He laughed, and she laughed back.
“It was,” she said as she turned away from him.
He watched her walk up the drive to the house before he strode past the meadow and crossed the bridge toward home.
He was still smiling.
Chapter Seven
Clarissa was glad she had made arrangements to visit her parents again after church the following day. It was her mother’s seventieth birthday. She needed to put some distance between herself and Ravenswood and her memories of yesterday. She needed to clear out her head.
The journey was a long one, however, and though she had the company of her maid in the carriage, Millicent was not a talker. Even among her fellow servants she apparently had a reputation for taciturnity. Whatever was one expected to do with one’s mind under such circumstances? One could not gaze mindlessly upon the scenery beyond the windows for all of ten miles—it was eight, George had once explained to her, if one were a crow, ten if one were a human traveling the carriage road, nine if one knew the occasional narrower, more heavily rutted shortcuts.
George and Kitty had sent with her from London a magnificently painted fan as a gift for Mama for her birthday. Clarissa’s gift was a cashmere shawl so soft it felt almost like silk.
Think about those birthday gifts, then, and about family.
Not that kiss!
She had been unable to shake off the memory of it for the rest of yesterday. It had kept her awake after she went to bed. It had figured prominently in her dreams. She still could not forget it today. She had tried in vain to dismiss it as a mere part of their exuberant reaction to their safe—though madly perilous—descent of the hill.
She could not convince herself.
It had been a kiss.
Goodness, they were both in their fifties—well, she was as close to being there as made no difference. And he had never kissed her before. Though he had confessed to having wanted to do so when he was eighteen. As she had confessed to wanting it too. But that was over thirty years ago. Over half her life ago.
She had not been kissed for a long time, not in that way anyway. Caleb had been dead for six years, and for the difficult four years before that their physical encounters had become fewer and less passionate. She would almost be willing to swear they had not kissed at all during those years.
Yesterday’s kiss, no matter how she tried to rationalize it, had shaken her to the core. And it had not even been just one kiss, which might the more easily have been dismissed as a mindless conclusion to the swinging about and the laughter. No, there had been two kisses. And she very much feared she had initiated the second if not the first. In fact, she knew she had.
And then, almost all the way home across the park, he had held her hand. It seemed a simple enough thing in itself since they had walked side by side, and it had been a long way. But…well, no. It had not been a simple thing. She could not recall ever walking hand in hand with Caleb. She could not remember holding handswith any other man either. She would take an offered arm, it was true. But never a hand, unless it was offered briefly to help her in and out of a carriage or something similar.
It had been a glorious, wonderful afternoon. The long walk had exhilarated her and made her feel young again. And they had fallen into easy conversation, just as they always had. She had thought they could be friends again. And she had been right. It had been lovely to walk and sit with a friend her own age, someone she had known a long time, one with whom she could relax and talk and laugh without conscious effort. The memory of his picnic tea set her to smiling again even now, and she glanced surreptitiously at Millicent on the seat across from her own. Her maid was staring woodenly out of the window, however. Those sandwiches! She had had to open her mouth very wide to bite into hers. And that tea-flavored or coffee-flavored not-quite-cold water! The tea itself so strong it might almost make one’s hair curl! No plates or cups or spoons or napkins. She had never enjoyed a picnic more.
And his story—that incredible account of how he had come to be an archer. She felt marvelously privileged that he had told her, when she knew he had not told anyone else. That story had explained one thing about him that had puzzled her for more than twenty years. How could the troubled, restless boy she remembered have become the man who was even-tempered and quietly content with his very simple way of life, who seemed at peace with himself and his world? It had always seemed to her too great a change to have come naturally with advancing age and maturity. She knew now that he had had a profound spiritual experience up in those mountains—the Himalayas, were they? It had not been the sort of experience that had set him on fire with religious zeal or a crusading spirit, but rather one that had brought him an inner tranquility that had continued to the present.
Clarissa wished that kiss had not happened, or the hand-holding. She had wanted, and still did, an uncomplicated summer friendship with Matthew Taylor, not a romance. The very idea of a romance between the two of them was absurd after all this time. They were middle-aged.
She wished the kiss had not happened, but it had. And she wanted more—more of his friendship, that was. She had invited him to drive to the lake with her on Tuesday. They were bound to be seen, he had warned her. But they had already been seen, strolling hand in hand, and those gardeners were not likely to keep such a story to themselves. But she and Matthew were neighbors. What was so reprehensible about their enjoying each other’s company once in a while?
She knew the answer—why such a friendship was remarkable, anyway, even if not reprehensible. The village carpenter and the dowager countess. Not merely walking together but walking hand in hand.
She would not give in to any sense of wrongdoing. That carpenter was also a gentleman. Besides, it was no one’s business whom she befriended. And it was not as though the friendship was going to consume her every waking hour. He was a man who worked for a living. And she had certain social obligations she would keep up, though she would also continue to cut them to the minimum in order to spend time alone—she still intended to give priority to that.
It was just a shame that the mind could so often have a mind of its own—she smiled at the absurdity—and take one’s thoughts in a direction they did not wish to go. Her mind was more undisciplined than ever these days, thoughts tumbling all over one another in their eagerness to grab her attention and take her off on unwanted mental journeys.
Perhaps she needed to take up archery.
The journey to her parents’ home seemed more interminable even than usual. She was very glad when the carriage turned onto her father’s land and the house came into sight. Perhaps the visit would take her mind off yesterday. Indeed, it almost certainly would, she thought as she saw two carriages, a curricle, and a gig drawn up to one side of the house, minus their horses. There were other visitors, then. Someone must have organized a birthday party of sorts for her mother. How lovely!
Although the ten-mile journey was a long and tedious one, Clarissa had made the effort to visit regularly since her marriage. In all that time, however, she had only rarely encountered any of the neighbors she remembered, or the few who had come to live in the neighborhood more recently. It would be a pleasure to see some of them again.
The vicar was new here since her day, though Clarissa had met him a time or two. Captain Jakes and his wife and Miss Jennings, her sister, had lived as tenants on Matthew Taylor’s property for many years. Clarissa had met them before but had only a very slight acquaintance with them. And then there was Matthew’s brother and his wife, Reginald and Adelaide Taylor, and Philip, their elder son, with Emily, his wife.
Clarissa had not very much liked Reginald, more than ten years her senior, when she was growing up, though admittedly she had taken most of her information and opinions about him from Matthew, who had hardly been an impartial reporter. Reginald had been the good son, perfect and dutiful, an old sobersides—Matthew’s word for him—who frowned upon imperfection and indiscipline and frivolity. He had seen his younger brother as guilty of all three.
After kissing her father on the cheek and hugging her mother and wishing her a happy birthday, Clarissa shook hands with alltheir other visitors. She would have been happier if the Taylors were not of their number, though that was selfish of her, she admitted. They were, after all, the closest of her parents’ neighbors, and it was good of them to have come to pay their respects to her mother. Even so, she would just as soon have had no reminders of Matthew today. She smiled and set herself to being her usual sociable self, mindful to include everyone in the general conversation and careful to speak individually, however briefly, with each one.
