The Bargain (25 page)

“Here?”

“Indeed.”

“But… I don't understand.” Ariel gazed around the room. “What happened? Why did she leave?”

Raising his eyebrows slightly, Alan waited for the answer to this important question.

Bolton frowned. “Bess didn't care for Ivydene—not the place itself, but being so isolated. She missed the bustle of a town, all the people around her there. I claimed that a husband and child should be enough for her. And when she raged at that, I retreated further into my work, which only made her angrier. It was a wretched time.” He sighed.

Ariel's eyes were fixed on his face as if he were the answer to all her prayers. Alan's mouth fell into a grim line.

Bolton shook his head. “She came to me one day and said that she was leaving for London and that she didn't want me to come. I argued, but I was a stiff-necked young fool, and after a while I told her to go and be damned to her. I didn't think she really would. But she took you and went.”

There was a silence.

“I wonder she didn't leave me here,” said Ariel. “It must have been much harder for her, having a baby to care for.”

Her father shook his head. “Bess would never have left you. You haven't understood her if you think so. You were
hers
. From the moment you were born, she held on to you like a tigress. No one could interfere. Once, when we were arguing about going to London, I threatened to keep you.” He laughed without humor. “I thought she would kill me.”

Again, they sat in silence for a time. Ariel looked like she was fighting tears, Alan thought.

Bolton rose and stood at the window, half turned away from them. “Soon after she left, I became very ill. It was weeks before I threw off the fever. And then I had word that Bess had made a great success in the theater. It… it made me angry.” He looked a bit ashamed. “I'd hoped she would find she couldn't get along in London and come back to me, you see. But it seemed she was happy?”

“She loved the playhouse,” Ariel replied, “the cheers, the drama, the comradeship.”

Bess Harding had apparently loved the gowns and jewels and male attention, too, Alan thought, but no one mentioned that.

“And the chance to have a hundred lives, in the characters she played,” added her father, surprising Ariel with his insight. “Bess wanted everything. Every taste, every experience she could cram into a day.”

The silence that followed was laden with the unspoken. Alan wished they had never come.

***

The next day, Ariel's father showed her the house and grounds, explaining something of his life as he did so. “I'm interested in the properties of herbs,” he said as he took her around a large garden full of plants she didn't recognize. “There's an old woman in Glastonbury who is extremely knowledgeable and has shared her wisdom with me. Do you know that there are herbs to cool fever and banish backache, to soothe the stomach and bring sleep? It is one of Nature's great bounties.”

“My mother always used to laugh about my love for books,” said Ariel. “I never understood why until now. I must have gotten it from you.” It was odd, suddenly having a heritage that went beyond her mother, she thought.

The look he gave her was unsettling.

Ariel still didn't know how she felt about all this. She was strongly drawn to this man who was her father. He seemed intelligent and kind and eager to form a bond with her now that they had met. But all the years when he had made no attempt to see her or contact her stood between them. The fact that Bess hadn't wanted him to come wasn't enough of an explanation. How could he be so glad to see her now, and yet never have tried to do so in twenty years?

The contradictions made her uneasy, and she did not feel the least at home in Ivydene so far. And to add to her discomfort, Lord Alan seemed to have withdrawn from her again, after those hopeful moments on the road. He had hardly spoken to her since they arrived, and his expression remained coldly noncommittal. Perhaps he
was
just waiting for an opportunity to go and leave her in the care of Daniel Bolton, Ariel thought nervously. Her father's name didn't even sound familiar yet.

Well, she wasn't going to be left, or kept, or anything but what she decided to do, she told herself fiercely. But it was growing harder and harder to maintain a pleasant, interested facade with all this happening around her.

“I explore the past,” her father said later as they sat in his workroom watching the sun sink behind the orchard. “Glastonbury is an ancient place. There was an abbey here seven hundred years ago, and our family has lived here as long.”

“Family.” Ariel had never heard the word used in reference to herself.

