“I think it would be uncomfortable, moving from billet to billet,” Gwyneth said. “Never having a settled home. Itsoundsromantic, Stephanie. I grant you that. But I doubt it is in reality. It also would be very stressful, though no more so, perhaps, than remaining at home and awaiting news. Military menfight.They get wounded and maimed. They get killed. Their wives surely live in astate of constant fear and anxiety. That poor lady might have lived through hell. We ought not to begrudge her that silly parasol now.”
Stephanie was gazing at her, her half-consumed drink forgotten. “She does notlookas if she has lived through hell,” she said.
“People do not always show on the outside what they feel on the inside, though,” Gwyneth said.
Ah. Devlin almost sighed aloud. No, indeed they did not.
“Is falling in love too risky a thing to do, then?” Stephanie asked. It was seemingly a rhetorical question. She did not wait for either of them to answer. “If I were in love, and if the man I loved returned my feelings, I would go to the ends of the earth with him and face dragons and volcanoes and invading armies with him. If anyone tried to stop me, I would elope with him and marry him and live happily ever after.”
“Splendid!” Gwyneth laughed.
What the devil sort of fairy tales had Stephanie been reading? Devlin wondered.
“Don’t elope, Steph,” he said, smiling at her and patting her hand. “I want to be at your wedding. Proud brother and all that.”
“You will wait forever, then.” She sighed and lost her look of rapt ecstasy. “No one will ever want to marry me. Unless it is because I am Lady Stephanie Ware, daughter of the Earl of Stratton, and rich. No one will ever fall in love with me. I am sorry about that, Dev, for you are the eldest and will therefore have to look after me all through my spinsterhood.”
“I will gladly look after you for an eternity if needs be,” he told her.
“I think you may be pleasantly surprised, Stephanie,” Gwyneth told her. “I think it altogether possible that the handsomest man in the world—and the most dashing and discerning—will fall very deeply in love with you and sweep you off your feet.”
Stephanie made that puffing sound with her lips, but then she chuckled. “And the man in the moon may fall off it,” she said, “and crash in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.”
“And on that note we had better get Gwyneth to the church before Sir Ifor and Lady Rhys grow tired of waiting for her and she has to walk home,” Devlin said as he stood up.
“We would take her in the curricle, silly,” Stephanie said. But she drained her glass and jumped to her feet.
The three men with whom the earl had been talking were still outside the inn when they left. Mrs. Shaw had gone on her way, though. So had their father, Devlin noticed.
Four children were out on the village green, to one side of the duck pond, throwing a ball from hand to hand. One of them waved to Stephanie, and she waved back and darted across the grass toward them, her braids bobbing against her shoulders.
“I’ll see you by the curricle, Dev,” she called over her shoulder.
He offered his arm to Gwyneth.
“You really do not need to escort me to the church, Lord Mountford,” she said.
“I am to be abandoned by both my female companions, then, am I?” he asked her. “In full view of half the village? My reputation will be in tatters.”
She smiled and took his arm after all. “I do love Stephanie,” she told him.
“So do I,” he said. “I just wish she loved herself a little more. But she looks in a mirror and, instead of seeing herself, she sees a fat child.Areyou going to fear for Nick and worry about him after he joins his regiment?” he asked before he realized the question would leave his lips.
“Of course,” she said. “The situation with Napoleon Bonaparte is getting nastier by the day. There are bound to be open hostilitiessoon, and the silly boy—man—is so eager to be a part of it all that sometimes I could shake him.”
“He does know, though,” Devlin said, “that war is serious business.”
“Yes,” she said. “He does. Oh, of course he does. I do him an injustice when I call his enthusiasms silly. Sometimes, though, I wish it was women who ruled the world. We would do so much better than men.”
“Only, perhaps, because women do not have power,” he said. “Perhaps if they did, they would soon begin to wield it as men do.”
“Oh dear,” she said. “Power really does corrupt, then?”
“I think perhaps it does,” he said. “Not many people can hold firm to the noble ideal that power ought to be used in the service of those who do not have it.”
This, he thought, was the longest conversation he had ever had with Gwyneth Rhys. And he was sounding as though someone ought to pick him up and shake the dust off him. Was it any wonder she had never liked him?
They had arrived outside the church. The doors stood open, and organ music spilled out.
