Page 13 of Hearts at Home

5

E ric arrived back at Eastwood Hall in the rain. He had never been more pleased to be wet to the skin, though his teeth chattered as he rubbed down his own horse and then Ugo and helped the elderly manservant to haul hot water for his bath.

He hadn’t seen Charis in two weeks. After she made no appearance for three days, he’d sent the housekeeper to find out if something had happened to her. She was well, but travelling daily to Bath for the Season, the housekeeper told him.

Relieved she was not hurt or sick, he visited Bristol where he had several business meetings. His worry about possible suitors for Charis grew day by day, and he greeted the foul weather with delight, immediately cancelling the rest of his meetings in Bristol to return to Eastwood.

Estate business would not wait for long. Had the Wayford estates been without any stewardship at all until he took up the task? Certainly, something was seriously amiss with the accounts, and he and his friend Phillip, his former tutor, were doing their best to get to the bottom of it.

Still, business could wait for now. Eric intended to be at home when the weather kept the Fishinghams from Bath, but improved enough that Charis could manage to once more slip away to her refuge by his folly.

It took three days, days he spent mostly over paperwork, apart from a brief run with Ugo morning and evening. Otherwise, Ugo slept in front of the study fire as Eric worked at the desk by the window that overlooked the path from the Fishingham estate. Not that he made much headway with the work he was expected to do. When he wasn’t gazing at the path, he was imagining his first meeting with Charis. How would she react to his reappearance? Most of the scenarios he rehearsed ended badly; he could not believe she remembered him as fondly as he remembered her.

At last, the rain clouds lifted, and his attention to the path sharpened. After this long wait, he couldn’t, wouldn’t miss her. There. A flash of blue in the Fishingham woods, and then a small figure in the distance. Definitely a woman, by the skirts, and who would it be but Charis? He watched for a minute or two longer. Yes. She was climbing the stile on the boundary wall. Eric grabbed his coat and scarf, laid ready to hand for this moment, and hurried from the house, barely acknowledging the housekeeper as he brushed past.

In minutes, he was setting a hand to the branch by which he would pull himself up to the tree and then the loft of the folly. Ugo gave a single bark. “That’s right,” Eric encouraged. “Go and greet our lady.” The dog barked again and ran off in the direction of the stile, and Eric finished his climb.

Ugo was soon back, pacing majestically beside Charis, his tongue lolling in a huge doggy grin. He flopped at the foot of the bench as she removed her oiled rain cap and spread it, outside down, where she planned to sit.

Once she was seated, she made no move to take out the book that weighted her bag. Instead, she bent forward to rub Ugo’s ears. “This may be my last visit, dog,” she said.

Above her head, Eric leaned forward to hear better.

Ugo’s tail stopped sweeping the ground as he registered Charis’s sad tone. “Not for good,” she reassured him. “Just until it is safe again.”

Safe from what? Eric frowned. He was there to keep Charis safe from any danger.

Charis gave a huge sigh. “I am to stay close to the house, and well away from Eastwood, Mother says. All of us, but the others don’t care to walk, so it just affects me.”

But why? Charis had always come here, and no one had ever objected. As if she had heard his thoughts, Charis echoed them.

“They have never cared before. Fifteen years I have been coming here, and they have been happy to have me out of the house. But the earl who owns the estate is coming to stay, a lady in Bath told us. Perhaps he will be nice, dog. Perhaps he won't mind a girl who only wants a quiet place to read."

Another huge sigh. “He won’t be nice, though. Even I have heard about the Earl of Wayford. Wild to a fault and selfish to the core. I remember him when he used to visit my Eric and make his life a torment.”

‘My Eric.’ Eric, who had been preparing to call out, sat back at those words. She still thought of him as ‘my Eric’?

“I cannot understand mother. She thinks the earl might ruin me, whatever that means. It is a bad thing, I know that. And yet she thinks I should marry him? Why would she want me to marry such a wicked man?”

* * *

So Mrs. Fishingham was matchmaking, was she? And with the wicked Earl of Wayford as her target? Eric grimaced. Lord Wayford had been besieged when he appeared for the Season in London, despite his reputation. Trust Charis not to be drawn to the title and the money. But would she take plain Eric Parteger, hideous scars and all? How would he ever know if he didn’t put it to the test?

Charis was saying goodbye to the dog. He could delay no longer. He leaned out of the window and called her name. “Charis.”

She leapt to her feet and looked up, her brows drawn together.

How beautiful she had grown. The men of Bath must all be married or blind. Her wide blue eyes narrowed, and then she smiled and held her hands up as if she would fetch him down through the window. “Eric? Eric, is it really you?”

Ugo gave an amiable bark and wagged his tail, then collapsed onto the grass at Charis’s feet. She frowned again, looking from the dog to its master. “He is yours? Oh, but he has been here for weeks. Eric, have you been hiding from me?”

“I did not want to scare you, Charis. I never thought you would know me right away. But wait, I will come down.” No flinch. No fixing her eyes and then turning them away. It was as if the disfigured side of his face was no different than the side that bore a single long scar from a knife cut.

