Love's Way (8 page)

“I have good ears. Perhaps you would be kind enough to tell me whether what you said is being generally repeated, by anyone but yourself.”

“You mistake the matter if you think I have nothing better to do than gossip about my neighbours. I have said nothing about either you or Emily, except for the one remark I made within your hearing. If others have said so, they have not said it to me.”

“An inappropriate spot you chose for your one outbreak. Do I have your assurance you will not repeat that remark?”

“I do not owe you any assurance on anything, Mr. Gamble. This request is nothing short of an insult. If Emily has decided not to have Edward, it is entirely ...”

“Edward has not asked her to marry him. I hope he does not mean to do so. The match is utterly ineligible, or so I judge from what I have seen and heard.”

“I cannot imagine what gossip you have heard that leads you to believe Edward to be beneath a penniless lady of extremely mediocre accomplishments and no talents except for appearing pretty. The Barwicks are an old and well-respected family, sir.”

“I do not judge by gossip,” he said, cutting me off before I could mention our various prestigious ancestors. “I know from prime sources that Edward has no income save what he makes from Ambledown. I know the extent of his mortgage and can only marvel that you keep up as respectable an appearance as you do. I know as well that he is no manager. There is little likelihood of his pulling himself up by his bootstraps, as a different sort of go-getting gentleman might do. He is a poet, I understand?”

“Yes, and a good one,” I shot back angrily, and inaccurately.

“Does he make much money at it?”

“When a man is a poet, money is of little interest to him.”

“That’s what I was afraid of. He has no blunt, and no practical ability to make any. Emily is in the same predicament. You must see this is a wretched match for you to be pushing on them.”

“
I
pushing on them! Well upon my word, this surpasses all the rest. That girl came here hounding him to death, throwing her cap at him day after day, making handkerchiefs.... And now to say
I
pushed it, when I have advised Edward a dozen times against it!”

“You must confess when first I came here I was given to understand the match had your sanction.”

“No, sir, you were given to understand I resented your heavy-handed manner of dealing with the affair.”

“Ah, good, then I have misunderstood your feelings. I thought I sensed some resentment of my courting Emily.’’

“It is nothing to me one way or the other. The romance, or whatever it was between Emily and Edward, was of their own devising. You will not find me throwing any rubs in your way, though I must say it is odd Emily should encourage you when she has been chasing Edward as hard as she can any time these past months.”

“Boredom,” he explained curtly. “She is a romantical girl, her head full of fellows, and no one to carry on with now that he’s gone. If it had not been Edward, it would have been someone even more ineligible. You must realize a match between them is impossible. Send your brother to me when he returns, and we’ll talk it over. He cannot be very eager to have her in any case, or he would not have gone racketing off to climb the rocks for a month at this time. If he did not recognize me for competition, he should at least have realized he needed to win my approval of his suit.”

As we were both being so frank, I decided to settle firmly how matters stood. “Is it your intention to marry Emily then?”

He stopped walking. We had reached the end of the orchard and were looking off to the fells behind—still beautiful, even in the bracken season, though not so beautiful as at some other times. Dots of moving gray and white could be picked out, the sheep scrabbling about for food. After a longish pause, he said, “Maybe,” in the most unemotional tone imaginable. He might have been a farmer discussing those sheep, except that farmers are usually more concerned than he appeared to be. I waited to hear what provisos stood in the way. “I mean to marry some nice proper lady in any case, and do it soon,” he added, with his back still towards me.

I said nothing, but I was wondering whether his infatuation with the girl had not begun to fade already. This was not the voice of the man who had teased her in our saloon the day he came to take her home. I don’t know why it was, but Lady Irene Castleman flitted into my head. I daresay it was Nora’s mention that she was again amongst us, along, of course, with her relentless pursuit of any eligible male, that gave rise to the thought. When he turned back to me, his face was changed, transformed into an expression of reverence. An expression it had not worn in church, I might add, but one often seen on admirers of the fells.

“I mean to settle down at last, you see. I never looked to be Carnforth. There was another cousin ...”

“Wilbur Gamble,” I said.

