Elisabeth Kidd (9 page)

They moved into the library, Mr Kenyon with his pipe and Mrs Curtiz
with a glass of tea. Octavian and Isabel set up a small table with a
backgammon board, from which Isabel placed herself at a cautious distance, keeping the board within her limited vision but not so far away
that Octavian might think her standoffish. Antonia, who alone knew the
reason behind this manoeuvre, smiled when the puzzled Mr Gary leaned
forward to be closer to the girl.

“Maidenly modesty?” whispered the viscount into her ear. Antonia shook her head, but did not explain Isabel’s behaviour. Indeed, she did
not entirely understand it herself and was unsure whether her own
wishes were obscuring her perception of what was, in reality, occurring.
To all appearances, Octavian behaved more as a brother than a suitor
toward Isabel, and she seemed to accept him as such. But Antonia was
uncertain whether this was clever strategy on Octavian’s part or whether she was reading too much into his behaviour. Her niece’s motives were
becoming entirely inscrutable to her. She sighed.

“Shall we walk in the garden?” Kedrington asked, breaking into her
reverie. The day had begun dully after a cold night, and they had seated
themselves before the long French windows to watch as it brightened.
Antonia wondered how long he had been regarding her rather than the
view, but when she turned to him, his face was unreadable. Perhaps he
was only restless at being indoors in fine weather.

“You forget the proprieties, sir!” she scolded him.

“What? Oh, I suppose you mean we must have a duenna. Gothic, but
still required in this civilised society of ours.” He stood up and addressed
his host with a counterfeit heartiness. “Kenyon! Shall we take a tour of
the garden?”

“Thank you, no,” Mr Kenyon declined civilly, placing his feet firmly
upon an ottoman so as to preclude his being asked a second time.

“Perhaps the children would like to go,” Mrs Curtiz suggested, but
Octavian declined vigourously, if with false bravado.

“Can’t you see I’ve almost beat her?”

“Ha!” said Isabel, whose concentration was not so easily distracted,
and knocked off one of Octavian’s pieces.

“Must I recruit Milford?” demanded the viscount querulously.

“Good God, no!” Octavian protested, immediately thereafter apologising
to the dice for raising his voice in their presence. “You know he isn’t fit to
live with for days after exposure to fresh air—confound it!”

Isabel held out her hand for the dice, which Octavian reluctantly
handed over. The viscount saw that it was useless to address either of
them further.

“Why don’t you take two horses from the stables,” Mr Kenyon suggested,
as if equine companionship were all that was required. “Antonia will
show you all the paths.”

Kedrington accepted this solution as the best he would get, leaving the
company before the offer could be withdrawn again. “Can you ride in
that?” he asked Antonia of her carefully chosen morning ensemble.

“Mrs. Walker—the housekeeper—was used to keep some things here for us to ramble about in. I daresay they are still here somewhere, if you
do not mind appearing abroad with a positive frump.”

“I don’t expect we shall be observed.”

“Dear me! Don’t remind Uncle Philip of that.”

Antonia excused herself and reappeared after a short time in an old, but undeniably becoming, dark blue riding habit. Kedrington exercised
his self-control in declining to comment on it, confining himself to admiring the ribbon trim on her hat, and they were off.

The horses were as eager to be loose as their riders. The overnight cold
had frozen the ground hard, and they began with a quick gallop across
country, almost to the edge of the estate. The crisp air was exhilarating,
and Antonia’s cheeks were flushed with the pleasure of the first such
good ride she had enjoyed in weeks. Kedrington looked as if he did it
every day.

They halted for a moment on the ridge looking toward Wyckham and
an expanse of rolling country. The viscount’s eyes narrowed as they swept
the horizon with a keenness that most observers would not have granted
it. He reminded Antonia just then of her brother, who had told her that in Spain survival often depended on keeping the eyes in the back of his
head open. He had also said that attending to what might happen rather
that to what was happening was a difficult habit to break.

“You look as if you are expecting to be ambushed,” she said.

Kedrington smiled. “By you, fair one?”

She was anticipating this line of attack today and met his opening volley with a broadside of her own.

“Is it true that you were betrothed to a Creole countess?” she asked in a
tone of detached enquiry.

He threw back his head and laughed. “Good God! Wherever did you
hear that?”

“Is it not true, then?”

He leaned over to stroke the neck of his horse, which had begun
cropping the sparse grass around them, but he did not turn away quickly
enough to conceal the unmistakeable glint of mischief in his eye.

“She wasn’t a countess,” he said.

Antonia had a suspicion that she ought not to pursue the subject, but
could not help asking, “What happened to her?”

“She sailed away with a Barbary pirate.”

“Wretch!” she exclaimed, choking. “How shall I know what to believe of you?”

“My heart, don’t you recognise a Banbury tale when you hear one?”

“You mean it is all a hum?”

“Entirely!” he confessed cheerfully. “Believe me, if I had been the
subject of half so many true stories as apocryphal that fly about after me, I should have been dead of exhaustion years ago.”

“Well, I don’t know what was so implausible about that one. Although
it is quite true that people will believe what it suits them to believe. I
once said—quite in jest—that I painted my face with honey and crushed
rosemary to aid my complexion, and before I knew how it had come
about, this absurdity had become all the crack. Some ladies even claimed
it helped them! I soon denied I had anything to do with promoting such
nonsense, however, and I do not understand how you can allow such
much more likely tales to be spread about yourself. Do your aunts believe
them?”

