Joan Wolf (9 page)

“Margarita!” He stared at her cloak. “Surely you don’t need that! It is June.”

She handed the sable-lined cloak to him. “It is already feeling a little chilly, and by the time we come home it will be cold.”

He sighed and draped it over her shoulders. “I was positively hot all afternoon.”

“You
go around half the winter without even a coat,” she replied accusingly. “Clearly you have no sensitivity to cold at all. I have.”

“So I have observed.”

She smiled at him. “You are teasing me, my lord, and it is very nice of you to try to take my mind off this party. You will promise not to desert me if there are cards?”

Nicholas had warned her that it was likely that Lady Hopkins would get up a few tables of whist. He had been teaching her how to play, but she was still very much a beginner. “I promise,” he said.

The dinner party consisted of Sir Henry and Lady Hopkins, Lord James Tyrrell, who was visiting them again, Mrs. Alnwick, Mr. Knight, who owned Eversly Manor a few miles away, and his wife. Lady Anne, who was a daughter of the Earl of Lawnthorpe. The only ones who had ever met the new Lady Winslow were the residents of Twinings; the rest of the company was politely but definitely curious.

Catherine Alnwick found herself staring in great surprise at Margarita; somehow she had not expected her to look like this. “How do you do, Mrs. Alnwick,” Nicholas’s wife said in a low, clear voice. “I am pleased to make your acquaintance.”

Catherine said something in reply and Margarita passed on to Lord James Tyrrell, who bowed over her hand with reverence. Catherine’s eyes went from the face of his wife to Nicholas, but she could discern nothing behind the pleasant, courteous expression on his too-good-looking face.

They went into dinner. Margarita sat next to Sir Henry and on her other side was Mr. Knight. Nicholas, chatting lightly with Catherine Alnwick, saw that she was charming the two older men effortlessly. She was so modest, yet so attentive and aware, with her big brown eyes and soft gravity. Mr. Knight, who was often stiff and haughty with strangers, was smiling at her genially and telling her about his dogs, which he was famous for breeding. By the time the last course was served he had offered her a puppy. “Come and choose one for yourself. Lady Winslow. Get your husband to bring you. We’ll be glad to see you any time.”

Nicholas, hearing this, said to Catherine Alnwick, “Knight has just offered Margarita a puppy. If she can accomplish that in the course of one dinner, I ought to enroll her in the diplomatic corps.” His voice was softly amused and she looked at him sharply.

“She is very lovely. And
so young.”

He slanted a look at her, eyebrows raised. “She is eighteen,” he said. “You knew that.”

“Yes, I suppose I did.” She smiled a little ruefully. “What I meant to say was that she
looks
so young. I suppose I must be feeling old.”

A flash of amusement came and went in his face. “I shouldn’t worry, Cat. You are looking very lovely yourself tonight. I always like you in blue.”

The rest of the company was surreptitiously watching this low-voiced exchange between Nicholas and Catherine. There wasn’t a person in the room, including the servants, who didn’t know about Nicholas Beauchamp and Mrs. Alnwick. They also knew that his marriage did not seem to have interrupted the most famous secret liaison in the neighborhood. They looked from Catherine and Nicholas to Margarita, who was listening to Mr. Knight. There was not a shadow on her serene young brow. Obviously, they all thought, “the wife” had not yet found out.

* * * *

Margarita bore up very well under the polite but relentless scrutiny of the ladies when they retired after dinner to the drawing room. She was conversing amicably with Catherine Alnwick when the gentlemen joined them. Catherine was surprised to find she did not at all feel as if she were talking to a young girl; there was a dignity and graciousness about Margarita that was rarely seen in English girls of her age.

As Nicholas had surmised, Lady Hopkins set about arranging two tables of whist. She was about to suggest that Margarita play with Lord James when Nicholas said easily, “If you do not mind, Lady Hopkins, I will partner my wife.”

“Of course I do not mind,” replied Lady Hopkins, good breeding effectively concealing her surprise.

“You see,” Margarita explained with a shy smile, “I am just learning to play, and my lord is so patient with me.” At that Lady Hopkins did stare in surprise. Patience was not one of Nicholas’s more well-known virtues.

