Page 90 of The Ladies Least Likely

Amaranthe bid Joseph goodbye the next day with a few admonitions and no tears.

He shrugged off her cautions to take care on the road and be wary of robbers, and to write her at Penwellen if he had need.

Joseph only had eyes for Miss Pettigrew, who looked peaked and resolved in a plain grey bonnet and cloak.

The nearer they drew to the small town in Gloucestershire where she’d been raised, the more Miss Pettigrew reverted to her proper and retiring Quaker roots, setting aside the fashionable bonnet and fur-lined cape she’d worn from London.

She’d had little to say to any of them, even Joseph, and Amaranthe worried at what her lack of warmth signified.

Of course, Amaranthe herself was making a point not to hang too much upon Malden Grey, particularly here where he was among his family.

She might feel a great deal of warmth, but she attempted to keep it within reasonable limits of expression.

Perhaps Miss Pettigrew was being equally conscious about any show of preference, but inwardly felt all for Joseph that she ought to feel for a man she was inclined to give her hand to.

“But if you do convert. To the Quakers, that is.” Amaranthe held to the frame of the hired gig as Joseph leapt up to the driver’s seat. “They won’t keep you from us, will they? That is, you won’t have to repudiate me to join them?”

“Anth, don’t be a peagoose.” He didn’t spare a glance for her. “I won’t throw you over when I marry. I’ve already said you’ll have a home with us, didn’t I? You’ll be able to dandle your nieces and nephews on your knee from their first days. Consider Favella’s brat practice.”

“Don’t marry in haste, mind,” Amaranthe retorted. “I want at least to attend your wedding.”

Joseph turned to ensure his passenger was settled, and his expression went soft as he watched Miss Pettigrew tuck her skirts around her. Beneath the plain grey bonnet the delicate lines of her face were achingly lovely.

“I’ll marry her the moment she’ll have me,” he said with a foolish, lovestruck grin. “An angel come down to earth, she is.”

He chucked the horses to walk on and lifted a hand in farewell as the gig passed from the broad courtyard of the coaching inn to the busy Old Market beyond. Miss Pettigrew did not wave.

“That’s trouble, there,” Mal said low in her ear.

Amaranthe startled to find him standing next to her in a sheltered corner of the yard, apart from the traffic to and from the stables or the flow of passengers seeking relief in the common room, where Bea’s hearty stew and Littlejohn’s equally hearty laugh awaited them.

“What do you mean?” Amaranthe asked, fearing highwaymen, an accident that overturned them on the road. It happened all too often.

“A man who wears that look for a woman is bound to have his heart broken in two,” Mal said.

She glanced up into his face and found his expression serious. His blue eyes, so often sparkling with merriment these past days, were quiet and somber.

“He will?” Her own heart clutched as if she’d taken a blow. Joseph was the closest person in the world to her, the only family she had left. “You don’t think she feels the same for him.”

“She certainly doesn’t look at him in the same way. As if he hung the moon and could make the stars dance if he wanted.”

That odd pain rippled through her chest again. No one had ever looked at her as if she hung the moon. But how foolish to wish such a thing. “You can’t know it will mean heartbreak,” she said. “She may simply be very reserved.”

“It’s true, I can’t know her heart. But I know that’s the look I wore for Sally. And it’s the look my father wore when he met Sybil, come to that.”

“But your father married Sybil.” Her heart, ridiculously, sank in her chest. She wished the organ would stay in its proper place. Mal had looked at his sweet Sally with adoration. He had lost his heart to another woman, long ago.

“It’s calf love,” Mal said. “Sentimental and self-indulgent. ’Tis not how a man looks at the woman he considers his proper mate.”

“Oh? And what does that expression resemble, pray tell?” she asked, more sharply than she intended.

She twisted to face him, and his look halted the rest of her accusation.

His eyes were still serious but held a deep, warm light.

He studied her as if he were probing her mind, weighing the emotions behind her words.

His gaze touched every part of her face, not with timid reverence or indulgent fancy but with thoughtful attention.

As if he inspected a real woman, cataloging all her perfections and flaws, and understood the person they came to form in whole.

As if he saw her, through and through. And approved what he saw.

Her response to this attention was much more than gentle warmth.

A raw rush of vulnerability plummeted through her core, stunning in its intensity.

