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Chapter Twenty-Five
Irrespective of the damage it could do to his shoulder, the wretched fool galloped off in a cloud of dust that afternoon when Ned loaded the last of Sophie and Aunt Jemima’s cobbled together hand-me-down belongings into his cart while Archie stood by distressed. She had not seen or heard hide nor hair of him in the week since but thought about him constantly. She didn’t want to. Tried her best not to. But with tomorrow looming like the Grim Reaper, it was impossible to bottle all her tangled emotions inside like she usually did when they hurt too much.
She had never dreaded a day more. She had no clue how he would react to her by his side when they showed the clutch of potential buyers around the estate tomorrow, or even if he still wanted her to be there. He hadn’t sent any word to the contrary nor had he sent any in confirmation. For the sake of the village, she had to go. For the sake of her own sanity, she would rather not, because seeing him, taking those first, painful steps towards saying a permanent goodbye to him, would be torture. Steps that signalled the beginning of the end. Once a buyer was chosen, the papers would be drawn and signed, and then, like the sand pouring through an hourglass, she would have to count down the days to the end. A process which might take months, but could take weeks if he raced it all through. Which, knowing Rafe, he would because she had hurt him.
After that, she would never see him again. Never spar with him. Talk to him. Laugh with him. Hold him.
A stark and unpalatable reality she was nowhere near prepared for.
‘Oh, good heavens above, girl, stop moping!’ The thud of Mrs Fitzherbert’s cane on the floor made Sophie jump. ‘You’ve been staring at the rain for an hour.’
As she had been so lost she hadn’t even noticed the sheets of rain pummelling the window, Sophie jabbed her needle in her embroidery with purpose. ‘I was wool-gathering.’ She forced a smile to the three ladies in Mrs Fitzherbert’s warm parlour where they had relocated a fraction of the Friday Sewing Circle so that Aunt Jemima could join in. ‘Thinking about the potential buyers tomorrow and what to ask them.’
‘By wool-gathering, she means pining,’ said Isobel beside her. ‘And by thinking about potential buyers, she means that she is thinking about him incessantly. She misses her handsome lord and wants him back.’
‘I do not!’ Although she did. She missed everything about Rafe, from his safe, reassuring presence to his dry wit. His solid, distracting body to his soulful bright blue eyes.
‘Then why are you off your food?’ Mrs Fitzherbert glared. ‘Why are you not sleeping? And why, pray tell, do you keep staring off into space with the most irritating winsome and tragic expression on your face? If you want the fellow as we all suspect you do, go get him, girl.’ All three ladies nodded in unison with pity and frustration.
‘I don’t want him.’
‘And I am a unicorn,’ said Isobel unhelpfully. ‘You pine for him just as he pines for you. Ned said he caught you crying when you left Hockley Hall. You—miss hard-hearted and no nonsense—huddled in a doorway sniffling into your handkerchief.’
‘I had some dust in my eye. Hockley Hall is a factory for the stuff.’
‘And now I am a unicorn too.’ That came from Aunt Jemima who tossed her embroidery hoop onto the table and rolled her eyes. ‘The pair of them were in despair when she rushed me out of that house. Wretched despair. She was in a blind panic and was behaving as if the sky was about to fall and he was stomping about and slamming doors and screaming at the servants.’ Her aunt squeezed her hand in sympathy. ‘Archie told me Rafe proposed.’
‘He proposed!’ Mrs Fitzherbert beamed at the news. ‘Why, that is marvellous! Why didn’t you say so sooner? You marrying him solves all of our problems!’
‘I am not marrying him and he didn’t propose!’ At least not in so many words. A proposal would have been easier to deal with than his unsettling and hopeful declaration of love. She could have politely declined a proposal. Rejecting his love had been gut-wrenching. It would have been easier to cut off her own arm than it had been to walk away from him. But she couldn’t listen to her heart as he had begged, no matter how much it screamed at her to succumb. What if she lost him? What if history repeated itself? How on earth could she continue?
