Remember Love (Ravenswood #1)(30)

Her mother was looking rather intently at her. “That was quite an honor,” she said, “being singled out by Devlin for the first set. It is a pity he is not as lively as Nicholas or quite as good-looking. He is a very steady and worthy young man, however.”

“And the eldest son of an earl, Bronwyn,” her father said, his eyes twinkling. “Never forget that.”

“Oh. That was not my point at all, Ifor, as you very well know,” she said, clucking her tongue. “One thing you would never be able to accuse me of is playing the part of conniving matchmaker. I want both Idris and Gwyneth to marry for love, as you and I did. When they are ready. I am in no hurry to lose either of them just yet.”

Gwyneth turned with a smile to greet her next partner, Sidney Johnson, the handsome gentleman farmer and maypole dancer.



* * *



—

    Devlin danced every set before supper with a different partner. He found time between sets to bring drinks to several of the older people, including one of his grandmothers. He spoke with as many guests as he could. He took a plate of sweetmeats out to a cluster of children who had gathered in one corner of the terrace.

He neither sat down nor ate during supper, but moved about the room, making sure everyone had what food they wanted and as much as they wanted. He occasionally signaled a footman to refill a cup with tea or a glass with lemonade or some stronger beverage. He talked with everyone, asked if they were enjoying themselves. Ben and Nicholas and his parents were doing the same thing, of course, his father with a glass in his hand. Pippa was seated with Gwyneth in the midst of a group of other young people, all of them talking animatedly and doing a great deal of laughing. It was the one group Devlin did not approach. His sister was doing duty for the family there, he told himself.

Eventually guests began to wander back into the ballroom to await the resumption of the dancing, and the young people in that group began to disperse. Devlin strolled closer, asked his sister if she had sore feet yet, chuckled when she told him she was having the best time ever and did not care if she woke up tomorrow with blisters on all ten toes, and finally turned to Gwyneth.

“My dance, I believe?” he said.

“It is.” She looked at him with a face sparkling with exuberance, and he was reminded of how he had seen her from afar at Cartref as a girl. A free, happy spirit with boundless energy. She slipped a hand through his arm, and he led her into the ballroom and over to the French windows.

Darkness had fallen a while ago, but as he had guessed, the outdoors was bright with moon-and starlight. Even beyond the terrace illuminated with colored lanterns it was possible to see the various features of the park—the temple pavilion on the hill nearby, the rise and fall of the land beyond, the clearly defined paths, the lake in the near distance with a silver band of moonlight across the water.

There were four people out on the terrace, in conversation with one another while they waited to dance. There were no children now. They had been sent up to the nursery before supper, grumbling and dragging their feet but reconciled to the inevitable by the promise of their own feast awaiting them there.

“Shall we take a stroll?” Devlin suggested. “Or would you rather dance?”

“I would love a stroll,” she said.

They were not the only ones. The four people on the terrace had decided to walk toward the front of the house, where there would be more lanterns to light the lawn and a few chairs to sit upon while they enjoyed the cool air and the moonlight. They would hear the orchestra playing even if they did not return to dance.

Devlin did not follow them. He led Gwyneth across the terrace, down the slight grassy slope beyond it, along a flat stretch of lawn, and up the rise to the pavilion.

“Do you sometimes wish,” she asked him when they were standing at the top, looking out at the view, “that your vocabulary would expand on certain occasions?”

“Sometimes,” he agreed, “no words seem adequate to express deep feeling. Yet if we were to invent new words, the feeling would simply burst beyond them too.”

“It would.” She laughed softly. “Lovely, beautiful, breathtaking. What we are looking at is all those things, but so much more. It is . . .”

“Magnificent?” he suggested. “Majestic? Nice?”

They both laughed.

“Very nice,” she said.

“But sometimes,” he said, “words are just not necessary.”

“As they were not this afternoon,” she said.

He turned his head to look at her. “I was afraid that perhaps you thought me a dull fellow indeed for not introducing some topic to converse upon,” he said.

“You must have known I thought no such thing,” she protested, looking back at him. “It was perfect. It was a silence we shared.”

“I thought so at the time,” he told her. “But afterward I feared I had deluded myself and kept you from enjoying more of the fete in the company of someone more lively.”

She turned her whole body toward him then, her free hand coming to rest on top of the other on his arm. “You are very different from the rest of your family, Devlin,” she said. “I sometimes used to think that perhaps you were a bit arrogant—because you are the heir to all this and already have the courtesy title, because you are so handsome, and—”