Axel (37 page)

Well,
possibly.

They moved down through the rows of plants, Axel’s chest aching queerly, perhaps due to the odd weather. By the time they emerged from the glass house, the air was nearly mild, the eaves dripping, and the sunshine in the snowy garden blindingly bright.

Or perhaps that ache was due to the fact that Matthew would soon leave, Abigail would soon leave, and Axel could complete his herbal in plenty of time to organize a remove to Oxford for the coming academic year, if need be.

Though for two hours sketching with Abigail in the glass house, he had, indeed forgotten all about the damned fellowships, about the investigation, about everything.

Except the sheer joy of being with her, and the heartache that was sure to follow.

The fickle weather gave Abby one more night sharing a roof with her beloved. The snow was melting apace, and the result was mud everywhere. Matthew Belmont departed for Oxford, where he’d spend a few days with his sons before trying his luck on the highway.

Abby left the professor in solitude for most of the day after his brother’s departure, trusting that the roses would soothe the ache of parting. She packed up her dresses and sent them back to Stoneleigh Manor, reread some of her grandfather’s journal, and took herself to the Candlewick library intent on responding to the last of the notes of condolence.

“The calls will start as soon as you’re back at Stoneleigh Manor,” Hennessey said, setting down a tea tray by Abby’s elbow. “You’re a pretty widow, and the neighborhood will beat a path to your door. That handsome Sir Dewey will be among them, I’ll warrant.”

“Thank you for the tea, Hennessey. It’s too soon for the calls to properly start, and the roads are a mess. I hope we’re spared visitors for a short while at least.”

Or maybe the calls would help Abby stay busy while she tried not to wonder how Axel went on. That question had at some point eclipsed the matter of who had killed Gregory Stoneleigh.

Hennessey departed in diplomatic silence, and Abby moved aside Axel’s latest pile of letters rather than risk a spill on the lot. On the top of the stack was a single unfolded sheet of vellum, the handwriting elegant and bold.

My Dear Dean Clemson,

The undersigned is in receipt of, and humbly thanks you and the committee for, your kind offers of Thursday last. Upon reflection, I find that my circumstances are now such that either a deanship or continued service in a purely professorial role are the—

Abby set Axel’s reply from her as if the paper might burst into flames. Of course, she wanted to respect his privacy. She also wanted that letter to say that nothing Oxford had to offer, not international respect, brilliant scholars, intellectual challenge, nothing, could compare with the love of an upset, almost-virgin widow who was only now learning how to kiss.

“My timing, as usual, is impeccable,” Axel said, marching into the library. “That tray needs at least another three sandwiches and a decent pear or two. Cook always goes into a pet when Matthew departs. I should threaten to turn her off without a character and cheer the poor soul up.”

“Ask her for a batch scones,” Abby said, “but insist she use her own recipe.”Axel took the tray to the low table before the sofa. “Come sit with me, Abigail. How did you know I’d finish up in the glass house before dark? You left me all the chocolate tea cakes, which I cannot possible eat myself.”

“One can hope,” Abby said, abandoning the desk. “It’s a wonder my dresses still fit, the way your kitchen feeds me.”

He bit into a tea cake and settled beside Abby on the sofa. “If your dresses no longer fit, you must leave them off. Are you ready for tomorrow’s journey home?”

No, Abby was not, and the journey was not homeward. She’d simply return to the place she’d lived before being widowed.

“I’m not afraid the killer will return.” Not as afraid. “What we’ve learned about Gregory suggests he could have made enemies with reason to do him bodily harm. I don’t condone murder, but neither do I think those enemies have a motivation to harm me.”

Axel’s arm rested along the back of the sofa, and he had to lean partway across Abby to choose a raspberry tea cake.

“You attribute rational processes to somebody capable of taking a life, madam.
I’m
worried about you leaving Candlewick, and wish you’d reconsider.”

This wasn’t what they needed to discuss. “You are sending no less than six footmen, four maids, and Hennessey to guard my well-being. You’ve lectured my staff at length, inspected the premises, changed the locks on every door, including the larders and pantries, found one safe, and doubtless set the staff to searching out the other—if it exists. What more could you possibly do?”

