That Summer: A Novel Read Free Page B

sleepy village with the smell of the sea in the air.
    It might, perhaps, have been a little bit lonely, but Imogen had never wanted for occupation. As soon as she was old enough to read, she had helped her father with his studies, marveling over the tiny figures painted into illuminated letters, careful not to rip manuscripts gone frail and brittle with age. By the time she was six, she could read the cramped Latin hands of late-medieval scribes as easily as she could the printed pages in her primers. There had been no question of her going to the village school—she was the daughter of the vicar, of a different order than the village children—so her father had taught her himself, making geography and history come alive with his tales of tormented kings and defiant queens, of knights and ladies and impossible quests.
    It wasn’t all knights and ladies and fantasy. All of the responsibilities of the lady of the parish had quickly devolved to her. The villagers came to her father for spiritual consolation, but it was Imogen who tended to their more practical needs, bringing soups and jellies to the poor, reading to the elderly, making sure they had enough wood for the winter.
    Through the shrubbery, just down the hill, lay the church where her father preached every Sunday, or had preached, before the cough had settled in his chest and his lungs. Hard by the little village church, in the shadow of the steeple, she could see the grim shapes of tombstones, one after the other.
    A touch of sun, Imogen told herself staunchly, that was all that was needed. Warm weather and good food and her father would be right as rain again.
    “Truly,” Imogen said, tucking in a corner of the blanket next to her father. “I want to marry Arthur—Mr. Grantham.”
    She stammered a bit over the name. It was so new still. She wanted to hug it to herself, to whisper his name in private, to marvel over it like a bit of sea glass found on the beach, something rich and strange and rare.
    Impossible to think that only three weeks ago she’d had no idea such a man existed and he no notion of her. There they had been at opposite ends of the world until fate had brought them together.
    Arthur, she repeated to herself. In public he could be Mr. Grantham, but she had the right to call him Arthur.
    It was her father’s illness, ironically, that had brought her and Arthur together. As the winter had grown colder and her father had grown sicker, he had begun to fret about money. There had never been terribly much. What little they had her father spent on books. That hadn’t mattered, so long as he had his parish, but with his death Imogen would lose her home and what little income there was. There was nothing saved away, nothing salable, except for her father’s beloved fifteenth-century Book of Hours.
    Against Imogen’s protests, he had put it about, through select channels, that his book, his precious book, might be available for sale.
    She had expected the purchaser to be someone of her father’s age, another elderly antiquarian, with a lined face and thin hands, someone as pale and fragile as the old parchment he coveted.
    Instead, it had been Arthur.
    He came riding in, like his namesake, like a knight of old, albeit in a sensible traveling chaise rather than on a charging destrier. Imogen didn’t hold that against him. It would be rather hard to ride a galloping steed all the way from London, particularly given the state of the roads in winter.
    He had appeared on a blustery February day, bringing with him the tang of the outside world, like the orange her father always gave her at Christmas, tart and sweet and strange. Arthur’s long ginger whiskers, the cut of his clothes, the shape of his hat, all spoke of a world well outside their cloistered village.
    He was not a man of fashion, Arthur had told her apologetically, just a widower, a scholar, a man of quiet tastes and quiet habits.
    He had found her in the garden that first day, on this