“That’s the one. Old Wilbur. I made sure he’d live forever, or at least till he had produced a dozen sons. Well, he didn’t, so it is up to me. I’ll have to be the village worthy, instead of the wild buck I once was. A good, decent wife seems the right first step, don’t you think?”

“It would do something to mitigate
...
that is...”

“My scarlet past is known, is it? Even to non-gossipers,” he added with a glinting light of irony in his eyes. “I had better find this good woman without delay.”

“I have lived here all my life. It is impossible not to be privy to the more colourful stories of the neighbourhood. I know no details, and don’t wish to know any. When a gentleman has picked up a shady reputation, however, he can often dilute it by a good marriage.”

“Quite. That is why I wish no gossip, no scandal about my relationship with Cousin Emily. She is not being coerced to have me, if that is what you actually think. Whether we marry or not, I don’t wish the girl’s reputation damaged, and of course my own is also of concern to me.”

“Of equal concern must be the state Carnforth Hall is in,” I pointed out.

“That is remediable. A gent don’t come home from India poor, if he has his wits about him.”

“A pity Edward could not get a position there,” I commented, really to myself, as Gamble had turned away again to soak up the beauty of the landscape.

“I said if he has his wits about him, Miss Barwick,” he said over his shoulder.

“Edward is not actually feeble-minded. Just young. He will grow out of this phase.”

“I hope so, for your sake as well as his own. Indeed for the sake of the neighbourhood. It is a pity to see Ambledown so sadly deteriorated. It is one of the finer old historical homes in the district. Older than the Hall, I think?”

“Yes, I believe the Barwicks were here for some time before the Gambles arrived,” I was happy to tell him.

“It really is a shame,” he said rather wistfully, then shook the thought away and returned to the present situation. “What you inferred about Emily being restrained in some manner by us, it is not true. She is free to come and go as she likes, within the bounds of propriety of course. She has led an incredibly sequestered life. I plan to take her about a little into good society—London next spring for the Season, and before that to visit and attend any local parties that offer. She is free to visit you, if she wishes, and we hope you will also come to see her at the Hall.”

This was not so magnanimous a course as it sounded, for Edward was not here this month. Neither was there much in the way of attractive gentlemen locally to lure her from him. As to London, that was half a year away or more. If Carnforth were not dead by that time
,
making the visit impossible due to mourning, I would be surprised.

“Will you come?” he asked impatiently, breaking into my reverie.

“I am very busy. We are not much in the custom of visiting Emily at her home. Usually she came to see us here.”

“You actually run Ambledown yourself?”

“Yes. I do not personally shear the sheep and mend the stone walls, but I handle the accounting and generally deal with any problem that arises.”

“That must keep you busy,” he murmured, turning back towards the house, to Emily and Nora. As we proceeded he mentioned the many changes he noticed since his return—the empty houses where families had moved out, the number of tourists, the seeming busyness of the place, yet without any great prosperity.

“There is plenty of prosperity, most of it in your friend Wingdale’s pockets,” I answered sharply.

“That’s the kind of friends I live to have,” he answered, laughing lightly. Unfortunately, he did not turn to see the sneer I was directing at him.

“For Emily as well as yourself?” I was forced to enquire, to get him to look at me.

“Oh yes,” he agreed readily. “For Emily even more than myself. I don’t expect that custom has changed in the fifteen years I have been away. So far as I have heard, pretty ladies of good breeding and narrow means still marry gentlemen of fortune, if they are wise and lucky.”

I cast a withering look on him, but we had rounded the corner of the house, and he was looking to Emily, so he missed it. During our absence Nora had called for lemonade. I expect Mr. Gamble would have preferred a stronger drink. He accepted the lemonade like a gentleman, however, and gulped it down before calling for the blue phaeton.

We waved goodbye as they jogged off, the cream ponies already getting away from Emily’s control so that Gamble had to put an arm around her shoulder to get at the reins. He had devised a singularly successful means of courting his cousin. Emily’s merry laughter drifted back on the wind.

“They’ll be married before Edward gets back,” I prophesied
.

