Page 28 of To Swoon and to Spar
“Clean and dry,” Mrs. Ash intoned.
“Out, damned spot!” Jane added helpfully.
Penvale turned to her, incredulous. “Do you mean to imply that you think my uncle had some sort of mental break in which he started imagining bloody spots where there were none?”
Jane shrugged, seeming remarkably unconcerned. “I wouldn’t dareventure a guess,” she said meekly, leaning forward to select another biscuit. “In any case, that was when he decided to sell the house and go to London.”
“I can’t imagine why,” he murmured. At that moment, however, out of the corner of his eye, he thought he detected something decidedly odd in Jane’s expression. He couldn’t define it specifically, but he had the impression that she was watching him very carefully. Almost as if she wanted to see how he would react.
And, all at once, deep in his bones, he knew: Janeknewsomething. Penvale was not much of an expert when it came to the ways of young, innocent Englishwomen, but he was absolutely certain that they did not sit calmly eating biscuits while mysterious, allegedly bloody christening gowns were discussed, not unless they knew something more was afoot. Now, her desire to help him search the house and interview the servants seemed more suspicious. Why did she suddenly wish to spend so much time in his company? It certainly could not be due to any great affection on her part.
Jane had lived at Trethwick Abbey for years, had come to know these servants—if she did know who the culprit was, her first instinct would not be to inform him, nor would it have been to enlighten his uncle, for whom she’d already mentioned her distaste. No, she would take pity on the person, try to persuade him or her to stop, perhaps, but with equal energy would attempt to ensure no consequences for the actions.
While Penvale was sympathetic to the dislike his servants might have felt for his uncle, his sympathy did have its limits. And he was discovering that one limit was a perhaps bloody christening gown in a bedchamber.
However, he did not say any of these thoughts to Jane—not yet.
He merely turned back to Mrs. Ash and said, “Is there anyone on staff that you have noticed behaving oddly?”
He half-listened as she shook her head and made a number of protestations about the upright moral character of every person in her employ; this was no more than he had expected, so he paid little mind to it. Instead, he thought about the woman sitting next to him and how he was going to convince her to tell him what she knew.
He recalled their earlier conversation and Jane’s casual utterance:We haven’tgoneon a walk together.
It was, he thought, high time for that to change.
It was time he got to know his wife.
Chapter Ten
“Jane,” Penvale said a fewdays later, “would you like to come with me into the village?”
Jane glanced up from her toast. Penvale was seated opposite her at the breakfast table, looking uncommonly cheerful, and she frowned slightly. She didn’t know what could give him cause for good cheer this morning, since she was nearly certain that his sleep had been interrupted by a bit of eerie wailing the night before—herscertainly had been, though at least she’d had the advantage of knowing that the source of the wailing was Hastey, who had a taste for theatrics and had been alarmingly eager to take a turn playing the role of a mournful ghost.
And yet here he was at breakfast at his usual virtuous hour, despite the fact that it was a blustery, gray sort of day—the clouds in the distance looked as if they might even foretell snow.
“Why are you going into the village?” she asked.
“I thought to eat luncheon at the inn, just to make the villagers more familiar with me, and perhaps offer my custom at a few of the shops. I’ve visited on a couple of errands but have yet to spend much time there, and I thought I ought to remedy that.”
St. Anne’s, the seaside village closest to Trethwick Abbey, wasintimately linked to the viscountcy and had been for generations. Penvale’s land abutted the edge of the village, and the majority of its population relied in some fashion upon the largesse of the estate. For all that, Mr. Bourne had rarely ventured into the village and had never seemed overly concerned with what the villagers thought of him. Jane said as much to Penvale, and he frowned.
“I rather hope the standard of behavior I am being held to is somewhat higher than that of my uncle,” he said curtly, pouring a splash of milk into his coffee, and Jane realized that she had offended him. Until that moment, she hadn’t even realized that she had the power to do so.
“I… I didn’t mean…” she began, the words awkward on her tongue. She wasn’t accustomed to having to apologize to anyone, because she wasn’t used to her words mattering enough that they would have the power to wound. She paused, took a breath. “I don’t mean to compare you to your uncle—I am well aware that you’re very different men.” She hesitated. “Your uncle… I mean to say…” She sighed, frustrated that, as ever, the words would not come out in a configuration that matched what she felt. “I do not mind your company, most of the time,” she said in a rush, surprising herself as soon as the words were out of her mouth.Thatwasn’t what she’d meant to say at all.
And yet she thought that perhaps it might be true.
“We’re not very good at this yet, are we?” Penvale asked. He’d remained silent, watching her carefully as she’d struggled to get her apology out. At some point, his mouth had quirked into an odd half-smile, and his gaze had warmed as she’d spoken. His eyes were hazel, more brown than green most days, but the flecks of green stood out to her this morning as she looked back at him, not feeling remotely tempted, for once, to look away.
“Neither one of us wanted this marriage,” he continued, “and we’renot making much of a success of it yet. We’ve both said things we didn’t mean—or at least that we didn’t mean in precisely the way that we said them—so let’s call it even, shall we?”
“All right,” she said slowly.
“If,” he added, and she slumped back into her seat, waiting to see what his condition would be, “you come to the village with me today.”
Jane, recognizing when a battle was lost—or no longer worth fighting—merely nodded.
St. Anne’s was, Jane supposed, an exceptionally lovely little village, resembling nothing so much as a particularly idyllic scene from some sort of sentimental novel. It was all right, if one liked that sort of thing.
