“I would love to come,” she said. “I will have a word with David to be sure that he does not mind my not going to Pembroke Castle with him, and I will ask Joshua if he minds watching David for me. But I do not believe either of themwillmind.”
“I will have a gig outside the door here at one o’clock, then,” he said, “if I do not hear otherwise from you.”
A gig. It would be the first time they had ventured anywhere they could not reach on foot. She wondered if a groom would drive them. Three of them would be very crowded on the seat of a gig.
But she looked forward very much to the outing even though going would mean giving up seeing the castle. She even found it difficult to get to sleep after she went to bed—like a child with a promised treat, she thought, rather disgusted with herself. Though it was not all excitement that kept her awake.
It would be theirlastafternoon together.
She hoped the fine weather would hold for one more day.
The fine weather did hold.
When the carriages left for Pembroke Castle in the middle of the morning, the sun was beaming down from a clear blue sky. When Mr. Butler arrived on foot later and a gig appeared on the terrace from the direction of the stables at almost the same moment—Anne had been watching from the window of her bedchamber—there was still not a cloud in the sky.
She tied the ribbons of her straw bonnet beneath her chin and half ran down the stairs without waiting to be summoned. She felt like a girl again.
Mr. Butler was standing in the middle of the hall, looking up at her, a smile on his face. It was strange, she thought, how quickly she had become accustomed to his looks—to the empty right sleeve, the purple, nerveless right side of his face, the eye patch.
“It looks as if we are going to have a lovely afternoon for a drive,” he said.
There was a groom standing at the horse’s head, Anne saw when they stepped outside, but he pulled his forelock respectfully to them both and stayed where he was as Mr. Butler handed her up to the seat on the left side of the vehicle and then took the seat beside her. The groom handed him the ribbons and stepped back, and they were on their way.
Mr. Butler was going to drive them himself, then? She ought to have expected it. She knew he was up to most challenges—including riding a horse.
“You will be quite safe,” he assured her as if he had read her thoughts. “I have had a great deal of practice at doing this. It is amazing what can be done one-handed. I have even driven ateamof horses on occasion, though admittedly that was somewhat hair-raising.”
His left hand, which she had noticed first for being long-fingered and artistic and then for being deft and skilled as it wielded a fork, was also very strong, as well as the arm that went with it, she realized as he turned the horse onto the driveway without any apparent effort and later, after they had stopped at his cottage for a servant to load a picnic basket onto the back of the gig, drove through the gates and across the bridge and made the sharp turn off the main road onto the narrower road through the village and beyond.
“Are you able to write with your left hand?” she asked him.
“I can produce something that looks like a cross between a spider’s web and the tracks of chicken feet,” he said. “But remarkably, it seems to be decipherable to other people. I am also now able to produce more than one three-letter word in a minute, though only if my tongue is tucked into my cheek at just the right angle.”
She laughed as he chuckled. It seemed strange now to remember that she had seen him at first as a tragic, broken figure of a man, and hehadadmitted to loneliness. But he was certainly not a man sunk into self-pity or defeat. He was able to laugh at all sorts of absurdities, and even at himself, the sign of a man with considerable inner strength.
“Can you not hold a paintbrush in your left hand, then?” she asked.
She regretted the words as soon as they were out of her mouth. Although they had been deliberate and she really wanted to know if he had tried—if he had taken on that challenge as he had others and had simply been defeated by it—she also realized that she had crossed an invisible line they had set between them early in their acquaintance. There was no outer sign that his mood had changed, but there was a tense quality to the short silence that ensued that had not been there before.
“No,” he said after a while. “My brushes are always in my right hand, Miss Jewell.”
Present tense. She did not know what he meant. But she would not ask. She had already intruded too far.
They negotiated another sharp bend beyond the village, and the road became so narrow that the hedgerows brushed against the wheels on both sides.
“What if we were to meet another vehicle?” she asked.
“One of us would have to back up,” he said. “It would be more productive than sitting and glowering at each other. One becomes an expert at backing up in this part of the world.”
Green crops waved in the breeze beyond the hedgerows to their right. Sheep grazed on the more stony land to their left. And always in the distance there were the ever-present cliffs and the sea. And there was the warm salt air to breathe.
“You must be very proud of your son,” he said. “He is a lovely child.”
She looked at him in surprise and gratitude.
“Ralf and Alleyne and Freyja were telling me a few days ago how eager to please and to learn he is,” he explained, “and how ready to play with all the younger children. There is rather a crowd of them, is there not?”
“He is always a good boy,” she said. “The teachers and girls at the school are all fond of him. At first, when he was younger, I thought the school a wonderful environment for him. But he cannot stay there indefinitely. I have become more than ever aware of that this month. I dread the thought of letting Joshua find a boys’ school for him, though. Oh, Mr. Butler, it is very much harder to be a parent than I could possibly have expected.”
