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“I have.”
She could have stopped there; she should have stopped there, but for some reason his interested expression encouraged her to say more and she found herself telling him, a stranger, the story of her life.
“My mother died when I was born. She was a beautiful woman, and loved by all, so her death was a terrible tragedy. Now there is just my father and I. He was the headmaster at the school, before he retired, and now Mr. Marly has taken his place.” She blushed, and he wondered why. “I am his assistant at the moment but I hope to rise further in time. If I had been a boy my father would have sent me to the grammar school but for a girl he did not think it worth his while. Instead he taught me at home and he was very thorough. So in spite of not going to grammar school I can’t claim any lack in my education.”
Personally, Alistair thought the father sounded like an old horror. True, he had lost his wife, but did he have to tell his daughter how marvellous she had been? To make her feel as if she had deprived the world of this paragon and she was unworthy to have taken her place? And then, because she was a female, having to be educated at home, and no doubt with the constant reminder of what her birth had taken from her father? He could imagine it and Alistair had a very good imagination when it came to cruelty. The little slights, the silences, the sense that if she had been a boy then perhaps, just perhaps, her mother’s death might have been forgiven.
Alistair decided he would make it his mission while he was in Lyme to make Clarissa smile as often as possible.
Starting now.
“I think you have made a mistake, Miss Debenham.”
She looked startled, those blue eyes so big and wide he felt as if he could happily sink into them. “A mistake?” she repeated anxiously. “What do you mean, Lieutenant McKay?”
“I mean, Miss Debenham, that you should have purchased that bonnet. What if there is an occasion that calls for it?”
The anxiety left her eyes and she smiled. “What possible occasion could that be?”
“Hmm. One that requires a bonnet with a bunch of red cherries on it.”
Now she laughed, but it had a rusty sound. “Perhaps you should buy it yourself for your . . . wife?”
He met her curious gaze and she blushed as if she had said something wrong.
“I have no wife,” he said quickly, before she could back away from the subject. “Nor do I have a fiancé or a girl I am courting. I am all alone, Miss Debenham, just like you.”
She hesitated.
“Go on, ask me,” he told her, “I won’t bite, I promise.”
“Well, I was going to ask whether you are all alone because you prefer it, or whether it is because of lack of opportunity?”
He waited until they reached the end of the street. Ahead he could see a square brick building that had the look of a school house. When the bell in its wooden crate began to ring solemnly, the rope pulled by a man with a handsome face, wearing a sombre jacket, he knew he was right.
“Lack of opportunity,” he admitted wryly. “When you are at sea so much there is little time for romance, and then if you find someone and attempt to write letters, they are always going astray. In my experience, Miss Debenham, girls do not forgive letters going astray. They soon find someone with a nice safe occupation on shore, who comes home every night for his supper and isn’t sailing to the other side of the world.”
She was searching his face, reading far more than he wanted her to, and now he was the one who felt he was on the back foot.
“This is my school,” she said. “Thank you for taking the trouble to walk with me, Lieutenant McKay.”
“My pleasure,” he assured her.
She would have walked away then, but the gentleman who’d rung the school bell approached them. “Mr. Marly,” she said, “I hope I am not late.”
Mr. Marly took out his pocket watch and checked. “I assume your father is not well again,” he said in answer to her question. He shot Alistair a curious and not entirely approving glance.
Clarissa felt herself feeling rather cross about that. Naval officers were to be admired, surely? They were gallantly fighting for England.
“This is Lieutenant McKay. Lieutenant, this is Mr. Marly, the headmaster of our school.”
The two men gave perfunctory bows. Alistair understood now why Clarissa had blushed when she said Mr. Marly’s name. He was very handsome, the sort of man many women would probably day dream about, but Alistair thought him stiff and joyless, just the sort of fellow Clarissa should not fall in love with. Good Gad, it would be like marrying her father!
“I must go now,” he said, speaking to Clarissa. “Shall I see you tomorrow as we arranged? At ten o’clock on the Cobb?”
Clarissa’s blue eyes widened at his lie but she managed to retain her composure. “Oh, um, I . . . that is, Mr. Marly sometimes requires me to come in on Saturdays, to set out lessons for the following week.”
“I’m sure Mr. Marly won’t mind this once,” Alistair said with such authority that even Mr. Marly found himself agreeing that yes, this once, he could spare Miss Debenham.
