Page 44 of Exile's Return
Agnes looked at Lord Longley’s handsome wife and fine little boy and wondered how Longley could not want hearth and home.
‘But enough of such gloomy domestic talk,’ Nell said with a smile. ‘Your friend Master Lovell is acquainted with Jonathan from the days of Worcester, I believe.’
‘So he says. It is his brother, Kit Lovell, who was Sir Jonathan’s friend.’
A smile lifted Nell’s face. ‘Oh, of course, Kit Lovell. I remember him. If I had not been so besotted with Giles, I could have fallen in love with Kit. He was half-French, I recall, with all the charm of Frenchman.’ She frowned. ‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’
‘Daniel told me he was hanged a few years ago for some part in a plot to kill Cromwell.’
Nell nodded. ‘Oh yes, I remember Jon reading about it in a London newssheet. But what about this brother, Daniel?’
The child Agnes held had grown heavy, her head lolling against her shoulder. ‘I think someone is ready for bed,’ she said, handing the drowsy child to the nursemaid.
‘You too, Master Richard,’ the nursemaid said.
The boy stuck out his lower lip. ‘But I want to play wiv Charles,’ he said.
‘Charles is going to bed too. Kiss Mama,’ Nell said, rising to her feet. She stooped and the boy threw his arms around his mother’s neck, planting a large, sloppy kiss on her cheek.
Agnes’s heart broke just a little more.
‘They are such a joy for Kate and me,’ Nell said, a fond smile on her lips as the door closed. ‘Come, Agnes. I may call you Agnes? It is time for supper.’
As they left the room, Nell slipped her arm into Agnes’ and leaned into her. ‘Now tell me, Agnes. You and the handsome Daniel Lovell. Is it true, are you just friends?
‘Hardly even that,’ Agnes responded a little too quickly. ‘Ishe handsome?’
Nell’s mouth quirked. ‘Oh yes, he has some of the looks of his brother, but rather less…French. I warrant that out of the sick bed, he is a fine-looking man.’
Agnes swallowed. ‘I am no judge of these matters,’ she mumbled. ‘I know very little about him.’
Nell frowned. ‘So, how do you come to be in his company?”
How strange it would sound to this woman if Agnes were to even try to explain that her relationship to Daniel came only from a mutual acquaintance with a man they both hated!
‘As I told you last night, I was abandoned in London without the means to support myself and Daniel came to my aid.’
‘A knight errant,’ Nell held up her hand. ‘But I won’t ask anything more of you. I have learned that in this day and age it is best not to know too much.’
They had reached the door to the dining chamber and Nell pushed it open. The rest of the family was already seated. Agnes slipped into her now-familiar place at the Thornton table, and after answering Kate’s question about how Daniel fared that evening, she let the family gossip wash around her.
Chapter 19
The following morning, Ellen Howell judged Daniel well enough to be allowed to dress and sit in a well-cushioned chair beside the fire in his room, a table beside him on which had been placed a jug of small ale and a plate with two late-season apples. A London news sheet lying unregarded on his lap, Daniel stared into the flames of the cheerful fire that crackled in the hearth.
It occurred to him that since meeting Agnes — since coming to this house — something in his universe had shifted and he could describe it in one single word: kindness.
The years of exile had been wasted years and had left him at the age of twenty-eight with only the prospect of a long and lonely life. There had been no room in his heart for sentiment or charity. His had been a hand-to-mouth existence, lived among hard men with a brutal job. When he had sought relief from life aboard a privateer it had been in the arms of the whores of Fort Royal. When he had been stricken with the fever it had beenthe rough tending of his shipmates that had nursed him back to health.
He looked around the pleasant room, redolent with the scents of beeswax polish and lavender. A fitful late autumn sun spilled in through the diamond panes of the window, bringing back memories of happier times at Eveleigh, a house of a similar age and history to this one.
He wondered now how real those memories were. It seemed he had lived his whole life in the shadow of conflict, but there must have been a time before the war when they had lived as a family at Eveleigh. He recalled games of hide and seek with Kit — on the occasions Kit had been at home. Being ten years older, there had been school and Oxford and other distractions for a young man, but when he had been at Eveleigh there had always been time for romping with his younger brother and sister.
But it was more than just the kindness of the strangers who had taken him in. There was Agnes — that perplexing little woman who had sat beside him as he tossed in fever. He remembered more than she probably realised, but most particularly the touch of her hands as she had cooled his body. No one had touched him like that, with such…he struggled to find the word…intimacy? Intimacy but not carnal desire. Her touch had come with — again, that word — kindness.
Or was there more than that?
He’d never been in love. Even with Jennet Pritchard, who had made no secret of her feelings for him. He had liked Jennet enough to have contemplated a life with her but love…? No, not love. If he had married Jennet it would have been for one reason only — an escape from servitude. She knew that, she understood. She had told him love could come later.
