Martha Schroeder (16 page)

They had both won. Meg had seemed happy when at last she had curled up beside him and drifted off to sleep. When he awoke and looked down at her face, he’d let out a deep breath he didn’t know he was holding as he saw she smiled in her sleep. Now, only an hour later, he sipped his tea. Hot and dark just the way he liked it. Life was good.

“Good morning, James. Why didn’t you wake me before you came downstairs?” Meg avoided meeting his eyes and went to take her place opposite him.

She was dressed for a normal working day in her dark blue riding habit. That disappointed him. He was looking forward to spending another day talking and perhaps even laughing together, learning about each other. But Meg clearly had another plan.

“I thought we could ride out and take a look at the haying. If you would like, that is. I usually spend most of the day outside when it’s time to get the crop in.” She smiled briefly at Meadows as she gave her order for breakfast.

James noticed that the old man gave her a searching look before he nodded once decisively and retreated behind the green baize door. Meg lifted her chin and looked straight at James’s nose. She didn’t meet his gaze.

“Meg,” he said softly. “Look at me, please.”

“I am,” she replied curtly, still focusing on his nose.

“Are you embarrassed? There’s no need to be.” He stretched his hand out, but she did not extend hers to meet it. “What’s troubling you?”

“Miss Meggie!” This time it was Mrs. Meadows who came in to make sure he hadn’t harmed her darling. “What’s this about only having tea and toast? You can’t be riding all morning with that little bit of breakfast in you. Wouldn’t you like a nice omelet? Or at least a bit of bacon?” Her hands twisted in her apron.

“No, Mrs. Meadows. Just tea and toast this morning.” Meg smiled at her, and like her husband, Mrs. Meadows searched her face. She nodded briefly.

“All right. But you be sure to get back here in time for luncheon and no mistake!”

“She must love you very much to bully you so unmercifully,” James said when Mrs. Meadows had left the room.

At last Meg looked into his eyes. Then she surprised him by answering his earlier question. “Yes, I am embarrassed. It seems to me everyone I see is going to stare at me and ask how I am. It’s as if they all know exactly what we were doing last night.” She blushed a fiery red as James chuckled.

“They do know, of course, and they want to know how you are because they love you very much and want you to be happy.” He paused for a moment. “Are you happy, Meg?”

She frowned and he cursed himself. Why try to push her beyond what she gave him freely? She wasn’t ready to admit to any real feeling for him. It was enough that last night had not been a fiasco and that he hadn’t left her hating the married state in general and him in particular.

As she so often did, Meg surprised him. “I do not know. I’m not sure I know what happiness is. But I am enormously relieved. I enjoyed what we did.”

James smiled at the buoyant feeling her words awoke. “You cannot know how relieved I am to hear you say that.”

“And we’ll go to see the haying this morning?”

“It is important to you that we do?” He looked at her and could see that something was very important to Meg. She had drawn herself up to her full height and her chin was lifted, but her hands were clasped in front of her and the knuckles showed white.

“Yes. I need to be sure everything is going as it should.” Begin the way you mean to go on, she told herself. She would show him around the fields, impress him with her knowledge and competence, tell him just how his money should be spent. They could get a good start on the real business of this marriage.

“Of course,” James said, “it’s time I got my hands dirty and found out what makes Hedgemere work.”

I
do know,
she thought.
And today you’re going to find that out.

* * * *

Returning hot and dusty a few hours later, James gazed at his wife with unconcealed admiration. There was no corner of her domain, no person who dwelt on it that Meg did not know, no task she did not herself know how to do. Her tenants admired and trusted her. He noticed, too, that she seldom gave anyone a direct order. Instead, she relied on requests and explanations, and her men seemed to respond. James was surprised she got the results she did. The navy did not use sweet reason as a persuasive method. From the minute he boarded his first ship as a frightened but determined twelve-year-old, he’d learned the value of absolute, immediate obedience. Command had honed that appreciation to a fine point.

