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Mr Brabazon strolled back into the house and found his young cousin still sitting in the chair, rather pale but with glittering eyes. He leaned back and looked up at his guardian with a merry expression. ‘What a very good-looking pair when they’re not muddy-skirted and prinked with straw.’ He chuckled.
‘I hope you’re not nurturing any tendresse for Miss Carey,’ Mr Brabazon said, fixing a forbidding eye on the young man.
‘Well, then, you’d better whisk me back to London and the charms of Lady Cleome as soon as possible. I’m sure you’re missing whatever tempting armful you’ve got hidden away in the fleshpots of Covent Garden. You’re so havey-cavey about your life, Ant. Does anyone ever know what you’re up to?’
‘Not even the inestimable Dewsbury. Whereas you, my dapper young dog, display your private linen for the world to see.’
‘Oh, ho! If you’re warning me against Miss Carey, should I be warning you against growing too fond of the beautiful widow?’ Being sequestered from society had made Lord Lynwood’s natural high spirits even more giddy and reckless. His cousin could be coldly disapproving, capable of the most quelling of rake-downs, but emboldened by boredom, he dared to enquire into Mr Brabazon’s private life.
‘You’re an impertinent boy! You should know I’m not susceptible to widows. Or their young sprigs.’
‘The devil take it! I’d forgot the angelic brat.’
‘Stop fudging and ask Mr Toller to pack. We’re going back to Town the day after tomorrow.’
The following day dawned fine and sunny, and Sybella was woken from sleep by an excited small boy climbing into bed beside her. ‘Mama, George brung my pony today. Too ’cited to sleep.’ He was wriggling and inadvertently kicking her with his soft pudgy feet.
She knew he was so full of anticipation and coiled energy he could not help himself. ‘It’s very exciting, isn’t it? Have you changed your mind about his name?’
‘No. Love Dasher.’ He slipped out of her bed. ‘See Lucie now,’ he said as he careered out of the room.
After breakfast, James went off to the nursery and Lucie started to plan her basic wardrobe for the coming London Season. Sybella went in search of George to discuss the crop rotation in the twenty-acre field. She had not forgotten that Mr Brabazon intended to visit to see how her new beehives improved honey collection, and she was keen to show off her apiary to the best advantage. She found young Greenhill weeding in the kitchen garden and asked him if he could spare an hour to scythe a broad path through the orchard, to make it easier to approach the hives without the knee-high grass leaving seeds and stains on clothes and boots.
Just half an hour before the expected visit, Sybella ran into the house to grab her husband’s violin. She had recently discovered that playing a lullaby to the bees seemed to work miraculously in calming them, making them less likely to sting if disturbed. She wanted the visit to be a success. She stood in the middle of the orchard and started to play an old folk lullaby she used to sing to James when he was a baby. The music diffused like light through the apple trees to resonate with the humming of the bees and the blackbird’s liquid song. She was lost in the music and the beauty of the late summer day.
Halfway through the lullaby, Sybella sensed the vibration of the orchard change. She turned her head. With a shock, she realised Mr Brabazon had arrived early: his stature, dark hair and immaculate dress, the straight lines of him, made a strikingly incongruous sight amid the unruly abundance of the orchard. She met his gaze across the vibrating verdant space and raised her violin bow in salutation.
Anthony Brabazon had set off on his black stallion, Hades, to ride cross-country to the Manor. It was one of those timeless golden days at the end of summer, perfect weather for riding over his land. He had not managed to revisit much of his estate while he had been at Shotten, and he and his ward were dusting the soil from their heels tomorrow. Hades was in the highest fettle. He sniffed the air with excitement, pricked up his ears and for a while was so frisky his rider was hard put to hold him from kicking up into a headlong gallop. He trotted through the big field, left fallow for too many years and full of tares and ragwort.
Crossing into the woodland dividing his estate from the Carey land, the difference in husbandry was clear for all to see. He emerged from the woods into a vista of blowing red poppies and ripe corn ready for harvesting, in a field punctuated with fine field maples and occasional oak trees. When he reached the Manor’s park, Mr Brabazon eased into a canter and Hades sprang forward in sheer pleasure as they galloped down towards the house. It was an ancient rambling manor house dating from the fifteenth century, built low and well-sited in the centre of its parkland. The Cotswold stone walls glowed in the afternoon light. It seemed to exist almost in a dream.
