2

Sarah’s heart withered to the size of a pea and retreated to somewhere in the vicinity of her toes. What had she just done?

A glance around the room revealed that everyone else was just as shocked as she was. The earl’s mouth was still hanging open a bit from his gasp while Lady Densbury’s lips were so tightly pursed that they’d turned white and disappeared into her face.

Only the dowager countess looked unruffled by Sarah’s outburst. But then, she knew Sarah better than anyone else in the room. It wasn’t unheard of for Sarah to express her opinion to the old lady, even if it were contrary to her employer’s views on a subject.

Never had she opened her mouth in front of the family, though. She’d meekly accepted her role and retreated behind the piano. But she would not allow them to mistreat the dowager, a wonderful woman who had saved Sarah’s pride and independence and had spent the past year demonstrating true strength of character.

She’d been hired as the dowager’s companion, and wasn’t part of that job seeing to the old woman’s comfort? For a woman of her age and severely declining health, moving households to a colder, damper, lonelier climate was akin to a death sentence.

At that moment, the dowager was looking over her shoulder at Sarah, a wide smile on her face and her eyes gleaming with pride. After a moment, she turned back to her family seated around the large table. “Well, I think that says it better than I could.”

The current countess glared at her predecessor. “You can’t possibly intend to keep her in your employ after an outburst like that.”

“And why not?” The dowager sniffed. “I pay her to look out for my best interests. You shuffling me off to die in some drafty house north of Yorkshire is not in my best interests.”

“Mother,” Lord Densbury said with affronted exasperation, “no one said anything about wanting you to die.”

Sarah’s eyebrows winged upward, and a cough sputtered through her lips. Oh the things she wanted to say in response to that cold and callous statement, but she’d done enough damage already.

“No one said anything about wanting me to live in comfort, either,” the dowager huffed.

She might have grown slower over the past year and struggled with normal everyday tasks, but her mind was perfectly capable of presenting her own defense. The dowager hadn’t needed Sarah’s intervention.

Why hadn’t she stayed behind the piano in her rightful place?

“Your comfort is all I’m thinking of, Mother. You’ve mentioned that the stairs in Cloverdale are difficult. A younger family will handle the sprawl better than you.”

Silence fell as the dowager tilted her head a bit in consideration. “You’ve a point, Stuart.”

Visible relaxation sagged through the family members at the head of the table. Sarah blinked. Surely the dowager wasn’t going to give in on this. Cloverdale was a dower property. No one could make her move if she didn’t want to.

But the dowager was smiling, a look on her face that Sarah knew all too well. There would be no concession today.

Giving a nod, the old lady said, “Sarah and I will take up residence in the cottage in Bath.”

Desperate to cover the laugh that threatened to emerge, Sarah clapped a hand over her mouth and looked away from the grinning dowager. Her gaze collided with Randall’s, and the urge to laugh was smothered beneath his direct gaze.

He stared at her, head cocked to one side, crooked smile tilting his lips up slightly at the corners. What was he thinking?

She fought the urge to fidget, to escape back to the safety of the piano. Around her the conversation raged on, swirling into a murky pit of familial disappointment. She heard the words but couldn’t pull herself away from those blue-grey eyes and the curiosity in them.

“The cottage in Bath?” The countess’s voice finally cut through the general commotion. She was obviously deeply affronted by the idea.

“Yes, yes.” The dowager sounded rather excited about the idea, even though Sarah knew it would take a full team of horses and a royal decree to get the woman to actually leave Lancashire. “I would never have considered it before, you know, being so comfortably ensconced at Cloverdale for twenty-three years, but your insistence that I see to my health has convinced me. The cottage is smaller, and I’ll be able to take the waters and breathe the sea air.”

“But . . . but . . . you’ve always declared such things to foolishness and nonsense,” the countess sputtered out.

Sarah could almost envision the dowager smiling and mentally rubbing her hands together the way she did when she knew one of the household servants was about to fall victim to one of her harmless pranks.

“Perhaps I’ve changed my mind,” the dowager mused. “You return from your yearly trips to Bath declaring yourself refreshed and feeling five years younger. I have to confess. I wouldn’t mind feeling five years younger. It means a terrible lot to me that you would forgo your weeks in Bath so that I can live in health and comfort. And, of course, the sacrifice dear Harriet and Beatrice would be making as well.”

Randall’s smile widened. He finally broke eye contact with Sarah to look at his grandmother. Blessed air rushed in to Sarah’s lungs as she was released from his regard. She couldn’t stop staring at him, though, watching the delight on his face as his grandmother maneuvered and guilted his family.

