“If you think I am going to answer that question,” Hugo said, “you must have cuckoos in your head.”
“Which is all the answer I need,” Vincent said, waggling his eyebrows.
“And my lips are sealed,” Ralph said. “I will neither confirm nor deny what I saw through the morning room window, though I will say that I was shaken to the core.”
“Imogen,” George said, “will you cater to our collective male laziness and pour the tea?”
The Duke of Stanbrook produced a pair of crutches for Gwen the following morning, explaining that they had been needed when his house was a hospital but had lain untouched and forgotten for several years since. He had had them tested for safety, he assured her. He measured them for length and had a few inches sawn off them. He had them sanded and polished. Then Gwen was able to move around to a limited degree.
“You must promise me, though, Lady Muir,” he said, “not to bring the wrath of Dr. Jones down upon my head. You must not dash about the house and up and down stairs for eighteen hours out of every twenty-four. You must continue to rest your foot and keep it elevated most of the time. But at least now you can move about a room and even from room to room without having to wait for someone to carry you.”
“Oh, thank you,” she said. “You cannot know how much this means to me.”
She took a turn about the morning room, getting used to the crutches, before reclining on the chaise longue again.
She felt a great deal less confined for the rest of the day, though she did not move about a great deal. Vera spent most of the morning with her, as she had the day before, and stayed until after luncheon.
Her friends, she reported happily, quite hated her for being on intimate visiting terms with the Duke of Stanbrook. His crested carriage had been seen to stop outside her house a number of times. Their jealousy would surely cause them to cut her acquaintance if they did not find it more to their advantage to bask in her reflected glory and boast to their less privileged neighbors of being her friends. She also complained of the fact that His Grace did not see fit to send anyone in the carriage to bear her company and that again today she was not invited to take luncheon in the dining room with the duke and his guests.
“I daresay, Vera,” Gwen told her, “the duke is touched by your devotion and considers that you would find it offensive to be taken away from me when I cannot sit in the dining room with you.”
She wondered why she bothered to try to soothe ruffled feathers that never stayed smooth for long.
“Of course you are right,” Vera said grudgingly. “I would be offended if His Grace parted me from you for a mere meal when I have given up a large part of my day just to offer you the comfort of my company. But he might at least give me the opportunity to refuse his invitation. I am surprised that his chef serves only three courses for luncheon. At least, he serves only three here in the morning room. I daresay they enjoy a larger number of courses in the dining room.”
“But the food is plentiful and delicious,” Gwen said.
Vera’s visits were a severe trial to her.
After the Duke of Stanbrook had borne her friend off to his waiting carriage, Gwen felt a little agitated. What if Lord Trentham came again as he had yesterday? The weather was just as lovely. She could not bear to find herself tête-à-tête with him again. She had no business being attracted to him, or he to her. She had no business allowing him to kiss her, and he had no business asking it of her.
If he came again this afternoon, she thought, she could pretend to be asleep and to remain asleep. He would have no choice but to go away. But she was not sleepy today.
She was saved anyway from having to practice such subter-fuge. There was a tap on the door not long after Vera left, and it opened to reveal Viscount Ponsonby.
“I am on my way to the l-library,” he said in his languid voice and with his slight stammer. “Everyone else is off enjoying the sunshine, but I have such a stack of unanswered letters that I am in grave danger of being buried under it or lost behind it or some such dire thing. I must, alas, set pen to p-paper. It occurred to me that you may wish to try out your new crutches and come to select a book.”
“I would be more than delighted,” she said, and he stood in the doorway watching while she hoisted herself onto her crutches and moved toward him.
Her ankle was still swollen and sore to the touch. There was still no possibility of getting on a shoe or putting any weight on it. It was somewhat less painful today, however. And the cut on her knee was now no more than a scab.
Lord Ponsonby walked beside her to the library and turned a sofa that was by the fireplace so that light from the window would fall on it.
“You may remain here and read or w-watch me labor,” he said, “or you may return to the morning room after choosing a book. Or you may run up and down stairs, for that matter. I am not your jailer. If you need a volume from a high shelf, d-do let me know.”
And he retreated behind the large oak desk that stood near the window.
Gwen wondered about his stammer. It was the only imperfection she could detect in his person. Perhaps he too had come through war physically unscathed but had gone out of his head, as Lord Trentham had phrased it. She had not thought a great deal before this week about the mental strain of being a military man. And yet it showed a lamentable lack of imagination on her part that she had not.
She read for a while, and then Lady Barclay found her and invited her to the conservatory to see the plants. There were some long wicker seats there, she explained, on which Lady Muir could rest her foot. They sat there and talked for a whole hour. Later, they went for tea in the drawing room.
It was Lady Barclay who dined with her that evening.
She wanted to broach the subject of Lady Barclay’s loss and assure her that she understood, that she too had lost a husband under violent, horrifying circumstances, that she too felt guilty over his death and doubted she would ever free herself of the feeling. And perhaps it was more than just a feeling. Perhaps she really was guilty.
But she said nothing. There was nothing in Lady Barclay’s manner to suggest that she would welcome such intimacy. Anyway, Gwen never talked about the events surrounding Vernon’s death or the fall that had caused it. She suspected she never would.
She never even thought about those events. Yet in some ways she never thought of anything else.
Later in the evening, she admitted when asked that she played the pianoforte, though not with any particular flair or talent. It did not matter. She was persuaded to cross the drawing room on her crutches in order to sit at the instrument and play, rusty fingers and all. Fortunately, she acquitted herself tolerably well. And then she was persuaded to remain there in order to accompany Lord Darleigh as he played his violin. She moved to the harp with him afterward while he explained to her how he was learning to identify all the many strings without seeing them.
“And his next trick, Lady Muir,” the Earl of Berwick said, “is to play the strings once he has identified them.”
“Heaven defend us,” Lord Ponsonby added. “Vincent was far less d-dangerous when he had his sight and the only weapons at his disposal were a sword and a giant cannon. He is threatening to start embroidering, Lady Muir. Lord knows where his needle will end up. And we have all heard horror stories about silken bonds.”
Gwen laughed with them all, including Lord Darleigh himself.
When she withdrew to her room soon after, she was not allowed to climb the stairs with her crutches. A footman was summoned to carry her up.