Matilda had insisted that the second son of the Earl of Heathmoor be mourned according to the strictest rules of propriety, though she had not needed to insist—Samantha had put up no fight. It had not even occurred to her that she might or that the rules of which Matilda spoke were excessive as well as oppressive. She had allowed herself to be decked out from head to toe in what must surely be the heaviest and gloomiest mourning garments ever fashioned. She had not even insisted upon being fitted for the new clothes. She had allowed herself to be cloistered within her home, the curtains always more than half drawn across the windows out of respect for the dead. She had allowed Matilda to discourage any visitors who made courtesy calls of sympathy from coming again, and to refuse every invitation that was extended to them, even to the most sober and respectable of social gatherings.
Samantha had not missed mingling with society in the form of her neighbors for the obvious reason that she never had mingled with them. She hardly even knew them beyond nodding at church on Sunday mornings. She had been at Bramble Hall for five years, and almost every moment of those years had been devoted to Matthew’s care.
For four months now she had not cared for anything beyond the numbness of her own all-encompassing lethargy and exhaustion. If truth were told, she had been rather glad that Matilda was there to take charge of all that needed to be done, even though she had never liked her sister-in-law any better than her husband had.
But numbness and exhaustion could last only so long. After four months, life was reasserting itself. She was restless. She was ready to fling off her lethargy. She needed to get out—out of the house, out of the park. She needed to walk. She needed to breathe real air.
She gazed outdoors, her fingers drumming, and then looked down at her widow’s weeds and grimaced. She felt the blackness of every ill-fitting stitch of them like a physical weight. She had tried reasoning with Matilda earlier. Surely, she had said, it would be harmless to go out for a walk along country lanes that were rarely traveled. And even if they did encounter someone, surely that person would not think any the worse of them for strolling sedately in the countryside close to their own home. Surely whoever it was would not dash off to spread the word throughout the neighborhood that the widow and her sister-in-law were kicking up a lark, behaving with shocking levity and disrespect for the dead.
Had she really hoped to draw a smile from Matilda with her exaggeration? Had Matildaeversmiled? What shehaddone was stare stonily back at her smiling sister-in-law, deliberately set aside her unfinished mending task, and announce that she had a sick headache, for which she hoped Samantha was satisfied. She had withdrawn to her room to lie down for an hour or two.
Samantha was glad Matilda had never married. Some poor man had thereby been saved from a life of abject misery. She did not even feel guilty at the uncharitable thought.
Her downward glance at her blacks had also encountered the eager, hopeful expression of a large brown shaggy dog of quite indeterminate breed, a stray that had turned up literally on her doorstep two years ago looking like a gangly skeleton, and had taken up residence there after she fed him out of sheer pity and then tried to shoo him away. He had steadfastly refused to be shooed, and somehow, by means quite beyond either her comprehension or her control, he had taken up residenceinsidethe house and grown more bulky and more thick-and-unruly-coated but never sleek or shiny or graceful as any self-respecting dog ought to look. He was seated at Samantha’s feet now, his tail thumping the floor, his tongue lolling, his eyes begging her to please,pleasedo something with him.
Sometimes she felt he was the only bright spot in her world.
“Youwould come walking with me if I asked it of you, would you not, Tramp?” she asked him. “Respectability notwithstanding?”
It was a fatal question—it had contained a word beginning with the letterw. Actually, it had contained more than one, but one of them also had the lettersa-l-kattached to it. Tramp scrambled to his feet in his usual ungainly manner, yipped sharply as if under the illusion that he was still a puppy, panted noisily as though he had just run a mile at top speed, and continued to gaze expectantly upward.
“How could your answer be anything but yes?” She laughed at him and patted his head. But he was having none of such mild affection. He circled his head so that he could first slobber over her hand and then expose his throat for a good scratch. “And why not? Why evernot, Tramp?”
It was clear Tramp could think of no reason at all why they should deprive themselves merely because Lady Matilda McKay had a sick headache as well as strange notions about air and exercise and correct mourning etiquette. He lumbered over to the door and gazed up at the knob.
It was unseemly for a lady to walk alone beyond the confines of her own park—even when she wasnotin mourning. Or so Samantha had been taught during the year she had spent at Leyland Abbey while Matthew was away in the Peninsula with his regiment. It was one of the many dreary rules of being a lady that her father-in-law had felt it incumbent upon himself to teach the woman his son had married against his wishes.