Lord Saunders, who had seemed so confident when he suggested ousting his grandmother from her home, now looked unsettled as he cleared his throat. “Perhaps Harriet and I should return to London for a while. Mother is right. We wouldn’t want to take on too large of a task while Harriet is in such a state. Besides, it will allow us to establish ourselves better socially before the children come.”

“Yes, yes,” the earl rushed to agree. “The connections a man makes in his youth are very important.”

“Oh.” The dowager heaved a comically large sigh. “I suppose I’ll stay at Cloverdale, then. No sense in disrupting everyone’s routines just for me.”

Another laugh swirled about in Sarah’s chest. She needed to get the dowager out of here before it erupted—and before her employer forgot about her vow to stop trying to make her son and his wife drop a bit of their rigidity. They’d called a truce some years ago, but it wouldn’t take much for the dowager to renege.

Sarah stepped forward and cast a longing look at the remaining cake before laying a hand on the dowager’s shoulder. “Speaking of routines, I believe the hour is getting late, my lady.”

The dowager frowned up at Sarah, like a child told he’d have to wait until another day to go swimming in the pond. “Yes, I suppose it is.”

It took a few tries for the dowager to rise from her seat, her arm shaking a bit as it braced against the table in an effort to push her way to standing. Sarah bit her lip and resisted the urge to rush forward and help.

Finally the dowager was up. “I want you all to know,” she said a bit shakily, “that for all its foibles—and there are many—this is a good family. You’re a good son, Stuart, and you’ve done well with a life you never expected to have. And you’ve done well with a wife who made that transition better than any other woman could have. I wanted you all to know that.”

She nodded around the table at her grandsons. “Cecil, George, Randall, be good. Love the Lord and your family and you’ll do well enough.” She sniffed. “I bid you all a good night, then. And good-bye.”

She turned and left the room, Sarah trailing behind her to the front hall.

Once clear of the dining room, Sarah came alongside the dowager and offered her arm. “That was eventful.”

A low chuckle drifted from the older woman as she gave some of her weight to Sarah. A significant bit more than she’d done a month ago. “I’d have thrown myself on their mercies months ago if that’s what it took to get you away from that piano.”

The butler entered from a side room and waited by the door with their bonnets and pelisses.

Sarah smirked at her employer as she helped ease the finely woven wool over the woman’s thin shoulders. “I thought you liked my piano playing.”

The old woman’s nose crinkled. “I like your piano playing, not that tinkering you do in the dining room.”

Sarah reached for her own pelisse. “When we get home I’ll—” Sarah’s words fell off as the echo of footsteps on marble came from behind them.

With the outer garment half on one shoulder, Sarah turned around. No one ever followed them to the hall after dinner, the meal having more than fulfilled everyone’s familial obligations.

Yet there was Mr. Randall Everard, striding through the hall as if he intended to leave as well.

“I had no idea you wished to take the waters, Grandmother. You should have said so ages ago.” Mr. Everard’s already crooked smile was even more lopsided as one corner lifted in a conspiratorial grin.

The dowager countess laughed as she buttoned her pelisse around her. “Should I ever go, my boy, I’d certainly take you with me.”

He leaned down to kiss her on the cheek. “Then who would see to the farms?”

Lady Densbury sniffed. “Perhaps the man who is set to inherit them? You should have gone into the church. No sense hiding your mind and your faith in the dirt. Especially when it’s not even your own dirt.”

Sarah finished putting her coat on and reached for her bonnet. This was an argument the two had had on many occasions. Randall loved the outdoors and the earth, the challenge of growing things and managing nature, but his grandmother thought it a waste of his sharp mind and love of theology.

The bonnet Sarah took from the butler pulled her arm down with unexpected weight, distracting Sarah from the conversation between the two aristocrats. A peek inside the hat revealed a square parcel wrapped in linen. She grinned.

Cake.

But how was she going to explain not plopping her bonnet on her head to leave the house? Her grin fell as she looked up only to find herself under the scrutiny of both Mr. Everard and Lady Densbury.

“It would seem,” Mr. Everard said slowly, “that I am not the only one who has been hiding.”

Miss Gooding paled. The angles of her face seemed sharper as her eyes rounded and her mouth dropped open as if she were about to say something but forgot the words.

It was a problem he’d attributed to her the entire year he’d known her—an inability to actually put words together—but her display in the dining room had proven she was anything but inarticulate. It was clear that those moments when he’d glimpsed something more in her personality, something just enough to keep him from ignoring her entirely, had been the edges of her true self poking to the surface.

