“I suppose,” she said, “it would have been a bit foolish.”
“More than a bit,” he said. “If I allowed it, the Reverend and Mrs. Bailey would look reproachfully at me for the next year at the very least every time I stepped inside the church. And the whole of Fairfield and its surrounds would wonder what on earth I had done or said to you that you preferred to get soaked to the skin rather than ride home in my carriage. Everyone would talk of nothing else for a month.”
“If youallowedit,” she said.
“Poor wording,” he admitted.
And for some reason they both laughed.
“Am I permitted,” he asked her, “to tell you how lovely you look tonight and how well you dance?”
“Yes, you are,” she said. “Which is just as well since you have told me anyway.”
He laughed softly again.
“I suppose Mrs. Bailey has searched every room in the inn for a muffler that is snugly about the vicar’s neck at this very moment,” he said.
“Probably,” she agreed. “She is very precious. They both are. They are warm and human.”
Mrs. Bailey came back after several minutes without the muffler. She hurried into the carriage with the assistance of the coachman and a hand Harry offered from inside.
“It was not in the cloakroom,” she explained as she settled beside Lydia. “I looked in the assembly rooms too and even the taproom, though it was unlikely to be in there. It is as well to be thorough, however. One never knows. You must take me home first, Major Westcott. It would make no sense to go to Lydia’s and then have to turn back to the vicarage with me, would it? And she is no girl to need a chaperon over such a short distance.”
“The vicarage first, then,” Harry told his coachman.
Lydia was relieved to find that Mrs. Bailey seemed to fill the carriage with her cheerful presence and her chatter about all the pleasures of the assembly even though it was sad to think that while they had danced and enjoyed themselves poor Mrs. Wickend senior not so far away was perhaps really dying this time after suffering increasingly failing health over the past few months. But such was life, and she had lived to a good old age.
“None of us can live forever,” she concluded as the carriage drew to a halt outside the vicarage. “Which is a very good thing, as the vicar always points out, as our poor world would get so full of people we would all have to stand upright on it with our arms pressed to our sides.”
Harry drew a large umbrella from a holder beside his seat and escorted Mrs. Bailey up the garden path to her door.
And then he was back inside the carriage while the rain beat down on the roof and against the windows and the wind rocked it on its springs. The interior suddenly seemed more crowded than it had when Mrs. Bailey was still inside with them and very quiet despite the almost deafening noises of weather and horses and carriage wheels.
“I have finished knitting your scarf,” Lydia said as the carriage moved away from the vicarage. “I knitted it while I was away.”
“Oh,” he said. “You did not need to do that, Lydia.”
“And you did not need to chop my wood,” she said. “I have been wondering how I would get it to you. I will give it to you tonight.”
“Thank you.” He was gazing across at her, though there was very little light by which to see.
She could not think of anything else to say, and he remained silent. But she felt sadness welling for a reason she could not quite understand. It was over between them because it could not possibly work. She had her life to live, the life of freedom she had never expected, the life with which she had been gifted anyway. It was a way of life that brought her great contentment. And it was a life into which she had moved fully tonight, out of the shadows cast by her marriage. She was no longer anyone’s helpmeet. She was herself. Lydia Tavernor.
But for a brief moment there had been Harry.
And he had left behind in her a trace of sadness.
He took up the umbrella again as the carriage drew to a halt outside her gate. He raised it as soon as he was outside and held it aloft as he helped her descend the steps— carefully, for they were slippery with rain. He tipped it slightly against the wind as he opened the gate, and then drew her to his side with an arm about her waist as he hurried up the path with her. He kept her dry while she fumbled with her key in the lock and opened the door before bending over Snowball, who had come dashing and yapping to greet her and reproach him for keeping her out so long.
She lit the candle and turned toward him, pushing back the hood of her cloak as she did so.
“Step inside out of the rain,” she said. “I will fetch your scarf.”
He did as she suggested and lowered the umbrella, shook some of the wetness from it, and stood it against the doorframe. He half closed the door, presumably so that the wind would not blow out the candle.
Lydia got his scarf from her bedchamber, folded into a neat oblong. “I should find something to wrap it in,” she said. She was feeling a bit suffocated by the sight of him inside her house again, though he was only just inside.
“There is no need,” he said, reaching out and taking it from her. Their hands brushed. “Thank you, Lydia. It is a lovely bright color. It will mean a great deal to me. I will think of you whenever I wear it.”
