Someone to Cherish by Mary Balogh

Twenty

By the time they came around the side of the house onto the terrace, the infants who had been playing circle games with Elizabeth and her mother had gone back indoors, probably for afternoon naps, and the cricket game had just finished. The teams were gathering up wickets and bats and arguing good-naturedly about something. Harry’s grandmothers and great-aunt Edith were still outside. Aunts Matilda, Louise, and Mildred were with them. So were Lady Hill from the neighboring estate and Rosanne. Lawrence was down talking with the cricketers.

Poor Lydia was about to be exposed to more than she had bargained for. But it was too late to change direction now. They had been seen. He felt Lydia draw a deep breath and let it out slowly. Snowball, trotting along at her side, was straining at her lead and yipping in anticipation of confronting yet more strangers.

“Lydia, my dear.” Lady Hill got to her feet and came a few steps toward them, both hands extended. “Maynard often tells me that I live with my head buried in the sand, which brings a rather horrid image to the mind. However, sometimes I think he must be right. We and our visitors all slept late the morning after the assembly even though it was over long before midnight, and we spent the rest of the day very quietly at home. On Saturday we went into Eastend to do some shopping. If you can believe it, we did not hear about all the bother here until after church on Sunday, by which time you had already walked home and we had a luncheon engagement to keep us away until the middle of the evening. When Rosanne and Lawrence and I called at the cottage today you were no longer there, and we discovered, just as you were coming around the corner now, in fact, that you were actually here at Hinsford.”

She squeezed Lydia’s hands, which were now in her own. “My dear!” she continued. “It is all such utter nonsense, as I have told everyone with whom I have spoken since Sunday morning, but distressing for you nonetheless. And embarrassing for Harry too, I do not doubt. But so many people are only too ready to listen to scandalous tidings, regardless of facts and common sense. How dared that horrid woman! It ought to have been obvious to everyone on Thursday evening that you and Harry are friends, as why on earth should you not be? Mrs. Monteith has just been telling us that your mama and Harry’s mother were dear friends before your mother passed on. It is the most natural thing in the world, then, that their son and daughter should be friends too. But I am talking too much. How do you do, Harry? How does it feel to be almost thirty?”

She released Lydia’s hands and resumed her seat while Rosanne smirked at Harry and gave him what looked suspiciously like a wink.

“May I have the pleasure of presenting Mrs. Lydia Tavernor?” Harry said, looking along the line of his relatives. “My paternal grandmother, the Dowager Countess of Riverdale, Lydia. My maternal grandmother, Mrs. Kingsley.” He went on to introduce Great-aunt Edith and his aunts.

“I am pleased to make your acquaintance,” Lydia said, including them all in her smile and inclination of the head. Snowball, on her best behavior, had flopped down beside her.

“How do you do, Mrs. Tavernor?” Grandmama Kingsley said. “You must have been just a child when my daughter and your mother were friends. And when your mama died.”

“I was eight years old, ma’am,” Lydia told her.

“That was very sad for you,” his grandmother said. “Do you have sisters and brothers?”

“I have three brothers,” Lydia told her. “Two older than me, one younger. My mother never recovered her health after the birth of my youngest brother.”

“You were unfortunate not to have sisters,” Aunt Matilda said. “I have always found mine to be a great blessing.”

“So have I,” Aunt Louise added. “Well, maybe not always.” She smiled while the other two aunts chuckled. “I feel for you in the premature loss of your husband, Mrs. Tavernor. I lost mine far too early too.”

“Thank you,” Lydia said.

“You live alone, Mrs. Tavernor,” Grandmama Westcott said. It was not posed as a question.

Lydia answered anyway. “Yes, quite alone, ma’am,” she said. “My cottage is small and my needs are modest. I can clean and cook for myself and actually enjoy doing both. I also enjoy my own company.”

“You were seen kissing Harry on the doorstep of your home a few evenings ago,” his grandmother continued. “Living alone and allowing such intimate behavior to be witnessed by anyone who chances to be passing by is like an open invitation to unwelcome gossip and the necessity of a marriage proposal that the one party does not wish to make and the other does not wish to accept. That you did not accept is to your credit, at least. Perhaps you have learned something from the experience, Mrs. Tavernor?”

This time she was asking a question.

“Grandmama—”

“Mama—”

Harry and Aunt Mildred spoke at the same time, but his grandmother held up a staying hand, and Lydia answered.

