The Escape by Mary Balogh

6

“It is quite fascinating to observe how differently various people are affected by their infirmities,” Beatrice said over a late tea. “Some people are an inspiration. They remain smiling and cheerful while suffering the most dreadful afflictions. Others make one feel as though one were being sucked into a black hole with them, poor things.”

“You look exhausted,” Ben said.

“But glad to be back to my parish and community duties at last,” she assured him. “How did you enjoy your ride?”

“Very well indeed,” he said, “for the five minutes it lasted. I was just riding out when I spotted a gig coming along the road in the direction of the house. It looked to me as though the lone occupant was dressed in unrelieved black. So I turned around and came back.”

“Mrs. McKay?” she said. “Without Lady Matilda?”

“The lady has a head cold.”

“And so Mrs. McKay was able to escape alone.” She smiled at him. “You were not so lost to all conduct as to entertain her in here alone, I hope, Ben?”

“We sat outside in the garden for all of an hour,” he told her.

It was a bit surprising, actually, that he had even turned back from his ride, since he might easily have escaped without her seeing him. And he certainly could have stopped her from staying. It had not been her suggestion. But then he was the one who had suggested that she call at Robland. He had felt sorry for her, cooped up in that gloomy manor with the battle-ax.

“Poor lady,” Beatrice said. “I do not suppose her sister-in-law is good company even when she is in the best of health. Mrs. McKay must be very lonely. I wish I had been here.”

“If ever the topic should arise, Bea,” he said, “you have been complaining just recently that the horses in the stables are in need of more exercise than they are getting.”

“Oh?” she said in some surprise. “Have I been so slandering my grooms? I am obliged to you for reminding me, Benedict, as I have no recollection of saying any such thing. And why should the topic arise?”

“I said as much to Mrs. McKay before she left here,” he explained.

“Oh?” Her cup paused between the saucer and her lips.

“I asked her to ride with me the afternoon after tomorrow,” he said, “but I suspect there is no suitable mount in the stables at Bramble Hall.”

“I do not doubt you are right.” She placed her cup back in its saucer and set both aside. “And she agreed?”

“Yes.”

She rested her elbows on the arms of her chair and regarded him with a slight frown. “I doubt her sister-in-law will allow it,” she said. “If she has power over Mrs. McKay, that is. But is it wise anyway, Ben? I can see no reason why a recently bereaved widow ought not to take the air on horseback if she so desires, but in the lone company of a single gentleman?”

“I did say I would persuade you to join us,” he said. “Will you, Bea? Are you feeling up to it?”

“I certainly will be,” she said, “if the alternative is for you to ride out alone with a lady, Ben. It would not be at all proper, even if she were not in deep mourning.”

“She is lonely, as you just observed,” he said, “and restless.”

Though why he should have taken it upon himself to try to alleviate that restlessness, he did not know.

“It is hardly surprising,” she said. “She has been virtually incarcerated at Bramble Hall ever since she arrived. I suppose it was a labor of love, poor lady, nursing Captain McKay, and clearly he was desperately ill, but I always thought it selfish of him not to insist that she go out occasionally, even if only to take tea with a neighbor. She never did. It is perfectly understandable that by now, with the first wave of her grief passing off, she would be longing to flutter her wings.”

“Yes.”

She fixed him with a direct stare. “You are not making a flirt of Mrs. McKay by any chance, are you, Ben?” she asked him. “You have not conceived a tendre for her? I have been hoping for some time that you would recover your interest in women and in courtship. You have been a hermit for too long. I have been hoping you would marry before you turn thirty, though you have only a few months left in which to make me happy on that score. But I am not sure a recent widow is a wise choice, especially given the identity of her father-in-law. Of course, she is quite astonishingly lovely. She must have foreign blood to account for her dark coloring. That would not endear her to the Earl of Heathmoor, I daresay.”

“Beatrice,” Ben said in some exasperation, “I have met Mrs. McKay four times, including our disastrous encounter in the meadow and our brief meeting at church. We are to take a ride together the day after tomorrow—in your company. I do not believe we will be having the banns called this week or even next.”

She laughed. “She is very beautiful. Though the black clothes she wears are unbecoming, to say the least.”

“Agreed.”

“If you sat outside in the garden,” she said, “I suppose she kept that hideous veil over her face.”

“She pushed it back over the brim of her bonnet, actually.”

She regarded him in silence for a few seconds longer and then shrugged. “I know,” she said. “You do not need to say it aloud. You are no longer nine years old or even nineteen. You are quite capable of living your own life, and even if you are not, you would not thank me for trying to live it for you. Very well, I will not. But what are you going to do with your life, Ben? You have appeared to … to drift aimlessly in the years since you left Cornwall. I have sworn to myself that I will say nothing, but here I am saying it anyway and annoying you.”

