He was quite resigned to what his immediate future had in store for him. He had had enough time to think about it, after all. His grandmother had talked openly about it at Christmastime. His mother had been hinting for at least the past year. He had been procrastinating. That must stop.
He would persuade his grandfather to talk about his boyhood and young manhood today. Grandpapa enjoyed telling the old, oft-repeated stories, and who knew if Ralph would be hearing them for the last time? Was his grandfather ailing? Or could he go on as he was now for another ten years or so? The answer to that question, impossible to know, did not affect the central issue, though, did it? The duke had an heir, but that heir himself did not. And life, as Ralph’s grandmother had observed last evening, was always uncertain, even for the young. He could die at any moment.
Indeed, there had been times when he had wanted to die and had even tried to help the process along . . . But he would not be drawn into remembering those dark days. Now was the time to think of life. Though what sensible man would wish to be responsible for bringing yet another human life into this world?
He shook his head. Such thinking must not be pursued.
“How old do you think it is?” a voice asked from behind him, and he turned in amazement to discover that Miss Muirhead had followed him across the lawn and was standing just a short distance away. “The oak, I mean.”
He gazed at her without smiling. Had he asked for company? Did he look like the sort of man who would feel lonely and pathetic if left to stroll alone? But he looked at the trunk beneath his hand and up into the spreading branches when perhaps he ought to have ignored her question and her entirely.
“Several hundred years,” he said. “Perhaps even more than a thousand. The second duke, who had the house built more than a century ago, had the good sense to leave the oak standing and to build farther back from the river.”
“It looks like a child’s paradise,” she said. “Did you climb it as a boy?”
“It is too visible from the house,” he said. “My grandmother had me spanked after she caught me up there one day when I was five or six. Even then she must have been afraid that I would fall and kill myself and my father would beget no more sons.”
“And did she have you spanked when you chose to become a military officer?” she asked. “You did choose to be one, I suppose?”
He looked back at her, all amazement again, and had to remind himself that she was not a servant. She was standing out in the sunshine, and the sunlight was gleaming off her hair and making it appear even more startlingly red than it had looked yesterday. With her pale complexion and freckles, she must have to be very careful about exposure to the sun. Her skin would surely burn horribly. Yet she was wearing no bonnet.
He was surprised to notice now that he was looking fully at her that she was rather good looking, even beautiful in a unique sort of way. Her eyes were large and decidedly green. Her nose was straight and the perfect length to fit her oval face. Her cheekbones were well defined, her lips full and well shaped, her mouth on the wide side. With her hair down . . .
But she had asked him a question—an impertinent, intrusively personal question. He answered it nevertheless.
“I begged and pleaded with my father to no avail,” he told her, “and my mother was firmly and tearfully on his side. My grandmother threatened to have me whipped—horsewhipped, to use her exact words. I suppose she thought I had outgrown spankings. But my grandfather surprised us all and incensed everyone but me. It had been his boyhood dream, it seemed, to be a military officer, a general no less, but of course it had not been allowed because he was a duke’s heir and had no brothers. His own son had been a disappointment to him—yes, he said it in the hearing of my father, who was the epitome of the dutiful heir. Let the boy have his way, then, he said of me. Let him follow his dream of glory. I was eighteen years old and just getting finished with school. I was as innocent and as ignorant as a newborn babe. But the word of the Duke of Worthingham was law to his family. And so he purchased my commission in the very best regiment as well as all the finest trappings money could buy.”
“But your dream was soon shattered,” she said softly.
What did she know about it? He looked stonily at her before turning his head away sharply. Should he stride off toward the river and trust she would not come trotting after him to offer her company and her conversation again? Or should he stride back to the house and rely upon outpacing her?
He hesitated a moment too long.
“I could not help but overhear your conversation with Her Grace last evening,” she said. “I was not deliberately eavesdropping.”
His eyes returned to hers. He removed his hand from the trunk and leaned his shoulder against it. She must think a gale was blowing. She had a death grip on the corners of her shawl.
“I understand,” she said, “that you do not wish to marry but that you must.”
He crossed his arms over his chest and raised one eyebrow. Her impertinence knew no bounds. Though she was quite correct—she had not been eavesdropping. She had been in the drawing room by right of the fact that she was a guest here.
“I do not believe it is just your youth, is it?” she asked.
He raised the other eyebrow to join the first.
“That makes you reluctant, I mean,” she said. “It is not just that you are young and wish for more time to sow some wild oats before you settle down. It is not, is it?”
He felt a curious mixture of urges. One part of him wanted to bellow with laughter. Another part wanted to explode with fury.