A Lady Awakened (21 page)

“Well,” he said. One gloved hand came out, palm up, fingers spread, while he counted off with the other. “I haven’t been addressing the right part of you. We know that can be corrected. Your conscience interferes. And you haven’t known me very long, but we’ve two weeks or so remaining to our bargain. Are those all my obstacles?”

For Heaven’s sake, why couldn’t he apply such energy to something worthy and useful? She pointed her bonnet straight ahead, eyes on a distant bend in the road. “The greatest obstacle is the difference in our natures. You’re correct in perceiving that I don’t dislike you. In fact I like you better than I ever expected to do.”

“But that isn’t enough.” His hand, with three fingers’ worth of obstacles counted, still stuck out before him as if he’d forgot it there.

“For me it is not.” How did one go about saying these things gently? “You’re not a bad man, Mirkwood. I do think you have promise. But while I find I can be cordial with a man who lives for pleasure, and even come to feel a certain regard for him, I cannot, in the end, truly admire such a man. And I don’t care to give myself up to a man I don’t admire. Pardon my frankness.”

“Not at all. I’m the one who opened the subject.” His hand went slack, the three obstacles just three among five fingers again. He turned it, and turned it back the other way, and let it fall to his side.

A
CERTAIN
regard
. What a paltry place for a man to hold in a woman’s esteem. And yet some women could cultivate desire on such flimsy ground. Some women, for that matter, went about claiming just such a preference for upstanding men, and fell into the arms of the first willing scoundrel.

Though Lord knows, with a willing scoundrel hired to attend her, Mrs. Russell had had every opportunity to take that fall. She wasn’t so susceptible.

“Did you admire your husband?” What the devil did he think he’d accomplish with that question? Did he mean to console himself with the disappointments of a dead man?—because he knew, even before asking, what the answer must be.

“No,” she said without any particular emotion. “I did not.”

He tipped his head back to watch the aimless clouds. Like those wisps of sheep fleece caught on shrubbery all over the widow’s land. Sheep scratched themselves on bushes and left those slight markers behind. So she’d told him, walking one day.

Had Mr. Russell hoped to be desired by his young bride, and had he ratcheted steadily down into despair? He mightn’t have cared. Some husbands didn’t. Some availed themselves of their conjugal right and no more thought of the woman’s feeling than one would wonder at a chamberpot’s sentiments on being similarly used. Some thought passion in a wife unseemly, and saved up all their best attentions to spend on a mistress.

But many, many husbands must feel otherwise. Many a man must make a mistress of his wife, or at least wish to do so. That could be quite pleasant, a mistress in one’s house day and night. Flirting with a man over the breakfast table. Sleeping but two or three doors away. Sleeping in his own bed some nights. Poor miserable Mr. Russell, if that had been his hope.

“We’ll see my drive from this next rise.” He gestured with one hand. “Granville will likely be outside already. I’ve called on you four times, remember, and always with land business to discuss.”

H
ERE’S OUR
first bit of roadside waste,” Granville said as they approached it. “In general this will be less useful land due to the location. Some of these pieces are thick with trees too.” He was in exceptionally good spirits, the agent, with twice the expected number of young people to lecture, and one of them actually paying rapt attention.

“What are its boundaries? Besides the road, I mean.” Mrs. Russell, too, appeared to be having as delightful a time as could be allowed to a woman in mourning, as she unrolled her dashed map—his dashed map—to see how this spot was represented.

Theo walked a bit away from the others, bending shrubbery branches and letting them spring back as he went. Roadside waste. What man would want to add anything of that description to his holdings? Better to leave it for the turf-cutters’ use. Indeed, here was a place where someone had been digging it out. He poked at the ragged edge with the toe of one boot.

“Why do you suppose the ground drops off there?” The widow had noticed his wandering attention, and swiveled to address him, rather loudly as she still stood beside Mr. Granville with the map. “It looks as though part of it were peeled away.”

“Cut away, yes. Someone uses this turf.” Someone else he could deprive by enclosing. He kicked idly at a loose bit of ground.

