With slow steps, Jane followed Mr. Burry into the breakfast parlor. She was disappointed to see all of her favorite muffins gone from the breakfast board. With a resigned sigh, she filled her plate and poured herself a cup of coffee. She shook herself out of her reverie and sat in a chair near the Willoughbys, who were just finishing. Though she refused to listen to others' speculation, she decided she would attempt to learn for herself what so disquieted Mr. Burry and Sir Helmsdon. It should make for an amusing game.
She took a sip of tepid coffee and grimaced.
“I’m sorry I cannot offer you any entertainment today,” she told the Willoughbys.
“Quite all right, quite all right Miss—Grantley,” said Lord Willoughby.
The slight hesitation before her last name caught Jane’s attention, as it must have Lady Willoughby, for her brow rose and she threw her husband a sidelong glance.
“Lady Willoughby and I will take a carriage ride today. See a bit of the countryside. Very different from our own, you know,” he continued, with a barking laugh.
“Well, actually, I don’t know,” she answered apologetically. "I’ve never been in that part of the country. What is it like?”
“What’s it like? Oh, hilly and empty. Lots of windswept moors, gray rock, that sort of thing.” He turned to his wife. "Are you quite finished, my dear? Then I expect we’d best be off. We’lltalk more this evening, Miss Grantley, eh, what? Come, dear,” he said, pushing back his chair and rising quickly. As he stepped back against the table to allow his wife to pass first, his arm swung backward. It caught the lip of Jane’s cup.
Jane looked down at her plate in time to see the coffee stream into it.
“Oh, I say, I am sorry, Miss Grantley!”
“That’s quite all right, Lord Willoughby. Do not concern yourself. I wasn’t hungry, anyway,” she said with a rueful sigh.
CHAPTER 12
The first rays of afternoon sunlight that struck the tall west-facing Gothic parlor window cut a knife-edged swath across the brilliantly-colored carpet. Motes glittered and danced in the sun like a sprinkling of fairy dust in the air. There was a lazy stillness to the house, to the room. Indeed, for Jane, such calm was a long-forgotten treat, redolent with memories.
Sir Helmsdon was gone, the Willoughbys off jaunting, Mr. Burry napping, Millicent still keeping to her room, and Lady Serena somewhere, it didn’t matter, anywhere but in Jane’s vicinity. The children had coaxed Cook into preparing another picnic. Nurse Twinkleham was resting easily while Elsbeth worked in the stillroom. The marquis and the earl were closeted in the earl’s room, playing cards and blowing a cloud.
A sense of peace settled into Jane, smoothing the faint traces of tension in her brow, at the corners of her lips, in the set of her shoulders. She sat on one of the long settees, her shoes off, her feet drawn up under her, an open book lying forgotten under her hand. She savored the stillness for its implicit, ephemeral nature. It gave time and space for her thoughts to settle and expand. Since she’d heard Lady Serena and Millicent were tovisit, her mind had been buzzing and darting about, frantically and to no purpose, a bee seeking nectar from all the wrong flowers.
For almost three years they had been manipulating her life. Three years! Not directly through explicit actions, but by the continuing canker on her soul—the canker formed by her naiveté and their deceit.
She leaned her head back against the upholstery, willing her body to relax. She let her thoughts melt and flow.
The manipulation of her life had begun with David Hedgeworth.
Or had it? Had it actually begun then, or with the death of her mother? Yes, the history of their interference went back further.
She remembered herself as a fragile child, burdened with myriad uncertainties, which Lady Serena and dear Cousin Millicent fed. Then, as she grew older and began displaying a sense of her own self, there were the carefully contrived insults and snubs followed disorientingly by warm solicitation and advice. Lady Serena often told Jane that she could not be blamed for her defects. Serena’s actions and words were all so insidious—wispy, like smoke in the wind. There was not a specific action or set of words that could be pointed to and declaimed. That was why the history of their influence in her life eluded Jane so. That, and the lack of motive. Why?
Somehow, by clinging tenaciously to her mother’s memory and hearing again her words, even if only in her mind, she'd matured. If not unscathed, then honed. She was the quintessential homely child turned beautiful on maturity. More importantly, she grew strong, though not necessarily any wiser, she ruefully conceded.
Then there was Mr. David Hedgeworth. She remembered she met him at eccentric Lady Oakley’s annual ball. It was early in the season. He was new in town, returning to England after twoyears spent between the West Indies sugar plantation he stood to inherit and traveling about the Americas. The War of 1812 with the United States had brought him back to England.
He was a tall, slender young man of some five-and-twenty years. An easy smile and a chivalrous nature made him popular throughout London. It was odd, but all she could clearly remember was his distinctive lopsided smile. She supposed, when she thought of it long and hard, that his hair and eyes had been brown—light brown. But she could not conjure a face to put with that hair, or to his name. It made her feel oddly guilty. She shook her head bemusedly.
That season, Jane was often in his company. Their interests had ostensibly been the same. They visited London like tourists, she with a guidebook in hand, dutifully reading some historical or architectural note while her companion trailed after them, muttering of her blistering feet. Theirs was a comfortable relationship, and she, with the ice of aloneness still in her soul, craved—nay, loved!—comfort. Dreams of a lifetime of comfort began drifting, like gossamer threads in the wind. It was mesmerizing. She began mental plans, gentle dreams, for their future.
Then came the Bridlingtons’ house party.
It was held at the end of the season, and she stopped there on her way home to Speerford Hall. Mr. Hedgeworth was to accompany her. It was understood between them that he would speak to her father before making his declaration to her. That was why he was coming to Speerford, to catch Sir Grantley while he remained in England, and secure his consent before he approached Jane. Mr. Hedgeworth was a stickler for conventions, for adhering to society’s rules. Once, when she’d made some mention of that fact, he answered solemnly that he liked order in his life. After experiencing the disorder of the Americas, he craved England’s ordered life.
He was not a man society gossiped about. There was nothing in his nature that would generate gossip. He was a quiet, comfortable man. Excesses of emotion were alien to his nature. Jane smiled in remembrance. He certainly was not one to drive her to the anger the Earl of Royce could engender. Nor, that she recalled, had she felt any of the strangely exciting prickly tingles she experienced in the earl’s company.
Perhaps Millicent had not been so fortunate after all.
The thought drifted, unbidden into Jane’s mind. Annoyed, she angrily shunted it aside. It was beneath her! Mr. Hedgeworth was everything she had desired in a man.
Once desired, amended that gentle voice.
