He went into the village shop after work the day after the picnic at the lake and found there were two women ahead of him at the counter, enjoying a cozy gossip with the Misses Miller, to whom the shop belonged. It was not an unusual occurrence. Normally Matthew would cheerfully have awaited his turn and even joined in the conversation. He was well known to everyone and accepted as one of their own. But on this occasion a strange hush fell over the shop as soon as he entered it, and the hush was succeeded by a self-conscious rush to comment upon the weather. The customers soon took their baskets of goods and left, favoring him with self-conscious nods as they edged past him, and he was left to the tender mercies of the Miller sisters.
“You had a lovely day for your picnic with Lady Stratton yesterday, Mr. Taylor,” Miss Jane, the younger of the two, said.
“The dowager Lady Stratton, Jane,” Miss Miller reminded her.
“Yes, of course.” Miss Jane smiled as Matthew handed her his shopping list. “You had a lovely day anyway. It is lovely, the lake at Ravenswood. Did you take out one of the boats?”
“We did,” Matthew said.
“Lovely,” she said, setting the items from his list one by one onto the counter. She seemed to have become stuck on the one word as a descriptor.
“The late Mr. and Mrs. Taylor lived right next to the Greenfields,” Miss Miller said. “The dowager countess’s mama and papa, that is,” she added, lest Matthew be unaware of the fact.
“Yes,” Matthew said. “We were neighbors. And friends. The dowager countess and I are less than a year apart in age.”
“Ah,” Miss Jane said. “That would explain it, then. We sometimes forget that Mr. and Mrs. Taylor—such a lovely couple—were your mama and papa, Mr. Taylor.”
Everything that was on his list stood before him on the counter.
“I think that is all for this week,” he said. “How much do I owe you?”
And Miss Jane had no choice but to add the prices to his list and work out the total with the stub of a pencil that had never seemed longer than it was now and never seemed to get shorter either. Perhaps the sisters kept an array of identical stubs under the counter.
He paid the bill, bid them a good afternoon—a wish they returned with bright cheerfulness—and made his way home, half smiling and half resigned to the fact that if all the staff at Ravenswood knew, and the Misses Miller at the shop, the very center of village life, knew, then there could be no one for at least a five-mile radius around the village and Ravenswood itself who did not know that he had gone picnicking yesterday at the lake and had walked hand in hand with the dowager countess through the park a few days before that and had taken coffee with her one morning on the terrace outside the ballroom.
Change was coming, unless both he and Clarissa put a firm end to whatever was developing between them right now and provided the gossips with no further fuel to feed their curiosity and mild sense of outrage. At least, at the moment it seemed to be mild.
His relationship with Clarissa and the reaction to it was not the only change that was pending in his life, however. There was also the letter that had been awaiting him in his rooms—Cam must have brought it up and pushed it under the door—when he returned from the picnic.
It was a brief note from his nephew, Reginald’s elder son, asking if he might call upon his uncle one day. He had informed his father that he was making the request, he had explained in the letter, butthough his father had warned him that his uncle might refuse to have anything to do with him, he had nevertheless not tried to forbid his son from making the attempt. The nephew had signed the letter Philip Taylor, Matthew’s obedient servant.
He had been just a toddler when Matthew left home. His brother had been little more than a baby. Their sister had not yet been born.
So here was some definite change coming, Matthew thought. Not inevitably, of course, for he could refuse the request or even simply ignore it.
But he sensed change was happening.
First Clarissa had mentioned that his brother and nephew and their wives had attended Mrs. Greenfield’s birthday party. It had been the first mention of his family anyone had made since he could not remember when. After his return from his travels, he had made no attempt to see any of them, and none of them had made any attempt to see him.
There had been a total estrangement ever since. No one had begun it—unless he had, years before, when he left home without a word to anyone except his grandmother’s solicitor, who had agreed for a reasonable fee to keep him informed of any essential information he needed to know, provided Matthew always made the solicitor aware of how and where he might be reached, of course.
No one had formalized the estrangement after his return. By what had seemed mutual consent, he had ignored their existence and they had ignored his. He had never gone even as close as his grandmother’s house, now his, since his return. He had found out about the deaths of his grandmother and his parents from the solicitor. He had not reacted to any of those events. Not outwardlyanyway. He had wanted things to remain as they were. Life was more peaceful that way.
But he had always known that it was the one area of his past life—a rather large area, actually—with which he had never dealt. Ignoring its very existence would perhaps not serve him until the end of his life. He pondered his response to his nephew’s letter, but there was really no doubt in his mind how he would respond. He had no quarrel with the boy—no, not a boy. Philip was a man in his thirties now. Matthew had no open quarrel with his brother either. Just an estrangement that neither of them had confronted in the more than twenty years since Matthew had come to live in Boscombe.
He invited his nephew to call upon him the following Tuesday at four o’clock in the afternoon, if that was convenient to him.
And then there was tomorrow, his regular day for practicing archery in the poplar alley at Ravenswood. Weather permitting, of course. He had told Clarissa he would be there. He had not suggested that she come too, and she had not said she would—or would not. They had come to no explicit decision on what to do about their friendship despite the fact that they had both begun the picnic intending that it should be the last of such meetings. They had walked back to the house from the lake hand in hand and in near silence.
He did not know if she would come tomorrow. He did not know what it would mean if she did not, though he would assume it was the end of an experiment that had just not worked. Except that it had worked all too well.
He expected to come very close to finishing Miss Wexford’s dining table tomorrow. He would go to the poplar alley after that. If Clarissa did not come, he would need to practice longer eventhan usual. Life was changing, but he must not disintegrate with the changes.
—
Clarissa was late arriving at the poplar alley the following afternoon. Deliberately so, which was unusual for her. But she did not want to delay or interrupt his archery practice if she could possibly avoid doing so. Besides, it was a cloudy, chilly day and she wondered if he would be there at all. It would not hurt to have a look, however. One ought to take some outdoor exercise each day, after all, though it was easy to make excuses when the weather was not to one’s liking.
She dreaded seeing him again and dreaded not seeing him.
