Page 14 of Hearts at Home

6

C haris was barely aware of the path home, turning by rote into the short cut through the woods and slipping quietly along behind the stables so she could come at the house from the opposite direction to the Wayford estate.

Eric was home. He was tall and charming—handsome, too, under the scars left by the Italian surgeon’s knife, and the single slash on the other cheek. Underneath it all, though, he seemed the same sweet friend she had missed for ten long years. He even still remembered their childhood vow to wed, which she would not hold him to, of course, once he got to know her again.

Her own family did not care to know her, and none of the people she had met in Bath pursued more than a surface acquaintance. To be fair, they interested her no more than she interested them. But she had long known that her love of books and her way of questioning the world set her apart. She would rather be lonely than have to pretend to be someone she was not.

And perhaps Eric would not lose interest. They had been friends once. They were on their way to being friends again. Once she had recovered her balance after the surprise of seeing him and his shocking interest in courting her, they had talked as if they had never been separated.

She managed to reach her room without being intercepted. When the door opened half an hour later without a knock to announce who was visiting, she was sitting at her desk writing in her diary in the code she had devised to keep her nosy sisters from learning her secrets.

“You’ve been to Beastwood again,” Matilda accused.

Charis winced at the cruel local name. “Don’t call it that!”

“Cas, you will never guess.” That was Eugenie. Matilda didn’t wait for Charis to try. “The earl has been here for weeks but hasn’t been visiting.”

Charis knew that, because Eric had told her, assuring her the earl wouldn’t bother her if she came to meet Eric again tomorrow, back at the folly. Could she do it? She shouldn’t. It would make her mother angry if she found out. On the other hand, Eric would keep her safe; she just knew it.

Eric, she knew, was some kind of relative of the earl’s, and the man and his family should be ashamed for punishing Eric for something he could not help. The earl would have been a child at the start of it, she supposed, and at least he had brought his cousin or whatever home after all this time.

As a child, she had quickly stopped noticing the nobbly, purply-red lump on Eric’s cheek. By the time she left him today, she had likewise forgotten his scars. She hoped the earl and the rest of Eric’s family would treat the adult Eric better than they did the child, though the earl’s Christmas plans seemed to suggest otherwise.

The earl was touring all his estates, Eric said, and was expected to join his mother for the seasonal feast. Eric didn’t seem to mind being left behind. “We will have time to get to know one another again,” he promised.

“Cas, you’re not listening!” Matilda stamped one elegant slipper.

Phoebe snorted. “She never listens. She has her head in a book even when she isn’t reading.”

“Cas, this is important,” Eugenie insisted. “Mother is going to invite the earl to dinner next week, and you must at least try to be normal. Mother’s friend Mrs. Greenham says her sister in London says he is definitely looking for a wife. And why not one of us?”

Dear me. But the man was wicked. “Why would you want to marry a man who was wicked?” she asked.

“You mean the fighting?” Eugenie waved one hand. “I wouldn’t mind. He can stop doing it now.”

Fighting? Was that part of being wild? Charis thought about some of the men in the stories she’d read and decided it made sense. Fighting, and drinking, and treating women badly.

“I would not count on that,” she warned her sisters. “Mrs. Eggleston says you should never marry expecting your husband to change, because you’ll be disappointed.”

“Oh, Cas,” Eugenie groaned. “You and your old village women.”

“Mrs. Eggleston was a farmer labourer’s wife, Cas,” Matilda pointed out. “One can’t expect common people to understand. Gentlemen are different.”

“Mother says an earl would be an excellent catch,” Phoebe said and smoothed her skirts. “I am going to ask Mother if I can stay up and have dinner with you when he comes.”

Had Mother run mad? Just this morning, she had demanded that Charis stay close to home while the earl was in the neighbourhood, and now she would let the man marry one of her daughters?

That settled it. Charis was meeting Eric tomorrow.

“Ca-as,” her sisters chorused. “Where have you gone now?”

