Page 2 of Set in Stone

Arianna Westbrook had been craning her neck as she walked along the nave of the church, trying to see enough detail of medieval paintings above the windows to guess at the parable each portrayed.

Then bam! She walked into something solid. Someone solid, in fact, for he grunted, “Oof.” She recoiled, and as she did so, tripped over her own boots, but before she could fall, the man scooped her into his arms and gently put her back on her feet.

“Please accept my apologies,” he said, his voice that of a gentleman though he was dressed more casually than the gentlemen she usually met. “I was absorbed in the Prodigal Son up there and not paying attention to my surroundings.”

“It was I,” Arianna admitted. “I was walking along, looking at the paintings and not watching where I was going. I am so sorry.”

“They are quite hard to make out, are they not?” He gestured up toward them. “Quite wonderful to think they are still here, though, after perhaps as much as seven hundred years.”

Arianna was quick to agree. “It is! Only a few survive in the whole country, or so I believe. They were painted directly onto a prepared wall, you know. Not directly onto wet plaster, like a fresco, but onto a dry base. And in a place like this, they used colors readily available to them, which is why we are seeing mainly reds, browns, and yellows.”

“I knew that blue was expensive,” the man commented. “But I do not see green, either.”

“One sometimes sees both, but you are correct,” said Arianna. “Both blue and green pigments were expensive. Ultramarine from lapis lazuli is—to this day—worth more, ounce for ounce, than gold, and cheaper types of blue pigment still cost more than a local church like this could easily afford. Green was generally cheaper, but still not cheap. Whereas materials to make reds, yellows, blacks, and whites—and all the variants made by mixing them—could be found in the local environment.”

Gracious! He did not need to know all of that! He must be a very polite man, for his eyes had not yet glazed over, but at any moment, he would be making an excuse to leave.

“How incredible that they have lasted so long,” he commented. “I suppose it helps that they would never be in direct sunlight, placed as they are above the windows.”

Thrilled that he had made such an intelligent comment, Arianna could not resist explaining more. “Even so, in most churches around the country, such paintings have been scrubbed off, painted out, paneled over, or otherwise destroyed. These are a real treasure.”

“The innkeeper raved about the rose window,” the man said, his tone disparaging. “It is very nice of its type, I suppose.”

“But in this church, it is just wrong,” Arianna blurted.

The man’s smile was both pleased and admiring. “Exactly! It is Tudor in an otherwise Norman church. Just wrong.”

How unexpected. How marvelous. He understood. He agreed with her!

“I suppose, to be fair, it only matters to people who know how exceptional this survival is,” she mused. “People who worship here are probably proud of the Tudor window.”

“The innkeeper certainly is. He boasted it was a gift to the parish from Elizabeth I after she stopped in Fenwick once while on a royal progress. Apparently, she stayed in the inn and even gave it a Royal warrant.”

Arianna snorted. “Unlikely.”

And the man nodded. Oh, why could Mama not set her matchmaking eye on a man like this!

It wasn’t just that he was intelligent, though Arianna had suffered far too many fools not to know that intelligence was the rarest and, to her, the most attractive of all the qualities on display in Society. She also appreciated that he was tall, broad and attractive.

Not handsome, exactly. He was too rugged to be handsome. But definitely attractive, with sand-colored hair cropped short as if he did not have time to be bothered with it, grey eyes, and skin that was darker on his face and hands than she would have expected in a man with such fair hair.

Did he work outside? Or had he been in the army or the navy during the long war with France (and a few other countries as the occasion arose)? So many eligible young men had gone off to war, and many had never come back, a fact her mother frequently bewailed as damaging to Arianna’s chances.

She gave herself a shake. Why was she thinking like one of those fluff-headed girls she had secretly despised during her time on the marriage mart? Not every eligible man was interested in marriage. Indeed, in her experience, such men were so rare that they could have their pick of the ladies on the market.

And, furthermore, this man was probably not at all eligible, or he was already married, as all the good ones were. More’s the pity, said some part of her.

Even Arianna’s obscenely large dowry did not tempt any but the worst of fortune hunters to ignore her stubborn refusal to fit the mold of a fashionable debutante. She absolutely refused to pretend to be frivolous, empty-headed, and willing to dote on any gentleman who paid her attention.

Instead, she was impatient with fashionable idiocies, preferred conversations of substance, and would not treat foolish opinions as if they had merit merely because the person promoting them happened to be male.

“It is unusual,” said the man, “to meet someone who shares my enthusiasm for architecture.”

How surprising. He said “someone” and not “a lady.” And he would have been right either way. Arianna had often been told her interests were not suitable for a lady, but she knew of very few men who shared them.

Five points, she thought.

To amuse herself during the social events to which her mother insisted on dragging her, Arianna often awarded points to the gentlemen she met, adding and removing them according to the man’s conversation, actions, and characteristics. It was harmless enough. No one ever knew she was doing it, and it saved her from yawning in a man’s face or hurling a cake at his head.