Page 52 of A Hint of Scandal

Chapter Twenty-Five

“There’s nothing much to tell about me,” Serafina said, dropping her eyes from Max’s piercing gaze. He almost looked as though he wanted to dig into her soul and set free her deepest secrets. Not that she had many. Well, apart from that one she never wanted him to find out about. Too embarrassing.

“I would disagree. You may think you’ve led a reclusive life, but you still have much to share. One of things that makes me curious is why you’re still with your brother’s family when you’re past your majority. You could have left them more than two years ago, could you not?”

A question she’d asked herself on more than one occasion, but what was the answer? She gave a shrug. “I couldn’t leave the children. They needed me.” And besides which, he’d refused to hand over her inheritance. With no one to turn to for help, and no money to sustain her while she tried, she’d been unable to either leave or obtain her rightful dues. She’d begun to think that Ogden never intended to let her have the money.

“Yet you can leave those children now. Do they no longer need you?”

An excellent point. “I suppose they do… but one can only go on so long before having to change, be it for the better or the worse.” He was prodding her where it hurt. She didn’t want to tell him about her withheld inheritance. And thinking of Letty left to the avaricious clutches of her mama was like a nugget of anxiety in her heart. And as for the other children, at home with their governess… “I never for a moment imagined I should be able to leave Milford and get married.”

He smiled, that heart-wrenchingly charming smile. Was he aware of how he looked when he smiled? “I should admit that I too had never thought to find someone to marry, even though Julian had instructed me that I had to. Our meeting in the summerhouse was a fortuitous occasion.”

She nodded. “I suppose it was, for we could have happily attended ball after ball with our families and never would our paths have crossed. With both you and I waiting in the shadows as we were, we might never have even seen one another from afar.” Best to keep their conversation to his aforementioned business-like mode. She must give no hint of how much she found him attractive. It was plain he could never reciprocate.

“Tell me about your life before your father died. He can’t have been all that old, can he?”

In her mind’s eye, her father’s face smiled down at her as he kissed her goodnight, having read her a story from one of his books of mythology. Greek, or her favorite tales of Egyptian gods, nurturing in her the longing to visit that distant land. Ogden, thank goodness, had inherited nothing physical from their father and looked nothing like him. “My father was the kindest man I know. The sweetest, and the most just. My brother was much older than me, and already married to Araminta, but they kept away from me, so much so that I hardly noticed their existence until my father died.” The truth was they’d looked down their noses at her, the “governess’s brat.”

The sudden lump in her throat forced her to halt. “It was very sudden. We were outside in the gardens, and he was playing with me. Chasing me between the flower beds and making me squeal with laughter. He staggered, I remember, with his hand to his heart, and as I turned to look, he buckled at the knees.” This image was more indelibly printed on her brain than his laughing face had ever been, but it had been an image she’d not wanted to revisit. Suddenly, for Max, she felt she could. “He fell forward onto the gravel path, for a moment his breathing was loud in the suddenly silent garden, and then it was gone.” She swallowed, hearing it anew. “The servants found me there, crying across his body, trying to get him to wake up and play with me again.”

He reached out with his left hand and covered hers where they lay clasped in her lap. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for you to have to tell me how he died.” He sounded awkward. “It must be difficult for you…”

She looked up. “It’s all right. I want to share this with you. I’ve not been able to do so with anyone before.” She hesitated, frowning again. “Ogden told me it was all my fault. If he hadn’t been playing with me, running at his age, which wasn’t old, I see now, but to me then it was, he wouldn’t have died. They said it was his heart—like your brother but a different type of heart ailment. A quick one.” How warm and comforting his touch was.

“He had no right to do that. It was a cruel thing to say to anyone.”

“I know that now. But then, as a frightened child, I believed him. My papa had been playing with me when it happened, so it must have been my fault. The guilt I felt was crippling.”

“You know now that it wasn’t your fault? No more than it’s anyone’s fault Julian is so sick. There was nothing you could have done to change it. He would have died anyway.”

