Beauty like sunlight,
Love me for ever as I love you.
Ivo
Underneath in a different hand, was D.P. and a roughly scratched heart.
Her immediate thought as she stood there was, This is why he did not want me walking down here. This was their special place.
Then all the hints and comments that she had been trying to ignore, pretending to herself not to understand, or consoling herself with the thought that it was all in the past, became clear. Lord Westhaven did not want her to expect love because Ivo’s heart was already given. His aunt’s jibes had been directed at Jane as much as at Ivo—she was being compared with the golden-haired beauty whom Ivo loved.
He had tried to save Daphne from the consequences of her elopement and she had responded by almost having him killed. The sense of betrayal must be even more acute if he still loved her. And Jane thought he must do.
She walked out of the hermitage and back the way she had come, blind now to the butterflies and the flowers, the scent of haymaking and the warmth of the sun. She sat on the bottom step out of the ha-ha, hidden from the house, and hugged her knees for comfort.
Ivo had loved—did love—Daphne, had tried to save her from making a dreadful mistake and had failed. In the process she, Jane, had been compromised and, being Ivo, he had proposed to her. Protectiveness seemed engrained in his character. But he had denied loving anyone else, she had asked him. She closed her eyes and thought back to the orchard and his proposal and her question.
‘I am not promised to anyone. You have my word on it,’ he had said. ‘There is no one who has hopes of me, upon my honour.’
But that was not what she had asked him and he had not answered her, had avoided mentioning his own feelings. He had spoken the truth, but only part of the truth. If he had loved Daphne once but no longer, then, surely, he would have said so?
If he no longer loved her, would he not have obliterated that inscription? It must have been vivid in his memory, because he had reacted instantly to dampen her interest in the hermitage, to give her reasons not to walk there. Perhaps he had gone to remove it, but could not bear to, so had covered it. Buried it. She shivered despite the heat.
Daphne was lost to him now, she was married, however unsatisfactory that marriage might be. From what the lawyers had said there was no possibility of an annulment and divorce was appallingly difficult even if both parties wanted it. As it was, neither of them did.
Jane blinked and looked up to find that it was raining out of a cloudless sky. Then she realised that the moisture on her face was tears.
What are you crying about? she asked herself angrily, swiping at her cheeks with the back of her hand. You knew he did not love you.
But you did not know he loved someone else, a harsh little inner voice whispered.
Perhaps he had fallen out of love when he had discovered that Daphne was faithless, had had him beaten, might have caused his death.
But love was not like that. Shakespeare had written, ‘Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove,’ and the man from Stratford seemed to know about love. Ivo might fall out of love with Daphne, but that would not happen until he saw her with different eyes and realised that he had loved someone different from the woman she had become.
Which left Jane with a question. Did she marry a man who loved another woman or call off the wedding? Her bones ached as she stood up and plodded up the steps to the lawn again, ached as though she had been ill. She put back her shoulders and made herself walk firmly.
I am strong, she told herself. I will not weep. I will think this through and make a decision.
She found herself by the gate into the rear yard that led to the service area and pushed it open. The yard was large and cobbled with a pump in the centre and a range of outbuildings—a wood store, an ash heap, two doors with crescents and stars cut out of them—the privies, she guessed—and some kind of workshop. Outside that was a bench and a small boy perched there, feet swinging, a row of shoes on one side of him and another row, shining and clean, on the other.
His freckled face was screwed up in concentration as he worked blacking into the shoe he was holding and the tip of his tongue stuck out. Jane sat on a stool next to the chopping block outside the wood store and pulled out her sketchbook. Drawing helped her clear her mind and it certainly needed clarification now. After a minute she picked up the stool and moved to get a better view of the lad’s face. He was about eleven, she guessed, on the first rung of the servant hierarchy. Hall boy next, then under-footman.
He put down the shoe and picked up its mate and Jane moved closer again. This time he saw her and shot to his feet, dropping his brush. ‘Miss?’
‘I’m sorry I startled you. Please sit down again. Lord Westhaven asked me to draw all the staff—did you know?’
He shuffled back on to his seat again. ‘Mr Partridge said so, but I didn’t think it meant me, I’m only Boots.’
‘But that is a very important job, otherwise we would all have dirty shoes and that would be a disgrace. Just think what everyone would say if His Lordship went out in muddy boots!’
‘Cor, yes.’ He picked up his brush and began polishing again.
‘What is your name?’
‘Jem Fletcher, miss. Me dad’s head groom.’
Jane wrote Jem Fletcher, Boot Boy, in the corner of the page. ‘And you don’t want to be a groom, Jem?’