And he was only half joking, she thought, puzzled. Perhaps he did not understand that this was only a honeymoon period. Perhaps he thought his feelings would last. But what were his feelings? Was his passion for her only physical? Why had he married her of all women? He was thirty-one years old. He was an aristocrat, rich, powerful, influential, beautiful. Within the past ten years he might have married anyone he chose. No one, surely, would have refused him.
Why her?
But only half her attention was on the mystery that was her husband. The rest was upon the slight sickness she was feeling in her stomach. They had stopped for luncheon a short while ago. The other carriage had remained there along with their baggage and all the servants except the coachman. They would return there for the night. But soon they would come to Wensbury, where she had spent a couple of years of her infancy, where her mother was presumably buried, where her grandparents still lived at the vicarage beside the church, where her grandfather was still vicar.
Was this all a huge mistake? Since they had not wanted her, would it have been better to leave well enough alone and forget about them? But now that the blank emptiness of years had been wiped away, how could she be content not to know everything there was to know? She had to see them, even if they turned her away again. She had to see what she so dimly and inadequately remembered—the room with the window seat, the graveyard below, the lych-gate. Yes, she had had to come.
And then, long before she was prepared for it, they arrived in what looked to be a small, sleepy, picturesque village. Wensbury. There was almost no one outside—except a young boy who was bowling a hoop along the street until he spotted the carriage. He stopped then, yelled something in the direction of the thatched, whitewashed cottage beside him, and gawked at them, his mouth at half-mast, while a young woman came to the door, wiping her hands on her apron. A small dog a little farther along the street took exception to their invasion of its territory and barked ferociously, waking with a start the elderly man who had been sleeping on a bench outside his cottage, the dog at his feet, and setting him to staring after them, his hands clutched about the handle of the cane planted between his legs. Two women gossiping across a garden hedge stopped, probably midsentence, to stare in open amazement.
Anna doubted Avery had noticed any of it.
“It is a pretty church,” he said, looking across the village green. “Many country churches are. I wonder if there is a bell in that tower. I would wager there is.” Then he turned to look at her and, seeing her expression, said, “Anna, Anna, no one is going to eat you. I will not allow it.” He took her hand in a firm grasp.
“If they do not wish to see me,” she said, “we will just leave, Avery. At least I have come.”
“It sounds to me,” he said, “as though you are about to say you will be content.”
“Yes,” she admitted.
He squeezed her hand to the point of pain as the carriage turned sharply about the green.
And then they were drawing up outside what must be the vicarage beside the church, and an elderly gentleman with white, bushy hair and eyebrows and no hat was stepping out through the . . . oh, through the lych-gate from the churchyard and turning their way, an amiable smile of welcome on his face. As Avery descended from the carriage and turned to hand Anna down, the vicarage door opened and an elderly lady, tiny and birdlike, gray hair more than half hidden beneath a lacy cap, stood there looking out with placid curiosity. Not many grand carriages passed through Wensbury, Anna guessed, and even fewer stopped outside the church.
“Good morning, sir, ma’am,” the gentleman said. “May I be of assistance to you?”
“The Reverend Isaiah Snow?” Avery asked.
“I have that pleasure, sir,” the gentleman said as the lady came along the garden path toward the gate. “And vicar of the church here for the past fifty years. Some of my younger parishioners believe I must be almost as old as the church. And this is my good wife. How may we be of service to you? Is it the lych-gate that caused you to stop? It is a fine example of its type, and has always been kept in good repair. Or the church, perhaps? It dates back to Norman times.”
“Is that a bell tower?” Avery asked, his quizzing glass in his hand.
“It is indeed,” the Reverend Snow said. “And there are four faithful bell ringers in the village who duly waken all sleepyheads on a Sunday and ring them to morning service.”
“Isaiah,” his wife said, “perhaps the lady would care to step into the house for a glass of lemonade while you show the gentleman the church. You have started him on his favorite subject, sir, and will not get away from him within the hour, I predict.”
“Allow me to introduce myself,” Avery said, while Anna’s hand turned cold in his warm clasp. “Avery Archer, Duke of Netherby.”
“Ah,” the vicar said, “I knew when I saw the crest on the door of the carriage that you must be somebody of importance, sir. We are honored that you have seen fit to stop here.”
“And may I present my wife, the duchess,” Avery continued, “formerly Lady Anastasia Westcott, though she has been known through most of her life as Anna Snow.”
The lady’s hands crept up to cover her cheeks and her face grew as pale as her name. She swayed, and it seemed to Anna that she would surely fall. But she clutched at the fence before it could happen.
“Anna?” she said, her voice little more than a whisper. “Little Anna? But you died twenty years ago. Of typhoid.”