Miss Determined, page 14
“London is no different, Lissa.”
“London is worse, but I live in the hope that Mr. Clementi won’t be accompanying us.” The squabbling from the music room had escalated to the I-hate-you and you-are-not-my-sister phase, so Lissa set aside her bonnet and prepared to speak peace unto the heathen.
“Put them on bread and porridge for a week,” Grandmama said. “A good smack to the fingers wouldn’t go amiss either, and no fire in the nursery until they recall their manners.”
Neither Diana nor Caroline had set foot in the nursery for years. “They are anxious because we will soon leave home for Town. Mama hasn’t decided whether the girls are to come with us or bide here.”
Diana delivered her signature and entirely mendacious, “I will never speak to you again!” Which was met with Caroline’s familiar, “Let the rejoicing begin!”
Lissa opened the door to the music room in time to catch Diana sticking out her tongue and Caroline brushing at her cheek with her cuff. They stood six paces apart, so the final phase of the hostilities—hair pulling—was still a few minutes off.
“Why is Di so mean?” Caroline wailed. “I try to practice, and every time I do, Di comes around and says she has to practice, and she’s older, so she gets first crack at the piano, and then Mama says she has a megrim and no more pianoforte for the day, and I hate stupid duets anyway.”
Lissa wrapped her arms around Caroline, who was still enough of a child to accept the embrace. She was gaining height, though, and Lissa prayed that a merciful God would not visit too many more inches on a girl who already bore the burden of bright red hair.
“Diana,” Lissa said, “you have hurt your younger sister’s feelings.”
“Caroline can’t keep up. She doesn’t practice nearly as much as I did at her age,”—delivered with a nasty little emphasis—“and the piece is in the simplest possible key.”
I am ashamed of you. The words begged to be spoken in the most disappointed and imperious tones, but that would engender more spatting. Caroline tried hard, but she lacked Diana’s appetite for attention, and thus her playing was more circumspect.
More plodding, truth be told. More cautious and dull.
“You were a fiend at Caroline’s age,” Lissa said, “while Caroline is more drawn to the natural world. I will practice the duet with Caroline until we’re confident of the fingering, but you have to admit you set a blazing pace.”
Diana sank onto the piano bench facing outward. “I love to go fast.”
Caroline pulled away from Lissa and sat beside Di. “But you stumble on the difficult passages because you don’t make yourself work out the fingering. I don’t want to trip and fall at the cadenza. That’s the last, hardest flourish, and everybody will recall that I couldn’t manage it no matter how many arpeggios I played correctly.”
“Who is everybody?” Diana countered. “Grandmama? Lissa? The cat?”
Insight struck with painful certainty. Everybody did not include Gavin, who’d always encouraged Diana’s music and admired the wild flowers Caroline collected along the river.
“Gavin has been gone two years,” Lissa said. “Two years this week. We miss him.” She’d attributed the same upheaval last year to her impending Season and realized only in hindsight that the anniversary of Gavin’s disappearance had complicated matters.
“We worry about him.” Caroline plucked at her damp and wrinkled cuff. “I am tired of praying that God will keep him safe, but I’m afraid to pray that God will send him home, because if Gav doesn’t come home, maybe he can’t come home, and w-won’t ever.”
“I said I’d never speak to him again when he made fun of my bird bonnet,” Diana said. “A fortnight later, I spoke to him for the last time.”
They both looked so young and so forlorn. “Not the last time. England has rules about recording deaths and notifying the home parish and so forth.”
“Do highwaymen and cutpurses follow those rules?” Diana asked.
“He’s not dead.” Caroline for once sounded more mulish than Diana. “I’d know it. He said he could not wait to see how beautiful I was when I grew up, because I was so lovely in girlhood. He will come home.”
Oh, Gavin. “I agree,” Lissa said. “He will come home, and when we are done rejoicing at his return, we will stick out our tongues at him and never speak to him again for at least an hour. Until he does come wandering back to us, though, somebody has to sew the new trimming on my old bonnets, and I nominate you two.”
