Gentlemen Prefer Mischief (23 page)

Nate simply stared. Lily was incredulous, too. Was he going to surrender it, and without a fight?

“My lord,” Nate said after a long pause, “I did not suppose you could be so willing to believe me in this.”

“You might be the greatest liar the world has ever known, Beckett, but if Lily says you speak the truth, I believe you, and I will make no claim upon it.”

Lily’s heart beat faster. What did he mean,
if
Lily
says
you
speak
the
truth, I believe you
? He still trusted her, even though she’d rejected him and worked against him? How could he trust her so much, when she’d never been able to trust him—and told him so? And how could he be willing to surrender the ring when it had meant so much to him? Was it truly because of her?

“I had not supposed you could be so gracious, my lord,” Nate said.

Lily wanted to shout that she hadn’t either, but she felt askew, as if rushing to keep up with her shifting awareness of Hal. He was the same man he’d always been, but it was as though she was really seeing him now, like a painting that was suddenly more compelling for having a new frame.

“I don’t know what to say, my lord,” Nate said. “My thanks are inadequate.”

“You are welcome,” Hal said.

A glimmer of dawn light penetrated the trees, falling across his chest, making that part of him glow with all the warmth and familiarity of home. She’d thought that putting her trust in him would leave her vulnerable, but now she saw she’d been wrong.

He and Nate shook hands.

“Beckett, Lily,” he said and before she could say a thing, he was walking away from them, having taken control of the situation and resolved it. She realized that her mouth was gaping, and she shut it.

Gathering her wits, she quickly took leave of Nate and ran after Hal. Dawn was breaking on the horizon, a flat, bursting light spilling larger every minute, starting a new day.

Striding fast on his long legs, Hal was well ahead of her already. She called softly to him to wait, mindful of the need to not make noise that could draw attention from anyone who might be awake, but he kept going. She gathered up her skirts and ran, and reaching him, grabbed his shirtsleeve. He rounded on her.

“What do you
want
?”

Morning light gilded the clean lines of his jaw and cheek like an angel bathed in heavenly light. He wasn’t an angel, though he’d accused her of seeking saintliness—and he’d been right. But when she’d found the sacred in his arms, she hadn’t fully known what it was. And now she knew how human and muddled she was, and she was glad, because it was real.

“I—I’m sorry,” she said.

“For what? For conspiring against me? I would have thought you’d be triumphant to see a hardworking man like Beckett win out over a viscount.”

“Stop it, it’s not like that.” He arched an eyebrow at her. “Very well, yes, it’s true that once I would have felt that way, but I don’t now. You didn’t have to do what you just did. That ring meant something to you.”

“It’s just a piece of jewelry.”

She shook her head. “It was significant to you, and valuable. Probably the only family heirloom you ever wanted. And you could easily have taken it and walked off and hidden behind the power of the viscountcy. No one would have disputed your claim.”

“Beckett would have.”

“You know he wouldn’t have stood a chance. The ring belonged for generations to the men in your family you most admired. It was buried on your land. But you let Nate have it because you believed it had been given to his family.”

And she’d never been prouder of him.

“
Nate
,” he said, still talking in that cold voice she hated. “So what’s between you two, Lily? Are you lovers?”

Inappropriately in this tense moment, she laughed, a thin, slightly hysterical sound. His look turned thunderous.

“Nate is like a brother to me. I spent countless hours in the Becketts’ kitchen when I was young. Our families are old friends. But I didn’t know he was the Woods Fiend until I saw him that first night with you. And then when I found out what he was doing—that he was digging for an engagement gift your great-uncle had given his great-aunt—I couldn’t let you catch him.”

“So you interfered to help him.”

“Yes.” She huffed out a small breath, aware of how her motives had not been so pure as she’d wanted to believe. “At first I was angry at you over what happened four years ago with my journal, even if I didn’t want to admit that it still bothered me. Deep down I was angry that you’d never noticed me, and I wanted to pay you back.”

He crossed his arms, so shut off from her that he might have been a stranger. “So you can admit it.”

