He gazed at her in obvious exasperation before turning sharply away to look out through the window. “Do you regret that you remained here at Fairfield, knowing as you do now that the widow of the Reverend Tavernor would be held to a higher standard of behavior than anyone else?” he asked her.
She gazed at his back—tall, straight,military— and thought about it. “Regrets are pointless,” she said. “They do not change whatever that thing is that one may regret if one allows oneself to do so. That one thing for me would be asking you if you are ever lonely. I ought never to have asked. But there have been positive results as well as negative. I had a lot of wood chopped for me all at once.”
He looked at her over his shoulder and came very close to smiling before turning away again.
“I am still using the wood,” she said. “I will be forgetting how to wield the axe myself. Hasallyour family come, Harry? Hannah says it is probably because you have an important birthday very soon. Your thirtieth. You must be enjoying their company.”
“A pointed change of subject,” he said, turning from the window and drawing breath to say more. But before he could do so the back door opened with more noise than was necessary. Snowball trotted into the room, hesitated, and went to sniff Harry’s boots. The marchioness cleared her throat before coming to stand in the archway to the living room. She looked from one to the other of them.
“Well?” she asked, addressing Harry.
“She has said no,” he replied curtly.
“I would have been surprised,” she said, “if it had been otherwise. A bit of silly outrage over a kiss that was apparently hardly even worthy of the name is a poor reason for two people to marry if there is no other. You do not wish to marry my son, Mrs. Tavernor?”
“I do not,” Lydia said. “Though it was exceedingly kind of him to offer.”
“Then you must not be pressed further,” the marchioness said. “You do indeed have a pretty back garden. Even the woodpile is picturesque—and very neat. It smells good too. You must spend a lot of time out there and at the front.”
“Will you have a seat, ma’am?” Lydia asked, gesturing to one of the chairs. “May I make some tea?”
“Neither, thank you,” the marchioness said. “You told us you were on your way out. My apologies for having delayed you. We have a few more calls of our own to make before returning to Hinsford. We will be issuing a few verbal invitations to my son’s birthday party, though there will be more formal written ones to follow. Or ratherIwill be issuing invitations. I daresay Harry wishes us all in Jericho. You must come to the party yourself, Mrs. Tavernor. It is to be in the form of a ball.”
“Oh,” Lydia said, glancing rather aghast at Harry. He had turned to look out the window again. “I think it would be altogether best if I did not go, ma’am.”
“On the contrary,” the marchioness said. “Why would you be excluded? Your late husband was a brother of the Earl of Tilden, was he not? And we have already established that you are the daughter of Mr. Jason Winterbourne and the late Mrs. Julia Winterbourne, a friend from my younger years.”
“I—”
“You need not give an answer now,” the marchioness said as she moved toward the front door. “You will receive your written invitation within the next day or two and can decide then how you wish to reply. In the meantime, we will walk with you, if we may, until our ways diverge. You are going to the village shop?”
“Yes,” Lydia said. Harry had his hands clasped behind him. He was tapping them rhythmically against his back. “But—”
He turned. “Lydia,” he said. “Word will spread around the village and the surrounding countryside faster than wildfire that you were seen today walking along the main street with me.And with my mother, the Marchioness of Dorchester—who was, by the way, held in the deepest affection and esteem when she lived here as the Countess of Riverdale. Everyone will understand that there is nothing clandestine about your acquaintance with me, and that it has my mother’s approval. Allow us, please, to offer you this much countenance.”
She raised her chin.
“Sometimes,” he added, “when a person is fired upon, the best possible way to respond is to line upwith one’s comradesand fire right back.”
She pursed her lips.
“Put your bonnet on,” he said.
“If you please, Mrs. Tavernor.” The marchioness smiled, revealing herself to be a very pretty woman despite the fact that she was no longer in her youth. “I must be allowed to do all in my power to repair my son’s reputation, you see.”
Lydia sighed and moved toward the hooks behind the door.
And so it was that a few inhabitants of the village of Fairfield were treated to the unexpected spectacle of the newly notorious Mrs. Tavernor walking along the main village street with the Marchioness of Dorchester’s arm drawn through hers, while Major Westcott, distinguished and elegant as always, walked on his mother’s other side, nodding pleasantly to everyone they passed.
Sixteen
Thank you,” Harry said to his mother as they walked back home an hour or so later. “It would not, as you pointed out to me last night, have been appropriate for me to go there alone this morning.”
“Tell me, Harry,” his mother said. “Were you disappointed?”
“That she refused me?” he said after thinking about it for a moment. “No. As she herself pointed out, we would have been marrying for the wrong reason—because of some vicious gossip.”
“Gossip can irreparably destroy reputations and lives, however,” she said.