“I have, ma’am,” she said. “I have learned to look to my conscience for direction rather than to those people who observe my behavior or listen to an account of it and pass judgment. I have learned to respect myself and trust my own judgment.”

Oh, well done, Lydia, Harry thought. She had spoken with quiet dignity. Not many people stood up to his grandmother.

“That sounds well and good,” his grandmother said. “We can all admire someone who does not cringe in the face of adversity. Nevertheless, there is a certain code of behavior by which it behooves us all to live if society is not to fall into chaos.”

Harry drew breath to intervene, but again Lydia forestalled him.

“I agree, ma’am,” she said. “And if an acquaintance offers me a ride home in his carriage one evening because the clergyman who has promised to convey me has been called away to a sickbed, I would consider it ill-mannered to refuse. If he then escorts me to my door because it is dark and raining hard and he has an umbrella, I will be grateful. If he then, because he is something of a friend and not merely an acquaintance, chooses to kiss my forehead as he says good night to me, I am not going to slap his face or scold him for inappropriate behavior. When it happened, ma’am, I did not deem the kiss to my forehead in any way improper. I still do not, even though the gossips in the village have made me into something of a scarlet woman.”

“Lydia knitted me a scarf as thanks for a pile of wood I chopped for her,” Harry said. “She had just given me the finished scarf that night. Hence the infamous kiss—on the forehead. In the open doorway of her house with my coachman standing on the other side of her garden gate. If anyone is to blame for this whole stupid incident, it is I, not Lydia. I will not have her accused of impropriety.”

“Mrs. Tavernor.” Aunt Matilda had got to her feet. “Do come and sit down on my chair. We are having a tray of tea brought out. I shall go and make sure two more cups are added. And another chair. And I will have a bowl of water fetched for your dog, who is, by the way, adorable.”

“Thank you, Lady Dirkson,” Lydia said. “It is kind of you, but I will not stay. It has been a busy day and I am ready to go home.”

“We will look forward to seeing you at Harry’s birthday ball, then, Mrs. Tavernor,” Aunt Louise said.

The cricketers, a mixture of adults and children and both genders, were making their noisy way up the lawn, still arguing about something and doing a great deal of laughing in the process. Lawrence Hill grinned at Harry and greeted Lydia.

“I’ll escort you home, Lydia,” Harry told her, offering his arm.

“Just look both ways first if you plan to kiss her on the doorstep,” Lawrence advised him.

His sister was scolding him as they walked away.

“I am sorry, Lydia,” Harry said.

“Why?” she asked. “You cannot be responsible for what other people say and do, Harry. Neither can I. I believe we have learned that in the past few days. And there is no need for you to accompany me, you know, especially as you have guests here to entertain. I believe I can make my way back down the drive without losing my way.”

“Lydia! Have mercy on me,” he said. “My grandmother Westcott—probably both grandmothers, in fact, and all the aunts—would scold me into next week if I did anything as improper as allow a lady to walk home alone.”

She sighed.

“I believe,” she said, “that was exactly how and why all this got started, Harry. First Tom Corning and then you would not hear of my walking home alone. Should I now proceed to ask you if you are ever lonely?”

Harry did not follow her beyond her gate. He did not turn away after she had stepped into her garden and shut the gate, however. He stood against the fence, his hands resting on top of it. She could sense him there and turned when she was halfway along the path, while Snowball curled up into a ball of fluff on the doorstep and waited to be let inside.

“Did I ever give you a definitive answer?” he asked her.

They had talked about a number of things on their way home, but Lydia knew to which question he alluded. It was the one that had come to define their whole relationship.

Are you ever lonely?

She gazed at him and waited.

“It is yes,” he said. His eyes were softly smiling, yet he looked sad, Lydia thought. Just as she was feeling.

“Even now, with all your family surrounding you?” she asked.

He answered with a question of his own. “When you went home to your father’s house,” he said, “were you lonely? Perhaps more so than when you were here?”

“It would be illogical, would it not?” she said. “All those who are closest to me were there—my father, my brothers, my sister-in-law. I live alone here, apart from Snowball.”

“As I do at Hinsford,” he said. “Apart from an army of servants.”

“Yes,” she said after they had gazed at each other in silence for a few moments. “I was lonely.”

“There needs to be a special someone, does there not?” he said. “Or rather … No. There does not need to be. One ought to be able to live alone. One ought to have all the inner resources to live contentedly with one’s own company. We have to love ourselves, do we not? Or we are incapable of loving anyone else. I think we have both learned those lessons. And we have both been contented and perhaps will be again. But sometimes there is loneliness. And then— sometimes—there is a longing for someone special. Someone to move us from quiet contentment into a warmer happiness. Someone we do not need, but someone we want in order to fill in all the blanks in our lives. I am talking a pile of nonsense.”