They played against Catherine Alnwick and Lord James Tyrrell. Catherine was a very fine card player and usually partnered Nicholas, who was himself an excellent and demanding player. It soon became clear that Margarita was not in their class, although she did not do badly for a rank beginner. “I did not know you had that card,” she said to Nicholas after he had played the king of hearts.

“When the king was not played earlier, you should have known Lord Winslow had it,” Catherine explained kindly.

Margarita frowned a little, going over the play in her mind. She nodded. “Yes, I see.” She looked at her husband. “I should have led a heart back to you, should I not?”

“Yes, but there’s not much damage done. I was able to use it after all.”

Margarita sighed. “There are so many things to remember. I will never learn it all.”

“You are doing very well, Lady Winslow,” said Lord James reassuringly. “In fact, you and Nick are winning.”

“That
is because Lord Winslow has drawn all the cards tonight,” Catherine said a trifle tartly.

“It has been a lucky night,” Nicholas agreed suavely.

Catherine shot him a look from under her lashes. There was a smile touching the corner of his mouth as he regarded his cards. She looked at that firm, well-cut mouth and then forced her eyes back to her own hand. Margarita tentatively laid a card on the table and Nicholas smiled at her warmly. “Good girl,” he said and she flushed with pleasure.

Afterwards, over tea, the conversation became more general. Margarita, seated by the fire, was feeling extremely sleepy and wondered how long it would be before she disgraced herself and yawned. Nicholas, noticing her growing silence, looked at her intently. Her back was as straight as ever, her head was erect. Her eyes were black and enormous, and seemed to engulf her small face. He leaned across to ask her softly, “Are you tired?”

She looked like a child caught out in mischief. “A little.”

Ten minutes later, they were seated in their carriage on the way home to Winslow. Everyone had been most understanding and Mr. Knight had patted her paternally on the shoulder. “Your husband is quite right,” he said. “You must be sure to get proper rest. Mind now, don’t forget the puppy.”

“I won’t, Mr. Knight. I should love a puppy,” she responded softly.

“I am glad to see Winslow is taking care of her,” Mr. Knight announced to the remaining company. “She seems a very sweet little thing.”

Lady Anne and Lady Hopkins exchanged glances. They agreed that Margarita seemed a very sweet little thing. They agreed that Nicholas did indeed seem very attentive. Both ladies looked with veiled speculation to Catherine Alnwick, but her lovely face gave nothing away.

CHAPTER TWELVE

But in the world I learnt, what there

Thou too wilt surely one day prove,

That will, that energy, though rare,

Are yet far, far less rare than love.

Matthew Arnold

Margarita and Nicholas did pay a visit to Mr. Knight and went home with an adorable spaniel puppy that Margarita called Eva. The little bitch became her faithful companion, walking with her in the gardens and riding beside her in the old-fashioned phaeton that Nicholas had taught her to drive.

She loved to drive around the estate, surveying the fields of ripening wheat and oats and growing vegetables. The orchards were lovely and loaded with fruit. The cattle grazed peacefully in the summer sun. The fruitfulness of the land was a balm to her spirit. She found herself endlessly interested in Nicholas’s schemes; after the destruction and death she had seen in South America, making things grow seemed to her the most wonderful of ambitions.

Nicholas expanded under her interest. He was used to being regarded as freakish for his passionate interest in agriculture. Even in those who were outwardly sympathetic, like Catherine Alnwick, he detected a note of amused bewilderment. It was all very well to want to improve one’s property, but no one thought it necessary for Nicholas to spend his days in the fields.

His devotion to the land, to Winslow land in particular, had manifested itself after his mother’s elopement. He had been left rootless, without an object on which to focus his quite considerable capacity for love. People, particularly women, seemed to him untrustworthy. Never again, a ten-year-old Nicholas had sworn, never again would he let himself be hurt as his mother had hurt him.

And so his love turned to Winslow: to the land that had belonged to his family for seven hundred years, to the land that would one day belong to him. Like Margarita, he found enormous satisfaction in making things grow. He had never been able to share this satisfaction with anyone, until she came.

