Page 68 of A Sense of Misgiving
*
The next few days passed in a blur, and yet somehow time also seemed to drag. Flora felt constantly tired and emotionally drained, reading day after day of all the good her grandmother had done with her herbal cures. Her grandfather too had brought comfort to so many people with his séances. Was that not what religion was supposed to do, she reflected? Supply comfort in anguished times? Give people something to…well, have faith in. Why must there only be one true god, and who got to say which god that was?
She shook her head, trying not to feel aggrieved because she hadn’t seen Luke since before he went off to rescue Mary. She knew he was now in Sussex, dealing with problems at one of his other properties. She also knew that she had no claim on his time, and realised that it would not be wise to get into the habit of leaning on him for support. She felt angry with herself for having become dependent upon a gentleman so far above her in the order of things that he could be forgiven for forgetting her name. He would marry sooner or later, she reminded herself, and his new countess would have something to say about a paid companion who failed to remember her place.
She took comfort from the fact that when that time came she would at least have enough savings and income on which to live. She reapplied herself to her grandmother’s journals, going back to the one that covered the time when her grandfather had died, two years after her own birth. On this occasion she noticed an anomaly that she had previously overlooked. There was a section missing from the book. No pages had been torn out, but an entire week’s worth of activities around the crucial period had not been recorded. That had not happened before. Her grandmother had been a dedicated diarist and there were entries for every day, faithfully recording every little thing that she did.
Flora put the book aside and pondered for a moment. Something exceptional must have happened during that period. Well of course it had! Her grandfather had died, and her grandmother would have been grief-stricken. But that did not, Flora sensed, account for the missing entries. Grandmamma might not have been able to write about her terrible loss when it was still so fresh and painful, but Flora was convinced that she would have gone back and recorded the particulars of that unhappy time when she felt more composed. She had left the diaries to Flora, who was absolutely convinced that she would have wanted her to know all the painful details.
‘So where is it, Grandmamma? What is it that you want me to know and that Papa is equally anxious to keep from me?’
She felt her grandmother’s comforting presence all around her, flowing from her possessions and fuelling the atmosphere, but it brought her no nearer to finding the missing entries. Flora tapped a finger against her teeth as she contemplated her dilemma. Grandmamma had never hidden her diaries. Flora clearly recalled the current one always having pride of place in the centre of her dresser. Flora wouldn’t have dreamt of reading them, but she wouldn’t put anything past her father. If there had been something contentious or suspicious about her grandfather’s death, it would make sense that it was not openly recorded.
‘Suspicious? What am I thinking?’
She had to know the truth, no matter how unpalatable, and searched through her grandmother’s letters, which she had not yet had the courage to explore in detail, with renewed focus. When nothing untoward came to light, she turned her attention to her books. She had almost given up hope of finding anything when he fingers fell upon a thin wedge of papers, sealed with wax, lodged carefully inside the protective sleeve of her grandmother’s handwritten book of herbal remedies.
The book had been Grandmamma’s bible and since acquiring it, Flora had taken it to bed with her every night to study and to learn from. She recalled her grandmother labouring over it, adding and amending remedies as she assessed their effectiveness. Flora had often sat at her side, listening, watching and absorbing everything. Learning at the feet of an expert herbalist. It ought to have occurred to her at once that anything of significance would be concealed within that weighty tome, but the papers had been so well affixed that she had only found them when the outer sleeve slipped.
Flora studied the wax. It had cracked but remained unbroken. There was no address on the outside of the papers, but then there didn’t need to be. This was intended for her. Flora took a deep breath, feeling a great sense of foreboding. With shaking hands, she broke the seal and began to read.
*
‘I appreciate your company, but you really don’t need to dedicate so much of your time to me.’ Mary paused, in the process of attempting to capture the likeness of a heron that stood statue-like in the lake’s shallows. ‘I am quite recovered from my ordeal.’
‘Then take pity on me,’ Paul replied, making an adjustment to his own sketch. ‘Luke has taken himself off and I am entirely without occupation. Look upon me as a charitable cause if it helps.’
Mary laughed. ‘You are never that.’ She tilted her head to one side, using the end of her pencil to push aside a strand of hair that kept blowing across her eyes. ‘Why is it so difficult to draw a bird’s beak? The obliging creature has posed without moving a feather for ten minutes now, but I still can’t get it right.’
‘It’s out of proportion.’
Paul leaned over her to indicate the area where she had got it wrong. The spicy aroma of his cologne assailed her senses, making her feel a little breathless. She glanced at his rugged profile. It should have been so familiar to her, and yet it felt as though she was seeing him for the first time. She looked down at his hands, still bruised and cracked at the knuckles from where he had struck Captain Redfern. Now they guided her pencil across the paper, a stroke here, a line there, righting her portrayal of the heron in a few gentle and instinctive movements.
Atingle of awareness trickled down her spine when his arm bushed against her. She sent him a look of mild astonishment, thinking she must have imagined her reaction. This was Paul. Solid, dependable, fun-loving Paul. A man she had known since her infancy. A man who had made some sort of sacrifice that had prevented him from carving out an independent career on his own terms. A man who could achieve anything he set out to do, but who chose to remain here as Luke’s right-hand. A man who never complained, exercised endless patience and who she appeared to be noticing as a woman was supposed to notice a man for the very first time.
How peculiar.
Mary shook off her sudden and turbulent reaction to him, imagining she must still be unsettled following her narrow escape from Captain Redfern. But she had never responded to the captain’s accidental touch quite so violently. She felt tremors still trickling through her. Pleasurable tremors that she’d never experienced before that pooled deep within her core and spread throughout her body. Her stomach felt weightless and her pulse quickened. It was most unnerving.
‘Thank you.’ She concentrated her burning face on her sketchpad, but sensed Paul’s gaze fixed upon her profile. Had he felt it, too? ‘You’re right. I can quite see it now.’
‘Are you really recovered from your ordeal, or do you seek to reassureme?’ he asked her after a short silence in which they both gave their full attention to their sketches.
‘I believe so. I feel that if I allow myself to wallow in self-pity then he would have won.’ Mary sighed. ‘I was an idiot to be so easily taken in by the man and cause so much trouble.’
‘Perhaps you should reconsider your decision not to have a season,’ Paul remarked. ‘The rules are more stringent in the capital. You would not be allowed to venture out without a maid or some other form of chaperone in such an environment.’
Mary shuddered. ‘Even so, the thought does not appeal. There are just as many fortune hunters’ prowling the salons of the capital, I’m sure.’ She sighed. ‘I shall never really know if I am being pursued for myself or my fortune.’
‘If any man did not want you for who you are then he would be a damned fool who did not deserve you.’
Paul spoke with such violent passion that Mary sent him a surprised look. ‘Thank you, but you are biased.’
‘And you should not doubt your own good qualities.’
‘Ha! I must sound terribly spoiled to you. I have everything I could wish for. A comfortable home, a loving family and financial security—and yet I appear dissatisfied.’ She glanced up at him. ‘Unlike you, no sacrifices have been asked of me.’
Annoyingly, he didn’t cast any light on the precise nature of the sacrifice he’d been required to make.
