Mrs. Fisk baked the bread rolls and cakes she had been planning in her head for weeks. Her son, her beloved only child, was back home, not to mention Viscount Darleigh, that bright and happy boy who had used to run wild with Martin and drag him into all sorts of scrapes—not that Martin had taken much dragging. Poor boy. Poor gentleman. She sniffed and wiped away a tear with the back of her floury hand.
At ten o’clock the young Misses Granger called upon the equally young Miss Hamilton to discover what she planned to wear to the assembly, which would surely happen now that Lord Darleigh had come. The three of them proceeded to reminisce about Vincent-Hunt-that-was winning all the races at the annual village fete by a mile and bowling out every cricketer on the opposing team who had the courage and audacity to come up to bat against him and looking so very handsome with his always overlong fair curls and his blue, blue eyes and his lithe physique. And always smiling his lovely smile, even at them, though they had been just little girls at the time. He had always smiled at everyone.
That last memory drew tears from all of them, for now Viscount Darleigh would never win any race or bowl at any cricket game or look handsome—or perhaps even smile at anyone. He would not even be able to dance at the assembly. They could conceive of no worse fate than that.
Vincent would have been horrified to know that, in fact, his arrival in Barton Coombs had been expected. Or, if that was too strong a word, then at least it had been looked for with eager hope and cautious anticipation.
For Vincent had forgotten two overwhelmingly significant facts about his mother and his sisters. One was that they were all inveterate letter writers. The other was that they had all had numerous friends at Barton Coombs and had not simply relinquished those friends when they moved away. They might not be able to visit them daily, as they had been used to do, but they could and did write to them.
His mother had not been reassured by the two notes that had arrived, scrawled in the inelegant hand of Martin Fisk. She had not sat back and waited for her son to come home. Rather she had done all in her power to discover where he was. Most of her guesses were quite wide of the mark. But one was that Vincent might return to Barton Coombs, where he had spent his boyhood and been happy, where he had so many friends and so many friendly acquaintances, where he would be comfortable and would be made much of. Indeed, the more she thought of it, the more convinced she became that if he was not already there, he would end up there sooner or later.
She wrote letters. She always wrote letters anyway. It came naturally to her.
And Amy, Ellen, and Ursula wrote letters too, though they were not as convinced as their mother that Vincent would go to Barton Coombs. It was more likely that he had gone back to Cornwall, where he always seemed to be so happy. Or perhaps to Scotland or the Lake District, where he could escape their matchmaking clutches. All three of Vincent’s sisters rather regretted the aggressive manner in which they had pressed Miss Dean upon him. She obviously was not for him—or he for her. It had not escaped their notice that rather than looking mortified when it was discovered that he was gone, she had been hard pressed not to look openly relieved.
However it was, long before Vincent actually did arrive in Barton Coombs, there was scarcely a person there who did not know for a near certainty that he would come. The only question that had caused any real anxiety was when.
Everyone, almost without exception, was enraptured as the news spread through the village and beyond that the wait was at an end. He was here.
The most notable exception to the general mood of rapture was Henrietta March. She was horror-struck.
“Vincent Hunt?” she cried.
“Viscount Darleigh, my love,” her mother reminded her.
“Of Middlebury Park in Gloucestershire,” her father added. “With an income of twenty thousand a year, at a conservative estimate.”
“And two blind eyes and a deformed face,” Henrietta retorted. “Yeeuw!”
“You would not have to look at him,” her father told her. “Middlebury Park is big enough, or so I have heard. Far larger than this. And you would need to spend time in London as a fashionable viscountess. It would be expected of you. He would hardly go with you, would he? And you would want to visit here. He will not want to come too often to be subjected to that Waddell woman each time, not to mention the vicar and all the other sycophants who live in the neighborhood.”
The mouse, who sat in her corner of the March drawing room darning pillowcases, looked sharply and incautiously across the room at him. Sycophants? Other people? Had her uncle not looked in a glass lately? But she lowered her head quickly before he noticed her. She certainly did not want to be caught staring, especially staring incredulously. Besides, she needed her eyes for her darning.
She did not particularly mind being the mouse in the corner. She had, in fact, cultivated invisibility for most of her life. While her mother had still lived with her and her father, a time she remembered only dimly, there had been almost daily and nightly arguments and even fights, from which she had withdrawn into the dimmest corner of whatever rooms they had happened to be occupying at the time. And after her mother left, never to return, when she was five, she had kept well clear of her father when he came home in his cups, though he had never been a violent man and it had not happened with any great frequency. More often, it was his boisterous friends from whom she had hidden when they had come home with her father to carouse and play their card games instead of going elsewhere. They had had a tendency to chuck her under the chin and bounce her on their knees when she was young—and she had always looked younger than her years. And then there had been landlords to hide from when they were slipping away from yet another set of rooms for which they were in arrears on the rent, and merchants and bailiffs who came looking for payment of various debts. She had spent most of her childhood, in fact, trying to be invisible and silent so that no one would notice her.