Miss Dramatic, page 6
“I am supposed to say that Mr. DeWitt and I are only recently acquainted, and he seems a very agreeable gentleman.”
“He strikes me as a very honorable gentleman, but discontent.”
“Honorable?” Not the first word Rose would have used to describe him. Or the third or fourth.
“When Phillip had to absent himself from Nunnsuch, he appointed Mr. DeWitt my bodyguard, for reasons on which I need not elaborate. Mr. DeWitt was at my side, or within earshot and keeping me in view, from first light to last. He didn’t merely attend me, he directed my activities to ensure I wasn’t bothered by those who would have vexed me. He executed thankless duties conscientiously and without a thought to his own convenience.
“After three days of that,” her ladyship went on, “I was ready to wallop him for his devotion to duty, and yet, he would not be swayed. He was more tenacious than an overactive conscience.”
They rounded the bend in the path, and through the trees, another manor came into view. “Is that Twidboro Hall?”
“The very one. The DeWitt ladies are likely enjoying the evening air in the garden, if you’d like to be introduced.”
Rose beheld a modest manor on a slight rise. The place looked of a piece with its setting, contented, dependable, solid, the perfect home for that squire Gavin was trying to become.
“I would like to meet the DeWitts, but perhaps another time, when visitors are more likely to be expected.” When I have my wits about me and am not recovering from a verbal ambush.
“It’s not like that here,” Lady Phillip said, taking a seat on a bench that had to have been built shortly after the Great Flood. The oak had long since silvered, and several sets of initials had been carved into the seat. “Neighbors drop in unannounced. They visit back and forth across the hedgerows and collect the day’s news on the bridle paths. Unnervingly informal. Phillip says I’ll become accustomed to it. It’s not that different from London, except it is, and Phillip can’t quite grasp that. People here are kind.”
“You love Lord Phillip very much, don’t you?” A woman in love was always willing to see the world in a benevolent light.
“Extravagantly so. I flatter myself that my sentiments are returned. I should not have asked about you and Mr. DeWitt, but I’m something of a co-hostess here. If you want to be thrown together with our Gavin, if you want him kept out of your way, you should tell me.”
Rose settled onto the bench. He’d never been her Gavin, though she’d wished and hoped and wondered if he might be.
“We met early last spring. One of those house parties that tries to take advantage of the end of hunt season, but isn’t a hunting party. I spent some time in London when I’d first emerged from mourning, but the whole business was too much. I am merely gentry and only comfortably well-off. What was I doing there?”
“Fending off offers of marriage?”
“A few. Widowers looking for somebody to manage their nursery and have their slippers warming at the end of every day. Older bachelors having second thoughts about their finances. I was appalled at first.”
Crosspatch was blessed with an abundance of songbirds. The resident chorister on this stretch of the river was an enthusiastic robin, and his solo, while vigorous, struck Rose as sad. His babies were likely flown, and he was doomed to bide here through the harsh winter rather than fly off to gentler climes.
No warmed slippers for him or his missus.
Lady Phillip regarded her in the slanting evening light. “You were appalled by the offers of a practical match, until other sorts of offers began arriving?”
“Those other sorts of offers had likely been extended from my first week in Town, but I was too naïve to grasp what the flirtation and pretty manners were truly about. I was staying with a friend, and she found my lack of experience hilarious. I knew nothing of how to hold my fan, my parasol, my gloves. I was ignorant of half the meanings of flowers that arrived in bouquets. I was very much trying to fill a role without knowing the plot or my lines.”
Lady Phillip stared at the river flowing placidly by. “Because you were not titled or an heiress, they all assumed you had come to Town to frolic. You had probably come thinking to catch up on the latest fashions, having put aside your weeds at long last.”
“And to see some professional acting, to hear some opera, to take in St. Paul’s and the Tower. Hampshire is lovely, but our entertainments are humble. My late husband always spoke so glowingly of Town, and I had never been for more than an occasional short stay. I wanted to know what he’d fallen in love with. I have concluded London is a very different experience for a young man of means than it is for his widow some years later.”
