It was he who moved back, releasing her and folding his arms over his chest as he settled his shoulders across the corner of the seat. Was this February or July?
“This time, Lady Barclay,” he said ungallantly, “a slap across the face would be hardly justified. For all of two minutes you were a willing participant.”
“You are no gentleman,” she said.
Whatever that meant. It was not the first time she had said it either.
She had not been raped. Then what?
He reminded himself of a schoolboy worrying a scab on his knee instead of leaving it alone to heal, knowing that he would only make it bleed again.
9
Imogen moved back to the dower house the following morning. The work on the roof was not quite finished and the upper floor was a mess—the furniture that had been left up there was draped with Holland covers and coated with dust and debris. The lower floor was crowded with much of the upstairs furniture. The house had not been heated or cleaned for two months. There was no food in the larders or coal in the coal bin.
She did not care. She moved back anyway.
An army of servants arrived within an hour of her return, though not by her instructions. They brought her personal belongings, all neatly packed, and food and candles and coal, as well as pails and mops and brooms and other cleaning paraphernalia—as though she had none of her own. They did not look to her for instructions, but set about lighting fires in all the downstairs rooms and cleaning everywhere and getting the kitchen orderly and functional and doing a hundred and one other tasks. They were supervised everywhere by a ferociously energetic Mrs. Primrose, Imogen’s housekeeper and cook, who had been staying with her sister in the lower part of the village during the latter’s confinement, but had come almost at a run when a footman from the hall brought her the news that my lady was back in residence.
She soon had a cup of tea to set at Imogen’s elbow in the sitting room and some raisin scones fresh out of the oven, and professed herself to be in her seventh heaven at being back working where she belonged. Those last words were said with a note of reproach. Imogen had chosen to live alone when she first came here, much to the consternation of her father-in-law and the disappointment of Mrs. Primrose—it was a courtesy title since she had never been married—who had been promoted from senior chambermaid at the hall and still lived there in her room in the attic.
Blossom had been brought to the dower house in a housemaid’s basket. She had expressed no particular objection, having never quite recovered from having had her chair by the drawing room fire taken away and replaced with one she did not find nearly as comfortable, and one she was moreover expected to relinquish every time a certain man was in the room to claim it for himself. She prowled about the new environment, upstairs and down, before selecting a chair on one side of the fireplace in the sitting room. No one ordered her to get down. She was fed tasty victuals in the kitchen and assigned a comfortable bed for the nights in one corner beside the oven. She promptly forgot the old home and adopted the new.
The sound of hammers from the direction of the roof was close to being deafening all day, but Imogen did not mind. At least the noise gave indication that the job was being done. And living in a noisy, chilly, slightly damp, very dusty house—at least for the first hour or two—was certainly preferable to the alternative.
She did not set foot outside the house for the entire first day, even to check her garden to see if an early snowdrop had made its appearance yet. She had hardly left the sitting room since it had been cleaned and all was bustle and activity elsewhere. She even ate there, as Mrs. Primrose declared the dining room still unfit for her ladyship.
Imogen felt she was in heaven. She sat during the evening, as she had all afternoon, with her workbag beside her and a book open on her lap. Mostly, though, she enjoyed the silence and solitude. Her housekeeper and the roof workers were gone for the day, and all the extra servants had returned to the hall.
He read Alexander Pope, she thought as she turned a page of her own book. At least, that was the volume that had been on the table beside his chair in the library when she had looked one morning. Perhaps he had taken one glance inside it and closed it and neglected to return it to the shelf. Perhaps he had not even taken a glance.
And perhaps he had read it.
Why did she always want to believe the worst of him?
She set a hand flat on her book to hold it open, closed her eyes, and rested her head against the back of her chair. If only last night could be erased from memory. No, not just from memory—from fact. If only none of it had happened. If only she had returned home with Aunt Lavinia and Cousin Adelaide.
But if onlys were pointless. She had spent three years learning that lesson.