Page 23 of Miss Dramatic
They turned onto the sun-dappled towpath in the direction of the village. Sid was a seasoned lady’s mount, happy to toddle along, and Roland seemed willing to follow his example.
“My talent, as you call it, doesn’t signify,” Gavin said, “except as it comes to bear on a new role. I have never been a country squire before, and Mama has never been an in-law to a peer. She is at sixes and sevens. One moment, she’s awash in glee with high expectations for Diana and Caroline, the next she’s poring over DeBrett’s and scolding me for how I knot my cravat.”
“You don’t have a valet?”
“In a small theater troupe, we often had to change clothes from the skin out in less than three minutes, without assistance, several times in a single performance. I have a valet. He tends to my clothing, and I guard my privacy as best I can.”
“I was to acquire a companion when I graduated to second mourning. As if having a stranger hovering about would somehow improve the situation.” Timmens’s words, and for once Rose had been appreciative of an outspoken lady’s maid.
“But you managed without a companion quite well.”
“I needed privacy more than I needed to appease the expert jury in the churchyard.” And Rose needed tonot do this. To not slip back into exchanging confidences with Gavin DeWitt and trusting him to exercise a loyal friend’s discretion.
A lover’s discretion. A lover who’d had no need of her coin, but had expected payment all the same.
“Good for you,” Gavin said as a quartet of ladies came around a bend in the path. Roland shied, then recovered himself. Sid took barely any notice of the foot traffic or of Roland’s lapse. “If you were missing your Dane, then all the companions in the world would serve no purpose but to impose on you a burden of pleasant manners and agreeable behavior.”
That was the sort of honest, kind, socially suspect response she’d learned to expect from him. He’d forever been encouraging her, putting her at ease with her own feelings.
All part of the service?
“Ladies.” He tipped his hat. “Good day. You’ve plundered the shops to your satisfaction?”
“We conquered the ladies’ parlor at the Arms too,” Miss Peasegood said, nodding earnestly. “Miss Tansy Pevinger tried to warn us about her mama’s cider, but we were heedless of caution. This is a frequent failing on our parts.”
“We left not a hair ribbon unpurchased in the whole of Crosspatch Corners,” Lady Iris said. “Your local maidens will be tying their tresses with purloined yarn.”
Her admission provoked peals of merriment, a sound Rose had also heard the previous evening. Women laughing, truly enjoying one another’s company. Being a bit silly and possibly even tipsy in broad daylight.
She wanted to join in the banter, and she wanted to gallop all the way back to Hampshire.
“Then you must stash your booty in yonder smuggler’s cave,” Gavin said, nodding in the direction of Miller’s Lament. “If the Sheriff of Nottingham and hisposse comitatuscome looking for you, Mrs. Roberts and I will direct them to London.”
“Robin Hood is mine,” Miss Peasegood said, nose in the air. “Lady Iris, you can have that Alan fellow if we spot him in his Sherwood green.” The women trundled off, arguing with good-natured vehemence over the fate of Little John, who fought so wellwith pike and staff.
“What’s wrong?” Gavin asked when the horses were again plodding along the path. “You look as if the expert jury just found you not guilty by reason of insufficient evidence.”
The Scottish verdict, condemnation without capital consequences. “They are happy,” Rose said. “Unmarried, aging, and entirely pleased with themselves. They will never be widows.”
“That upsets you.”
Gavin stated what to him was likely obvious, but came as something of a revelation to Rose herself.
“I went to London when I first put off mourning,” she said. “I should not be telling you this, but when has that stopped me from confiding in you? I saw Dane’s mistress, the woman who’d drawn him back to Town over and over. I kept the Colforth books, and the first time a jeweler’s invoice ended up with the monthly bills, I paid it, thinking my Christmas token would be very fine indeed.”
Gavin kept his peace. Rose had always appreciated his way with a silence, damn him.
“Dane gave me a set of earbobs for Christmas. Pearls, quite nice. Understated. They matched the bracelet he’d given me the year before. I’ve managed to since misplace the lot. The jeweler had sought payment for emeralds. Emeralds can cost more than diamonds. She looked like me. Emeralds would have suited her.”
A fish leaped, the sound a little punctuation of an otherwise placid summer afternoon.
“I am sorry, Rose.”
“Dane wasn’t. He tried to jolly me past my outrage—what was a bit of frolic when he was far from Hampshire? Surely the fact that he put a roof over my head signified more than his passing fancies ever could.”
“Emeralds are not a bit of frolic, and emeralds weren’t the point.”
“Precisely. My settlements pulled Colforth Hall back from the brink. My dower properties are why that estate is profitable even now. My mill, my leaseholds… Dane no more put a roof over my head than I presented him with triplet sons. Why can’t I put this behind me?”
