“But she has very little countenance,” she added. “Of course, she has had only her mother’s example to follow, and Lady Effingham has an unfortunate tendency to vulgarity. The girl was flirting at dinner and afterward with every gentleman within range of her, just because you were not beside her, I believe, Rannulf. It is regrettable behavior in a young lady I still hope will be your bride. You are pleased with her?”
“She is only eighteen, Grandmama,” he said. “She is just a child. She will grow up, given time.”
“I suppose so.” She sighed as they reached the top of the stairs. “Lord Braithwaite has a comic genius.
He can create hilarity out of the most ordinary circumstances and is not afraid to mock himself. But Miss Law! She has the sort of talent that makes one feel humble and honored in its presence.”
“Yes,” he said.
“Poor lady.” She sighed again. “She is beautiful beyond belief and does not even know it. Her father must be a puritanical, joyless sort of clergyman. How could he possibly say such dreadful things of that glorious hair of hers?”
“I daresay, Grandmama,” he said, “he has seen some of his male parishioners getting an eyeful of her and has concluded there must be something sinful about her appearance.”
“Foolish man! It is a dreadful fate to be poor and female, is it not?” she said. “And to be offered the charity of someone like Louisa Effingham? But at least Miss Law has her grandmother. Gertrude is fast coming to dote on her.”
What’s done cannot be undone. That line she had spoken as Lady Macbeth kept running through Rannulf’s head after he had seen his grandmother to her dressing room and had retired to his own room.
How very true. He could not go back and ride on alone for help after coming across the overturned stagecoach. He could not restore her virginity. He could not erase that day and a half or those two nights when they had talked and laughed and loved and he had been prepared to pursue her wherever she went, to the ends of the earth if necessary.
He could not go back and change any of that.
He had fallen somewhat in love with Claire Campbell, he admitted to himself at last. Not just in lust.
There had been more to his feelings than that. He was not in love with Judith Law, but there was something ... It was not pity. He would have been actively repelled by her if he could do no more than pity her. It was not lust even though he definitely and ignominiously wanted to bed her. It was not... He simply did not know what it was or was not. He had never been much of a one for deep emotions. He had colored his world with faint, bored cynicism for as far back as he could remember.
How could he define his feelings for Judith Law when he had no frame of reference by which to measure them? But he thought suddenly of his quiet, morose, stern, always correct, always dutiful elder brother, Aidan, who had taken a commission in the cavalry on his eighteenth birthday, just as it had been planned all his life that he would. Aidan, who had recently married without telling anyone in his family, even Bewcastle, and had then just as abruptly sold out in order to live with the wife he had married only to keep a solemn vow made to her dying brother, a fellow officer in the south of France. Rannulf had accompanied Aidan home from London to his wife’s property on the first stage of his own journey to Grandmaison and had met Lady Aidan for the first time—and the two young children she had fostered.
Rannulf had watched, transfixed, outside the house as the two children had come racing eagerly to meet Aidan, the little girl addressing him as Papa, and he had scooped them up and given them his fond attention just as if they were the most dearly loved products of his own loins. And then he had looked at his wife as she came more slowly after the children and enfolded her in his free arm and kissed her.
Yes, Rannulf thought, that was his frame of reference. Just that moment when Aidan had set his arm about Eve and kissed her and looked young and human and exuberant and vulnerable and invincible all at the same time.
There was only one word to describe what he had witnessed.
Love.
He strode impulsively into his dressing room and found his cloak in the wardrobe there. He dug around in the inside pocket until he found what he was searching for. He drew it out, unwrapped the brown paper from about it, and gazed down at the cheap little snuffbox with the ugly pig’s head carved on its lid.
He chuckled softly, closed his hand about the box, and then felt almost overwhelmingly sad.
Chapter XIV
Judith returned home in the last carriage with her grandmother, who had been slower than everyone else getting ready to leave and had twice asked Judith if she would be so good as to run back up to the room in which she had changed to make sure she had not forgotten anything. It was very late by the time they arrived at Harewood. All the guests had retired to their rooms for the night. Aunt Effingham was waiting in the hall. “Judith,” she said in awful tones, “you will assist Mother to her room and then attend me in the drawing room.”
“I am coming too, Louisa,” her mother said.
“Mother.” Lady Effingham bent a stern gaze on the old lady though she attempted to soften her tone. “It is late and you are tired. Judith will take you up and ring for Tillie if she is not already there waiting for you. She will help you undress and get into bed and will bring you a cup of tea and a draft to help you sleep.”
“I do not want my bed or a cup of tea,” her mother said firmly. “I will come to the drawing room. Judith, my love, may I trouble you for your arm again? I daresay I sat too long in the rose arbor this afternoon.
The wind has made all my joints stiff.”
Judith had been expecting the scold that was obviously coming. She could hardly believe herself that she had had the temerity to act before an audience—Papa would surely have sentenced her to a full week in her room on bread and water if she had ever done such a thing at home. She had even taken her hair down. She had acted and she had reacted to the audience, which had given her its total, undivided attention even though she had not been consciously aware of it. She had been Lady Macbeth. The audience had liked her and applauded and praised her. What she had done could not have been so very wrong. Everyone else had entertained the company, not all of them with music. She was a lady. She had been as much a guest of Lady Beamish as anyone else.
Lady Beamish had called her hair glorious and beautiful. How else had she described it? Judith frowned in thought as she climbed the stairs slowly with her grandmother while Aunt Effingham came behind.
I would compare it to a gold-tinged, fiery sunset .
Lady Beamish, though she had perfect manners, was not given to frivolous, flattering compliments, Judith suspected. Was it possible, then, that her hair could be seen that way? A gold-tinged, fiery sunset. . .
“These earrings pinch me almost as badly as those others,” her grandmother said, pulling them off as they entered the drawing room. “Though I have been wearing them all evening, of course. Now where shall I put them so that they will not be lost?”
“Give them to me, Grandmama,” Judith said, taking them from her and putting them safely inside her reticule. “I will put them away in your jewelry box when we go upstairs.”
Horace was in the room, she saw at a glance, sitting on the arm of a chair, a glass of some dark liquor in his hand, swinging one leg nonchalantly and looking at her with insolent malice. Julianne was there too, dabbing at her eyes with a lace-edged handkerchief.
“Are you feeling better, Horace?” Grandmama asked. “It is a great shame you were indisposed and had to miss dinner and the entertainment in the drawing room afterward.”