“Absolutely,” she said. “I would have no idea how to arrange all these flowers and creatures into one harmonious whole. I know you will do it to perfection.”
He removed the candlesticks from the edges of his drawing and rolled it up neatly again while she replaced everything as it had been when he arrived.
“There is no hurry, of course,” she said. “Though I would love to see the finished product tomorrow. Prudence’s need is greater than mine. She would love nothing better than to have her table yesterday. And doubtless you have other work too.”
“I never take on more than I can comfortably handle,” he said.
“May I come and see the crib after you start on it?” she asked. “I would love to see it develop from pieces of blank wood into a child’s paradise. However, I do know that many artists of all kinds—painters, writers, musicians—do not like any outside interference in their creations until they are complete.”
He was one of those artists—ifartistwas not too pretentious a word to apply to himself. But it was not for that reason he hesitated. She really ought not to come to his rooms again. Not that it wouldseem indiscreet to her. For all her amiability with him and her use of his first name, she must see him merely as a tradesman. But for him…? And for other villagers, who would hardly be able to avoid seeing her coming and going? Well. Perhaps when the time came, he would suggest that she bring a maid with her.
“Perhaps,” he said vaguely.
“It is time for morning coffee,” she said. “Will you join me, Matthew? Oh, but not in here. It is such a lovely day after all the clouds and drizzle we have been enduring. I will have it taken onto the terrace outside the ballroom. There will be a sunny corner there by now. Will you come?”
What the devil would her servants think and talk of among themselves? Would they assume it was merely business they were discussing over their coffee? And would they be right? Did it matter?
He had decided many years ago that the rigid British class system no longer meant anything to him, that all people mattered equally, that he could not care less whether people knew or remembered that by accident of birth he was a gentleman. That designation had never served him well anyway. It was not that he resented the facts of his birth. He truly did not care. He mingled socially with everyone alike. And he spent a great deal of his time—most of it, in fact—alone with his own company. He liked it that way. A solitary man who was nevertheless sociable.
“I will welcome both the coffee and the fresh air and sunshine,” he said, and she smiled happily and turned to pull on the bell rope.
The butler must have been hovering close to the drawing room doors. He appeared within moments, and Clarissa requested that a tray of coffee for two be taken outside.
“Come,” she said, crossing the room to the door and allowing him to open it for her. “I decided to return home early fromLondon, though my children and friends tried to persuade me to stay until the end of the Season and then join them in their various plans for the summer. Jennifer and Ben also invited me to spend the summer at Penallen. I wanted to be alone, however. Solitude is such a rare and precious luxury. But I will welcome some company. Is that very muddleheaded of me?”
“Life is made up of opposite extremes,” he said. “A contented life comes from finding a balance of those extremes, though it is not always easily achieved.”
“What a wise understanding of life,” she said, turning toward the west wing and the ballroom. “And have you found balance in your own life, Matthew?”
“I believe so,” he said. “With the understanding that I cannot always control events, of course.”
He fell into step beside her.
Chapter Three
Clarissa led the way along a lengthy corridor toward the west wing and then through the ballroom and out onto the terrace, where two comfortable chairs had already been brought out, a small table between them. They had been set up in the corner of the terrace where the shade cast by the building had already receded to admit the warm sunshine.
Clarissa had decided to invite Matthew Taylor to stay for coffee on impulse. After looking over the design for the crib he was bringing for her approval, she had planned to go outside herself to enjoy the warmer weather, perhaps to go up the hill beyond the west wing and sit inside the temple folly, from which there was a fine view over the park and surrounding countryside. She would not even bother with a book this morning, she had thought. She knew she would not read it. Just when she might have expected to enjoy long hours of reading to her heart’s content, she seemed to be right off books. All she wanted to do was gaze about her and think and dream. It was unusual for her. She had never imagined that doing nothingwould appeal to her. There had always been so much to do and so much she wished to do if only she had the time.
Being alone and idle once she had dealt with the business of the crib, then, had been her plan. Yet here she was, seated on the terrace outside the ballroom, Matthew beside her, waiting for a coffee tray to be brought out. So much for solitude.
But why should even her hours of idleness be mapped out ahead of time? Why should she not sit here with an old friend if she wished, talking about nothing in particular? She was not bound by any schedule, especially a self-imposed one.
It was a concept to which she found it strangely difficult to accustom herself. She had no one to please but herself for the next couple of months. She had come home to Ravenswood for this very purpose, to discover herself anew, to learn how to enjoy her life free of her usual compulsion always to be doing something useful, always trying to please everyone and behave as they expected her to behave. She had done that all her married life and even in the six years since Caleb’s passing. It was hard to learn how to be selfish.
She smiled at the thought. Was that what she could be for the rest of her life if she chose? Could she really choose anything? Be anybody? Was that what freedom was?
Matthew had once been her closest friend. Closer in many ways than her own brother, whom she adored. Certainly closer than any of her female friends who sometimes came to spend an afternoon or even a full day with her or invited her to spend a day with them. She remembered very little of all those visits, except a lot of giggling.
But Matthew had of necessity become a near stranger after she married Caleb. Then he had disappeared for more than ten years. When he returned, he had been different. Among other things, hehad come to Boscombe as the village carpenter and did not socialize exclusively with the gentry of the neighborhood, although he was a gentleman himself. She and Caleb had still been married then. She had been the Countess of Stratton. She had had children to raise and duties to perform. Any real friendship with him had been out of the question. It had become a habit to treat him as a mere acquaintance, to acknowledge him whenever they met, but never to speak with him at any length.
Yet for the past six years she had been essentially free of the obligations imposed by her marriage.
She turned her head to look curiously at him now as he squinted off toward the lake. She tried to see in him the boy of whom she had been so dearly fond all those years ago. He had been very slender then, to the point of thinness, in fact. He was still slim and wiry in build. He still had all his hair, though the darkness of it was sprinkled with gray. There was even still that lock that had insisted upon falling down over his forehead. His face was as angular as it had always been, with some lines fanning out from the corners of his eyes. Those eyes were still very dark, though they were less intense than they used to be. His jaw was hard and firm but not as stubborn as it had been then. He was not a handsome man, just as he had not been a handsome boy. But he had always been striking in appearance. He still was.
Attractivewas perhaps the word for which her mind searched. He was still attractive. And it occurred to her that she had not allowed herself to admit that in all the years he had been living in Boscombe. She had never allowed herself to be fully free—a startling thought when she had lived such a privileged life of luxury.
She wondered what story lay behind his settling here as a carpenter, specifically in rooms above Oscar Holland’s smithy, when hisgrandmother had left him her stately manor house and pretty park and accompanying farmland when she died not very long after the death of his wife, the former Poppy Lang. It could not have been more than a year or so after his disappearance. And what was the story behind that unexpected marriage of his, so soon after her own?