She pushed on, needing him to understand it was different now. “Yes, you were right when you said I was angry. I was angry about many things, but I didn’t want to acknowledge that. Being angry felt out of control and wrong.”

“It’s not wrong to be angry about injustice. The way your father treated you after your mother died was weak. He imposed on you.”

“Yes,” she said, her voice deepening as she admitted it out loud. “He did, and I hated it, and hated that he seemed to choose to be feeble. He left me to contend with problems that were too much for me.”

“Bravo,” he said softly.

She wanted to ask him what he meant by that, but she’d betrayed him, and right now she owed him a full explanation. “At first I didn’t guess that the engagement gift might be your ring. And then I found that I was having the time of my life trying to get the best of you.”

Something flickered in his eyes. “Were you?” he said and, though his voice was soft, it scared her a little, as if he were turning harder before her eyes, so hard that he was impenetrable to her. She rushed on to explain.

“When I realized it might possibly be your family heirloom, I dismissed the idea because it seemed like too grand a gift.”

“Did it ever occur to you, Lily, to simply talk to me about Beckett and what he felt he needed to do? Am I an ogre?”

“It was Nate’s secret. I couldn’t share it with anyone.”

“And you couldn’t have asked him if you might talk with me about it? As close as we’d gotten, you couldn’t talk to me?”

It hadn’t occurred to her, of course, because she hadn’t believed she could trust him, even though everything they’d done together—the talking, the touching, the fighting—had told her that he knew her, that he wanted to know her more, and that he cared about her. But she’d rejected him and hurt him, and she was very much afraid she’d thrown all that away.

“I…”

“Didn’t trust me. Couldn’t imagine I might do something good.”

“Yes.” She looked down at her feet, so ashamed of how freely she’d judged him, how righteously she’d found him wanting. He was such a threat to her heart that she’d needed to. But that need to judge him was gone now; it had been replaced by need
for
him. She couldn’t have picked a worse time to recognize it.

“I know you are a kind person,” she said, the words coming out husky. She needed him to see that she understood him now. That finally she’d seen the world through his eyes, a view he’d been trying to show her all along. “I should have tried.”

“You’re right, you should have. But you were too busy trying to save the world.”

“Yes,” she said, her heart in her throat. She looked up at him, needing him to know how sincere she was. “But I feel differently now.”

Her words seemed to confuse him, and then his eyes narrowed. “No you don’t. You’ve simply been swayed into thinking I’m a worthy man because I treated Beckett fairly. Don’t let it sway you. I have loads of money and jewels. It was nothing to me.”

He was being deliberately cruel. It wasn’t just the personal value of the ring he’d surrendered. It was the way he’d treated Nate, a farmer, a nobody as far as a viscount was concerned. He’d treated him as an equal. Only a very
good
man would do that.

He turned and starting walking again.

“Hal, wait!” He stopped but didn’t turn around, and she moved to face him. “You’re right. I didn’t want to believe that you might do the right thing. I… needed you to be someone I couldn’t admire. I was wrong.”

“You, Lily Teagarden, owe an apology to a wastrel like me?”

She was seeing the hard core at his center, and she could hardly bear it. “I deserved that. But I don’t think you’re a wastrel. And I am more sorry than I can say.”

“Fine,” he said. “Apology accepted. Now go home. The sun’s up and you’ve no good excuse to be standing here alone talking to me.”

That was true, but suddenly there was so much to be said. Didn’t he feel that, too? Didn’t her apology mean anything to him? Or was everything ruined between them?

“But… I hate how it feels, you being unhappy with me.”

He sighed and lifted a hand and cupped her cheek. “I’m not unhappy with you, Teagarden. Truly. We enjoyed each other, but that was a time outside of time. You were right: we are too different.”

He started walking again, and she didn’t follow him, aware that, now that she so much wanted to, she didn’t have the right.

Matthew Fforde came to dinner that night, and Lily, exhausted from what had happened early that morning, nonetheless forced herself to face him. At least now she knew, with no hesitation, that she couldn’t marry him.

