A snap and all three of them turned to gawp.
“Cousin Marcus,” cried his ward. “Is that you behind that tree?”
His cane had shattered beneath his acute lean. Purchased in London, the shoddy stick was clearly not up to the rugged Lakes countryside, so he swiftly discarded it, sauntered out and tipped his hat as though dukes fell from trees every day.
“What are you doing here?” his ward asked with a frown.
“I was just…passing.”
Dinah peered this way and that. Charlotte’s eyes crossed in disbelief. And the gentleman rose from his stool.
“Your Grace. A pleasure. We met at the Association of Ambleside Business.”
“Ah, yes, Mr William Green, is it not?”
“Indeed.” And they cordially shook hands.
The gentleman was in his fifth decade or thereabouts and Marcus knew he had quite the talent for art, selling his paintings in a gallery within town.
“Look at this, Cousin Marcus. Isn’t his work a marvel?”
He perused the drawing. In just a few strokes of charcoal, the gentleman had caught the might of the waterfall and the bareness of winter. “It is beyond doubt a marvel.”
A ruddy hue gathered in Mr Green’s cheeks. “I am compiling aTourist’s New Guide to the English Lake Districtand this might be included. There are so many special wonders here on our doorstep, are there not?”
Marcus’ eyes had drifted to Charlotte who’d ambled towards the waterfall, her gaze fixed on its three channels of seventy-foot meanders down the ravine.
Parting, crashing, meeting and separating.
“Yes, indeed,” he murmured.
“I wish I could draw.” Another thespian sigh. “Then perhaps I could be a famous artist as well as an author.”
Mr Green chortled. “Here, have some fresh paper and my charcoal and I’ll show you some basic lines.”
“Most kind,” said Marcus.
With a wink, Mr Green led Dinah by the hand back to his stool and easel.
Ignoring that cold logic which again nagged him to return home, Marcus nonchalantly strolled to Charlotte and stared to the falls also.
“I haven’t been here for years,” she said softly, “and so thought we might make it before the snows come.”
“I had the same notion,” he answered. “Charlotte, I must apolo–”
“No.” She twisted, gaze lowered. “I could have protested. And it was just a…just a kiss. Don’t fret.”
Just?
It had given him a restless night of turbulent dreams. So much so, he’d been forced to rise and re-tally some variant sums in his ledgers.
Thoroughly vexed, he leaned close. “Did it not…” Both his breath and the breeze gusted the tendrils that had escaped her chignon. “Disturb you in the least? Did you not lie awake…”
Her lashes raised, eyes as green as the bedewed moss.
“Yes,” she whispered. “But that was because I was trying to think of a second Christmastide event for you to attend and came up with naught.”
Minx.
