“Will you come again?” she asked him abruptly. “With your sister?”
“You will surely be happy to see the back of me,” he said. For his part, he could hardly wait to make his escape.
“No one comes,” she said. “No one is allowed to come. We are in deep mourning.”
Her vivid smile was long gone. He wondered if he had imagined it.
“Perhaps,” he suggested unwillingly, “you would like to call upon my sister at Robland Park? It would be an outing for you and perfectly respectable. Or does deep mourning not allow that?”
“It does not,” she said. “But perhaps I will come anyway.”
It occurred to him suddenly that for the past few minutes she had been standing while he had been sitting—and that he had stayed far longer than etiquette allowed.
“Beatrice will be happy to hear it,” he said, reaching for his canes and slipping his arms through the straps. “Her own activities have been curtailed by the persistent chill she contracted before Christmas. I thank you for the tea and for listening to me.”
He could not thank her for her forgiveness. She had not given it.
He hoisted himself upright, aware of her steady gaze. He wished he did not now have to shuffle out of the room in his ungainly manner while she watched.
“We have something in common, you know,” he told her, stopping abruptly before he reached the door. “I want to dance too. Sometimes it is what I want to do more than anything else in life.”
She accompanied him in silence to the front door and the waiting carriage. Beatrice was already standing beside it with Lady Matilda. They all said their farewells, and the carriage was soon on its way down the driveway.
“Well,” Beatrice said on an audible exhalation, “that was a gloomy afternoon if ever I have spent one. I do not wonder if that woman has ever laughed, Ben—I am confident she has not. What I do wonder is if she has ever smiled. I seriously doubt it. She spoke of her father with the deepest reverence. I pity poor Mrs. McKay.”
“She asked if we would come again,” he told her. “I suggested she call on you at Robland instead. It seems, though, that neither receiving visitors nor paying calls is quite the thing for ladies in mourning. Was my social education incomplete, Bea? It seems a peculiar notion to me. But she did say she might come anyway. I hope you will not disown me for making so free with your hospitality.”
“She might come?” she asked him. “But will she, do you suppose?”
Ben shrugged for answer. But he recalled the unexpected passion with which she had told him that she wanted to live. That infamous stroll in the meadow had probably been her way of breaking loose, at least for a short while. And he had ruined it for her.
“Did you make your apology?” Beatrice asked him.
“I did.” He did not add that forgiveness had not been explicitly granted.
“Then duty is satisfied for now,” she said. “It is a huge relief, I must say. And perhaps they will not come.”
“She wants to dance,” Ben said.
“What?” She turned her head to frown at him. “At the assembly next week, do you mean?”
“No. She wants to dance, Bea. I do too. I want to dance.”
She tipped her head slightly to one side. “We will certainly go to the assembly if you feel up to it,” she said, “though I doubt you will be able to dance to even the most stately of the tunes, Ben. You do very well walking with your canes. I am prouder of you than I can possibly say. But dancing? I think it wisest to put it from your mind, dearest, and concentrate upon what you can do.”
Ah, literal-minded Bea! He did not try to explain.
5
Samantha scarcely set foot over the doorstep for the rest of the week. It rained almost without ceasing—though that was not strictly accurate. She might almost have enjoyed an honest-to-goodness rain. This was drizzle and mist and heavy gray skies and chill temperatures. Pea soup weather, she could remember her mother calling it, the sort of weather that seeped beneath doors and around window frames even when they were tightly shut and made one feel damp and cold and miserable despite a fire crackling in the hearth and a woolen shawl drawn about one’s shoulders.
She did not even go to church on Sunday, a rare omission. Matilda had a head cold as well as one of her headaches and submitted to being sent back to bed with a hot brick for her feet. Samantha might have gone to church alone, as she had done for five years, but Matilda became agitated when she suggested it, and she was actually quite glad to avail herself of the excuse not to go out.
She had seen no one but Matilda and the servants since Tuesday. The visit of Lady Gramley and Sir Benedict Harper seemed weeks ago rather than merely days. But when she had broached the idea of their driving over to Robland Park one day next week to return the visit, Matilda had looked pruneish, as Samantha had fully expected she would. It was a courtesy to pay an occasional call upon a neighbor in mourning, she had explained, but no one would expect a return visit. Indeed, most people of any gentility would be surprised and even shocked if it happened.
Samantha simply did not believe her. Not any longer. And even if Matilda was right about social expectations, how could she possibly submit to remaining inside the darkened house for another eight months with only the occasional foray into the garden for fresh air and one weekly attendance at church? She would go out of her mind with the tedium of it.
She was going to pay that return call, she decided between journeys up and down stairs as she tended to the invalid, a long-familiar role that did nothing to lift her spirits, though she was always careful to be cheerful when she was in her sister-in-law’s room and seeing to her comfort by turning and plumping her pillows or straightening the bedcovers or moving her glass of water closer to her hand or laying a cool cloth on her fevered brow or closing the almost invisible gap between the curtains that was letting in a flood of hurtful light.