They spoke together alone in the sitting room after dinner, her siblings having discreetly made themselves scarce. She was very sorry for the disappointment in his kind eyes when she gave him her answer. Some of that was her fault. But they’d been little more to each other than good companions and hope for the future, and she knew now that she couldn’t build a life on that.

As she watched the door close behind him, the room almost dark with evening settling in, she thought how all this time, all these years, she’d been wanting to do good deeds, not allowing herself to slip up and waste time or lose her focus on her goals. It had all been in a sense empty. Not that the desire to do good was wrong, but it had grown out of something askew; it hadn’t come from love.

She who was going to serve the world knew nothing about love. She was a mere beginner; she had so much to learn. She wanted to learn, more than anything, and she knew that this desire to learn was right, a good beginning. The person she wanted most to discuss this with was Hal, but she didn’t know how to begin. Besides, she thought it very likely that he no longer wanted to hear what she had to say.

Ian came back from a trip to Highcross village the next day and reported that Hal had made a public announcement that he’d caught the Woods Fiend—and that their specter had only been a foolish young man from another village, playing a joke. Hal had said he’d scolded the youth for the trouble he’d caused, then offered him a position at one of his other estates. Everyone was now having a good laugh over how they’d been fooled.

“Quite magnanimous of him, wasn’t it?” Ian said. “Offering the young scoundrel a job when he might have thrown him in the stocks instead.”

“He ought to be properly thanked,” she said, carefully keeping emotion out of her voice. “Shouldn’t we ask him to dinner?”

“Can’t. He’s left, for Spain I think. Doesn’t his cousin James have a vineyard there?”

Her heart fell with a thud. He’d gone. Mayfield had been vacant all those years, and he’d come back and brought it to life and woken her up to so much, and now he was gone. All the way to Spain.

So that was it. She’d had a taste of something wonderful and refused it. Wasted her chance.
No
had been her watchword for so long, a reflex she hadn’t known to question. And now she didn’t want to live out of a reflex anymore, and it was too late.

It couldn’t have been more clear that he didn’t want to see her again.

But how would she ever forget him?

The days dragged by as though weighted, despite her best efforts to fill them. Helen came back, and the shawl business picked up where it had left off. Lily threw herself into her old routines, carding wool for hours and spinning until her fingers were numb. She knitted four new shawls, but she was unhappy with all of them and unraveled each soon after it was done.

She met with Anna and Mary Cooper and allowed herself to be delighted by how much they’d learned so far. They responded to her warm praise with renewed enthusiasm and brought their friend Eliza Cartwright to join them. Hal had promised to provide funds for the school, and she was certain he would honor his promise, but she’d have to wait to receive whatever help he would give now that he was gone, so in the meantime she meant to continue raising funds herself as well.

She stopped by the Beckett farm and found a laborer fixing the damaged gutters. Mrs. Beckett invited her in for tea, clearly eager to tell their amazing news: Nate had found a valuable ring and sold it to Lord Roxham for a large sum.

“Can you imagine?” Mrs. Beckett enthused. “Well, it is beyond imagining, really. And we have such plans for the money. There are some debts that must be paid, but then Little Billy can go to school and study to be a surgeon. So much is possible!”

Out walking with Buck some days later, Lily wandered onto the Mayfield property, where the Italians were at work finishing the folly. She asked them as best she could whether the master was coming back to see the completed folly, but they just shook their heads uncomprehendingly.

She meandered daily among the woods and meadows for hours, the kind of time-wasting thing she never used to do.

“I wish he were here to walk with us,” she said to Buck one afternoon as they poked around at the edge of a meadow looking for something to use as a dye. The sky had been gray all day, and the chill October wind bent the branches down low over the dying plants. There was little of anything with color around to be found, but she aimlessly tugged at spent raspberry canes and picked at the bark of a fallen tree.

Buck just barked at her, as if to ask why they were lingering there. A gust of wind sprinkled them with drops of water left on the leaves from a noontime rain. “Very well, I suppose it isn’t a nice day for a walk.”

