Lady Griffith's Second Chance

Chapter Eighteen

Regan did not see Thomas again before she left. She spent most of the night awake, either pacing or watching the clock or looking out her bedroom window without seeing anything at all. She composed a letter she had no intention of giving to him, crumpling it up and setting it to light with the flame of her candle before she tossed it into the fireplace, the paper curling and turning black before it seemed to disappear entirely. She was behaving entirely like a child, she told herself. Her brief time in London before she had married Edmund had shown more maturity from her, she reminded herself.

But then, Edmund was not Thomas. And she was not the same woman she had been over twenty years before.

They did indeed leave in the morning. She and Katharine ate in their rooms while their luggage was borne away and loaded onto the carriage. Lord and Lady Polmerol bid them farewell, as did Mr. Winthrop, though his attention was focused solely on his betrothed. Regan caught herself glancing at the stairs, at any and every doorway, waiting for Thomas to make an appearance.

He did not.

Neither did Lord Hays. In fact, she saw nothing of him after Thomas's return. Because he had made his accusations against Thomas with the belief he would not have to face him again in Regan's presence? Regan did not know. Nor, she found, did she care. All she wanted was to be home again, and as the carriage trundled through the gates and up the long, curving lane towards her own home, she gripped the edge of her seat, fighting the urge to fling open the door and run the rest of the way to the door.

Jack and Maria were waiting for her. They must have noted the approach of the carriage, and were already careening down the front steps, bits of gravel kicking out behind her son's shoes as he ran and barreled into her arms.

And there came the nurse behind them, chiding them for their indecorous behavior, bustling like a sheep dog to draw them away and make the two children stand together and greet their mother with some little bit of manners and dignity.

But Regan did not care two figs for dignity. She wanted her children.

"What have you been up to?" She looked down at Jack's trousers, rolled up to the knee, and Maria's skirts all dark and sodden at the hem. "In the stream, I suppose? Well, let us hope you have not gone and ruined another pair of boots," she admonished, though there was no sting in her words. She kissed their heads, then their cheeks, then pulled them towards her again, revelling in the smell of them, all outdoors and damp and perspiration with a hint of something to do with berries. Jam, no doubt, judging by the sticky smear across Maria's cheek.

"Inside, then," Regan chivvied them on and up the stairs again, though she regretted it as soon as they stepped through the door and she felt the walls and ceiling as they seemed to close in around her. After several days in a carriage, in various inns and the cramped rooms they offered, she had no desire to be inside at all. "Some tea and sandwiches on the terrace, please," she told Mrs. Higgs, their housekeeper, who bustled away while Molly attempted to convince her to go upstairs and change out of her travelling dress.

"I am fine," Regan told her. "I am in greater need of fresh air and sustenance than to change out of a wrinkled gown laden with dust."

She removed her bonnet and gloves, pushed back a few stubborn tendrils of hair determinedly clinging to the perspiration on her neck. The children continued to bound around her like excited rabbits, and she herded them through the house and towards the terrace, where their energy would have more room to be expended.

"Ah, you're home earlier than I anticipated." Aunt Agnes stepped out from the music room, a place she had taken to using for her own day to day activities as the children did not frequent it as much. "I heard a carriage coming up the drive but I did not think it would be you."