Page 4 of Miss Dramatic
“Move,” she muttered when the chairs whispered to her toget off her feet. She’d been off her feet for the past four hours. “Do something before Timmens invades and starts in with her suggestions.”
Early in mourning, Rose had succumbed to the lure of inactivity. The attendant rituals of isolation and withdrawal made becoming one with a favorite wing chair all too easy. Not the bed—too many memories in the bed—but the couches, window seats, and reading chairs gracing nearly every room of Colforth Hall.
She’d stopped playing the piano, stopped riding out in the morning, stopped looking in on the tenants. Stopped living.
Timmens had been on hand then, too, always ready with a pillow for Rose’s feet, a shawl against a nonexistent chill. Loyalty like that deserved to be appreciated, though the cosseting itself had eventually driven Rose to stop moping.
“Move, my girl,” she muttered, turning her back on the chairs and the balcony with the pretty view of the Twid. “Put on your boots and sally forth.” The towpath along the river would be shaded and private, and a pleasant stroll would be just the thing for shaking the lethargy of travel from a lady’s mind.
Shaking Gavin DeWitt from her memories would be another matter entirely.
“The beauty of investing,” Hecate said, “is that you need only a little coin to do it.”
“Coin and a solicitor or agreeable male relative,” Amaryllis replied. One also needed aninterestin the subject, of which she was decidedly not possessed.
She and Hecate had hit a lull between arriving guests and had taken the opportunity to sit for a moment in the cool shade on the side terrace. The river made such a peaceful vista on three sides of the house, but Amaryllis’s favorite view was this one.
Orderly, but colorful and bucolic too. Some of the beds would have to be redone—no country household was complete without a spice garden and a medicinal garden, but for now the flowers were lovely.
“We have agreeable male relatives,” Hecate retorted, toeing off her slippers and putting her bare feet up on a hassock. “Phillip is as happy to learn about investing as I am to learn about management of Lark’s Nest.”
Phillip, whom Amaryllis had known for her whole life, was happy to do anything that allowed him to sit next to his new wife.
Amaryllis bestirred herself from a dragging temptation to close her eyes. “He’s more interested in investing than learning the quadrille?”
Hecate’s smile was impish, which Amaryllis would not have thought possible even three months ago. “Phillip has many fine qualities. If he never learns the quadrille, I will be content to partner him in other activities.”
His lordship had grown up on a neighboring estate, a quiet, bookish man who nonetheless was passionate about his acres. Few in Crosspatch Corners had known much of his antecedents, and over time, his parentage simply hadn’t mattered. Phillip was a good neighbor, an excellent farmer, and a generous friend.
He would bring the same focus and integrity to the business of being Hecate’s husband as he brought to his agrarian undertakings, and she would make him the most devoted of wives—or Amaryllis would know the reason why.
“Trevor will invest for us if I ask it of him,” Amaryllis said, “and I do mean Trevor. He might have Worth Kettering see to the details, or Ash Dorning, but we are done with old and respected firms of thieving reprobates.”
“Amen. I do hope the ladies will be amenable to my proposal. Investing wisely will allow us to do good while doing well.”
Hecate, when engaged on a topic, was like a girl in her first Season invited to discuss the ideal choice of fan. Inexhaustible, enthusiastic, and a fine soporific. Amaryllis was tempted to take off her own slippers, but nothing was more likely to inspire the arrival of the next guest than yielding to such an impulse.
“Some of the ladies will be interested in your scheme, some not. We will have a pleasant time nonetheless. Have you noticed how many of our guests have floral names?”
“Yours is a floral name,” Hecate replied. “Better that than a goddess of sorcery.”
“Phillip says you are the goddess of magic, and anyplace you bide becomes enchanted.”
Another of those pleased, wifely smiles. “I am afraid I will wake up to hear my cousins squabbling, their mother demanding to discuss her allowance with me, and my London butler rapping on the study door in that tap-of-doom way that conveyed family calling. Crosspatch Corners is so peaceful, so…”
“So beautiful.” The Twid made its placid meanders through the shire, the seasons wore their green, golden, and white finery by turns, and nobody could be bothered with who’d been denied a voucher to Almack’s.
A notion to inspire a lady to catch forty blissful winks. Amaryllis mentally batted the thought away and instead wondered if putting Mrs. Rose Roberts in the Rose Suite was badly done. She’d be more or less isolated on that side of the house, and widows endured enough isolation.
“Phillip says Gavin took the news of our gathering calmly,” Hecate observed. “You are Gavin’s sister. What do you think?”
“I think our husbands are trying to be subtle, but their matchmaking is about as hard to miss as Mr. Dabney discoursing in praise of mules.” A great fan of the mule was Mr. Dabney, proprietor of the local livery. His orations invariably inspired Vicar to counter with an exegesis on the virtue of the English hunter, whose stamina and bravery had brought the quality of British cavalry stock to near-Olympian heights.
“I think,” Hecate said, “that Gavin is a highly skilled actor, one who could have moved on to the London stage after his provincial tours. If he appeared calm at the prospect of a dozen single women of respectable social standing invading his neighborhood, he was giving yet another virtuoso performance.”
Amaryllis and Trevor had been spared the Nunnsuch house party by their newlywed status, but Gavin, Phillip, and Hecate had attended. For a few days, Gavin had been thrown into close proximity with Hecate as her informal bodyguard.
Gavin was a skilled actor, while Hecate had perfected the fine art of noticing more than she let on.