“Caroline sews straighter seams than I do,” Diana said. “She has more patience.”
Caroline was concerned that not even her stitchery reflect poorly on her, and that broke Lissa’s heart, but Diana was apologizing after a fashion.
“Perhaps you can serenade us while Caroline and I work at our straight seams. Mama says every bonnet must be retrimmed.”
“Only poor people retrim their bonnets,” Diana said. “Are we poor, Lissa?”
“We are frugal. Our only poverty is a lamentable lack of menfolk to deal with the solicitors. We are, in fact, wealthy, though we would never be so ill-bred as to mention that beyond ourselves, would we?”
Diana twirled on the piano bench and laid her fingers on the keys. “Of course not, but retrimming bonnets never fooled anybody.”
“Play the F major, Di.” Caroline rose and shook out her skirts. “I like retrimming bonnets.”
Lissa hated it. As Diana had noted, retrimming last year’s millinery was the hallmark of straitened finances, also tedious beyond bearing. “Come along, then, Caroline, and we will festoon my hats with rainbows.”
They found Grandmama asleep, her mouth slightly open. Lissa gently eased the embroidery hoop from her fingers, tucked the needle into a corner of the fabric, and draped a lap robe over Grandmama’s knees. In sleep, Grandmama looked more frail than usual, more vulnerable, and she was dropping off in the middle of the day more frequently.
She had yet to fall asleep at table, but that day was doubtless close at hand. The London tabbies would not let that behavior go unremarked.
“When did you plan to tell me that Mr. Heyward timed Roland over a half mile this morning?” Caroline asked, taking up the half-completed pink ribbon project. “Cook says Mr. Dorning let Roland have his head, and he ran like a hound with his nose halfway to the ground.”
“We actually had two Mr. Dornings present,” Lissa said. “One of Mr. Trevor Dorning’s distant relations—Mr. Sycamore Dorning—has come out from Town. They are mad keen to brew beer commercially or something.”
Grandmama’s hand twitched, and then her eyes opened. “Where is my…?” She patted around her lap. “Who took my hoop?”
Lissa fished the requisite item out of her workbasket. “You were resting your eyes. I didn’t want this to fall to the floor.” She passed over the embroidery,
The look Grandmama gave her was odd. A little wary, a little suspicious, as if she might not have heard Lissa clearly.
“I don’t suppose you have my spectacles in that workbasket, young Lissa?”
Caroline looked up from her stitchery. “Your eyeglasses are about your neck, Grandmama. You always wear them on a chain about your neck.” Caroline shifted so she was closer to the window light, while Grandmama donned her eyeglasses and pretended to assess her embroidery.
We are going mad. We are all going slowly mad, and all I can think about is kissing Trevor Dorning again, and…
“Will you two excuse me?” Lissa said, rising. “The hem of my riding habit has doubtless dried enough to be brushed out, and one mustn’t put that off.”
“Sooner begun is sooner done, your grandpapa always says.”
Caroline rolled her eyes and kept stitching, and Lissa departed with as much dignity as tattered nerves and tried patience could muster. As she brushed at her hem, hard enough to remove any trace of mud and then some, tears threatened.
Grandmama would continue to fade, Caroline and Diana would fret, and Mama would insist that the solution lay in finding Lissa the right husband. A husband of sufficient standing to take the whole situation in hand—solicitors be damned, Gavin’s troubles be damned with them—and with a wave of his magic, husbandly wand, all would come right.
Though Mama’s proposed solution was all wrong.
Trevor Dorning wasn’t a courtesy lord or an heir-in-waiting. He was a common mister with some ambition and education. His connections were not spectacular, but they were good—witness an earl’s younger brother had come racketing out to Berkshire to talk business with him.
Lissa absolutely agreed with Mama that Papa had meant for his oldest daughter to marry a title and open the door for Diana and Caroline to make fine matches. Papa had made no secret of his ambitions or of Lissa’s role in them.
Mama was also correct that Giles Purvis would attempt a hundred delays and dodges before parting with an extra shilling of DeWitt money. In Gavin’s absence, not just any fellow would be up to the challenge of outwitting such schemes.