Besides offer the protection of marriage, which Abby would be honor-bound to reject.

Axel held the raspberry cake up for her to take a bite, then finished it off himself.

The silence became thoughtful, then, for Abby, sad. They would likely not sit thus, companionably enjoying a tea tray, ever again.

“I will miss you, Abigail, and will, as you suggest, continue my investigation as unobtrusively as I can. I expect word from Nicholas any day regarding the import business, and I will start reading your grandfather’s journal tomorrow. Your turn to choose a tea cake.”

He did this. Made up intimacy out of nothing, so that in the course of the day’s least remarkable moments, vines of shared memory wrapped around Abby’s heart.

“Bother the tea tray, Axel. What happens when I go back to the manor?” Not Stoneleigh Manor. She’d find another name for it.

He sat back and took her hand in his. “You will have a discussion of this? Very well, we’ll discuss it. You shall return to your property, and at the Weasel, some money will exchange hands, for our prospects are doubtless the subject of vulgar wagers. I will finish my herbal, find a comfortable set of rooms in Oxford, and prepare to enjoy the life of a much respected academic. You will become the most visited widow in the shire.”

Axel kissed her knuckles and gave her the saddest specimen of a smile she’d ever seen.

“You will not be among those visitors?”

“The talk must die down, Abigail, and you must make a dispassionate appraisal of all the options before you. You are among the wealthiest landowners in the area, if not the shire. I have created certain expectations that mean I cannot offer you matrimony at present, but you well deserve to remarry if you so choose.”

The ache in Abby’s heart had dulled her brain. “You think I should remarry—you who has had years to remarry and declined the pleasure?”

He patted her hand, for which Abby wanted to smack him. “I think you are lovely, and deserve the devoted appreciation of a man who can stand beside you as a spouse, if that’s what you desire.”

“What if you’re what I desire?”

“Then we should retire early tonight, for tomorrow will be a full and fraught day.”

Abby was about to ask him what in the perishing perdition that meant when Hennessey returned with enough sandwiches to satisfy an entire university college.

Rather attempt to eat, Abby rose and paced across the room, which at midafternoon was full of the sunlight reflecting off the snow.

“You are denying me a continuance of our liaison?” she asked, her back to the man who’d promised her much, but not what she needed.

“I’m suggesting that you take time to consider options, Abigail. That right was wrenched away by a scoundrel when your parents died. You were harried, misinformed, taken advantage of, and victimized.”

“I hate that word.”

“I hate that you suffered.”

Blast him and his honorable heart. “Thank you. I understand what you’re about.” Abby’s mind did, the part of her that could puzzle out what the woodcuts in Axel’s books depicted, outlandish though they might be. Her heart was like a potted rosebush dropped to the floor of the glass house—torn leaves, exposed roots, shattered crockery, dirt everywhere, blossoms trampled into unrecognizability.

“What am I about, Abigail?”

“You are easing me away, gently, for my own good. You presume to know what my good is.”

Abby turned to see him getting to his feet, and for a moment, she expected him to leave the room. She was being… ungrateful, selfish, shrewish.

Also honest. Who was Axel Belmont to say what she needed from whom, or when?

“I am presuming to respect you,” Axel said, enfolding her in his arms.

They were before a window, visible from the stable, and Abby cared not one whit. Widows needed comforting, by God, and so did a woman saying good-bye to the man to whom she’d given her heart.

“I’m being cross,” Abby said. “Maybe I am afraid after all.” Terrified, more like, but not of somebody who’d born a grudge against Gregory Stoneleigh.

“If you need me, Abigail, a note will suffice. I’m still your closest neighbor, and I’m your friend too, and always will be at least that. Turn Stoneleigh Manor upside down, turn every bachelor in the shire upside down, but mostly, be happy. You deserve to be happy, and your happiness matters to me a very great deal.”

Abby wanted to run out to the sanctuary of the glass house and weep until sunset.

She settled for making love with Axel on the sofa, then ruining her supper by helping him demolish what remained of the offerings on the tea tray.

Madeline Hennessey had been half in love with Axel Belmont since she’d joined his household at the age of sixteen. He’d been a few years older than she, but decades wiser, and had ignored or convincingly misinterpreted every inexpert lure she’d cast.

