Page 8 of A Delicate Deception
“Maybe I wanted the pleasure of your company,” Amelia suggested. She had been hoping she could sit on an overturned crate and watch him tend the horses, knowing that in his better moods he was capable of going hours without talking. Today Keating did not seem to be in one of his better moods.
“I’m not here to amuse you,” Keating grumbled. “You’re not here to be amused at all. You’re supposed to be in that room”—he pointed to the house—“writing books no decent man ought to know about. Fact is that you’re too young to be left on your own and I don’t know what your mother was thinking in letting you out of her sight.”
Amelia wrinkled her nose. She knew Keating was only trying to provoke her. She was hardly too young to be left alone. Her mother had already had three children at this age. But Amelia never came out well when she compared herself to her mother. It only made her feel inadequate, and then guilty because her mother would be the first to tell her she was merely different, not lacking. Her mother probably even believed it. She ought to be grateful to have this time and this space, but it seemed yet another way Amelia fell short of everyone’s expectations and needs, including her own.
“That was only the first book,” Amelia pointed out. “The rest have been quite respectable, as well you know. I was going to ask if I could watch you curry the horses.”
“And I was going to suggest that you bugg—run off. No, you can’t watch me. I’m not putting on a show.”
“You are in an exceptionally foul mood,” Amelia said. This probably meant he had suffered a falling-out with the ostler at the Swan or the curate or the traveling china mender or whoever his latest bedmate had been. She made up her mind to ensure that Janet sent over a slab of the treacle tart she was making, as long as the thing could be done without alerting Keating to anything that looked like solicitude. “Robin said you were pleasant company,” Amelia said with an exaggerated pout. Although, now that Amelia thought about it, what Robin had actually said was that Keating was a good man to have around in a pinch, which could mean a lot of things.
“You believe anything that yellow-haired slip of mischief says, you’re a fool,” he said with unmistakable fondness. “In fact,” he said, pointing the currying brush at her menacingly, “I’ve done my time putting up with shiftless young lunatics and I’m supposed to be enjoying a quiet retirement.”
“Ha! Is that what you’re calling it? And at your age,” she murmured.
“You know,” Keating said, shaking his head sadly, “I don’t think you’re quite a nice sort of girl.”
“I’ve been trying to tell you all that for years.”
“Figures, with the company you keep.” He gave her the Keating equivalent of a smile—one corner of his mouth hitched up in a grizzled cheek.
Well, if Keating wouldn’t let her hide in the stable, she had no choice but to go for a walk. The sun was in the wrong place in the sky. Very disconcerting. She paced along the shrubbery at the side of the house for a few minutes, but walking back and forth felt pointless. She followed her usual path along the edge of the property, and when it reached the lane she headed uphill, away from the village. There was a risk that she’d run into someone, most likely the vicar’s wife, who seemed to turn up precisely where one didn’t want her.
Usually she confined her walks to the perimeter of her property, sometimes completing two turns around it if the weather was especially fine. Other days—especially if she had Nan for company and nominal protection—she ventured further, exploring the countryside. That was what she had been doing when she ran into the land surveyor—she wished she knew his name—at the standing stones. And that was what she wanted to do today. She thought she might head in the direction of a ruined chapel she had once seen.
The branches were heavy with summer leaves, the air thick with the scent of blooming flowers. Bird calls and the sound of woodpeckers made an almost soothing rhythm until they started to take the shape of the sounds that would drift into her bedroom window in London, a hum of voices, hoofbeats, cart wheels. She quickened her pace.
Then the sounds changed again, resembling footsteps, loud enough that she turned her head to see a man approaching on foot, as if she had conjured the sight out of her fancy. It was, however, only the land surveyor.
“Oh, bother,” he said, his expression comically dismayed, his eyebrows knitting together with stern disapproval.
“A good afternoon to you too, sir,” she said, suppressing a laugh.
“I only meant— Now you’re definitely going to think I’m following you.”
Anyone who actually wanted to see Amelia would know she wasn’t usually abroad in the middle of the day. “I think nothing of the sort. However, if you’re heading up this path, I wonder if I might impose upon you to walk with me so as to protect me from the vicar’s wife.”
“For a minute I thought you wanted my protection from brigands, and I was afraid I’d have to disoblige you by telling you I wouldn’t know the first thing to do.”
“I don’t think you’d need to do anything. Just stand there looking all large and cross. Besides, who cares about brigands? They would be unlikely to try and foist off their maiden aunt as my chaperone.”
“Ah, so that’s the fate you wish to escape. Most understandable.”
This was, by any standard, an actual conversation. And Amelia did not know why it was not burdensome to her, whereas the prospect of mere pleasantries with a duke made her mind fray at the edges. Perhaps it was because this man in his plain coat and worn trousers, his jaw dusted with the beginnings of a beard, his hair uncombed, seemed as far from her former life as she was likely to get.
“She means well, which only makes it worse. So will you walk with me?” she asked, hoping that she didn’t sound too eager. But shewaseager, and for reasons she preferred to ignore—something to do with the breadth of his shoulders and his ready blush, the way his laugh sounded rusty and seemed to come as a shock to him. Even as she glanced up at him, she saw color spread across his cheekbones, and she bit her lip.
“I very nearly called on you to ask your name,” Sydney admitted.
When thinking of her—which he realized he was doing with inexplicable frequency—there was a blankness where her name belonged. But with names came explanations, personal histories, family background, and right now he enjoyed the sense that they were just two people, sharing sunshine and scenery, nothing tying them to this world except what they did and said. Still, it seemed vaguely inappropriate to have met a person three times without knowing their name.
“Call on me?” she said. “How drastic. You could have asked anyone in the neighborhood.”
With a start, he realized she was right—he need only have asked the Pelham land steward the name of his new tenant. He was not accustomed to overlooking obvious solutions; he would not have the career he did if he weren’t in the habit of solving problems efficiently and automatically. The fact that he hadn’t done something so obvious made him suspicious of his own mind, and he had to acknowledge that he had avoided learning her name for the simple reason that he wished to withhold his own: she would hear Goddard, and know him to be the owner of Pelham Hall. The truth was that he feared that this friendship—even though it was probably presumptuous to call it so—would be crushed by anything so solid as names and identities, anything as weighty as his complicated grief and his reasons for being here. Friendship, as far as Sydney could tell, was rare and fragile, not a naturally occurring substance, and he wasn’t quite certain what he had to do to preserve it. He steeled himself for some minor dishonesty—not actual lying, only a bit of delicate evasion.
“My name is Sydney,” he said.
“Mr. Sydney.” She nodded and gave him a wintry little smile that he supposed was what ladies did upon introductions. He hated it and already regretted broaching this topic.