They moved on, making for home. As they were drawing near to Thistlethwaite, Delia came running out waving the post, which had just arrived.

“A letter from Eloise! She’s in London, and she writes that every time she’s worn the shawl we gave her, she’s gotten lavish compliments. And now she has seven friends—imagine having seven friends!—who all want shawls. So they’re sending orders to Mr. Trent.”

“Oh,” Lily said. “Well, that is very good news.”

“Good grief, Lily, where’s your enthusiasm? With the Woods Fiend gone and new orders coming in, you can have everything the way you want it now.”

If only Delia knew the irony of her words. But she was glad for the shawl orders, because if anything could help her through the restlessness that Hal’s departure had brought her, surely it was work.

“Shall I tell you why I’ve been so invested in the shawl business, Delia? What I hope to do with the money that’s earned?”

“I always supposed you just liked to save it.”

“I
have
been saving it—because I want to start a school for all the local girls.”

“Oh! What a lovely idea. Why didn’t you ever say?”

“I suppose I didn’t think anyone would like the idea of my doing it.”

“Well, that’s silly. We already know you like to help people. Though why you don’t also like to dance and laugh with gentlemen I will never understand.”

A faint smile nudged the edge of Lily’s mouth. “Sometimes I do like those things, too. Very much. Does Eloise say anything else?” she asked, trying to keep eagerness out of her voice.

Delia returned to her letter. “Let’s see. Eloise bought three new gowns, one poppy, one yellow, and one green. Freddy and Louie got into Diana’s best perfume and put it all over one of their dogs.”

“Oh, dear,” Lily said dispiritedly.

“I’m sure the dog will be fine,” Delia said. “Oh, and she writes about Hal, but we knew this already, that he’s gone to stay with their cousin James and his wife, at their vineyard in Spain. Though Eloise writes that she thinks he’s going to spend some time in a monastery as well.” Delia looked up from the letter. “A
monastery
? Why on earth would he go there?”

Lily was surprised, too. But not astonished, or incredulous, as she would once have been. “To have some quiet, I imagine. People do, you know.”

“I suppose, but I shouldn’t have thought Hal would want
that
much quiet.”

“He’s not
only
a handsome man, you know.”

Delia gave her sister a penetrating look. “I knew it! You do care for him!”

Lily had been so used to denying it, but now she was finished with being who she was not. She sighed. “Yes, I do care for him. More than any other man I know.”

Delia’s smile slipped. “You must be very disappointed that he’s gone.”

“I am.”

Delia put a hand kindly on Lily’s arm. “He cares for you, too, I’m certain he does. And surely he will come back.”

“I’m afraid that’s rather too much to hope for,” Lily said. She smiled a little. “But I do have the shawl business.”

Delia sighed. “At least you didn’t accept Dr. Fforde. He was dull.”

“Oh, Delia, what are we going to do with you?”

“Take me to London, if at all possible,” she said, giving Lily’s arm a squeeze. “You could do with a visit there, too. I’m sure it’s wonderfully distracting.”

“Perhaps,” Lily said. Rob had been talking of their going, but she hadn’t had much enthusiasm for it.

Delia gave her the other piece of mail, a packet from Mr. Trent, and went back inside the house to reply to Eloise’s letter. Lily took the packet over to a stone bench at the far end of the garden, Buck following her, and sat down. Mr. Trent’s packet contained a long list of orders and a note from him addressed to the responsible person in charge of the Thistlethwaite shawl business.

It read in part:

And so, with the unmasking of the Woods Fiend, orders have been coming in daily for new shawls. A list is attached. By far the largest order is from Viscount Roxham. Puzzling though it may be to waste such beauty on those who have so little need of it, the viscount has ordered fifty shawls, which are to be sent to the Millhouse Foundling Home in London.

Tears filled her eyes. She sniffed inelegantly to discourage them, but they spilled down her cheeks as if they’d been stored up for years and were finally being released, and they fell on Trent’s letter and made the ink run. She let her head drop into her hands and sobbed as she couldn’t remember ever doing.

