His mother.
His mother had refused to see him.
Philippa was out behind the carriage house, pale almost to the point of greenness, with dark circles beneath her eyes; she was hugging her arms and hunching her shoulders because the early morning was chilly and she had not brought a shawl with her. She was standing beside Devlin’s curricle, which was ready to go. A groom had just finished strapping his bags and Ben’s to the rear of it. Ben was rubbing the back of her neck with one hand.
She looked at Devlin with haunted eyes.
“Go and talk to Mama,” she said. “Please, Dev? She cannot possibly have meant what she said last night. And even if she did, she will have changed her mind this morning. This whole...thingwill be patched up soon and forgotten about. It is what always happens. Go and talk to her. Grovel if you must. Just please do not go away.”
“She will not see me,” he told her.
She walked into his arms then and pressed her face to his shoulder while reaching out one arm to draw Ben too into her embrace.
Chapter Ten
Sometimes I find myself quite annoying,” Lady Rhys said. “I have a very late night and think to myself that it does not matter. I will simply make up for it by sleeping on in the morning. But does it happen? It does not. I wake up at my usual time notwithstanding, and when I direct myself quite firmly to go back to sleep, myself does not listen.”
“And it seems you have trained us all to be just like you, Mam,” Idris said. “Here we all are to prove it.”
All four of them were up and seated about the breakfast table at their usual hour, and Lady Rhys was talking for the sake of talking, in Gwyneth’s opinion. With unnatural cheerfulness, just as though the world had not come to an end last night. Just as though she had not noticed that her daughter was toying with the food on her plate, moving it from place to place but not into her mouth.
“I needed to be up anyway,” Sir Ifor said in an identical tone of voice. “I want to get to church early. I have no idea how many of the choir boys and girls will turn up today and which of them will bringtheir voices with them. There may not be enough of them to drown out my mistakes, and I chose some tricky pieces for this week.”
Her fathernevermade mistakes, Gwyneth thought. The more complex the piece of music, the more brilliant his playing became. She knew a few people who were willing to admit that they went to church for the sole purpose of listening to Sir Ifor Rhys play the organ.
“I’ll go with you, Dad,” Idris said. “We can take the gig. It’s a nice enough morning. Mam and Gwyn can come later in the carriage.”
All this hearty cheerfulness was going to make her scream in a minute, Gwyneth thought. It was time someone addressed the issue that was on all their minds and had probably kept them all awake half the night. More than half in her case. But before anyone could broach the topic, her mother and Idris both turned their heads sharply toward the window, and Gwyneth heard it too. Some sort of carriage. Pulled by more than one horse.
“There is someone coming here at this hour?” her mother said. “On a Sunday?”
Idris pushed back his chair, got to his feet, and went to the window. “It is Devlin,” he said. “And Ben Ellis. In Dev’s curricle.”
Gwyneth felt a great surge of joy.He had come.But it lasted no longer than a moment, for everything was wrong with the picture that had rushed to her mind. It was very much too early. It was a Sunday morning before church. He had his half brother with him. And after last night it was impossible that he was coming courting. She was very glad she had not leapt up from her chair.
Idris went striding out of the room while Gwyneth’s parents exchanged glances and Lady Rhys looked with some concern at her daughter.
“One of us must have left something at the hall last night,” Sir Ifor said, “and they have come to return it.” He set his napkin beside his plate and rubbed his hands together.
Idris returned within a minute or two with Devlin, who was looking pale and grim and tight-lipped—and was dressed for travel.
Sir Ifor and Lady Rhys both rose to greet their visitor. Gwyneth stayed where she was. She wished she could sink beneath the table, for this was the Devlin she had known all through her growing years. He did not even glance her way. And her instinct again, as it had been then, was to hide. Yesterday had been a dream more wonderful than anything she had ever imagined, but it had ended in a nightmare.
“Where is Ben?” her mother asked while her father shook Devlin’s hand.
“He will not come in,” Idris explained. “He is going to stay with the horses.”
“Come and sit down, Devlin,bach,” Sir Ifor said, using an unexpected Welsh endearment. “Have some breakfast with us. I daresay you have not had any yet. Idris will go back out and persuade Ben to join us. One of our grooms can watch the horses.”
“I am not staying,” Devlin said. “But thank you for the invitation, sir. Lady Rhys, I am sorry to interrupt your breakfast. I wished to apologize for involving your daughter in that rather... sordid scene last night. It was unforgivable of me. I did not intend to draw her into it, but that is no excuse. I—”
Gwyneth’s mother held up a staying hand. “Say no more about it, Devlin,” she said. “No one will think the worse of Gwyn for taking a stroll outside with you during the ball. A number of other people were doing the same thing. Ifor and I knew she had gone, and we did not worry in the least because we know you to be a steady, responsible young man. And never mind about that scene, nasty as it was while it was happening. I daresay it will all be forgotten within a few days as such things always are. Let me—”
“I came also to inform you that I am leaving,” he said. “Ben is coming with me. We will not be back. At least I will not.”
Gwyneth, gazing at him from her place at the table, felt as though someone had constructed a sort of tunnel between herself and him. Everything outside it receded into darkness. Everything within it was sharp and icy cold.
“Not be back, Dev? Have you taken leave of your senses?” Idris asked him. “You run Ravenswood and all the other properties too. You and Ben between you. You told me after you came down from Oxford last year that this is where your heart is and you would never willingly leave here again.”
