Page 25 of Miss Dramatic
Roland sighed.
“I saw her first,” Gavin murmured. “You’ll have to find your own filly, my lad.”
Roland lifted his tail and, as was his wont, broke wind at length.
“Behave like that in the presence of a lady, and I’ll gallop you straight to the knacker’s yard.” Gavin swung back into the saddle and turned his steed for Twidboro Hall. The outing had been sufficiently lengthy and athletic that Roland was content to walk, though he did give a prodigious shy at nothing when Gavin turned onto the towpath.
Well, not nothing. “Caroline, good day.” She occupied the same notch in the same maple Gavin had often preferred for memorizing sonnets. “Will you join us for the walk home?”
She studied him for a few moments, while the Twid babbled past, and Roland’s ears flicked in all directions.
“Roland, it’s only me. You mustn’t be in a taking every time you find a girl in a tree. Contemplatives love trees.” She climbed down rather than leaping, doubtless in deference to Roland’s delicate nerves. “See? It’s your own Caro, silly beast.”
She held out a hand, which Roland tentatively sniffed. They had a relationship involving carrots and curry combs. Gavin suspected Caroline had turned to his horse for comfort when she’d found herself deprived of a resident big brother.
And maybe the horse had been comforted too. “Shall you ride up before me?”
She wanted to. Gavin could see the longing in her eyes, the wistful yearning for a pleasure they’d shared when she’d been small, and he’d been—to her—the older, wiser, adult brother who’d always made time for her and her troubles.
“I’m not a toddler to be riding astride on my pony,” Caroline said, scratching beneath Roland’s chin. “You hacked out with Mrs. Roberts.”
“You spied on us.”
“I was in plain sight. You were too absorbed to see me.”
Caroline was clearly unhappy about that. Gavin dismounted. “Up you go. Sit aside if you must, but please don’t grow up any sooner then you have to. Adulthood, I assure you, is vastly overrated.”
Still, Caroline hesitated, and Gavin wanted to howl. She’d been a little girl when he’d left, a small, sprightly, curious person who overheard much and said little. Now she was too tall, too dignified, and lost to him in some awful, permanent way.
“A leg up, if you please.” As imperious as the Queen of the May.
Gavin obliged, and Caroline was soon perching aside in his saddle, which she accomplished with surprising grace despite the lack of a horn around which to secure her knee.
“Will you marry Mrs. Roberts?” she asked, taking up the reins as Gavin ran up the offside stirrup.
“We rode out together, Caroline. To the village and back for a pint of cider at the Arms. That is hardly a romantic interlude.”
Roland daundered along as placidly as an old pony, Gavin in step beside him.
“Lately,” Caroline said, “you have the same look in your eyes that you had before you went away. I thought going to the Hampshire house party might agree with you, but the look was still there when you came back. Now Amaryllis is married, Diana is planning her come out, Mr. Heyward is marriedandhe’s Lord Phillip now, and you have that gleam in your eyes again.”
Gavin walked with his horse, recalling many such chats he’d had with Caroline when teaching her to ride. Put a quiet little girl on an equine, and she gained confidence in more than just her seat.
“What gleam would that be?”
“Restless, unhappy. I don’t care for it. Trevor says you need to indulge your manly humors, and I know what that means, Gavin, but you aren’t calling on Tansy, which would addressthatproblem, if it even is a problem.”
Stop growing up. Just stop.“You are trying to shock me. That is usually Diana’s tactic, when she isn’t murdering everybody’s peace in the key of C major.”
“Diana is a talented musician. Why do we all pretend she’s only making noise? I could practice until Domesday and never be half as good as she is.”
Gavin heard the unspoken lament:I’m not good at anything. I’m not grown up and brilliant like Lissa. I’m not pretty and charming like Di. I’m not sweet and kind like Mama. I can’t recite all the plays by heart like you.
“I suspect Di fortified herself by controlling the keyboard when she couldn’t control anything else,” Gavin said.
“Like you ride Roland hell-bent all over the shire?”
Caroline sat atop the horse, to all appearances just a girl enjoying an impromptu pony ride, not the oracle of Crosspatch Corners she’d apparently become.
