A Christmas Beginning by Anne Perry Page B

Costain?” he repeated the question.
    â€œOf course he did. But she had no patience with him. Nice man, but tedious. She used to tell me about him. Came to see me every week. Brought me jam.” Her eyes filled with tears, and unashamed, she let them slide down her cheeks.
    â€œShe talked about Sir Alan to you?”
    â€œDone well for himself,” she said, shaking her head a little. “Grew up here, then went south to the mainland.”
    â€œEngland?”
    She gave him a withering look. “Wales, boy! Wales!”
    He smiled in spite of himself. “But Olivia refused him.”
    â€œCourse she did. Liked him well enough. Kind man, when you get to know him, she said. Good horseman, patient, light hands. Need that on a horse. Heavy hands ruin a horse’s mouth. Loves the land. Best thing about him,” she said.
    â€œBut she refused his offer of marriage?” He did not want to see Faraday as part of this wide, beautiful land with its wind and its endless distance, when Runcorn himself had to leave it and go back to the clatter and smoke of London. But he did want to think that there was a better side to him, a man who could love and give of himself, who could be gentle, handle power with a light touch.
    â€œWas he angry that she refused him?” he persisted.
    She looked at him as if he were a willfully obtuse student. “Of course he was. Wouldn’t you be? You offer a beautiful and penniless young woman your name and your place in society, your wealth and your loyalty, and she says she does not wish for it!”
    He tried to imagine the scene. Had he loved her? He certainly had not shown it when he spoke of her after her death. Had he forgotten her in his new love for Melisande? That was too raw in his mind to touch. “Why did she refuse him? Was there someone else she preferred?”
    Miss Mendlicott smiled. “Not in any practical way. Sometimes she had very little sense. She could see the flowers in front of her, count their petals, and she could see the stars, and tell you their names. But she was fuzzy about the middle distance, as if there were mist over the field.” There were tears in her eyes again and she did not brush them away. She was not going to dissemble or excuse herself to a man from London, probably not to anyone else, either.
    â€œThere was someone impractical,” he concluded aloud. Had that been Kelsall after all, a young man who could still barely afford to keep himself, let alone a wife?
    â€œA poet,” she replied. “And explorer.” She snorted. “Of all the romantic and ridiculous things to be. Off to the Mountains of the Moon, he was.”
    â€œWhat?” He was jolted out of courtesy by shock.
    â€œAfrica!” the old lady said witheringly. “Some of these explorers have very fanciful minds. Heaven knows where they would have ended up, if she had gone with him.”
    â€œShe wanted to?” It was surprisingly painful to ask, because he could imagine the loneliness of being left behind. He had always been a practical man, the whole notion of dreams was new to him. He had reconciled himself to a solitary life, his friendships and his time and effort were absorbed in his increasingly demanding work. Now he was torn apart by impossible dreams. How could he criticize Olivia for a similar longing?
    The old lady was watching him with sharp, amused eyes. The age difference between them was enough that she could have taught him as a schoolboy, and that might well be how she was regarding him now.
    â€œShe did not confide that in me,” she responded. He knew it was her way of avoiding answering. And that meant that Olivia had loved the man as well as the adventure, but many things had made it impossible. Perhaps she had not even been asked.
    How could the reality of Faraday, kind, honest but predictable, have matched the dream? It did not matter now, because Olivia had not gone, and she had refused