Simply Love

had freely admitted during the morning. Her brother-in-law was a clergyman in a small country parish. Her mother and sister lived together in a cottage in the same parish.

Yet here they all were, as fully accepted by the Bedwyns as if they had all been born with the bluest blood.

It was true, of course, that no one else here at Glandwr had an illegitimate child, but no one treated Anne as if she were a pariah-or as if she had no business being among present company. Indeed, Lady Aidan asked her particularly about her son and laughed when Anne told her how he had been spoiled by teachers and girls alike at Miss Martin’s school.

“Though for his sake I must send him to a boys’ school when he is a little older,” Anne said. “It will be hard-for me if not for him.”

“It will,” Lady Aidan agreed. “We will be sending Davy to school next year when he is twelve, and already I am feeling bereft.”

They exchanged a smile, just two concerned mothers commiserating with each other.

“That poor man,” Mrs. Pritchard said softly in her musical Welsh accent as the gentlemen joined the ladies. “It is a good thing he is not of the working classes. He would never have found employment after the wars were over. He would have become a beggar and starved as so many of those soldiers did.”

“Oh, I am not so sure of that, Aunt Mari,” Lady Aidan said. “There is a thread of steel in him despite his quiet manners. I believe he would have overcome any adversity, even poverty.”

They were talking, Anne realized, of Mr. Butler, about whom she had been feeling horribly guilty all evening and whom she had consequently avoided even looking at-though she had been aware of him almost every moment.

“What happened to him?” she asked.

“War,” Lady Aidan said. “He followed his brother, Viscount Ravensberg, to the Peninsula against everyone’s wishes but his own. His brother brought him home not long after, more dead than alive. But he recovered, and eventually he offered his services to Wulfric and came here. That all happened before I met Aidan, who was still a cavalry colonel in the Peninsula at the time, the superior officer of my brother, who never came home. How glad I am that the wars are over at last.”

It was some time later when Anne noticed that Mr. Butler was seated alone in a far corner of the room after all the groups had just rearranged themselves with the setting up of some card tables. She herself was with Miss Thompson and the Earl and Countess of Rosthorn, all of whom had declined a place at the tables. But Anne stood and excused herself before she could lose her courage. She could not allow the whole evening to go by without speaking to Mr. Butler, though she doubted he would have any wish to speak with her.

He looked up sharply when he saw her approach and then got to his feet.

“Miss Jewell,” he said.

Something in his manner and voice told her that indeed he would have preferred to remain alone, that he did not like her-but she could hardly blame him for that, could she?

She looked into his face and quite deliberately adjusted her focus so that she looked at both sides. He wore a black patch over his right eye-or perhaps over where his right eye had been. The rest of that side of his face was covered from brow to jaw and on down his neck with purplish burn marks. His empty right sleeve was pinned to the side of his evening coat.

He was, she noticed, half a head taller than she-and she had not been mistaken about his broad chest and shoulders. He was clearly not a man who had wallowed in his disabilities.

“I went back last night,” she said, “a few minutes after I ran away. But you had gone.”

He looked back at her in silence for a few moments.

“I am sorry,” he said abruptly then, “that I frightened you. I did not intend to do so.”

Courteous words, courteously spoken. Yet she could still feel his dislike, his reluctance to speak with her.

“No, you misunderstand,” she said. “I am sorry. It is what I went back to say. I truly am. Sorry.”

What else could she say? She could only make matters worse by trying to offer an explanation for her behavior.

Again there was a silence between them long enough to be uncomfortable. She almost turned and walked away. She had said what she had felt compelled to say. There was nothing else.

“Going back was a courageous thing to do,” he said. “It was getting dark and the cliff top is a lonely, dangerous place to be at night. And I was a stranger to you. Thank you for returning even though I had already gone home.”

She had, she supposed, been forgiven. She did not know if he still disliked her, but that did not really matter. She smiled and nodded and would again have turned away.

“Will you have a seat, Miss Jewell?” He indicated the chair close to the one he had been occupying.

She had hesitated too long, she thought, and courtesy had compelled him to offer to prolong their encounter. She would rather have moved off somewhere else. She did not like being close to him. Ashamed as she was to admit it, she did not like having to look at him.

And how difficult it was to look at him as if he were any normal man, not to focus only on the left side of his face, not to look away lest he think she was staring. Did some people who knew about her find it equally difficult to look at her, to treat her as if she were a normal woman? But she knew very well that there were such people.

She sat straight-backed on the edge of the chair and folded her hands in her lap.

“You are a brother of Viscount Ravensberg, Mr. Butler?” she said politely, her mind having turned blank to all the many possibilities of interesting conversational topics.

“I am,” he answered.

And there was nowhere else to go with the topic. She did not even know who Viscount Ravensberg was. But he took pity on her.

“And son of the Earl of Redfield of Alvesley Park in Hampshire,” he told her. “The estate adjoins that of Lindsey Hall, Bewcastle’s principal seat. My brothers and I grew up with the Bedwyns. They were all hellions-but then so were we.”

“Brothers?” She raised her eyebrows.

“Jerome, the eldest, died of a chill taken while rescuing farm laborers and their families from flooded homes,” he said. “Kit and I are the only two remaining.”

There must have been much nerve damage to the right side of his face, she thought. It was immobile, and his mouth was rather lopsided as he talked.

“It must have been hard to lose a brother,” she said.

“Yes.”

She did not usually have undue difficulty making conversation, but everything she had said during the past minute or two was markedly stupid. Her mind, meanwhile, chattered incessantly with questions she knew she could not ask.

What happened out there in the Peninsula?

In which battle did it happen?

Did you sometimes wish you had died?

Do you sometimes still wish it?

He must have been extraordinarily, impossibly handsome once upon a time.

“What an utterly foolish thing to say,” she said. “As if you could possibly reply that no, it was not hard at all.”

His one dark eye met hers with a hard, bleak look for a moment as if he were about to make a sharp retort. Then it twinkled, and surprisingly they both laughed. The left side of his mouth lifted higher than the right in a lopsided grin that was curiously attractive.

“Miss Jewell,” he said, “shall we agree, for both our sakes, to pretend that last evening did not happen, that we have met here for the first time this evening?”

“Oh.” She relaxed back a little farther on her chair. “I should like that.”

His left hand was resting on his thigh. It was a long-fingered artist’s hand, she thought. She hoped she was wrong about that last point-or that he was left-handed. She looked up into his face.

“I have been feeling horribly intimidated all evening,” she was surprised to hear herself admit.