“I asked her to ride with me the afternoon after tomorrow,” he said, “but I suspect there is no suitable mount in the stables at Bramble Hall.”
“I do not doubt you are right.” She placed her cup back in its saucer and set both aside. “And she agreed?”
“Yes.”
She rested her elbows on the arms of her chair and regarded him with a slight frown. “I doubt her sister-in-law will allow it,” she said. “Ifshe has power over Mrs. McKay, that is. But is it wise anyway, Ben? I can see no reason why a recently bereaved widow ought not to take the air on horseback if she so desires, but in the lone company of a single gentleman?”
“I did say I would persuade you to join us,” he said. “Will you, Bea? Are you feeling up to it?”
“I certainly will be,” she said, “if the alternative is for you to ride out alone with a lady, Ben. It would not be at all proper, even if she were not in deep mourning.”
“She is lonely, as you just observed,” he said, “and restless.”
Though why he should have taken it upon himself to try to alleviate that restlessness, he did not know.
“It is hardly surprising,” she said. “She has been virtually incarcerated at Bramble Hall ever since she arrived. I suppose it was a labor of love, poor lady, nursing Captain McKay, and clearly he was desperately ill, but I always thought it selfish of him not to insist that she go out occasionally, even if only to take tea with a neighbor. She never did. It is perfectly understandable that by now, with the first wave of her grief passing off, she would be longing to flutter her wings.”
“Yes.”
She fixed him with a direct stare. “You are not making a flirt of Mrs. McKay by any chance, are you, Ben?” she asked him. “You have not conceived a tendre for her? I have been hoping for some time that you would recover your interest in women and in courtship. You have been a hermit for too long. I have been hoping you would marry before you turn thirty, though you have only a few months left in which to make me happy on that score. But I am not sure a recent widow is a wise choice, especially given the identity of her father-in-law. Of course, she is quite astonishingly lovely. She must have foreign blood to account for her dark coloring.Thatwould not endear her to the Earl of Heathmoor, I daresay.”
“Beatrice,” Ben said in some exasperation, “I have met Mrs. McKay four times, including our disastrous encounter in the meadow and our brief meeting at church. We are to take a ride together the day after tomorrow—in your company. I do not believe we will be having the banns called this week or even next.”
She laughed. “Sheisvery beautiful. Though the black clothes she wears are unbecoming, to say the least.”
“Agreed.”
“If you sat outside in the garden,” she said, “I suppose she kept that hideous veil over her face.”
“She pushed it back over the brim of her bonnet, actually.”
She regarded him in silence for a few seconds longer and then shrugged. “I know,” she said. “You do not need to say it aloud. You are no longer nine years old or even nineteen. You are quite capable of living your own life, and even if you are not, you would not thank me for trying to live it for you. Very well, I will not. But whatareyou going to do with your life, Ben? You have appeared to…to drift aimlessly in the years since you left Cornwall. I have sworn to myself that I will say nothing, but here I am saying it anyway and annoying you.”
Hewasirritated by the question, since he still did not know the answer. And he hated that in himself. He had always used to think of himself as a firm, decisive man. He had planned out his life when he was fifteen, and he had not deviated from that plan until a bullet and other assorted catastrophes had stopped him almost literally dead in his tracks six years ago. Now he felt as if he had been set adrift without a compass on an ocean that stretched vast and empty in every direction. He had come here with the firm intention of making plans and then launching them into effect. He was still determined to do it—tomorrow. Was it only recently he had made the discovery that tomorrow in fact never comes?
But Beatrice was someone who had always genuinely loved him. Her concern was real. She had a right to ask and a right to be answered.
“For the first year or so,” he said, “my whole focus was upon surviving. Then it was upon the monumental task of getting up from my bed and somehow becoming mobile. And finally, and until very recently, it has been upon walking again and getting my life back as it was before so that I might proceed to live happily ever after according to the original plan. I must be very stubborn or very dense or both. I have only recently faced the truth—that neither my body nor my life will ever again be as it once was. I was a man of action, a soldier, an officer. Now I am none of those things. The trouble is, though, that I do not know what I am instead or what I will be. Or what I will do. I am in a bit of a bleak place, Bea, though I do not even know where that is.” He laughed softly.
“You will return to Kenelston after you leave here?” she asked him. “You will make an effort to settle there at last?”
“I thought I might travel first,” he said, plucking out of the air one of the ideas he had half considered. “I have done a little of it in the past few years. I have spent time in Bath, at Tunbridge Wells, in Harrogate, in other places. I thought I might see something of Scotland, the Lake District, Wales. I have even thought I might try writing a travel book. There are plenty of them for walkers. As far as I know there are none for people who cannot walk or who cannot walk easily or far. Yet there must be any number of people who would travel if they could do so without having to be ruggedly fit and healthy.”
“Have you ever done any writing?” she asked, her eyebrows soaring.
“No,” he admitted. “But I must do something. It does not make me comfortable to admit that I am an aimless nobody living nowhere. I must and will find a new challenge, and my eyes and my brain and my hands work well enough even if my legs do not. I may discover a hidden talent as an author. I may find myself traveling all over the world and penning dozens of books for my adoring readers. Can you not see my name writ large in gold on a leather cover?”
She shook her head, though she did answer his grin with a short bark of laughter. “Your challengecouldbe to run Kenelston for yourself,” she said, “and to make it your home. It is yours, after all. But you do not have the heart to supplant Calvin, do you? I could simply shake that boy for his blockheaded selfishness. Though he is no longer a boy, of course. He ought to have made other arrangements for his family as soon as poor Wallace was killed and everything passed to you. It is not as though Father had left him without funds. But he kept very quiet instead and continued on as if Wallace were still alive. And of course your lengthy indisposition made it easier for him to become entrenched. But Kenelston isnothis, and he has no business having the full run of it and allowing those unruly children of his to dash about inside it as though there were no such thing as a nursery wing there—and no such thing as discipline. Do let me have a word with him.”
The idea of having to enlist the help of his sister to fight his battles for him was appalling.
“Thank you, Bea,” he said, “but it suits my purpose to travel for a while until I can see my way forward to a more settled future. And since Kenelston will need a steward while I am gone, Calvin and Julia and the children might as well stay where they are. Heisa very good steward, you know. And he loves the work.”
She clucked her tongue and poured herself another cup of tea. She looked at him, teapot held aloft, but he shook his head.
Actually, he thought, perhaps he was using Calvin as an excuse. Perhaps it suited him as well as it did his younger brother to leave matters as they were. He was not perfectly convinced that the sedentary life of a country gentleman would be quite to his taste. It was a rather startling thought. He had not admitted as much to himself before.
“Begin your travels in London when I go there to join Hector,” she suggested. “Come with me. Perhaps we will find you a pretty young lady who was not widowed a few months ago and who does not have a fire-breathing dragon for a father-in-law.”
