Unable to sit still, Eden got up and went to the glass-paned double doors connecting the drawing room to the garden. The garden spread out before her, no longer an ugly maze of weeds and undergrowth but tamed into something approaching order. There was still a touch of wildness about it, but she found that she liked it that way.
Perhaps her new appreciation went hand in hand with her gradual discovery that the countryside was not Coventry after all. It was not a place to be avoided, a backwater where nothing ever happened. Even the woods seemed to beckon instead of repel. And Hartsmere itself, after a thorough cleaning by a local charwomen and two additional maidservants, revealed the charms she had overlooked as a girl.
Eden heard voices just out of sight, and soon Hartley Shaw came into view, Donal trailing after him. Hartley touched a few of the dormant plants that he had shaped and nurtured with such surprising care, inviting Donal to do the same.
Hartley knelt on a patch of bare earth, his back blocking Eden’s view. Two heads, both nearly the same shade of brown, bent together. After a long moment, Hartley looked up. His nostrils flared as if to smell the air. Then he turned to look directly at Eden.
As always, longing and desire roared through Eden like a Lakeland flood. She put out her hand to brace herself against the doorframe.
Hartley did not smile. He did so even less often than Donal—especially since their first visit to Birkdale. When he spoke to her, he didn’t show his former impudence; in fact, he was noticeably distant. But instead of helping Eden overcome her impossible attraction to him, his behavior only served to increase it.
She closed her eyes. Who would have thought that you had such feelings left?
“Mother?”
She opened her eyes to find Donal with a stalk of tiny white flowers in his hand.
“For you,” he said and presented the flower to her. She was charmed far more than if the ton’s richest peer had presented her with an expensive jewel, and profoundly touched.
“Thank you, Donal,” she said. “What a very nice thing to do.” She was smelling its perfume before she realized that it was a lily of the valley, a flower that did not bloom until well into spring. She looked over Donal’s head for Hartley Shaw. He was no longer in the garden.
“Donal, where did you find this flower?” she asked.
“Hartley gave it me.”
“And where did he find it?”
Donal pointed into the garden. Eden saw only the bare patch of earth where Shaw and her son had knelt a few moments ago.
There was no sense in trying to make Donal explain. His heart was free of deception, though his imagination was quite extraordinary.
“Did you get your breakfast this morning?” she asked Donal with a bright smile.
“With Hartley, before the sun came up.” All at once he was contrite. “Do you want me to wait for you next time, Mother?”
He could still surprise her. She hugged him lightly as he preferred. “I am quite the slugabed, am I not? You need not wait on breakfast, as long as you join me for luncheon.”
Donal planted a wet kiss on her cheek. “Very well, Mother. May I go help Hartley with the horses now?”
“Off with you, then!” She watched him run through the garden and toward the stables. The flower, almost forgotten, claimed her attention again.
How very odd. The hothouse stoves have not been lit. How could Shaw have come by it?
“What have you there, Niece?”
Eden turned with a guilty start to face Aunt Claudia. “Donal brought me a flower,” she said, surprised at the stammer in her words.
“So I see. How lovely.” Claudia examined the blossom and touched one tiny white, bell-shaped flower. Eden waited for the obvious questions, but Claudia did not voice them. She glanced through the open doors.
“Donal is with Shaw again,” she said.
“Yes.” Eden wandered across the room with an air of unconcern. “Have you become acquainted with him, Aunt?”
“I have no desire to, and you should keep your son away from such unwholesome influences.”