He worried about her driving around by herself. He had refused to let her go out alone until he was satisfied that she was competent holding the reins, and the horse he insisted she drive was placid and steady. He understood very well her dislike of having a groom with her; he too preferred to be alone. And he was delighted that she wanted to get out of the house. So he crossed his fingers and let her go, and she managed very well. Several times a week he would run into her on one of the small roads that crisscrossed the Vale, ambling along in the sun, a straw bonnet on her brown head, and Eva perched up beside her. He always turned his horse to walk beside her for a while, and her small face, upturned toward him, would glow with pleasure.

At night, after dinner, they took long walks in the summer twilight, sometimes talking, sometimes silent, absorbed in their own thoughts. As her body thickened with the child, Nicholas insisted that they confine themselves to the gardens and stay off the hill, but still they walked every evening. Then they would go in for tea, and afterwards Margarita would go upstairs to bed.

It was a time of healing for Margarita. She had begun to correspond with Andrés Bello, and his letters usually left her depressed for days, but it was not the all-enveloping misery she had suffered last winter. The Spanish fleet had reached South America, and the first action of the commander, Morillo, was to take Margarita Island. The Republicans had no base left in Venezuela. Bolivar left Cartagena and was in Jamaica, trying to interest the British in aiding his cause. Andrés Bello wrote her that there was no chance the British would intervene; their relations with Spain were too tenuous.

It was a great help to her to be able to talk to Nicholas. She felt that he alone seemed to understand what it was she was feeling.

She was right in that he did understand. Nicholas knew all too well what it felt like to be left alone in the world. Margarita’s family had been torn from her by violence, but she, at least, was confident of their enduring love. She was a devout Catholic and derived much comfort from the conviction that she was not eternally separated from those she loved. She had never suffered the pain of a love that was betrayed and rejected. Nicholas had, and because of that he was armored against allowing himself to become too involved with other people. Margarita, on the contrary, suffered agonies at the thought of what the Spanish were doing to her countrymen. Nicholas was apprehensive for her; it was not safe to feel so much.

He was aware that he worried about his wife. For some reason he could not articulate, he felt personally responsible for her. All the protectiveness in his nature had suddenly narrowed and focused on this one human being. He was not a man given to self-analysis, so he did not realize that this feeling stemmed from the first time he had looked into her eyes and seen there a lost and frightened child. He had recognized instantly, emotionally, that look, and from then on, he had felt it his personal mission to shield her from any further pain.

He had to go to London in early September and when be left, Margarita felt lost. She went to visit Mrs. Frost every day, something she did not usually do so frequently. Mrs. Frost was a great consolation to her. She talked sensibly about childbirth and children and dispelled many of Margarita’s fears about her coming ordeal. She talked too about Nicholas’s mother, whom she obviously remembered with a great deal of affection.

“My lord never mentions his mother at all,” Margarita said gravely. “I thought she was dead.”

Mrs. Frost looked at her own capable hands as they sewed a hem on a shirt. “Lord Winslow loved his mother very much. I think he can’t forgive her for leaving him, for preferring someone else. He was too attached to her, I suppose. When she left he had no one.” She sighed. “I’m sure she loves him still. His refusal to see her must hurt bitterly.”

Margarita’s brown eyes looked huge. “It is very sad.”

She found the information she heard from Mrs. Frost of very great interest, but she never mentioned his mother to Nicholas. Margarita had the Spanish sense of family. It was this sense that had prompted her to write to her grandfather about her mother’s death three years ago. She determined that when her baby was born, she would write to Nicholas’s mother.

Three days before Nicholas returned, she received a letter from Andrés Bello. In it was the information that the Spanish were besieging Cartagena. That night she opened her window and looked out at the sky. The night was clear and the stars were brilliant. She felt a kind of peace enter her as she looked up at the vast and remote heavens. What did all their little earthly sufferings and strivings matter in the face of that magnificence? She stayed at the window for a long time, reluctant to relinquish the peace she knew she felt only at the price of turning her back on life. She felt empty and free. And then the child within her kicked, and slowly she closed the window and got into bed.