He gave a short laugh. "I'd like to."
"Why should you not?"
"I've no experience." He dug the tip of his stick into the damp gravel. "Clanross did say he would find something for me on the hustings, but that was before I broke my blasted shin."
Maggie sat beside him. "There will be other elections."
"Not for years," Johnny said glumly. "I'm twenty-five and no farther along than I was when I came down from Oxford."
"Surely that's not..." Maggie bit her lip again. What did she know of politicks? He would be thinking her a thrusting sort of female.
"Not what, Maggie?"
She faced him, hot with embarrassment. "Not entirely true. You have Clanross's interest."
"But I'm his private secretary. Barney Greene deals with political matters."
"That's true now, but in a year or so things will be different. Mr. Greene talks of retiring to his manor, and I daresay there will be a by-election, and..."
Johnny was smiling at her. "You have it all planned out."
"I'm s-sorry, Johnny. It's just that I'm interested."
"That's kind of you, Lady Margaret."
She looked away, sure she had offended him. He had been calling her Maggie all morning.
Jean and Owen had crossed the length of the bridge and were now coming back. They stopped again in mid-span, and the poet flung out his arm in a gesture that embraced the grounds and the house, and all he surveyed, probably.
"I wonder what he is declaiming now?" Johnny murmured.
"He is writing an anthem for the ploughmen of England."
Johnny made a rude noise in his throat. |
