“I am not averse to walking. It is not so far to go, after all.”
He offered her his arm, and she accepted it without hesitation. “Was there a particular reason you wished to find me? Beyond my fascinating company, that is.”
“I have arranged to make a visit with Their Graces at Falstone Castle.” The Duke of Kielder was another whom Mater had taken into her heart. “The offer was made to collect me here, but it is such a long journey to require of His Grace when I could, with a little ingenuity, get myself closer to Northumberland.”
“I haven’t the least doubt any of your children, honorary or otherwise, would consider any journey, however long, an honor to make if it meant spending time with you.”
She hooked a silver eyebrow upward—he’d never before met someone whose eyebrows were entirely gray but whose hair was not. She had told him once that it was a trait she had inherited from her father. “Imagine, Scott, if you put your knack for flowery words to use in courting someone. You’d have all the young ladies in the kingdom clinging to your every word.”
Until they realizedhewas clinging to his everypenny. Then they, too, would realize he was a born failure.
“I suspect you mean to ask if I would accompany you on a journey to the north,” Scott said, “to wherever it is you’ve arranged to meet up with the Duke of Kielder.”
“When you and Sarah first moved here, we spoke of traveling. But then Sarah went and got married and ruined the entire scheme.”
He could not help a laugh. “She married one of your sons.”
“Yes, and I have not yet forgiven him for interfering with my travel plans.”
Scott had noticed that Mater’s humor seemed to emerge more fully when speaking with him than it did with others. He liked the thought that he had a lightening effect on her. She’d suffered so much in her life, and she deserved every bright spot she could claim.
“I would not only consider it an honor and privilege to travel with you, but I will also declare your request very fortuitous. There is a Sarvol holding in the North Riding of Yorkshire that I need to look in on. This journey would place me far closer to it than I am now.”
She studied him a moment. “I hadn’t heard that the late Mr. Sarvol owned any properties other than Sarvol House.”
“I have only been made aware of it in the past few months. I am discovering that my uncle left me with a great many surprises, none of which has proven the least bit pleasant.”
She patted his arm, a maternal gesture she often employed when talking with him. “The last few years before he passed, I often thought your uncle might be losing his faculties. Whether that was the impact of age or the result of a life spent so bent on anger and bitterness that he had begun drowning in it, I don’t know.”
Scott sighed. “‘Anger and bitterness.’ That is a rather perfect way of describing him.”
“I confess, I’m not sure I will ever be able to forgive him for how cruel he was to your sister.”
His voice tight with those painful memories, Scott said, “Neither am I.”
Uncle Sarvol had been more than cruel to Sarah; he’d been vindictive, abusive, destructive. Only Mater’s taking Sarah in, giving her a home away from their uncle, had saved Scott’s beloved sister from the mountain of abuse that had defined Uncle Sarvol’s last few weeks. There’d been no real escape for Scott though. There still wasn’t.
“I hope to reach Cumberland by the end of the week,” Mater said. “I would not have waited to ask you, but I only just received word yesterday from Adam that the arrangement I suggested would suit him.”
It would never stop being strange to hear the infamous Duke of Kielder, a man who was feared throughout the kingdom, referred to so casually by his Christian name. But Mater had known him since he was a child and had loved him as her own.
“I will have my traveling coach ready and at the door of the dower house bright and early tomorrow,” he told her. “We can make the journey as quickly or as slowly as you wish.”
“In case I have not told you enough in the last two years, I’m so happy that you’re here now,” Mater said. “I missed you during the years you spent in America. I realized it was your home and that you were there with your family, but I couldn’t help feeling all that time that I wished you were home with me.”
He gave her a hug, fully intending to pull back and be on his way. She, however, didn’t permit it.
She held him fiercely. “I do love you, Scott. I hope you know that.”
Was it any wonder he would move heaven and earth for this lady? These moments, when she said things that gave him hope, very nearly drowned out the ceaseless reverberations of his uncle’s denunciations.
She believed in him. He didn’t want to disappoint her.
He walked her to the door of the Lampton Park dower house, then made his way to his own home.Home. It didn’t truly feel that way. Sarvol House held the memory of his father telling him of his childhood spent there. It echoed with the voices of his parents and sister during their many visits over the years. The front approach, no matter that it was more overgrown and less impressive than it had once been, always pulled his thoughts back to the moment two years earlier when he had arrived here, knowing Sarvol House would eventually be his. He’d been so full of hope, so convinced that good things lay ahead for him. He’d returned to his father’s childhood home, to a place where he knew his father had been happy. He’d anticipated having a bit ofhis father back while living in Sarvol House. When Scott saw the state of it now, though—somewhat rundown, devoid of people, feeling less like a home every day—his father seemed farther away than ever.
“I have to make this right,” he whispered, approaching the front door. “Somehow.”
But that was the rub. He had spent a year and a half uncovering one problem after another connected to the Sarvol estate, and no matter how hard he tried, no matter what potential solution he stumbled upon, nothing worked. Nothing. And as far as he could tell, nothing would.