Page 146 of The Ladies Least Likely
“It’s calf love,” Mal said. “Sentimental and self-indulgent. ’Tis not how a man looks at the woman he considers his proper mate.”
“Oh? And what does that expression resemble, pray tell?” she asked, more sharply than she intended.
She twisted to face him, and his look halted the rest of her accusation. His eyes were still serious but held a deep, warm light. He studied her as if he were probing her mind, weighing the emotions behind her words. His gaze touched every part of her face, not with timid reverence or indulgent fancy but with thoughtful attention. As if he inspected a real woman, cataloging all her perfections and flaws, and understood the person they came to form in whole.
As if he saw her, through and through. And approved what he saw.
Her response to this attention was much more than gentle warmth. A raw rush of vulnerability plummeted through her core, stunning in its intensity. She felt the absurd and very dangerous urge to lean against the tall, broad strength of him and fasten her lips to his. She wanted to twine her arms about him and never let go.
She stepped backwards. Her foot caught in the groove between cobbles, and she righted herself as his hand snaked out to grasp her wrist.
Mal could not see her and like her. He could not know the truth. The real Amaranthe was a liar and a thief. He would never look at her again with that warmth, with that cherishing, if he knew the things she had done.
“I hope Joseph will still have his position at Hunsdon House if he returns to us heartbroken and alone,” she said instead. “He is likely to need it.”
She turned away as if she had not just read his heart in his eyes, an honest declaration. As if she had not just admitted she had nothing to give him in return.
“Tell me about Mal’s mother.”
Amaranthe sat in the warm kitchen with the Littlejohns. For two days they’d pitched in with projects around the inn, Mal hammering and hauling, painting shutters and fixing signs, and Amaranthe helping Beatrice air linens and organize the storerooms. The Littlejohns had plenty of assistance in the youths of many ages, boy and girl, who darted around the place, for they had continued the practice of taking children from the workhouse and giving them employment and a home. They had no children of their own making, but Bea had expressed no lament about that. She treated their helpers as part of the family, and she was full of stories about a coaching daughter who had lately married and set up a home of her own, with a baby on the way.
Amaranthe found the delay in reaching Favella, and Reuben, did not bother her very much. She liked Mal’s sense of duty toward his family. Besides, the thought of seeing her cousin again filled her with cold dread.
“I’m curious about her. Mal’s mother,” she said in answer to Bea’s surprised look. “I’ve gathered what his relationship with his father was like, but Mal doesn’t speak of his mother very often.”
Mal was busy in one of the storerooms that opened off the kitchen, fixing the hooks in the rafters that held cuts of meat for curing and herbs for drying. She watched his back, coatless again, shirtsleeves rolled up, muscles flexing beneath his waistcoat. He had to have heard, but he didn’t comment on her interference.
“Marguerite,” Beatrice said softly. “Her name was Marguerite. Born two years afore me, she was, and lovely as a flower.”
Between them on the table sat wooden bowls overflowing with the cherries the two women had gathered that afternoon from the gardens behind the coaching inn. Beatrice’s pile of pitswas already much larger than Amaranthe’s, but she was making a good show of herself.
“That’s the name of a flower in medieval French,” Amaranthe remarked. “The daisy. Though in Latin sourcesmargueritecould also mean pearl, a word that comes from Old Persian. Marguerite, Queen of Navarre wrote a wonderful collection of short stories, theHeptameron,sixteenth-century French.I translated a poem of hers, ‘The Mirror of the Sinful Soul,’ for which she was called a heretic, because?—”
She looked up and paused, her small knife halfway through a round ripe cherry, and blinked to see all of them watching her. “Forgive my prattle. I am interested in languages and old literature.”
“Marguerite liked old things, too,” Beatrice said with a smile, pushing aside a cherry pit with the side of her knife. “Our girl was as quick and lively as you ever saw. It was no surprise to us that she captured a duke.”
“He wasn’t a duke at the time.” Mal’s voice drifted to them, subdued. “Just an elder son and heir back from his Grand Tour, with nothing to do but roister around the countryside seducing innocent damsels.”
“He was Lord Vernay then?” Amaranthe focused on extracting the pit of the fruit before her, as if the inquiry were entirely casual, but still she felt Mal’s eyes upon her.
“Aye.” Beatrice sighed. “She always swore they married, but she could never say where she put her copy of the marriage lines that she took from the priest. She had a spell when the lad left her, you see. Quite wild and out of her head with fever for a long while. I was married to Littlejohn by then, but Vernay put her up in a little home of her own overlooking the Avon Gorge. When I moved her here with us I searched all her things and found no trace of a document.
“We all begged him not to trifle with her, we did,” Bea went on. “Knowing she was already sick. But young ones in love? When do they ever heed sense?” She shook her head as if she had not been young herself then, and equally in love, though to a steadier man.
“Sick with what?” Amaranthe couldn’t help asking.
“Consumption,” Beatrice answered. “Caught it as a girl, methinks, and was never free of it. When you live by the water, how do you escape the damp?” She dabbed at her eye with a corner of her apron, her fingers stained red with juice.
“She might have lived if he could have taken her away somewhere,” Beatrice went on. “I often think that. Fresh, clean air on a country estate might have saved her. But the duke came looking for his heir, and when he found the lad had set up house with Marguerite, he was livid. He forced the boy to leave her behind, and I brought her here when she started to swell with child.”
Bea sniffed and pressed the back of her hand to her nose. “She lingered a long time, with proper care, but when she learned he’d married…I think that broke her heart. After that, she lost strength so quickly.”
She glanced toward the storeroom with blurry eyes. “She wanted more than anything to see you a grown man, Mal, but her lungsandher heart, broken together—she couldn’t bear it.”
“My father told me once she was the only woman he’d loved.” Mal spoke with his back to them, but Amaranthe heard the stiffness in his voice and guessed he held back strong emotion. “Yet I notice he never came back until well after she’d died.”
“Nay, you can’t blame him if he couldn’t bear to see her so ill,” Bea sniffled. “Not many as could. They’re not all as hale and brave as your Uncle Littlejohn, are they?” She gave her husband a watery smile, and he responded with a gruff rumble of confirmation.