“We might as well leave her alone,” Matilda suggested.

They trooped out, Eugenie pausing in the door for a parting word. “But Cas, you will be nice to the earl, won’t you?”

Be nice to someone who was wild to a fault? The books Charis read did not exactly explain what 'wild to a fault' meant, but she knew a girl could be ruined by such a man—and ruined was a very bad thing; one that would affect not just her, but her three sisters.

They were annoying, noisy, and silly. They constantly interrupted her to drag her into their activities, none of which appealed to her in the least. She loved them, but she wished they would understand that she wasn’t like them. One couldn't rewrite people in real life to make them easier to live with, or safer for a quiet and harmless trespasser who loved to read.

She sighed again but brightened as she remembered that the earl was going away for Christmas, and that Eric was staying.

* * *

Mother’s invitation to the earl was politely declined, the earl explaining that he was expected in Bath.

Mother nodded, not at all discouraged. “We will meet him there,” she said. “Cas, just think. When you are countess, you can live at Eastwood.”

But the weather and the dark of the moon meant Mother had to delay her conquest of Lord Wayford on Charis’s behalf. Charis was delighted. Even the rain could not keep her at home when Eric lived once more at the other end of the path. Her mother’s conviction that ladies should rest in the afternoon before the exertions of the evening became Charis’s ally. Mother slept, as all the sisters knew, though Mother would deny it, and the sisters were meant to sit together, reading or sewing.

The three younger Fishingham sisters made no comment when Charis announced she would read in her room. She became adept at hurrying quietly down the back stairs and along the back of the stables and the kitchen garden to where Eric and Ugo waited to escort her to the folly.

Eric was as interested in her stories of the past ten years as she was in the far more exciting adventures he’d had. The theft of the Fishinghams’ best rooster paled beside the invasion of the Kingdom of Naples by Napoleon’s troops when Eric was 14. The scar left on her elbow from falling over a fence while fleeing an outraged and unexpected bull was nothing to the one Eric had earned when (as he put it) his unmarred cheek came between a bar maid and a bully with a knife. The ridiculous stunts pulled by Eugenie’s swains in an effort to outdo one another and impress Eugenie seemed even more childish when measured against Eric’s life as a fugitive from the French overlords.

“Brigands, the authorities called me and my friends, but better that than to be known as working for England. They did their best to wipe the brigands out of the mountains, but they didn’t have a chance of getting us all, so they went after the easy wins. We made sure not to be easy. If they’d known our real goal, they’d have left no stone unturned.”

“Didn’t they execute brigands?” Charis asked.

Eric shrugged. “They tortured and then executed the English.”

How could the man Eric had grown into be content with a country mouse like Charis? She loved him more with each day that passed, each meeting they had, each story he told. The boy had grown into a strong man, and a good one.

In the first moment of awed wonder that he wanted to court her, she had not questioned the bond between them. Then day after day passed with no evidence he saw her as more than a friend. Her misgivings grew. How could Charis expect to capture and keep the attention of a charming, handsome, experienced man of the world? She was the least pretty of the Fishingham sisters, the odd one, the bluestocking; awkward and anxious in company; impatient with gossip and social lies.

He showed no sign that she bored him, but then his manners were excellent. He showed no sign that she attracted him, either. He never tried even to hold her hand, let alone kiss her. For her part, her whole body hummed with tension when she was near him, reverberating like a tuning fork to another tuning fork set to the same note.

Surely, he must feel something?

* * *

Eric was living a kind of blissful agony. Charis trusted him enough to meet him in private, and he’d honour that trust if it killed him. Some days, tense with need, he felt it might. As soon as the weather cleared enough for travel, he was heading to the midlands, where her uncle and guardian lived. He’d seek Mr. Pethwick’s permission to ask Charis to be his wife, and none of this nonsense about long betrothals, either. The sooner he could have Charis at his side all the time, where she belonged, the better. Even the thought spread a grin across his face. No more lonely nights.