The Belmonts had not been the most cheerful couple, but the young master of the household had been sensible, and devoted to his wife even when not quite enthralled with her. Eventually, Hennessey’s respect for Mr. Belmont had eclipsed her infatuation.

As he and Hennessey waited for Mrs. Stoneleigh to emerge from the Candlewick manor house, Hennessey felt neither respectful of, nor devoted to, the professor.

Though she
liked
the poor wretch more than ever.

“So I’m to watch over Mrs. Stoneleigh, see to her welfare, and insinuate myself into her confidences?” Hennessey asked, as Mr. Belmont paced before the mounting block.

They were taking the coach over to Stoneleigh Manor, for a closed conveyance was fitting when a widow was in first mourning. Then too, Mr. Belmont had spent most of the day in the glass house with Mrs. Stoneleigh. Somebody had muttered about “letting the lanes dry out,” though that would take until April.

And now, darkness was falling, and not only in the literal sense.

“You are to
earn
her confidences,” Mr. Belmont said, turning to pace the distance between the mounting block and the lamp post. “You are to keep those confidences, from me, from the rest of the staff, from any who would pry. You are to protect her with your life, and bring to bear all the common sense I know you to possess. Abigail—Mrs. Stoneleigh, that is—appreciates common sense.

“Draw upon the second sight you claim to have inherited from your great-grandmother,” Mr. Belmont went on, “upon the charm the footmen attribute to you without limit, Hennessey. Abigail Stoneleigh deserves to be happy, to make friends, to entertain those friends, and have them about her. She needs books and beautiful flowers, complicated projects and simple joys. She should take her conservatory in hand—you might suggest that to her, there being a botanist in the neighborhood who has some helpful ideas—and she’s to discard mourning if she’d rather ignore convention. Above all things, she should be—”

“She should be with the man who loves her,” Hennessey interjected.

Mr. Belmont came to a halt facing the lamp post. Hennessey would not have been surprised to see him smack his forehead against it, repeatedly.

“Many people have supported my cause at the university, Hennessey. I have created obligations there I cannot extricate myself from easily. My own children expect me to be on hand when they matriculate. As for Mrs. Stoneleigh…”

His gaze went from the mud and snow along the main drive to Candlewick’s front door. The look in his eyes was wrenching—love, determination, and heartache, blended with the noble bewilderment of a man incapable of acting on a selfish impulse.

“She loves you too,” Hennessey said. “You do her no favors by abandoning her this way.”

He braced himself with a hand on the lamp post. “Hennessey, you forget your station.”

“So turn me off without a character,” she shot back. “I’m a woman, I know what it is to love a man beyond reason. She thinks you don’t want her, that your infernal roses are more important to you than she is. I must say, for a man of science, you are not very intelligent, sir. I’m glad I no longer work for you. Mrs. Stoneleigh and I will be fine.”

The hint of a ghost of a suspicion of a smile that Mrs. Turnbull and Cook watched for and discussed and treasured upon each sighting flickered over Mr. Belmont’s features.

“Hennessey, that was a lecture. I’m quite sure the ability to lecture has been grafted onto my very staff.”

“I’m not your staff anymore,” Hennessey retorted, though in some sense, she wanted to be the professor’s friend. His ally, for she did owe him. “Mrs. Stoneleigh will worry about you. Mourning means she can’t call on you, and thus you consign her to that stinking house, like a princess locked in a tower. She’ll miss you, and her heart will
break
for want of your company when she needs you most. You encourage her affections, and then you turn her out. You are being a dunderhead, sir. A complete, hopeless dunderhead.”

He leaned against the lamp post, crossed his arms, and regarded her with such a ferocious scowl, Hennessey was glad she was no longer in his employ.

“I will explain myself to you, Hennessey, out of respect for your years of service to me and my household, though I ought instead to arrest you for some damned thing or other. When a man’s regard for a woman exceeds a certain limit, his own needs cease to matter. Above all—above
all
—Abigail Stoneleigh needs to know that she is the sole authority operative in her life.
She chooses
with whom she associates now.
She chooses
the art hanging in her stairwells, the amount of sugar in her every cup of tea, whether her front door is manned by a butler, footman, or porter.