A Country Wooing Read online

  Charles had been earl for five years when Alex had left. That was the impetus, then.

  “You never said anything about it.”

  “I’m the oyster of the family. We need one, you know, when the rest of us cackle like geese.”

  “I wouldn’t call you an oyster.”

  “Wouldn’t you. Duck?” he asked, turning to smile at her. It was a warm, intimate smile that eased the harshness of his expression. “We used to call you Duck when you were two years old and waddling like one.”

  “What a memory! You must have been only a child yourself.”

  “The name lingered a long while. You were called Duck till you were twelve—and I a callow seventeen.”

  “I seem to remember,” she said vaguely, but what she remembered more clearly was that Charles used to call her Duck occasionally, right up to the time he died. The dark eyes smiling intimately into hers looked suddenly very like Charles’s eyes. How odd! She’d never noticed that resemblance between the brothers before.

  “Do you remember the day you forbade it?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “I do. It was the Easter Charles came down from Oxford and gave you the white kitten that was supposed to be for Bung. He bawled all night long. You must remember the kitten. I was so gauche as to call you Duck in front of Charles, when you had taken into your head to flirt with him. Your first effort at batting your lashes— inexpertly done, but a pretty performance. I daresay the inopportune moment I chose to call you Duck accounted for your rant.”

  “I called him Whitey—the kitten.”

  “And you called me—no, some things are best forgotten.”

  “I had forgotten all about the incident,” she said, dismissing it as of little interest. “Alex, why did you leave? Now that you’ve turned voluble, perhaps I can pry it out of you.”

  “Not yet,” he said. “Later.”

  “You’re just giving yourself airs, to be mysterious and interesting.”

  “You don’t have to put on airs to be interesting. You’re interesting, and you’re the most airless girl I know.”

  “I sound remarkably stuffy—absolutely airless.”

  “Never! Airless, but not stuffy. A rare combination.”

  “I sound like a vacuum. Absence has made your heart grow fonder of more than trees and petals. If I hear you praise the sermon on Sunday, I shall know it’s homesickness speaking, for you always abhorred Danfer’s sermons, and they have not improved during your absence. In fact, they haven’t changed.”

  “Then I shall be sure to disparage it, for I don’t want you to take the notion my praise was insincere. Notice I don’t call it flattery, Duck?”

  “Since you’re determined to be gallant, I shan’t discourage you, but let me slip you a clue, Mr. Oyster. Your future gallantry is not to take the form of expensive gifts.”

  “Oh, expensive!” he scoffed. “I don’t know what Rob was thinking of not to have given you Lady years ago. You should have suggested it, Anne.”

  “Of course I should. I really ought to have hit him up for a new team and carriage while I was about it. The kitchen roof is not all it should be either. I wonder he didn’t get it fixed for us before now. Really, he’s been very behindhand in looking after Mama and me.”

  “I’ve passed the margin from gallantry to gaucherie, have I? You make it easy on my pinched purse, forcing me to limit my gallantry to mere words.”

  They returned to the house, but on this occasion Alex did no more than say good day to Mrs. Wickfield before leaving to go into the village.

  “I must find out how much I am in hawk to all the merchants,” he said. “Some of them came to the Hall, which fills me with terror. I should have thought they’d wait till I went to them. Such an undue eagerness for my company makes me fear the sum is staggering. I hope there is enough money left from the auction to begin tiling.”

  “Tannie told us three hundred pounds for the cobbler,” Mrs. Wickfield mentioned.

  “I should realize between one and two thousand from what Rob took to the auction. Closer to two—I sold off a few carriages we didn’t need, as well. A sky-blue phaeton and a rattan curricle seemed an unnecessary extravagance. Even Rob won’t drive in them.”

  After he left, Mrs. Wickfield cast a few animadversions on the late earl’s extravagance. “What a rotten kettle of fish for Alex to come home to,” she griped.

  But as he spoke of picking up a couple of thousand from selling his excess stable, no one could worry about his solvency. Anne’s mother did not find the loan of Lady exorbitant and smiled softly to herself. She suspected the offer of his hand might follow before too long.

