Page 40 of The Secrets of Ashmore Castle (Ashmore Castle #1)

‘No, no,’ she protested politely. ‘It must have been a dreadful shock for you to lose your wife, when you’d been married such a long time.’

‘Well, it was,’ he acknowledged. ‘She was sixteen and I was twenty when we wed, and such a sweet pretty thing she was. She had a look of that young lady over there, the one with the glacé sarcoline pumps.’

‘Miss Bayfield,’ Nina supplied, from the direction rather than the shoe description.

‘Aye, as pretty and fresh as a bunch of violets,’ he said admiringly. He was silent a moment, gazing at Kitty, then went on talking about his late wife, a topic that lasted until people began to move.

Kitty came past on the arm of Lord Stainton. ‘We’re going back in, Nina. I’m dancing with Mr Courtlandt next,’ she said. Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes bright – Nina guessed she had been enjoying her supper conversation just as much as Nina had, but for very different reasons.

Mr Cowling stood up. ‘I should deliver you to your first partner,’ he said. ‘Who are you dancing with next, Miss Sanderton?’

Carriages were provided on Sunday morning to take everyone to church who wanted to go, which, as Lady Wroughton was known to be a stickler, was everybody.

The service was a long one, and the night before had been strenuous, and many a young lady had difficulty in keeping her eyes open and her mouth shut all the way through.

When they stepped out into the sunshine, some people stood and chatted, while others got into carriages in different combinations from the journey out, with the result that there were not places for all.

Several people said they would like to walk back through the park on such a lovely day, rather than wait for the carriages to go to the house and return, and Nina was one of them.

She felt stiff and stuffy and wanted fresh air and movement to clear her head.

She had seen Kitty climb into a carriage with her parents, presumably summoned for an inquisition on the night before, so she knew she wasn’t needed.

Eight of them started off together, but by the time they turned in at the park gates they were well strung out.

Nina, a good walker, was in the van with Lord Stainton – they had come together quite naturally and comfortably, like old friends.

Mr de Grey and Miss Courtlandt started out with them, but soon began to lag behind, absorbed in a tête-à-tête.

For a while Nina and Stainton walked in silence – one of the comfortable things, she thought, about real friends was being able to be silent together.

Nina enjoyed the movement of her limbs, the verdant view and the sounds and smells of nature.

The green of the park was decked in bridal white, hawthorn and chestnut, moon daisies and kex.

‘Who was that queer old fellow you went in to supper with last night, Miss Sanderton?’ Stainton asked at last.

‘Mr Cowling. He was one of the King’s party.’

‘So I saw. But he seemed to have a great deal to say. He quite monopolised you.’

He sounded almost peevish about it. Nina glanced up at him. ‘He was telling me about his wife, who died five years ago. He misses her.’

Stainton’s expression softened. ‘You were good to listen to him so patiently. But I believe you are always kind.’

‘No-one is always kind,’ she said. ‘And Mr Cowling was interesting when he talked about his business.’

‘Then to interest you I should talk about my business? Unfortunately, I’m only just starting to learn it.’

‘You mean your estate?’ He nodded. ‘Don’t you love it? I mean, I suppose you grew up there?’

‘I’ve never had much to do with it. My father and I didn’t get on – one of the reasons I spent so much time abroad.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry.’

He shrugged. ‘I believe it’s a matter of chance whether a son likes a father and vice versa. There’s no rule about it. Mine disapproved of my academic bent. Now I find the estate’s in a bad way. My father left matters much involved, and I have to straighten them.’

‘You sound as though the job is not to your taste,’ Nina said.

He was silent a moment. ‘I confess that I felt very resentful when I was summoned home to take up the …’ He hesitated.

‘Burden?’

‘Yes.’ He looked around him. ‘I even hated England – all that wetness and greenness.’

‘I suppose you’d got used to a very different landscape,’ Nina said. ‘Your estate – Ashmore, isn’t it? Is it like this?’

‘No, not at all. Dene is the archetypal English park, laid out around all sides of the house. Pretty much flat, so it was an empty canvas to whoever designed it.’

‘Humphry Repton,’ Nina supplied. He was amused that she knew. ‘I looked it up before I came,’ she explained.

‘How thorough of you,’ he said.

‘You didn’t have Repton at Ashmore? Or Brown or Bridgeman?’

‘We didn’t have anyone. It just evolved.

It has a long history – perhaps I may have time to tell it to you one day.

