Page 38 of Miss Determined
“I hope we meet again soon, Mr. Dorning.”
“I will sustain myself with the same ambition, Miss DeWitt. Don’t be too hard on Sycamore. Whatever else is true, he means well.”
“Thus do all busybodies excuse their meddling.” She clucked to Jacques, who ambled down the drive at a placid walk. Sycamore steered his mount beside Jacques, and Trevor watched a piece of his heart disappear around the bend.
Au revoir, ma chérie.
“Here,” Heyward said, passing over a square of red silk. “You can return that to Lissa for me.”
Or Heyward could have passed it to her at any time in the previous hour and a half. “This is her handkerchief?”
“What use would I have for a red silk frippery, Dorning? Come along, and you can pretend to marvel at my humble abode.”
Heywardknew. He at least knew that Trevor and Amaryllis had been kissing—the blasted hat had given that much away—and he might well know more than that.
“Your humble abode looks to be in excellent repair,” Trevor said some thirty minutes later.
Heyward had taken him not quite from the attics to the pantries, but through all the public rooms and into the cellars. The kitchen was an old-fashioned half-sunken marvel of vaulted stonework with a hearth large enough for a man to stand in upright.
“I keep after it,” Heyward said, twisting off a few leaves of mint from a potted specimen in the windowsill over the copper sink. “I do, after all, spend most of my time on my own property.”
“I haven’t spent enough time on my property,” Trevor said as the mint filled the kitchen with a pungent aroma. “Why don’t you rely on your landlord to manage the repairs?” That was the law—the landlord alone had the right and responsibility to maintain his asset.
Heyward crushed the mint between his palms and tossed it into a pot of water simmering over the coals in the hearth. “I do as I please here. Were you doing as you pleased with Miss DeWitt?”
Heyward moved around the kitchen not like the lord of the manor, which he was, but like the head stable lad come in for a pint between chores.
“The boot was on the other foot,” Trevor said. “Miss DeWitt made up her mind that I was worthy of her notice, and she has certainly earned my esteem.”
Heyward’s smile was fleeting and sweet. “Good for Lissa, then, but mind your step, Dorning. Lissa did not have an easy time of it in London, and now Mourna is determined to drag her back there. I have only the one strong arm, but if you forget your manners where the DeWitts are concerned, you’ll learn that I have strength enough to cause you a few regrets.”
“Thank heavens somebody is bestirring himself to make threats on the ladies’ behalf. Where the hell has the brother got off to?”
The smile came again, this time bringing with it a fleeting hint of familiarity. Somebody else Trevor knew smiled like that, a private amusement given momentary expression. A little mischievous, a little rueful… That smile was charming, implying goodwill in the face of life’s many conundrums.
Heyward led the way up the steps and took Trevor to the parlor where Amaryllis had presided over the tea tray the previous day.
“Gavin DeWitt was discontent in Crosspatch,” Heyward said, gesturing for Trevor to take the chair nearest the fire. “He had no interest in managing the family business, which I gather is actually a network of businesses. The lot is run by competent managers, from what I can tell. Gavin would have been in the way, and worse, he would have directly associated himself with the shop, when his grandmother and parents were dedicated to distancing him from it.”
Amaryllis’s words came back to Trevor, about fashionable Society disdaining the classes that made all their finery and frolic possible.
“That tells us what Gavin did not want, but where did his ambition lie?”
Heyward poked up the fire, tossed another square of peat on the flames, and took the opposite wing chair.
“Gavin was an excellent storyteller,” Heyward said. “You might think that a mere party trick, but here, where we’ve no theater, no gentlemen’s clubs, no social whirl, the fellow who can sit in the common and spin an old yarn into new entertainment is valued. He spent time with all the elders, listening to them reminisce. He was great friends with the herb lady, who knew all manner of miraculous tales. Gavin is the reason the witching oak still stands.”
“He made up that story about the tree being haunted?” The chair was well cushioned, the parlor cozy, and the company inviting, but the portrait over the mantel prevented the moment from being entirely comfortable.
Mama to the life, but a more lighthearted version of the lady than Trevor had ever known.
“The witching oak story might have been languishing in the Husey family’s fading memory,” Heyward said. “Gavin dusted it off, reenacted the drunken particulars, and turned it into our local version of Tam O’Shanter. The tree is safe for another hundred years at least.”
What did this story say about the man who’d seen its potential and saved the tree? “He’s clever, then, and likes being the center of attention.”
The fresh fuel caught, and the fire blazed a little higher. “Not quite, but close. Gavin was the only son, then the only male, in the DeWitt family. He was quite the center of attention, more than any fellow could enjoy, though Lissa has always run Twidboro. When she was a child, she’d drop by the kitchen and suggest dishes to the housekeeper on menu day. She looks after the tenants, settles their squabbles, fusses over the new babies, and takes tea with the elders.”
“Gavin should have been doing that?”
