“She is talking about building a cottage on the edge of the park,” Owen said. “A sort of dower house, for the love of God. She showed me the place this morning. As though Ravenswood were not large enough to house the five thousand in some comfort. And as though Dev and Gwyn and the rest of us did not love her. As though she wanted to get away from us and shut the door in our faces. It is dashed upsetting, that is what it is. What have we done to her to make her change like this? What have you done?”
“Perhaps,” Matthew said, wading into waters he would probably be better advised to avoid, “you ought to try looking at the situation from your mother’s point of view.”
“I suppose she has told you we neglect her,” Owen said. “And to our shame, we did allow her to come home alone a few weeks ago instead of insisting that she stay awhile longer and then go with Dev or Pippa or Uncle George to spend the summer. Or instead of me insisting that I come home with her. I feel hellishly guilty, I do not mind admitting, about being so selfish and staying in London only because I thought I would be bored silly here. I put my own pleasure before my mother. Whom I adore, I would have you know.”
His voice was wobbling a bit. He was not far from tears, Matthew guessed as he poured him another cup of tea.
“Your mother has told me just the opposite of what you assume,” Matthew said. “She has told me all her children and her brother and her friend, his wife, shower love upon her and include her in all their activities and make sure she is never alone or lonely. Has it occurred to you—though apparently she has tried to explain to you herself—that she craves some time alone in which to assess her life now that you are all grown up? Has it occurred to you that she is a person as well as your mother? Who loves you all very dearly, I might add.”
He wondered if he had gone too far. He had not planned to say anything at all. He guessed that most of what Owen had said so far was unplanned too.
“I beg your pardon,” Matthew said. “All this is none of my business.”
“I was sent,” Owen said, “or rather, I came to warn you off from taking advantage of Mama’s being alone here, without any of us to protect her. I suppose…it is hard to think of one’s own mother as a person. As someone who had a life long before one was born. And who still has a life after one has grown up.”
Matthew held his peace and Owen got to his feet.
“Now I feel like an idiot,” he said. “I ought to have planted you a facer as soon as I came inside. I ought to have let Dev come. Or Uncle George. Sometimes I wish Nick was already back in England. It seems as though he has been gone forever with his regiment. It has been ten years. Only ten years, you may think. But ten years to me is almost half my life. I have no backbone. That is my problem. And I like you, Mr. Taylor. You have always been my idol as an archer. Where did you learn that, by the way?”
“You have backbone.” Matthew set a hand on his shoulder and squeezed. “More important, you also have a heart. I cannot promise that my renewed friendship with your mother will end, Owen. That will be up to her, and up to me too. But I will never do anything to dishonor her. That is a promise I can safely make.”
He dared not think how close he had come to doing just that out at the lake a few days ago. It would not happen again.
“That will have to be good enough for everyone,” Owen said rather bitterly as he made his way to the door. “Or, if they do not like it, they will have to come and confront you themselves. Thank you for the tea. Mama would consider it far too strong, but I like it this way.”
And he opened the door, let himself out, and closed it behind him.
Matthew found himself thinking, of all things, about the tea he had taken for them to drink up on the hilltop. After sitting for several hours in the flask, it had been twice as strong as what he had just drunk with Owen. Yet she had said it was the best picnic she had ever had. How smoothly she lied.
He found himself chuckling when surely he ought to be feeling anything but amusement.
Chapter Fourteen
Monday morning brought a servant from Colonel Wexford’s with a written invitation for Matthew. Miss Prudence Wexford requested the pleasure of his attendance at a reception and soiree to be held at the home of her brother two evenings hence.
A reception. And a soiree.
They were grand names to give a social gathering in the country. But Matthew could almost picture Miss Wexford’s dilemma as she planned it. If she had decided upon a dinner, her guest list would have to be relatively small despite the impressive size of her new table. And the table itself would have to be covered, and the guests would have to practically crawl under the cloth in order to admire the artwork beneath. They would not even see the carved frieze around the edge of the tabletop or the mosaic on the surface of it. If, on the other hand, the occasion was a reception, then the table could be left bare of an enveloping tablecloth, with just small mats under the various food dishes from which the guests would be invited to help themselves.
The table would be on view in all its splendor, except perhaps the full effect of the mosaic, while the guests satisfied their appetites and remained on their feet and Miss Wexford gave a guided tour of the table’s architectural features.
The wordsoireewould have been added to suggest that the gathering would continue into the evening as a more general party.
And Matthew Taylor was to be one of the guests. Perhaps, in a sense, the guest of honor. He smiled in some amusement at the thought. He almost always accepted specific invitations, no matter who the sender. He was comfortable with the company of all social classes despite his preference for solitude. He would have accepted this particular one without a qualm despite a certain embarrassment at being the maker of the table that had occasioned it. He would have looked forward with a mild sort of pleasure to seeing and conversing with his neighbors. He liked the people among whom he lived, after all.
But he would have given a great deal, he thought as he propped the invitation on top of the bookcase in his living room, to find himself with a plausible excuse for not accepting it.
Clarissa would almost certainly be there.
He, she, they were going to be the focus of attention, more even than the table. There was no doubt in his mind about that. Word had spread. It had even, quite predictably, reached her family in London. Young Owen Ware had been sent home as their ambassador to discover what was going on and to confront the village carpenter, who had dared hold his mother’s hand during a walk in the park and ride off to the lake with her in a barouche to enjoy a picnic with her.
Owen’s arrival would not have gone unnoticed. Nor would his visit to the rooms above the smithy the following day. And now thethree of them would, almost without a doubt, be on public display at Miss Wexford’s reception and soiree. It was the stuff of grand drama.
Or farce.
Matthew did not like any of it. He did not like it for himself, and he certainly did not like it for Clarissa. Not a whisper of poor taste or impropriety had ever been associated with her name.
It was all very well for them to have decided last Thursday when they were together, just before Owen drove up in his curricle, that they would defy the gossip and exercise their freedom to choose the sort of life they would live and the friends they would have. It was another thing to feel themselves getting more and more embroiled in what he did not doubt was the conversational topic of the moment in the neighborhood.
