‘You should take a hot bath.’ He almost smiled again at the confident tone. Planning and making decisions seemed to cheer Kate up as much as it did him. ‘And we’ll take our time changing for dinner. Let’s look in on Anna and Charlie on our way up,’ she suggested. ‘With our guests and our plans for later, I think this should be an evening for adults, don’t you?’
‘Oh, yes,’ Grant agreed. ‘Most definitely.’
Chapter Fifteen
Kate accepted a shelled walnut from Cris de Feaux, who was cracking them with one hand while moving the cruets around the table to demonstrate some obscure point about the Schleswig-Holstein question that her husband and Gabriel were arguing about.
‘Thank you,’ she murmured, too engaged with the argument to feel shy with him any more. He was beginning to intrigue her, with his sharp intelligence and sardonic observations. But he was unhappy, she sensed. It was hard to tell with such a controlled, contained man, but she thought he was acting, putting on a false front of normality for his friends. She wondered whether he resented the fact that two of them had married and there was certainly something in his eyes when he looked at Alex and Tess, but she thought it was pain rather than resentment or jealousy.
‘The convolutions in a walnut are as nothing compared to Gabriel’s mental processes,’ Cris observed, breaking into her musings. ‘Of course the Danes have a good claim to the territory,’ he added as Alex joined in the argument. ‘But the German states…’
Kate met Tess’s eyes and smiled. She had been pleased with herself for remembering to rise and nod to Tess when everyone had finished dessert and she had been taken aback when the other woman said airily, ‘Must we? It is only us after all.’
‘Why, no, I would be happy to stay if the gentlemen are not inhibited by our presence.’ They certainly would not be removing a chamber pot from the sideboard to relieve themselves, as she knew Henry and his male guests did as soon as the ladies were out of the way, because her wary inspection had revealed that was not done in this household. On the other hand she had always assumed that the men liked the freedom to discuss sport, politics and women.
‘I would wager that you and I know quite enough about politics to keep our end up in a discussion,’ Tess had announced. ‘And if they want to talk about bare-knuckle boxing or duels, then I am all agog to hear about them, too.’
‘But that means we won’t be able to discuss opera dancers or our latest flirts,’ Alex Tempest said plaintively and was punished with a well-aimed walnut thrown by his wife.
But, despite the teasing, the arguments were anything but frivolous. From her hours of lonely reading Kate realised that they were all travellers who knew the Continent well—and that included Grant, although she knew he had not been abroad since their marriage and she had no idea why he would be travelling across the Channel in any case.
‘After the way we treated Denmark during the war, I am surprised they are a friendly nation now,’ she remarked, making herself join in the discussion and not spend the evening silently puzzling over her husband.
‘The fact that we bombarded Copenhagen twice?’ Grant asked. ‘Things in that part of the world are so complicated, even after the Treaty of Vienna, that they are probably grateful for a friendly trading partner who doesn’t want to realign their boundaries.’
‘You’ve never had any problem buying horses in Holstein, have you?’ Gabriel Stone reached for the decanter and refilled all the glasses within reach.
‘None. You’ll have to come down to the stables and look at my latest crosses with Yorkshire coach horses. They are going to be the carriage horse of choice if I have anything to do with it.’
So that was what the handsome bay horses down at the stables were. They were not riding horses, she knew that, but not being a good horsewoman herself, she had never been curious enough to ask about them. Now it seemed that Grant was enthusiastic about horse breeding and she’d had no idea. Another side of her husband that was unknown.
The men got up, lost in an intense argument about something new that had escaped Kate’s notice whilst she was brooding. ‘Come and look at the atlas,’ Grant was suggesting as he headed towards the door. ‘It should be clear on a large-scale map.’
She and Tess were alone, one at each end of the table. ‘That’s done it,’ Lady Weybourn remarked. ‘They are off on the subject of Waterloo and we probably won’t see them until breakfast time now. I shudder with relief every time I remember they were all four in that hell and none of them was wounded.’
‘Shall we go into the drawing room?’ Kate suggested and was surprised, and pleased, when the other woman took her arm in a companionable manner.
‘Is Grant better now? He looks it.’ Tess kicked off her shoes and curled up in an armchair in a scandalously casual manner.
Kate remembered something that Grant had said about Alex’s wife being born on the wrong side of the blanket and never having a come-out. Despite that, she seemed relaxed enough about her place in society, which was encouraging. If she could do it, so could Kate. And then she remembered that she would have to negotiate London society while avoiding one particular aristocrat and it all seemed impossibly difficult again.
‘Grant is much better, I think.’
‘Had you had a row?’ Tess asked with a cheerful lack of restraint. ‘I thought you both looked positively stony with each other when we arrived, but of course that might have been his headache and your nerves at the thought of us all descending on you.’
‘A row?’ Kate temporised. She was not going to be indiscreet about Grant, but she did wish she had someone to confide in, at least about her husband.
‘He’s not like Alex. We have rows at least once a week and no one’s any the worse for it and we usually end up laughing our heads off, or in bed. Or both,’ she added with a wicked smile, apparently not noticing Kate’s flushed cheeks. ‘But Grant is so self-contained. Alex says he virtually never loses his temper—not to show, in any case. But you are obviously doing him good.’
‘I am?’ Kate murmured, lost in the face of so much frankness.
‘When I first met him I had sprained my ankle and he was very kind to me, but his eyes held so much sadness, even when he was smiling. That’s gone now.’
There was the fleeting memory of that look in his eyes when they were in the bothy and, afterwards, when they reached Abbeywell. She had thought that the haunting sadness had gone because he was home again, and with Charlie, but Tess implied that it had been there for longer than just that difficult journey from Scotland. ‘I know the look you mean. And you are right, it isn’t there now.’
‘That’s love for you,’ Tess said, her smile tender and secret.
‘But it isn’t,’ Kate protested. ‘We’re not in love. Surely Grant told you all in London about how we met, why he married me? This is not a romance, this is a marriage of practicality.’