But Trevor Dorning would deal summarily with legal ditherers. He’d make a few pointed, polite comments, let silence speak volumes, and achieve more from Purvis without drama than Mama and Lissa ever achieved with tears, threats, lectures, and scolds.
Lissa left off scrubbing at hems that needed turning and fresh trim, though they were more than adequate for Crosspatch Corners.
“If Trevor Dorning asks to court me,” she muttered, “I will consent.” He wouldn’t be like the dimwits, making overtures in bad faith, taking liberties, and sauntering on his way. In fact, with Trevor, Lissa had taken the first liberties…
He had certainly joined in the spirit of the undertaking.
She cracked the laundry room window and hung up her habit to dry, then returned to the family parlor. Grandmama was stitching away, and Caroline was fastening the pink ribbon into place with a series of French knots done in matching thread.
“I didn’t realize you liked pink so much,” Caroline said.
“It’s not fashionable, but we have plenty of it, and one doesn’t want to run out halfway through a project. Grandmama, shall we ring for a tray?”
“No, thank you, dear. I’m at a good stopping point, and I do believe it’s time I had my lie-down.”
When had Grandmama taken to napping so much? She spent more time in slumber than an infant did.
“I’ll see you up to your room.”
“Don’t bother. I might forget my glasses, but I do know where I sleep.” She pushed to her feet and made a stiff progress toward the door. “Thank heavens Diana is taking an intermission. I don’t know which is worse, when she rushes through a passage and bungles it, or when she finally slows down enough to play it correctly—over and over.”
“We will applaud her newfound patience,” Lissa said, “though I suspect it will be short-lived. Pleasant dreams, Grandmama.”
“Cook says there’s another Dorning racketing about Crosspatch. One of the trees. The late Earl of Casriel named all his children for trees and shrubs and whatnot. Daft notion, but we can’t all be George, William, and Edward, can we?”
“His name is Sycamore Dorning,” Caroline said. “He’s out from Town.”
Grandmama put a hand on the door latch. “One of those Dorset Dornings married old Lord Tavistock’s widow, if I’m not mistaken. This would have been… oh, before your father died, certainly. Years ago. The poor woman wasn’t well liked, but then, she was married to a difficult man and was many years his junior. Society was quite surprised that she’d remarry and give up the title. Perhaps she wished it good riddance. That’s all getting to be ancient history, I suppose.”
She wafted out the door, muttering about Old George and a proper court and your grandpapa always said…
“She’s getting worse,” Caroline said.
“She’s getting older.” But Grandmama’s distant memories were still for the most part reliable. Lissa went to the window, where afternoon sunshine gave the oaks a pinkish cast. Green leaves would soon follow, and then…
If one of Trevor’s distant relations had married the former marchioness of Tavistock, Trevor might keep that to himself rather than get off on a bad foot with potential neighbors in Crosspatch. More likely, he had little idea to whom a distant cousin’s wife had been married to ten years ago.
Trevor would have been a schoolboy, and what schoolboy concerned himself with fashionable matches?
Lissa would nonetheless ask him about it, some fine day when she’d run out of other ways to spend time with him. Maybe.
And maybe not.
Chapter Ten
Trevor spent a week pretending to school Roland while, in fact, lecturing himself on the folly of indulging impulses and the necessity of charting a deliberate, well-reasoned course in life.
Between lectures, he indulged in kisses with Amaryllis. She accompanied him on his hacks, though sometimes they spent more time walking the horses along the Twid, holding hands, and arguing—discussing, as Amaryllis put it—than they did in the saddle.
The weather moderated, the birds built their nests, and Trevor tried—inasmuch as a smitten man could—to make sense of his situation.
All to no avail.
“How much longer will you bide at the Arms?” Amaryllis asked as they walked their horses along the lane leading to Twidboro Hall.
“How long until you must remove to London?” Trevor replied. “I’m supposed to return to Town myself, Sycamore made that quite plain, but I’d rather bide here.”
“What pulls you to London?”