He and Hades trotted into the stable yard, where Sybella’s groom was busy making a poultice for one of the carriage horses. It had been many years since such a beautifully turned-out horse and rider had graced the old stable yard. Both man and beast had strikingly elegant refined lines, both tall – the stallion at least seventeen hands – and both seemed supremely masterful; Hades as black and lustrous as ebony and Mr Brabazon in his dark riding coat and top boots, fitted to his form as if he had grown an extra skin. Gem watched him dismount and took Hades’s reins from his gloved hands. ‘Mrs Lovatt?’ The drawled question cut through Gem’s open-mouthed admiration.
‘Oh! Yes. Of course. Will you excuse me if I leave you to go through to the orchard? I must apply this poultice while it’s at the right temperature.’ Gem pointed to the entrance to the walled kitchen garden that led to the orchard beyond.
As Mr Brabazon walked towards the mulberry tree, he could hear music. A soaring thread of sound united the birdsong and the industrious hum of insects, adding a strange enchantment. The closer he came, the more he was encompassed by a swelling wave of song. Arrested for a moment in the sonorous air, he was freed from thought, merely breathing.
Sybella had her back to him, her arms were raised and in her hands was her violin. She and the music, on this day in the late warm sun with the trees and busy creatures full of purpose, were at the centre of a sensuous organic world he had never acknowledged before. All his life he had been tightly wound, clothed in a carapace of cynicism and indifference: here, on this prodigal afternoon, some hasp inside him slipped, and the spring uncoiled a little. He had never seen a woman play music like this before, on an instrument shaped like a woman and made for men.
Mr Brabazon was uneasily aware he was intruding on something very private. Her tall figure, her eyes closed in some unselfconscious ecstasy with her arms uplifted, cradling the violin between her cheek and shoulder, was somehow shockingly intimate to witness: the only honourable thing to do now would be to leave. He could then ask her groom to announce him. About to retrace his steps, he heard the music fade away. It was too late. She had turned her head, and slowly raised her bow in salutation.
Anthony Brabazon walked down the scythed path towards Sybella. ‘I apologise for being early.’ He bowed. ‘I came cross-country and it was surprisingly swift.’ He had managed to regain his characteristic control, but she was on her own territory here and did not let his world-weariness discomfit her.
‘I should also apologise. I was late with my preparation. I wanted to calm the bees with music before you arrived. But you always seem to be catching me unawares.’ She laughed. ‘At least I hope I don’t have a bee in my hair this time!’
His languid voice and cynical manner could dispirit her too easily, but now she was close enough to see his face, she was surprised that the hard lines had softened and for the first time noticed that his usually stone-cold eyes were actually blue-grey. Was it just a trick of the light? Or the orchard working its magic?
Sybella laid the violin on the bench under the Bramley tree as he enquired politely, ‘When did you learn to play?’
‘My husband brought it back from the Peninsular War. He played himself and began to teach me before he was recalled.’ She smiled apologetically. ‘I realise it’s unbecoming for a woman to play such an instrument in public. It puts her on a level with actresses and opera dancers.’
This self-alignment of a lady like Sybella Lovatt with these morally dubious female professions rather astonished Mr Brabazon. It even surprised him that she talked so frankly of such things to a man she barely knew. Sybella had seen his heavy-lidded eyes momentarily widen, before returning to their usual regard of lazy indifference.
She realised she had been rather too forthright and said quietly, ‘I hope not to have been overly frank, sir. Perhaps you forget, I’m no longer a schoolroom miss but have been married. And to a soldier, too.’
This elicited an unexpected bark of laughter from him, but he quickly suppressed his amusement and murmured, ‘You are incorrigible, Mrs Lovatt. That makes you a woman of the world, I suppose? Now, show me these special beehives of yours.’
Sybella told Mr Brabazon to stay where he was as she walked quietly into the centre of the circle of skeps. With bees buzzing around her head, she slowly opened the top of the conical hive and gently extracted a wooden frame from which hung golden honeycomb, dripping with honey and bees. Talking quietly, she explained that this way the honey could be extracted without harming the bees. ‘If your gardener has any traditional skeps, each year he would hang them over a burning sulphur pit and kill the bees to get access to the honey.’ She replaced the grass-woven lid and quietly returned to Brabazon’s side. ‘I didn’t want to risk my luck. The bees were getting a trifle tetchy.’