“Uses it?” She lowered the map and took a step toward him, her face written all over with astonishment and her voice almost indignant. “For what purpose?”

“To burn. This is the sort of turf people use for fuel.” Didn’t she remember? They’d spent too much of an afternoon reading some tract on the usage of common land, just last week.

“For fuel, really?” Her eyes narrowed at him and she marched over to inspect the ground’s cut edge.

“Fuel, to be sure.” Granville trailed her at a distance. “Among people too poor for firewood, it’s quite common.”

“Do your laborers burn this, Mr. Mirkwood?” She was bending over now, to pick up a crumb of dirt in her gloved fingers, and he looked quickly away from where her skirts gave a sudden elegant delineation to her form.

Fuel. Turf. No, a plain vision came to him of the Weavers’s firewood box with all those folded papers scattered among the sticks. “I believe all our people burn wood.” He glanced at Granville, who nodded. “I presume your tenants do as well, Mrs. Russell?”
Martha
. Her name, the name that said nothing of her husband, lingered unspoken on his tongue like an aftertaste.

“They do.” She frowned at the clod held up between her thumb and first two fingers. “I wonder which of our neighbors does use this.”

“Perhaps none of them. Gypsies come through a neighborhood sometimes, and take turf away in pieces to sell. Or so my reading tells me.” The gentlest of jabs. She really ought to remember this detail. He recalled quite clearly that she’d been reading aloud when they came to that passage, and had stopped to poke him in the ribs on suspicion that he dozed.

“Gypsies. Indeed. I have seen them about on occasion.” She dropped her bit of dirt and dusted her gloves together, tucking the map under one elbow. “Does your reading tell you anything of how such people would be affected by enclosure?” She angled her head to look at him, bright-eyed with interest.

Ah. Sudden daylight. There was nothing accidental about this question, or about anything she’d said. She remembered exactly what learning he’d acquired. “In fact that’s one of the arguments put forth by the defenders of enclosure,” he said, and only now did he notice the way Granville listened, nodding almost imperceptibly. “Enclosing reduces the presence of rootless people in a neighborhood, by eliminating the common land where they might camp.”

“I collect the practice has its detractors as well, then.” She glanced from one man to the other. “What are the arguments on their side?”

Theo hesitated, to give Granville a chance to answer, but the agent dipped his head and held out a hand, palm up, to indicate he should proceed.

“Well, it tends to mean more cropland, to the loss of pastureland. More of the land held by the few wealthiest families in a region.”

“Though that hasn’t been an unmixedly bad state of affairs,” Granville put in, directing his words to Mrs. Russell. “Many of the last century’s advances, in knowledge of drainage and crop rotation for example, came about through the curiosity of gentleman farmers of ample means and acreage on which to try out their theories. A yeoman farmer hasn’t the leisure to conduct such experiments.”

“I see.” Her brow furrowed. “I’m sorry, though, to think of anyone losing the independence of making his own living on the land. So many young people must go to the city now for work.”

“Work that not so long ago was done in cottages.” Here was something he could add. “Fifty years since, tenants on your own land all had spinning-wheels or looms, and Seton Park was known for its finished cloth as well as the raw wool you produce now.”

“How do you know that?” Genuine surprise flickered in her eyes. “I’m sure it’s not in any book.”

“I should think he’s been speaking to people who remember it so.” The agent smiled with undisguised satisfaction. “Visited Mr. Barrow, have you?”

“He has a great many interesting stories to tell.” He looked at the ground, to avoid the sensation that he was somehow preening under Granville’s approbation. He’d visited the old man to be sociable, after all, not for any high-minded educational purpose.

“You do well to listen.” The smile came to him, even with his eyes averted. “Books make an excellent foundation, but they haven’t the immediacy of a man’s own experience. To hear the stories of Mr. Barrow, and others both like and unlike him, will give a complexity to your understanding beyond what you could pick up from a book.” The agent’s address broadened to include Mrs. Russell. “Shall we go on to the next piece of land?”