  “Did he say anything interesting while you were walking?” she asked hopefully.

  “We were just talking about the old days.”

  “It might be best not to harp on the past, Annie,” Mrs. Wickfield advised. “A young gentleman wouldn’t like to hear about his lady’s other flirts.”

  “Good heavens, Mama, we weren’t talking about Charles,” Anne said. “Just a mention in passing ...”

  But really they had talked about Charles quite a lot. Specifically about her and Charles, and she had been too naive to disclaim her interest. What was the point? She had loved Charles—one couldn’t erase the past. But somehow she rather wished she had softened it a little.

  Chapter Six

  Anne was surprised to discover her muscles were stiff the next morning from her short ride on Lady. The best cure was to do exactly what she wanted; namely, remount and go for a longer ride.

  As the backhouse boy was busy cleaning ashes from stove and fireplace, she was confined to the private land between Penholme and Rosedale, but this left her plenty of choice. How exhilarating it was to be flying through meadows with the wind in her face and a smooth pacer under her, to be able to jump a stream instead of urging Mrs. Dobbin through it. When a low fence suddenly appeared in front of her, she summoned her courage and put Lady over it. There! She hadn’t done that in five years. She had forgotten the soaring joy of a real ride.

  When she became warm from her exertions, she rode through the shaded spinney at a slower pace, to admire the wild flowers and the soft gurgle of a brook. The morning was perfect—nearly. A companion to ride with would have completed the pleasure.

  From there she rode around the edge of the sheep field to admire the gamboling new lambs, which looked like little clouds fallen from the sky. After an hour’s hard riding she was tired, but the day was too fine to go home. In the distance the stone walls of Penholme rose. As she approached it from the rear, the first person she saw was Alex. He already had his arm out of the sling. He was talking to some workmen. When he saw her, he waved and walked forward to meet her, leaving the men behind.

  “Now aren’t you glad you came down off your high ropes and took Lady?” he asked. “You make a beautiful pair.”

  “More gallantry! Lady and I thank you. I didn’t come to take you from your work, Alex. I’ll go in to say hello to Aunt Tannie.”

  “I’ll join you presently. Wait till I come.”

  “Yes, milord.” She gave him a pert smile.

  “That was a request, however incivilly worded.”

  “It had the air of a military command.”

  “No, no. I’ve sold out. It’s my new title that makes me so arrogant, Duck.” He laughed and turned back to the workmen.

  Loo and Babe were in the stable, admiring the ponies Robin had chosen for them at Eastleigh. The stable looked half empty. Anne mentally tallied up what mounts had been put on the block. He’d kept the grays for the curricle, the bays for the family carriage, a hack and hunter each for himself and Rob, a hack each for the twins, and he’d bought the ponies for the girls. Just what a man in his position would consider essential.

  While she was complimenting the girls on their Welsh ponies, Alex joined them. “Here, up you go,” he said to Babe.

  “Alex, your arm!” Anne cautioned.

  “I can lift Babe
with one arm,” he said, and did so, hoisting her up on the pony’s back. Like all the Penholmes, she had a natural affinity for horses. She was soon jogging around the yard as easily as she walked. Loo had scrambled up on her pony by herself and went after her.

  “Imagine Babe not being mounted till she’s six,” Alex said ruefully.

  “She’s still a baby.”

  “A Penholme baby! Rosalie was hunting when she was eight. And look at Loo—what an awkward set of hands. Here, Loo!” He went after her and rearranged the reins between her fingers, urging her to sit straight and not pull on the line.

  This done, he stood back to watch. “They should be in the schoolroom today, but I had to let them try out their ponies. As far as that goes, that governess.... Where did she come from, anyway?”

  “Sussex, I believe.”

  “Literalist! I meant what is her background. I stepped into her schoolroom yesterday and heard a few paragraphs of a gothic novel. She’s not at all well spoken. I don’t relish telling her she must leave, but the girls need a better teacher than that.’’

  “I don’t know what her background is, but she is engaged to the local schoolteacher. Perhaps if you intrude yourself into the schoolroom with gentle hints of geography and grammar, she’ll see fit to marry him in a hurry.”

