Remembrance

“And the most vanity,” Talis added.

“No, no, she was good and pure. Only others saw her beauty. She thought of herself as plain.”

“Humph.”

“And there was a prince,” Callie said.

“A handsome prince?”

“Oh no, not at all. Ugly as a toad.”

At that Talis started to get up.

“All right,” she said, “perhaps he was a little handsome.” For a moment she put her cheek against his chest, held his arms close to her body. “He had black, glossy curls, thick black lashes, and a mouth as soft as a baby’s. But his nose was too long and thin.”

“I am sure he had a perfect nose.”

“Perhaps. One day the princess—”

“No,” Talis said, “tell me more of what this divinely handsome prince looked like. Was he tall and strong?”

Callie’s first impulse was to tease him but then she smiled and picked up his hand and said, “He had beautiful hands, long fingers, very strong hands…”

27

Sir,” Talis said, his shoulders back, his head up. “I should like your permission to marry Callasandra.”

John was taken off guard at this. His son was just a boy. Why, just yesterday he had been in swaddling clothes. How could he think to marry?

Slowly, he turned from the table where he was inspecting the accounts his chamberlain had left with him. When a boy married, it changed him, made him put his energies into something other than what was at hand.

Never in his life would John have admitted to himself that he was jealous. He had just found his son; he did not yet want to share him with anyone. But at the same time he did not want to disappoint the boy. There was an independence about Talis that frightened John. His other children belonged to him, belonged to him body and soul. He could demand what he wanted of them, dismiss them or congratulate them as he felt and he knew they would be near him the next day.

But this Talis was something that John had not experienced before. He did not feel gratitude coming from the boy for having saved him from a life of poverty. John often felt Talis’s delight in his new life, but never gratitude. John wasn’t sure, but he thought that if Talis did not like what his father did, the boy might well take the girl and leave Hadley Hall forever.

“Yes, yes, of course,” John said, not wanting to directly tell the boy no. “I must of course speak to your mother first.”

“Yes, sir,” Talis said, his face breaking into a radiant grin, his happiness fairly lighting up the room. Then, trying to calm himself, he left the room, running down the stairs. In his exuberance, he practically knocked the prim, proper Edith to the floor, but, easily, he caught her in his arms, and kept her from falling. Then, to her disbelief, he kissed her hard on the mouth. A kiss, to him, of brother to sister, but to Edith a kiss such as she’d never had from a man.

Talis continued his run down the stairs, making one leap to hit the bottom of a tapestry hanging above the stairwell, then running out the door.

On the stairs, Edith’s sisters Dorothy and Joanna were open-mouthed in their astonishment at the way Edith was staring after Talis. Edith considered herself above any man. According to her, the reason she was twenty-nine years old and not married was that she had never found a man to her liking. But now, judging by the look on her face, she certainly did like Talis!

When Joanna gave way to a giggle, Edith pulled herself to her full height and started up the stairs, trying her best to regain her dignity. But at the top of the stairs, she could not keep herself from looking out the window to see that glorious creature run across the courtyard.

Turning back, she tried to keep her face straight. “Come, there is work to do.”

“Yes, Edith,” Joanna said, and behind her back, she exuberantly kissed the back of her hand, then mocked Edith’s straitlaced walk down the corridor.

“Of course he should marry your daughter,” Alida said to her husband. It took all her willpower to remain calm. She must not allow her husband to see that her heart was pounding in her throat, that her breath was wanting to come rapid and harsh.

“My son,” John said sternly, his brows knitted together, emphasizing the point that Talis was his.

Alida knew that she had to tread carefully, but she also knew that she could not be a coward. If ever she had to think quickly, this was the time. It did not matter about her, but her children’s future depended upon what she did in the next few minutes. Her first instinct was to laugh at her husband. What an old fool he was to think he could

pass off that dark boy as his son. He was a thin man, she was a thin woman and together they had produced eleven thin, pale children. Who did he think was going to believe that in the midst of these blonds he had produced an olive-skinned, black-haired, black-eyed giant?

As rapidly as possible, Alida tried to think. There were many reasons that she could not allow this marriage to go through. A marriage would ensure that John would leave everything to this boy who was not his son, and she could not bear to see her own sons disinherited.