Page 20 of Engaging Sir Isaac

There. She had given him permission to forget the whole evening, if he wished. “I can understand how difficult it is to have a stranger in the middle of familiar friends.” Millie attempted to smile, but he appeared no more at ease in her company than before. “Thank you for coming to inquire after my health.”

Sir Isaac gave another distracted sort of nod. “Of course, Miss Wedgewood. I had best take my leave now. Good day.” He bowed, turned stiffly on his heel, and left the room. She took a few steps after him, stopping in the doorway to watch his retreating back. When he came to the turn in the corridor, he glanced over his shoulder and saw her there. Swiftly, he snapped his head forward again and disappeared from sight.

How odd.

But promising.

“He is a strange one, miss,” Sarah said from her corner, where she had silently stood during the whole of the exchange.

“I quite agree with you.” Millie closed the door slowly. Her thoughts began spinning again. As she tried to put them in order, a new plan formed. She smiled to herself. “Perhaps things are not as dire as I thought. I may yet fulfill Lady Olivia’s demands.”

Sarah frowned, but pressed her lips together rather than give voice to whatever unpleasant thought had occurred to her. The maid had given up trying to talk Millie out of her course of action, which proved a relief. Every time Sarah had tried, Millie had faltered, had wondered if there was another way to regain her family’s place in Society. She could not afford to be swayed. Not now.

Sir Isaac was her quarry, the fox she meant to trap. If she did not, her mother would never let Millie forget ruining their chances. Everything depended upon her success.

* * *

The house stifled Isaac. He woke up every morning with the desperate need to simply get out of his own home. That morning was no different. The comfortable bed he had enjoyed prior to his time in the military had yet to give him a full night’s rest. He would have slept better in a mud puddle out in the fields.

Despite the stone house’s generous size, and the fact that Isaac and the servants alone lived there, an oppressive weight hung in the air. Perhaps it was merely the disapproval of all his ancestors, staring down at him from their portraits. At least one antiquated painting hung in each room of the old house.

After he deftly put his coat on, something he had practiced many times until getting it precisely right, Isaac tucked the mostly empty sleeve up and pinned it into place. His valet stood behind him, waiting for permission to adjust Isaac’s cravat. “Will you be going far this morning, sir?” Matthews asked, adjusting a fold in the white cloth at Isaac’s neck.

“Not too far, I should think.” His morning walks had become a habit. He took a small breakfast in his room, then rambled about on his estate or by the seashore before returning to the house to see to his daily affairs. In the afternoons, he went riding. The routine had become both blessing and curse. He knew precisely when he might escape the confines of the house and company, but he had tired of the sameness of every day some time previous. The hours spent out of doors cleared his head and relaxed him, but he could not very well set up a canvas tent and camp in his own gardens.

People might think him as mad as he had tried to lead Miss Wedgewood to believe.

Miss Wedgewood.

Isaac trotted down the front steps of his house, walking stick tucked under one arm. This time, he did not smirk to himself over the memory of Miss Wedgewood’s expression when he had described the baronet as touched in the head. Not since the night at Jacob and Grace’s dinner table had he been entertained by that particular memory. It would not do to paint Miss Wedgewood with the same brush as Lady Olivia merely because the two of them kept each other company.

He did not adhere to the usual paths that day, but marched directly through the estate’s meadow, making for the lane. Leaving the confines of the house was not enough. He needed to escape his lands entirely, if only for a few minutes. So he tromped across the grasses, pushed through the hedge, and came to the road. Anyone else who traversed the lane might see him and think his exercise unusual, but he hardly cared.

Most of the neighborhood seemed uninterested in his doings. When Miss Wedgewood had said, during their very first meeting when she had no idea of his identity, that women would flock to a man with his looks, it had taken him by surprise. True, he was still a decent enough catch for women of the gentry class. At least those who did not mind an old title with little prestige.

But Miss Wedgewood had called him handsome. She hadn’t stared at the place his missing arm ought to be, nor had she asked wide-eyed questions about it the way some of the misses in the neighborhood had in an attempt to pretend they understood his difficulties.

Actually. He had almost enjoyed their first meeting. Only the recollection of whose house she occupied bothered him.

He really hadn’t been fair to her at all.

Isaac walked, as though with a purpose, but with no destination in mind. He breathed deeply. Marched in time to an imaginary drummer.

A little more than a year before, he had been presumed dead in one of the last skirmishes between French and British forces. His family had mourned him, and he had arrived barely in time for them to cease preparations for his memorial service. A plaque still graced the church’s wall, actually, though his death date had thoughtfully been removed after Jacob Barnes became vicar.

A man ought to maintain gratitude in his heart to go from dead to living as he had. Yet sometimes, in the loneliness of night, in the midst of his dreams, Isaac wondered why he had lived while so many others, men under his command, his superior officers, his friends, had never come home to England again.

But he could not go on blaming the past for his foul moods or rudeness. Especially to a young woman who had done nothing wrong, save show a bit of curiosity.

His jaw tensed and he used his walking stick to lash out at a branch that dared hang too near the road.

“Dear me,” a voice said from his left, across the dirt track. “Whatever did that bush do to earn your wrath?”

Isaac jerked around, startled. Standing parallel to him was none other than the distracting Miss Wedgewood. “How long have you been there?” he asked, then swallowed when he heard the offensive tone he had used. He had to do better.

She turned and pointed at a break in the trees. “I stepped through there a moment ago and saw you walking. I hadn’t made my mind up whether to call out to you until I saw you mistreating the flora.” Miss Wedgewood faced him again, her expression clear and bright as the morning, one corner of her mouth higher than the other. “Someone must come to the defense of our native plants.”

Whatever did she mean, jesting with him in such a familiar way? He narrowed his eyes at her, attempting to categorize her behavior in a way that made sense. She had been cowed by him at the vicar’s dinner party, generous when he apologized, and now acted as though they were on good terms. No one was that quick to forgive and forget.