Someone to Care (Westcott #4)(29)
He took her hand in his and laced their fingers—as he had done last evening before they returned to the inn. And he dipped his head and kissed her. “The strap beside your head looks far more reliable than the one in the other carriage did,” he said. “But I hope you will not find it necessary to use it. I am the same man I was last night. The same man I will be tonight.”
They were deliberately seductive words, and of course had an immediate effect upon her body. She felt the ache of wanting, as he had known very well she would. His head was still turned toward her, his dark, apparently lazy eyes boring into hers. But she no longer had to fight the seduction. She had surrendered to it. And it was not even seduction, for that implied that she was unaware of what was happening and would be an unwilling victim if she were. She was fully aware, and she was fully complicit.
There was something freeing in the thought.
“What?” she said. “You do not improve with practice?”
She had the satisfaction of seeing a startled, arrested look on his face before he laughed. And, goodness, she did not believe she had ever seen or heard him laugh before. Laughter made him look more youthful, less hard, more human—whatever she meant by that.
* * *
? ? ?
At the inn they had just left, the maid who had taken Viola’s letters and her generous tip was called to some busy work in the kitchen before she could go to the office and the post bag. And as bad luck would have it, the elbow of the cook’s helper standing next to her sent a bowl of gravy spilling down the front of her frock and apron. She was sent off to change in a hurry since she was still needed urgently in the kitchen. She dropped the dirty garments into the laundry basket on her way back to work and forgot the letters until a couple of hours later, when it was too late to save them. They came out of the laundry tub still inside the apron pocket but reduced to a soggy clump.
It was impossible to smooth out the clump into anything resembling paper, much less individual pages. And even if it had been possible, there were no words left to be read. The ink had turned the inside of the pocket and some of the outside too a mottled gray and black and ruined one perfectly good apron.
The poor girl felt quite sick, not least because the cost of a new apron would be taken out of her wages. But she did not confess to the soggy clump’s having once been letters entrusted to her by a lady customer who had already departed. She claimed instead that it had been a letter she had written to her sister, who worked at a private home twelve miles away.
The letters had probably not been important anyway. Letters rarely were. Or so she consoled her conscience.
Seven
They took their time. There was no hurry, after all. They were running away, not to anything in particular. The journey was as much a part of it all as was the destination. They stopped for practical purposes—to change horses, to partake of meals. The latter they did at their leisure, and sometimes they went walking afterward if the place where they had stopped seemed of interest. They explored a castle, descending to the dungeons down long, spiraling stone steps and then climbing to the battlements in the same manner to gaze out over the surrounding countryside, the wind threatening to blow his tall hat into the next county. They looked about churches and churchyards. She liked to read all the old monuments and gravestones to discover what age those buried there had been when they died and how they were related to one another. She liked to work out how they had been related to others in the graveyard.
“You have a morbid mind,” he told her.
“I do not,” she protested. “Graveyards remind me of the continuity of life and family and community. In this cemetery the same four or five last names keep recurring. Have you noticed? I am sure if we were to ask in the village we would find that the same names predominate even now. Is that not fascinating?”
“Wondrously so.” He favored her with a deliberately blank look. “It would certainly seem to indicate that people on the whole do not do much running away.”
“Or else they run but then return,” she said, “as we will do after a while.”
“A good long while, it is to be hoped,” he said.
He was in no hurry to think about returning. After a few days and nights in her company, he was still enchanted by her. It was a strange word to pop into his head—enchanted—but no other more appropriate word presented itself. Lusted after was too earthy and did not quite capture how he felt.
Sometimes they wandered through markets and often bought cheap frivolities that would have repelled him, and probably her too, in a more rational frame of mind. He bought her a pea green string bag to hold their purchases like the ones other women were carrying and a sky blue cotton sunbonnet with a wide, floppy brim and a neck flap. He suggested that they look for a three-legged stool to go with it and a pail and a milking cow, but she called him silly and pointed out that they would be unable to squeeze the cow into the carriage and it would be unreasonable to expect it to trot behind and still be ready to fill the pail with milk whenever they stopped. He conceded the point.
She bought him a black umbrella with hideous gold tassels all around the edge that dripped water everywhere, mainly down the neck of the holder when he tried to keep it over himself and his companion on a rainy day. She suggested that he keep it for future use as a sunshade. He suggested that he cut the tassels off but did not do so. He bought himself a gnarled and sturdy wooden staff with which to trudge about the hills of Devon like a seasoned countryman. It snapped in two with a loud crack when he put the smallest amount of weight upon it in their inn room later that evening. Fortunately for his dignity, he maintained his balance, but she collapsed into giggles anyway on the side of their bed and he shook the jagged stump at her and would perhaps have fallen in love if he had been twenty years younger and twenty times more foolish.