Page 55 of Miss Dauntless
Matilda passed him a paper yellowing with age. “Harry’s death notice, more or less. This is the letter from the proprietor of the Hungry Hound, the inn along the Oxford Road where Harry died. I hadn’t read it in quite some time, and I felt the need. The business with the house unnerves me.”
Tremont studied the single page that had set Matilda free, at the same time it had obliterated what little security Harry had provided.
“An odd blend of courtesy and avarice. This sounds more like a solicitor wrote it than an innkeeper.” He handed the missive back, and Matilda folded it into the pages of her diary.
“An innkeeper who somehow knew the exact direction of Harry’s London dwelling,” she said, “which Harry was usually careful not to disclose.”
Tremont took the seat next to Matilda on the sofa. “Your late spouse oppresses your spirit from the grave. Would you rather stay in, Matilda?”
She leaned into her suitor—her fiancé—and Tremont’s arm came around her shoulders. The sight of him was enough to settle her nerves, and being close to him took some of the chill off her heart.
“I agree with the men that an appearance of normality makes sense. That means I spend time with you.”
Tremont kissed her knuckles. “But you don’t want to leave Tommie here. Shall we take him to the tea shop? It’s a bit brisk for a walk in the park, but some fresh air would agree with him, I’m sure.”
“What do we know of Jessup and Jensen, Marcus?”
Matilda found herself hefted into Tremont’s lap.
“You are like a general at the start of the campaign season,” he said. “You’ve come off winter quarters, unsettled by inactivity, and not yet comfortable with life on the march. Every dispatch rider is suspect, every subaltern a potential spy, and the weather itself plots against you. Jessup and Jensen are known to me from my days in the stews, and I vouch for their loyalty. Is there something you aren’t telling me?”
How gently he opened the trapdoor that led to so many bad memories. “There’s much I haven’t told you, all of it pathetic. After Harry died, I used to think I’d caught a glimpse of him, lurking beneath an awning, disappearing around a corner. Dorcas MacKay claims she had the same experiences when her mother died. She’d smell her mother’s perfume without explanation, or think she heard her mama humming a favorite hymn across the corridor.”
Marcus had the knack of holding a lady in his lap so she didn’t feel ridiculous. She felt safe and sleepy and cherished.
“I encountered my father’s ghost once,” he said, “or I believe I did.”
“Tell me.”
“After his death, I became very… contrary, I suppose you’d call it. I was forever eluding my tutors and larking off about the estate. The staff, my sister, Lydia, and tenants kept an eye on me and occasionally had to cart me home when my ambitions exceeded my energies, but for the most part, I was allowed to ramble at will. I was in the orchard, the place where Papa proposed to Mama, and I fell asleep against a venerable apple tree.”
“You’ve never told this to anybody else, have you?”
“Of course not. They would think me daft. When I woke up, Papa was leaning against the next tree, looking as handsome and wonderful as always. He smiled at me—I will never forget that smile—and he said, ‘I am so proud of you, Tremont. Never forgetthat. I will always be proud of you.’ I blinked and tried to speak, but then he wasn’t there.”
“And you’ve told yourself it was a dream, wishful thinking, or the product of a child’s tired, fanciful mind, but you hope it was real.”
“At the time, I knew it was real. He called me Tremont, and I wasn’t Tremont until Papa died. Ergo, I was looking at an angel, not a memory or a dream. Or so I reasoned in my boyhood. I also knew I could not lose my wits—the Earl of Tremont did not see ghosts in his orchard—and I became passionately devoted to logic and philosophy from that point forward.”
“The men say you used to quote old Greeks and Romans by the quatrain, but I haven’t heard much of that.”
Tremont was silent for a time, his thumb rubbing gently across Matilda’s nape. His was a peaceful presence—a paradox, given how active his mind was—and she’d had too little of peace.
“I wanted safety,” he said. “As a boy who’d suffered the worst blow, as a peer too young for his responsibilities, as a youth who’d thrown himself into the moral cauldron of war, I wanted a system of infallible answers. Philosophers appeared to provide that refuge, but ancient aphorisms aren’t the bulwark I’d thought them to be.”
“I wanted safety too,” Matilda said slowly. “To me, that meant the respectability of marriage, relief from my father’s constant judgment, and distance from that chilly, grim parsonage.”
“We lived,” Tremont said, “and we learned, and now we love. May I show you something, Matilda?”
She was learning to read the subtle signs with Tremont. His question was almost casual, meaning whatever he had to show her was likely to be upsetting.
“You may.” She resumed her place beside him, and he took a folded piece of foolscap from his breast pocket.
“Nan Winklebleck drew that from memory.”
Matilda unfolded the paper, and as if some part of her mind knew what she’d see, she beheld a portrait of Harry and was not surprised.
“The eyebrows aren’t quite right,” Matilda said. “Harry parted his hair down the center, not to the side. He usually wore a mustache, and this fellow is clean-shaven. This looks like him, and yet, it might not be him.” She passed the sketch back, despite a temptation to study it further.
