The next morning they went riding together, travelling for miles, enjoying the fresh air of early summer, content in the new peace that reigned between them. There was still a lot to be said, but for the moment they could stop by a stream, lounging on the ground while the horses drank, and look at each other, smiling.
‘I’ve been away for such a short time, yet it all looks different now,’ she observed.
‘I know. We’ve brought the cattle out of their winter quarters into the fields.’
‘And the mowing. I thought harvest wasn’t until August.’
‘We harvest the grain in August. In May we mow the grass so that it can be stored for winter feeding.’
‘I’ll learn.’
His eyes flickered to her, but he said nothing.
‘I wish you’d stayed with me last night,’ she said impulsively.
After a long pause he said, ‘I hate that room.’ He threw a pebble into the water. ‘My mother used to sleep there.’
‘You told me about her death-how they didn’t tell you until you came home-’
‘I knew she wasn’t strong. When she wasn’t on the step to greet me I thought she must be in bed so I ran upstairs to her room. I burst in, longing to see her-’
‘Oh, no,’ she whispered, torn with pity for the eager little boy running towards heartbreak.
‘The room had been stripped. No bedclothes, just a bare mattress. That was how I discovered she was dead. Now I never go there, except once when I thought there was an intruder-’ He gave her a brief smile, inviting her to remember that night. ‘At other times, I prefer it without light.’
She touched his face. ‘No wonder you don’t trust anyone. But don’t mistrust me, Jarvis. Don’t hide from me.’
‘That’s easy to say. A sensible man keeps himself hidden.’
‘That wouldn’t be a sensible man. It would be a stunted one. If he keeps himself a prisoner how can he ever reach out to anyone?’
‘I can’t argue with you. I don’t know how. You’re too good with words.’
‘And you think there’s nothing to me but words?’
After a moment he said quietly. ‘You know better than that.’ And for once it was the voice that spoke to her in the night. And suddenly the night was there with them, despite the sunshine. Memory was stronger. His eyes, too, were defenceless.
‘I thought you weren’t coming back,’ he said quietly.
‘I was always going to come back.’
‘Are you here to stay now?’
She hesitated. ‘I have to return once more, because I left in such a hurry-’
‘Yeah, sure. Well, just let me know when. Time we were going.’
The moment was over. Like a hunted creature that sees the glint on the gun barrel and darts away, he’d spotted danger and retreated into his prickly shell.
But she’d advanced a step into his confidence. The battle was winnable, she thought as they returned home.
Sometimes she asked herself why she bothered. She had a good life waiting for her on the other side of the Atlantic, people who admired her and things she had planned to do when she had control of her fortune. Why not just draw a line under Jarvis, go off and enjoy her life?
Because nothing was the same any more.
Life meant being here, with the man who’d seized painful hold of her heart and wouldn’t let it go.
What did he have to recommend him to her? His title? It meant nothing. His great estate? She could buy all the land she wanted.
His castle? She could probably buy one of those too, somewhere.
What then?
And here her inner arguments fell silent in the face of the truth. By floundering around, not really knowing what she was doing, she had somehow stumbled on the one man who could give her what she didn’t already have. His need.
She could add to that the need of his people, hundreds of them, all unwittingly giving her something that she needed, the satisfaction of knowing that she was making a difference for good. But it was Jarvis’s need, dumb, heart-wrenching, beyond his power to express, that ached within her, drawing her back here when common sense would have told her to go.
Their fragile peace held for a while. One day Jarvis came home to find workmen crawling all over the castle with instruments.
‘They’re giving me an estimate for the central heating,’ Meryl explained. When he frowned doubtfully she engaged him eyeball to ball, saying, ‘I am Lady Larne. I am mistress of this castle, and I want central heating.’
‘You’re probably right,’ he agreed meekly.
He didn’t complain when the turnip mattress mysteriously morphed into the latest fully sprung wonder, not even when Meryl said, ‘I didn’t actually throw the turnips away. I mean, they’re part of England’s heritage, aren’t they? You can give them to the nation, and say, “Queen Elizabeth I slept on these”.’
He grinned. ‘No, she slept on cabbages in the West Wing.’
But the following week their truce began to fray when he said, ‘I’ve had Ned Race and his cronies onto me, complaining that you’re filling their wives’s and daughters’s heads with nonsense.’
‘Cheek!’ Meryl exploded.
‘These men run family farms that need everyone’s help. Now the women are spending all their time knitting.’
‘I know Ned Race. He leaves the bulk of the work to his womenfolk, does as little as possible himself, and spends too much time in the pub.’
‘Nonsense, I’ve known him for years.’
‘But what do you know?’ Meryl demanded indignantly. ‘What he wants you to know. You should try talking to Clarrie Race and you’d hear a few things that would surprise you. Ned’s bellyaching because he’s got to shift his fat backside for a change.’
‘Meryl, I know you think you know what you’re talking about, but believe me, you don’t, and it isn’t kind of you to encourage these women to neglect reality and chase shadows. What was that?’ Meryl had made a noise.
‘I said a very rude word,’ she said crossly. ‘One of the best in my repertoire. It needed saying. It applies to Ned Race in bucketfuls and I’m beginning to think it applies to you, too. But since you’re my husband I’ll just call you a blinkered dinosaur with the discernment and farsightedness of a newt.’
‘That doesn’t make any sense.’
‘It does where I’m standing,’ she said dangerously.
The subject was dropped, but there were others that only just avoided being quarrels. Sometimes his own defences failed him and she sensed the ardour that he couldn’t entirely deny. At other times she felt as though he was almost trying to drive her away, willing her to live down to his worst fears so that he could kill his hopes and have done with it. But that was to imagine that he had hopes, which she hardly dared believe.
At the end of June Sarah departed to visit the Hamlins on Long Island, and Meryl said, ‘I shall have to go back soon, myself.’
‘Is it really necessary?’ Jarvis asked politely.
‘There’s a load more things to be signed, stuff I don’t want to entrust to the mail. Besides, I want to see Benedict’s opening. He called me today-’
‘Then of course you must go,’ Jarvis interrupted her. ‘I expect you’ll be off tomorrow.’
‘Well, maybe. I only wanted to tell you-’
‘But, my dear, there’s no need for you to tell me anything. I wouldn’t dream of prying into your private affairs.’
‘Why do you do that?’ she asked, exasperated. ‘One minute we’re fine, and the next you set me at a distance.’
‘Perhaps it’s because I’m always aware of how easily you set Larne at a distance when your memory fails.’
‘The fête again. I thought we’d sorted that.’
‘It’s true that you retrieved the situation in fine style, but only because you managed to hire that helicopter. That’s not remembering. That’s forgetting and covering up.’
‘I didn’t forget Larne, or my promise. I just didn’t notice that the date had crept up on me. It could happen to anyone.’