  “How long has she been here?”

  “Since shortly after you left.”

  “That’s what I thought,” he said. His manner of saying it told her what was in his mind. Charles’s work, hiring an unsuitable employee because she was young and pretty.

  A groom, and there was an excess of them with the diminished stable, was called to oversee the girls’ lesson, and Anne and Alex entered the house.

  They met Mrs. Tannie just coming from conference with cook. She ordered tea and went with them to the gold saloon. “How much do you owe the builder?” she asked bluntly.

  “Fifty for the dovecot, two hundred and fifty for the stables. That was Coulter, the builder, with me just now,” he explained to Anne.

  “Between that and the servants’ wages and Dr. Palmsey, it will eat up what you got at Eastleigh yesterday,” Mrs. Tannie said.

  “A pity. I had hoped to buy tiles from that blunt and pay off the merchants. We’re so steeped in debt I’m reluctant to go into a shop. I wonder what else I can sell.” His eyes wandered around the walls, hung with valuable paintings.

  “Not the pictures, surely!” Anne exclaimed, alarmed to imagine things had come to such a pass.

  “No, I’ll go through the welter of things in Charlie’s jewelry case. It’s big as a shoebox, full of tiepins and rings and watch fobs. Good stuff—he had an eye for pretty gewgaws.”

  “Charles always dressed fine as a peacock,” Mrs. Tannie said, but fondly.

  Alex ignored the compliment. “We haven’t done anything about our party, Anne. Have you decided what we should have first? The garden party, perhaps, while the weather is fine.”

  “It’s a poor time to have a party, with money owing everywhere,” Mrs. Tannie objected. “That stove in the kitchen is ready to topple over in a heap.”

  “You must know by now how things are done here,” Alex said airily. “We do everything on tick.”

  “A garden party won’t cost much, Aunt Tannie,” Anne pointed out. She was looking forward to that party. “Let’s make a list.”

  Tannie finished her tea and left them. “I’m surprised Aunt Tannie didn’t urge the party on us. She seems a bit stiff this morning,” Alex said.

  “Yes...”

  “You sound as if you know something. What is it?”

  “None of my business, really.”

  “Make it your business.”

  “Very well. It’s not only your servants whose wages are in arrears. Charles told her he would give her a hundred a year when she came here. She was your papa’s pensioner, but when she became housekeeper and substitute mother for the children as well, Charles promised her a wage. She tells me he never paid a sou.”

  “Good lord, why didn’t she tell me? You mean all these years—never paid anything at all?”

  “She bought what she required on credit.”

  “That comes to—something like five hundred pounds I owe her. Where am I to raise all this money?” He ran his fingers through his short hair worriedly. “I know how the government feels. I owe the whole world back wages.”

  “What about your rents, your income?”

  “The rents are down more than a third, but I’ll see what I can wring out of the bank.”

  “Alex, the income used to be ten thousand! Surely you can’t be in financial trouble, real trouble, I mean.”

  “Not desperate trouble. A temporary shortage only. Penholme is mortgaged to the roof. Papa already had twenty thousand on it, and Charlie upped it another twenty. It’s only worth fifty altogether. I don’t know how he talked anyone into letting him have such a sum.”

  “Why would he need that much money?”

  “Charles liked the best. I’ve often heard him say so. ‘The best’ doesn’t come cheap. A pity he didn’t carry that philosophy over to hiring a governess. Or getting the best rate on the mortgage, for that matter. He paid ten percent for the second mortgage.”

  Anne sat, dumbfounded. “But if the rents are down and the mortgage up so high, it—it doesn’t leave much....” She did some rapid arithmetic and soon realized that Alex had less than half what she had supposed was needed to operate Penholme and all the other nonprofitable properties.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll come around. Now about this party.”

  She felt faint. “Why don’t you wait a little, Alex? Business before pleasure.”