He was irritated by the question, since he still did not know the answer. And he hated that in himself. He had always used to think of himself as a firm, decisive man. He had planned out his life when he was fifteen, and he had not deviated from that plan until a bullet and other assorted catastrophes had stopped him almost literally dead in his tracks six years ago. Now he felt as if he had been set adrift without a compass on an ocean that stretched vast and empty in every direction. He had come here with the firm intention of making plans and then launching them into effect. He was still determined to do it—tomorrow. Was it only recently he had made the discovery that tomorrow in fact never comes?

But Beatrice was someone who had always genuinely loved him. Her concern was real. She had a right to ask and a right to be answered.

“For the first year or so,” he said, “my whole focus was upon surviving. Then it was upon the monumental task of getting up from my bed and somehow becoming mobile. And finally, and until very recently, it has been upon walking again and getting my life back as it was before so that I might proceed to live happily ever after according to the original plan. I must be very stubborn or very dense or both. I have only recently faced the truth—that neither my body nor my life will ever again be as it once was. I was a man of action, a soldier, an officer. Now I am none of those things. The trouble is, though, that I do not know what I am instead or what I will be. Or what I will do. I am in a bit of a bleak place, Bea, though I do not even know where that is.” He laughed softly.

“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.”

Samantha wove the silk thread invisibly through her work at the back of the cloth before cutting it and changing to a different shade. She seethed at the condescension of Matilda’s words. She ought to just keep quiet until the subject was changed. But why should she? Anyway, Matilda was going to have to know her plans.

“Lady Gramley was not at home,” she said. “Sir Benedict was just returning from a ride and was kind enough to keep me company in the garden for a while so that I would not have to drive back home immediately.”

“It is to be hoped no one saw you there, Samantha,” Matilda said. “Perhaps now you understand the folly of acting impulsively and contrary to the advice of your husband’s sister.”

“We had a very pleasant conversation,” Samantha told her. “I am going riding with him tomorrow. He is going to have a horse from the Robland stables brought over for me.”

Some imp of mischief led her to omit adding that Lady Gramley would be riding with them. She looked up when there was no immediate response to her words. Her sister-in-law was gazing back at her with red-tipped nose and ashen face and cold eyes.

“I must very adamantly advise you against such a thing, Samantha,” she said. “Indeed, I take it upon myself to speak even more strongly on behalf of Matthew and Father. I forbid you to do this.”

“Matthew liked me to ride,” Samantha said, lowering her head to her work again. “If he could speak now, I daresay he would tell me to go, since he no longer has need of me in the sickroom. I need air and exercise. Quite desperately.”

“Then I will walk with you in the garden,” Matilda said.

“No, you will not,” Samantha told her. “That is a very bad cold you have. You need to stay by the fire and out of drafts. And I need exercise that is more vigorous than a stroll in a confined area. A walk is not enough. I want to ride. And that is what I will do tomorrow. Oh, dear, did I say the forbidden word?”

Tramp, who had been lying in the shaft of sunlight that beamed through the window, looking for all the world as if he were comatose, had scrambled to his feet and was now standing before Samantha’s chair, making pathetic little whining sounds and gazing fixedly and hopefully up at her.

“I used the word walk, did I not?”

His tail wagged. Yes, indeed, she had.

“Oh, very well.” Samantha got to her feet. “We will go into the garden and find a stick for you to chase. Though that is not a fair game at all, you know, for you never throw the stick for me to chase.”

“Samantha,” Matilda said sharply before her sister-in-law could escape from the room to fetch her bonnet and cloak. “I must categorically forbid you to go riding tomorrow. You may say, if you will, that I have no power to command you, but indeed I do. I stand as Father’s representative here.”

Samantha stopped and turned to face her. “I do say that you have no right to command me, Matilda. It is insufferable that you would try. Your complaints and advice I will listen to. You have every right to express them. You have no right to tell me what I must do, or, more important, what I must not do. Nor does the Earl of Heathmoor. He is not my father.”

Though he did own the home in which she was living.

She stayed outside in the garden for longer than an hour, to Tramp’s great delight. She was feeling very close to the end of her tether. The past five years had been difficult ones, but though Matthew had been a demanding, often querulous patient, she had made allowances for his pain and discomfort. Besides, he was her husband. She had not been happy during those years, but she had been too busy and usually too exhausted to feel any great unhappiness.

The four months of her bereavement had been difficult ones too in a different way. They might have been less difficult if she had been able to respond to the very touching outpouring of sympathy and good wishes of neighbors with whom she had had no chance to become well acquainted before Matthew’s death.

She might have made some friends, or at least a few friendly acquaintances, during these months. She had not been allowed to accept the overtures of her neighbors, however, and she had meekly given in to Matilda’s directions on what was correct. She could do it no longer. She was beginning to feel quite mutinous.

I must categorically forbid you to go riding tomorrow … I stand as Father’s representative here.

Oh, it was intolerable.

Finally even Tramp was tired of playing. He came and lay at her feet as she threw his stick once more, and then rested his chin on his paws.

