Page 47 of To Swoon and to Spar
Her first stop, once she made it to St. Anne’s—her hem a muddy mess from the walk along the cliff path and her bonnet trailing behind her on its ribbons, the wind long since having knocked it from her head—was the village school. She had found in the library an illustrated dictionary that she thought might interest the children, and had tucked it among the other books that she carried.
“My lady!” Miss Trevelyan seemed surprised when Jane tapped at the door; Jane had deliberately timed her visit for the afternoon, when she knew the children would already have been dismissed, so that she wouldn’t interrupt a lesson, and so that Miss Trevelyan was alone. “The children have enjoyed the books you sent along—we already had an incident with a child sneaking one home and returning it with a few spots of raspberry jam on the pages.” She looked vaguely guilty. “We, er, did our best to wipe the jam off.”
Jane waved a dismissive hand. “I don’t need those books back, so feel free to spill as much jam on them as you please.” She paused, considering. “Or perhaps not—I suppose it might attract ants after a while.”
Miss Trevelyan’s mouth twitched, but she merely said, “We’re very appreciative, at any rate—and if I might add…” Here she trailed off, looking a bit hesitant. “We’re so pleased by the buns the viscount has sent over regularly as well.”
Jane frowned. “I beg your pardon?”
Miss Trevelyan smiled. “You needn’t tell him that we know it’shim—I understand that he swore Mrs. Rowe to secrecy when he asked her to ensure that a box of cinnamon buns was delivered to the school twice a week, for the children to enjoy as a treat. We’re ever so grateful, and we’ll never let on that we know it’s him, but… I wanted to tell you, at least, how kind I think it is.”
Jane was torn between astonishment and irritation. Would Penvale never have the decency to behave as she expected him to? Why, ohwhy,could he not be the unfeeling London gentleman she had been so certain she was marrying? She had no qualms about haunting that man. But this one! A man who delivered baked goods to children! It was… well, it was simply unfair. Why had she had the bad luck to marry a man who seemed determined to make her like him?
Miss Trevelyan was regarding her with something approaching concern. “Are you quite all right, my lady? Should I not have mentioned it? It’s just that I can’t say anything to Lord Penvale directly, but I didn’t want it to go unacknowledged—”
“No, no,” Jane assured her, waving a hand. “Lord Penvale is very… thoughtful.” She paused, eyeing the schoolmistress, before tentatively adding, “And you might call me Jane, if you wish.”
Miss Trevelyan opened her mouth, likely to protest, and Jane felt as though she’d badly misstepped and hastened to make amends. “I mean, you don’t have to, not if it makes you uncomfortable. It’s merely that I was thinking—well, we’re of an age, and there aren’t many ladies of our age in the village—”
At this juncture, mercifully, Miss Trevelyan interrupted her. “Jane.”
Jane fell silent, having only the vaguest, most horrified notion of any of the words that had just come out of her mouth.
“I’d like that. I’m Louisa.” She hesitated, shifting the dictionaryfrom hand to hand, then added, “Perhaps you might care to come to tea sometime?”
Jane, who belatedly realized that she should have been the one to extend such an invitation, as the viscountess and mistress of a large estate, but couldn’t figure out a way to decline now without sounding even ruder, simply said, “I—I’d like that.”
Miss Trevelyan—Louisa—smiled at her and said, “I’m a bit out of practice at making friends, but I’ve no doubt we can muddle through together.”
And Jane, recognizing these words for the gift that they were, managed a smile in return.
A short while later, as she made her way from the schoolhouse farther into the village, her thoughts returned to her husband, and what Louisa had told her, and the word Jane had used to describe him in reply: thoughtful.
Hewasthoughtful, she realized, her mind lingering on the memory of their previous visit to the village together, and his request for a private room for their meal, his willingness to return home far earlier than he would have preferred. All because he could tell—without her uttering a single word—that that was whatshepreferred.
She also had the oddest feeling that he would deny such an adjective being used to describe him. She puzzled over the strange, contradictory man she had married as she continued making her way around the village—popping into the haberdasher in search of a new hat for the springtime; getting fitted for new boots at the cobbler; stopping in at the bakery, because she had walked all the way from Trethwick Abbey, after all, and she thought she deserved a treat for her trouble. As she continued her afternoon in this pleasant fashion, she could nothelp but notice that the villagers had changed ever so slightly in their manner toward her.
Coming into the village as the ward of Mr. Bourne had always been a rather fraught experience for Jane; her guardian, unsurprisingly, had not been popular, and she always felt anxious, as if some of the villagers’ dislike for him was going to rub off on her. So she’d done what she had always done whenever she felt anxious or uncomfortable: gone very, very quiet and very, very cold in the hope that no one would notice how awkward she felt. This meant that whatever sympathy the villagers might have felt for her, as a young lady stuck alone in a drafty old manor house with an unpleasant guardian, quickly faded.
And Jane had no one to blame but herself.
But today was different. She didn’t pick up on it at first, being caught up in her own thoughts, but as she made her way along the village’s narrow streets, she noticed smiles and friendly nods from the villagers, as opposed to the curious stares she was accustomed to on her infrequent visits. When she stopped at the bakery, a man went out of his way to rush to hold the door open for her, and when she thanked him, he asked her to give his best to her husband.
When Mrs. Rowe at the bakery slipped a couple of extra cinnamon rolls into a bag for Jane to take back to Trethwick Abbey “since his lordship is so fond of them,” Jane paused before again expressing her thanks.
When Jane popped into the cheesemonger, who had a particularly advantageous location in the very heart of the village, to inquire if she could leave her basket of books—along with the carefully handwritten placard readingPlease take as many as you wish,with her name signed beneath—at the far end of the counter near the door, the shopkeepergave her a smile of such warmth that she was tempted to peer over her shoulder to ensure he wasn’t smiling at someone else.
And when a pair of sisters skipping down the street paused to ask her if it was true, as the viscount said, that Jane read three booksevery week,Jane was sufficiently surprised that a laugh nearly escaped her.
By the time Jane had concluded her errands and begun her solitary trek back to Trethwick Abbey, she could only draw one conclusion: The villagers were determined tolikeher.
And she was fairly certain it was all Penvale’s fault.
It was odd, Jane thought, since, upon her first meeting with Penvale, she never would have guessed that he was the sort of man capable of inspiring such loyalty among the populace.
But the truth was, the more time that passed, the more Jane came to realize that her impressions of Penvale at their first meeting had borne only a passing resemblance to the man he actually was—and she was beginning to suspect that he loved Trethwick Abbey just as much as she did.
Many of Jane’s fondest memories took place in the library: rainy afternoons spent before the fire, a book and a pot of tea at hand; the first time she’d entered the library at Trethwick Abbey, never having seen so many books in a single place; the evening recently when she’d chucked a volume of poetry at Penvale’s head as he was particularly irksome (marriage was causing him to finely hone his ducking skills). But all of them paled in comparison to the sight before her eyes just now, upon her return from the village.
