“I was never interested in the life of a gentleman for the sake of social status,” he said. “And at the time I had little interest in farming. The same man had run the farm for years and years, and he was very efficient at his job and very protective of his authority. I wanted to live a simple life, but not shut up in a manor house, where I would not feel any real sense of belonging either with the class into which I had been born or with any other. I wanted to be a wood-carver with a side occupation of carpentry to pay the bills. I discovered there was need of a carpenter in Boscombe, and when I went there, the first thing I did was call at the smithy to make inquiries. That same night, my meager belongings were upstairs in the rooms where the Hollands used to live. I have been there ever since.”
“Your brother and his wife and their elder son and his wife were at my parents’ home last Sunday when I went there for Mama’s seventieth birthday,” she said. He raised his eyebrows in surprise. “I found that someone had arranged a small party for her. Captain Jakes was there too with his wife and her sister. They are considering going to live in Plymouth after their lease expires next year. They want to be close to the sea again.”
“Yes,” he said. “I have been informed of that.”
She felt she had encroached upon forbidden territory and must go no further. “I am glad you came to Boscombe,” she said. “But it must have taken some courage.”
“I stayed away from England for longer than ten years,” he said. “In that time I freed myself of all lingering traces of obligation to be the man I was apparently born to be. A gentleman, in other words. I became simply a person. A person with an unfocused dream for a long while. But it became more focused with time. Iwanted, I needed, to work with wood and a knife, just as some people need to work with canvas and paints or with paper and pen or with a violin and a bow. Who knows why certain people are born with these cravings? But nothing brings contentment or peace of mind to such people except the decision to answer the calling and become the person one was meant to be. By the time I returned to my own country, Clarissa, it needed no courage at all simply to do what I had to do. I came here specifically because it was a familiar part of England and there was need of a carpenter. I have stayed here because I have never felt the urge to move on to something different. I was done with both restlessness and traveling.”
“And so,” she said, “it turns out that you are far stronger than I, Matthew. Yet it seemed the other way around when we were children.”
“Ah,” he said, “but it was you who always believed in me, who always encouraged me, often without the medium of words, to be the person I needed to be. Almost your last words to me on that final afternoon were to seek the fulfillment of all my yearnings and thus be happy.”
“Did I say that? Aloud?” she said. “So I encouraged your rebellion?”
“No, nothing as negative as that,” he said. “Quite the opposite. You…How do I express it? You permitted me to be the person I was deep within. You liked me just as I was and as I was becoming. It felt almost like love.”
“It was love,” she said. “Long before I knew anything about other kinds of love, I loved you.”
They smiled at each other and he squeezed her hands. Before he could let them go, she lifted her right hand and his left, drew them across her body, and set the back of his hand to her cheek.
“What do we do now, Matthew?” she asked. “Make this the last, glorious afternoon we spend together? Because of what people will say? Or will we continue? I am finding it difficult to be the person I want to be. Being the person I think I ought to be and the person other people expect me to be is very deeply ingrained in me.”
He drew a breath and released it slowly.
“I will be in the poplar alley on Thursday, as usual, practicing archery,” he said. “Weather permitting.”
And so they would delay their decision for another day.
He drew their clasped hands toward him across the table and kissed the back of hers before releasing it and getting to his feet.
She stood too and picked up the folded cloth. He gathered up their two empty glasses and the almost empty bottle of champagne, and they made their way back along the northern path to restore everything to the picnic basket, which he set inside the boathouse to be picked up later.
He carried his towels as they walked back to the house in near silence—and hand in hand.
Chapter Eleven
Clarissa had spoken of the various phases of life one could distinguish as one grew older. For her, there had been her childhood and girlhood as one phase and her marriage and motherhood as a second. Now she was into the third, which had started with the death of her husband.
It seemed to Matthew that his own life had been lived in three distinct parts too so far, and that the third was the longest and the most satisfying. He wished it could go on forever. But nothing did. Change was inevitable even when one scarcely noticed it happening. And actually one had very little power to prevent it.
For more than twenty years he had lived in much the same way—in the same rooms in the same village with the same friends and acquaintances, doing the same work. He earned his living with carpentry, and he spent his spare time carving and practicing archery and reading and socializing. He was known as an even-tempered man. The closest he had come to losing his temper had happened ten years ago during that disastrous ball at Ravenswoodon the night of the summer fete. He had been a witness to the ghastly scene Devlin Ware had created on the terrace outside the ballroom, when he had accused his father of having brought his mistress from London and of having behaved in a most unseemly fashion with her up in the temple folly while his wife and children and their friends and neighbors were dancing, oblivious, in the ballroom a mere few yards away.
All of Matthew’s suspicions had been confirmed, and Matthew had wanted to throttle the man right at that ball. He had wanted to throttle him when he heard that it was Devlin who had been forced to leave Ravenswood as a result of the fracas, not Stratton. He had wanted to throttle him when he heard stories of how Clarissa had withdrawn from society as much as she could and hidden away in that vast house, which had so often flung wide its doors to the community at large. He had wanted to throttle Stratton when he heard that most people had stopped going to the park on open days because they wanted to give the countess the privacy she seemed to crave—and they feared the terrible embarrassment of a chance meeting with her. He had wanted to throttle Stratton because all his sons and daughters had been negatively affected by his behavior, even the youngest two, who were still children at the time. They were Clarissa’s children too.
He had wanted to hurt Stratton because the man had been in possession of one of the most precious gifts the world had to offer—Clarissa herself—and had spurned her and sullied her and hurt her beyond imagining and possibly ruined all that remained of her life.
Matthew had not throttled the man. Doing so would have solved nothing, and if there was one thing he had learned in all the years after he left home, it was that acting violently was almost never justified and almost never brought lasting satisfaction. Hehad not hurt Stratton, but he had steadfastly avoided being in his company. If he went to the village inn for a pint of ale and discovered Stratton there before him, he simply closed the door of the taproom without stepping inside. If Stratton arrived after him—as had happened on the night of his sudden death—then Matthew simply left and went home.
He had hated the man with a passion. He had not mourned his death. Indeed, if he was strictly honest about it, he would have to say he had rejoiced.
In the main, however, the twenty or so years he had spent in Boscombe had been years of tranquil contentment. Yet now he could sense definite change coming, and he seemed helpless to do anything about it. Or perhaps he was unwilling to do anything about it. He went about his daily routine as usual and waited for his life to settle back to normal, though he suspected it was not going to happen.
For one thing, there was his renewed friendship with Clarissa. Thoughfriendshipwas not an adequate word, for it had become increasingly obvious to him that it was a romance that was developing between them, and a romance was far less convenient than mere friendship. Yet evenromancewas not quite a strong enough word. They wanted each other—he was in no doubt that she shared his hunger. And that would certainly not do. There was no way on God’s earth he was going to begin an affair with Clarissa Greenfield.
Yet the desire was very real and must somehow be dealt with. The most obvious way would be to put an end to the whole relationship, but that seemed not to be working. On either side.
Then there was the gossip, which bothered him more than he cared to admit and probably bothered her too.
