What he saw robbed him of speech.
Immense rock formations thrust out from the hillside. Massive, stony obelisks lay strewn about, like ninepins. Upon them grew the lichens and mosses that so fascinated Mr. Oldridge. Trees and shrubs wedged in the spaces between rocks, and a sampling of braver and hardier wild plants hinted at the profusion that must appear in warmer seasons. Alistair heard water dripping from somewhere in the mountain, the same water that trickled through the petrifying wells.
The trees and rocks shut out everything else. He and she might have been on some fairy-tale island. He turned slowly round, gazing in wonder like a child.
“This site is called the Romantic Rocks,” came her cool voice from a distance. “In the height of the season, it is overrun with tourists.”
He looked at her.
She sat on one of the obelisk-like stones, her hands folded. Her dull grey bonnet and cloak blended into her surroundings, drawing all the attention to her glowing countenance and the fiery curls framing it.
“You love this place,” he said.
“Not simply this spot,” she said. “I am a part of the Peak, and it is part of me. My mother told me she fell in love with this part of Derbyshire when she fell in love with my father. Some of my earliest memories are of walking with her up to the Heights of Abraham. We often came to these rocks. We visited the caverns, too. We went to the baths and the petrifying wells. We took a boat across the river to the Lovers’ Walks. We even made trips to Chatsworth and the other great houses. We never grew tired of the sights.” Her voice softened with nostalgia. “Sometimes on our expeditions, we would sketch and paint. Sometimes my father came along. In those days, he was fascinated with botany, but in a more rational way. Mama made him wonderfully detailed paintings of plants and flowers.”
Alistair walked to her and sat down beside her, thinking no more of his expensively tailored coat and the effect of moss and lichen upon it than she did of her unfashionable cloak.
“Your father loved her very much,” he said.
She nodded. Her eyes glistened.
“If she was at all like you, I can understand your father’s shutting himself off from the world for all these years,” he said. “It is only a few days since last I saw you, yet to me it has seemed a dark and wearisome eternity.”
She stood abruptly. “You are not to make love to me,” she said in clipped tones. “I should not have taken you here. I should have stopped at the first picturesque viewpoint, as I meant—or thought I meant. I seem to persist in doing the exact opposite of what I ought to do.”
Alistair rose as well, though more stiffly, for the rock was chilly and his leg had not forgiven him for the visit to the cold, damp petrifying well. “Love makes people behave strangely,” he said.
“I am not in love with you,” she said. “It is an infatuation. I have heard of such derangements happening to elderly spinsters.”
“You are neither elderly nor deranged,” he said. “Perhaps you are merely infatuated with me, but I am over head and ears in love with you, Mirabel.”
She turned away. “I advise you to conquer the passion,” she said in a voice as cold and brittle as ice, “because absolutely nothing will come of it.”
Whatever Alistair might have expected, it wasn’t this. All the glow had gone out of her in an instant, and all the warmth and trust and affection.
He stood, chilled and uncomprehending, staring after her as she hurried away.
IN case her frigid leave-taking failed to discourage him from following, Mirabel made a quick detour and hurried down a well-concealed bypath.
She would not cry. She could not cry. In a few minutes, she would be back upon the South Parade, and people must not see her with red eyes and nose. If they did, the news would be all over Matlock in an hour, and traveling over the surrounding hills and dales in two.
She would have plenty of time to cry later, she told herself.
Alistair Carsington would soon be gone.
Still, at least this would be a clean break. If she had broken off cleanly with William Poynton in London eleven years ago, he would have stayed away. He would not have followed her here, and tried to change her mind, and made her more miserable than she was already—though he never meant to—and she would not have added to his unhappiness.
That was what came of trying to break off with someone kindly and gently: You only made it drag on longer and made everyone involved more wretched.
No, this way was better, Mirabel told herself. It would have been far better had she turned cold and cruel before Mr. Carsington declared his feelings. But she had been weak, wanting another minute with him before they separated forever, then another minute and another.
Still, she would have hurt him no matter when she did it, and perhaps it was only fair he wound her, too.
I am over head and ears in love with you, Mirabel.
Who would have thought those words—the sweetest any woman could wish to hear—could hurt so very much?
Still, she knew they would both heal. In time.
Meanwhile, something far more important than her heart was at stake.
She had no choice. She must get rid of him.
IT took Alistair only a minute or so to absorb the blow and set out after her, but it was a minute too long.
Though he went as fast as his leg would let him, he caught no glimpse of the grey bonnet.
Not until he came out of the walkway into the main road at Wilkerson’s did he see her. It was the back of her, however, upon the curricle, with a smallish groom perched behind. The vehicle was fast disappearing from view.
; He hurried into the hotel to order a horse and narrowly missed colliding with a servant hurrying out at the same moment.
“There you are, sir,” said the servant. “There is a—”
“I want a horse,” Alistair cut in. “Pray make haste.”
“Yes, sir, but—”
“A horse, with a saddle upon it, quickly,” Alistair snapped. “If it is not too terribly inconvenient.”
The servant scurried out.
“And where were you thinking of going in such a lather, Car, if a fellow may be so impertinent as to ask?”
Alistair turned toward the familiar voice.
Lord Gordmor stood in the doorway leading to the private rooms. He wore a mud-spattered overcoat, and his boots looked as though they’d been dragged through a swamp and chewed on by crocodiles.
Alistair quickly collected himself. He was growing used to shocks. “You look like the devil,” he told his friend. “I should ask what brings you here, but I am in rather a hurry. Why don’t you have a bath or something? We’ll talk when I get back.”
“Ah, no, dear heart. I think we must talk now.”
“Later,” said Alistair. “There is something I must take care of first.”
“Car, I have come a hundred fifty miles by post chaise,” said his lordship. “A drunken idiot driving a phaeton four-in-hand ran us into a ditch late on Saturday, ten miles from anywhere in every direction. We spent most of the following day trying to find a soul willing to break the Sabbath to repair our vehicle. I have had not a wink of sleep since Oldridge’s express came—which, by the way, it seems his daughter wrote. It broke my repose hours before any cock thought of crowing on Saturday.”
Alistair had started to turn away, planning to run to the stables and saddle a horse himself if necessary. Gordy’s last sentence brought him back sharply.
The only express messages Miss Oldridge had mentioned to him had gone out more than a week earlier.
“An express?” he said. “From Oldridge Hall? On Saturday last? Only three days ago?”