“Goodbye, Matthew,” Clarissa said, smiling at him.
He had only a moment in which to decide how he would address her. “Goodbye, Clarissa,” he said.
He wondered, as he crossed the bridge and made his way around the village green toward the smithy, if it really was goodbye.
Chapter Thirteen
For once in her life Clarissa was not entirely pleased to see one of her children. And this was exactly what she had just been talking about. How lovely it would be to have a cottage of her own, or even rooms above a smithy, with a front door she could shut and lock against all comers if she wanted. But how dreadful of her even to think of locking her own children out of her home.
Owen chatted cheerfully about his journey during the short drive. He hugged her again after they had stepped inside the house.
“I would kill for a cup of tea, Mama,” he said. “But I will run up to my room first and freshen up a bit before joining you in the drawing room. My valet should be here with all my baggage fairly soon, though it may be too late for me to change for dinner. I hope you will not mind dining informally tonight.”
“Of course I will not,” she told him. “I will refrain from wearing a tiara and diamonds.”
He laughed. “I decided that, after all, Ravenswood held more lure for me than London,” he said.
“Even before the end of the Season?” She raised her eyebrows.
“All those parties and such become remarkably tedious after a time,” he said, setting an arm about her shoulders. “I’ll kick about here for the summer if you can bear my company.”
He smiled at her, using all his considerable charm—her tall, lean, handsome young son with his finely chiseled features and slightly overlong near-blond hair.
“What happened to your work at the home for delinquent boys?” she asked him.
“Oh, God, that!” he said, raking the fingers of one hand through his hair. “Whoever had the asinine idea that giving such boys a clean bed and new clothes, nutritious food, and a decent education would render them grateful in return and remorseful for past sins and devoted to virtue and goodness forever after was an idiot. They are, of course, little horrors. But the only remedy anyone can dream up is to concoct a long list of rules and double and triple them until the boys’ old lives begin to look vastly more appealing than the new. There has to be another way.”
“Go and freshen up, Owen,” she told him. “I will have a pot of tea waiting for you in the drawing room.”
“Make it an extra-large pot,” he said before bounding off, taking the stairs two at a time just as though he were still fifteen instead of twenty-two.
Clarissa was waiting for him when he joined her ten minutes later, rubbing his hands together and still smiling cheerfully.
“I am glad to see you have had the fire lit,” he said. “What a chilly day it is out there. I do not know what happened to the sun. You are looking well, Mama. I enjoyed seeing a few familiar faces close to home. Mrs. Danver and Eluned Rhys were coming out of the shop and waved to me as I drove by on the other side of thegreen. Cam Holland waved from the doorway of the smithy. And then there was Mr. Taylor down by the bridge, on his way home from some archery practice. Walking back from the village, were you?”
He took his cup of tea from her hand and added a biscuit to his saucer before sitting down and smiling at her even more cheerfully. “It is good to be home,” he said. “I ought to have come with you and given you my company from the start. I am sorry I did not.”
She gazed steadily at him after seating herself beside the fireplace. She took a sip from her cup. “I suppose there was an emergency family conference,” she said. “A somewhat depleted one since Pippa and Lucas and Stephanie had already left town. I suppose you were the one chosen, as it was easier for you than for any of the others simply to hop in your curricle and give the horses their head once you had turned them in this direction.”
He made a valiant attempt to look blank.
“Who wrote from here?” she asked. “Was it one person or multiple persons?”
“Wrote?” He frowned, his cup suspended halfway to his lips.
“Let me see,” she said. “The writer would have been concerned. There were the beginnings of some talk, though nothing vicious, of course. And there was no suggestion of anything improper. The very idea! But perhaps Lord Stratton would wish to consider how it appeared for his mother to be at Ravenswood alone. And how it must feel to her. She must surely be missing her family and the company with which she is usually surrounded. Some possibly unsuitable people were taking advantage of her good nature and pressing their company upon her when perhaps there ought to be someone here to keep such persons mindful of the fact that she has relatives to protect both her and her reputation from such presumption. She was actually persuaded, for example, to walk in the parkwith Mr. Matthew Taylor and share a picnic with him at the lake. The village carpenter. Am I reasonably close, Owen?”
He had the grace to look a bit flustered. When he bit into his biscuit, a shower of crumbs landed on his coat and pantaloons. He tried to brush them off with the back of the hand that held the remains of the biscuit, but another shower followed the first.
“Idris happened to mention it in a letter to Gwyneth,” he said. “He is her brother, Mama, and Devlin used to be his best friend when they were boys. Lord Hardington wrote to Uncle George too, but only to advise him to ignore any foolish gossip he heard about you. In his opinion there is no one more respectable than you.”
“Hence the family conference,” Clarissa said.
“It was hardly a conference, Mama,” Owen said. He set aside his cup and saucer and laboriously brushed crumbs into his hand. “We all dined with Gwyneth and Dev, and the letters were mentioned. That was all. I wanted to come here. Are you not happy to see me?”
She sighed. “I am always happy to see you, Owen,” she said. “Even so, I wish you had not come. You will be bored to tears. Besides, I do not need a guardian or a chaperon. I tried to tell you all before I left that I wished to be alone for a while, that I looked forward to enjoying my own company and deciding what sort of future I want for myself.”
“Like marrying Lord Keilly?” he said. “You could do worse, but you could probably do better too. He is a bit of a dry old stick, is he not? Though I ought not to have said that aloud. Maybe you really do plan to marry him.”
