“If you want them,” he said, “we will stay. But everything can wait if we choose—ifyouchoose. It can all wait a month or two months or a year or ten. Or f-forever. Shall we go to Candlebury? Shall we go h-home?”
She stopped walking again and drew him to a halt. She could see the Serpentine in the near distance. Soon they would be among other people walking beside the water.
“But you have been avoiding Candlebury Abbey for years,” she said. “Are you sure you want to go there now? Are you doing this for me?”
“For us,” he said.
She searched his eyes, longing welling up inside her.Shall we go home?he had said. There were memories there for him. Conscious, painful ones of his brother’s last days. And unconscious ones, she suspected. She suspected too that it was both facts that had made him reluctant for so long to return there. Now he wanted to go—for her sake and for theirs.
She smiled slowly at him.
“Let’s go home, then,” she said.
22
My love,he had called her at Marianne’s party, entirely for the ears of all the guests there.My love,he had called her a short time later in the refreshment room, in order to tease away the stress of the past half hour or so.
My love,he thought now, sitting beside her in his carriage, watching her profile as they approached the top of the rise above Candlebury after turning through the gates a short while ago. He wanted to see her expression when she saw the house. It almost always took the breath away, even when one had a lifetime of familiarity with it.
My love.The words sounded silly when spoken in the silence of his own thoughts. Would he ever speak them aloud so that she knew he meant them? Anddidhe mean them? He was a bit afraid of love. Love was painful.
He watched her, he realized, because he did not want to have that first glimpse of Candlebury himself. He really did not want to be where he was, moving ever nearer to it. Yet he would not be anywhere else on earth for all the money in the world. Was there anyone more muddleheaded than he?
She was looking prim and trim and beautiful beside him, clad in a dark blue carriage dress, which was expertly and elegantly cut to hug her figure in all the right places and to fall in soft folds elsewhere. Her chip straw bonnet trimmed with tiny cornflowers had a small enough brim that he could see around it. Her gloved hands were folded neatly in her lap. Her head was half-turned from him, and he knew she was gazing at the half-wild meadowland beyond her window and seeing all the wildflowers growing there and imagining herself tramping among them, an easel under one arm, a bag of painting supplies in the other hand.
And then the carriage topped the rise, and her head turned to look into the great bowl-like depression below. Her hands tightened in her lap, her eyes grew larger, and her mouth formed a silent O.
“Flavian,” she said. “Oh, it isbeautiful.”
She turned to smile at him and reached out a hand to squeeze one of his, and if he had been in any doubt before this moment, he doubted no longer. He loved her. Idiot that he was, he could not be content with safety. He had had to go and fall in love with her.
“It is, is it not?” he said, and he looked beyond her shoulder and felt somehow as if the bottom had fallen out of his stomach.
There it was.
The house was built on the far slope of the bowl, a horseshoe-shaped mansion of gray stone that often gleamed almost white when the sun shone on it at a certain angle in the evenings. To one side of it and connected with it were the remains of the old abbey, most of them virtually unrecognizable moss-covered ruins, though the cloisters were still almost intact, and usable with their walkway and pillars and central garden, which his grandmother had made into a rose arbor.
It was the only really cultivated part of the whole park, apart from the kitchen gardens at the back. The rest was rolling, tree-dotted grassland and wooded copses and graveled walking paths and rides, in the style of Capability Brown, though not designed by him. This inner bowl had been planned to look secluded and rural and peaceful, and it succeeded admirably, Flavian had always thought. There was a river and a deep natural lake and a waterfall out of sight over the rise to the left of the house. And a genuine stone hermitage. Follies had always been unnecessary at Candlebury.
“It is very d-different from Middlebury Park,” he said.
Middlebury was actually rather old-fashioned, with its carefully tended topiary garden and formal floral parterres forming the approach to the house. But it was grand and lovely, nevertheless.
“Yes.” She looked back out through the window, but her hand remained covering his. “Ilovethis.”
And he felt like weeping. Home.Hishome. But the latter thought served only to remind him of how he had always been quite adamant about thinking of it asDavid’shome, even though he had known from a relatively young age that it would be his before he had grown far into adulthood. But David had loved it with all the passion of his soul.
“We will p-probably be called upon to inspect the servants,” Flavian said.
They had remained in London for two days after deciding to come here. He had felt obliged to give the servants some notice of his coming. And there was a tea at his aunt Sadie’s that Agnes had promised to attend. Delivery of the rest of her new clothes, as well as a pair of new riding boots for which he had been fitted at Hoby’s, was expected within a day or two. And Agnes wanted to call upon her cousin, who lived in London—or rather the late William Keeping’s cousin, Dennis Fitzharris. He was the man who published Vincent and Lady Darleigh’s children’s stories, so Flavian gladly accompanied her and enjoyed himself greatly.
His mother had been less upset than he had expected by their decision to come to Candlebury. Perhaps it would be as well, she had said, for them to leave town over Easter and even for a few weeks after. By that time the new Lady Ponsonby and her story would be old news and only sufficiently interesting to bring everyone out in force to meet her at the ball they would give at Arnott House. Flavian had let his mother believe they would return in a month or so. And who knew? Perhaps they would.
At least she had not suggested accompanying them.
“Will that be a formidable experience?” Agnes asked, referring to the parade of servants that probably awaited them at the house.
“One must remember that they will be agog with eagerness to see us,” he said. “Both of us. They have not seen me since I inherited the title. And I am returning with a b-bride. This will be a h-happy day of celebration for them, I daresay.”