Meg had left him with a lot to think about. It seemed that civilian life had some challenges in store for him. He remained deep in thought and was quiet on their ride back to the house. He could feel her gaze rest on him from time to time, but she didn’t interrupt his thoughts until they entered the cool quiet of the house itself.

“Mrs. Meadows usually leaves a cold luncheon in the dining room. I am never sure quite when I will return. Annis sometimes waits and other times eats without me.”

She stopped and turned toward James, consternation showing clearly on her face. “Annis!” she said. “I haven’t given a thought to Annis!”

“Why should you?” James said, meaning only that Annis would return to them as scheduled sometime in the afternoon.

Meg took one angry step toward him. “Because she is my friend. Or is it your habit to ignore those whom you hold in affection?”

James raised his eyebrows. “I cannot see why Miss Fairchild needs you to be constantly thinking of her. What possible good will that do? Is there any reason why she cannot make her way from Mattingly Place to Hedgemere without your thinking of it? Or is your worry an indispensable element of your friend’s well-being, as you conceive it?”

“I meant nothing of the sort! I know Annis would be capable of traveling all over the British Isles by herself if the occasion arose. I only meant that I haven’t received a note letting me know when she will return.” That wasn’t all she meant. Best not to bring up Annis’s continued residence at Hedgemere now, perhaps, but a look at James’s face convinced her she had better say something.

“I was thinking not so much about her return here today as about what she is going to do after she returns.” She cast a considering look at James. She wasn’t sure what his reaction would be to the idea of Annis’s staying on at Hedgemere.

“Why should that be a problem? Surely there is enough to do in this house to keep you both busy for some time to come.” He extended his arm. “Shall we go in to lunch, my lady?”

Meg didn’t know whether to be glad that there was no longer any obstacle to Annis’s continued residence or to take her new husband to task for assuming that the decorating tasks would all be hers.

“Yes, it will be wonderful to have Annis here. She knows about colors and fabrics. I can leave the house entirely up to her.”

“You have no interest in your home?” James could remember the duchess’s constant redecorating projects at Kettering. She spent almost as much time furbishing that vast, Elizabethan pile as she did clothing herself in the latest fashions. He realized he didn’t know much about women, but surely it was unusual to be as uninterested as Meg seemed to be in both subjects.

“Why don’t we go in and have our luncheon?” Meg said.

After he had seated her at one end of the table, James went over to the sideboard. “May I help you to some of this cold beef?”

Meg got to her feet. “I am perfectly capable of filling my own plate, James.”

James looked at her, wondering what had made her so prickly. When she met his gaze, he could see the turmoil in her eyes. “Marriage is going to take some getting used to, isn’t it?” he said, groping for some explanation of her mood.

Meg slapped two slices of beef on her plate. “I don’t see why.” She dumped a salad of lettuce on the plate. “Why should anything have to change? Why can’t things go along just as they have?” There was a note of near panic in her voice.

James carefully filled his plate and returned to sit down. He chose a seat to one side of hers, rather than at the other end of the table. It put him in the position of a guest rather than master of the house, but he was closer to Meg. This was not a conversation he wanted to have with a long, formal dining room table between them.

He began to eat in silence. Meg had taken a roll and now sat crumbling it between her fingers. “James,” she said at last, her voice tentative.

“Yes, my dear?” he encouraged her when she failed to continue.

“I—I told you I hadn’t any social skills. Well, I don’t have any housekeeping skills either. I never learned much about keeping house, except darning sheets. Mrs. Meadows taught me, and she says I’m very good at it,” she added.

“That’s a commendable skill. Many times I could have used you in my career. Could you darn socks as well?” He smiled at her.

“Yes, and they had no lumps at all.”

“You are a pearl without price! I cannot tell you how many times as a midshipman I tried to darn my own socks. They were nothing but lumps when I finished.” He chuckled and for a minute thought Meg might join him. But the moment passed, and she returned to her destruction of the roll.

“I really do not know much else about anything other girls know about.” She sounded defiant, as if daring him to think that this was a fault. “Annis tried, but she soon gave up water-colors and the pianoforte, and I gave up trying to teach her to enjoy riding.”

