Once she was inside it, Elizabeth was almost knocked over by a wave of sadness. Just a few short months ago, she would have been sleeping in this room with her husband and wouldn’t have had to rely on the housekeeper to find it.
She took her time examining all the items on his escritoire (no awe-inspiring letters this time!), touching his clothes, and smelling his pillows like she wanted to.
She then quickly deduced where Stevenson could have stored the boots, pulled them out, penned a brief note mentioning the Secret Lady Society, left it where the boots used to be, and all but ran back to her own room, feeling like a child again.
The prank was discovered the next morning, so breakfast was a merry affair, despite the awful weather. Sinclair was really the only man who seemed truly downcast because he couldn’t go hunting, whereas the rest took the prank for what it was – a fun game among friends. Surprisingly, the unmarried men seemed to have enjoyed the prank the most and were eager to hear all the details of its execution.
“We shall retaliate,” Frederick swore in a solemn voice, while raising his butter knife in the air like a general might do with a sabre.
Isabella’s eyes glittered with so much joy and mischief and love that Lizzie had to look away. Not for the first time, she was jealous of how well-matched the couple were and how much fun they seemed to have together.
Colin didn’t say much about the prank, but he did seem to notice the change in her, so he said, loud enough for everyone to hear, “I shall rather enjoy a walk after breakfast, if you’d be so kind to join me, wife?”
Elizabeth blinked several times, uncertain if he was being serious in his offer. It had rained all night, and the ground was most likely all mud.
“Of course, I would need my boots back first,” he added with a smile, and Lizzie found herself smiling back.
“Of course.”
After breakfast, they dressed (Stevenson had come to her door to pick up his master’s boots with an almost amused expression) and went out into the gardens. Despite the gloomy sky and muddy ground, Elizabeth enjoyed the landscaped vistas and carefully curated and symmetrically arranged paths and lawns. It was obvious that whoever maintained this garden not only had great skill but also great love.
“Did you enjoy stealing my boots?” Colin asked her after a while, and the tone in which he said it awoke this irrational fear in her heart that he had somehow seen her smell his pillow.
She examined his face for any trace of that knowledge, but could only detect friendly curiosity.
“More than I thought I would,” she admitted with a smile. “I hope you’re not too sad that you can’t go shooting today. I thought that because of your arm…”
“Don’t worry,” he interrupted her. “I wasn’t planning to participate anyway.”
“Good,” she said with a small smile. “How are you enjoying our stay here?”
“It’s all right, although I find myself a bit bored lately. After a while, all these country manors start to look the same.”
“Colin Talbot, tiring of England? I can hardly believe it,” Elizabeth teased him. “Next thing you know, you’ll be on a ship to America.”
“You never know,” Colin said with a small smile.
They walked in silence for a while.
“Does your arm bother you?” Elizabeth asked.
“Frankly, what bothers me is your sister’s presence,” he said with a frown, then widened his eyes. “I didn’t mean to offend you, I apologise.”
Elizabeth was surprised by her own laugh. “I assure you I’m not offended, but I had no idea you felt that way.”
“And I usually don’t, because the Lord in His infinite kindness allows me to forget just how vexing it is to listen to Lady Charlotte’s vapid stories and observations,” he said. “You two are so different, I sometimes forget you are sisters.”
Elizabeth said nothing, shocked by the knowledge that all the polished manners she coveted and admired in her sister were being interpreted like this.
“When we were at Eton,” Colin said suddenly, “I came home with Nicholas a few times for school holidays. And Lady Charlotte was insufferable even then; she always followed us around, especially Sinclair.” He smiled. “Well, now she finally has him.”
“You think she liked him even then?”
“Who knows? She was a spoiled little girl, and she wanted what she wanted. I just cannot,” Talbot stopped walking and shook his head, then turned his whole body towards his wife, who had also stopped walking. “I just cannot stop thinking about this lately. If Nicholas hadn’t found you, you, my precious, kind, Elizabeth, would have spent your life living close to the rookery, working your fingers to the bone until you’d lost your eyesight.” He appeared to be struggling to breathe as he said these incredibly emotional, confusing things to Elizabeth. “Every Wednesday, I am assailed by visions of you bent over some lady’s dress, yourbody thin and frail like it was when I first saw you in front of your house.”
“Colin,” she said gently and put a hand on his shoulder, careful not to jostle his arm. “Don’t agitate yourself.”
“But I must! Don’t you see how wrong I was! Itdoesn’tmatter! You and your sister were both born to the same father, a duke, the only difference being that one of you has had the good luck to be born inside marriage, the other no. How arbitrary it is of society to ascribe such vileness to the very notion of your existence, a thing so utterly outside of your control? And how much more impressive, interesting, lovely, hard-working, clever, and resilient are you than all the other women in existence?”
