Rachel’s mother would have brushed away these supposed signs, for sure, and reassured her daughter that the match was a fair one, given the circumstances. Anne Crofton had been a practical woman; kind and affectionate but wholly pragmatic. She hadn’t married Rachel’s father for love, but out of good sense; though love later grew between them. She would have approved of the cautious way in which Rachel had considered Richard Weekes’s proposal before accepting. He was lower than her in birth, to be sure, but his prospects were good, his business flourishing. His income was more than enough to keep a wife in modest comfort. His manners were a little coarse but there was no doubting his charm; and with innate charm, Rachel could work to shape the rest. A rough diamond, to which she could bring a shine. And however more rarefied her birth had been, the fact remained that her current status was lowly. All these things she could hear her mother say, when she shut her eyes at night and missed her parents with a feeling like a terrible ache in her bones. And in her father’s voice… well, he would have said less. Instead, she would have seen the misgiving in his eyes, because John Crofton had married for love, and always said it had made him the happiest man alive.
But Rachel had an argument ready for him, as welclass="underline" she knew that Richard Weekes loved her. Thus she entered into the match on much the same footing as her parents had, and hoped to be as happy as they had been. Rachel hadn’t believed in love at first sight – not until she’d met Richard for the first time in June, and watched it hit him like a thunderbolt. He’d come to Hartford Hall with a selection of Bordeaux wines for Sir Arthur Trevelyan to sample, and was waiting for the gentleman in the small parlour when Rachel came into the room to find a deck of cards. Outside a summer storm gathered, brought on by a week of torpid heat; the sky had gone dark and odd flickers of lightning came and went like fireflies. Trapped indoors, her two younger charges were restless and bad tempered, and she’d hoped to distract them with whist. She hadn’t known that anybody was in the room so she entered with unladylike haste, and frowning. Richard leapt up from the chair and tugged his coat straight, and Rachel halted abruptly. They faced each other for a suspended, silent moment, and in the next second Rachel saw it happen.
Richard’s eyes widened, and words that had formed in his mouth were never spoken. He went rather pale at first, and then coloured a deep red. He stared at her with an intensity that seemed to border on awe. For her part, Rachel was too taken aback to say anything, and her murmured apology at intruding also died on her lips. Even in the wan light from outside, which made his burning face look a little sickly, Richard was arrestingly handsome. Tall and broad at the shoulder, even if he did not stand up as straight as he should. He had light brown hair the colour of umber, blue eyes and a square jaw. In spite of herself, in the face of such scrutiny, Rachel blushed. She knew she wasn’t beautiful enough to have caused such upset with her face or figure alone – she was too tall, her body too flat and narrow. Her hair was the palest of blonds, but it was fine and wouldn’t curl; her eyes were large, heavy-lidded, but her mouth was too small. So what else could it have been but realisation? The realisation that here was the person he’d been looking for, without even knowing it; here was his soul’s counterpoint, the one who would bring harmony.
There was a mist of sweat on Richard’s top lip when at last Sir Arthur’s footsteps were heard, and they were released from the spell. Rachel dipped him a graceless curtsy and turned to leave, without the deck of cards, and Richard called out:
‘Miss… forgive me,’ as she walked away. His voice was deep, and smooth, and it intrigued her. She went back upstairs to the children’s rooms feeling oddly breathless and distracted. Eliza, the eldest daughter of the house, was curled up in a window seat reading a book. She looked up and scowled.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ she said, loading the question with scorn. It was lucky for Eliza that she was dark and delicate and pretty. A plainer girl would not have got away with such a waspish personality, but at fifteen Eliza already had a great many admirers.
‘Nothing at all to concern you,’ Rachel replied coolly. There had been times during the six years that Rachel had been governess at Hartford Hall, more times than there ought to have been, when her fingers had itched to close Eliza’s mouth with the flat of her hand.
For a few weeks after that, Richard Weekes appeared here and there, unexpectedly, claiming to be on business in the area. Outside church; near the grocer’s shop in the village; on the green on a Sunday afternoon, where people gathered to gossip and plot. He came to Hartford a number of times, ostensibly to ask after the latest wines he’d delivered, and how they were drinking. He came so often that Sir Arthur grew irritable, and dealt with him brusquely. But still Richard Weekes came, and he lingered, and when he caught sight of Rachel he always found a way to speak to her. And then he asked for her permission to write to her, and Rachel’s stomach gave a peculiar little jolt, because there could be no mistaking his intentions from that moment on. He wrote in a crabbed hand, each character stubbornly refusing to join up with the next. The prose was coloured by quirks in spelling and grammar, but the messages within it were sweet and ardent.
She’d had only one proposal of marriage before, even though, in the days before their disgrace, her family had been wealthy and well respected. Rachel was never beautiful, but attractive and well spoken enough to arouse interest in more than one young gentleman. But she never gave them any cause to hope, or encouraged them at all, so only one ever plucked up the courage to ask for her hand – James Beale, the son of a close neighbour, on his way up to Oxford to read philosophy. She’d turned him down as kindly as she could, feeling that she ought to wait – wait for what, she couldn’t say. There was loss in her family already, by then, but it was not grief that stopped her; only the want of something she could hardly put her finger on – a degree of conviction, perhaps. She was not romantic by nature; she did not expect her soul to take flight when she met the man she would marry. But she did hope to feel something; something more. Some sense of completion, and certainty.
Richard Weekes fumbled his proposal when he came to it, tripping over the words with his cheeks flaming; and it might have been that sudden show of vulnerability that convinced Rachel, in the moment, to accept. They’d been out walking, with the children to chaperone them, on a warm afternoon in late July. The countryside around Hartford Hall, near the village of Marshfield to the north of Bath, was more golden than green, drowsy with warmth and light. It had been a hot year, the wheat ripening early and the hay fields rife with wild flowers – poppies and cornflowers and tufted vetch. They came to the top corner of a sloping cattle field, where the air was scented with earth and fresh dung, and stopped in the shade of a beech tree while the children ran ahead through the long grass, like little ships on a waterless sea – all but Eliza, who seated herself on the low stone wall some distance away, opened a book and turned her back to them conspicuously.
‘This is a beautiful spot, is it not?’ said Richard, standing beside her with his hands linked behind his back. He had stripped off his coat and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, and Rachel noticed the solid build of his arms, the scuffed and weathered look of his hands. A working man’s hands, not those of a gentleman. He wore long, well-worn leather boots over snuff-coloured breeches, and a blue waistcoat just slightly too big for him. Bought second-hand and never altered. That does not make the man any less worthy, Rachel thought.
‘This is one of my favourite views,’ Rachel agreed. Beyond a line of birches and willow pollards at the bottom of the slope, the land rose again, sweeping up, chequered with fields. High above them a young buzzard was calling to its parent across the cloudless sky, its voice still whistling and babyish, though it soared half a thousand feet over their heads. The skin felt tight over Rachel’s nose, and she hoped it wasn’t sunburned. Her straw hat was making her forehead itch.