It seemed to please her to spend some of her time with him.
Chapter Five
Clarissa spent the following morning in the library, writing letters. She had been amused and rather touched at how many she had received since her return. Her family and friends must have started writing almost as soon as her carriage drove out of sight of the group of them gathered outside Stratton House to wave her on her way.
They had probably felt guilty at allowing her to return home alone. They would fear that she was going to be lonely. Obviously she had failed to convince them that it was something she really wanted to do.
Kitty and George reported that they were still enjoying the Season in London, though they would return home soon—home being the dower house on the estate now owned by Sir Gerald Emmett, Kitty’s son. Clarissa must never forget that she was welcome to join them there at any time. Lord Keilly had asked particularly about her at the soiree they had attended the evening before and had appeareda little taken aback andhugelydisappointed to learn that she had returned to the country.
Kitty had underlined the one word.
Gwyneth was missing both Clarissa and Stephanie, as well as the frequent visits from Pippa. Devlin would probably be pleased, however, to receive fewer bills from her shopping trips now that her mother-in-law and sisters-in-law were no longer available to accompany her. There was very little pleasure to be had from shopping alone, alas. She was looking forward to leaving for Wales as soon as the parliamentary session ended. It was still not too late for Clarissa to go with them. Everyone—she had underlined the word—would be delighted.
Owen—yes, he had actually written his mother a letter, a rare feat for him—was missing her and “even that pest of a sister of mine.” He had started to help out at a home in London for delinquent boys, and his hair might well be a uniform gray by the time his mother saw him next. He would still be happy to join her at Ravenswood for the summer if she felt herself in need of company. All she had to do was let him know.
Stephanie reported that she was very happy indeed to be at Greystone, which was far better for Pippa’s health than London. The twins, now two years old, were exhausting, and Lucas kept assuring her that she need not feel she must amuse them during their every waking hour since they had a perfectly competent nurse, not to mention a doting mother and father. But playing with them was fun. She hoped her mother did not need her at Ravenswood just yet. She did wish, though, that Mama would come to them. Both Pippa and Lucas would be delighted, as would the children. And she would be over the moon.
Pippa had written with very similar news and sentiments. Shewas feeling considerably less tired than she had much of the time in London. In fact her energy had surged back now that she was home. Even so, she was so glad of Stephanie’s company. Only Mama’s company too could make her happier.
Ben had written from Penallen as soon as he learned Clarissa had returned home alone from London. Jennifer was blooming with good health and exuberant spirits despite—or maybe because of—her condition. His aunt Edith, who now lived permanently with them, was enjoying fussing over her, and Joy kept bringing both women gifts of wildflowers and shells and pebbles from the beach. Joy was enormously excited at the prospect of a new brother or sister, though she had almost seven months to wait. Both Aunt Edith and Jennifer were in the process of writing letters of their own to Clarissa, and Joy was drawing her a picture of Carrie, her collie, now two years old and as frisky as ever. But Mother did not have to wait for letters. She would be more than welcome to come and stay whenever she wished and for as long as she wished. Ben would even come and fetch her if she would but say the word.
Clarissa wrote to them all, a time-consuming process since she could never be satisfied with writing just a brief note. And she felt a welling of love and gratitude for all of them. She felt slightly guilty too, since she knew she had worried them and made them wonder if they had done something to drive her away, despite her firm reassurances to the contrary. It seemed absurd that after fifty years of active living she sometimes felt as though she knew and appreciated everyone and everything around her except herself. Her family seemed to be in an unconscious and entirely well-meaning conspiracy to keep things that way.
Who exactly was Clarissa Ware, née Greenfield, Dowager Countess of Stratton? Sometimes it seemed that she had dreamed her waythrough life, that it was all something that had happened to her rather than something she had lived with conscious intent. Yet she had never had much time to dream. There had always been so much to do, and she had wanted to do it all well, to be perfect, not to neglect even the smallest duty.
How fortunate it was that at least she knew beyond any shadow of doubt that she loved her family. All of them. She had even loved Caleb in a way it would be hard to explain. It was a bit surprising she had loved him at all, since in many ways he had been a weak man. He had left the running of the estate entirely to a steward and later to his eldest sons, Ben and Devlin. He had left the raising of the children and the running of the home and social events like the grand annual summer fete to her. He had left them all behind for a few months every spring while he went to London, supposedly to fulfill his duties as a member of the House of Lords, though Clarissa had suspected he had little interest in politics. He had spent those months partying with thetonduring the Season, flirting, committing adultery, betraying both her and their children over and over again.
