Home > Someone to Cherish (Westcott #8)(4)

Someone to Cherish (Westcott #8)(4)
Author: Mary Balogh

“It does,” she agreed. “And Abigail. I was so very worried when she married Gil without a word to any of us except you. It seemed impossible to me that she could ever be happy with him. Sometimes I simply love being proved wrong.”

“Gil is a good man,” he said. Gil had grown up in the gutter, to quote his own words, the bastard son of a village washerwoman and Viscount Dirkson, who was allowed no part in his upbringing and who was now connected to the Westcott family through his marriage to Harry’s aunt Matilda Westcott a few years ago—but that was another story. Gil had risen through the ranks in the army until he jumped the almost insurmountable barrier to officer status, courtesy of his father after his mother’s death. He had ended up as a lieutenant colonel, one rank superior to Harry’s. “I knew he and Abby loved each other, Mama, when I encouraged them to marry, though they did not yet know it themselves.”

She took a sip of her coffee, set down her cup, and sighed audibly. “And then there is you, Harry.”

He answered her merely with an interrogative lifting of his eyebrows. Here we go, he thought.

“It hurts my heart to see you forever placid and cheerful,” she continued. “Will I never get my boy back? I begin to despair of it. When will I see you eager and vibrant and exuberant again and enjoying life to the full?”

He thought he had been eager and vibrant and all the rest of it, besieged by nephews and nieces and dogs as he had been for the past week, and actually enjoying himself without having to be deliberately jolly.

“If you are referring to the time before the Great Disaster, Mama,” he said, “then I would remind you that I really was just a boy then. I was twenty. Do you truly want to see me conducting myself with bouncing high spirits, spouting superlatives and hyperbole with every utterance? I hope I have grown up a bit since those days. I am contented with my life as it is.”

She shook her head, obviously unconvinced, and regarded him for a while with a disconcertingly steady gaze. “But I want to see you happy, Harry,” she protested.

He grinned despite himself as a shriek of childish laughter and an excited woofing wafted in from somewhere beyond the shut door. “With a wife and six children, I suppose,” he said.

“I am not sure about six,” she protested, grimacing and then chuckling. “But yes, I would love to see you with a woman who can make you happy. With a woman whom you can make happy. With someone or something to make your life … oh, vivid. Do not shake your head like that, Harry, and don that amused, knowing expression. Love, happiness, vividness of life, do exist, and I am proof of it. I am living all my dearest dreams with Marcel.”

His smile softened as he looked back at her. “Yes, I know, Mama,” he said. “And I could not be happier about it.”

“Harry.” She leaned forward and took one of his hands in both of her own. “I want to see you happy with someone you … Oh, with someone you can cherish.”

He cringed inwardly though he did not stop smiling. “Time to change the subject,” he said, turning his hand to squeeze one of hers before taking up his cup again, draining his coffee, and getting to his feet. “Better yet, it is time to take myself off. I seem to remember challenging Robbie to a game of billiards this morning. He will accuse me of cowardice if I fail to show up.” Robbie was Camille and Joel’s eleven-year-old.

“Forgive me, Harry.” His mother got to her feet too and hugged him warmly. “Your life is yours to live your way, as Marcel is forever reminding me when I worry about you. Let us go and enjoy the rest of Christmas.”

Which they did.

 

 

Two

 


Much as he had enjoyed Christmas in Bath and the month in Gloucestershire, Harry was very happy to return home in February with signs of early spring all around him in the form of greening grass and budding trees and catkins and snowdrops, primroses and crocuses. For the past week or so he had begun to crave his own home and the quiet serenity of his life there.

For the ensuing week he enjoyed his aloneness, though admittedly it was not complete solitude. He spent time on the home farm, delighting particularly in watching the new lambs frolic on spindly legs about their mothers. And his two particular friends, Lawrence Hill, son of Sir Maynard Hill, a neighbor whose land adjoined Hinsford, and Tom Corning, the village schoolmaster, each came and spent time with him. Both were friends he had had since boyhood. Lawrence brought an invitation from his mother to take his potluck with them for dinner. Tom invited him to an evening of cards with some neighbors that his wife was organizing. Harry was soon feeling that he would never want to leave again, in fact. This was where he belonged and where he was most contented.

Except …

Well. Dash it all. Annoyingly, he appeared to have brought a certain restlessness home with him, and it could not be as easily ignored as it always had been. He kept thinking—with great satisfaction, it might be added—about how happy his mother was. And how happy Camille and Abigail were. They had each found what Harry considered among the rarest and most precious of graces: love and companionship with the men they had married. But then his thoughts would shift to himself. Would there ever be someone like that for him? That one woman in the whole wide world made just for him? How had his mother phrased it?

Someone to cherish.

He could start looking anytime he wished, of course. If he did not seek, he could not expect to find, after all. He was reluctant to go on a search, however. What were the chances he would find unhappiness instead—to be discovered only after he was married, when it would be too late to bow out and regain his freedom? Did everyone fear that sort of disaster? Of marrying the wrong person? Hadn’t his mother’s first marriage, to his father, proven how unhappily it could turn out?

But if he did want to start looking, he would almost certainly have to leave Hinsford to do it. There were a few eligible ladies within his circle of friends and acquaintances here, it was true—Rosanne and Mirabel Hill, for example, Lawrence’s sisters, and Theresa Raymore, daughter of the local magistrate. Harry liked all three and believed they liked him. They were all pretty girls and doubtless on the lookout for husbands. Harry might stand a chance with any of the three if he really pushed it. He did not believe his illegitimacy would be any great hindrance. However, he felt no noticeable tendre for any of them and detected none in them toward him. Certainly it was impossible to think of any of the three as someone to cherish.

Sometimes he wished he had never heard that phrase. But—could he ever settle for anything less?

So any courtship here was out of the question. For there was absolutely no one else. Yet he did not want to leave home. He certainly did not want to descend upon London in the middle of a Season. But where else would he look? And when else?

He did not really want to get married anyway. Not yet. Did he?

Why could he not just forget the whole thing, then, and return to normal? But he knew why. His thirtieth birthday was approaching. Why there should seem to be such a difference between twenty-nine and thirty he did not know. But there was. A man ought to know his own mind by the time he reached his thirties instead of floating along like a piece of driftwood on a river. A man ought to be settling down by the time he reached thirty.

He was not ready to settle down.

Hot Books
» House of Earth and Blood (Crescent City #1)
» A Kingdom of Flesh and Fire
» From Blood and Ash (Blood And Ash #1)
» A Million Kisses in Your Lifetime
» Deviant King (Royal Elite #1)
» Den of Vipers
» House of Sky and Breath (Crescent City #2)
» The Queen of Nothing (The Folk of the Air #
» Sweet Temptation
» The Sweetest Oblivion (Made #1)
» Chasing Cassandra (The Ravenels #6)
» Wreck & Ruin
» Steel Princess (Royal Elite #2)
» Twisted Hate (Twisted #3)
» The Play (Briar U Book 3)