She spent most of the rest of her disposable money at her favorite place, which was fortunately Mrs. Bailey’s too—a needlework shop, where she bought a supply of bright yellow wool and a smaller amount of pink wool, several shades darker than her dress. It would make a very pretty shawl. It was an age since she had last knitted. She was going to start again. The vicar’s wife meanwhile left the shop with a fat bundle of embroidery silks.
Back at home, Lydia knitted whenever she could not invent something else to do—she could not concentrate upon reading. But knitting, alas, occupied only the hands, not the mind too. She tried knitting and reading at the same time, but the rather intricate pattern she was working made it impossible.
Perhaps by the next time she saw Major Westcott he would have forgotten. Perhaps he had not paid much attention even at the time. Yet he had stood on her garden path, frowning at her door—not that she had been able to see his expression in the darkness around one lifted corner of her curtain, it was true, but she would have bet the sixpence she had already lost at cards that he was frowning. He had stood there for what had seemed like an eternity.
Denise Franks, one of the friends she had made during the past year, distracted her one afternoon by calling and staying to share a pot of tea. They exchanged news and recipes, and Denise admired her knitting, which was already a few inches long, and chuckled over the bright yellow color. She had come to invite Lydia to a surprise birthday party she and her sister had decided to give for her father’s seventieth birthday. She was very grateful when Lydia offered to make a birthday cake, since she and her sister were swamped with all the other preparations.
“It was an impulsive decision,” she explained. “It was only when Papa told us a couple of days ago that we must on no account make a fuss over his birthday that we realized that yes, really we ought and must. He clearly expects it.”
“He will scold you and be delighted,” Lydia said, laughing.
She baked the cake the next day and decorated it with marzipan and icing the day after. By the time she was finished with the decorating, Snowball was restless. She had had only a brief outing before breakfast and was hovering at the door, whining. The front door.
Lydia hesitated. She had been avoiding the front entrance all week like the coward she was. Her front garden was directly across the street from the entrance to Hinsford Manor. In the past she had often been outside when Major Westcott came down the drive. She had never felt any awkwardness about smiling at him, raising a hand in greeting, even exchanging a few meaningless pleasantries about the weather with him. The sight of him had always brightened her day, in fact, though she doubted he had ever really noticed her.
It would no longer brighten her day to see him for the very reason that now he would almost certainly notice her.
Why oh why oh why had she done it? And why was it impossible to recall words once they were out of one’s mouth? If she could just hide away in a hole somewhere and stay there until he grew old and died or until she did, whichever came first, then … Well, then nothing. Sometimes one’s mind churned out the silliest of absurdities.
All her spring flowers were blooming merrily out there, most notably the daffodils, her favorite flower in the world. But the weeds were thriving too. The poor flower beds had never been so neglected. And all because she was a coward and afraid to go out front. Yet she had to see him again sometime.
“Right, Snowball,” she said as she went to get her gardening tools and gloves. “Out we go. You can run around while I tackle the wilderness.”
Snowball rushed out as soon as Lydia opened the door. She dashed over to the fence that bordered the copse, did her business, and dashed back again, bringing with her a stick that looked incongruously big and heavy for her. She dropped it at Lydia’s feet outside the door, wagged her stub of a tail, and gazed up hopefully.
Lydia glanced across at the empty drive. Nothing and no one. She looked at the gardening things in her hands, winced as she saw the flower bed beneath the front window—it seemed even weedier without the barrier of a pane of glass—glanced back at her dog, and laughed. Why not? Good heavens, why not?
Snowball woofed her agreement.
“Just for a few minutes, though,” Lydia said. “I do have more important things to do, you know.”
She was down at the bottom of the garden ten minutes later, her back to the fence, throwing the stick yet again in a game Snowball never seemed to tire of, when she heard the unmistakable sound of clopping hooves. She darted a dismayed glance over her shoulder at the drive and saw no one riding down it. Her relief was short-lived, however. Major Westcott must have ridden into the village earlier while she was busy in the kitchen. He was returning now along the street, his horse’s head just coming into view around the bend.
Foolishly, Lydia turned sharply away and pretended she was so engrossed in the game that she had neither heard nor seen him. She willed him to sneak by without saying anything. He might be just as desirous of avoiding her as she was of avoiding him, after all.
Apparently he was not.
“Good morning, Mrs. Tavernor,” he called, his voice pleasant and cheerful, as it always was. Lydia looked around in feigned surprise while her dog abandoned the stick game in favor of the greater excitement of charging toward the fence, growling and baring her teeth and then barking as though she considered herself the equal of man and horse combined.
“Good morning, Snowball.”
“Oh,” Lydia said, all bright with false amazement. “Good morning, Major Westcott. I did not hear you coming. It is a beautiful day, is it not?” It was actually blustery and chilly. Clouds hung low with the promise of rain at any moment.
“I find every morning beautiful when I wake to the realization that I am still alive to enjoy it,” he said, touching the brim of his hat with his whip.
And it struck Lydia that she had done him an injustice by thinking of him as good-looking but not outstandingly handsome. Actually he looked nothing short of gorgeous astride his horse. And virile. And several times more powerful—and appealing—than he looked when he was not riding. Though even then … He sat there now with graceful ease, as though he and his horse were an indivisible unit.
Snowball was incensed by them.
“There is no doubting how you came by your name,” the major said, addressing the dog.
“She was a gray, bedraggled puppy with ragged, matted fur when Mrs. Elsinore found her squeaking and crying on the back step of the vicarage,” Lydia told him. “She was shooing the poor thing away when I happened to come into the kitchen. I believe a vagrant we had fed earlier must have abandoned her and left without her. She looked dreadful, but after I had fed her some milk and washed her and rubbed her dry with a towel, I discovered she was white and fluffy and eager to live and to wash my face with her little pink tongue. That was early spring two years ago, and the snowdrops in the garden were just coming into bloom. I thought she needed a pretty springlike name and called her Snowdrop for a day or two. But she looked far more like a snowball, so that is who she became.”
Far too much information, Lydia, she told herself. She rarely spoke at such length to anyone except perhaps her new friends. Certainly not to any man. But she had talked more than usual last week too when he had walked her home, she remembered. And in the end she had spoken far too much.