So much, she thought, for her great-aunt’s pronouncement that she had looked striking. She had struck this man as plain and sober enough of demeaner to be a clergyman’s bride—a clergyman she had never met before today.
“I thank you for your kind offer, Reverend Bowles,” she said. “But I really must decline.”
She was about to add some sort of explanation but decided against it. She did not owe him any. Had he really believed her to be so desperate that she would accept the offer of a total stranger? She supposed he must have convinced Papa that his offer was at least a respectable one.
“I have your father’s nod of approval,” he said, sounding surprised.
She doubted it.Papa, she guessed, would have given only his permission for the Reverend Bowles to address his daughter.
“My father allows me the freedom to think and make decisions for myself,” she said. “He would not stand in the way of any reasonable offer of marriage I chose to accept, just as he would not urge me to accept an offer that was ab—that was not to my liking.” She hadbeen about to sayabhorrent, but that would be cruel. “I am not looking for any offer of marriage.”
“Yet what else can a young lady expect of life?” he asked her. “I assure you I am well able to support you, Miss Cunningham.”
“I find my life quite fulfilling as it is,” she said. “Good day to you, sir. A servant will show you out.”
She turned and left the room without further ado. Well, at least, she thought as she climbed the stairs back to the drawing room, she would not have to go through life without ever receiving a single marriage offer. Success indeed. Something of which to boast in her spinsterish old age. She wished she had not already sent her letter on its way to Bath. She would have to write another tomorrow entitledThe Sequel.
She shook her head. What an extraordinary thing to happen. Had he really expected…?
Clearly he had.
—
Winifred never did find time either to read or to play with the children in the nursery. No sooner had she finished giving her account of what had happened in the library to Papa and Aunt Anna and Uncle Avery and Great-Aunt Louise than a steady stream of visitors began to be shown into the drawing room, most of them male. They came to pay their respects to the duchess and the dowager duchess and to compliment Miss Cunningham on her success the evening before. Several of them brought invitations from their mothers or sisters to attend other events of the Season—an evening at the theater, a garden party, a literary soiree, another ball.
She was launched upon society, Winifred thought as AdrianSawyer, who had escorted Great-Aunt Matilda here, grinned and winked at her from across the room. She had known him since she was a girl and thought of him as a cousin, which in a sense he was.
She did not want to be involved in the whole dizzying round of social entertainments with which thetonamused itself during the spring months in London. It was not why she had come here. Papa was ready to start painting Lady Jewell’s portrait, and she would be needed to greet people who came to the small gallery he always rented to display some of his uncommissioned portraits while he was here, though the opportunity to work on those had lessened as his fame grew. Winifred was also needed to take new commissions for him, or at least to write down the names of those who wished to secure Papa’s services. He always decided for himself which to accept.
It was at the gallery that she had met Owen Ware when he had come there with Bertrand one morning and she had explained to him how her father worked.
“Fascinating,” he had said, and he had seemed to mean it. He had stayed when Bertrand was forced to leave to keep a prior appointment, and he had asked question after question and listened attentively to her answers. “I can see that Mr. Cunningham does not flatter his subjects. Yet he does.” He had frowned at the contradictory nature of his own words as he gazed at the portrait of Mrs. Brown, widowed proprietor of a popular bakery in Bath, whose nose was broad and flat and redder than the rest of her face, and whose mouth was unnaturally small. Her cheeks, round as apples, had begun to droop from advancing age. No one could call her lovely, yet there was a look of kindness in her eyes that Papa had captured—Winifred never understood how hedidthat—andcomfort in her overall expression that gave her individuality and a sort of beauty.
“Papa painted it from memory after visiting the bakery numerous times when he lived in Bath as a young man,” she had explained. “But Mrs. Brown laughed when he showed the picture to her and declined to have it hanging in either the bakery or the rooms above it, where she lived. She told him he was going to have to make his subjects look stunningly beautiful and at least ten years younger than their real age if he hoped to make a successful career as a portrait painter. She did not understand his art at all. I am delighted that you do.”
They had sat together on a bench facing the paintings and talked and talked until finally they were interrupted by the arrival of a couple of potential customers and Winifred had got to her feet to answer their questions.
They had talked, she and Owen, about every subject upon earth, it seemed, without ever having to force the conversation. She assured him she had no talent as an artist—or as anything else in fact. She explained to him about her family and what they did and how she helped and felt she made herself useful. She told him about Robbie, the brother who had had terrible behavior problems when he joined their family and the patience with which Mama and Papa had dealt with him, trying to find a way past his fierce hostility and temper tantrums to the frightened child they were sure lurked within. She told them about their eventual discovery that a dog helped enormously—the first of their menagerie of dogs and cats. She told him about Andrew and the frustration of not being able to communicate with him. She told him of the sign language she had devised to help them speak to him and he to them. She told him ofher efforts to teach the signs, limited though they were, to her family.
Owen had been enormously interested.
“It is what I have been trying to do with my life ever since finishing my university studies and balking at the prospect of taking holy orders and so tying myself to the tedious and often frivolous demands of a country parish,” he said. “All I really want to do is help people with troubled or difficult lives, especiallyyoungpeople, to find a solution so they may live independent, happy, and productive lives. Without in any way condescending to them, that is, or forcing on them my ideas of what those solutions must be. It is not easy, as I have discovered several times in the past seven or eight years. I have such a strong tendency, because I have always lived in wealth and comfort, I suppose, to assume I know the solution to problems of young people who have never known any such things. It is not easy sometimes to be humble, not to feelsuperiorjust because one wears decent clothes and speaks correct English and has never been either hungry or homeless.”
They had talked on and on until the interruption of the new arrivals and again when he had called a few more times at the gallery alone, deliberately seeking out her company. They had grown comfortable with each other. Winifred had tried to persuade herself that it was a mere friendship they shared, but she had begun to dream of a closer connection. She had never been in love and never expected to be. Yet she had known for a few years that she could not marry without at least some deep mutual affection being involved. The security of being a married lady with a home and perhaps children of her own would not be enough.
Yet she did yearn to be married.
Perhaps Owen…
He had come calling this afternoon with Bertrand, who brought the news that his twin sister had been delivered of a son a few weeks earlier than expected. Owen took a chair close to Winifred’s while her great-aunts exclaimed with delight and tried to soothe Bertrand’s anxieties as he told them he would be leaving the following day to see his new nephew. Though he did turn to Owen to assure him that he still intended to attend the summer fete at Ravenswood, Owen’s home, to which he had been invited.
“I am hoping,” Owen said to Winifred, “that you will take advantage of the fine weather we are having today by driving in Hyde Park with me after all your visitors have left. I will return at five with my curricle if you will. You have not lived, you know, if you have never made an appearance there at the fashionable hour. Everyone who is anyone drives or rides or walks there daily to see and be seen.” His eyes twinkled at her.
“Oh dear,” she said. “I distrust that wordfashionable. I doubt I have anything to wear that will be remotely suitable.”
She had heard of the fashionable hour, when all the latest fashions, both male and female, were on full display and gentlemen ogled the ladies from horseback while the ladies flirted back from their open carriages by twirling their parasols and pretending not to notice or care.
Oh, but she absolutelymustexperience it for herself at least once in her life.