“Julia does not credit them, but I sometimes suspect Hester of inventing
half of them herself. I believe she thinks they enhance my prospects.”

“Nonsense! You must have every matchmaking mama in town encamped
on your doorstep as it is.”

“I do. That is precisely the end for which Hester strives.”

She frowned. “Do you truly wish to have a wife chosen for you?”

“Have you an alternative suggestion?”

“No, indeed!” she stumbled, put off by the apparent earnestness of the question. “How should I? I merely wonder that you cannot—that is, you must know what you want. Is there no one you...you wish to offer for?”

“Oh, yes. But she has refused me.”

“Who—oh, I take it you are referring to me! But you will have to do better than a Shakespearean aside at a dinner party, you know—I was scarcely attending.”

“Very well.”

Before she had quite caught up with his thinking, she found her hand
being held in his—his horse’s reins being carelessly discarded—and
herself being addressed forcefully.

“My dear Miss Fairfax! Allow me to
tell you how very ardently—I beg your pardon, but it is as difficult to be
ardent on horseback as at a dinner party—my dear Miss Fairfax, you
must know how much I admire you! Will you...dare I hope you will
consent to be my wife? Blast this animal!”

He let go of her hands to steady his mount, and Antonia, who was torn
between amusement and exasperation, finally burst into laughter at his
foolishness. “Do you always make your offers so casually?”

“I generally, as I have said, do not make them at all. Do you accept?”

“I do not.”

He did not look very disappointed. “I understand that it is usual with
young ladies to reject, sometimes two or three times, the addresses of the
man they secretly mean to accept, and I am therefore by no means
discouraged.”

“However do you come to understand anything so idiotish?”

“Why, I have it on the best of authority, Miss Fairfax. That delightful
novel you insisted I read tells me it is true, and I must therefore suppose it to be so.”

“Well, let me tell you, sir, I have at least as many refusals at my
command as you may have offers.”

“Excellent! I shall essay my various styles on you. May I?”

“Certainly not.”

“You refuse to help me? How am I to know what is the proper thing to
say when such time should come that I meet the young woman I
shall—er, wish to offer for?”

“You cannot expect me to choose a wife for you!”

“Why not?”

“Why, it is the same as
...
as selecting another man’s home for
him!” she said, “Would you send Mr Gary to purchase a house on your behalf?”

“I trust his judgement.”

“Oh! Oh—thank you.”

A wicked gleam came into his eye. “But the fact is, I asked you to help
me choose the words, not the woman. Believe me, I am quite capable of
making that choice myself.”

“I am sure I may hope so!” she said, indignant at being again drawn
into the same trap. But then she had to laugh at her own slow-wittedness.
Really, it had been much too long since she had engaged in a verbal
sparring match with so quick an opponent! It occurred to her that this
was the one thing she had missed from her life in London—the opportu
nity to exchange in both nonsense and earnest conversation with someone intelligent enough to follow her nimblest thoughts and to make verbal leaps of his own that challenged her mind to follow.

“Tell me, Antonia,” he said then, with another of those quicksilver shifts that so disconcerted her, “what are you going to do with yourself
when your brother grows up at last and comes home to take his proper place as head of the family? Will you continue here as you have been?”

She considered several defiant retorts, but she had always been all too
aware that she was mistress of Wyckham only by virtue of Carey’s
absence. The inheritance was his. When he married—as he was bound to
do, for he was not such a shuttlecock as he made out to be—and brought
a new mistress to Wyckham, then she must think about...what? Beg
ging Carey for a corner of her own to live in, like Cinderella? Or worse,
like Maria, living out a half-demented existence? She ended by admitting
simply to Kedrington, “I don’t know.”

He looked intently at her. “Will nothing tempt you willingly to leave
Wyckham?”

“No.”

“Have you never been tempted?”

She stumbled, but said again, “No,” and turned her eyes away. This
time he did not pursue his advantage, but instead suggested that they ride
toward the stream that bordered that side of the Kenyon property. They
did so slowly, following a ridge that gave them a view of the stream to one
side and, to the other, a few straggling hedgerows that separated the
individual holdings of some tenants, whose cottages were in need of
repair. Antonia remarked on it, and Kedrington gave her a quizzical look.

“Do I detect a note of censure, Miss Fairfax?”

“I did not intend it so, but...well, I cannot help wishing that Uncle
Philip would take a greater interest in Windeshiem. It is not as if he
cannot afford to have roofs rethatched and hedges replanted. At any rate,
Charles could certainly afford it, but he—”

She stopped then, aware of venturing into conversational waters that
might prove too deep, but Kedrington was tactful enough not to press
her. Instead he gazed fixedly in the direction of a fringe of bare willow
branches that hung over the stream and shivered slightly in the light
wind.

“I think you may have a prowler or a poacher,” he remarked. “At least,
there is some unusual activity in that copse by the brook.”

Antonia could see nothing, but as they neared the trees, two boys
dropped out of one of the largest of them and ran off across the fields on
the far side of the stream.

“Oh, it’s only the Fletcher boys. I suppose they did not recognise me, and of course they do not know you.”

“Is that sufficient reason to run off like a pair of hedge-thieves? Who are they?”

“The sons of my bailiff. They have the run of both estates, and indeed
are often of assistance in one way or another. But they do have a
lamentable tendency to get into scrapes. I think it was young George—
still home with the mumps today, I fancy—who broke a collarbone on
that very tree only last summer. All the boys appear to look upon it as
something of a challenge.”