"You are quite enjoying the idea of running away, aren’t you?" Erris finally spoke after almost two hours of silence. Clare glanced at him, trying to judge his mood before answering. Perhaps in some gruff way, he was attempting to make this journey endurable by being civil at last if not entirely friendly. Something had loosened up around his eyes it seemed.
"You seem to have read my mind.” She smiled. But what ever she had imagined to be remotely softened in his expression, suddenly hardened again.
"I wouldn't exactly call it that," he said shortly.
"Oh," Clare searched her mind, trying to figure what breach she had made to cause the sudden change. She pressed on; even an argument was preferable to the awkward silence the two had been enduring since Ballina had fallen a sleep a while back. "What would you call it then? Because I was thinking just that, at the very moment you spoke. I was thinking how lovely it was to be putting so much solid distance between me and that manor."
"What was so dreadful about the manor?" He asked. Clare didn't even notice the evasion of her question it was done so smoothly. Erris prided himself on points like these. How easily people will be led.
"Oh, Sir, you must think it was grand enough, and that I a dreadfully ungrateful lady to have found no enduring happiness there. But a house such as our manor, is it really any more that a large box? A cage if you will? Shall a heart ever be confined to such smallness?" Erris laughed out right when Clare finished her little speech.
"You find something amusing, Sir?" She asked
"Oh, yes, Madam I do." Erris feigned some type of bow, clumsily enough from where he sat beside her.
“What then?"
“Clare," he shook his head, smiling. Clare noticed that he used her name very naturally. “We are not in your grand manor now. You speak to me so daintily as if we were making polite conversation at one of the Balls." He laughed again. "If I ask you a question, answer me naturally. No pretenses on this journey, you see." Here his face grew serious again. "We mustn't pretend that we are things that we aren't. I tried that for a while," he paused, and reclined against the back of his seat. His mind roving back to hopes released. "It profits you little. Trust me."
Clare thought about this for awhile, and he let her think. This was a characteristic she had never known in a man before. Her father, and Astar and Brennan even were always pushing her along in conversations, or leaving her far behind. They never gave her a chance to catch up with her own thoughts. The silence of a woman deep in thought seemed to terrify them. But the silence seemed not to disturb Erris at all. He gave the ideas time to take root and spring up again within Clare's own opinion. She found her thoughts coming more clearly because of this. In fact the short silence that followed Erris’s words, seemed to cleanse Clare's mind of all
the rubbish that was always hindering her from brilliance.
"Thank you," she said finally.
"For what?" he asked
"For a new thought, and for permission to be natural, you called it. Young ladies in society are not much encouraged to be natural."
"Yes," he agreed, "and the result is that most men never meet a woman worth knowing." Yet another interesting notion that Clare had never considered, and another long, cleansing silence for her to turn over a new thought.
After a while he started again, “You never answered my question,” he reminded her.
“Oh, what question was that?” she asked innocently.
“I asked you were you enjoying the idea of running away?”
“No, I am merely enjoying the ride, the air, the landscape.” Clare truly did not want to talk about her ‘running away’. She had not yet figured out her own strange mixture of guilt and pleasure over the sudden turn her life had just taken.
“You can’t be more than twenty, surely,” Erris commented and then turned to scrutinize Clare physically. His eyes roved her body and she felt the embarrassing flash of warmth creeping up her neck as he tried to guess her age by examining her figure. He laughed at her again. “Are you blushing?” He bellowed. “Then maybe I give you too much credit with twenty. Seventeen maybe?” Her entire face was now crimson and she felt she might actually begin to sizzle if he did not stop soon. But Erris would have gone back to face Astar and all his men rather than let Clare out of this. “Ballina,” he yelled over his shoulder, still ginning at Clare, “this child you have drug along with us, is actually blushing at me!” Ballina began to stir in the back.
“Quit tormenting her, Erris,” she scolded.
“Don’t worry, love,” Erris leaned in close to Clare and the pleasantly warm smell coming off him made her blush deeper. “Ole, Ballina can cure you of blushing. A few evenings listening to some of her stories, will blush every ounce of modesty you ever had, right out of the top of your head.”
“And you’re wrong as usual, Erris,” Ballina leaned up so that her head bobbed between the two of them, “Clare will be twenty five on The Eve.” Erris looked at Ballina in disbelief. A definite look of shock passed over his face. It was not only the age that surprised him, but the birthday. Clare was quick to catch it, but Erris recovered himself just as quick.
He cast another smug look toward Clare. “An innocent, undeveloped twenty five, if you ask me.” Ballina rolled her eyes and Clare’s anger surged again as Erris added insult to injury. She quickly wrapped up in her cloak concealing herself from any further scrutiny or opinions.
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