He smiled. “Your ancestors came over with the Normans. And one of those adventurers married the Saxon mistress of Ivydene, so the bloodline goes back even farther. Some member of the family has always occupied the place.”

“Seven hundred years,” Ariel marveled. She couldn't comprehend it. In the blink of an eye, she had changed from being a woman with no heritage to one with a vast line of ancestors behind her. It made her giddy, as if she had spun too fast in a circle and upset her sense of balance.

***

In the stableyard outside, Alan was speaking to one of the men who had come with them, and who had been surveying the house and grounds. “A prosperous country estate,” he was told. “I didn't see anything out of the ordinary. Could be a bit better kept up. There are very few servants. Stableman says the man's some kind of scholar. Hasn't traveled for years.”

“Umm,” said Alan.

“None of the horses here would get him anywhere,” the man added. “Two spavined nags and a lame hunter.”

To himself, Alan acknowledged that this was probably a waste of time. Daniel Bolton was no doubt just what he appeared to be—a slightly eccentric country landholder immersed in his studies. By rights, he should have admired such a man, Alan thought. So few of his class cared anything for books or ideas. He should welcome him as a comrade in the pursuit of knowledge. But for some reason, he felt only resentment and restlessness.

He would have rather enjoyed discovering something disreputable about Bolton, Alan realized. Ariel seemed to be accepting anything he said at face value and hanging on his every word. She might have shown a bit more wariness, he thought resentfully. The man was a total stranger, no matter how much he resembled her.

Alan's mouth set in a hard line. It didn't matter, he concluded. He intended to be careful and wary enough for all of them.

***

On her second afternoon in Somerset, Ariel and her father walked in the soft sunshine up the small rise at the end of the garden, past the flowers near the house and the ranks of fragrant herbs. A path led into the trees and they followed it upward.

It was a rare, golden summer day, brilliantly warm. The hum of bees and birdsong surrounded them, and the air was heavy with the scent of growing things. “It's so beautiful here,” said Ariel.

“I'm glad you think so,” he replied.

The path kept on rising up the wooded hillside, and they walked in the shadows of leaves. It finally ended at a clearing—a semicircle of trees that overlooked the entire valley. Within it were scattered piles of stones, the remains of a building.

“What was it?” Ariel asked.

“It used to be a small chapel. It's left from the times before King Henry VIII abolished the great abbey at Glastonbury and all its satellites,” her father told her. “The countryside hereabouts is dotted with such remains.”

Ariel went to examine the half walls of stone and the remnants of the slate floor. “Oh, look,” she said, pointing to a great hawk circling above the hill. Its wings were spread wide to catch the mild breeze. Its beak and feathers gleamed in the sunlight. Despite the distance, she thought she could see its fierce yellow eye intent on its prey.

“Hunting,” said her father. “She'll be after mice or small birds for her hatchlings. Feeding a nest full of half-grown hawks is quite a labor.”

Like taking care of a child, Ariel thought. “Why did you never write me, or try to see me?” she couldn't help but ask. “No matter what Bess said, weren't you… even… curious?”

He turned to look down at her, his face partly shaded by the trees. “I was more than curious,” he answered. “But you see, I didn't realize that Bess had told you nothing about me. It simply didn't occur to me that she would cut us off so completely, or that she would allow the world to believe she had a… a fatherless child. I suppose I didn't understand her very well.”

Ariel wondered if anyone had.

“I thought you knew who I was and where I lived,” he added. “Indeed, I wondered, as time passed, why you did not write to me.”

“I was a child,” she protested.

He nodded. “I know. You're right. It was my place and my responsibility to contact you. It should have been my great pleasure to do so.” He shook his head, and the patches of light and darkness shifted across his face. “I held on to my resentments long past the time when I should have let them go,” he continued sadly. “I let my disappointments and anger at Bess live far beyond their time. And as a result, I lost you. I deserved that punishment, but you most certainly did not. I can only hope that you will let me make it up to you now, and in the future.”

