“What’s that, my dear?” asked Kitty, lines of displeasure tightening about her mouth.
“Take her back to London with us. You’d like a companion, wouldn’t you? She needs to see something of the world. There it is, then!” He rocked on the toes of his feet, clearly quite pleased with his own cleverness.
“Oh, my lord,” breathed Daphne, overcome at the prospect opening up before her, “how very, very kind of you—”
“Dandridge, my dear, you cannot have thought,” Kitty protested with a titter of laughter that held very little of humor. “Daphne doesn’t have the right clothes for such a visit. We wouldn’t want to embarrass her by having her come to us looking like a dowd!”
Even Lord Dandridge appeared somewhat taken aback by his wife’s lack of tact. “Nonsense! What I mean is, no such thing. Couldn’t look like a dowd if you tried,” he assured Daphne with perhaps more diplomacy than truth.
“It’s very kind of you to say so,” Daphne told him warmly, even as her hopes and dreams plummeted abruptly back down to earth. “And of course I should love to come and visit, but I’m afraid I can’t leave my mother just at present.”
“Yes, how is your poor mother?” Kitty asked, all eager sympathy now that she was no longer faced with the prospect of playing hostess to a shabby-genteel friend who might still contrive to cast her into the shade. “Pray excuse me, Daphne. I simply must say something to dear Mrs. Drinkard, for Dandridge and I return to London first thing in the morning, you know.”
With these words, she flitted away, leaving Daphne alone with Lord Dandridge, who shuffled his feet awkwardly.
“Pay no heed to the things Kitty says. She don’t mean half of ’em, you know.”
“While as for the other half, she never stops to consider how they must sound to those on the receiving end,” she concurred, nodding in understanding. “I assure you, my lord, I have known Kitty for a very long time—far too long to let her disconcerting remarks upset me.”
And it was true, she told herself a short time later, as she accompanied her mother on the walk from the church to the boardinghouse. She had certainly known Kitty Morecombe too long, and too well, to be distressed by her verbal jabs. Furthermore, if Kitty had told the truth when she’d claimed to have been cast into the shade by Daphne (and whatever else might be said of her, Kitty was nothing if not brutally frank), well, perhaps one could not blame her for taking a certain satisfaction in the knowledge that she had made an advantageous marriage while the friend who had once outshone her was left to languish on the shelf.
Still, it was only with difficulty that Daphne held up her end of the conversation at nuncheon, most of which centered on praising Mr. Nutley for the excellence of his sermon. As soon as she could, she excused herself from the table, pausing only long enough to exchange her good Sunday walking dress for her faded blue muslin round gown before making her way down the neglected garden behind the house to the river that flowed some little distance away. She walked across the stone footbridge spanning the water until she reached the apex at its center, then braced her arms against the parapet and leaned over, gazing down at the waters rushing beneath her.
It was here, a short time later, that Theo found her. “Miss Drinkard? May I join you?”
She summoned a smile that was perhaps not quite so feeble as it might have been only a few minutes earlier. “Please do.”
He stepped up onto the bridge and crossed it in half a dozen long, easy strides, pausing next to her at its highest point. “Forgive me, Miss Drinkard, but is anything wrong? I couldn’t help noticing at nuncheon that you seemed to be troubled.”
She looked up at him in some alarm. “You—you don’t think Mama noticed, do you?”
He shook his head. “I doubt it. She, along with everyone else at the table, seemed far more interested in congratulating Mr. Nutley on his sermon.” Thinking that she might be more inclined to confide in him if he could engage her first in some other topic of conversation, he asked, “Does it not seem to you that Mr. Nutley is rather old for a curate? I should have thought he would have a church of his own by this time.”
“And so he might have had, were it not for a”—she lowered her voice, although there was no one else in sight—“an unfortunate incident in his youth.”
“An ‘unfortunate incident’?” echoed Theo, grinning broadly. “I can’t imagine Mr. Nutley committing any indiscretion worthy of blighting a clerical career.”
“Nor can I,” Daphne confessed solemnly. “That’s what makes it so sad.”
Theo’s smile faded in the face of her disinclination to laugh. “What happened, then?”
She hesitated for a moment, then said, “You must not let on that I told you, or that you know about it at all.” Upon his agreeing to these conditions, she began. “As I said, he was very young at the time. He had just taken holy orders, and was invited to a dinner party at which the Archbishop of Canterbury was present, along with several other church leaders, any one of whom might have had the power to make his career.”
“I should have thought that was a piece of rare good fortune,” Theo observed.
“So it might have been, but I believe he used to be painfully shy when he was young, and was quite intimidated by the company in which he found himself. Dinner in those days was always served à la française, but poor Mr. Nutley was so afraid of saying something wrong that he dared not ask for any of the dishes farther up the table to be passed to him, and so terrified of dropping the heavy platter in front of him that he resolved not to pass it around the table
