“I would be delighted still to do so,” Owen said, beaming at Winifred. “I am always happy to show off the family home to a new and appreciative audience.”
“Thank you,” Winifred said. “That would be lovely.”
She did, however, end up going to Cartref. She went directly after breakfast at the invitation of Stephanie to fetch Siân Rhys, young daughter of Idris Rhys and his wife, to play with her cousins at the Hall.
“What difference will one more child make to the minders, after all?” Stephanie said cheerfully as she drove the gig. “And I daresay I will be one of the minders.”
Winifred was touched by the warm welcome with which she was greeted at Cartref and enchanted by the lilting Welsh accents of Sir Ifor and his wife and Idris Rhys and his wife. She really had not known what to expect from the stay at Ravenswood. But it seemed they really were to be treated as honored guests, just as General Haviland and his family were.
Lady Rhys pressed coffee and cake upon her and Stephanie even though they had come directly from the breakfast table. And they urged Winifred to come back whenthat young scampOwen had not decided to lay claim to her time.
“Oh, we have stories we could tell you about that lad that would raise the hairs on the back of your neck, Miss Cunningham,” Sir Ifor said. “Stephanie will bear us out.”
“He is hardly a lad any longer, Dad,” Idris said. “He is close to thirty.”
“You are showing your age, Ifor,” his wife said. “He is a very responsible young man now, I have heard.”
Sir Ifor laughed.
But the little girl made sure they did not settle in for a longer visit. She jumped up and down in front of Lady Stephanie’s chair.
“Can we go now, Aunty Steph?” she begged.
Meanwhile, her baby brother was lying in his mother’s arms, his plump cheeks still rosy from a recent sleep, and chuckling helplessly as she pretended to eat the fist he held up to her mouth.
“Give Aunty Steph and Miss Cunningham a moment to sit and finish their cake, Siân,” Eluned Rhys said. “Go and kiss Dad and Grandma and Grandpa before you go.”
“Sir Ifor is the most glorious organist,” Stephanie told Winifred on the way back to Ravenswood while the little girl bounced with excess energy on the seat between them in the gig. “You will hear him at church on Sunday. And he conducts all the choirs—boys, girls, mixed, and adult. I swear he could make stones sing. He occasionally takes us to competitions in Wales, and almost always we win. He looks so disappointed if we do not that we promise faithfully to practice our heads off so it will not happen again.”
They both laughed. But really, Winifred thought, how lovely it would be to have such neighbors. And to have a friend like Stephanie, who seemed good-natured and genuinely pleased with her company.
…that young scamp. She smiled inwardly. Yes, she could imagine it.
—
Nicholas did not go to Cartref with the Havilands. He had been planning to accompany Gwyneth as she showed them about the house this morning. He had hoped he could steer Grace away from the group at some point for more private conversation.Perhaps he would take her out to the courtyard and sit in the rose garden with her. She would surely like that. It had occurred to him that she was perhaps uncertain of him, not sure that he really wanted to marry her. Perhaps her reserve, the fact that her smiles for him were no warmer than were those she bestowed upon everyone else, reflected her uncertainty. He wanted to change that.
She had preferred, however, to accompany her parents and Gwyneth to Cartref this morning. It was the polite thing to do, she had explained to him, rather pointedly, he had thought, in the hearing of Winifred Cunningham, who had made the opposite decision. But Miss Cunningham was more spontaneous than Grace, more likely to do what she wished to do rather than what others might think she ought to do.
Directly after waving the carriage on its way to Cartref, Mr. Cunningham, sketchbook in hand, set out for the cottage by the river for his first preportrait interview with Mama. He wanted to see her in the setting of her home, he had explained, where she was doubtless most comfortable. He was right about that. Mama spent most of her time there with her husband when he was not working at his carpentry business. They often wandered outside, hand in hand, among the flower beds they had planted with such care after the house was finished. Sometimes they sat in the small rose arbor on the east side of the cottage with books they rarely opened because there was too much distraction in the river and all the scenery, both natural and cultivated, around them. And in each other.
Nicholas hoped Cunningham would be able to capture his mother’s deep contentment with her life. It was more obvious to him, he supposed, than it would be to anyone who had not known her as she used to be. It had never occurred to Nicholas, or to any of his brothers and sisters, he would guess, that she might beunhappy while they were growing up. She had always been perfectly poised and elegant. She had always given freely of her time to friends and neighbors—and to her own family. She had organized dinners and musical picnics by the lake and parties and—most taxing of all—the annual summer fete.
After what Nicholas always thought of as the great catastrophe of his father’s infidelities being found out in the worst possible way at a village fete, his children had lost faith in a father they had admired and adored. Their mother had lost far more, however, though her marriage limped on for several years before their father’s sudden death of a heart seizure one night while he was in the taproom at the inn.
Now she was both happy and contented. There was no mistaking the changes her second marriage had wrought in her life. Nicholas hoped Cunningham would somehow see that, though he doubted she would tell him about the ordeal of her first marriage. For while she had shielded them from knowledge of their father’s infidelities during the spring months he spent in London without them, she must have known. She had chosen, as so many ladies in her situation did, to keep a dignified silence on the matter.
Nicholas found himself unexpectedly at loose ends this morning. Stephanie had undertaken the task of helping the nurse entertain all the children, including Siân Rhys. Perhaps he should help? However, when he peeped in at the nursery, he saw that Devlin was there too. He raised a hand in greeting and closed the door on the chaos of what seemed to be preparations to go outside. They would manage without him, though it was not going to be an easy task. The Cunninghams were a rambunctious lot and varied widely in age and temperament. His own nephew and nieces were high-spirited.
Owen was giving Winifred Cunningham a private tour of thehouse, something upon which Nicholas would not dream of intruding—as he would not have appreciated being intruded upon if Grace had remained here. However, he soon discovered that young Sarah and Andrew Cunningham had felt no such compunction to be tactful and allow romance to take its course—if it was indeed a romance between those two. Sarah no doubt felt she was too old to be lumped in with the children. Andrew was probably bewildered by his silent, unfamiliar surroundings and considered his eldest sister the safest harbor in the absence of both his parents.
If Owen was disappointed, he was too good-natured to show it.
“Come along, then,” he was saying cheerfully to his group as Nicholas came down to the hall, having decided to go for a ride. “The more the merrier.”
And if Miss Cunningham was disappointed, she did not show it either. She made no attempt to dismiss her siblings. Nevertheless, it would be a kindness to join them too, Nicholas decided. At least he could keep the younger two distracted while the prospective lovers had some chance to be just with each other.
Howdidone distract a boy who could neither hear nor speak, though? How did one entertain him? He did it largely by chance when he beckoned the boy over to the French windows on the west side of the ballroom, where they began the tour. The boy’s sisters had been exclaiming in awe over the size and splendor of the room, and now young Sarah was twirling in the center of the floor, her arms out to the sides while Winifred laughed and clapped her hands and Owen gazed indulgently at them both.
