“Do I know your brothers?”
“You don’t recognize me?” she asked with a wide smile.
Ambrose looked more closely at her. “Should I?”
She dropped her mallet. “I guess not.” She turned heel with a little shimmy. “You’ve made my whole night.” And without another glance, she did a quickstep dance away from him.
It was then May walked across the lawn in a silver dress, dark hair and dark eyes. He was getting over the shock of her now—a real woman and no longer a ghost haunting his mind. In the deep V of her gown, against her skin, she wore his necklace. Though he effectively looked calm, he couldn’t be normal, could not yet react to her in an offhand manner like friends. He lowered his eyes from the vision, fiddling with the handle of his mallet.
“Are we going to play?” she asked.
“You first,” he said, picking up the green ball, glad of something to do, and settling it next to the post.
She nudged it with her shoe for a more advantageous shot and then gripped the handle.
“Rigging it so you get your way?” he asked.
“It’s my party.” She pretended to study the course. “Someone once told me rules about that.”
She lined up her shot, looking incongruous with a wide stance in her lamé gown. She sent the ball flying with a solid thwock. “Nicer without the beard,” she said, turning to him.
Was she flirting? Trying to unsettle him? He felt the edge in her voice, a slight defiance, as if daring him to become outraged, to fight her. He hit his ball through the wickets, joining hers. She came and stood next to him; they were touching shoulder-to-shoulder. He wanted to shove her off, shove her away. But he suspected closeness was her strategy, used to unnerve her opponents. For just a moment he felt how difficult things could be.
“Who’s that?” he asked for something to say, pointing with his mallet toward his former opponent, who was now encircled by laughing men.
“Don’t you recognize Arabella Rensselaer?”
What he remembered of Arabella was a bandy-legged girl with her hair in plaits, younger sister to the twins, Frederick and Michael Rensselaer.
“She’s an embryo deb; came out while you were gone. She’s having quite the year, so I hear, though someone told me she’s angling hard for college. Smith, I think. She’ll be lucky if she can swing it. Poor thing, I hear her mother’s about ready to ship her off to one of those Swiss finishing schools where you spend all day hiking and eating muesli.”
“Do those places still exist?”
“Not everyone’s free to roam the world, you know.” He felt the sting in her words. “It’s where they’ll send Loulou, I’ll bet, if Dicky gets any more serious.” She took her second turn and missed. “What do you think of them?”
“Dicky and Lou? I try not to.”
“That is your preferred way of doing things, isn’t it?” she said.
“Pretty sure I haven’t cornered the market on that. Pretty sure you know all about that.”
She blew out a little puff of air as she rose from aiming a shot. “This isn’t the way to start.” She took a breath, righted her elbows, and stiffened her back, a hand at her chest. “Let’s start over. Let’s start like this—I love it. Truly. Thank you.”
“You already thanked me.”
“It means something to me.”
This grated, as if he should be surprised, grateful, relieved? Of course it meant something. It meant everything. He’d never have given it to her otherwise. “It’s a trinket, really. For tourists. You don’t need to make a big deal out of it,” he said, avoiding her eye.
“Someday I’ll hand it down to a daughter and I’ll say, ‘Your uncle Ambrose gave me this as a wedding present.’?” A pause stretched out in front of them and into it she filled, “I’d like to do that. We’re family now.”
Ambrose said nothing, suddenly enduring the game, taking wild, chancy shots, hoping to get it over with quickly. He’d made the wrong choice in coming here. He wanted to go back to town, wanted to go back to New York, wanted to get on the next ship leaving for anywhere far from here.
“I’m happy now,” she said after a pause. “I’ve wanted you to know that.” She twirled her mallet like a windmill, making sure he kept his distance.
“I suppose that’s all that matters.”
“Aren’t you happy? Wasn’t your trip everything you wanted?”
“You stopped writing me.” He took the mallet out of her hand.
“I could see when you left that it wasn’t ever going to work,” she said, coming close and speaking privately. “I thought it was just the trip. I mean, I didn’t know if you’d even come back, especially after . . . But it was so much more than that, too. With you gone I could see that clearly.” She went on. “It’s so easy now. And nothing was ever easy between you and me. There was push and pull, too much, I think. Always keeping track of who was winning.”
“You did that?”
She smiled wanly. “Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. Ethan and I . . . No one has to lose. You have to see that. And if you don’t see it now, I hope you will. I hope you won’t bear me any ill will. I truly did what I think is best.”
Ambrose noted that she’d said nothing about love.
“I want us to be friends, Am. I want to see you happy and settled.”
“Forgive me if that seems a little . . .” He trailed off. “Clearly that wasn’t what you wanted. Not at all.”
A red flush on her cheeks traveled down to her jawline. “You made it clear what you valued.”
“You’re the one who made everything irrevocable.”
“It wasn’t me,” May said quietly. “You didn’t come back.”
“He told me not to. It didn’t make the trip any longer.”
“You let him pay you off,” May said.
Ethan appeared at May’s side then and stepped in between the couple. “Pay what off?” he asked May, awkwardly taking the mallet out of her hand. Watching him, Ambrose wondered if his brother was in pain. Judging by the glimpse of the long incision scars running up Ethan’s arm there was surely nerve damage, and couldn’t paralysis cause phantom pains?
“Pay you back for my trip,” Ambrose said, twisting what they’d been talking about, hiding it. “But we’re settled up now, aren’t we? Or am I going to have to dump a wheelbarrow full of gold doubloons on your doorstep?” Ambrose had his lawyers take the portion he owed his brother out of his corpus when he’d returned. But the accountant had called him last week. It’d been more than a month and Ethan hadn’t deposited the check. Given the size of the draft, the man had been worried it was lost.
“The bookkeeper’s taking care of it,” Ethan said, and swung the mallet with his one good hand, sending the ball through two wickets and hitting the post, effortlessly ending the game. “What do you make of that?” he asked, rising from a crouch.