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Ash tried to find an answer. “There are things I need to . . . I have questions . . . unanswered questions . . .” He gave up.
Simon was still waiting and suddenly Ash didn’t want to discuss Juliet with him. The matter was a private one. He needed to see her again. Speak with her. Monkstead was right in that at least, even if his comments about Ash keeping himself at a distance from life, in case he got hurt again, were completely ridiculous. Ash was perfectly happy with his life just the way it was, and he’d prove it. He’d go to Juliet and make his peace. How difficult could it be?
“I am going to Crevitch,” he said with sudden decidedness. “Today.”
And he turned and walked out of the library.
Simon could hear him running up the stairs as if he didn’t have another moment to lose.
Should he be concerned by this sudden change in his elder brother? Usually Ash brushed off life’s difficulties, as if they didn’t touch him, or at least not overly much. He never spoke in the way he just had, and he certainly never ran up the stairs in his eagerness to visit a woman he hadn’t seen in nearly ten years!
Maybe, Simon thought, he should make his laborious way up the stairs after him? Try to talk to him so that he could understand what was happening? Instead, he found his thoughts turning to Christina Beales.
He had only met her a month ago. He’d just returned from Crevitch and had been walking—or limping—in the gardens when they had come face to face. Christina had been with Miss Willoughby, who was staying with her cousin, Mrs Maclean, in Number Nine. Miss Willoughby, who was walking her cousin’s dog, had seen the way things were between Simon and Christina. Perhaps the woman was a romantic at heart. Instead of sticking close to them, she had drifted away to a safe distance, so she could still be seen to be chaperoning the pair but was not listening to their conversation.
They had sat on a bench and conversed for over an hour, the time had gone so quickly, and instead of sleeping that night, he’d found himself going over the moments they’d shared. Her soft voice, her smile, her eyes gazing into his. He’d hardly been able to wait to pay another visit to the garden, and when he did he had thought he would have to sit there for many hours until she eventually turned up. If she did turn up.
She had, and with Miss Willoughby once more in tow. As soon as she saw him, she appeared relieved, as if she’d been thinking about him too. Since then they had been meeting nearly every day.
Simon hadn’t allowed himself to consider a future with her. His injury held him back—why would a woman like her want a cripple for a husband? But then his brother had met her and in a flash was talking about marrying her. Simon had felt as if a rug had been pulled from under his good leg and he was floundering even more than usual.
His brother was his hero, and a man he aspired to emulate. He had never disobeyed Ash before but now, as if from nowhere, he remembered Juliet’s words to him in the cottage hospital. I am a little suspicious of bravery. It smacks of uncaring recklessness.
Was his brother uncaring? Not consciously so perhaps, but it was true that Ash always expected to get his own way. He was the heir of Crevitch, and it was how he had been brought up. And was he reckless? Had his heroic action in Spain been nothing more than irresponsible behaviour? Sometimes when Ash rode in his curricle he could be reckless, although their acquaintances considered his behaviour ‘dashing’. He wasn’t a cautious man, that was true, and he rarely considered the consequences of his actions. Apart from recently, when he’d spoken of Crevitch and its importance to him, and how he needed to marry and secure their inheritance for at least one more generation to come.
And that was where Christina Beale had come in.
Just now, while he waited in the library, Simon had steeled himself to tell Ash how he felt about Christina. He had never stood up to his elder brother before, and the very idea of going head to head with him on this matter made him feel slightly queasy. But it had to be done, he was determined, no matter if it caused a rift between them. He was in love with Christina and he could not watch her life and her future ruined by his brother’s sudden decision to find a suitable wife.
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Now it appeared Ash was off on some wild goose chase, and Simon was very glad he had not had to say the words he’d been practising all morning. It would also give Simon a chance to steal his brother’s chosen bride right out from under his nose.
Chapter Four
Summer, 1816, Montgomery House, Crevitch, Somerset
It was a beautiful evening and Juliet was bored. Since she’d returned home her life, apart from the hours spent in the hospital, seemed to have narrowed into one long tunnel of doing very little. It was true that while she was married her time had been full of social engagements which, in hindsight, had not been terribly important. Not like the hospital. But at least her days, and nights, had been busy enough to keep her thoughts occupied.
After her hasty wedding she had discovered that Baron Flett liked to entertain. It was a pleasant surprise, and once they had moved into the house in Taunton, she found she was a good hostess. They’d had some merry old times.
She’d been fond of the baron, perhaps even loved him, but it was the sort of love she might have felt for an elderly relative. Their intimate moments had been few and far between, and rather embarrassing if the truth be told. Apart from the bedroom, her marriage to him had been surprisingly enjoyable. She’d put aside her resentment at being handed off to him by her father and made the best of things.
“Enjoy yourself, my dear,” the Baron had said to her, near the end. “Don’t mourn me for too long. Someone as young and beautiful as you deserves to be adored.”
At twenty-five she was not so young as she had been, Juliet thought wryly, although she was still an attractive woman, or so her mirror told her. What were a few lines here and there, and the occasional grey hair—which Yvette made sure to pluck out. And anyway, who would she find to adore her as her baron once had?
As Ash once had.
“No!” Juliet shook her head angrily. She would not think of him. Ash lived in London these days, and although there had been some recent talk of him returning to take over the Crevitch estate from his elderly uncle, it was yet to happen. She thought it unlikely it ever would. Ash was probably enjoying his life in the capital far too much to put himself out, just as he had never bothered to come and see her after he left the army.
“Madam?” Yvette was standing in the shadows by the door. “Do you require me to help you change your clothing?”
“Thank you, Yvette, but I am going to swim in the lake,” Juliet replied, ignoring the moue of displeasure on the woman’s face. “I should be back in time for supper.”
Yvette had been trained in the art of being a lady’s maid in the home of a Parisian duchess and she took her job very seriously. The duchess had been caught up in Napoleon’s Republic and had lost everything. She’d had to let her maid go. Baron Flett had found Yvette on a trip to London, sheltering in the house of one of his exiled French aristocrat friends, and thought she would do well for his wife.
Yvette turned out to be an exceptional lady’s maid, and very clever at dressing Juliet’s long dark hair into some wonderful styles. Though these days, when she went nowhere apart from the hospital, there was little call for dressing up. Juliet was well aware that Yvette considered her position here to be vastly inferior to the one she had held with her duchess. She asked herself why the girl stayed on, especially when she obviously thought herself far too good for provincial Somerset. Juliet wouldn’t be at all surprised if one day she woke up to find her maid had flown to greener pastures.