  “I’ve waited a long time for this pleasure. A simple garden party doesn’t seem too much to ask.” The vehemence of his tone surprised her. She thought it even surprised him, and embarrassed him, for he soon pulled in his horns. “Perhaps you’re right. I have to go to London, and Robin is itching to get to Sawburne.”

  “Are you quite sure you can afford to give him Sawburne?”

  “It’s not mine; it’s his, morally his. I’d like to give it to him soon. Like the rest of us, Robin has only one life to live. Mother insisted on buying Sawburne—for me, the second son. Rob’s the second son now. I have no right to deprive him of it. I’m right about Sawburne, and you’re right about the party. We can’t afford it. Sensible Annie, what would we do without you?” His smile was warm, despite the unhappy topic.

  “Sink into a morass of parties and balls,” she said.

  “And debt. But it isn’t hopeless, you know. I’ll come around soon. We must be patient a little longer.” He looked at her with an impatient expression—intent, questioning.

  Anne felt as surely as she was sitting in his gold saloon that he was talking about marriage. It was a perfectly presumptuous thing to read into his innocent words, but when he reached out and patted her hand, she knew it was that and nothing else that he meant. His fingers ran over the opal ring she wore. She always wore it now. When he smiled softly, she knew exactly what was in his mind: I hope you will have a lovelier one, one day, to wear on the other finger. The atmosphere was so heavy she sought to lighten it.

  “Thinking of taking my gift back and pawning it?” she asked.

  “Not even close. Will you stay to lunch?”

  “I don’t want to leave Mama alone. I’ll be going now.”

  He accompanied her to the stable. As he helped her onto Lady’s back, he looked along all the empty stalls in the useless addition Charles had built and scowled.

  “I’m driving over to Sawburne with Robin tomorrow,” he said before she left. “We’ll get an early start and be back by afternoon. I’ll call around three or four, if that’s all right.”

  “I’ll give Mama the order and tell her to be home, with tea ready.”

  “It’s you I’m coming to see, Duck,” he said with an intimate, meaningful smile.

  Anne’s spirits soared as she cantered home through the flower-dappled
meadow. She knew her mother wanted this match with Alex, and as a sort of daydream, she had often considered it. It would be a marvelous social coup, and of course extremely convenient. In these considerings, the only objection had been Alex himself. Cold, aloof Alex. How had she misread him so completely? Had she been so blinded by the dashing, reckless Charles that she’d never bothered to look—or had he changed?

  From the moment he had bumped into her in the doorway of Rosedale and grabbed her in his arms to be welcomed home, he had seemed to view her as a lover. Almost as though he had come home and come to Rosedale with no other view than marrying her.

  Chapter Seven

  Anne’s head was bent over her sewing as she sat in the saloon the next afternoon, awaiting the arrival of Alex and Robin. She hadn’t paid much heed to fashion in the year and a half since Charles’s death, but with Alex home, there would be a few small do’s, and such gowns as she possessed were under revision for possible updating. The yellow silk on her lap was being enlivened with white lace and green ribbons. She wasn’t sure whether it was an improvement or the opposite, but at least it was a change.

  Her mind flew to that rapidly thinning bolt of creamy crepe in Mumbleton’s drapery shop. She mentally balanced her dwindling allowance against absolutely necessary new gloves, a birthday present for Mama, a proper repair to her blue patent slippers (for the tacks piercing her toe rendered them nearly unwearable), and the white crepe. She had been deeply distressed to learn the crepe cost three guineas a yard.

  A daring straight gown was what she had in mind, and the pattern called for three yards. She had never paid such a sum as nine guineas for material in her life; it was a monstrous extravagance. With a little rearranging and careful cutting and omission of the shawl, two yards would do it. A little frown puckered her brow as she considered this important matter. Intent on the solution, she was unaware of company. Alex and Robin had stabled the curricle and come in the back door.

  “If you hate sewing as much as that Roman frown indicates, why do you do it?” Robin asked.

  She looked up to see two handsome young men smiling at her. Both were decked out in fawn trousers and Hessians—city clothes, instead of their customary buckskins and top boots. Robin was undeniably the more handsome, but it was at Alex that she looked longer. A spontaneous smile of surprise lit her face.