Page 49 of From Unwanted to Duchess
CHAPTER 16
James
The following day, James stood outside and mounted his horse.
Frances was on the horse behind him, having been assisted up by a groom.
James had been concerned that she would not be able to keep pace with him, but once again, she surprised him. She not only kept pace with him, but also looked graceful doing it. She rode as though she were born to the saddle.
“I did not know you were such a good rider,” he commented.
“There is much you do not know about me,” she replied.
And much, she suspected, that he did not wish to know.
He was beginning to understand that. He had felt almost a kinship to her when he heard about the hardship she had faced with her father. However, he couldn’t deny that hearing her tell her father that she was going to lead a miserable life just like her mother had affected him deeply.
He didn’t want her to be miserable. He had indeed done this to help himself, but at the same time, he couldn’t deny that those words had hit him hard.
He still wanted to help her and had thus defended her against her father. But he had felt awkward ever since. He wasn’t sure if it was meeting Lord Blatt again after all these years, or finally having to do the one thing he swore he’d never do—get married—or the peculiar feelings he had for her. In any case, he had not felt like himself. He felt like a stranger in his own skin.
And returning to his country estate had only made things worse.
“… all of the tenants?”
He turned. “Pray, what?”
“I said that Lizette told me that you know all the tenants.”
“I do,” he said. “I am not intimately familiar with them, but I do know them all by name. That first house there belongs to the Holtons. They’ve been on the estate for three generations. They farm corn and wheat, primarily.” He pointed to a house with a red shingle roof and neatly planted rows of corn.
“I love to walk in corn,” Frances admitted. “When I was very little, my mother would take me, and we would run through the cornfields together. It is one of the few memories I have of her.” She paused. “At least I think it is.”
“You think?” he asked. “What does that mean?”
“It means that sometimes I’m not certain if what I am remember are true memories or if they are simply figments of my imagination.” She let out a breath. “Sometimes I imagine that she is still alive. Somewhere. And that I am with her, but we are living a different life.”
“You mean, like a different universe?”
“Yes. One where we have made different decisions that affected our lives differently, and where we live out our lives in different ways. Perhaps not perfectly happy either, but different. You know?”
James nodded, his heart suddenly heavy as he thought of one particular decision he had made that had changed his life.
“Perhaps in that other reality, my brother is still alive.”
“Perhaps. Perhaps in that reality, he never engaged in a duel.”
He swallowed, wanting to tell her that it wasn’t a duel that killed his brother, but he kept it to himself. The night that had changed everything. The night he could never speak of.
He didn’t know her. Not really. Certainly not well enough to share the truth of that awful night with her.
They pressed on, and he showed her the rest of the estate, trying to keep his racing thoughts at bay. Being in this place never lifted his spirits. He knew why, but he couldn’t explain it to anybody else.
He showed her where the Sweeney family lived, who were raising cattle on their farm, the Bradfords and their apple orchard, and several other families.
They dismounted their horses more often than he had anticipated because she wanted to actually meet the tenants. She spent some time at the apple orchard asking questions about the type of apples, what they were used for, and how long it took to harvest. Then, she pressed on, leaving the orchard behind and familiarizing herself with several more farms and their tenants. However, there were far too many to meet them all in one day, she realized.
Perhaps it was because she had grown up in a place like this, because she knew fieldworkers, that she knew how to speak to them. She did it with such ease. She spoke to them as equals, not as inferiors, and they loved her for it. James was almost jealous. She accomplished in moments what he had struggled to accomplish in years.