Yet he had undoubtedly had a great fondness for them all. His pride in his children and his admiration for her had been genuine. He was a man with an enormous amount of natural charm. He loved people, and people loved him. Until the great upset at the summer fete ten years ago, they had been seen as a happy family at the heart of a happy neighborhood. And it had not been all illusion, though it would be hard to explain that to any skeptic.
Matthew Taylor leapt to mind.
But had she been equally weak? Had she convinced herself that it was better to have half a life than none at all? Had Devlin’s moral outrage when he found his father up in the temple with that womanin the middle of a ball exposed her own weakness of character as much as it had Caleb’s? Was that why she had sent Devlin away? Had it been not so much to protect him as to save herself from having to look inward and admit the truth about herself? She and Caleb had never talked out all the sorry mess that had been made of their lives. Rather, they had moved onward as though nothing monumental had happened. She had genuinely grieved when he died suddenly of a heart seizure four years later.
Human relationships were never as simple as it seemed they ought to be. Nor was understanding oneself.
But she had fallen into a daydream. She picked up her bundle of letters and took them out to the hall, where she set them in the silver bowl that held outgoing mail.
She loved her family. They were the anchor of her existence. So was Ravenswood. And Boscombe and the neighborhood surrounding it. She had dear friends and many friendly acquaintances here. She belonged here. But was it all something to which she clung because there was nothing else? Just a void at the center of herself? It was a thought that disturbed her. She had come home to find and confront the answers.
She went upstairs to her room, found a warm woolen shawl, and left the house after informing the butler that she would probably not be back for luncheon but would have something cold if she was hungry when she did return.
Then she walked, taking the lower path west of the house, veering off among the trees between the path and the river after she had passed the end of the meadow, and reducing her pace as she wound her way among the trunks and looked up through the branches to the sky and the clouds floating lazily by. It was closer to heaven up there, she thought, her eyes upon the upper branches. And shesmiled. She had always liked that idea, concocted one day by Matthew to persuade her to climb. And he had been strangely right. They had seemed to leave cares behind them whenever they did climb, and they would relax on a sturdy branch and dream away the hours together, or laugh them away as they composed one of their ridiculous stories.
She set a hand flat against the rough bark of one of the trees and imagined, as she had all those years ago, that she could feel the energy push its way through the roots and the soil, up through the trunk and into the boughs, all the way to the topmost branches and on up into the heavens. Trees lived for a long time, sometimes even centuries, stalwart and rooted in one place. Did they know of their own existence? Someone—was it Matthew?—had once told her that when a tree fell, whether brought down by a storm or by an axe or even old age, the whole forest wept.
She stepped back out onto the path and across it instead of following it to the lake. She struck off north, across rolling grassland with its upward slopes and dips into unexpected little flower arbors.
They were very different from each other, she and Matthew. She was securely established at Ravenswood. She enjoyed the love of an ever-growing family. She had roots here that ran as deep as those of the trees she had just touched. This would be her home for the rest of her life, though she would never be fully dependent upon Devlin. She had her own modest fortune upon which to live in comfort. She had, in fact, everything for which her upbringing had prepared her. Hers was a success story. It had not been without its upsets, it was true, but that same upbringing had enabled her to smooth them out and live through them and beyond them.
Matthew, on the other hand…He had made a life for himselfthat must have seemed a shocking failure to his father before he died. Matthew did not live as a gentleman lived. He seemed uninterested in doing so, though it would surely have been possible, since as far as Clarissa knew he still owned the home and estate his grandmother had left him. He had cut himself off from what remained of his family. She had not heard of there being any communication between him and his brother. He worked as a carpenter, a job that financed his basic needs, she supposed, but would not allow for many luxuries. Yet he was not reputed to spend long hours and days on more and more work so he could earn more. He seemed to be a man without ambition.
Some people might say he had crawled home after years of travel, exhausted, defeated, unfulfilled, having never made his fortune or even found the place in life the younger son of a gentleman of property might have expected. But it was impossible to know Matthew Taylor, even in the limited way Clarissa now knew him, without seeing that he was a man…Oh, how did one describe it to oneself? At peace with his world? At one with it? Living just exactly the sort of life he had been born to live?
His prevailing mood was so different from what it had always been when he was a boy that it was impossible to explain to herself what had caused the change. But she wanted to know, to understand. She suspected that most if not all the answers lay in those lost years, about which she still knew very little. They had not been lost, though, according to him. He had lived through them and come out the other side a changed and, he said, happier person.
He had gone away to find himself all those years ago, and it appeared he had done just that. In contrast, she had stayed at home all her life, at her parents’ home until she married, at Caleb’s after that. And she had never been on any search for herself. Why shouldshe? She had always known perfectly well who she was and where she belonged. Until now.
It occurred to her suddenly that in many ways she and Matthew had reversed roles during the thirty-plus years since their friendship ended. It was a startling thought.
