“Why is that?” Evan asked suspiciously.
Judith studied her hands for a moment. If ever there was a time to tell Evan the trials that his father had shared with her it was now, but her courage failed her. “I think because of the time we spent here together,” she lied, her voice milky with tears.
“I would not have thought it of him.”
“People can change. They can see what they’ve done wrong and try to make up for it,” she pleaded.
“Are we talking about him or me?”
“I had meant…” She stopped when she realized she had been speaking about herself. Tell him, she thought, but any way she arranged the admission, it sounded sordid.
“Yes, if the shoe fits…Is there the slightest chance that an educated and proper girl such as yourself would ever consider marriage to a worn-out soldier?”
“No, never!” She jumped up in shock.
“Oh,” he said, slowly rising, knowing he had moved too fast and not wanting to panic Judith further.
“I mean I shall never marry.” She turned her face away.
“But why not?”
“I have found a…higher pursuit—my studies.”
“Do they consume all your time?”
“Nearly all.”
“When you are not sewing.”
“Yes.” She looked from side to side, as though searching for a means of escape.
“How is it that you sew a great deal and have nothing to show for it?” He could see a tear sparkling on her eyelashes. “Don’t mind me. I’m just a clumsy soldier. Think of me as your brother if it will help.”
“I have to think of you as a brother or I will not be able to think of you at all,” she said desperately.
Evan studied her intense face and knew she was not indifferent to him. “And as a brother I should be able to buy you some bolts of fabric to sew with. Once again you had better help me pick them out.”
“Why are you doing this?” She looked into his eyes.
“There is so little I can do. Humor me?”
“It is not right. People will talk.”
“Who are these unnamed people who talk so much?” he asked with a forced laugh. “I think they should mind their own business.”
She nervously brushed away a tear and said, “I don’t know. It’s what Helen always says when she does not want us doing something.”
“People will talk no matter what you do. It’s a waste of energy to pay any attention to them.”
“I should like to ignore them, all of them,” she said wistfully.
“Good, we will go shopping again tomorrow.”
As they found their way back to the house, Judith thought again that she should tell Evan why she would not marry. But she could not bear to think of him disgusted with her, angry even. In spite of reading all his letters over and over, she did not know him well enough to guess how he would react. If he pressed her, of course, she would have to confess, but she rather thought that she had nipped his suit in the bud, that he would become much like Terry. Now she had only to worry about controlling herself around him. His slightest touch, whether to help her off her horse or up from a seat, made her heart pound with desire.
Evan’s inspiration to include Angel on this next shopping expedition was a wise one, since she chivied Judith into more extravagant fixings for finery than would have occurred to Evan. He drove the gig home himself. Such intense discussions of hemlines and laces would have distracted even such a staunch mind as Judith’s from her driving.
They heard Lord Mountjoy shouting in the library from the courtyard and ceased their merry laughter. Evan shooed the girls upstairs with their packages and wondered whether he should intervene on Terry’s behalf. Having listened to many such lectures, Evan was not cowed, except to shrug in sympathy at the monologue that issued from the library. His father might have been speaking to him, for some of the lines were the same. And yet the words were all he remembered, his father’s disembodied voice nagging at him. He looked around the hall. Unless it had changed vastly, he did not remember it any more than he did the library or dining room, or even his bedroom. But he knew he could walk into the dower house and go through it blindfolded. What freakish tricks the mind played.
The library door burst open. “I thought I heard you come in.”
Evan jumped at his father’s intrusion.
“Get in here. I need you.”
Evan moved reluctantly into the room, but Terry was nowhere in evidence. There was instead, lounging in one of the chairs, a surly young lad of no more than fifteen years, who bore a resemblance to Angel in one of her pouts.
“I want you to take him in charge. You made it through school. If he has a prayer in the world, it is you.”
“Me? Take him in charge? But who is he?”
“Helen’s son, Ralph. He is incorrigible. Well?”
“Sorry to be struck stupid, but I did not know of his existence until this moment.”
“And I did not know of yours until today,” Ralph said resentfully.
“So we are even then?”
“Not by a long shot. I suppose I won’t even get the barrens now,” Ralph countered.
“The barrens?” Evan asked.
“Don’t you remember anything?” his father demanded. “The moorlands. Not good for much except pasturing sheep, but they would yield a living if properly managed.”
Ralph looked up, a spark of malice in his eyes. “Is that where Terry is to be exiled now?”
“That is none of your affair, you young cur.”
“Do you like farming?” Evan asked blankly.
“No, I should sell it and go back to London.”
“Back to London?”
“He was sent down from school a month ago, but he copped the letter out of the post and has been philandering in London.”
“Pretty exciting this time of year, all littered with the ton?” Evan asked.
“And expensive.”
“He ran out of money and into debt,” Lord Mountjoy said, as though Ralph could not hear him.
“How many subjects did you fail?” Evan asked casually.
“All of them,” Ralph said proudly.
“A great temptation, the life at Oxford or Cambridge, as I recall. Better than half my class got sent down, for one
reason or another, by the middle of each term. Their fathers got them back in, of course, for as long as it seemed worthwhile.”
“It’s a total waste,” Ralph said.
“Not to the fathers, who have got rid of a troublesome lad for months at a time.”
Evan had not been aware of his father leaving the room, but when he bothered to look around, he noticed his absence.
“Were you sent there to get rid of you?” Ralph asked.
“Oh, yes.”
“Toying