For a long moment they simply looked at each other.
“I never had any doubts,” he said evenly.
She turned abruptly away from him. She lowered the rifle, staring at the place where the apple had shattered. Pensive.
The groundskeeper walked over to take it from her hands.
And then came an odd silence.
“WhenIshoot, Lillias,” Giles said deliberately, “I think about how blessed I am that I and my family are wealthy enough to never go hungry even if I never shoot a thing. About how fortunate we are to never know a danger other than the odd storm or two. That we have a full staff of servants to cook for us in our enormous comfortable house with grounds large enough for game to roam... and yet I can still shoot for the simple pleasure of it.”
He offered her a little smile.
She gave him one of her own, out of habit. It vanished swiftly, however.
“When the stakes are low, everything is a game,” Hugh said politely to Giles.
Chapter Twenty
The mood of the day officially changed after that.
A hum of tension seemed to underlie every polite word uttered.
“May wepleaseeat now?” the Earl of Vaughn wanted to know.
The footmen smoothed a blanket over the grass beneath the branches of a huge old oak, and began laying out plates and glasses, cheeses and fruits both fresh and preserved, various tarts and cakes and sliced cold meats, bottles of water and wine, and everyone settled in to feast. Conversation was pleasant and desultory and kept to the safer topics, the ones not likely to upset digestion. This meant dogs and horses, usually, and the weather.
Lillias hadn’t said a word since she’d blown the apple to smithereens.
Nor had she met Hugh’s eyes. She seemed, once again, filled with thoughts.
“It’s been such a joy sharing Heatherfield Park with Lillias and her family over the years. Does the... Cassidy... family have an ancestral seat, Mr. Cassidy?”
Giles asked this. Hugh almost said, “Have you any more obvious questions? Because I can’t think of one.” He was tempted to point to the nether regions of his pants and say, “All of my ancestors had one, same as yours.”
He supposed this was the sort of posturing Lillias hoped for from him.
He took a sip of some of the ale brought out.
“Not as such. I helped my father build a cabin from the ground up. We chose and felled the timbers. It was our first real home. My brother was born there.” Thusly Hugh provided his autobiography in clipped syllables.
He didn’t mention that his father didn’t know his own father. He wassorelytempted, but he didn’t want to subject Lillias to gasps.
“A... cabin?” Giles repeated. As if he wasn’t certain one ought to say that word in polite company. He turned a worried expression toward Lillias.
Lillias gave him a taut, distracted smile.
“A dear little house, Giles,” his mother called from behind them. “Made of sticks. A bit like a bird’s nest, isn’t that so, Mr. Cassidy?”
“No,” Hugh said.
He saw the startled expressions and drew in a breath. Clearly that had emerged a little abruptly. “Perhaps it’s best to think of it as a cabin on a ship. Simple, snug, immeasurably sturdy. One feels safe in it when one sails across the ocean. And since I built it and my father was there with me, I would trust the safety and comfort of anyone I loved to it.
“My mother used to shoot dinner from the porch,” Hugh added.
“Oh. Oh dear,” Lady Bankham muttered.
“A few years later, we built a home with plastered walls and a roof because a woman deserves a proper home. Four rooms and a door and windows, stairs up to the attic room, flowers on the mantel, rugs loomed by my mother . . . it’s still standing, too. Withstood battering storms and heat. That’s where my sister was born. I’d hold it right up to Heatherfield in terms of endurance.”
