Another letter. Another letter from London.
From him.
Was it for Bess? Did he mention Bess in the letter? Was there news of how he was—Lord, Bess didn’t even know what she hoped to hear.
Did she want to know that he was unhappy? Pining away in his big, empty Mayfair mansion without her? Or did she perhaps hope to hear that he’d moved on completely? Perhaps she would be satisfied by the news of his engagement to the lovely Miss Devensham or another well-bred heiress of her ilk.
Bess had to set down the last plate carefully and put her hands flat on the table to steady herself as she breathed through the pain.
“Flora,” she said, interrupting the flow of her cousin’s chatter. “Have you sent up Henrietta’s supper yet?”
“Not yet! It’s ready for her, though, as soon as she wants it. I think she’s in the back garden, sketching.”
“The light is about to go,” Bess observed, wiping her hands dry on the plain rust-colored linen of her skirts. “I’ll take her supper up to her.”
“Thanks,” Flora smiled, flushed and pretty as she bustled about the kitchen. “I’ve a deal of work to do and that will save me a trip up those stairs!”
Bess arranged the tray for Henrietta, as she had so many times before, and carried it up the back stairs and out into the tiny garden behind the inn.
It was late summer now, and the light clung to the sky as long as it could before giving way to dusk. Even twilight, at this time of year, glowed with a lazy warmth that seemed to melt into night like a chunk of ice dropped on the hot cobblestone path.
Amid the drowsing bees bumbling amongst the heavy-headed roses, Henrietta sat at a small, round table with her journal and a pack of charcoal pencils. She wore an enormous straw bonnet to shield her from the setting sun; it was plumed with a spray of ostrich feathers at least eighteen inches high and dyed an unlikely shade of fuchsia. Grosgrain ribbon of the same violent pink decorated the wide brim and trailed becomingly down the sides to tie in a large, lopsided bow that rested on Henrietta’s right shoulder.
Careful not to startle her, Bess set the tray down on the table and waited for Henrietta to blink over at her. She dropped her pencil, hand flexing as though it was cramped. “Dear Bess! Have you brought me sustenance? Bless you, sweet girl. Ooh, fish pie, yummy yummy.”
Henrietta tucked in, exclaiming over Flora’s pastry crust, which Bess tried not to take personally. To distract herself and let the poor woman eat, Bess gestured at the sketchbook that lay discarded upon the table.
“May I?”
“Of course! They’re only doodles, you know, little bits and bobs, things I’ve noticed. People I’m thinking of.”
Bess smiled at a charming line drawing of a hen, beak open and wings spread, castigating a rooster with a positively wilted coxcomb and a palpable air of glum defeat.
Henrietta had filled several more pages with studies of the flowers in bloom about the garden, the blowsy, overblown roses and the gracefully trailing wisteria like clusters of grapes in a vineyard.
She turned further back, paging past a rather nice sketch of Gemma in profile, a wicked glint in her eye and a teasing grin on her lips, and several pairs of hands at work about the inn at various tasks, in different positions.
Then Bess turned another page and felt her soul leave her body.
Chapter Twenty-Six
It was a sketch of Nathaniel. His lean, sculpted visage with its distinctly sloping patrician nose stared out at Bess from the page.
Henrietta had captured the circles under his eyes, which were the color of ice chips in the drawing, the dark fringe of his eyelashes the only softness in his harsh, wintry face.
His eyelashes, and his lips—sharply cut, yes, but there was a plush fullness to the bottom lip that Bess knew, intimately, and it was soft and tender and God above, but she longed to kiss that mouth.
It was the expression Henrietta had caught, though, that made Bess feel as though her skin had been stripped off, leaving her bare nerves exposed to the cooling evening breeze.
He looked…wrecked. Without a single tear or scowl or any obvious sign, somehow the sketch conveyed a bleak despair, a devastation, that Bess recognized innately.
Because she felt it too.
As though she’d died, days ago, but no one had noticed. And she somehow had to keep getting up and moving her body from place to place and uselessly taking air into her lungs.
“Oh yes, dear Nathaniel,” Henrietta said around a mouthful of trout in cream sauce. “He’s been on my mind, rather. Well, you know all about that.”
Bess stiffened, closing the sketchbook with a snap. “I have no idea what you mean.”
