Penweather held the door for Daisy. “Then you are blessed indeed, my lord. My family associations are few and distant. Tell me, my lady, have you children? You must, for you knew exactly how to foil Pandora’s escape.”
How lovely of him to ask after the children rather than after Eric. If Daisy had to reply even once more to the question, Don’t you miss him terribly? she’d stomp on her horrid black bonnet and engage in public profanity.
“I have two boys, my lord, nearly eight and nearly seven, and they have a younger sister. I can scold fluently in dog Latin, spy unicorns among the clouds, and give orders like a pirate captain.” Though Daisy had all but forgotten how to sleep through the night, waltz, or laugh.
“The lemon drops are an inspired touch,” Penweather said. “I’m partial to them myself.”
When had anybody referred to anything Daisy had done or thought as inspired? She undid her bonnet ribbons and hung the dratted hat on the antlers of a buck murdered years ago. The old fellow was a bit moth-eaten, but he was a fixture from Daisy’s childhood, and she was inordinately glad Casriel hadn’t retired him to a bonfire.
Daisy’s cloak came next, and Casriel draped it over the back of the chair at the desk. He was frowning, probably concluding that his baby sister had lost weight, but then, his baby sister had been developing the rounded proportions of a heifer at spring grass prior to Eric’s death.
Eric’s assessment, offered with that winsome smile of his.
The few dresses she’d chosen to dye black were loose on her now, and she’d selected outfits she didn’t particularly like rather than ruin her favorites. So few women were flattered by black that even the clothes a widow wore formed another blow. They made a lady feel as unattractive on the outside as she feared she was on the inside.
“Tea is in order,” Daisy said, tugging the bell-pull twice. “And you must tell me what brings you to this corner of Dorsetshire, my lord.”
Penweather eyed the buck sporting Daisy’s mourning bonnet. “I’m in the area on business, thinking to acquire a property more commodious than the ancestral pile in Hampshire. Casriel’s hospitality is much appreciated.”
Perhaps widows weren’t to adorn mounted cervids with mourning bonnets. Perhaps Penweather thought her a bit daft. Perhaps she was a bit daft, and there was Casriel, once again looking anywhere but at his own sister.
“Pandora would like that use of your millinery,” Penweather said, regarding the deer. “A touch of the unexpected. Gives yonder buck a certain dashing gravitas.”
He smiled at Daisy, the curve of his lips slight, the warmth in his eyes even more subtle, but it was a smile, and she was much in need of smiles.
Also answers. She very much needed answers.
Penweather’s presence prevented the questions Daisy wanted to put to her brother. She remained mostly quiet while the men reminisced about old school chums and deadly dull professors. The benefit of this conversation was that Daisy was spared the interrogation Casriel doubtless longed to aim at her.
By the time the teapot was empty, flurries were drifting down from the gray sky.
“I’ll send you home in the coach,” Casriel said, holding Daisy’s cloak for her. “The temperature is dropping, and this snow looks like it means business.”
The snow, to a woman raised in the country, looked like the merest passing weather. “Please do not trouble the grooms,” Daisy said. “I have few enough pretexts to actually leave my own property, and a chance to stretch my legs does much for my mood.”
“Might I walk you home?” Penweather asked before Casriel could lapse into polite intractability. “I was immured in a coach for two days with Pandora for company. I’m in need of some fresh air myself.”
Casriel could say nothing to that, and thus Daisy would be permitted—permitted—to walk the entire mile from her childhood home to the manor where she’d kept house for her husband since her wedding day. Such were the great freedoms a widow was permitted.
While cornering Casriel on the specifics of Eric’s will would have to wait for another week.
Fabianus rejoiced to be moving through the brisk air. He kept pace with Lady Daisy’s modest stride, content simply to be away from the house and away from the enfant terrible in the Dorning Hall nursery. Traveling with Pandora had been a penance, not so much because the child whined—she was merely a child, and hours shut up in a stuffy, cold coach justified discontent—but because of the endless remonstrations her nursemaids offered in response to her whining.
When the whole business had grown too tedious, Fabianus had banished Pandora to the second coach and then felt like an ogre for dismissing her.
Lady Daisy took him down a path that led from the extensive Dorning Hall gardens, past a pair of enormous glass houses, and onward beside the carriage house and stables.
“I must pay a call,” she said, veering off along a fence that enclosed what appeared to be a mare’s paddock.
Fabianus, as her escort, had no choice but to accompany her, though any excuse to tarry in the out-of-doors suited him.
Her ladyship produced two halves of a purple carrot and climbed the first rail of a four-board fence. “Guinevere! Carrots!”
A sway-backed, furry gray mare, apparently blind in one eye, ambled over to the fence, whuffling as her walk became energetic.
“An old friend?” Fabianus asked. The horse wouldn’t see twenty again, perhaps not even twenty-five.
“The oldest horse on the property. She was my first grown-up mount. I was ten, and so was she. We were young ladies together. Will I scandalize you if I climb this fence?”
“Certainly not.”
Lady Daisy clambered over, apparently having scaled many a fence, and stood beside the horse. Her ladyship removed a glove and commenced scratching the mare’s withers.
“Gwenny never put a foot wrong, never held my mistakes against me. I told her all my secrets, confided all my woes in her.”
“And she never betrayed you.” Though perhaps somebody had. Lady Daisy’s air of soldiering on was a habit of long standing.
“Casriel offered to let me take her with me when I married, but my husband objected. He said he’d mount his wife, but as it turned out, I had no time to ride for pleasure once I married, and Gwenny was safer here.”
She leaned on the horse’s neck, a privilege indulged in by equestrians everywhere. To rest against a sturdy companion, to pause for a moment and yield to human frailty, was one of the greatest gifts of association with a trusted steed.
Fabianus studied the sky the better to offer her ladyship privacy, and considered the late Mr. Fromm’s promise—to mount his wife. He’d apparently got three children on her in the space of a very few years. There had, indeed, been mounting involved.
And one could not blame a husband for that, particularly not when the wife was so fetching, but couldn’t the fellow have exercised some restraint?
Her ladyship fed the beast the carrot and outright hugged the horse in parting. “A visit with Gwenny is my reward for calling at the Hall,” she said. “Casriel doesn’t know what to do with me, for all he married a widow. Lady Casriel was well past mourning when Grey met her, though, and she apparently believes siblings should be left to muddle on without interference.”