Why would a young woman so obviously passionate be willing to spend hours every week stuffed behind a piano absorbing verbal barbs of the veiled and not-so-veiled variety?

“May I see you home, Grandmother?”

“Why?” the old woman who’d practically raised him asked with a grin. “You’ve never seen the need to before.”

That wasn’t precisely true. He’d seen her home on several occasions before she employed her new companion. He’d even walked her home the first few months of Miss Gooding’s employ until he’d become frustrated with the conflicted thoughts and feelings he had about the young woman.

Thoughts and feelings that were once more entering a swirl of confusion. He’d thought he had her figured out, thought he knew her, but as he stood in the front hall now he questioned everything.

He cleared his throat and debated between sounding like a dutiful grandson or teasing his grandmother. In the end, he opted for an honesty his family was all too good at avoiding. “You’ve never leaned quite so heavily on your companion before.”

The dowager’s growing feebleness bothered Randall. Yes, his grandmother was old. Yes, he knew, in the way one knows the sun rises in the east, that she would die one day. Until recently he’d been able to easily ignore both of those things. But she looked considerably weaker than she had on his last visit. Thinner. Shakier.

“And you lean too much on your father’s laziness,” the dowager grumbled, showing him that the spirit hadn’t weakened along with the body. “Thought the boy was destined to write sermons and visit parishioners all day so I didn’t worry about teaching him when he was younger. Now he’s the earl and doesn’t even know what crops grow on his farms.”

She poked one wrinkled finger in Randall’s direction. “You need find your own land to settle on while you’ve still got the energy to do so.”

He hated that she was right, but he also hated that the idea of being completely on his own, starting from essentially nothing, terrified him. “And here I thought my decline and dotage to be years in my future.”

“Bah!” She crammed a bonnet on top of her silver curls and lifted her chin to let Miss Gooding secure the ribbons.

Instead of jumping forward to comply, the companion looked from Randall to her employer to the bonnet clutched in her slim-fingered hands. Her delicate throat jumped as she swallowed. Then she stepped forward and . . . handed her bonnet to the dowager?

With her hands unencumbered, she set about tying the ribbons. “I am perfectly capable of seeing your grandmother safely home. That is my job, after all.”

Something shifted in Randall, making him feel almost off balance. Showing gumption twice in one night? What had come over Grandmother’s timid bird of a companion?

“Are you? And what would you do if you encountered a highwayman or wild dog? You won’t have a piano with you to soothe them with your melodies.”

It wasn’t like him to throw such challenging statements at people, but he was curious to see how riled she could get.

“Given that Cloverdale is a mere mile from here, on a well-maintained path that doesn’t even require us to leave Densbury lands, I feel confident that I can handle any threat that may come our way.” She straightened her shoulders and looked him in the eye with a directness that seared Randall in the chest.

Respect bloomed through him, along with an attraction he thought long dead. There’d been a moment, that one single moment, not long after she’d come to live at Cloverdale, when he’d seen her and wondered what it was about her that had finally convinced his grandmother to get rid of the annoying cousin she’d been talked into hiring. He’d wondered if his grandmother’s new companion could shake him from the worn and beaten-down rut he’d been living in.

But then she’d proved herself quiet and timid, and that hope had faded like a candle on the verge of gutting out. But now, with her eyes no longer cast to the ground, it was amazing how different she looked. Not just in appearance, although the sight of her wide eyes seemed to completely change the look of her unique face, but there was a change in spirit. As if she’d seen the more difficult side of life and learned when and how to fight.

Randall shook himself from his frivolous musings.

Whatever fanciful notions he was attributing to the girl, he couldn’t possibly connect himself to a woman who couldn’t manage to place her bonnet on her head.

Granted, the sun was nearly gone and the hat was no longer a needed accessory, but wouldn’t it still be easier to wear it upon her head instead of carry it?

Miss Gooding ran her hand along the brim of her bonnet. “It’s getting late,” she said quietly, though her pale, icy blue eyes didn’t fall from his. “I should get Lady Densbury home.”

The dowager shuffled toward the door. “Yes, yes, have to get me home before these old bones decide they’ve finished creaking for the day.”

“I’d be happy to have the carriage brought round.” Randall stepped forward and offered his arm to his grandmother. He tried not to frown at how frail her grip felt. Why hadn’t his father already started using the carriage to bring her to and from the dower house? Had the earl not noticed the dowager’s declining health?

“Nonsense. If I stop walking now, I’ll never start again.”

“You’re wasting your breath,” Miss Gooding said in her soft voice. “I’ve tried everything to convince her to use it more often. If it makes you feel better, though, we do take the carriage if it is especially late or the night is not clear.”