Theo threw a look to the widow as the other man turned his back. Such a piquant stew of sentiments on her face. Pride at his showing and at her own part in it, surprise that he’d learned something worthy without her assistance, and poorly suppressed disapproval over the implied disparagement of book-learning.

“
Complexity
,” he mouthed with a tap at his temple, just to pique her further, and her features resolved themselves in favor of disapproval. His arm wanted very badly to sling itself about her waist, so he clasped both hands behind his back and they walked on.

Thus the morning went, from one patch of enclosable land to the next, Mrs. Russell framing questions and remarks that would show off the fruit of his study, Mr. Granville hearing it all, and dispensing supplementary wisdom, with a gratified good cheer, and one or another of Theo’s limbs clamoring to touch his subtle mistress every minute.

A man might get used to landowning, after all. Not only to being outdoors on a morning like this, to see how the little wildflowers, curled indistinct and glistening with dew, gradually opened to reveal their shapes and colors as the sun climbed higher in the sky. A man might get used to discussing things with his agent, for example; to seeing his opinions received and considered as though they had actual weight. He might get used to the company of a neighbor who wished him well. He might even come to welcome the decisions and responsibilities themselves.

Nobody expected much of him, in London. Nobody ever had. He’d been spoiled from two different directions, really. All the privilege and consequence that went with being an eldest son, yet young enough to be doted on by fond older sisters. Such a boy must necessarily grow up believing himself to be wonderful just as he was, mustn’t he? Then the mistresses and friends of one’s young manhood only reinforced the view. Even his father’s disapproval made but one more tributary to the same stream. Everyone expected him to be feckless and trivial, and all his life he’d gladly obliged.

At their final stop—another, even less promising piece of waste—he hung back, mulling over these novel conceptions while Granville showed Mrs. Russell how to measure a boundary, until his attention was caught by the unhurried beat of approaching hooves. He looked up the road to see a figure in a black coat on a frankly pitiable horse. “Is that your curate coming?” he said over his shoulder.

The widow left off her measuring, and came to step round him into the road. She shaded her eyes with one hand. “Indeed I think it is.” She looked … God, but she looked pleased to see the fellow, shabby horse and all, despite the fact that she must see him often enough in the course of his regular business. She let her hand fall and stood where she was, fairly beaming. She must have felt his stare because she glanced his way and smiled, radiant and unself-conscious, as though certain that he, too, had wanted just this chance encounter to make his morning perfect. Then she turned back to the road.

Something unfurled in him, something base and bitter, as he watched her watch the curate. She’d never looked at him that way.

For God’s sake, why should she
?
She’s known that man longer, and she doubtless likes his preaching, and she’s pleased about his school. That’s all
. Besides, plenty of women had looked at him, over the years, in plenty of exceedingly agreeable ways. He needn’t command the admiration of every woman on the planet.

Admiration. Good Lord. Like a fist in the belly, that word. That name for what he saw before him.
Admiration
it was that put a light in her eyes, and touched her upright, expectant posture with simmering grace. His mouth went suddenly dry.

Stop it. He’s not a rival, and she’s not yours to guard
. He bit down on the inside of his cheek, to will in some discipline and common sense, and only let up when the curate stopped—though really the man needn’t have done any more than raise his hat and keep to his errand—and greeted each of them by name, requiring some sort of civil reply.

Their outdoor business was explained to him. He listened with interest, and commended the idea of neighbors consulting one another on such decisions, with the slightest bow—an extra measure of endorsement—toward Theo, which might have gratified him had it not so obviously gratified Mrs. Russell. The widow and the churchman, a pair of grave bookends in their black garments, fell into some discussion of the imminent school then, as he’d expected they must. He removed a bit, with Granville, to let them speak.

The high opinion went both ways. That was plain. But then how should it not? What clergyman wouldn’t think highly of a virtuous, serious-minded young wife or widow, and where common interests and nearness in age promoted it, how should some little bit of friendship not develop? If only he weren’t so damnably interesting-looking, all light and dark and clean-carved angles. Wasn’t that always the way with these country curates? Not one in three of them had the good grace to be ugly, and promote sober-minded attention among the young ladies of a Sunday morning.