Well, she had no choice but to go alone. Matilda was flat on her daybed upstairs and would not have accompanied her anyway—it was the very idea of the walk that had put her on the daybed. If Samantha set one toe beyond the boundary of the park and Matilda and the Earl of Heathmoor found out about it…Well, even if she dug a hole all the way to China and disappeared down it, she would not escape their wrath. And the earlwouldhear about it if Matilda did. There were many miles of countryside between County Durham in the north of England and Kent in the south, but those miles burned up a few times each week with messengers bearing Matilda’s letters home and the earl’s letters to Bramble Hall.
Why had she allowed this to happen? Samantha asked herself. She was beginning to feel like a prisoner in her own home, under the guardianship of a humorless spy. Matthew would not have tolerated it. He had exercised a sort of tyranny of his own over her, but it was not his father’s. He had hated his father.
“Well,” she said, “since I was foolish enough to use the forbidden word in your hearing, Tramp, it would be nothing short of cruelty to disappoint you. And it would be the ultimate in cruelty to disappoint myself.”
His tail waved, and he looked from the doorknob to her and back again.
Ten minutes later they were striding along the path at the west side of the house toward the garden gate, which they passed through to the lane and meadows beyond. At least, Samantha strode in quite unladylike but equally unrepentant fashion while Tramp loped along at her side and occasionally dashed off in pursuit of any squirrel or small rodent incautious enough to rear its head. Though perhaps it was not lack of caution but merely contempt on their part, for Tramp never came close to running his prey to earth.
Ah, it felt so very good to breathe in fresh air at last, Samantha thought, even if it must be filtered through the heavy black veil that hung from the brim of her black bonnet. And it was glorious to see nothing but open space about her, first on the lane, and then on the daisy-and-buttercup-strewn grass of a meadow onto which they turned. It was sheer heaven to allow her stride to lengthen and to know that at least for a while the horizon was the only boundary that confined her.
There was no one to witness her grand indiscretion, no one to gasp in horror at the sight of her.
She stopped occasionally and gathered buttercups, while Tramp frolicked about her. And then, her little posy complete, she strode along again, a thick hedge to one side, all the fresh beauties of nature spread out on the other, the sky stretching overhead with its high layer of clouds through which she could see the bright, fuzzy disk of the sun. There was a brisk, slightly chilly breeze fluttering her veil about her face, but she did not feel the discomfort of the cold. Indeed, she relished it. She felt happier than she had felt for months, even perhaps for years. Oh, definitely for years.
She wasnotgoing to feel guilty about taking this hour for herself. No one could say she had not given her husband all the attention she possibly could while he lived. And no one could say she had not mourned him properly since his death. No one could even say she had been glad of his death. She had never, ever wished him dead, even at those times when she had wondered if she had any reserves of energy left with which to tend him and be patient with his endless peevishness. She had been genuinely saddened by the death of the man she had married just seven years before with such high hopes for a happily-ever-after.
No, she was not going to feel guilty. Sheneededthis—this pleasure, this peace, this quiet restoration of her spirits.
It was precisely as she was thinking these tranquil thoughts that her peace was shattered in a sudden and most alarming manner.
Tramp had just returned with the stick she had thrown for him, and she was bending to retrieve it with one hand while she held her posy in the other, when it seemed that a thunderbolt came crashing down upon them from the heavens, only narrowly missing them. Samantha shrieked with terror, while the dog went into a frenzy of hysterical barking and leaped aimlessly in every direction, bowling Samantha right off her feet. Her buttercups went flying about in a hail of yellow, and she landed with a painful thud on her bottom.
She gaped in mingled pain and terror and discovered that the thunderbolt was in fact a large black horse, which had just leapt over the hedge very close to where she had been standing. It might have kept on going, since it appeared to have landed safely enough, but Tramp’s barking and leaping and perhaps her own scream had sent it into a frenzy of its own. It whinnied and reared, its eyes rolling wildly and fearfully, as the rider on its back fought for his seat and brought it under control with considerable skill and a whole arsenal of curse words most foul.
“Are you out of yourmind? Are you quiteinsane?”
“Bring that blasted animal under control, woman, damn it.”
Samantha shouted her rhetorical questions and the man bellowed his imperious command simultaneously.
