Isaiah had wanted her to find another home for the dog. He had not been a hard-hearted man—far from it—but he did not believe animals belonged inside a house. Definitely not his own. Lydia had defied his wishes for surely the only time in their married life.
Major Westcott looked intently at her as she spoke, and it was obvious to Lydia that today he was really seeing her. It was not a reassuring thought. She would far prefer to be invisible again. She could feel herself flushing.
“She has appointed herself your guardian and defender, then,” Major Westcott said, “out of gratitude for being taken in and loved.”
And oh. He smiled. Really it was just with his eyes and a slight lifting of the corners of his mouth. Not a full-on, dazzling smile. It did not matter. Her knees trembled anyway. Idiot woman.
“I have just been invited to a party in honor of Mr. Solway’s birthday tomorrow evening,” he said. “He will have reached the grand age of seventy, and his daughters consider it an occasion for celebration. One can only hope he will agree, since it is to be a surprise. Will you be there?”
“I will,” she told him. “I will be taking a cake I baked.”
“I will be walking there,” he said, “since Solway’s house is even closer to home than Tom and Hannah’s was last week. May I have the pleasure of escorting you home afterward, Mrs. Tavernor?”
Her first instinct was to refuse. Mr. Solway lived only a few houses along the street. Besides … It would be ungracious, though, to tell him his escort was unnecessary. He was looking steadily down at her, waiting for her answer, while his horse pawed the ground and snorted disdainfully at Snowball, who was still bouncing around on her side of the fence, defending her territory with the occasional warning growl. The horse did not otherwise move, however. Major Westcott had perfect control over it.
“Thank you,” Lydia said. “That would be very kind of you.”
He straightened in the saddle. “Until tomorrow evening, then,” he said. But instead of riding away immediately, he continued to look steadily at her, that half smile still softening his eyes and curving his lips. “What kind of cake?”
“Fruit,” she said. “With spices. And marzipan and icing.”
“I wish now I had not asked,” he said. “I may not be able to sleep tonight in anticipation.”
Lydia laughed in surprise at his answer and bit her lip as she stared after him while he rode off up the driveway to Hinsford Manor.
Why on earth did he want to escort her home tomorrow evening when the distance was really quite insignificant? It did not have anything to do with what she had said to him last week, did it? He was not … Oh, surely he was not thinking of taking her up on the offer she had not really made. He could not possibly … She could not possibly …
But he had looked very intently at her while they spoke.
He had said—as a joke—that he would not be able to sleep tonight in anticipation. Of eating a slice of her cake tomorrow, he had meant. But what about her—in all earnestness?
How was she supposed to sleep tonight?
Whenever Harry dared to believe that perhaps he had fully recovered at last from his war experiences, something could be relied upon to reveal to him that he had not. That perhaps he never would.
The old, annoying nightmares had returned with a vengeance during the past week, and he knew why. He had felt guilty about being essentially unaware of Mrs. Tavernor’s existence for the past four years although he had seen her at least once a week at church and had even spoken to her and exchanged pleasantries with her outside her cottage during the year or so she had been living there. She had been a nonentity to him. Yet he prided himself upon his courteous attention to other people—people of all social classes and both genders. Courtesy should involve more than just amiable nods and smiles and rote comments upon the weather— and an essential unawareness of the other’s existence.
For years, however, he had deliberately and for his very sanity’s sake looked upon the French armies as one impersonal entity, to be obliterated from existence at every opportunity. He had never looked into the faces of individual French soldiers, either during battle or afterward, when large numbers of them lay strewn, dead, upon the ground between the armies.
Had he saved his sanity? Or had something been pushed so deep inside him that it would forever torment him?
In his nightmares he saw them. Sometimes they were still frighteningly faceless. Sometimes, even more frighteningly, they had the faces of his friends and family. Occasionally they had the face he saw whenever he looked into a mirror. He could go for days or weeks without those nightmares. And then … not.
He had thought that at least he had learned something from the ghastly experiences of war and from his own loss of status and identity. Concern, compassion for all. A conscious awareness of the existence and precious individuality of everyone he met. Yet unconsciously he had dismissed Mrs. Tavernor as someone not worthy of recognition as a human being.
Maybe because she was a woman? But no. In that at least he was surely being unfair to himself.
He would not absolve himself with that assurance, however. The fact that he loved his mother and sisters and female relatives did not necessarily prove that he saw all women as deserving of the same attention as men. And the fact that he had never totally ignored Mrs. Tavernor did not prove that he had therefore treated her as he ought. No woman was a mere appendage of her husband. No widow belonged in a shadow world.
Harry rode home, aware that he had looked fully and consciously at Mrs. Tavernor for the first time today. He had deliberately stopped to speak with her, though he might easily have avoided talking at all. He was well aware that she had seen him coming but had pretended not to. She had appeared flustered when he spoke to her and forced her to turn to him in feigned surprise. The poor woman had no doubt been consumed with embarrassment over the memory of what she had said to him so impulsively last week.
But he had wanted to look at her, to speak to her, to listen to her, even if it had meant embarrassing her. For if he had ridden past without speaking this time, an awkwardness would have been imposed upon all their future encounters.
She had looked rather pretty, though it was perhaps a bit shallow and condescending of him to notice that about her before all else. Would he have been less surprised by his lack of awareness of her in the past if he had discovered her to be plain? She had been wearing a blue dress, neither dowdy nor in the height of fashion, with a matching shawl about her shoulders to protect her against the chill of the day. She was slim and rather shapely. Her hair was chestnut brown, though he had not been able to see much of it beneath the white cap that covered her head and was tied neatly beneath her chin with narrow ribbons. Her cheeks had been flushed, her nose too in the cold, her eyes large with that pretend surprise, and somewhere between blue and gray in color. She had a wide, generous mouth, which did not seem quite to fit the rest of her face but nevertheless made it more pleasing.
It was actually surprising that he had scarcely noticed her until a week ago. She was a young, good-looking woman. Attractive, one might say. Why, then, had he not noticed her? He was as red-blooded a male as the next man. He noticed pretty women. Why had he not noticed her? Because she had been a married woman until fairly recently, and her husband had been a man of exceptionally forceful character and piety? But he noticed other pretty wives. Had she perhaps not wanted to be noticed? Had she been content to be the Reverend Isaiah Tavernor’s shadow? The vicar’s wife. The vicar’s helpmeet. He seemed to recall that Tavernor had always referred to her with that word, never as his wife. And never by name. Harry thought back to Mrs. Jenkins. She had perfectly fit her role as the vicar’s wife. Yet she had been unmistakably a person in her own right. The same could be said now of Mrs. Bailey.