“I’m sure you could learn anything, if you wished to. Mrs. Meadows and Miss Fairchild could teach you all the household skills you would need to know.” Would she agree to this simple solution? Somehow he thought not. Meg seemed to value not doing a woman’s work in the house as much as she valued doing a man’s work on the estate.

“I have no talent along those lines,” she said firmly, and attacked her beef with slashing cuts of her knife.

“No talent or no interest, Meg?”

Her knife and fork clattered to her plate. “Why are you pursuing this, James? Do you intend to attempt to turn me into the ideal, comfortable helpmeet? It won’t answer, I assure you!”

“What will answer, Meg? Do you intend that you and Annis and the Meadows will continue your lives as you always have? And what did you envisage for me? Handing over the blunt and then meeting you in the bedchamber at night?” He hadn’t meant to be quite so harsh, but her unwillingness to change, her refusal to discuss any deviation from her life as she had known it had flicked him on the raw. “What am I to be? The male equivalent of the cit’s daughter who marries into the peerage?”

Before Meg could gather her wits to reply, James threw his napkin onto the table and strode from the room, anger radiating from him like light. The sound of the library door slamming meant James was on his way to the stable. He had tried to purchase Aladdin from Gerald but instead had received him as a wedding gift.

Meg sat back in her chair and sighed. James’s temper always seemed to catch her unawares. He appeared to be made of granite, but his emotions were more volatile than she had suspected. Or perhaps it was her actions that were the cause.

A feeling of desolation swept over her. What had she done because of her inability to see what he felt? She didn’t understand men’s emotions. She’d never had the opportunity. But she did not want James to feel that she wanted to relegate him to the fringes of her life.

Yet, she was not entirely to blame. He was too sensitive, too apt to see slights where none were intended. That was it, she told herself with relief. It was his fault.

* * * *

James gave Aladdin his head and felt the sheer exhilaration that a gallop on a first-rate horse could give him. It was akin to standing on the deck of a ship and feeling it leap through the water like a greyhound. He grinned as the breeze whipped through his hair and hoped to feel his mood lighten.

But he wasn’t on a ship, safe from the interference of difficult, demanding women who wanted him out of the way and out of their lives. Meg, whom he admired for her candor and caring, was treating him the way the duchess, whom he had worshiped for her beauty and elegance, had years before. They both despised him.

He slowed Aladdin to a canter and then to a trot as memory overwhelmed him.

He’d known he was different from the moment the duke’s man of business had deposited him at Kettering, but it wasn’t until he had been there for several months that everyone else knew it, too.

He’d managed to be absorbed into the swarm of children— the duke’s, his brother’s, and those of his bailiff and secretary— who played outside in a sort of swirling mass, undifferentiated and equal. That day was no different from any other. They had been laughing and shoving and running in an excess of animal high spirits, when the duke and duchess appeared at the door.

James had met the duke for a moment when he had arrived, but he had never before seen the duchess. She was beautiful, the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen—blond and gleaming, dressed in silk of a color that had glistened like fire. Instantly all the children moved toward the two adults. James had gone along without thinking, knowing somehow that these two were the hub of the universe.

“Stop!” The voice was sharp, and James knew without looking that she was speaking to him. He skidded to a stop and looked up at the celestial being in the doorway. A long, slim finger was pointed at him, and the duchess’s lovely face was twisted into an expression he couldn’t recognize then, though later he knew it was anger and revulsion.

“I said he could live here, Trevor, but this—” She turned away, as if the sight of James was too hideous to be borne. “Not where I can see him. Please, Trevor.”

James had stood, transfixed, while the nightmare of public rejection and humiliation seeped into his bones. Everyone stared and slowly drew away from him.

The duke looked at him for a moment, then turned away. “Very well, my dear. James, you had better return to the schoolroom.” The duke seemed a little sad.

Terrified of speaking out, James could not leave it at that. He had to understand. “But what have I—?”

“Go! Right now!” The duchess turned on him in fury. “Or you can go back to the orphanage, where you belong!”