Lady Daisy popped back over the fence as nimbly as a spring lamb.
“And how is that working?” Fabianus asked as she pulled her glove on. “The muddling on. Are you tempted to wield your dog Latin on his lordship?” He’d like to hear her dress down a peer of the realm. Casriel was an exquisitely well mannered and genial fellow, but he had also been blessed with fine looks, consequence, and a good opinion of himself.
“Grey does not deserve the sharp edge of my tongue,” Lady Daisy said, “but I am nonetheless out of sorts with him.”
“And with everybody else as well?”
She marched off along the fence. “Everybody except my children. I seem to be able to muster patience where they are concerned. Did Lady Penweather disdain to accompany you to the wilds of Dorset?”
“In a sense, yes. My wife went to her heavenly reward more than two years ago.”
Lady Daisy’s steps slowed. “I am so sorry. No wonder you are such good company for a widow. The weeds don’t put you off, and you knew not to linger on the condolences. Does it ever get easier?”
Fabianus fell in step beside her, while the horse kept pace with them on the other side of the fence. The question was one he’d asked many a grieving woman, and their answers had stood him in good stead when his turn had come to mourn.
“Yes, for the most part it does get easier, but also a little bit no, at least for me. I am convinced no two bereavements are exactly the same. In my case, I find myself like a person who has acquired an unreliable knee. I daunder along most days, going about my business. I know to be cautious on terrain many other people would consider of no moment. Anniversaries of her death, our wedding, Pandora’s birth, and so forth catch me unawares.”
Lady Daisy stopped at the end of the fence line. “Exactly. Out of nowhere, when the going should be smooth, you stumble. You can’t predict the stumble, but there you are, all off-balance and hoping not to fall because Vicar chose a particular hymn your spouse once loved to sing.”
This was a reluctant, even bewildered admission. Lady Daisy stood blinking at her horse, and Fabianus was reminded of all the nights he’d spent staring into a fire, brooding over his husbandly failings. He’d had no energy to accomplish anything productive on those nights, but he’d dreaded to go up to his solitary bed.
“Guinevere might like a lemon drop,” he said as the mare turned a cloudy gaze on her former owner. “Or several lemon drops.”
“You have guessed our secret.” Lady Daisy produced the bag, shook a half-dozen sweets into her palm, and fed them to the horse. “Though the children are amenable to bribes as well.”
She passed Fabianus the bag. He popped two lemon drops into his mouth and handed her back the sweets. The horse, having completed the mandatory civilities, shuffled away.
“I miss her,” Lady Daisy said. “But she doesn’t see well now, and to move her to my stable would be unkind.”
The lemon drops were exactly as lemon drops should be—tart citrus and sweet honey. Lady Daisy hadn’t taken any for herself before putting the bag back in her pocket.
“Do you miss your husband?” Fabianus asked as they resumed their progress. “Not all widows do.”
“That is complicated,” her ladyship replied. “We were not a love match, though I tried to tell myself we were. I am an earl’s daughter, which in these surrounds gave me more cachet than I realized. I had more generous settlements than my sister, which mattered to my husband, and I was five years younger than she. He offered, and I must admit he knew his offer would be accepted despite my sister’s apparent interest in him.”
Her ladyship’s answer was somewhat of a prevarication, but if a widow was entitled to anything, it was the privacy of her own thoughts.
“I missed my wife, terribly,” Fabianus said, a truth he’d fought for months, “but I also missed the expectation that eventually our marriage would come right. All the petty slights and misunderstandings would acquire the trivial status they deserved. We’d fade into benign and affectionate old age surrounded by pleasant memories and pleasant neighbors.”
Her ladyship was quiet as they approached a stone wall. The face of the wall was tightly laid ashlar, while local style was apparently to form the wall’s cope from flat, triangular rocks stood on end to resemble jagged teeth. This arrangement deflected rain, weighted the construction generally, and added height to the wall, but also meant a horseman took a significant risk attempting to jump the obstacle anywhere but at a stile.
Lady Daisy proceeded along the path into a sparse wood of aspens and birches, leading Fabianus to such a stile in a clearing. Rather than traverse the steps, she faced Fabianus.
“And what of the slights that weren’t petty?” she asked. “What of the misunderstandings that drove the marriage completely off course?”
Ah. Fromm had been a bounder, then. “The term ‘merry widow’ strikes me as one of the least appropriate in the language. In my experience, those ladies might be cheerful, friendly, and quite determined on their pleasures, but they are all, in their way, seeking revenge of a sort.”
Lady Daisy traversed the steps of the stile without any assistance from Fabianus. “I don’t want revenge. Revenge serves no purpose. Eric never meant to fall from his horse.”
Fabianus followed her down the path, through the thinning woods, and into the adjoining field, which was occupied by woolly, curly-horned sheep, munching the dead grass poking up through the snow. Dorset sheep were the envy of the realm, prone to twinning and often producing two lambings a year.
“Eric never meant to fall from his horse,” Fabianus said, “but in some regard, he fell from your esteem. I do not refer to the small human failings that husbands and wives overlook in each other. You are a little relieved to be free of him, aren’t you?”
Lady Daisy marched on, and he had the sense that had the snow thickened to a blizzard, she would not have slowed her pace.
“I disappointed him too,” she said as the path wound uphill. “We were cordial.”
Fabianus took her hand, rather than offer his arm, which was presuming of him. “You were cordial in front of the neighbors and children. You were civil in private, and time spent together behind a closed door was mostly at the beginning and the end of the day.”
As they topped the hill, a manor house came into view on the next slope. The edifice was golden sandstone with an abundance of mullioned windows in a classically symmetric façade. The architecture might be secreting some medieval lord’s hunting box, but the outward impression was of grace, comfort, and means.
“You and your viscountess hit a rough patch, I take it?” Lady Daisy asked, pausing when the trail wound into a spinney of birches halfway down the hill.
“We did. The things that drew us together—her lighthearted, sociable nature, my more contemplative, retiring turn of mind—became sources of friction.” Fabianus was applying delicate euphemisms to a relationship that had descended into shouting matches and cold silences. He and Marianne had struggled past that phase, but the damage had been unhealed at the time of her death.
“You still miss her, though, don’t you?” Lady Daisy said, gaze on the plumes of smoke rising from three of the manor’s chimneys. “You miss her and wish it all might have been different.”