Gypsy - Lesley Pearse [78]
‘I thought I’d take you up to Central Park,’ Theo said as he helped her into the cab. ‘The trees should be beautiful in their autumn colours, and later we’ll go to a restaurant I know near there.’
Beth hadn’t been to Central Park since August, when the grass was brown from lack of rain. That day even the leaves of the trees had hung limply with a coating of dust. But it looked beautiful again now, the grass a lush green and the trees a blaze of yellow, russet, gold and brown in the sunshine.
Arm in arm, they walked around the lake, and Theo told her he’d had a big win the previous night at Heaney’s. ‘I won’t be going back there for a while,’ he said. ‘Heaney’s a nasty piece of work and I wouldn’t put it past him to pay someone to attack and rob me as I leave his place. He knows I took you home last night too, so if he asks you anything about me, just say you hardly know me, that we only met once on the ship coming here.’
‘That is all I could say,’ she said impishly. ‘I don’t know anything much about you.’
He laughed. ‘And I intend to rectify that today. Now, what would you like to know?’
They sat on a bench by the lake and he told her about his parents, older brother, two younger sisters and their home.
Beth had a picture in her mind of a mansion surrounded by farmland with a tree-lined avenue leading up to it. He’d been educated first at home with a governess, later at boarding school. His father ran the farm himself and Theo described him as a bluff, opinionated and selfish man who had no time for anyone who wasn’t as strong, or didn’t ride or shoot as well, as he did.
‘It was fortunate I could ride and shoot as well, if not better, than him,’ Theo said with a grin. ‘But that didn’t make up for my lack of interest in farming, and my reputation as a ladies’ man. He blamed Mother for both, but then he blamed her for almost everything.’
He said his mother was a loving but rather fragile woman who was unable to stand up to her overbearing husband. His older brother was like his father and Theo felt he had nothing in common with either of them. He did have a great deal of affection for his younger sisters, but said despairingly that they were like their mother, indecisive, weak and without any opinions of their own, so he thought they were destined to marry men just like his father.
‘I’m the odd one out,’ he said with a shrug. ‘I always wanted more than was offered — excitement, colour and new experiences. The thought of living the kind of sedate life my father approved of, which inevitably would mean marrying someone appropriate, filled me with horror. I want adventure, and when I marry it will be an adventure too, to someone with a mind of her own, passionate, with a sense of fun. I never want my children to suffer the kind of chilly formality I grew up in.’
Beth secretly thought that woman sounded like her, but she kept that opinion to herself and told him instead how she had been destined to be the dutiful stay-at-home daughter, until her parents’ deaths pushed her into a different kind of servitude.
She said her father had a heart attack and that her mother died in childbirth with Molly, but passed on quickly to how she went to work for the Langworthys, lightening the story by making it clear how good her mistress was to her.
‘My heart wasn’t really in leaving England,’ she admitted. ‘But it was for the best, and Mrs Langworthy writes every few weeks to tell me how Molly is getting on.’
‘You’re a very courageous girl,’ Theo said thoughtfully.
‘Not many could cope with so much while so young. I’m sure your parents would have been very proud of you.’
Beth laughed. ‘I’m not so sure they’d have approved of me playing my fiddle in a saloon.’
‘You are using a God-given talent, and you are making a great many people happy