“No, you are not,” she said, taking a step closer to the fence and then walking right up to it and grasping the top of it, her hands on the outsides of his. “There is a need … Ah, perhaps it is not actually a need. You are quite right about that. But there is a craving to trust. The loss of it, the loss of the ability to trust, is a terrible thing. It destroys so much. I have come to understand that my life is broken, and I have not been fully able to piece it back together. I dare not trust.”

His eyes continued to smile. And they still looked unhappy. He nodded.

“Harry,” she said. “Tell me I am wrong.”

He shook his head slowly. “Only you can tell yourself that,” he said. “When you are ready.”

“Do you love me?” She gripped the fence more tightly. Oh, her impetuous tongue again. It happened when she was tired. And she was bone weary now. This day had seemed a week long.

“Yes.” The word was so softly spoken that she read his lips more than she heard the sound.

“Am I your someone special?” she asked. “Am I someone you could … cherish?”

“Yes,” he said again.

“I adore you.” She blinked rapidly. She was not going to become a watering pot again. “And I trust you. I have thought about it from every possible angle during the past hour or so, but I cannot talk myself out of trusting you. The trouble with trust, of course, is that it is a future thing, and one can never be certain of anything in the future. One can only … trust. Or not.”

“And you choose to trust me,” he said.

“Yes.” She had blinked back her own tears, but now there were tears swimming in his eyes. “And you are someone I could cherish, Harry. My someone special. Oh, I did not plan any of this. It is most brazen of me. I—”

His hands came down on top of hers and curled around them. “Lydia,” he said. “I still cannot recall any of my pretty speech except the word ardent and the phrase happiest of men. But it was a grand piece of pomposity anyway, I daresay. Will you marry me?” He smiled at her suddenly, leftover tears and all. “Will you make me the happiest of men? I most ardently love you.”

“Oh, Harry—”

“You were saying?” he said when she did not immediately continue, raising her hands to hold palm-in against his chest. Lydia had to take a step closer to the fence.

“Will I make you happy?” she asked him. And here she went having to blink her eyes again to rid them of tears. “Will we be happy? Harry, I do not have much experience with happiness.”

“Neither do I,” he said, holding her gaze. “We will seek it and find it together, Lydia. But I think happiness comes in moments, not in great swaths of time. I do not think it is a future thing at all but only a present something we can carry forward with us if we choose. I feel awfully happy at this precise moment because I believe you are saying yes, and I want you to say it more than I can remember wanting anything else in my life. Take a chance with me, Lydia. Trust me. Trust yourself. Trust the future. For though we cannot control it or have any real idea of what lies ahead, we are not entirely helpless. We can promise ourselves and promise each other that we will work on a marriage to each other every day for the rest of our lives. Both of us. As equals.”

She gazed into his eyes—the loveliest eyes she had ever looked into, for there was kindness there as far back as she could see. As far back as the very essence of him, where darkness had led him to humility and empathy and kindness. And not just those things. There was love too. And right now it was focused entirely upon her—his someone special. She saw a little bit of uncertainty too and vulnerability because she had not yet actually spoken the word.

“Yes,” she said, and smiled. “I am saying yes.”

And nothing in her whole life, surely, had felt so right.

He gathered her against him, fence notwithstanding, but the brim of her bonnet got in the way as she tried to nestle her head beneath his chin, and they both laughed. And he kissed her.

Right out in the open, she in her front garden, he out on the road, the sun beaming down on them, for the whole world to see if the world chose to come and look.

“Soon,” he said when he drew back his head a few inches.

“Yes.

“Very soon.”

“Yes.”

“Sooner than soon?”

“Absurd.” She laughed, and he kissed her again.

“Lydia,” he said, “I think you had better invite me to tea. We have some plans to make.”

“Well,” she said, “since I seem to have very little reputation left to lose, I think you might as well come in.”

Lady Hill and her son and daughter did not remain long at Hinsford after Harry and Lydia left. They still had visitors at home, awaiting their return. A number of other members of the Westcott family had gathered on the terrace in the meanwhile—some of the cricketers, a couple of the returning riders, those who had been at the summerhouse, and a few from inside. The men among them wandered away soon after the visitors had left.

