“I am not offended in the slightest,” Frances’ mother assured her. "Once little Winnie knows us better, all will be well, I’m sure.”
“What horses do you have here, Frances?” Beatrice probed. “Lydia asked me the other day but I could not tell her anything useful. I think it’s only a riding stable here, isn’t it? Ambrose doesn’t breed horses, I don’t think.”
“We shall visit the stables on our way back to the house so that you can see for yourself and make a full report,” replied Frances, smiling. “You can interrogate the chief groom, if it pleases you. We might even take Winnie for a ride later, if Mother would like to take tea with the Duke of Westall while we’re out.”
“What do you think, dear?” Helen Harcourt asked her husband, looking back over her shoulder. “You don’t want to ride out with the girls, do you?”
Frances looked back too with a face like thunder, daring him to even suggest it.
“My place is at your side, Helen,” Edmund Harcourt said instead, smiling at his wife. “We shall take tea with the duke if that is what Frances and Ambrose prefer.”
Relieved not to have to fend off her father’s company but as riled as usual to hear him speak to her mother in such affectionate terms, Frances had to work hard to keep a smile on her face.
“The orchards are down this way,” she stated, repeating much of what the Westall Park staff had told her only a few weeks earlier. "It looks like there will be a good crop of plums and damsons this year and apparently the apples and pears always grow well,according to Mrs. Betsworth. The strawberries and other soft fruits come from one of the estate farms.”
“How nice,” commented Lady Scovell appreciatively. “It is always better to be able to eat ones own fruit than buy it in, I always think. You will have all your own preserves in winter too.”
“What a lovely day to see these gardens,” added Beatrice. “It’s a shame that Ambrose couldn’t join us for this walk. I do like him, Frances.”
“Ambrose has some business to attend to,” responded Frances evasively, hoping that this would be explanation enough until dinner when the duke would join them again.
“Do you and the duke do everything separately, Frances?” asked her father mildly and much to her irritation.
“I am perfectly capable of conducting my family around the grounds alone, Father,” she responded coldly. “There is no need for me to disturb my husband.”
“Of course you are,” Lord Scovell said quickly. “I did not mean anything like that at all. I only wondered at a couple who have been married for barely a month spending any time together. Everything you mention, whether walking, riding, estate business and so on, you do separately.”
“I have no idea what you mean,” Frances responded, trying to fight down her crossness at this unwanted intervention.
“At luncheon, you barely even made eye contact, and he apologized for touching your shoulder when he pushed your chair in.”
“Why am I being watched?” Frances snapped at her father. “I do not care for it, and nor am I going to justify anything in my marriage toyou,of all people.”
Lord Scovell’s good-natured bearded face fell as though she had slapped it and her mother rounded on her.
“Frances! That was unnecessarily rude,” Helen Harcourt rebuked her in an unusually angry tone. “Your father has been so looking forward to seeing you again, as have we all. I would like you to apologize to him.”
Beatrice’s eyes also regarded Frances unhappily, her younger sister keeping an almost protective hold of their father, as though he was an entirely innocent party in all their family drama.
Panic rose in Frances’ chest, suddenly feeling herself under attack from her whole family. Was she in the wrong? Ought she to apologize? She could not, but nor could she stand there under such accusatory glances and with such turmoil in her heart.
Turning on her heel, she broke away from them and raced back up the path, the skirts of her pale blue summer dress in her hands as she fled like a scolded child. It wasn’t until Frances reached the house that she realized she was crying.
The wedding preparations, the strain of her incomprehensible physical attraction to Ambrose Clarke, her unprecedented ecstasy at his hands, that vile letter from Oswald Keeton and all the awful old memories that had stirred up… Good or bad, Frances yet again had the sense that it was all too much in too short a space of time.
Stopping and leaning against the wall of the house, Frances felt unable to go inside in case she met Ambrose, but unequal to rejoining her family and finding some way to smooth over this latest row.
“Frances!” called Beatrice’s voice then, and to Frances’ dismay, she saw her younger sister racing over to her.
Briefly, she was tempted to run once more but the younger woman reached out a hand and looked at her pleadingly.
“Please don’t run off again, Frances. I ate too much at luncheon to want to do so much exercise this afternoon. The roast chicken was far too good and my second helping was a definite mistake.”
Despite her misery, Frances smiled at the expression on Beatrice’s face as she touched her stomach. If she thought this meant that Beatrice had come to make peace, however, Frances was wrong.
“Why must you always treat Father so badly?” her younger sister demanded once she was sure that Frances would stay to hear her out. “I have never seen Father be anything but kind and goodand honorable. Yet you speak to him as I would not speak to our dog.”
“Kind, good and honorable? You do not know him as I do, Beatrice,” Frances flared back at her sister.