How to answer that? “My solicitors need at least a stern lecture, if not sacking.” One could sack solicitors by letter, and one probably should, though Trevor would still have to return to Town, so he offered the rest of the explanation. “My step-mother bides in London, and she has social ambitions for me. I have been traveling much in recent years, and she has missed me.”
Did the errant Gavin miss his family? Trevor had discussed a few ideas with Sycamore about Gavin’s possible whereabouts, because clearly, directions to the solicitors would yield no results.
“You care for your step-mother?”
“Very much. She was all that stood between me and my father’s worst tempers. He never beat me—he left the birchings to the tutors—but he could slice a boy to ribbons with a few well-placed insults, and his rejections cut worse than any lash. I learned to be a very good boy and to avoid his notice. My step-mother wasn’t as lucky.”
The Twidboro gateposts came into view, and Trevor’s heart sank. Another parting loomed, and one day soon, either he or Amaryllis would travel on to Town. There would be no avoiding the fact that he’d misled her as to his identity. Their paths would cross in some ballroom or on some Hyde Park bridle path, and with all of Mayfair looking on…
He could not risk the injury such an encounter would do to Amaryllis’s pride, of that he was certain.
“Spring is supposed to be a time of hope,” Amaryllis said. “When I’m not with you, I feel mostly dread. My father was the sweetest of men—cheerful, kindhearted, grateful for life’s many blessings—but he was determined that I should marry as well as possible, and thus my settlements are outlandishly generous. If my sisters are to have a future, I must try to make a good impression in Town.”
“Unless your brother turns up.”
“The London newspapers go to every corner of the realm, Trevor. If Gavin is in Britain, he must have read about a certain delicate flower from bucolic Berkshire whose attractions were apparently inadequate even years ago to secure an offer from a titan of gentlemanly merriment, and so forth.”
“I am seized by an abrupt desire to burn down the penny press.” Soon enough, they’d be remarking the doings of the Marquess of T…
Roland attempted a halfhearted spook at a large blue butterfly fluttering about his face.
“He’s much calmer than he was even ten days ago,” Amaryllis said. “You’ve given him some dignity.”
What was she saying? “We all grow up eventually. Roland simply wanted for some guidance and experience.”
They turned through the gateposts, and the sinking sensation spread to Trevor’s gut. He’d be welcomed at the Hall for a cup of tea, and Amaryllis’s family would flutter about like human butterflies, chattering, laughing, and vying for attention. Amaryllis would grow quieter and quieter, until she saw him off with a wan smile.
He enjoyed her family—enjoyed their noise and warmth and humor—but today’s looming separation sapped his social stamina.
“Show me the gatehouse,” he said, before Amaryllis could extend an invitation to take tea. “Your mother mentioned that I might rent the place as temporary quarters, and it’s certainly more commodious than a room at the Arms.”
Amaryllis turned Jacques off the carriage lane onto a short drive. “Gavin liked to rehearse here. Caroline sneaks away to read in Grandmama’s old parlor. I come to the gatehouse and pretend I’m dusting, but mostly, I’m finding solitude. The gatehouse was the first dwelling on the property, where the original owner lived when Lark’s Nest was being built.”
Trevor expected her to launch into a discussion of the building’s provenance—who built it in what year, of stone from which quarry—but she instead remained quiet. They pulled off the horses’ gear and turned them out in a grassy paddock behind the gatehouse proper. Amaryllis took a key from beneath a boot scrape and led Trevor into a sunny kitchen with mullioned windows and a flagstone floor.
“When the kitchen is spotless,” Amaryllis said, taking Trevor’s hat from his head and setting it on a counter, “the house must be deserted or for sale.” She stripped off her riding gloves and set them in the crown of Trevor’s hat. “My father used to say that. Come, I’ll show you the rest.”
The rest consisted of four other rooms—a dining room and parlor on the ground floor and, according to Amaryllis, two bedrooms upstairs. The topmost floor was a garret for housing staff. The whole was furnished, though the parlor sofa and chairs were under Holland covers, and the china cabinet in the dining room was empty.
