There was no deterring a young lady determined to see romance everywhere. Seeing that she was not prepared to let the matter drop, he laid down his palette and brush, and stepped across to the table where the letter lay. Charlotte leaned forward expectantly. Breaking the seal, he unfolded the single sheet, scanned the contents quickly, then folded the page away.
“She does not jilt me. Now may I return to my work?”
“But what does shesay?Is there nothing of interest — that you may make public, that is, for I am not asking about her expressions of love. Is she well? Is she missing you? Oh, you need not purse up your mouth like that, for I hardly expect you to answer me, but you cannot blame me for being curious.”
He laughed, for her enthusiasm was infectious. Recklessly, for he knew he was heading into dangerous waters, he said, “What would you expect her to say?”
“That she loves you, and is half demented to be kept from your side for so long. At least… that is whatIshould say in such a situation. But then…” She frowned and he could see her working it out. “She has not written to you for several weeks, so—”
“Eight weeks,” Lance said tersely.
“Eight?Goodness! Yet she does not jilt you. That is strange behaviour in a betrothed woman. It takes no more than halfan hour to pen a few lines.‘We are all well, the weather is appalling, we had dinner with the new parson who is obnoxious.’That sort of thing. I write my duty letters on Sundays when there is nothing else to do apart from reading sermons. How hard can that be? Yet she has not.”
“Not even a duty letter,” Lance said musingly. Then, throwing caution entirely to the winds, he picked up the letter. “So tell me, as a woman, Lottie, what you make of that. No — wait! You should read the other one first, then tell me what you think.”
He lifted his smock to reach the waistcoat pocket where he kept Patience’s first letter, so prim and formal, and handed it to Charlotte, who read it silently. Then she read the second letter, then both of them again, more carefully.
“Well!” she said at last, her expression troubled. “These are strikingly different. The first, so dry and bland, nothing personal at all.”
“My valet says it is like a schoolroom letter.”
Her face creased into a smile. “You show letters from your betrothed to your valet? But then, he is a most unusual valet, is he not? But this second letter!‘You have been every day in my thoughts…’But not enough to write to you, apparently. Oh, she longs for your presence. Ooh!‘My dearest darling.’Nowthatis more like it!‘Do not delay so much as a day. Take a post chaise and four and come at once to the loving arms of your Patience.’Goodness! She sounds very heated! Why are you not rushing off to pack?”
He smiled. “Because I am in the middle of a portrait and if I abandon it now, I shall never be able to pick up the threads again and shall have to start over.”
“Hmm, what a pair you are! She sends you one brief letter — a schoolroom letter, as your valet so aptly has it — then nothing for eight weeks, and when the impassioned love letterarrives, you merely shrug.‘I am in the middle of a portrait.’But I think… you asked me what I think, so I shall tell you. I think that she does love you, but she does not yet realise that love is not something unchanging which may be taken up and set down whenever convenient, like a piece of embroidery, but must be carefully nurtured. She is only eighteen, after all.”
He considered that. “It is possible, I suppose. I have been more inclined to think that I was merely a passing fancy, and that the high ranking beaux she has been mingling with at Holtwell Abbey and Pentavon have reminded her how lowly I am.”
“Do not underestimate yourself, Lance Chamberlain! Any young lady, even the daughter of a marquess, would be happy to secure your affections.”
“Do you think so?” He recalled his proposal and the subdued manner in which it had been received and accepted. Only when he kissed her had she shown some spark of animation. What a strange girl Patience was!
Charlotte handed back the letters. “You need not fear I will tell the world what you have so honoured me by revealing today,” she said in serious tones. “You have not asked me what you should do, but I am going to offer you my advice anyway. You should go to her, if only because the business is eating you up inside. At least if you are with her, you will know how you stand with her — the love of her life or a passing fancy or something in between. It may be that she has been so bedazzled by the social whirl of engagements that she has forgotten her real engagement. Now she realises guiltily that she has neglected you shamefully and is terrified she will lose you, so she writes in impassioned terms. She could not write so if she did not truly feel that way, Lance.”
He agreed with it, and let the subject drop. There was no hope of picking up the thread of his painting, so he abandonedit for the day, and filled in the time before dinner with a lengthy bout with the rapiers with Denny. But as he sat in the bath that afternoon, while Denny toiled to keep the water warm, he pondered the mystery of the Lady Patience Torbuck and her two letters, the one so calm, the other so agitated, and tried in vain to make sense of them.
14: Sunday Dinner
Georgie liked having her own apartment within Staineybank. It was of a similar size to her cottage, and being situated on the attic floor, had rooms of a moderate size and ceilings of normal height, with some walls sloping under the eaves. Even the motley collection of furniture, some of Jamie’s family items mixed with things scavenged from the attics, felt right, for she had avoided the vast and ornate ducal pieces and chosen elderly furniture discarded by the nursery or the housekeeper’s room. Her previous bedroom, one of the richly decorated guest rooms, had made her feel small and inconsequential, wondering often just how she had come to be living in a duke’s household. Now she had her own domain, more in keeping with her lowly rank, and it felt very comfortable.
Then there was Jamie. Ah, Jamie! Before they had married, she had told herself very firmly not to make comparisons between her two husbands. Jamie could never be Henry, she could not expect it, and so she must simply accept him as he was,and be grateful that she had a husband at all after her stupidity with the brandy.
Yet now she found, to her surprise, that Jamie measured up very well. He was different, of course, a quiet, gentle sort of man, nothing like her big, boisterous Henry. He was shy, which Henry had never been, and even after a month of marriage, still dressed and undressed behind a screen, and blushed at the mention of intimate matters. But he was steady, predictable in ways that Henry had never managed, and he was sweetly solicitous of her, bringing her little treats from Brinchester and praising her simple cooking, noticing when she dressed her hair in a new way and taking charge of the fires so that she never had to carry heavy scuttles of coal.
And he never, ever disappeared for the evening and came home drunk. It was the oddest thing, for she had always told herself that the drinking was just Henry’s way and, after all, he was never aggressively drunk, merely a bit bosky and affectionate. She had never resented it or felt herself ill-used. But there was something wonderfully satisfying in a husband who was always sober. He drank wine with his dinner, of course, for what man did not, if it was provided? And he liked a glass of port afterwards. But whether they dined at the duke’s table or their own, all the drink did was to relax him a little, so that he became less reticent. They ended every evening sitting in matching chairs either side of the fire in the parlour, enjoying a final cup of tea and talking over the day before going to bed. Georgie decided she liked that arrangement very much indeed, and would not have traded it for Henry in the slightest.
Nor did she miss the irony that the only reason for their marriage was because of that one night when they had got horribly drunk. As she woke each morning to the delicious remembrance of the new life growing inside her, she blessed the day she had wept and Jamie had brought brandy to her room. Itwas still too soon to announce her condition to the world, but the secret brought her a happiness such as she had not experienced for several years.
Every Sunday, Georgie cooked dinner in the apartment, and it became a habit to invite her father-in-law to join them. He came to the Staineybank chapel for divine service and then spent the rest of the day with them. Georgie took very little part in the conversations between father and son, which seemed to focus heavily on their work of analysing the duke’s diaries and compiling his memoirs, but then her father-in-law shocked her.
“The cottage was broken into last night,” he said, as calmly as if he were talking about the weather.
“Broken into?” Jamie said sharply. “Someone smashed a window and climbed in?”
“No, no, nothing so dramatic. Simply walked in through the kitchen door, stumbled about downstairs for a bit, then left the same way. The doors are never locked.”
“Was anything taken?” Jamie said.
