Page 13 of The Derbyshire Dance (Kendall House #3)
“It’s the cap,” interrupted Nigel, shaking his head with a sigh.
“A cap on a lady’s head deters rakes just as effectively as a scarecrow in the wheatfield deters birds.
But you must have realised as much when you put it on.
” With enough goading, Nigel hoped that his hostess would remove the displeasing head covering, but Miss Morrison was not such a slave to vanity.
“You surprise me,” she replied. “I did not expect you to know anything at all about wheatfields.”
“I know very little. You have ascended to the summit of my knowledge.”
“Ah well, if you have no land and live only in London, why bother expanding your knowledge on the matter?” She spoke sarcastically as if a lack of land and a predilection for the metropolis were posting inns on the road to moral failure.
Nigel continued to rub his thumb behind Magpie’s ears.
He did have land. A great many acres of it in Lincolnshire.
But it was all in the hands of the steward his late brother had inherited from his late father, and he had little conception of whether it grew wheat, or barley, or bramble bushes.
He remembered the steward sending him a letter when he had received the title, and he remembered skimming the letter briefly and then tossing it into the fire.
“If you were to remove your cap,” he said cheerfully, “I suspect you would still be in little danger. For Magpie would have something to say if I attempted to move any closer to you on the sofa.” The cat was stretched out on him like a princess in her four-poster bed and luxuriating in its place of rest.
“How fortunate then that you have captured my cat’s affections, but I warn you that you’ll not be taking her home with you.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Nigel with a false show of meekness.
The conversation lapsed into silence, but still Aunt Lucy did not return.
“Might I ask you a question?” asked Nigel.
Miss Morrison raised one eyebrow, her left one. “Ask it.”
“You already know that my brother and his wife are dead. Do you have any brothers or sisters of your own?”
Her face froze as if she had caught sight of something unpleasant in the mirror and was too disturbed to look again to see if it were real or a phantom. “Yes, an older brother. Charles Morrison. He is in India.”
“India?” repeated Nigel. “That is a long way away. Did he join a regiment?”
“No, he embarked on his own. He had a longing for adventure, and India is everything that Derbyshire is not.”
“Indeed.” Nigel kept his voice soothing, both out of deference for Magpie’s catnap and to keep Miss Morrison from bristling and becoming silent. “How long ago was that?”
“Six years,” she said. “Almost seven, really.”
“Did he marry there? Start a family?”
She hesitated. “I don’t know exactly. Correspondence is so difficult from such a distance. But if he did, it would explain why he hasn’t returned yet. A wife and children make the journey more difficult.”
Nigel nodded. It was a far different story than the one he had overheard Harold Brownlee telling the vicar.
Was it possible that Mr. Brownlee did not know the truth of the matter?
Or was Bel Morrison simply trying to put the best construction on a miserable situation?
She said that correspondence was difficult—had she ever heard from Charles Morrison since his departure almost seven years ago?
The parlour door opened slowly, first a crack with an eye behind it and then wide enough to admit a person. Aunt Lucy re-entered the room, still wearing the same dress sans any imaginary tea stains. “Dear me, have you run out of things to talk about? I have just the thing. A game of piquet.”
“With you, Miss Morrison?” said Nigel gallantly. “I would be delighted.”
“No, no, with Belinda!” said Aunt Lucy, her wrinkled cheeks pinking at the compliment. “She is far more clever than I.” She advanced to a cupboard and found a deck of cards. “To the table,” she said, urging them both to rise from the sofa.
Magpie stretched reluctantly as Nigel shifted her off his lap. Bel Morrison rose with almost the same reluctance. “Surely not on Sunday,” she said, forestalling her aunt’s eagerness.
“As long as there are no wagers, Mr. Davies never did complain about a hand of cards on the Lord’s Day.”
“Yes, but we’re under a new regime now,” said Miss Morrison, alluding to the new vicar .
“I’m certain that Mr. Lymington will say nothing to Mr. Townsend about it,” protested Aunt Lucy. She placed the deck of cards on the table.
“I would as lief say nothing to Mr. Townsend about anything,” murmured Nigel.
The younger Miss Morrison, who had caught the full import of his words, gave him a sharp look. “I daresay you play cards a good deal in town, Mr. Lymington.”
“It does pass the time for us indolent metropolitan folk,” said Nigel mischievously, “since we have no other occupation besides going to the theatre or making sport of our neighbours.”
Bel looked at him as if she was not sure whether he was making sport of her now.
Satisfied that her work was done, Aunt Lucy seated herself in a chair by the window with the best light for her embroidery, as far as possible from the card players.
Miss Morrison and Nigel walked over to the little table at the back of the parlour, and Nigel noticed that Miss Morrison seated herself hurriedly so she would not have to wait for him to pull out her chair.
She began to separate out the deck of cards into the requisite thirty-two.
“Will you be the younger or the elder hand?”
“Surely, I must be the elder,” said Nigel, robbed by her quick action of the chivalrous gesture of a gentleman.
He seated himself in the chair across from her.
Despite Belinda Morrison’s claim to spinsterhood, she could not be more than thirty years old while he could claim the advanced age of thirty-eight.
As the elder hand, he would exchange his cards and make his declarations first.
He leaned in conspiratorially. “Shall we keep your Mr. Davies’ prohibition against wagers, or—since we are already transgressing the Lord’s Day—wager as we like and ask repentance for another transgression as well?”
Bel’s clear grey eyes, incongruously youthful beneath that wretched cap, met his own gaze with a spark of deviltry in them. “If I win,” she said, “you must promise never to feed my cat again.”
“And if I win,” said Nigel, making sure he could not be overheard by Aunt Lucy, “you must promise to burn that cap.”