‘Urgh!’ Isobel groaned as she threw her sewing down too. ‘Of course you are not marrying him. Why on earth would you want to marry a handsome, rich and besotted earl when you have the dried-out husk of spinsterhood to keep you warm?’
‘I am not marrying a man I do not love.’ Sophie glared at all of them. ‘Not even for the sake of the village.’
‘Nobody’s asking you to marry a man you do not love, Sophie dear.’ Aunt Jemima patted her hand again as if she were a silly child. ‘We are merely baffled why you refused Rafe when it is plainly obvious to anyone with eyes that you are head over heels in love with the man.’
‘I am not.’ Because of course she wasn’t. She would never have allowed herself to be that stupid. That was why she’d set such strict parameters. Why she’d kept the carnal and the friendship separate. Why she’d resolutely quashed every single errant thought which dared to think otherwise. She touched her chest. Conjured Michael and all the pain of her past as a reminder of what it was she was tactically avoiding. ‘I have been in love—deeply in love—and cannot risk it again.’
‘Why ever not?’ Mrs Fitzherbert pulled a face.
‘He died,’ offered her aunt before Sophie could open her mouth. ‘It broke her heart.’
‘Poppycock.’ Mrs Fitzherbert frowned as if she was mad. ‘Hearts are meant to be broken and people die, yet the world still turns. Where would the human race be if we all adopted that defeatist attitude? It would come to shuddering end, that is what. The good Lord granted us the gift of life and therefore it is our duty to Him to live it to the fullest!’ The cane came down like a judge’s gavel. ‘What is the old adage? It’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.’ She waved it away as if the agony of losing that love was nothing at all. ‘I thought your motto was onwards and upwards? You mourn but you must move on. Exactly like I did.’
‘I loved Michael dearly!’ She would not be lectured by an old lady who replaced husbands like she did hats. ‘He was the only one for me. The. Only. One.’
‘More poppycock.’ Mrs Fitzherbert slapped one wizened hand on the tablecloth. ‘I loved each of my husbands with all of my heart and each time they were cruelly taken from me I swore I would never love again with the same fervour. But then fate called me a liar every time by sending me another man who filled my heart with the same purpose and the same joy. Each one vastly different, of course, as variety is the spice of life, but the feeling was the same. Just as all encompassing. Just as right. Just as passionate.’ She sighed at the memories. ‘It would have been easier to give up breathing than deny myself the pleasure of my husbands in my bed.’
‘Shh.’ Always a prude, Aunt Jemima nudged her incorrigible friend. ‘There are single ladies present who may be shocked by such sentiments.’
The cane thumped the floor three times as Mrs Fitzherbert stared at all three of them in turn. ‘Poppycock, poppycock and more poppycock.’ The last one was for Sophie. ‘You told me yourself, Jemima, that Sophie spent every single night in Lord Hockley’s bed and I dare say they weren’t darning by candlelight.’ She narrowed her eyes at Isobel who was grinning at all the shocking scandal she was hearing as if all her Christmases had come at once. ‘It would take a miracle for this one to still be intact.’ Then she skewered Sophie’s aunt with narrowed eyes. ‘And do not get me started on the subject of you and Caleb Parker, Jemima Gilbert.’
‘Caleb Parker?’ Isobel was beside herself with glee. ‘You had a fling with Ned’s father?’
‘It was more than a fling, dear.’ Mrs Fitzherbert cackled as her aunt winced. ‘He crept into Willow Cottage at least twice a week for twenty years!’ At Sophie’s widened eyes, she shrugged. ‘Few of us go to heaven in a box marked unopened, and people who live in glass houses have no right to be shocked. Your aunt is a flesh-and-blood woman and women have the same needs as men.’
‘He was married.’ Aunt Jemima winced again as she tried to explain away the bombshell. ‘Married and long separated from his horrid wife by a good hundred miles of road. But he died before she did, so we could never make things official.’