“So, Mama,” Louise said, “you did not like the notorious Mrs. Tavernor?”

“Mama gave her a stinging setdown earlier, when Harry brought her here to introduce her,” Matilda explained to those who had not been present to hear it.

“And she gave it right back to me,” the dowager countess said. “The brazen minx.”

“You liked her, then, Grandmama?” Jessica asked, smiling.

“She has backbone,” the dowager admitted. “Which fact does not excuse the decision she made after her husband’s death to live alone, without even a servant to add respectability, and then to entertain gentlemen at night.”

“There is no evidence, is there, Grandmama,” Abigail said in her quiet, gentle voice, “that Mrs. Tavernor has ever entertained gentlemen? Harry is not plural.”

“And there is a difference,” Anna added, “between evening and night, Grandmama, when one is speaking of a gentleman calling upon a lady.”

“Do I have any other granddaughters who wish to offer me some witticism or reproach?” the dowager asked, looking about the group. “Camille?”

“I think you like her, Grandmama,” Camille said. “Because she stood up to you.”

“Hmph,” her grandmother said.

“Harry will be thirty years old before another week has passed, Eugenia,” Mrs. Kingsley said. “My guess is that Mrs. Tavernor is close to him in age. Perhaps what they do in private together—or what they do not do, for that matter—is their business and not ours. Or that Mrs. Piper’s.”

“Quite right, Mother,” Mary, her daughter-in-law, said.

“She handled herself admirably just a little while ago,” Anna said. And she proceeded to describe what had happened with Jeremy Piper. “Harry was nothing short of magnificent.”

“I do wish I had been there to witness it,” Elizabeth said.

“But,” Mildred said, “Mrs. Tavernor refused Harry’s marriage offer just a couple of days ago.”

“But of course she did,” Viola said. “We would all like her considerably less if she had accepted it.”

“You like her too, then, Viola?” Wren asked with a smile.

“Do not we all?” Viola asked.

“I have not met her,” Elizabeth said. “Neither has Mama. Perhaps we will call on her tomorrow.”

“I will come with you if I may,” Mary said. “I have not met her either.”

“She has been indiscreet,” the dowager countess reminded them. “We ought not to forget that. But she does have backbone. And I never did say I did not like her, Louise, to get back to your original question.”

“We are forgetting something, however,” Louise said. “Three young ladies have come here to Hinsford in the hope that Harry will marry one of them. And we are responsible for bringing them and raising their hopes.”

There was a pained silence for a moment.

“Fanny is both a pretty and a sensible girl,” Mildred said, speaking of the sister of her son’s betrothed. “I thought she might suit Harry admirably. But I did not give that as a specific reason when I invited her and her mother to join us here. I spoke more of celebrating the new betrothal.”

“Besides, Aunt Mildred,” Estelle Lamarr said, “her sister confided to me earlier today that she suspects Fanny of having not only an attachment to a neighbor of theirs but also a secret agreement with him.”

“Gordon warned me,” Edith Monteith said, “that Miranda is not interested in marriage even though she is twenty-two years of age. It is not what her mother told me or what I expected. But I have seen for myself now that she is not as other girls are. If she were a man, it would not surprise me at all if she were to disappear into the bowels of a university somewhere—no doubt in Scotland—and gather dust there as a professor or a don. But she is not, alas, a man.”

“Poor lady,” Wren said. “It is not easy to be an independent woman in a man’s world.”

“And then there is Sally,” Matilda said with a rueful shake of the head. “She is a sweet child, and Charles and Adrian and his sisters all dote on her. Since she is now eighteen and making her come-out this year, it seemed to me that she would be a desirable match for Harry. However, she shows far more interest in Ivan and Gordon, who are closer to her in age. And really, I have found myself ever since we left London thinking of her as a child rather than as a young woman. She will not do, will she?”

“Fortunately, Matilda,” Althea said, “she seems to have not one ounce of interest in Harry. There are, of course, the local girls for us to consider. Miss Hill and her younger sister, for example. Miss Ardreigh, their cousin, who is visiting them. The magistrate’s daughter—Miss Raymore, I believe?”

Everyone gazed at her. No one took her up on her suggestion.

“As I thought,” she said, nodding, and a few of them laughed.

“But she will not have Harry,” Mildred said.

No one asked to whom she was referring.

“What does that have to say to anything?” her mother asked.

No one offered an answer.

“Mrs. Tavernor it is, then?” Louise said at last.

“What we need,” Matilda said briskly, “is a plan.”