“I have been threatening to tune Tom over it for at least that long.”
There was general laughter. Tom Corning and the major had apparently been close friends since childhood and were grinning at each other as they bickered.
Lydia laughed with everyone else.
No, it was not a man that was missing from her life.
It was a lover.
They were one and the same thing, of course, some might argue. But those people would be wrong. A man in her life, whether father, brother, brother-in-law, or husband, would want to own her—they would own her. They would also want to dominate her. She would not allow herself to be owned or dominated ever again. A lover, on the other hand, could be enjoyed and sent on his way when his presence became bothersome.
Mr. Carver, one of Major Westcott’s tenant farmers, who lived a mile or so beyond the village, had come to sit beside Lydia before the music began. As soon as Tom and Major Westcott had finished calling across the room to each other, he launched into an account of the sudden and mysterious lameness of one of his horses in the right foreleg, just when there was a great deal of farm work to be done. Lydia turned her attention to him, though at least part of her mind was imagining how very deeply shocked he and all her neighbors and friends would be if they were aware of her deepest musings.
A lover could be enjoyed and sent on his way . . .
She had been the Reverend Isaiah Tavernor’s wife and helpmeet. That was the word he had liked to use to describe her. It was as though she had had no identity of her own. She was only his helpmeet. For more than six years, first as a curate’s wife, then as a vicar’s, she had cultivated modesty and invisibility because it was what he had expected of her. Not literal invisibility, of course. Everyone had seen her, welcomed her, apparently liked and approved of her. She had forever been busy about parish business and the performance of good works, as befitted the wife of the vicar. But nobody, it seemed to Lydia, not even her closest acquaintances, had really known her. She had had no close friends while her husband lived. She had been too busy, all her time and attention devoted to furthering the work that was his passion. Sometimes she had had the rather dizzying suspicion that she did not know herself. Was there even a self to know? Someone quite separate and distinct from her energetic, zealous, charismatic husband?
Since Isaiah’s death, she had chosen to remain more or less invisible. It had been better thus while she was still in her blacks, and it was easier now so that she could guard her fragile, hard-won freedom. She was known, she supposed, as the amiable, placid, even bland Mrs. Tavernor, the brave, tragic widow and helpmeet of their much-revered deceased vicar. She did not mind. At least for the present, she did not.
Yet here she was, seated in the midst of a number of her fellow villagers, dreaming of a lover.
Specifically, of Major Harry Westcott.
Who very probably scarcely knew she existed.
She had never flirted with him or tried in any way to engage his interest. She would not even know how to go about either one, anyway, if she wished to try. She had no serious designs on him. The chance that she would find a lover, any lover, here in this small village, was slim to none. Actually, slimmer even than that.
But a woman could dream, could she not? Dreams were often ideal pleasures, because one could make of them whatever one wished. And if they never came true, as most did not—and this one certainly never would—then what did it matter? Her real life was very nearly perfect as it was. Her dreams merely brightened it a little more.
Major Westcott was a young man, probably about her own age. He was tall and lean—not thin. That was too negative a word. Besides, his arms and shoulders and chest looked strongly muscled beneath the well-tailored coats and waistcoats he always wore. And his legs were long and shapely and powerful-looking under his pantaloons. They looked even more so in riding breeches and boots, she had noticed on other occasions. He was fair-haired and good-looking, even if not outstandingly handsome. He had a goodhumored face, with blue eyes that almost always smiled. She was not deceived