“Poor lady,” Beatrice said. “I do not suppose her sister-in-law is good company even when she is in the best of health. Mrs. McKay must be very lonely. I wish I had been here.”
“If ever the topic should arise, Bea,” he said, “you have been complaining just recently that the horses in the stables are in need of more exercise than they are getting.”
“Oh?” she said in some surprise. “Have I been so slandering my grooms? I am obliged to you for reminding me, Benedict, as I have no recollection of saying any such thing. And why should the topic arise?”
“I said as much to Mrs. McKay before she left here,” he explained.
“Oh?” Her cup paused between the saucer and her lips.
“I asked her to ride with me the afternoon after tomorrow,” he said, “but I suspect there is no suitable mount in the stables at Bramble Hall.”
“I do not doubt you are right.” She placed her cup back in its saucer and set both aside. “And she agreed?”
“Yes.”
She rested her elbows on the arms of her chair and regarded him with a slight frown. “I doubt her sister-in-law will allow it,” she said. “If she has power over Mrs. McKay, that is. But is it wise anyway, Ben? I can see no reason why a recently bereaved widow ought not to take the air on horseback if she so desires, but in the lone company of a single gentleman?”
“I did say I would persuade you to join us,” he said. “Will you, Bea? Are you feeling up to it?”
“I certainly will be,” she said, “if the alternative is for you to ride out alone with a lady, Ben. It would not be at all proper, even if she were not in deep mourning.”
“She is lonely, as you just observed,” he said, “and restless.”
Though why he should have taken it upon himself to try to alleviate that restlessness, he did not know.
“It is hardly surprising,” she said. “She has been virtually incarcerated at Bramble Hall ever since she arrived. I suppose it was a labor of love, poor lady, nursing Captain McKay, and clearly he was desperately ill, but I always thought it selfish of him not to insist that she go out occasionally, even if only to take tea with a neighbor. She never did. It is perfectly understandable that by now, with the first wave of her grief passing off, she would be longing to flutter her wings.”
“Yes.”
She fixed him with a direct stare. “You are not making a flirt of Mrs. McKay by any chance, are you, Ben?” she asked him. “You have not conceived a tendre for her? I have been hoping for some time that you would recover your interest in women and in courtship. You have been a hermit for too long. I have been hoping you would marry before you turn thirty, though you have only a few months left in which to make me happy on that score. But I am not sure a recent widow is a wise choice, especially given the identity of her father-in-law. Of course, she is quite astonishingly lovely. She must have foreign blood to account for her dark coloring. That would not endear her to the Earl of Heathmoor, I daresay.”
“Beatrice,” Ben said in some exasperation, “I have met Mrs. McKay four times, including our disastrous encounter in the meadow and our brief meeting at church. We are to take a ride together the day after tomorrow—in your company. I do not believe we will be having the banns called this week or even next.”
She laughed. “She is very beautiful. Though the black clothes she wears are unbecoming, to say the least.”
“Agreed.”
“If you sat outside in the garden,” she said, “I suppose she kept that hideous veil over her face.”
“She pushed it back over the brim of her bonnet, actually.”
She regarded him in silence for a few seconds longer and then shrugged. “I know,” she said. “You do not need to say it aloud. You are no longer nine years old or even nineteen. You are quite capable of living your own life, and even if you are not, you would not thank me for trying to live it for you. Very well, I will not. But what are you going to do with your life, Ben? You have appeared to … to drift aimlessly in the years since you left Cornwall. I have sworn to myself that I will say nothing, but here I am saying it anyway and annoying you.”
He was irritated by the question, since he still did not know the answer. And he hated that in himself. He had always used to think of himself as a firm, decisive man. He had planned out his life when he was fifteen, and he had not deviated from that plan until a bullet and other assorted catastrophes had stopped him almost literally dead in his tracks six years ago. Now he felt as if he had been set adrift without a compass on an ocean that stretched vast and empty in every direction. He had come here with the firm intention of making plans and then launching them into effect. He was still determined to do it—tomorrow. Was it only recently he had made the discovery that tomorrow in fact never comes?
But Beatrice was someone who had always genuinely loved him. Her concern was real. She had a right to ask and a right to be answered.
“For the first year or so,” he said, “my whole focus was upon surviving. Then it was upon the monumental task of getting up from my bed and somehow becoming mobile. And finally, and until very recently, it has been upon walking again and getting my life back as it was before so that I might proceed to live happily ever after according to the original plan. I must be very stubborn or very dense or both. I have only recently faced the truth—that neither my body nor my life will ever again be as it once was. I was a man of action, a soldier, an officer. Now I am none of those things. The trouble is, though, that I do not know what I am instead or what I will be. Or what I will do. I am in a bit of a bleak place, Bea, though I do not even know where that is.” He laughed softly.