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‘Do you not think it romantic?’ Giles leaned his shoulder against the mantel shelf and regarded her with one perfect eyebrow lifted.
‘Thwarted young lovers might be romantic, possibly, but I imagine you are suggesting adulterous affairs.’ She could easily imagine Giles Harker indulging in such a liaison. She could not believe that he was celibate, nor that he repulsed advances from fast widows or wives with complacent husbands, however much he might protest the need to keep young ladies at a safe distance.
‘Not necessarily. How about happily married couples coming here to be alone, away from the servants and the children, to eat a candlelit supper and rediscover the flirtations of their courtship?’
‘That is a charming thought indeed. You are a romantic after all, Mr Harker. Or a believer in marital bliss, perhaps.’ She kept her distance, over by the window where the February air crept through the cracks to cool her cheeks.
‘Giles. And why after all? An architect needs some romance in his soul, surely?’
‘Yesterday your views on the relationships between men and women seemed more practical than romantic.’ Isobel picked at a tendril of ivy that had insinuated itself between the window frame and the wall.
‘Merely self-preservation.’ Giles came to look out of the window beside her, pushing the shutter back on its one remaining hinge. ‘How is it that you have avoided the snare of matrimony, Isobel?’
Surprised and wary, she turned to look at him. ‘You regard matrimony as a snare for women as well as for men? The general view is that it must be our sole aim and ambition.’
‘If it is duty and not, at the very least, affection that motivates the match, then I imagine it is a snare. Or a kindly prison, perhaps.’
A kindly prison. He understood, or could imagine, what it might mean for a woman. The surprise loosened her tongue. ‘I was betrothed, for love, four years ago. He died.’
‘And now you wear the willow for him?’ There was no sympathy in the deep voice and his attention seemed to be fixed on a zigzagging crack in the wall. Oddly, that made it easier to confide.
‘I mourned Lucas for two years. I find it is possible to keep the memory of love, but I cannot stay in love with someone who is no longer there.’
‘So you would wed?’ He reached out and prodded at the crack. A lump of plaster fell out, exposing rough stone beneath.
‘If I found someone who could live up to Lucas, and he loved me, then yes, perhaps.’ He would have to love me very much indeed. ‘But I do not expect to be that fortunate twice in my life.’
‘I imagine that all your relatives say bracingly that of course you will find someone else if only you apply yourself.’
‘Exactly. You are beset with relatives also, by the sound of it.’
‘Just my mother and my grandfather.’
Which of those produced the rueful expression? she wondered. His mother, probably. He had described her as eccentric.
‘If this paragon does not materialise, what will you do then?’ Giles asked.
‘He does not have to be a paragon. I am not such a ninny as to expect to find one of those. They do not exist. I simply insist that I like him and he is neither a rakehell nor a prig and he does not mind that I have…a past.’
‘Paragons of manhood being fantastic beasts like wyverns and unicorns?’ That careless reference to her past seemed to have slipped his notice.
Isobel chuckled. ‘Exactly. I have decided that if no eligible gentleman makes me an offer I shall be an eccentric spinster or an Anglican nun. I incline towards the former option, for I enjoy my little luxuries.’
Giles laughed, a crow of laughter. ‘I should think so! You? A nun?’
‘I was speaking in jest.’ How attractive he was when he laughed, his handsome head thrown back, emphasising the strong line of his throat, the way his eyes crinkled in amusement. Isobel found herself smiling. Slowly she was beginning to see beyond the perfect looks and the outrageous tongue and catch glimpses of what might be the real man hiding behind them.
There was that suspicion about secrets again. What would he be hiding? Or was it simply that his faultless face made him more difficult to read than a plainer man might be? ‘I thought about a convent the other day when I was reflecting on just how unsatisfactory the male sex can be.’
‘We are?’ He was still amused, but, somehow he was not laughing at her, but sharing her whimsy.
/> ‘You must know perfectly well how infuriating men are from a female point of view,’ Isobel said with severity, picking up the trailing skirts of her riding habit to keep them out of the thick dust as she went to examine one of the better-preserved panels more closely. Surely they could not all be so suggestive? It seemed they could. Was it possible that one could do that in a bath without drowning?
‘You have all the power and most of the fun in life,’ she said, dragging her attention back from the erotic scene. After a moment, when he did not deny it, she added, ‘Why is the thought of my being a nun so amusing?’
Giles’s mouth twitched, but he did not answer her, so she said the first thing that came into her head, flustered a little by the glint in his eyes. ‘I am amazed that the countess allows this room to be unlocked. What if the girls came in here?’
‘The whole building has been locked up for years. Lady Hardwicke told the children that they were not to disturb me here and I have no doubt that her word is law.’