Meanwhile, he shouldn’t be meeting her like this, but he couldn’t bear to have her so close and not spend time with her. He should ride up to Fishingham Manor and introduce himself to her mother and sisters; see her in chaperoned company away from the temptation to kiss her witless and more. Each day it became harder to honour the vows he’d made to himself, to pay his future wife the respect she deserved by keeping his hands off her.

How would Mrs. Fishingham react? From what Charis said, anyone with a title or wealth would be acceptable. Charis deserved better than that, and so did he. She wanted him for himself, not just the boy he was. She was the only person alive who knew him well from his childhood, but—after all their conversations—he was sure she was coming to love the man he had become. He didn’t believe that would change whatever her mother and sisters said, but he saw no need to risk it. Besides, he didn’t want to share his time with her in polite conversation with others.

It rained through Christmas and on into the new year, but Charis still managed to come most days, hurrying along the path from the Fishingham kitchen garden, bundled up in her oiled coat and sheltered by an enormous umbrella.

The folly offered them a dry place to talk, away from gossiping servants. The housekeeper-cook and her husband had been selected by Lady Wayford, and he suspected them of reporting to that lady. Even if they didn’t, he had no expectation they’d keep Charis’s unchaperoned presence under his roof from the village at large.

Besides, even in the folly in the rain, she was almost more temptation than he could bear, testing all the patience and self-control he’d learned as a family reject, then a surgery patient, then a bandit.

The rain’s ceasefire came almost as a relief from the churning of his thoughts and the struggle with his lust. His attention so focused on his errand, he forgot that the clearing weather meant the Fishinghams could resume their assault upon Bath.

He was lounging in a chair by the window of his bedchamber, watching the sun rise into a clear sky while sipping a coffee and planning the logistics of his trip. He’d hire a post chaise at the nearest post inn, change often, and stop for the night in Cheltenham. A riding horse would be faster, but he meant to keep travelling, and Ugo would run his heart out trying to keep up. A post chaise would bring him to Birmingham by the following night, all going well. The next day for his errand and then two or three days back. In six days’ time, if he hurried, he would be able to ask Charis to be his wife. He wanted her agreement before he told her his secret, though he wouldn’t hold her to her promise if she rejected him when she knew all.

Should he have told her from the beginning? He hadn’t wanted to put a barrier between them, and each day he said nothing it became harder. No. This was the best plan.

Ugo rose from his place by the fire and paced to the window, whining and looking expectantly at Eric.

“What is it, boy? A rabbit?” What he saw when he leant forward brought him to his feet. Surely, he was asleep still, for Charis would never visit him in the daytime as she did every night in his dreams.

But when he opened the doors to his small balcony and stepped out, there she was, looking anxiously up at him.

“I needed to see you,” she said, without preamble. The hood of her cloak fell back as she tipped her head back, and for a moment, his yearning for her stole his tongue. Then he noticed the pink tip of her nose and her stiff hunched posture as she shivered in the cold of the frosty morning.

“Wait right there,” he commanded. He caught the coffee pot up from the hearth on his way to the inner door. He’d find a cup downstairs, or Charis could use his. Did she like coffee? He took his without milk or sugar, brewing it himself over the nearest fire as he had for years in the mountains.

She was waiting on the terrace, and he opened the doors from the study to let her in. Ugo insinuated himself under her hand and received a fond caress. To distract himself from begging for the same, Eric knelt to start the fire, an easy job since the embers from last night were still alive under the ash.

“Will you have a coffee?” A curiosity cabinet by the fireplace held some Arabic cups—fragile fantasies in glass—that he’d picked up in Gibraltar on his way back to England, and at her nod, he fetched one and poured carefully, so as not to fill the little cup with grounds.

“I can’t get milk or sugar without alerting the servants,” he apologized, “but at least holding it will warm your hands.”

Charis blushed at the mention of the servants, even as she reached out for the cup. “I know I should not be here, but I had to see you before we left.”