“You will return to Kenelston after you leave here?” she asked him. “You will make an effort to settle there at last?”
“I thought I might travel first,” he said, plucking out of the air one of the ideas he had half considered. “I have done a little of it in the past few years. I have spent time in Bath, at Tunbridge Wells, in Harrogate, in other places. I thought I might see something of Scotland, the Lake District, Wales. I have even thought I might try writing a travel book. There are plenty of them for walkers. As far as I know there are none for people who cannot walk or who cannot walk easily or far. Yet there must be any number of people who would travel if they could do so without having to be ruggedly fit and healthy.”
“Have you ever done any writing?” she asked, her eyebrows soaring.
“No,” he admitted. “But I must do something. It does not make me comfortable to admit that I am an aimless nobody living nowhere. I must and will find a new challenge, and my eyes and my brain and my hands work well enough even if my legs do not. I may discover a hidden talent as an author. I may find myself traveling all over the world and penning dozens of books for my adoring readers. Can you not see my name writ large in gold on a leather cover?”
She shook her head, though she did answer his grin with a short bark of laughter. “Your challenge could be to run Kenelston for yourself,” she said, “and to make it your home. It is yours, after all. But you do not have the heart to supplant Calvin, do you? I could simply shake that boy for his blockheaded selfishness. Though he is no longer a boy, of course. He ought to have made other arrangements for his family as soon as poor Wallace was killed and everything passed to you. It is not as though Father had left him without funds. But he kept very quiet instead and continued on as if Wallace were still alive. And of course your lengthy indisposition made it easier for him to become entrenched. But Kenelston is not his, and he has no business having the full run of it and allowing those unruly children of his to dash about inside it as though there were no such thing as a nursery wing there—and no such thing as discipline. Do let me have a word with him.”
The idea of having to enlist the help of his sister to fight his battles for him was appalling.
“Thank you, Bea,” he said, “but it suits my purpose to travel for a while until I can see my way forward to a more settled future. And since Kenelston will need a steward while I am gone, Calvin and Julia and the children might as well stay where they are. He is a very good steward, you know. And he loves the work.”
She clucked her tongue and poured herself another cup of tea. She looked at him, teapot held aloft, but he shook his head.
Actually, he thought, perhaps he was using Calvin as an excuse. Perhaps it suited him as well as it did his younger brother to leave matters as they were. He was not perfectly convinced that the sedentary life of a country gentleman would be quite to his taste. It was a rather startling thought. He had not admitted as much to himself before.
“Begin your travels in London when I go there to join Hector,” she suggested. “Come with me. Perhaps we will find you a pretty young lady who was not widowed a few months ago and who does not have a fire-breathing dragon for a father-in-law.”
He laughed. “Thank you for the offer—for both offers. But London is the last place I want to go. And if I want a pretty woman, or any woman for that matter, I will find one for myself. I do not, though, as it happens.”
But, surprisingly, he looked forward to riding with Mrs. McKay two days hence even though Beatrice would be with them. Perhaps it was because a widow still in deep mourning seemed a safe enough companion. His life had been almost entirely womanless for longer than six years. Apart from his sister and his sister-in-law, and his fellow Survivor Imogen, he had had virtually no dealings with any lady in all that time. He had been celibate for longer than six years.
It would all have seemed incredible at one stage in his life. He had fancied himself in love half a dozen times before being sure of it with the colonel’s niece. And he had enjoyed a lusty sex life with women of another sort.
No longer, though.
But he missed the companionship of women. It was something he would like to have again, provided there was never any question of courtship. There could be no such question with Mrs. McKay. She still had eight months or so of mourning to live through before she could consider remarrying. And she would not consider him anyway, even if she were free to do so. She had just buried one husband who had been incapacitated by war. She certainly would not be tempted to take another.
She was a safe female companion, then. And he looked forward to seeing her ride—if, that was, nothing happened to prevent the outing. Inclement weather, for example. Or her sister-in-law’s intervention.
“When I wrote to Father today,” Matilda said, “I omitted all mention of your visit to Robland Park yesterday, Samantha. I thought about it last night and was forced to the conclusion that it was not a totally unpardonable breach of etiquette for you to return a call that had been made upon you last week by a countess, though I do wish you had waited until I could accompany you.”
Samantha kept her head down as she worked a new flower into the design of the cloth she was embroidering.
“I daresay Lady Gramley was gratified to see you,” Matilda added.
“I hope you sent my love to your mother,” Samantha said at the same moment.
“I did,” Matilda told her, “since you directed me to do so when you came to my room after breakfast to inquire after my health. I did not mention your visit, Samantha, because Father might see the matter differently from my more liberal view, and I would not wish to make you the object of his displeasure.”