“She does seem fond of him,” Nora admitted. “But I cannot think she
loves
him, Chloe. She spoke of Edward all the time the two of you were gone. What did Gamble want?”

“To whitewash the scandalous way he is trapping Emily into marrying him. I’m going to shell the peas while we sit out here, Nora. I hate being idle.”

Chapter Seven

Rain is usually a prominent feature of our Lake District. This summer it was remarkably dry and the dust nearly choked me as I rumbled into Grasmere in the tinker’s wagon to practice the children’s songs for the Rush-Bearing. The town was swarming with tourists, spilling out of Wingdale Hause into the various shops to purchase souvenirs, maps, sweets. A street vendor hawked ices. They came ostensibly to admire the lakes and fells. Why the deuce did they not go and look at them then, and leave the stores and streets for the inhabitants of the place?

They also came in droves to see our church, which is one of the most beautiful and interesting in the district, in my humble opinion. Dating from the eleventh century (and possibly as much as four centuries older), it is dedicated to St. Oswald. The tourists, added to the children come for practice, made access to the church nearly impossible. Miss Johnson and Mrs. Ostler were the other spinster and widow who were to assist me in the Rush-Bearing rehearsal.

It was a tedious enough afternoon to be sure. I did not much look forward to the dusty drive home either. It was Miss Johnson’s suggestion that we stop in at the Wingdale Hause tea shop for some refreshment before making the trip. As she lived not two streets away, I wondered that she did not invite us into her own home. “For it is so lively there, you know,” she said in a shamefaced way.

To my astonishment Mrs. Ostler expressed no surprise at this notion of paying Captain Wingdale for a cup of tea. “Lovely,” she gushed. (It was to be Miss Johnson’s treat, you see, to make up for not having us to her own house.)

“I do not frequent Wingdale’s place,” I said icily.

“Everyone does, Chloe,” Miss Johnson informed me. “Even Lady Emily is going nowadays, attending the assemblies with her cousin, you know.”

“Every night?” I asked in horror, for I knew of course she was to have gone on the Monday.

“Not every night,” Miss Johnson answered. “Twice they have been, on Monday and Thursday.”

This talk was held on Friday, the eve of the Rush-Bearing ceremony.

“Her cousin is always with her,” Mrs. Ostler rattled on. “They say there will be a match in that quarter. What happened to her and Edward, Chloe?”

“Edward is touring.”

“When the cat’s away, the mouse will play,” Miss Johnson informed me, with great unoriginality and great satisfaction. “Well, do you come with us or not?”

“No, I must get home,” I said evasively, for I had really nothing of any urgency to do. I would sit out under the copper beech, mending while Nora netted.

My mood was not of the best as I clipped along the road home. Neither did it improve when I met the little blue phaeton nipping into town, with Emily handling the ribbons somewhat more capably than before. Plenty of practice. Gamble sat by her side. He lifted a hand in salute and would have stopped, I think, had I given any indication of doing so. I did not, but bowled past as fast as Belle would carry me, to lick my wounds and wonder that the old natives who had been here forever could turn traitor and give Wingdale their patronage. Next thing we heard, they would be deserting the church dance Saturday night and going to Wingdale’s assembly instead of supporting local charities (for the funds from the Rush-Bearing party go to charity).

When Tom came out to Ambledown on that Friday evening, I was in a mood to be kind to him. I accepted his offer to attend the church dance next evening with him, and asked him to dine with Nora and myself before it, as he would be at the afternoon do, and this would save him the trip home. He read more encouragement into the offer than I had intended. I had to become quite sharp when Nora, the gudgeon, coyly excused herself to “just run upstairs a minute” that lasted half an hour, long enough for him to move over to join me on the sofa. As I slid by degrees the twelve inches towards its far end, he slid right along after me, and soon had his arms around me.

I like Tom, as I have indicated. What I could not like was to be in his arms. To feel his soft lips groping for mine was a thing so downright repellent I regretted having accepted the offer to the dance. Yet there was not a thing wrong with him. He was clean shaven, his personal habits unexceptionable. What repelled was the mere physical closeness of him. “You’re an
unnatural
girl, Chloe,” he said, offended.