She gave a little gasp when he clasped her carefully around the waist and lowered her to the ground with effortless strength. “I think we have always been allies in desiring the happiness of those we hold dear.”
For a quiet, drawn-out moment, they stood with his hands around her waist and hers on his shoulders. It would take only the slightest adjustment for their present stance to melt into an embrace.
Then a lad came running from the stables to take the horses.
Rebecca and Sebastian sprang apart. But after an awkward moment he gallantly offered her his arm and returned to their conversation. “If we are agreed that Miss Leonard and my brother should not rush into marriage, what can be done to prevent them? Do you think they might listen if we sat them down and talked to them, presenting a united front?”
Much as the notion appealed to her, Rebecca felt bound to express her reservations. “I am afraid that would only serve to make them unite against us, which is the last thing we want.”
Sebastian gave a dispirited nod. “What do you suggest then?”
She hesitated, loath to spoil this moment of closeness between them, as she knew her suggestion would. But she could not refrain from answering indefinitely and she could see only one solution. “I think you must tell them you will withdraw your objections to their engagement.”
“Withdraw my—?” Sebastian stared at Rebecca, wondering how his treasured ally had suddenly turned traitor. “You know I cannot do that. Is this some new stratagem you have contrived with them to get around me?”
“I would not do that,” she insisted with a ring of sincerity he found impossible to doubt. “I hope you know me well enough to believe I never would.”
His accusing stare softened and he allowed one corner of his lips to arch slightly. “I suppose I do. I apologize for my suspicions but my answer must remain the same. I cannot pretend to accept this engagement when—”
Rebecca interrupted to finish his sentence. “—when every time you look at Hermione you are reminded of Lydia?”
“I was going to say, ‘when I believe it would be a grave mistake.’ But your suggestion is not untrue.”
They entered the house, walking down the main gallery. Absorbed in their conversation and Rebecca’s company, Sebastian had little conscious idea where he was headed. He could take his lovely guest into the sitting room and call for tea. But that would require her to let go of his arm, a deprivation he could not bear. So he walked past the sitting room... the dining room... the library, out into the gardens.
Rebecca seemed not to notice where they were going as she concentrated on trying to persuade him. “I must have rehearsed half a dozen arguments on my way here, but now I see it is no use appealing to reason. It is your heart and soul I must win over so you will be free to do the right thing.”
Win his heart? It felt as if she had been doing that from the moment they met.
“You think I do not understand how hard it is to forgive,” Rebecca continued, “because I have never been hurt. But that is not true. Indeed, before coming to Rose Grange I was more accustomed to neglect and mistreatment than kindness.”
The thought of someone hurting her made every muscle in Sebastian’s body tense. “Who mistreated you? Your parents?”
His father had been cursed with a volatile temper of which he’d occasionally borne the brunt. Perhaps that was what made him seek to control his anger. One of the things he’d most detested about Lydia was how close she’d come to making him lash out.
Rebecca shook her head. “Never my parents. What little I recall of them was always gentle and loving. I believe the early foundation of their affection may have been what carried me through all that came after.”
So she had lost her parents at a young age, too. Sebastian scarcely remembered his mother, who had died when he was a small child. The loss of Claude’s mother had been much harder to bear. She had been as devoted to him as to her own little son and it was partly for her sake that he’d always tried to look out for his brother.
“What came after?” As they walked, Sebastian could not keep himself from drawing closer to her.
Rebecca kept her eyes downcast, watching the path as if she feared some obstacle might spring up to trip her. “They died of diphtheria the winter before I turned five. Papa was a poor clergyman with no family, so I was sent to live with my mother’s relatives. They were wealthy and titled and they had never forgiven Mama for marrying beneath her.”
A great many things suddenly became clear to Sebastian, including why she’d been so indignant at his opposition to marriages of unequal fortune.
“Did they harm you?” Instinctively his fists clenched. He wanted to thrash anyone who had dared lay a hand on her.
“Beat me, you mean?” Rebecca shook her head. “They were far too well bred to stoop to that sort of thing. But they could use words to inflict injuries as painful as any blow and far longer lasting. I was never allowed to forget that I was an embarrassing, inconvenient burden to them. They passed me from one to another like a hot potato no one wanted to be left holding. No sooner would I begin to find my way around a new household, learn people’s names and become accustomed to the routine than I would be sent somewhere new to begin all over again.”
“No wonder you prize familiarity.” Sebastian mused, recalling the first time she’d confided in him.
They’d been in the same place then—the Fountain Garden his grandfather had hewn out of this hillside. There was a mysterious air of unworldly peace about this secluded garden that seemed to invite disclosure.
“Finally, when I was nine,” Rebecca continued, staring out over the tranquil Cotswold countryside, “they decided I should be sent away to school. So off I went.”
“Was that the school where you met those friends of yours?” Sebastian tried to recall if she’d told him any more than that about the place.
She nodded. “The Pendergast Charity School for Orphaned Daughters of the Clergy. It is a shame the place did not live up to its impressive name. It was the most wretched institution—cold, damp, ill-staffed and ill-provisioned. For all that, I preferred it to the fine houses of my relatives where I had been infinitely better fed and clothed. At least there I had friends who cared for me, and I was able to stay long enough to become accustomed to it.”
Words continued to trickle out of her as if a dam had been breached. She told him more about the harsh deprivations of her years at the school and the forlorn confusion of being shuffled from one uncaring relative to another. His chest ached with a mixture of sympathy, grief and rage over what she had endured. He could not bear to think of her wanting for anything ever again, or going away to yet another new place.