But it’s built on quite a steep hillside, so there’s no room for “improvements” of the Repton sort.

No park in the accepted sense. There’s a walled vegetable garden and small area of what you might call pleasure grounds to either side of the house, but apart from that it’s just the untamed hillside all around. ’

‘It sounds rather nice.’

‘Oh, so you prefer the picturesque movement to the classical? More Emily Bronte than Jane Austen?’

She laughed. ‘You do like to put a neat label on people, don’t you? Put them in this box or that one, all nice and tidy.’

He looked at her with pretended shock. ‘Are you mocking me, Miss Sanderton?’

‘No, how could that be? You are the Earl of Stainton and I’m Miss No-one-at-all.’

‘I think you are very much a someone,’ he said seriously.

Almost for the first time with him, Nina felt self-conscious. She had to deflect him. ‘I’m just Miss Bayfield’s friend,’ she said. ‘Tell me more about your estate. Do you still hate it?’

‘Not hate. I … resent it, perhaps. It’s like a great boulder I have to roll uphill.’

‘And, unlike Sisyphus, you haven’t deserved it?’

‘Perhaps I have,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘We’re none of us without sin.

I haven’t been as dutiful to my father and mother as I should.

I’ve been determined to go my own way and do what I wanted.

That’s why I stayed abroad so long. I have two younger sisters I hardly know, who now depend on me.

Perhaps this is my punishment – to take up my father’s boulder and push it for the rest of my life. ’

She was distressed by his melancholy. ‘But life is not all boulders,’ she said.

‘I’m not from your world, so I don’t know what it’s like to be you, but every life has responsibilities, just as every life has joys and pleasures.

Isn’t Ashmore beautiful in its own way? Wuthering Heights rather than Mansfield Park, perhaps, but still beautiful and worth preserving? ’

‘Yes, it’s those things. I suppose what angers me most is the measures I have to take to repair matters. I feel like a cad and a villain to be searching for a wife on the basis—’ He stopped short, with a heightened colour.

She started to say, ‘Won’t you feel satisfaction in caring for it and passing it on to your—’ And then she stopped short too. He was looking at her intently. She blushed, her fingers became nerveless, and she dropped her prayer book.

Dipping hastily to retrieve it, she bumped shoulders with him as he went down at the same instant. Their hands collided on the book; and his closed over hers. The world went still.

They both rose slowly. He was very close to her: she could feel his breath on her cheek.

His face was inches from hers. Terrified, exhilarated, she thought What just happened ?

She was used to looking at him, knew every feature of that face, had often traced its lines with her eyes, admiring them in the abstract.

But now it was different, and she knew with a blind instinct that the change was permanent.

Those familiar features had taken on a significance that made looking at him a thing of agonised joy, a food for the spirit that she would crave from now on.

He was no longer merely Lord Stainton, a man she enjoyed talking to: he had become simply him , the one person that the mind and the heart and the soul never needed to name.

He said, very quietly, ‘Oh, God!’

What is it? she thought. Is it love? Is this what it feels like?

It wasn’t what she had read about, or heard other girls discuss.

They talked about ‘falling’ in love, but there had been no falling.

She had been struck by some force – a jolt, it had seemed, like a silent, painless earthquake that had shifted all her perceptions an inch to the left and into another dimension.

This feeling, this difference, was where she lived now, an entirely separate place, and there was no going back.

She had seen girls in love giggle and blush and whisper to each other, but she had no urge to do anything of the sort.

This feeling of hers was profound and rather solemn.

She needed to discover first if she could still breathe.

‘What—?’ she managed to say.

‘I didn’t mean—’ he said.

She looked at his mouth and had an overwhelming desire to kiss it; and she knew, somehow or other, that he was thinking the same thing.

Voices drifted towards them from the people following and, at the same time, they realised what a spectacle they were providing. Nina glanced back. Fortunately it was still Miss Courtlandt and Mr de Grey, whose attention was all for each other. The others were even further behind.

‘We had better walk on,’ she said, and was amazed to hear her voice sound quite steady, though distant.

‘Yes,’ he said. He released her hand, and she felt a rush of hollow coldness as if life itself were being withdrawn from her.

He was Lord Stainton and she was Miss No-one-at-all, as she had said lightly in the world Before.

The irony was not lost on her. He was still Lord Stainton, but now he was also him .

And she was host to a passion that, like a parasite, she was afraid would consume her, because there was nothing she could do either to feed it, or end it.