The Winter Companion (Parish Orphans of Devon #4) - Mimi Matthews Page 0,87
man again. Four years later, the image of him was still burned on her brain. Slim and dreamy, with an artfully knotted necktie, curling dark hair, and the eyes of a romantic poet.
“You grace us with your presence, Miss Hartwright,” he’d said the first afternoon she’d joined him at the table for her brother’s lessons.
And he’d smiled at her. A secret smile that had seemed reserved for her alone.
Within a month, he was sharing his poetry with her. Not only the works of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Tennyson, but poems he’d written himself.
“You inspire me, Miss Hartwright,” he said one afternoon as he walked her home from the village schoolhouse. “Something about your face, and the lilt in your voice. The way you sound both prim and provocative at once.”
She reddened to the roots of her hair. “I surely don’t.”
“You do, ma’am. I shall write a sonnet about it. You see if I don’t.”
It was thusly all summer. He overwhelmed her young heart with poetry and flirtation. Everything airy, and pretty, and…vague.
And then one day he kissed her.
She blurted out the good news to her mother that very same evening as the two of them sat in the small parlor of their cottage. “He wants to marry me.”
Mama looked up from her mending. “Who does?”
“Mr. Bryce-Chetwynde.”
“Bah.”
“It’s true, Mama. He kissed me today.”
Her mother’s eyes narrowed behind the lenses of her spectacles. “He what?”
“He kissed me,” Clara said again, smiling giddily. “In the field behind the cottage. He says we will soon be husband and wife.”
At least, that was what she thought he’d said.
She was so certain of it—of his love, and of his words—that she allowed her mother to march her straight into the squire’s drawing room. Clara had stood there in her best Sunday dress, in the presence of the squire and Mr. Bryce-Chetwynde, as Mama demanded that Mr. Bryce-Chetwynde acknowledge the secret betrothal he had with her daughter. Clara had been confident he would.
More fool her.
That confidence had cost her everything. Her pride, her job, and her reputation.
It had cost Mama and Simon, too.
Clara recalled how badly her hands had shaken as she’d held the newspaper a week later, desperately scanning the employment advertisements. That there was a listing for a lady’s companion was nothing short of a miracle. Clara responded to it at once, and within a fortnight, was on a train to York—as far away from Hertfordshire as she could manage.
She’d thought never to see Andrew Bryce-Chetwynde again. Never to hear his name.
And yet it would have been a lie to say she hadn’t thought of him in the years that followed. Indeed, she’d spent that first six months in York going over and over every interaction the two of them had had, trying to light on the instance she’d first misconstrued things. The moment she’d diverged onto a course that had very nearly ruined her, and her mother and brother along with her.
She’d never discovered it.
Which just went to show that her own judgment was faulty. That she’d spent too much time with her head in a book, daydreaming about epic poems and legends.
She’d resolved then and there to be done with such foolishness. If her imagination was so powerful it could make her see things that weren’t there, she couldn’t afford to keep feeding it. Better to starve it of its sustenance. Of poetry, novels, and plays. To force it to function, instead, on a diet of provable scientific facts. Everything sensible and orderly, fitting into neat rows and columns.
Coins clinked onto the table as Mr. Trent settled the bill for their tea. “Do you have relatives hereabouts?”
“Why do you ask?”
“You’ll need somewhere to stay. I’d offer you a room myself, but…” He stuck a finger into his cravat, tugging the rumpled linen as he cleared his throat. “The lads and I have rented a hunting lodge for the holiday. It’s no place for an unmarried lady.”
“You’ve no need to trouble yourself. I’m already established