Sitting by her knees, Buck sniffed at her hidden face and whimpered a little.

“Oh, Buck,” she said in a husky voice, emotion pressing hard on her chest. “I miss him so.”

The dog nuzzled her neck, and she hugged his comforting, furry body. She cried some more.

Finally the flow of tears abated, and she took a deep, shaky breath.

“He was thinking of me,” she told Buck in a quivering voice as she petted his soft head and ears. “He wants me to recognize the pleasure the shawls can bring those girls. He wants me to see that beauty is valuable, that something good comes from enjoying it.”

She wished it hadn’t taken her so long to see what had been trying to make itself known for so long: she loved Hal, loved him deeply. And she knew now that some of the very things that she’d most resisted about him were the things she needed if she was ever to grow as a person.

“But I was so unkind to him. I hurt him, and now he’s put me behind him, as well he should. I must learn to do the same regarding him. But it will be very hard.”

She wiped the last of the wetness from her cheeks and stood up. “Come, we must tell Helen about all this work to be done.”

***

Hal sat in his tiny cell of a room, his bare feet flat on the stone floor. His body, clad in only breeches and boots and a shirt with the collar left loose, was resting but alert in the old wooden chair, his mind wondering what he was doing here. But it was only a thought, he told himself. Brother Pablo had said that distracting thoughts would always come, and if Hal didn’t hold onto them, they would also go. And for the last three weeks in San Sebastian, that was exactly what Hal had been doing—letting distracting thoughts go.

Here in this plain, quiet place with days of vacant hours, he’d come to find that he could sit still. He’d never been so satisfied with so little, and it was exhilarating. Perhaps he would stay another month, or into the winter—the idea gave him hope for how he might get through the coming months, missing Lily as much as he did. She was not for him, and he was doing his best to root her out of his being, one thought at a time.

Outside the room’s small, arched window, a bird twittered under the clear Spanish sun, the heat of summer having softened into the warmth of October. At his cousin’s bodega, the grapes pressed in September were already fermenting in barrels. On his way to San Sebastian, Hal had stopped in Jerez to visit James and Felicity. They were over the moon at their recent discovery that Felicity was increasing, and while Hal wished them every happiness, he’d not been in the mood for the exuberance of lovers, and he’d kept his visit short.

The monastery bells sounded, four clangs in the still air. He was meant to be thinking about some words Brother Pablo had given him: “
Consider
the
lilies
of
the
field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin.
”

A small, pained laugh escaped him. If there had ever been a lily that toiled and spun, it was Lily Teagarden.

She would be back at work on her shawls now. He knew that she’d turned Fforde down; Delia had written to Eloise, who had let him know. But Fforde had never truly been what was standing in his way with Lily; it had always been, as she’d said herself, that they were too different. And that Lily couldn’t see him as a man worthy of her love.

He’d gotten over caring so much about that last part; being at the monastery helped—a little, when it didn’t give him more time to think of her. And to wonder what she might have said if he hadn’t walked away in a black mood of pain after Beckett found the ring. But he knew leaving had been the right thing. She’d been impressed by his magnanimity, but that wasn’t enough. It wasn’t love, and love was what he wanted.

Letting go of this desire for her love was a matter of disciplining his mind, and he reminded himself rather idiotically that he’d always relished a challenge.

A soft knock sounded at his door.

“Come,” he said.

Brother Pablo stepped quietly into the room on his sandaled feet. Hal had noticed that everything Brother Pablo and the other monks did was purposeful, as though they were choosing each thing when they did it. Raking leaves, singing in the chapel, eating dinner silently; everything to them was a prayer. With the quiet and the lack of diversions, Hal had had no choice but to practice as they did.

“The day is beautiful,” Brother Pablo said. “Would you like to walk in the garden?”

Hal agreed, following him down the loggia. The heels of his boots rang out, making what seemed like the only sound in the place. Brother Pablo’s sandals made no noise at all.