Page 41

Yes, indeed, she had courage.

She had taken up the challenge. Now it was up to him to deliver.

Chapter Thirteen

Six weeks later, Stephanie was all packed up and ready to leave the following day with her mother and Matthew for Redcliffe in Northamptonshire. Owen had come down from London the previous day to travel with them.

A dozen times since returning home she had changed her mind about going, and a dozen times she had changed it back. Once she had even begun a letter to the marchioness to make her excuses. But she had crumpled it up and dropped it into the fire before finishing. For one thing, it would be extremely bad-mannered, not to mention dishonest, in the absence of a genuine reason. And for another, she was curious to discover just what she had let herself in for—and apprehensive in equal proportions. Perhaps most of all, though, she was stubborn. She had said she would give Viscount Watley a chance to prove to her whatever it was he wanted to prove, and she was no coward. She had been told that Viscountess Dirkson and her sisters would be at Redcliffe too—the great matchmakers. But…Well, she was no coward.

Besides, if she remained at Ravenswood, she would be here alone. Devlin and Gwyneth were taking the children to Wales for a few weeks, as they often did in the summer, and Sir Ifor and Lady Rhys were going with them. She could go to stay with Ben, of course. But what if Mr. Courtney was spending part of the summer there? Or she could go to stay with Pippa and Lucas.

Or she could go to Redcliffe, as she had agreed to do.

And now it was the night before their departure. She and Owen were walking back to the house from her mother’s cottage, where they had dined. It was early dusk, with the promise of a lovely sunset.

“Do you want to watch it from the temple?” Owen asked. “I miss the open skies when I am in London.”

They walked along the terrace in front of the house and across the lawn leading to the hill with the temple folly perched on top. They were a bit breathless by the time they got there, but the climb was worth the effort. There were comfortable seats inside the temple and an open front framed by pillars. There were views in three directions, over the park and the village and farmland beyond, and, in the west, the lake with a miniature version of the temple on the island there. And there was the sky beyond it, pink now, with the sun just sunk below the horizon, leaving a band of fiery orange behind it.

“In all the years I have known Bert,” Owen said as they sat down inside the temple, “I have never been to Redcliffe. I am looking forward to seeing it. Are you?”

“Yes,” she said.

“The company should be interesting too,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Though it sounds as if we will know almost all of them from Christmas,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Except Justin’s sister and Dorchester’s brother,” he said.

“Yes.”

“And the sun will probably come up in the east tomorrow morning,” he said.

“Yes.” She turned her head sharply then to look suspiciously at him and laughed. “Wretch! I am sorry. I was thinking about what you were telling us at dinner.”

“About me as a one-man employment agency?” he said. “Lord knows how I got myself into it, but I did and now I seem to be stuck with it. Actually, the Lord probably does know how it happened. I must say he has a wicked sense of humor.”

“That is downright irreverent,” she said.

“You would prefer to think of him as an old sobersides, then, with a long white beard and a longer face?” he said.

She clucked her tongue. “Seriously,” she said, “do you think you have found your calling at last, Owen?”

He had told them about overhearing a group of shabby, unkempt boys one day when he was serving at a soup kitchen in a church not far from Piccadilly. They had been grumbling over the impossibility of finding any kind of work except perhaps at the docks because the whole world was against them. Their talk had been fueled by hatred and resentment and self-pity, and Owen, though he had felt sorry for them, also felt his patience growing thin. He ought to have kept his mouth shut, for to them he and his kind were the whole problem. Even the fact that he was serving them food only made them more resentful since it smacked of charity. He had spoken up anyway.

He had told them to take a good look—and a good listen—to one another and say honestly whether they would want to hire any one of them for a respectable job. He had told them he could give them twenty pointers without even stopping to think to make themselves employable if only they were prepared to listen and do a bit of work on themselves rather than curse and grumble and blame everyone and everything in the world except themselves, which was far easier to do.

They had sneered. And laughed at him. And glared at him with hatred in their eyes.

“Garn,” one of them had said. “Prove it, then.”

The others had banged their hands flat on the table, sending cutlery and food flying, and howled with derisive laughter at this calling of his bluff.

So Owen had done it. It had meant giving the boys some simple pointers, like washing themselves—not just their hands and faces but their whole bodies and their hair, preferably with soap. It had meant teaching them to eliminate at least the worst of the profanities and blasphemies from their speech and to speak clearly without murdering the English language to such a degree that it was unintelligible to anyone outside their own neighborhood. It had meant teaching them some rudimentary good manners. It had meant teaching them to relax their facial muscles and enlarge their eyes and look pleasant and interested in life, even if they could not smile. It had meant…