Ariel didn't know what to say. She wanted to agree, but it wasn't simple or easy to forget years of absence. “I hope we can,” she said, not knowing herself exactly what she referred to.

Her father smiled. “Hope is as much as we can manage just now,” he replied. “But it is a very… hopeful thing, isn't it?”

Ariel returned his smile, relieved that he asked no more from her so soon.

“With that settled, may I ask you a father's question, even though I have no real right?” he went on.

“What?” she wondered.

Daniel Bolton eyed this daughter who looked so like him, and yet was a complete mystery. Fortunately, he enjoyed mysteries. “I do not understand why you are traveling the countryside with a nobleman who is not related to you,” he said and noticed that her smile faded at the words. “Perhaps he was a friend of Bess's?” The idea was unpleasant. He had never faced the near certainty that Bess had enjoyed male company during her life in London. The relief he felt when Ariel shook her head surprised him.

“He didn't know her,” she said. “We met because of her ghost.”

“Her…?”

She told him the story of the haunting of Carlton House, and how she and Lord Alan had met in pursuit of the supposed phantom of her mother. “I helped him with the actors at the theater,” she finished, “and so he has helped me search for… my history.”

“Very charitable of him,” murmured Bolton. “Ariel, I know I have not been any kind of father to you, but—”

“Oh, you needn't worry,” she interrupted. “I am a sort of responsibility, you see, and his sense of duty is very strong. He hopes, you should know, to leave me here in your ‘care.'”

Bolton was taken aback by the emotion in her tone. He examined his newfound daughter closely, making good use of his talent for observation, honed to brilliant keenness by years of study. “You would be most welcome to stay here,” he ventured. “I would be delighted to give you a home after my years of neglect.”

He watched as she blinked furiously and then bit her lower lip. She seemed touched by his offer, and yet far from satisfied with it.

“You should get acquainted with the neighborhood,” he tried, “since Ivydene will be yours one day.”

This shocked her out of whatever feeling had been plaguing her. “Mine?”

“Of course. You are my only child.”

Ariel looked out over the broad valley that stretched below the chapel ruins, at the rows of apple trees on the other side. Daniel Bolton knew it was a gorgeous sight. But it did not seem to ease the tension he had noted in Ariel. “You need not be dependent on Lord Alan, or anyone,” he added, probing for what was distressing her.

“I can take care of myself!”

Her father felt an overwhelming impulse to make things right for her. It was a new feeling for him, and he wasn't sure at first whether he liked it. He was not an interfering man—quite the opposite. He was barely acquainted with his neighbors. He did not inquire into the lives of his servants or tenants. He gave everyone leave to live as they chose, and took the same privilege for himself.

But this was different somehow. Not only was Ariel his child, but he owed her an extra measure of concern because of the years when he had selfishly left her to fend for herself. He couldn't presume to dictate. But surely the gifts he had might be of some use.

First, however, he had to discover what was wrong. “It is gratifying to meet a young man who takes responsibility so seriously,” he ventured, feeling much as he did when he was extracting a delicate tincture from a combination of the herbs in his garden. One false move and…

“I am
not
his responsibility!” responded Ariel.

“Ah. But you are… friends, perhaps? When people work together toward a goal, they often become friends.”

“Yes,” she agreed baldly.

“It's not as if you knew his family, of course,” her father probed, exploring the limits of the relationship Lord Alan Gresham had offered her.

“Oh, I am well acquainted with his brothers,” she told him. “And Hannah is their former nanny, so she is a kind of family, I suppose.”

“His brothers?” he echoed.

“Yes. I have been advising them.”

Bolton blinked. This mystery was more intriguing than he had imagined. “Advising them about what?” he asked.

“Well, I showed Lord Sebastian how to catch the attention of an heiress he wishes to marry. And I explained to Lord Highgrove how to manage his fiancee's family.” She smiled slightly. “I'm not sure what I have done for Lord Robert, but he is certainly having some interesting experiences.”