“Of course, I knew you,” she greeted him when he rounded the folly and approached the bench. “No one has eyes like yours, Eric. And no one calls me Charis except you. Here!” She backed to sit again on the bench, sweeping her gown to one side and patting the place beside her. “Come and sit with me and tell me everything you’ve done since last we could write. Oh, Eric, when Nanny died, I felt as if I had lost you both, and I can only imagine how you must have felt so far away from home! I am so sorry.”

Eric hesitated. Given a choice, he’d have sat on the other side, so she didn’t have to look at the mess the surgeons had made. Charis put her head to one side, her smile slipping a little, and he sat quickly before he made her uncertain of her welcome.

“I thought it was worse for you,” he told her, “stuck here and no one knowing or caring how important she was to us both.”

When Eric had been sent to Italy, Nanny had been given a cottage in the village and a pension. “I will write, Nanny,” he had said. “I will write to you, and you can tell Charis what the letters say.” They had already reluctantly agreed that Charis would not be able to receive letters from him directly, not just because he was a boy and a flawed one at that, but because no one in the Fishingham household knew of Charis’s secret excursions and the friendship she and Eric had formed.

“My dear boy,” the old woman told him, fondly. “I never did learn to read, and now it’s too late, for my eyes are not what they used to be.”

Charis gave her a hug. “I shall read them to you,” she promised. So, Eric wrote each letter for the two females who loved him, sending them good news and bad. Outings with Phillip Taverton, the tutor assigned to instruct and care for him, who came to be his closest friend. The repeated operations to remove the strawberry growth that marred the whole left side of his face. The infection that nearly killed him. The new friends he made when he was well again and Phillip took him into Italian Society.

There, the scars became something of a passport to new friendships as he and Phillip vied to make up more and more outrageous stories about their cause. His favourite cast him as a ruthless brawler bested by a bandit in a knife fight in the mountains. In the story, the bandit was so impressed with his courage that Eric stayed with the gang for six weeks, being trained by the bandit.

And then the letters stopped. Six years ago, the village rector wrote, expressing his condolences on the death of Mrs. Parker, and enclosing the most recent of Eric’s missives, unopened. And since then, nothing.

Eric had stayed in Italy even after he reached his majority. He had work to do in the Italian mountains, making life uncomfortable for the king and queen imposed by Napoleon in his bid to have his family rule the world under his direction. Besides, this English manor had been his prison, not his home, and the only two people who had ever cared about him were lost, for surely Charis had forgotten about him as she moved into Society and acquired the suitors she richly deserved. Handsome men, men who were accepted by their families, men with their own fortunes.

But here she was, sitting beside him, her lovely eyes shining. “Oh Eric, I am so glad you are home,” she exclaimed.

And he was, he realized. Home for him had always been Nanny and Charis. “I never forgot you,” he told her.

She looked down, suddenly shy. “I never forgot you, either.”

Greatly daring, he asked the question that had been burning within him since his stay in London. “Is that why you never bothered with the men of the ton ?”

Charis blushed and would not meet his eyes. “They were all silly,” she protested.

“And you are promised to me.”

“A childhood promise,” she murmured, so quietly he had to bend closer to hear her, the urge to put an arm around her and rest his lips on the tender flesh of her cheek so strong that he moved away again immediately, so he did not alarm her.

He had pinned his hopes on that promise for the first part of his decade away, fallen into despair when their last link was cut, and—when Napoleon’s defeat meant he’d run out of excuses not to return to England—suppressed every foolish thought of rekindling the romance that had never had a chance to grow. Those thoughts were out of control now, rampaging across his consciousness, yelling ‘Mine,’ ‘Mine,’ ‘Mine,’ like the Norman barons who were his remote ancestors.

“Am I to court you, then, and win the adult woman’s promise?” he asked, the words escaping before he could hold them back. His heart sank. Now Charis would make polite excuses, or—worse still—pretend to be agreeable but never return. He didn’t blame her. Who would want to look at his flawed face every day of their life?

Sure enough, her smile faltered, but she didn’t look away, and the pain he glimpsed in her eyes was not pity for him, which he knew all too well, but something else. “Get to know me again, at least,” she told him. “I have never had a friend as close as you, Eric, and I have missed you more than I can say. But I am not the child you remember.”

He remembered her caution, a product of her mother’s insensitive attempts to mould her into another person. She was relaxed with him, once she learned to trust him, but he had been gone for a long time. “I have changed too, Charis, but not in my heart. I know we shall be friends again. After all, Ugo already loves you.”

She bent to give the dog another caress, lucky beast. “He is a darling,” she said. “What sort of dog is he? I have never seen one like him.”

“An Italian Mountain Shepherd dog,” Eric explained. “I found him in a river in a snow storm.”

Charis gave the little jiggle in place he remembered from a decade ago when a story was in the offing. It was considerably more disturbing in a lady of twenty than a girl of ten. With a stern internal reprimand to his baser self, he began his story and was rewarded as she relaxed beside him.

As an insurgent against Napoleon in the wild mountains at the foot of Italy, he had been famous for his ability to create and implement plans at a moment’s notice. Today’s plan was the most important of his life. Step one. Win Charis’s trust again. Step two. Win her love. Step three. Marry her and live happily ever after.