His tone startled her. She looked over. He stood there, a much different man than she had seen the last few days. Dark. Hard. He reminded her of how he had been at their first meeting, when he was angry that she had cut him.
She could not imagine why he was angry now. “Why are you in such a bad humor?”
He did not look directly at her, but more to that pool. “I told you not to leave the garden if you ventured out on your own. You might have gotten lost.”
She wanted to laugh. “There is a rough path that brought me here. I think I would have found my way back.”
“All the same, I told you not to do it. Now I have told you to come away with me, and you have disobeyed that as well.”
“You can hardly be surprised. You already knew I am not much given to obeying commands, especially ones that are not rational.”
He abruptly looked at her then. No, not at her. At the boulder on which she sat. His gaze locked on it. He said nothing. While she watched, something else emerged in him and mixed with his anger. It did not replace it. If anything, it made it worse. She could not ignore the change in him, however. His eyes no longer blazed only with fury. They also deepened with sorrow.
She looked down on her boulder, then back at his concentration on it. In the next terrible moment, she thought she knew what had changed him so, and what he saw in his mind while he stared.
She hopped off the rock. “Yes, let us leave. Thank you for finding me. I may have become lost despite my belief I never would.”
She walked past him to the edge of the clearing and the start of that path. He remained where he was, far from her in his mind.
She walked back and embraced him, for what little good that would do. That brought his gaze down on her. Her heart twisted at the pain she saw in him. She took his arm with a smile, as if she had not noticed. She urged him out of the clearing.
They walked back to the house in silence. She dared not speak. She had intruded on something private in that clearing that she had no right to see. She wondered if he would ever forgive her for that.
* * *
The road from Epsom to the racetrack was only about a mile long, but Clara concluded they could have walked and arrived in half the time it took her carriage.
She had traveled back to the town to rejoin with Althea. The only good thing about the slow journey amid hundreds of other vehicles was her confidence that many eyes saw her with her friend on this Thursday morning.
People of all stations jammed the road. From the finest coaches to the most humble carts, all aimed for the race that would take mere minutes to complete. She looked out her window and realized walking would not have been a good idea at all. Those who used feet instead of wheels had been forced off the road completely and trod in the wet fields and grass alongside.
“I do not mind helping you disguise your true whereabouts, Clara,” Althea said. “I think that it means I get to hear whether your tryst is going well, though.”
“It went very well. At least until this morning after breakfast.”
“Did you argue?”
“We barely spoke at all before I left.” She told Althea about her stroll in the woods and finding that pool and rock. “His anger made no sense, until I realized where I was. I think that his father did it there. Shot himself.”
“Oh, dear. No wonder he did not want you wandering off on your own.”
“I managed to wander exactly where he did not choose to wander himself. I think it evoked memories that remained in him until my carriage rolled away.”
She would never forget that look in his eyes in the clearing. Vivid anger and that deeper, soulful sorrow. Her heart knew that grief and recognized it in him. How much worse to have lost a parent the way he had.
“Are we still going to join him in the stand, as he planned?” Althea said.
“I suppose we will find out soon. He said a footman would come for us when we walked down below. If none does, or it is claimed we were not seen . . .”
“We will still see the race, just with a less advantageous prospect.”
Clara did not have the heart to tell Althea that seeing the race, about which she had been so excited since Stratton proposed this outing, no longer mattered very much. A sick worry had lodged below her heart. After being so close last night, Stratton’s distance this morning unnerved her. Cold formality tinged every word he said. It had been as if they had shared those intimacies in a different world.
Perhaps they had, and entering that clearing had brought him back to earth.
The carriage had not moved in some minutes. Now Mr. Brady opened the door. “We will get no closer.” He set down the steps and handed them out. He pointed to the end of a fence along the road. “I’ll be right here when you need me. Look for that last post and I’ll be standing nearby, no matter where the equipage ends up. I’d not dally much after the race if you want to reach Epsom before nightfall.”
Clara thanked him, then she and Althea made their way through the tangle of other carriages and the streams of people.
