It was unseemly for a lady to walk alone beyond the confines of her own park—even when she was not in mourning. Or so Samantha had been taught during the year she had spent at Leyland Abbey while Matthew was away in the Peninsula with his regiment. It was one of the many dreary rules of being a lady that her father-in-law had felt it incumbent upon himself to teach the woman his son had married against his wishes.
Well, she had no choice but to go alone. Matilda was flat on her daybed upstairs and would not have accompanied her anyway—it was the very idea of the walk that had put her on the daybed. If Samantha set one toe beyond the boundary of the park and Matilda and the Earl of Heathmoor found out about it … Well, even if she dug a hole all the way to China and disappeared down it, she would not escape their wrath. And the earl would hear about it if Matilda did. There were many miles of countryside between County Durham in the north of England and Kent in the south, but those miles burned up a few times each week with messengers bearing Matilda’s letters home and the earl’s letters to Bramble Hall.
Why had she allowed this to happen? Samantha asked herself. She was beginning to feel like a prisoner in her own home, under the guardianship of a humorless spy. Matthew would not have tolerated it. He had exercised a sort of tyranny of his own over her, but it was not his father’s. He had hated his father.
“Well,” she said, “since I was foolish enough to use the forbidden word in your hearing, Tramp, it would be nothing short of cruelty to disappoint you. And it would be the ultimate in cruelty to disappoint myself.”
His tail waved, and he looked from the doorknob to her and back again.
Ten minutes later they were striding along the path at the west side of the house toward the garden gate, which they passed through to the lane and meadows beyond. At least, Samantha strode in quite unladylike but equally unrepentant fashion while Tramp loped along at her side and occasionally dashed off in pursuit of any squirrel or small rodent incautious enough to rear its head. Though perhaps it was not lack of caution but merely contempt on their part, for Tramp never came close to running his prey to earth.
Ah, it felt so very good to breathe in fresh air at last, Samantha thought, even if it must be filtered through the heavy black veil that hung from the brim of her black bonnet. And it was glorious to see nothing but open space about her, first on the lane, and then on the daisy-and-buttercup-strewn grass of a meadow onto which they turned. It was sheer heaven to allow her stride to lengthen and to know that at least for a while the horizon was the only boundary that confined her.
There was no one to witness her grand indiscretion, no one to gasp in horror at the sight of her.
She stopped occasionally and gathered buttercups, while Tramp frolicked about her. And then, her little posy complete, she strode along again, a thick hedge to one side, all the fresh beauties of nature spread out on the other, the sky stretching overhead with its high layer of clouds through which she could see the bright, fuzzy disk of the sun. There was a brisk, slightly chilly breeze fluttering her veil about her face, but she did not feel the discomfort of the cold. Indeed, she relished it. She felt happier than she had felt for months, even perhaps for years. Oh, definitely for years.
She was not going to feel guilty about taking this hour for herself. No one could say she had not given her husband all the attention she possibly could while he lived. And no one could say she had not mourned him properly since his death. No one could even say she had been glad of his death. She had never, ever wished him dead, even at those times when she had wondered if she had any reserves of energy left with which to tend him and be patient with his endless peevishness. She had been genuinely saddened by the death of the man she had married just seven years before with such high hopes for a happily-ever-after.
No, she was not going to feel guilty. She needed this—this pleasure, this peace, this quiet restoration of her spirits.
It was precisely as she was thinking these tranquil thoughts that her peace was shattered in a sudden and most alarming manner.
Tramp had just returned with the stick she had thrown for him, and she was bending to retrieve it with one hand while she held her posy in the other, when it seemed that a thunderbolt came crashing down upon them from the heavens, only narrowly missing them. Samantha shrieked with terror, while the dog went into a frenzy of hysterical barking and leaped aimlessly in every direction, bowling Samantha right off her feet. Her buttercups went flying about in a hail of yellow, and she landed with a painful thud on her bottom.
She gaped in mingled pain and terror and discovered that the thunderbolt was in fact a large black horse, which had just leapt over the hedge very close to where she had been standing. It might have kept on going, since it appeared to have landed safely enough, but Tramp’s barking and leaping and perhaps her own scream had sent it into a frenzy of its own. It whinnied and reared, its eyes rolling wildly and fearfully, as the rider on its back fought for his seat and brought it under control with considerable skill and a whole arsenal of curse words most foul.
“Are you out of your mind? Are you quite insane?”
“Bring that blasted animal under control, woman, damn it.”
Samantha shouted her rhetorical questions and the man bellowed his imperious command simultaneously.
Tramp was standing his ground and barking ferociously, alternately with baring his teeth and growling in a fearsome manner. The horse was still prancing nervously, though it was no longer rearing.
Woman?
Blasted animal?
Damn it?