Words as comforting as his touch. “I do know that now, but at the back of my mind there’s always that nagging doubt that if he hadn’t been playing chase with me he might have lived just a little longer.”

Max bowed his head, but he didn’t remove his hand. The carriage rumbled on, now on a wider road, although its state was little better than the lane they’d been traveling. Serafina leaned back against the soft upholstery and closed her eyes, conjuring up her father once again, unseen this time, but his warm body there behind her as he held her on the pommel of his saddle to canter across the wide Milford parklands. A tear slid unbidden down her cheek. Hopefully Max wouldn’t notice.

Max watched her as she leaned back in apparent repose. An effective way of ending their conversation which must be about matters that still hurt. He’d been wary about asking her about her father, but now, the feeling that she’d confided in him warmed his heart. To his surprise, an overwhelming feeling of protectiveness filtered through him, and a strong desire to hurt the people who’d told a tiny, grieving child that it was her fault her father had died.

She’d closed her eyes, but he was sure she wasn’t asleep. A tear trickled down her cheek and she made no move to wipe it away. The urge to do so for her was strong, quickly followed by the urge to take her into his arms and hold her tight against his chest and allow her to cry her sadness away. If that were possible.

How strange was that? What had prompted such a feeling? He frowned. Most unlike him to respond to someone, anyone, like that. Particularly not a woman. He’d been so sure his heart was unbreachable, and yet, watching Serafina’s feigned sleep, he began to question how he felt about her. Might it not, after all, be a more productive match than he’d at first foreseen? He shook his head. She didn’t feel like that about him. How could she, when he was so incapacitated?

Annoyed with himself for his momentary sliver of hope of a normal life, he too settled back into his corner of the carriage and closed his eyes. But sleep did not come.

The rattle of wheels on a cobbled road roused Serafina from a restless sleep. She opened her eyes and peered out of the window to see their carriage was entering a sizeable town. It must be Oxford, surely. On each side of the wide street tall buildings rose up, built of mellow golden stone, and people thronged the pavements at the side of the thoroughfare, many of them wearing the distinctive gowns of students. That this was a university town was obvious.

Max was taking out his fob watch. “It’s well past midday. If we go to The Star on the Cornmarket we can find stabling for our horses and refreshment for us all before we head to the church.”

“Don’t you think we should go to the church first?”

He shook his head. “No. Food first. And…” He looked at his watch again. “It’s later in the day than I envisaged so I’ll procure rooms for us for the night and accommodation for the servants. We can return to Bratton tomorrow, unless anything untoward should occur.” He held up a hand. “No need to worry. My mother is not expecting us back this evening.”

She hadn’t been going to protest. On the contrary, she was quite enjoying the unaccustomed sense of freedom this enterprise was providing. Never before had she been able to follow her instincts and set out with no goal in sight of what she was going to do next. The effect was positively intoxicating, especially when added to the fact that she was in Max’s company.

The Star proved to be a substantial coaching inn which was happy to provide them with rooms, and, at Max’s suggestion, Elsie was to sleep in her room with her on a pull-out bed. “For propriety’s sake.” She’d wanted to point out that they were soon to be married, but had held her tongue, secretly reveling in his attention to detail. Although in reality she might also have liked it if he’d behaved with a little less propriety. Not that he was likely to with a plain young lady he was only marrying out of convenience.

After taking luncheon in a private parlor at The Star, they set off to locate St Michael-at-the-North-Gate. Elsie, eyes wide with amazement at her first view of a city, followed dutifully ten feet behind them, in the direction in which Max assured her the church lay.

He was right. Having pointed out to her Jesus College opposite the inn and told her that no, it wasn’t his alma mater, but Christ Church, which lay to the south was, and had also been Julian’s place of education, he nodded ahead to where an ancient church stood on the corner of a side road named, rather oddly, Ship Lane. Its tall, ivy-covered, square tower appeared far older than the body of the church. But they were not here to study its architectural merits or origins. Together they pushed open the door and stepped inside the nave.