“There are no r-rules, actually,” he said. “Or, if there are, I have not s-seen them.”
“What do you want of me, Lord Ponsonby?” she asked.
“What do you want ofme,Mrs. Keeping?”
“No,” she said, “I asked first.”
So she had.
“Your company,” he said. He could not have come up with a lamer answer if he had had an hour to think of it.
“And that is all? You have the company of your friends, do you not?” she asked.
“I do.”
“Then what do you want of me that they cannot give?”
“Does there have to be an answer?” he asked. “Can we not just w-walk here and enjoy the afternoon?”
“Yes.” She sighed. “But I seem to be the last sort of woman a man like you would seek out for company.”
“A flirt?” he said. “A l-libertine?”
“Well.” There was a short silence. “Yes.” And then she laughed. “Areyou?”
“I think, Mrs. K-Keeping,” he said, “you had better tell me what you mean by saying you are the last sort of woman I might seek out. And I think we had b-better sit inside the summerhouse while you do it. The air is rather chilly out here. Unless, that is, you are afraid I w-will p-pounce upon you in there and have my wicked way with you.”
“I daresay,” she said, “that if you intended to pounce, the outdoors would not deter you.”
“Quite so,” he agreed, opening the door so that she could precede him inside.
It was a pretty little structure, its walls almost entirely of glass. A leather-cushioned seat ran around the inside perimeter. Trees around the outside would offer shade from the hottest rays of the sun in summer but did not keep out the heat at any other season. It was pleasantly warm today.
“Tell m-me how you come to be living with your sister,” he said after they had seated themselves on opposite sides of the bench, though even so their knees were not far from touching.
“My husband’s entailed property passed to his younger brother,” she told him. “And while he was kind enough to assure me I might continue living there, I did not think it fair since he is unmarried himself and would have felt constrained to live elsewhere. My father remarried the year before I wed, and his wife’s mother and unmarried sister moved in after I left. I did not wish to return there. I went to stay with my brother in Shropshire for a while—he is a clergyman, but he has a family too, and I did not wish to stay forever. When Dora came to visit and suggested that I move here with her, I accepted gladly. She was in need of companionship, and I was in need of a home in which I did not feel I was intruding. And we have always been particularly fond of each other. The arrangement has worked well.”
He was very glad he was not a woman. There were so few options.
“Does your stammer result from your war wounds?” she asked him.
He looked at her and half smiled. She sat with a straight back and her hands arranged neatly in her lap. Her feet were side by side together on the floor between them. Prim virtue could sometimes look inexplicably enticing.
“I am sorry,” she said. “That was a very personal question. Please do not feel obliged to answer.”
“It was a h-head wound,” he told her. “Doubly so. I got shot through it and then f-fell off my horse on it before being r-ridden over. I should have been dead thrice over. For a long while I d-did not know where I was or who I was or w-what had happened. And when I did, I could not c-communicate with anyone outside my h-head. Sometimes everyone’s words were a j-jumble, or it t-took overlong to work out what they m-meant. And then the w-words to r-reply to them would not come out, and when they did, they were not always the w-words I was thinking. And I had forgotten about s-sentences.”
He did not mention the crashing headaches or the great memory gaps.
“Oh.” She frowned in concern.
“Sometimes when the w-words would not come out,” he said, “other things came out of me instead.”
She raised her eyebrows.
“I was d-dangerous, Mrs. Keeping,” he told her. “I did with my fists what I could not d-do with my mind or my voice. I was soon p-packed off to Cornwall and k-kept there for three years. Sometimes I still have what my family call t-tantrums.”
She opened her mouth to speak, thought better of it, and closed it again.
