“I was just an infant at the time,” Philip said. “I have no memory of any of those events. But apparently Papa suffered terribly after you left. He felt he ought to have done more, made more of an effort to understand you and be your brother. According to Mama, he once said that you had always had three parents while you were growing up, and that was one too many. What you had lacked, he said, was a brother. That was what he ought always to have insisted upon being. I think it very possible that he has felt guilty ever since. I think maybe he has always waited for you to come home.”
“Butwhatdid he suggest?” Matthew asked, staring intently at his nephew. “Why was it no shock to him to discover that our grandmother had changed her will?”
It was Philip’s turn to stare blankly at him. “Well, because it was Papa who asked her to do it,” he said. “Begged her, actually, since I believe she was a bit annoyed at your going away without a word when she had given you and your wife a home after youmarried. Papa had always felt a bit bad that he would inherit Great-Grandmama’s property as well as everything of ours while you would have nothing. After you left, he did something about it. He talked Great-Grandmama into changing her will and leaving everything to you.”
“Did you not know, Uncle Matthew?” Emily asked as Matthew scraped his chair over the bare floor with the backs of his knees and got to his feet.
“I did not,” he said. “No, I did not.”
He closed his eyes briefly and let this new, all-consuming knowledge seep into his being.
“I did not know,” he said again as Emily came around the table and hugged him again.
Chapter Fifteen
When Clarissa and Owen arrived at Colonel Wexford’s the following evening, the house was already humming with the sounds of conversation and laughter. They were welcomed by the colonel and Ariel, his daughter, and by a flushed and clearly excited Prudence.
“Are we last to arrive?” Clarissa asked after smiling at Ariel, kissing her friend on the cheek, and shaking hands with the colonel. “I hope we have not kept you waiting.”
“You have not, Lady Stratton,” Colonel Wexford assured her. “Everyone else was early. Owen, my boy. Good to see you. Ariel was pleased to hear you had come home to keep your mama company.”
“I was pleased to know there would be someone close to my age here tonight,” Ariel said. “But there is no reason to look archly at me in that way, Aunt Prudence. Owen and I are old friends, and that is all we are or will ever be—by mutual consent. Come into the dining room, Owen. That is where everyone else is, including your cousin Clarence.”
She linked an arm through his and bore him off.
“Ariel says the most startling things—in the presence of a young gentleman,” Miss Wexford said. “Young ladies are not what they were in my day, Lady Stratton. I do not know what our world is coming to. But there—she is a dear girl despite everything. Come into the dining room.”
The colonel offered his arm.
It was the first evening entertainment Clarissa had attended since coming home from London. There, all was glamour and glitter and the largest crowd that could be squeezed into the space, as every hostess tried to outdo every other. Here, all the guests had gathered in the dining room, and there was room for all of them even though the new table more than half filled the space. They were all neighbors and friends, and Clarissa felt instantly comfortable despite the slight apprehension she had felt all day about almost surely meeting Matthew here and knowing that everyone would be watching curiously to see how they would behave toward each other.
He was here already, she saw instantly, in a group with the Coxes and the Reverend Danver, a glass in his hand, a look of polite amiability on his face. He had not seen her arrive, or, if he had, he had looked away before she looked at him. She hoped they would not be doing that throughout the evening. Self-consciousness was not something from which she suffered often or willingly.
And self-conscious with Matthew? It seemed like a contradiction in terms.
Almost everyone was buzzing with enthusiasm and exclaiming over the table, which was by way of being the guest of honor. The thought amused Clarissa as she slipped her hand free of the colonel’s arm.
“It is quite…imposing,” she said to Miss Wexford. “I hope you are as pleased with it as you hoped to be.”
“Oh, more so,” Miss Wexford said. “How fortunate we are, Lady Stratton, to have Mr. Taylor living in our midst. Such talent! He could work in London and still be noticed and acclaimed. Do come and have a closer look.”
Prudence had wanted a table that was very special. But the trouble with tables, Clarissa thought as she looked closely at this one, was that they had to be flat on top with four legs, one at each corner, with perhaps another pair in the middle if the table was long. There would appear to be not much a carpenter could do to make the piece unique and memorable. Matthew had done both, though Clarissa could see at a glance why he considered the table a bit of a monstrosity.
There were actually eighteen legs in clusters of three, all of them designed to look like Grecian columns, but each of the three a different style from the other two—Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian, if she remembered her ancient Greek history correctly. They were intended, she realized, to make the table look like a Grecian temple—with a flat roof. Right at the center underneath, as though to hold up the table, was a circle of slender ladies in flowing Grecian robes with laurel wreaths upon their heads, each bearing a delicate urn upon her shoulder. The three graces? No, there were too many of them. The nine muses? There were not enough. The Delphic oracles? But they were not plural, were they? There was one at a time—the Delphic oracle. The oracle with her handmaids, then? But did they have to be any group in particular?
The tabletop was undeniably beautiful, with its overlapping diamond mosaics created out of inlaid wood. Were not such mosaics associated more with ancient Rome than with Greece, though?Perhaps not. A narrow frieze of columns to match the table legs had been carved in exquisite detail all about the edge of the tabletop.
The whole thing, Clarissa thought, was a bit of a confused mess, the product of Prudence’s imagination, based very loosely upon what she had read of ancient history. Yet it had an undeniable sort of charm. Her friend was clearly ecstatic over it, and that was what mattered. Fortunately most, if not all, of their neighbors appeared to agree with her. Clarissa moved back so others could see more clearly. She glanced across the room and locked eyes with Matthew for a few moments. She allowed her amusement to show and raised in a silent toast the glass Colonel Wexford had placed in her hand.
His eyes did not twinkle back at her as she had expected. He did not raise his glass, which looked as full as it had when she entered the room. He had an expression on his face that she could not interpret, though it was vaguely familiar. Memory came flooding in as he turned his head to speak with Marian Ware, who had just touched his arm. He looked as he often had when he came as a boy to seek her out. He seemed troubled, though there was no outer sign that would betray him to anyone else. He was half smiling now at Marian and at Thomas Rutledge, Lord Hardington’s eldest son, and Thomas’s wife. He looked perfectly composed.
Something told Clarissa he was not.
Was it the strain of being the focus of attention as the crafter of the table? But she might have expected the occasion to amuse him more than it would embarrass him. Was it being in a room with her, then, surrounded by a large number of their neighbors, most of whom would be watching them surreptitiously but closely enough not to miss a thing?
Or was it something else?
The table was set with plates and dishes of sumptuous-looking dainties, both savory and sweet. Hot savories filled the warming dishes on a sideboard. Clarissa filled the plate Ariel Wexford placed in her hand, set her empty glass on a side table with others, and began to circulate in the room, intent upon having a word with everyone. It was something that came as second nature to her. She did not detect any great difference from usual in the way she was treated.
