things anyway. Not many people fit into them once one scratched the outer surface they presented to the world and took a good look at the person within.
She raised her eyes to his, her eyebrows slightly arched upward, as though to ask him why he was holding her hands if he was not intending to help her get to her feet. Why indeed? But their faces were suddenly uncomfortably close.
“You did not tell me if I was forgiven,” he said. “For kissing you,” he added when her brows rose a little higher.
“Did I not?” she said. “You were. You are.”
“I regret,” he said, “that I was so gauche. And so impetuous. Such a blockhead. I went about it all wrong.”
“The kiss?” Her voice was almost a whisper.
“That too,” he said. “But I was referring to my proposal of marriage. I have always despised bended knee and rosebuds and poetic speeches and hand over heart. But there is surely a large range of possible behaviors between that and ‘I wish you would marry me.’ I believe those were my very words, or something similar. I am glad you had the good sense to refuse me.”
