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if they could stop carping long enough to put the fragments of their marriage together and called up all the patience he’d learnt during his years without her. He should have remembered that aspect of marriage better and the magical glee of loving her less, he supposed grimly. Still, they were talking, even if it was in snaps of irritation. The odd moment of rediscovery made this all seem heartbreakingly familiar then strange by turns and he almost wished he’d slung his unconscious wife across his saddle brow and ridden off with her like a pirate with a princess.
‘Comfortable?’ he asked after the silence had stretched so thin he couldn’t endure it any longer.
‘What do you think?’ she challenged. ‘You should have let me ride astride as I asked instead of perching me up here like a doll.’
‘And have half the yokels in Wiltshire looking at your legs? I think not,’ he managed to say as even the idea of it made him rampantly jealous.
‘I doubt they would bother when they saw the rest of me,’ she said with a sweep of her hand at her dusty person that set his steed dancing and set Gideon’s overstretched nerves on edge. He tried hard to rein himself in at the same time as he clamped a firm grip on the bit and forced the idiot horse to stop wasting its energy, as well.
‘They would. You look magnificent,’ he told her tersely and surely that wasn’t a pleased little smile she was doing her best to hide behind that hideous bonnet? ‘As a girl you were lovely, now you’re beautiful, Callie,’ he added and heard her snort of disbelief with mixed feelings.
If she thought herself an antidote, would it make his task as her jealous and fiercely protective husband easier? If he ever managed to win her back, of course. Yet if she was blind to her own attractions she would draw in wolves the moment she set foot in a ballroom at his side. So, on second thoughts, his life would be hell if she had no idea how potently her lovely face and fine figure and that firm disbelief in her own charms could affect a man. He groaned aloud at the idea of following her about like a possessive stallion for the rest of his life in order to make it very clear she was his mate and he didn’t share. No, that really was putting the cart before the horses and he had to hold back all this hope in case it crashed to the ground around him again.
‘Are you hurting in some way, Gideon?’ she asked innocently, and what was he to do with such an odd mix of naïveté and sophistication as his estranged wife?
‘It’s been a long day,’ he said with a shrug.
‘It’s probably about to get a lot worse,’ she warned as Cataret House came into view again and she was quite right, just not in the sense she thought.
‘Aye, your aunt never could abide me, could she?’ he replied as if that was all that troubled him right now when even the thought of her as his true wife again was rendering him unfit for any company at all, let alone hers.
‘No, she’s deeply distrustful of all men and, considering the one she was wed to for so long, I’m not at all surprised.’
‘So why did she marry Bonhomie Bartle, Callie? They never had children, so I doubt they were forced to wed for the sake of a child as my parents were. It always puzzled me what those two saw in one another as they seemed to hate each other every bit as much as my mother and father did.’
‘Grandfather told me she insisted on marrying him, although he begged her not to go through with it, so I suppose she must have loved him once upon a time. Nobody forced her to wed the man and I never knew what she saw in him, but why do any two people wed each other when they don’t have to?’
‘Because they want to spend the rest of their lives together, I suppose,’ he said and cursed his clumsy tongue when she refused to meet his eyes. Finally they had reached the sloping drive and he and his weary mount slowed in deference to the day and the incline and at least despair was having a dampening effect on his foolish manhood.
‘Mr Bartle was heir to a wealthy baronetcy, before his great-uncle took a young wife and began producing heirs in his old age.’
‘So they ended up poor and disappointed?’
‘Yes, but I don’t think either of them ever thought the world well lost for love.’
‘Perhaps not,’ he agreed and refused to make the challenge her averted gaze and tight fists on the reins told him she expected. But we did once, his inner idiot argued all the same and he told it to be quiet before it drove the rest of him mad.
‘Nobody will answer the front door, you might as well lead this unlucky animal to the stable.’
‘Where are your outdoor staff?’ he said with a frown at the sheep-cropped turf and the faintly down-at-heel air of the whole place.
‘Aunt Seraphina says the war has made everything so expensive it’s impossible to keep a handyman and a groom. We have maids and a good cook she insists we employ to keep our young ladies healthy.’
‘And her liking for fine dining has nothing to do with that, I suppose? What have you been doing with the allowance I make you, Callie? You certainly haven’t spent it on yourself, so I hope you haven’t been learning your aunt’s nip-farthing ways.’
‘As senior schoolmistress I take a small stipend out of the fees, but it’s not enough to turn myself out in the sort of style you seem to expect, Gideon,’ she said as if he was being deliberately obtuse and the notion of who gained most from their estrangement took firm root in his mind as Virginia’s warning about Callie’s aunt rang true yet again.
‘At first I could only send enough to clothe you decently and live in modest comfort, but now the money I pay into an account in your name every month could easily run a house twice this size and still allow you to dress in style without penny pinching.’
‘It would? Why don’t I seem to be receiving any of it then?’
‘An interesting question, don’t you think?’
Callie looked thoughtful as they rounded the corner into a modest stableyard and he saw two good carriage horses and a trio of fat ponies looking curiously back at them from a nearby paddock.
‘You keep a pair of carriage horses, yet I see no riding horse? How do you endure it, Callie?’ he asked as the memory of her riding like the wind at his side slipped into his mind and made him wonder what other privations she suffered while he had been coward enough to take her at her word and stop away all these years.
‘I’m not a wild young girl now, I grew up.’
‘Did you? Have you ever taken a good look at what you prefer to a life with me, Callie? By heavens, you have a very effective way of making me humble for all the sacrifices here seem to be yours and the luxuries your aunt’s.’
‘She stood by me. She made a home for us both and at least we had each other—there was precious little else to be glad about at the time.’
‘A far more comfortable home than she could afford without you.’
‘No, Gideon, you don’t understand. The school produces a reasonable income, but I have no desire to cut a figure in local society. My aunt likes to pay calls and it keeps our school in the minds of potential clients. She sees to the business side of our enterprise while I tend to the girls in our care. We do well enough without you.’
‘So you must always believe her before me?’
‘No, of course not,’ she argued half-heartedly.
Gideon had to bite his lip as he helped her out of the saddle, then steadied her, because she had endured a great shock today and, if his suspicions were right, there were plenty more of those to come.
* * *
‘The household has been at sixes and sevens since we found you gone,’ Aunt Seraphina scolded benignly as she bustled towards them as soon as she and Gideon walked out of the baking stableyard and into the cool of the stone-flagged hall of Cataret House by the garden door. ‘How could you wander off on an afternoon like this, Calliope?