“Mr. Butler.”
“Miss Edgeworth, welcome to Alvesley,” Syd said. “Has your journey been very tedious?”
“Not at all,” she replied. “I had the company of my aunt and cousin, you see, and the knowledge that Kit would be here waiting for me at the end of it.”
Kit looked at her appreciatively. She sounded so warmly convincing that he felt a foolish lurching of pleasure in the region of his heart.
But his mother was, as always, the perfect hostess. She would accompany the ladies to their rooms, she told them, coming to join them on the top step, so that they might have an opportunity to freshen up before tea was served in the drawing room. She took Lauren’s arm, drawing her away from both her sons, and led the way inside while Lady Kilbourne and Lady Muir followed behind. Lady Muir limped, Kit noticed.
Chapter 8
Gwendoline was playing the pianoforte while the Earl of Redfield stood behind the bench, turning the pages of the music for her. The countess and Aunt Clara were seated side by side on a love seat nearby, alternately listening to Bach and conversing with each other. Sydnam Butler was sitting on the window seat at the opposite end of the drawing room, where he had been ever since they had moved here from the dining room following dinner, slightly turned so that his right side was in the shadow of the heavy velvet curtains. What had happened to him? Viscount Ravensberg—Kit—moved about the room, smiling, genial, occasionally interjecting a remark into a conversation, but not becoming a part of any group, and never approaching his brother.
He looked restless, rather like a caged animal of the wild.
Lauren had spent almost the whole evening seated beside the dowager countess, Kit’s grandmother, close to the fire, though she had obliged the company by taking her turn briefly at the pianoforte. She had told the old lady about Newbury Abbey, about the weeks she had recently spent in London, about the few entertainments in which she had participated there. She had also listened. It was not easy to do when the dowager’s speech was halting, punctuated by long, painful pauses as she tried to form words. It was tempting to interrupt, to supply the words she knew were about to be spoken, to complete sentences whose endings she could guess long before the words were out. It was what the earl and countess tended to do, Lauren had noticed both at tea and at dinner. Perhaps they were embarrassed for her in the company of guests. Perhaps they thought they did her a kindness. But it seemed unfortunate to Lauren.
She listened, giving the old lady her full attention, keeping her expression bright and interested. Nevertheless there was a great deal of time in which to think and observe. She had been welcomed to Alvesley with meticulous courtesy but perhaps without warmth. But she had not expected warmth. Courtesy was enough. Kit had played his part well. He had looked so delighted to see her, in fact, that Gwen had been totally beguiled. She had come into Lauren’s room before they went down to tea together, hugged her, and beamed at her.
“Lauren,” she had said, “he is quite gorgeous. That smile! And when he kissed you for all to see as soon as your feet touched the ground, I could have quite swooned with the romance of it.” She had laughed merrily. “You said he could be quite outrageous.”
That last remark had not been a criticism, though the kiss, brief peck though it had been, had almost robbed Lauren of her poise.
There had been almost no communication between him and his parents since her arrival, she had noticed. All three of them had spoken with her, with Aunt Clara, with Gwen. But not with one another. They were very upset with him, then, over this betrothal when they had hoped for another for him? And perhaps none of them could forget that he had fought with his elder brother three years ago, presumably over the woman they had both wanted to marry, and that afterward the earl had sent him away and told him never to return. How bitter an experience it must have been for the earl to see his eldest son die and suddenly to have his exiled second son as the new heir. And how doubly bitter to Kit to know that his banishment had been revoked only because of his elder brother’s death.
Kit and his younger brother both behaved as if the other did not exist. And yet Kit had made a point of introducing them on her arrival, and it had seemed to her at the time that he was fairly bursting with affection for his horribly wounded brother. What had happened?
The Earl of Redfield’s family was certainly not a close or a happy one, she concluded. Suddenly the task ahead of her, the task she had taken on so glibly that night at Vauxhall, seemed daunting indeed. How could she help reconcile Kit with his family when the wounds were apparently both deep and long-standing? And when she was responsible for widening the gap, deepening the wounds? And when she was going to break off the engagement . . .
But her thoughts were distracted by the dowager countess, who had grasped her cane with the obvious intention of getting to her feet. Lauren restrained her first impulse to jump to her feet to help. She had not been asked for help, and any intrusion on her part might be resented. She smiled instead.
“Going to bed, Mother?” The earl was striding toward them. “Allow me to summon your dresser.”
“I am . . . going to . . . walk first,” she said.
“The evening air will not be good for your lungs, Mother,” the countess said, raising her voice. “Wait until the morning.”
“I’ll . . . walk now,” the old lady said firmly, waving her son away with her free hand. “With . . . Kit. And Miss . . . Edgeworth.”
“She will insist that fresh air and exercise are good for her,” the countess was explaining to Aunt Clara. “Though I am sure rest would do her more good. She insists upon walking along the terrace and back every day, rain or shine. But usually it is in the morning.”
Kit meanwhile had come to draw his grandmother’s free arm through his own while she leaned on her cane with the other hand. He was grinning his usual sunny smile.
“If you wish to walk now, Grandmama,” he said, “we will walk now. If you wish to dance a jig, we will dance a jig—until you have worn me out. Will you come too, Lauren?”
“Of course,” she said, getting to her feet.
And so five minutes later they had donned cloaks for warmth and were strolling slowly along the terrace, away from the stables, Kit’s grandmother on his arm, Lauren on her other side, her arms clasped behind her.
“Tell me,” the old lady said in her habitual slow, laborious manner, “how you . . . two met.”
Kit’s eyes met Lauren’s over the top of her head, his eyes dancing. “Grandmama is an incurable romantic,” he explained. “ You tell her, Lauren.”
But he was so much cleverer at such stories than she, Lauren thought. Gazing across a crowded ballroom, eyes alighting on her, heart skipping a beat, knowing that she was the one woman in this world meant for him—he could make it all sound quite soulful. Besides, it needed to be told from his perspective. She could, of course, describe . . . Her smile was entirely an inward one.
“It was in Hyde Park one morning,” she said and watched the laughter arrested in Kit’s eyes before she turned her head away and continued. “Lord Ravensberg—Kit—was in the middle of a fistfight with three laboring men while half the gentlemen of the ton cheered him on. He was stripped to the waist and he was swearing most vilely.”
She listened to herself in some amazement. Lauren Edgeworth never told such sordid tales. And she was never motivated in either speech or action by a sense of mischief.
The old lady surprised her with a bark of laughter.
“The men had insulted a milkmaid,” Lauren continued, “and Kit had ridden to her defense. He knocked them all down and then kissed the milkmaid as I was passing in company with my aunt and cousin.”