“Doubtless true, and does that take us to Mr. DeWitt?”
Whose past with me is none of your business. “I mean Mr. DeWitt no harm.”
And upon reflection, that was true. Rose had raged and railed and ruminated where he was concerned—and felt beyond stupid—but now, having seen him again, she could be more dispassionate. He wasn’t a monster, nor was he irresistibly magnetic.
He was simply a man who’d behaved disappointingly.
“You mean him no harm.” Lady Phillip’s study of the river became intent. “That suggests to me he left you with a less than favorable impression on an earlier occasion.”
Rose flailed about in search of patience, humor, or any genteel spar in a sea of private and difficult emotions, but Lady Phillip was hectoring her past all bearing.
“Coming here was a mistake.” Rose stood and sketched a curtsey. “Even my lady’s maid could see that. Please excuse me, and I hope you will understand if my attendance at this gathering is brief.”
“Run off, then,” Lady Phillip said pleasantly. “Gavin ran off, and his family and friends are still at a loss as to why.”
“Because he was miserable,” Rose retorted. “Denied any hand in the family business lest gainful employment be seen as relapsing into the foul clutches of trade, expected to ramble around his acres for decades though nobody had bothered to tell him how to tend those acres, no friends despite everybody being friendly and kind, no control over his own funds… Why on earth would he have stayed where he was little more than a handsome tailor’s dummy? On the stage, he was valued for so much more than good looks and pleasant repartee.”
The robin had gone silent, and from the direction of Twidboro Hall, the notes of a pianoforte tinkled forth over the lengthening shadows. The tune was as sprightly as the robin’s, jarringly so.
“Clementi,” Lady Phillip muttered, rising. “Diana is in a taking about something. I suspect you are too. Keep your counsel if you must, and please do not swan off in high dudgeon because I have been graceless in my interrogation. Phillip is concerned about Gavin—Phillip is Crosspatch born and bred—and you were kind to me at Nunnsuch, very kind. I am concerned for you and Gavin both.”
Why must you always make a Drury Lane production out of nothing, little Miss Dramatic? Dane’s accusation still had the power to hurt. His wagering had been nothing, his temper had been nothing, his flirtations had been nothing, his increasing inebriated forgetfulness, and his leering friends…
All nothing.
“Mr. DeWitt and I did not part on friendly terms,” Rose said. “Our expectations were at cross-purposes.”
Lady Phillip for once held her peace.
“I went to Derbyshire thinking I would get in some reading, practice my pianoforte, put the whole confusing, unpleasant business in London behind me. Meet a few new faces in a congenial situation, but raise no expectations and have none put upon me. I was half right. My hostess—Countess Rutherford—assured me my wishes would come true.”
Rose resumed her seat on the bench, while Lady Phillip remained standing on the path. Smart of her, to keep some distance.
“At the last minute, the guest list ran short by a few bachelors,” Rose went on, “so the countess arranged for some members of an acting troupe biding in the area to join the gathering. Not quite guests, not quite servants. Gav—Mr. DeWitt told me that actors expect to inhabit the fringes of polite society, the outer reaches of low society, and everything in between.”
“You might refrain from telling his family about the low-society part.”
“Because they won’t want to hear it, just as they didn’t want to hear of him taking a hand in the family businesses, didn’t want him joining the local militia, didn’t think he needed an extra year at university. Those women were driving him half mad.”
Lady Phillip worried a fingernail. “I ought not to admit this, but I am well acquainted with the frustrations family can engender. The DeWitt ladies are delightful, though I fear they were so comfortable with Gavin the youth that they couldn’t see he’d become Gavin the man.”
“Gavin the man is formidable,” Rose said, resorting to the very word he’d chosen to describe her. “He reads voraciously in several languages, his grasp of politics is keen, he’d make an exceedingly effective member of Parliament, and when he chooses to be charming…”
“Yes?”
