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Whether Mr. Keats agreed or not, he very wisely kept silent.
She left to the sound of shovel against stone, hurrying inside where no one could see how a simple broken statue had ruined her composure so thoroughly.
She went up to her father’s office to bury herself inMrs. Miniver, the book Avis had selected for her first club meeting. Though Louise would hardly call it fine literature, it was oddly comforting, reading about hardy British folk being measured for gas masks in one chapter, then fussing over the right diary to buy from the shops in the next. A factually based, straightforward distraction.
But no matter how many pages she read, she couldn’t stop the memories pouring in like the sea at high tide.
———
JUNE 1913
The moment Louise woke, she threw off the bedclothes to look out the window and couldn’t suppress her smile. Over the sea, the sky was a roiling mass of dingy gray, though the pane wasn’t yet flecked with raindrops. The perfect gloomy summer day.
On mornings when clouds threatened but had not yet broken into the windy gales that beat against the summer home’s cliffs, Father almost always had their driver take him to the library. Which meant Oliver would likely be free from his regular duties.
She finished a hasty breakfast, then offered a hurried explanation that she was going out to the garden, ducking outthe back door to escape Delphine’s fussing about not spoiling her hair—there would be a caller for tea, as usual. Above her, storm clouds blustered impotently, but Louise only clutched her sketchbook tighter as she approached the cool, impassive guardian of the garden. Her fingers curled under the raised arch of Persephone’s foot. As always, when her fingers touched a scrap of folded paper, it sent a spark like the manor’s newly installed electricity all through her.
All the note said was9.She checked the gold heart-shaped locket containing a small timepiece, one of Father’s expensive gifts upon her boarding school graduation. Only five minutes from now. She had nearly been late.
And, as always, there was something else with the note, tucked inside the fold: the pressed bloom of a red columbine, native to Maine’s woodlands, but likely clipped from Father’s wildflower garden. The scarlet petals draped about the dangling stamen like a ragtime singer’s evening gown.
She couldn’t help frowning. The flowers he left for her were sweet, but if Father ever saw Oliver desecrating his beloved garden without permission, he’d fire his manservant in an instant. The risk wasn’t worth it.
What would she do without these stolen moments? At first, their meetings had been full of shirked chores, hushed conversation, and outbursts of laughter, precious stolen minutes in a regimented routine under Aunt Eleanor’s hawkish gaze.
Now, two summers and a few stolen kisses later, they’d come to mean so much more.
I’ll have to be cautious enough for both of us.Which, by now, came naturally—the second glances at the shadows cast by the garden’s trellises and draping bowers, the forced casualness that took her down the path to the storage shed until the ivy-covered arbor hid her from view.
The key tucked under the metal birdbath was gone, the garden shed unlocked. Still, Louise hesitated in the doorway asher eyes adjusted to the dark collection of tools and shelves, watching for movement. Her voice came out in a whisper. “Is everything all right?”
For a moment, there was silence, and in her caught breath, scented with earth and rotting leaves, Louise felt that all her fears had at last come true. Someone had found him. Someone had seen them together, followed him, was on their way to tell Father...
But then she heard that deep, familiar, reassuring voice say, “Why wouldn’t it be?” and Oliver stepped out from behind the propped-up wheelbarrow. She rushed into his arms, smelling the aftershave he’d likely applied to Father’s face after trimming his gray beard hours before. “I’m with the most beautiful woman in the world, after all.”
Relief mingled with the blush that Louise could feel rising on her face.
The compliment wasn’t true, not remotely. Louise knew she was plain, her greatest charm coming from the dowry promised by Father’s fortune, well managed by more business-minded men. And yet, the way Oliver looked at her, she could almost believe she was as lovely as the elegant goddess who guarded their hidden messages.
She’d sketch him someday. Try to capture that look, though she worried it would take a greater artist than she to get at the nobility of that strong nose, the fire in the rust-colored hair, the ambition in those brown eyes. And no picture could really capture Oliver Goodwin, the young man who had made a game of smiling at her when the other servants weren’t looking, who had taught himself to read and quoted Shakespeare’s sonnets, who was the first to ask whatherdreams might be—and who somehow managed to take her breath away when the suitors her aunt paraded before her merely made her yawn.
Pulling away, she tried to become her rational self again. “We should be more careful. What if someone finds our notes?”
His laugh came easily, as always. “What, a scribbled number or two? They wouldn’t think a thing of it.”
“Or finds us here,” she insisted.
“You know your father keeps the other key. And he only hires a gardener for the months he’s not living here.”
It was true, and the one reason she’d agreed to the meeting place weeks ago when Oliver had suggested it. Despite the dirt and labor involved, Luther Cavendish insisted gardening was a gentleman’s hobby. Though Louise knew it was more than that. It was his way of honoring his wife’s memory, by personally tending a place she had loved so well—and, characteristically, by ordering everyone else away to do so.
When Father was absent from Windward Hall, the threat of his displeasure and the lock on the door kept all others away. For those precious hours, Oliver was hers.
“Don’t worry, my sweet flower,” Oliver murmured, warming her cold hands with his warm ones. “We’re safe here.”
Part of her wanted to continue her protest, but another part wanted to believe him. The fact that the schoolgirl who copied her essays two to three times to perfect her penmanship had grown into a young woman who stole away for a rendezvous with a servant had surprised even her. The desire for caution, to avoid being found out, warred with the sheer exhaustion of a life of pressure and perfection.
But as Oliver closed the space between them again, she knew there was a greater danger. No amount of caution could keep her from losing her heart to this man. It was far too late for that.