That was some consolation, he supposed, and he had no doubt that his grandmother was stubborn enough to refuse the assistance, but he still had to wonder at his father allowing two women to stroll the grounds after the sun had set. As Randall and his grandmother exited the door, Miss Gooding fell meekly into place behind them, still clutching the bonnet in front of her like a basket.

A swirl of impishness fed by the renewed curiosity about the companion drove Randall’s tongue. He tilted his head toward his grandmother’s ear but cast his gaze over her shoulder to view her companion, who was swiping her curls from her face as the light evening breeze blew them around. “Your companion seems to have an aversion to wearing anything on her head.”

“Bah.” His grandmother waved her free hand through the air. “She doesn’t want to smash her cake.”

Randall nearly stumbled to a halt. Fortunately the dowager was moving slowly enough that it didn’t really matter. He turned his head more fully to look at Miss Gooding, who was now frowning at her employer.

“Best be careful, Lady Densbury,” she said, her frown shifting into more of a smirk. “I don’t have to share my bounty with you, you know.”

“After I asked them to wrap up an especially large piece? That would be a mite bit ungrateful.”

“Considering you’ve given away our secret, this might be the last piece I get to bring home.” The sigh that escaped Miss Gooding was exaggerated and long as she lifted a linen-wrapped bundle from within her bonnet and shoved the hat onto her head.

“My dear Randall would never betray my secret, would you?”

Randall had to clear his throat before he could talk. “Of course not.”

An inelegant snort came from behind him. “Who, pray tell, are we keeping the secret from, then, if not your family?”

Grandmother gave a matching sound of disgust. “There’s family and then there’s family. Randall here is the second one.”

Was he supposed to be flattered by that? He supposed there had always been some distinction between him and his brothers. The knowledge that he would have to make his own way in the world, that his children would not be aristocratic, that his fate was not among the elite, had meant that he viewed life a bit differently.

While his father had trained the elder two boys, Randall had simply been . . . there. His mother had more than once lamented that he’d have been ever so much more useful if he’d been born a girl. Then at least he could have been married off to enhance the family connections. She’d always claimed it was a joke, but Randall never found it funny.

There hadn’t even been much of an army for him to join, given that the past ten years had seen an unprecedented peace over the country.

“To prove my loyalty,” he said with the intention of getting the lighthearted teasing to continue, “I shall endeavor to sneak an entire Madeira Pound Cake over to Cloverdale before I leave.”

He was positive he heard Miss Gooding whimper.

Grandmother shuffled to a stop. “Before you leave? You aren’t staying through Christmas?”

Randall looked down into his grandmother’s beloved face, accusatory in the light of the bright moon. Desperation had him sending a pleading look back toward Miss Gooding.

He caught the open curiosity on her face before her eyes widened and she dropped her head forward to stare at the ground. No help from that quarter then. “Grandmother, I have to get back to Bluestone.”

“For what?” She poked him in the side. “It’s the middle of winter. Even your bothersome father knows there’s nothing growing right now.”

Which made his easy acceptance of Randall’s excuse to return all the more painful. “Be that as it may, that is where I belong.”

“Bah.” Grandmother started walking again, mumbling words he couldn’t quite catch.

Miss Gooding obviously had more experience interpreting the dowager because her giggle drifted forward on the light breeze.

“Care to enlighten me on my grandmother’s agitation, Miss Gooding?” He turned his head but kept walking. If his grandmother guided him into a tree, they weren’t walking fast enough to do any real damage.

Miss Gooding’s lips pulled together, making her chin look a bit more pointed and her eyes even more wide set. It was the most unique face he’d ever seen. Somehow, the sharp shape and lines suited her thin arms and narrow body. Like God had assembled her for efficient movement and grace. Like a greyhound.

Probably best not to mention that comparison.

“If I may, Mr. Everard,” she said with a bit more firmness to her words and a considerable great deal more amusement, “your grandmother is not happy with your life.”

He grinned. “I know. But if I were to change it, we’d have nothing to talk about when I came to visit.”

Grandmother grunted. “Of course we would. Because you’d have babies.”

“Babies require a wife, Grandmother.”

She nodded. “I’d be able to talk about her too.”

Randall shook his head and patted the hand resting on his forearm. Thank goodness they had arrived at Cloverdale. This conversation was getting uncomfortable and bordering on ridiculous. “I haven’t got a wife, Grandmother.”

“And don’t I know it?” She stomped up the stairs with as much force as her slightly stooped body could manage. “I went through the trouble of handpicking one for you, and you can’t even walk the mile from the estate house to come court her!”