She felt the absurd and very dangerous urge to lean against the tall, broad strength of him and fasten her lips to his.

She wanted to twine her arms about him and never let go.

She stepped backwards. Her foot caught in the groove between cobbles, and she righted herself as his hand snaked out to grasp her wrist.

Mal could not see her and like her. He could not know the truth. The real Amaranthe was a liar and a thief. He would never look at her again with that warmth, with that cherishing, if he knew the things she had done.

“I hope Joseph will still have his position at Hunsdon House if he returns to us heartbroken and alone,” she said instead. “He is likely to need it.”

She turned away as if she had not just read his heart in his eyes, an honest declaration. As if she had not just admitted she had nothing to give him in return.

“Tell me about Mal’s mother.”

Amaranthe sat in the warm kitchen with the Littlejohns.

For two days they’d pitched in with projects around the inn, Mal hammering and hauling, painting shutters and fixing signs, and Amaranthe helping Beatrice air linens and organize the storerooms. The Littlejohns had plenty of assistance in the youths of many ages, boy and girl, who darted around the place, for they had continued the practice of taking children from the workhouse and giving them employment and a home.

They had no children of their own making, but Bea had expressed no lament about that.

She treated their helpers as part of the family, and she was full of stories about a coaching daughter who had lately married and set up a home of her own, with a baby on the way.

Amaranthe found the delay in reaching Favella, and Reuben, did not bother her very much. She liked Mal’s sense of duty toward his family. Besides, the thought of seeing her cousin again filled her with cold dread.

“I’m curious about her. Mal’s mother,” she said in answer to Bea’s surprised look. “I’ve gathered what his relationship with his father was like, but Mal doesn’t speak of his mother very often.”

Mal was busy in one of the storerooms that opened off the kitchen, fixing the hooks in the rafters that held cuts of meat for curing and herbs for drying.

She watched his back, coatless again, shirtsleeves rolled up, muscles flexing beneath his waistcoat.

He had to have heard, but he didn’t comment on her interference.

“Marguerite,” Beatrice said softly. “Her name was Marguerite. Born two years afore me, she was, and lovely as a flower.”

Between them on the table sat wooden bowls overflowing with the cherries the two women had gathered that afternoon from the gardens behind the coaching inn. Beatrice’s pile of pits was already much larger than Amaranthe’s, but she was making a good show of herself.

“That’s the name of a flower in medieval French,” Amaranthe remarked.

“The daisy. Though in Latin sources marguerite could also mean pearl, a word that comes from Old Persian. Marguerite, Queen of Navarre wrote a wonderful collection of short stories, the Heptameron, sixteenth-century French . I translated a poem of hers, ‘The Mirror of the Sinful Soul,’ for which she was called a heretic, because?—”

She looked up and paused, her small knife halfway through a round ripe cherry, and blinked to see all of them watching her. “Forgive my prattle. I am interested in languages and old literature.”

“Marguerite liked old things, too,” Beatrice said with a smile, pushing aside a cherry pit with the side of her knife. “Our girl was as quick and lively as you ever saw. It was no surprise to us that she captured a duke.”

“He wasn’t a duke at the time.” Mal’s voice drifted to them, subdued. “Just an elder son and heir back from his Grand Tour, with nothing to do but roister around the countryside seducing innocent damsels.”

“He was Lord Vernay then?” Amaranthe focused on extracting the pit of the fruit before her, as if the inquiry were entirely casual, but still she felt Mal’s eyes upon her.

“Aye.” Beatrice sighed. “She always swore they married, but she could never say where she put her copy of the marriage lines that she took from the priest. She had a spell when the lad left her, you see.

Quite wild and out of her head with fever for a long while.

I was married to Littlejohn by then, but Vernay put her up in a little home of her own overlooking the Avon Gorge.

When I moved her here with us I searched all her things and found no trace of a document.

“We all begged him not to trifle with her, we did,” Bea went on. “Knowing she was already sick. But young ones in love? When do they ever heed sense?” She shook her head as if she had not been young herself then, and equally in love, though to a steadier man.

“Sick with what?” Amaranthe couldn’t help asking.

“Consumption,” Beatrice answered. “Caught it as a girl, methinks, and was never free of it. When you live by the water, how do you escape the damp?” She dabbed at her eye with a corner of her apron, her fingers stained red with juice.