who had forgotten their handkerchiefs and hugged Verity close as they said a private goodbye to Lady Virginia.
They stayed in the chilly winter sunshine until a crush of nobility and gentry left the tiny church while the tomb was opened inside and Virginia’s closest family and friends saw her laid beside her beloved Virgil. Only then did Chloe order the staff downstairs to get Farenze Lodge ready for the mourners’ return and all the rituals of this solemn winter day.
Bran’s militant look at her former charge told Chloe she wanted her ewe lamb out of the frigid January air as urgently as she did Verity, but at that moment a robin began to sing as if its life depended on it from the top of an old holly tree nearby. Neither of them could bring themselves to scold the girls for avoiding the ladies who were gathered about the fire in the grand drawing room sighing and reading their prayerbooks after that. They went downstairs with the echo of that joyful song in their ears, a last serenade to a woman who had always lived life so richly and loved so well.
* * *
‘I’m glad Lady Virginia made it clear she didn’t want a grand formal fuss when she died. Miss Eve will miss her too much to want to play hostess to half the county as if she’d only lost her pet canary, with her being as close to her ladyship as she always was,’ Bran observed to Chloe over tea in the housekeeper’s room several hours later.
‘She did it very well, but she’s too young to endure much more formality today and Lady Virginia’s real friends know it. By leaving as soon as they decently could they took the rest with them by sheer force of will, which is why they were Lady Virginia’s friends in the first place, I suppose,’ Chloe replied as she eased her aching feet on to the footstool and blessed the comfort of a fire of her own. The demands of the last few hours seemed to crowd in all over again and she wondered if she’d forgotten some small but vital detail. ‘I thought Lady Bunting and the Squire and his wife would never leave, though.’
‘And I wondered if that dratted Mrs Winterley would ever stop eating,’ Bran said with a grimace.
‘But, Bran, “in a well-regulated household there would be more sugar in the plum cake and less salt in the cheese scones”,’ Chloe parodied the lady wickedly. ‘That didn’t prevent Mrs Winterley eating vast quantities of both while telling anyone who would listen how prostrated she was by grief.’
‘Fat old hypocrite,’ Bran said as she lay back in her chair and closed her eyes.
‘I can’t argue, although I know I should,’ Chloe replied as the warmth of the room and her own deep weariness tugged at her conviction she still had a deal to do before she dared try to sleep again. ‘You’re a bad influence on me, Bran,’ she said drowsily.
‘Someone needed to be,’ her new friend declared and opened her shrewd eyes as if she’d only been pretending to be half-asleep. ‘It’s high time you learnt to live again, young woman,’ she said, as if she could see into Chloe’s heart and all the bitter memories she didn’t want to face.
‘I could say the same about you.’
‘I did all the living and loving I ever shall with a man before Miss Eve was born. My Joe is buried at sea on the other side of the world and I’ll have no other, but you deserve better than life seems to have handed you so far.’
‘No, I don’t,’ Chloe said shortly, even as a picture of Luke Winterley flitted into her mind, laughing and at ease as nature intended him to be and murmured, But aren’t I better than you imagined in your wildest dreams before you met me?
‘Then perhaps he does,’ Bran said.
Chloe’s heartbeat had accelerated at the thought of him and the way all the longings she wished she could kill shivered through her body whenever the wretched man was in the same room. It must have shown in her eyes.
‘He needs more than I can give,’ Chloe said and closed her eyes again in the hope it might put paid to such a painful topic of conversation. All her normal defences felt so weak it was as if her emotions were about to spill over in a disastrous flood. ‘More tea?’ she asked with a brightness they both knew was false and Bran nodded obligingly and let the painful topic of Mrs Wheaton’s feelings for her noble master drop, with a look that said this wasn’t the time for an argument, but her new friend would have to confront those feelings sooner or later.
* * *
Chloe was glad Mrs Winterley and the other ladies favoured the state rooms as the early January dusk began to darken the skies outside and most of the gentlemen congregated in the billiard room. They couldn’t divert themselves with a game on such a day ,but seemed comforted by the idea that Virginia would have told them to forget such flummery and get on with it and most of them were avoiding the drawing room and the low-voiced gossip that was all the ladies could indulge in as dusk came down on this solemn day.
It seemed a good time to place the little vase of snowdrops someone had snatched a moment to gather earlier and she had only now found time to arrange with a few sprigs of wintersweet. The gardeners always forced as many spring flowers as they could to bloom early, since Virginia delighted in the bravest of the spring ones to remind them winter wouldn’t last for ever.
Sooner or later she would have to stop behaving as if Virginia might walk into a room and exclaim at such a simple luxury and ask about a gardener’s elderly mother, or perhaps his wife being close to her time, when one of them came to hand the flowers over. Chloe thought it a shame to kill off Virginia’s routine and make her loss even harder to bear. She did her best not to make things worse than they must already feel when the speechless, grief-stricken head gardener came to the door with this tribute to his employer and old friend and simply nodded her sincere thanks and told him how beautiful and hopeful they seemed in the depths of winter.
‘Oh, heavens! I didn’t see you there, my lord, but why on earth are you sitting in the dark?’ she gasped now, shocked when he rose from the chair by the window where Virginia often sat to catch the best light for her book.
‘Because I enjoy sitting in the dark?’ he replied wryly, but she heard the flat weariness in his voice and somehow couldn’t make herself walk away.
‘I doubt it,’ she said as her eyes grew accustomed to the gloom and instinct warned her to plunk the vase down and leave.
‘You’re right,’ he said gruffly and she wondered if he didn’t want her to see tears in his supposedly steely gaze when he turned his head away.
‘How gratifying for me; good evening, my lord.’
‘No, stay,’ he asked, again in that rough voice as if he couldn’t find the energy to smooth it into any sort of gentlemanly restraint right now.
‘You know I can’t,’ she murmured as she sank on to the chair closest to his and folded her hands to stop them reaching to him as if by right.
‘Don’t speak of “can’t” today.’
‘I have to,’ she argued, gripping her fingers more tightly together to stop them soothing his lean cheek, or ruffling the stern discipline he’d imposed on his unruly raven locks in his great-aunt’s honour.
‘Virginia wasn’t a great one for rules and conventions,’ he replied with tension in his voice that said he wanted human contact, too, even if he hadn’t moved since she sat down.
‘I imagine she was as determined not to be confined by them as a young woman as she was when I knew her.’
‘She was a rogue, or so her sisters said before she outlived them all,’ he said with such pride and love for his late great-aunt by marriage in his voice Chloe felt herself melting from the inside out.
‘So many people loved her for it that it makes you wonder if being correct and ever ready to criticise, as I remember her sisters being when I first came here, is the way to live a good life after all. They used to visit and sniff and carp at her for simply having me and Verity in the house, let alone employing me as her companion-housekeeper.’
Chloe shifted uncomfortably in her seat