“Ingrate!” she said. “You might at least have fetched it one more time before making your wishes known. It was a perfectly decent stick. Now I will have to search for another the next time you insist upon this game.”

He heaved a sigh of unrepentant boredom.

“We had better go back inside, then,” she said. “I have been avoiding the inevitable. Why did I have to marry into such a horrid family, Tramp? No, don’t answer. I know why. It was because of the fatal combination of scarlet regimentals and a handsome face. He was very handsome, you know, and very dashing. You were not acquainted with him in those days. And it was not his fault his family is so horrid.”

She thought of avoiding the sitting room when they went back inside and taking her outdoor things up to her room, where she would find something to keep her busy. But there was no avoiding Matilda forever, and she was not going to start hiding inside her own home. She left her outdoor things in the hall and opened the sitting room door, prepared somehow to make peace.

The room was empty.

She breathed a sigh of relief and crossed the room to pull the bell rope.

“Bring a tray of tea, will you, please, Rose?” she said when a maid answered her summons. “Do you know if Lady Matilda was feeling unwell again? Did she go back up to her room?”

Rose flushed and looked uncomfortable.

“I think she is up there, ma’am,” she said, “but not to rest. She sent Randall down to the cellar to fetch her trunk and her big valise, and she sent for her maid to pack them.”

Samantha stared at her. “Right. Thank you, Rose,” she said. “Never mind about the tray for a while. I shall call for it later.”

The maid scurried from the room.

All was bustle and activity in Matilda’s room. Her trunk, two valises, and three hat boxes were open on the floor, and it seemed that every garment she possessed was piled either on her bed or on chairs—except the chair on which Matilda herself sat, her back ramrod straight, her lips set in a thin, straight line.

“What is this, Matilda?” Samantha asked. It was a rather foolish question, of course. It was perfectly obvious what this was.

“I shall be leaving for Leyland tomorrow morning,” Matilda said without looking at her. “I shall take the traveling carriage and some servants.”

Samantha walked farther into the room. “I am sorry it has come to this,” she said. “Are you sure you are well enough to travel?”

“I will not remain here,” Matilda said. “I know what is due my family and the memory of my brother, Samantha, and I will not sully either by remaining with someone who does not.”

“And this is all because I choose to return the calls of my neighbors?” Samantha asked her.

“I hardly call riding out with a single gentleman who is staying with one of your neighbors visiting, Samantha,” Matilda said. “Even if you were not in deep mourning I would call it both vulgar and scandalous.”

“Vulgar and scandalous.” Samantha sighed. “Did I neglect to mention that Lady Gramley will be riding with us?”

“That fact makes no difference,” Matilda said. “I hope your conscience will persuade you to remain at home tomorrow, Samantha. But whether it does or does not, the intention was there and the determination to persist even after I had spoken to you quite sternly on behalf of my father. I will not remain after such an insult—an insult not to me, you will understand, but to the Earl of Heathmoor, your husband’s father.”

“Very well,” Samantha said. “I see there is no point in my saying anything further. I shall make arrangements for the carriage and the coachman and a few other servants to be ready in the morning.”

“It is already done,” Matilda said. “I beg you not to exert yourself on my behalf.”

And the thing was, Samantha thought a short while later when she was back in the sitting room, prowling about as though there was no comfortable chair upon which to sit—the thing was that she had been left feeling guilty, as if she really had behaved quite outrageously enough to be shunned by all decent folk.

Vulgar and scandalous—good heavens!

Oh, she was very angry again. Quite furious, in fact. For two pins she would hurl every ugly ornament on the mantelpiece onto the hearth and shatter them into a million pieces. But she doubted she would feel any better afterward.

Surely—oh, surely, other newly bereaved widows were not expected to stay in a darkened home for a whole year, discouraging visitors and never returning any calls they did receive. Surely they did not cut themselves off from all exercise and social activity, even if they did avoid more frivolous entertainments, like assemblies and picnics.

Surely the way she had been living here with Matilda was not normal.

Perhaps she was wrong. Perhaps her restlessness did denote a waywardness, a lack of respect for the man who had been her husband for seven years and for his grieving family. Were they grieving, though? Beneath the outer trappings of mourning, that was. None of them had come to Bramble Hall even once during the five years Matthew had been here, except Matilda at the end. None of them had come for the funeral. It was a long way, of course, from Kent to County Durham and would have caused an uncomfortable delay in the proceedings. Nevertheless, she had personally sent word to the earl and countess by special messenger, and they could have got word back to her just as quickly to delay the service. They had not done so.

Matthew had been the black sheep.

Oh, no, she decided, tugging firmly on the bell pull again, she was not going to feel guilty. And she was not going to try to persuade Matilda to change her mind. Good riddance to her. She was not going to send word to Robland Park to cancel tomorrow’s ride either.

She was not going to feel guilty.

But of course she did.

“Bring the tea tray in, please, Rose,” she said when the maid answered her summons.

She was not hungry either, though. Or thirsty.