“I will pay for the roof and chimney and floor, and he will pay for everything else?” she said.
“Oh, but you must pay for the red door too, Clarissa,” he said.
“And the knocker?”
“It would seem only fair,” he said, and they both laughed over their own silliness.
It had always been thus between them. They had never allowed gloom to dominate their mood.
“Will you come to visit me?” she asked him. “Frequently?”
“Perhaps Stratton will set up armed guards at the driveway end of the path,” he said.
She smiled. “Will you come?” she asked again. “Will you be my friend, Matthew?”
“Always,” he said, and he reached out and took her hand in his.
The scent of the wildflowers and the sheep in the meadow behind them mingled with the fresh smells of the river flowing by below the bank. There was a sound to the water too, hardly heard unless one deliberately listened for it. From the blacksmith’s shop in the distance came the ringing of a hammer against the anvil.
He raised their clasped hands and kissed the back of hers and then her fingers one at a time. He turned her hand and placed a lingering kiss on her palm. She dipped her head to rest on his shoulder, and he placed his arm about her shoulders and kissed her on the lips. She kissed him back and smiled at him.
He settled his cheek against the top of her head, and they gazed silently outward, drinking in the beauty and peace of it all. He was more relaxed than he had been earlier. He had been taut and ready to snap in two while they were in the rose arbor and walking down the driveway. Or so it had seemed. She had desperately wanted to dissuade him from going home alone like that, just as he had left home earlier. He had had a bad archery practice, surely a rare thing for him. He had lost his equilibrium and had been unable torecover it during tea—which he had not eaten apart from one bite of a jam tart.
He sighed after several minutes.
“I thought I was at perfect peace,” he said, “even knowing that I had blocked out a whole segment of my past. I suppose it was never a good idea to do that. I ought perhaps to have confronted my demons as soon as I came home from abroad, but I did not consider it necessary or desirable. I did not want to look backward but only forward. It seemed to work. Until now.”
“What will you do?” she asked him.
“Confront those demons?” he said. It was more question than statement. “Confront my own self-pitying and ill-informed assumptions about my family? About my brother anyway.”
She did not say anything. She had learned long ago that often with Matthew it was best not to do so. All through his childhood and boyhood he had been told how to think and behave. With her he had always been able to think for himself, to find some sort of calm spot inside himself. She would not give her opinion or advice now, though it was not easy to keep quiet and apparently relaxed.
“I have written my brother a number of letters in the past couple of days,” he said. “All of them I have fed to the stove to heat my kettle. But I cannot face him. What the devil would I say? He probably would not want to see me anyway, not after thirty years or so of my apparent ingratitude. I must persevere with the letter writing until I have expressed myself just so.”
“Remember,” she said, “that his son and daughter-in-law would have gone home a couple of days ago with the news that you never knew why your grandmother changed her will.”
He sighed. “I am going to have to go there, am I not?” he said. “It is the very last thing I want to do.”
They sat in silence again.
There was a vehicle coming along the main road from a distance, Clarissa could see. Not the stagecoach, but a private carriage. She watched it idly for a few minutes until it made the turn toward Boscombe. It was not a grand carriage, but it was considerably larger than most that belonged in the neighborhood. Except Ravenswood, that was. And Ravenswood was almost certainly its destination.
Clarissa sat up. “I have the distinct feeling that history is about to repeat itself,” she said. “There is a carriage on its way here.”
He shaded his eyes with one hand and watched it approach the village. “Do you recognize it?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “It is not Devlin’s. I must go and meet it after it crosses the bridge.”
He got to his feet and offered his hand to help her up.
“You may stay here for a while if you wish,” she said. “Though I do not mean that the way it might sound. I am not ashamed of our friendship, Matthew. Good heavens, I am not. But you may wish to avoid any sort of confrontation or unpleasantness.”
“I am not concerned,” he said. “Besides, my things are piled at the end of the path, a sure sign that I am lurking not far off.”
“I am sorry,” she said. “Perhaps I am jumping to the wrong conclusion, but really I am starting to get very annoyed with my family.”
They arrived at the end of the path just as the carriage came rumbling over the bridge. It felt very like last week all over again, though it was a different sort of conveyance from Owen’s curricle.