Rose felt an odd urge to cry. “I fell for him, my lady. I fell as I’d never fallen for my husband. Dane and I had grown up together. We’d known we were to marry from a young age. I was familiar with Dane, he esteemed me. We were happy, at least at first, and I was devoted. With Gavin DeWitt…”
The aggressively cheerful piano music came to a merciful cadence. “You were knocked top over tail? Phillip knocked me top over tail. All it takes is his smile across the breakfast table, and I’m back to doing aerial somersaults in my heart. Most bewildering.”
“You are happily bewildered, though,” Rose said, “and delighted with the notion that Lord Phillip is tumbling about in midair with you. Now imagine you are in the initial throes of those feelings, thinking that for the first time, somebody has chosen you, is enthralled with you, and would love to spend the rest of his life with you. Then you learn that it has all been a sham.”
“You’re saying Gavin was acting the part of the smitten swain?”
In for a penny… “Acting the part of the lover, my lady. The devoted lover. The first of his kind to grace my experience. Mourning was well behind me. I wasn’t getting any younger, and he was nigh irresistible. I was ripe for the plucking.”
“Oh dear. He played you false?”
Better if he had. “Not in the sense you mean. I never found him in any other lady’s bed. He was never rude or overtly mean.” Rose paused to consider what exactly she was about to reveal. “You will hold this conversation in confidence?”
“Of course. I am not a gossip.”
By reputation, Lady Phillip had been the next thing to an antidote. Bookish, much given to managing her funds, not very well liked.
Deserving of trust, if anybody was.
In for a pound. “I was gently informed by another member of the troupe that actors act, and they expect to be paid for their performances. For all of their performances.”
“Good God. Might you have misconstrued the innuendo?”
The urge to cry was shifting into an urge to throw rocks and shout and gouge a knife into sturdy old wood.
“I was not mistaken. Mr. DeWitt performed wonderfully, and then his behavior toward me abruptly cooled. No explanation and no overt rudeness. He became painfully correct. When I remarked the shift in his demeanor to a senior member of his troupe, the situation was explained to me. I could not bring myself to pay him—did not know what sum would have been expected and would not have been able to look him in the eye, as angry as the whole business made me.”
Lady Phillip took the seat beside Rose. “Well, good. At least you were angry.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Consenting adults may do as they please, but Gavin should have been clear with you regarding the terms of the arrangement. He deceived you and had his pleasure of you—even actors cannot dissemble in some regards—and that is despicable. Heinous. Beneath contempt. He toyed with your trust and your affections, and I can assure you of one thing, Mrs. Roberts: Gavin DeWitt did not need your coin.”
Lady Phillip’s outrage was reassuring, but not as gratifying as it should have been. “He was a penniless actor. I’m sure he had need of every…” Except he hadn’t been a penniless actor. Gavin DeWitt was heir to a thriving business and a pretty rural property… His older sister had been legendarily well dowered.
He’d bought a thoroughbred colt on a whim, simply because he liked the look of the beast.
“He didn’t need the money,” Rose muttered. “Then why not simply part from me fondly, allude to wonderful memories, and be about his next role in the hay, as it were? Why the chilly reserve and air of subtle disdain?”
She fell silent, the only sound the soft murmur of water lapping past rocks.
“Gavin DeWitt and I are of recent acquaintance,” Lady Phillip said slowly, “but my husband considers him a friend and entrusted my safety to him. To have treated you so ill seems out of character.”
“I could not fathom it at the time. How could I have been played for such a fool? How could he do that to me?”
Rose had never voiced the question aloud, but all the bewilderment and disappointment in the world filled those few words. How could he humiliate her, disdain her, he who’d heard her every confidence, dried her tears, and held her through hours of darkness? He who had been so patient, so kind, so loving?
“You have a chance to confront him,” Lady Phillip said. “At the very least, you deserve an apology. Gavin is nobody’s fool. He must realize that if you choose to alert the right gossips, you could ruin Diana’s chances in London next year.”
“I wouldn’t do that.”
