She had behaved quite shockingly badly. It was no wonder he did not wish to see her again. And she surely would not wish to see him again if she were not so lonely and so restless.
It would be for the best if she never saw him again, she decided. And then she learned that soon he would indeed be gone. Lady Gramley was planning to leave soon to join her husband in London. And her brother, she reported to a group of ladies at the vicarage one afternoon two weeks after his visit to Bramble Hall on that rainy afternoon, was going to do some traveling about the British Isles, starting in Scotland.
Samantha told herself quite firmly that the news did not depress her in the slightest. It was nothing to her. She had put memories of that afternoon firmly behind her. Soon he would be gone, and she could devote herself to her new life here at Bramble Hall without the distraction of expecting to see him wherever she went. She intended to be active and busy while she lived out the remainder of her year of mourning.
Perhaps she would even be happy.
9
A little over a week later, the carriage that had conveyed Matilda to Leyland Abbey returned to Bramble Hall, driven by a different coachman, with different outriders accompanying it. Samantha recognized the coachman from five years ago, but the other men were strangers to her. They were all large, burly men, as servants hired to guard travelers often were. They all also seemed particularly surly of disposition. That was what working for the Earl of Heathmoor did to people, Samantha thought. One of them handed her a letter that bore the earl’s seal.
She took it from him and felt immediately chilled. She did not want any more dealings with Matthew’s family, and this was hardly going to be a friendly missive. And why had other servants returned in place of the ones who had gone with Matilda? She took the letter into the sitting room and closed the door. She shooed Tramp off her favorite chair, upon which he was strictly forbidden to take up his abode—just as he had been strictly forbidden to enter the house once upon a time—and seated herself there in his place.
She did not want to break the seal on the letter. She had been feeling reasonably happy of late. She had friendly acquaintances. She had places to go, things to do while all the time preserving her respectability and her obligation to be in mourning for what remained of the year. She did not want to be plunged back into gloom and guilt. For one moment she considered tossing the note on the fire and forgetting about it. Matthew would have done just that. But the trouble was that she would not forget it. It would be better to read it now and then somehow put it out of her mind.
She broke the seal with a terrible sense of foreboding.
She read the letter through without stopping and then bent her head over her lap and shut her eyes very tightly. After a few moments she could hear Tramp panting nearby and could smell his less-than-sweet breath. A cold, wet nose nudged at her hand and he whined. She set her hand on his head.
“Tramp,” she said.
He licked her face and whined again, in obvious distress.
“Oh, Tramp.”
Stunned despair at the unexpectedness of it all engulfed her. The Earl of Heathmoor was displeased by the scandalous goings-on of his daughter-in-law as reported to him by Lady Matilida. That was hardly a surprise. Neither was the long-winded eloquence with which he chastised her. It was the punishment that made her feel rather as if she had been punched hard in the stomach, though he did not call it punishment. If his daughter-in-law did not know how to behave without the firm guiding hand of a man, and clearly she did not, then he must insist upon her removing to Leyland Abbey without delay. There he would himself impose the necessary discipline to halt the wayward behavior that would surely bring censure and even ruin upon the good name of his family if allowed to continue.
If there had been no more than that, Samantha might well have burned the letter after all and dealt with her seething wrath as best she was able. But there was more.
For of course—oh, foolish, foolish, foolish of her to have relied upon Matthew’s expectations—Bramble Hall was not hers. It had never been made over to Matthew, and if it had been willed to him, the bequest meant nothing when he had died before his father. The house belonged, with all its furnishings and all its servants, to the Earl of Heathmoor, and now, his second son being deceased and his son’s widow not to be trusted to remain here and uphold his good name, he was sending his third son to live here. Rudolph and his wife, Patience, would arrive to take up residence within a fortnight. The house would be made ready for them during the intervening weeks. The earl’s head coachman and his head groom, with other trusted servants, had been given instructions to convey Samantha to Leyland with just one day of rest between their arrival at Bramble Hall and their departure. She would make herself ready to accompany them.
He made them sound like jailers. They looked like jailers.
“Tramp,” she said, “why did I not see this coming? Am I an utter idiot? I never dreamed. I thought he would be happy to leave me here, out of sight and out of mind.”
For a few moments she sat with tightly clenched eyes while he whined and licked her face again. Then she lifted her head and gazed into his mournful eyes only inches from her own.
“I would rather kill myself than live at Leyland Abbey again,” she told him. It was only just an exaggeration.
She got abruptly to her feet and paced the room, the letter still clutched in one hand. Whatever was she to do? She would be swallowed whole if she went to Leyland. She would never be free. But what was the alternative? She had never had to consider any. Matthew had assured her that she would have a home here for the rest of her life, and she had believed him. Oh, she ought to have known …