The Obsessions of Lord Godfrey - Stephanie Laurens Page 0,3
it that far, but we’ll need to stick to the drive.”
Godfrey made no reply. The icy cold had seeped through his clothes and was sinking through his skin all the way to his bones. As he drew in a harsh and labored breath, that last one hundred yards might as well have been a mile.
Standing at Hinckley Hall’s drawing room bow window, Eleanor Hinckley narrowed her eyes in an effort to pierce the impenetrable white screen obscuring the drive. Midafternoon, and the light had all but gone. Unable to make out anything at all, she sighed and reluctantly drew the curtain over the icy pane.
Swallowing her disappointment, Ellie faced the three older gentlemen gathered about the drawing room fireplace. “The blizzard’s set in. Mr. Cavanaugh must have stopped in Ripon.”
Her father, Matthew Hinckley, nodded in resignation. “Aye. Not a day for man or beast to be out braving that tempest.”
Seated to the left of her father’s bath chair, Walter Pyne grimaced. “Pity. I would have liked to make the fellow’s acquaintance. I’m curious to see what this business of being an authenticator is all about.”
“Aye, but,” Edward Morris, seated on her father’s other side, observed, “what with us likely stuck here now, courtesy of the storm, if the fellow rides from Ripon as soon as the thaw sets in, likely we’ll still be here when he arrives.”
Pyne arched his brows. “That’s true.”
Ellie bit her tongue on the information that Mr. Cavanaugh had written that he would bring a manservant. A London toff with a gentleman’s gentleman would be more likely to sit snug at the Unicorn in Ripon and wait for the roads to clear sufficiently so he could drive or be driven to the Hall.
Pyne and Morris were her father’s oldest friends and, as usual, had arrived midmorning to take Wednesday luncheon with her father and the family; given her father could no longer walk beyond a few steps and didn’t venture out beyond attending church on Sundays, it was kind of both men to so indefatigably turn up every Wednesday to spend the day with him.
Her father fixed her with a sapient eye. “How deep’s the snow?”
“Too deep for a carriage.” Ellie glanced back at the curtained window. “I doubt even a rider would make much headway out there now.”
“That means”—her father looked at his friends—“that, indeed, you’ll need to stay on until it clears. You both know you’re very welcome.”
Pyne and Morris murmured their thanks and acceptances of the offer. Like her father, both were locals born and bred and suffered the inconveniences of winter storms with the stoic resignation of those who have long ago learned the futility of railing against Nature’s unpredictable furies.
All three men looked at Ellie, and she summoned a smile. “I’ll let Kemp and Mrs. Kemp know, but I’m sure they’ll have already made arrangements.” Both butler and housekeeper had served the family for most of Ellie’s twenty-eight years; she felt sure Mrs. Kemp would already have sent the maids upstairs to prepare the rooms Pyne and Morris habitually used when they remained overnight at the Hall.
As the three men returned to their conversation, Ellie cynically observed that neither Pyne nor Morris were reluctant to stay, nor did they show any sign of concern over being trapped by the storm. Pyne’s wife was widely recognized as an unmitigated shrew, and he tended to seize any excuse to absent himself from his own hearth, while Morris was a widower of many years, and his home, Malton Farm, was a cold, lonely, stone mausoleum presided over by a crotchety housekeeper who believed in frugality above all else.
Neither man would regard a forced sojourn at the Hall as a hardship, and with the roads almost certainly blocked throughout the area, there would be no activity on Morris’s farm or at Pyne’s business in Ripon. Better for both men to be trapped at the Hall than under their own roofs.
For her part, Ellie viewed the prospect of having Pyne and Morris as houseguests for at least the next few days with equanimity. They would chat with her father and keep him entertained, and that would be a blessing.
She glanced at the curtained window; even through the Hall’s thick walls, she could hear the wind lashing and howling outside. The possibility loomed of the snow delaying Cavanaugh’s arrival for weeks, but after a second considering the notion, she resolutely pushed it aside; there was no telling how bad the impact of a storm such as the one