Lady Phillip paced a few yards down the towpath, skirts swishing. “If you want to return to Hampshire, I will make your excuses, but I suspect Gavin DeWitt has haunted your nightmares and will continue to do so if you can’t get him sorted out.”
“We’re to hack out tomorrow afternoon.” Rose wasn’t about to turn up as sniffy and distant as he had on her. They were starting afresh, by heaven. “I will stay another day or two at least, and I really am interested in your investment advice.”
“And I am keen to give it. I plan for us to begin by discussing charities, which we ladies are usually left in peace to run as we see fit. When we confidently manage those, we are better schooled for taking on the profitable enterprises.”
Rose stood and started off in the direction of Miller’s Lament. “You’ve given this a good deal of thought.”
“Years and years of thought. Women run households, budgeting to the penny. We run charities, and we inherit our husband’s properties and businesses and keep them prospering, as you have with Colforth Hall. The notion that women aren’t competent to handle financial matters is poppycock wrapped in nonsense tied up with a bow of balderdash.”
Her ladyship held forth about a sailors’ home in Bristol she wanted to open before Christmas and was as enthusiastic on her topic as Lady Iris had been regarding peppermint. All the while, Rose nodded and murmured and asked appropriate questions, but her mind was consumed with a different puzzle.
Gavin DeWitt hadn’t needed her money.
Why did that realization matter so much?
Chapter Five
Phillip could be droll when tipsy.
Gavin suspected he was the only person in the whole world to know that fact about his lordship. They’d traveled this towpath on foot, on horseback, pushing barrows of rocks to build a sheep ford, and by moonlight after a few too many pints of Mrs. Pevinger’s best.
Phillip wasn’t remotely droll now.
“Tavistock means well,” Phillip said as the last of the pebbles went into the Twid. “Only the best of intentions inspired him to hire this troupe of actors. One must give credit where due and make allowances where necessary. He cannot help that he’s the marquess.”
“Our marquess,” Gavin said, because in Crosspatch Corners, one did not miss an opportunity to stress the possessive where the ranking peer was concerned.
Phillip took Gavin by the arm and resumed walking. “Tavistock is your sister’s husband, too, lest you forget.”
“How could I? Tavistock has turned a once-articulate, ferociously efficient woman into a lady who smiles pleasantly at the middle distance, who wafts when she used to march from room to room, and who gathers up a bouquet of wallflowers and calls it a house party.”
Phillip’s steps slowed. “Whatever else these ladies are, DeWitt, they are not wallflowers. I have no doubt Miss Zinnia Peasegood was reciting the royal succession without a single mistake by the age of two. Lady Iris has a prodigious grasp of medicinals. Lady Fern Linwood can describe for you, to the last tiara on the oldest dowager, what was worn at any social event she’s attended. These women pay attention.”
Phillip had always been the quiet neighbor, content to mind his patch, but he’d also read more widely on agriculture than anybody else in Crosspatch. He ordered books from Paris and London. He corresponded with botanists and horticulturalists from all over the Continent.
He would know astute observers when he saw them.
“Amaryllis is in love,” Gavin said as a squirrel raced across the towpath. “She hasn’t gone completely witless since marrying Tavistock. She would hardly surround herself with ninnyhammers and blockheads.”
“Tavistock has turned blockheaded on us.”
“He’s in love too. I expect the condition is permanent, though the outward symptoms might moderate in another few decades. We need only be patient.” Gavin did not envy Tavistock the foolishness of his infatuation, not much anyway.
Good God… actors in residence at Crosspatch Corners. Professional actors.
A soaking in the Twid was too good for our marquess. Any dramatist could see that Gavin was owed revenge upon Tavistock. Mandatory attendance at an extended Dorning family gathering might serve. Tavistock’s step-mother’s family numbered in the thousands, and they were all lively.
“Then you aren’t annoyed that Tavistock has hired a troupe of traveling players to entertain the ladies?” Phillip asked, tugging Gavin to a stop. “Lady Tavistock has no idea of this plan. He thinks to surprise her.”
