Page 29 of Miss Determined
Heyward took an inordinate amount of time to pass over Trevor’s hat. The shy bumpkin was back on duty, or theslybumpkin.
“I’ll bring Jacques.” Amaryllis straightened a shooting jacket hanging from a peg along the wall and moved on to tidy up a plain wool cloak hanging beside it. “A hack before breakfast starts the day off on the right foot, but I’m not up for a public race. Phillip, you will keep an eye on Pearl?”
“And Dove and the lot of them. I’ll send word if there’s any change.”
“Thank you.” Amaryllis kissed his cheek. Heyward settled a cloak over her shoulders, and they smiled at each other like… cousins or something, though Trevor’s lady cousins had never smiled at him quite that sweetly.
“Come, Mr. Dorning,” Amaryllis said. “I’ll walk with you to the gateposts, and you can regale me with all the latest tattle from the Arms.”
She jaunted out the door and down the steps, leaving Trevor to bow a farewell to Heyward and join the lady as she set off along the drive.
“For a recluse, Heyward is friendly.” Also quite good-looking. His house, from what Trevor had noted, was also devoid of the recluse’s requisite cobwebs, bats, and lurking cats. Lark’s Nest appeared to be in better trim than Twidboro Hall.
“You asked about barley or hops or winter wheat,” Amaryllis said. “I forget which, and Phillip cannot help himself on topics such as that. His head is full to bursting with knowledge. He says he travels between the pages of his books.”
“Had I been in the slightest manner rude or condescending to Heyward, you would have put me in my place, wouldn’t you?” Like Jeanette had done to Trevor’s tutors when they had presumed to criticize the boyish imperfections of his penmanship.
Though Heyward wasn’t a boy and could probably have handed Trevor a tidy set-down without any assistance from anybody.
Amaryllis’s gait acquired a marching quality. “Had Phillip been rude to you—he can be very direct—I would have chided him as well. I feel as if my feet have been cold since Michaelmas. I’m ready for spring to get on with itself.”
A change of subject in any language was a change of subject. “You’ll miss him when you go to London,” Trevor said, thinking back to those old fellows lighting their pipes in France. “He’s a part of home for you.”
“Phillip is kind and sweet and a good neighbor, but every time I’m around him, I think, ‘Those dandies and diamonds in Mayfair would never see him for the treasure he is. They would ridicule him because he isn’t fashionable and he doesn’t lisp his gossip in French. I want to take a horsewhip to the lot of them.”
The lady was not complaining entirely on Phillip Heyward’s behalf.
“Mayfair Society includes some decent folk, Miss DeWitt. Good souls who behave with kindness and generosity toward others.” Jeanette was such a soul. Sycamore might be, too, beneath all his bluster. Goddard of a certainty was a fine specimen, and Trevor could name others.
The present Marquess of Tavistock, for example, wasn’t such a bad fellow, once you got to know him. He was putting a new roof on St. Nebo’s and making repairs at Twidboro Hall.
“You are right, of course,” Amaryllis said as the Lark Nest’s gateposts came into view. “Not everybody in Town is a backbiting tattler or an overdressed wastrel, but that seems to be the Society I found myself in most frequently. I truly dread returning to London.”
“Then don’t go. The solicitors cannot allow you to starve, and an independent investigator ought to be able to turn up some clue as to your brother’s whereabouts.”
“One must pay such investigators, Mr. Dorning, and Mama hoards every groat against our London expenses. Grandmama has written to every friend and acquaintance she can think of. I have made inquiries of Gavin’s friends, to the extent I could do so discreetly.”
She stopped at the bend in the lane and looked back toward Heyward’s manor house. Lark’s Nest was a half-timbered, whitewashed Tudor dwelling of three stories atop a sunken basement. The interior had been full of light owing to an abundance of mullioned windows, the flagstone floors had been uneven with age, and the hearths small.
A modest, aging jewel, but a jewel nonetheless.
“Papa tried to buy Twidboro,” Amaryllis said, shading her eyes with her hand, “but the old marquess would not sell. An offer on Lark’s Nest was similarly rejected out of hand, and now we can be tossed into the street at the new marquess’s whim. His lordship has a dozen properties, but he would not sell the least of them to us, not even for excessively generous coin. I loathe a snob, Mr. Dorning, but thanks to Lord Tavistock’s intransigence, I’ll likely have to marry one.”
Now that was… That was unfair. “Lord Tavistock did not snatch your brother away or decide the terms of your father’s will, Miss DeWitt.”
She rounded on him, and Trevor was both impressed and glad she hadn’t a horsewhip to hand. “You haven’t been paraded through half the ballrooms in Mayfair while the same men who sampled your wares ruin your chances of a decent match, the same men who promised tobethat decent match as they were pawing at your skirts. Lord Tavistock may not number among those knaves, but he is of their world and one of the authors of my family’s distress.”
They were in view of the house, so Trevor resumed walking around the bend, where they would have more privacy.
“Do you know what annoys me the most about you?” he said as Amaryllis stalked after him. “You are so confident, so competent, so capable and self-possessed. You can ride astride with no self-consciousness whatsoever. According to Raybourne, the village goes into a collective decline when you remove to Town. Your family clearly pins all their hopes of salvation upon you, but you have no idea, not the least dim inkling, how magnificent you are, how breathtakingly lovely and dear, and if you tell me who those blasted lordly arsewipes are, I will see them ruined in the next fortnight.”
She took him by the arm, forcing him to slow his pace. “How can a mere mister ruin an earl’s heir or a viscount’s spare?”
She ignored the lovely and dear part of his outburst. Of course, she did. “The same way they’d seek to ruin you—with talk. London runs on talk and money, and please recall that I’m connected to the Dornings and, through them, to the Haddonfields, who are on conspiring terms with the Windhams. The former Miss Emily Pepper is among the Dorning brides—she is quite the heiress—and one of the Dorning sisters married a viscount of her own.”
He stopped short of mentioning that the other Dorning sister had married Worth Kettering, and Kettering’s brother was an earl. Goddard and Jeanette had a Shropshire earl amongtheircousins-by-marriage, and a Welsh knight or baronet or something of the sort…
“You should throw more tantrums,” Amaryllis said. “One would almost think you are a peer when you’re all self-possessed and articulate. I like the fellow who splutters better.”
