by Mary Balogh
She could have bitten out her tongue when it was too late to recall the words.
“I do,” he said, playing a scale softly with his right hand. “It does not happen to everyone, or even perhaps to most, but it does happen. And it must be wonderful when it does. Most people settle for comfort instead. And there is nothing wrong with comfort.”
She was feeling decidedly uncomfortable.
He looked up at her then and smiled.
“I had better return you to the vicarage,” he said. “I suppose it was not quite proper to bring you here, was it? But we are betrothed and will be married very soon.”
“You do not need to walk back with me,” she said.
“Ah, but I do,” he told her, getting to his feet. “When my lady needs to go somewhere beyond my home or hers, I will escort her whenever I am able.”
It sounded a little excessively possessive, but she understood his need not to be handicapped by his disability.
My lady.
Was that what she was now—his lady?
Most people settle for comfort instead, she remembered as they left the house together. And there is nothing wrong with comfort.
Oh, there was not.
But … comfort instead of the everlasting kind of romantic love about which he had sung?
And even the comfort might not last.
They were on their way to London, in the middle of the second day of their journey. It had been tedious, as all journeys were. They had scarcely talked.
Vincent tried not to regret everything he had done in the past few days, starting with his acceptance of Sir Clarence March’s invitation to spend an evening at Barton Hall. Or perhaps starting with his decision to go to Barton Coombs instead of returning home.
He had offered marriage to a stranger—and not even a normal marriage. It was that last part that weighed most heavily upon him. He was going to have the doom of a possible separation hanging over his head from the first moment. Impulsive behavior had always been his besetting sin. And he had often lived to regret it. He had once impulsively stepped forward to see why a large cannon had not fired.
He had, though, felt a desperate need to persuade Sophia Fry to marry him, and there had seemed no other way to get her to say yes. She had needed to say yes.
The near silence in which they had traveled for a day and a half was as much his fault as hers. More so. He believed she was a little intimidated by him and his grand carriage and the grandeur of the life she was facing. And by the fact that she was stepping into the unknown.
Last night could have done nothing to help her relax. They had stopped at one of the more obscure posting inns, chosen by Martin and Handry between them, and had taken two rooms, one for Martin and one for Mr. and Mrs. Hunt. He had slept in Martin’s room, but all night he had worried about the impropriety and possible danger of Sophia’s having to huddle all alone in her room, without even a maid to lend her countenance.
He tried to think of something to say, some conversational opener that would elicit a response, perhaps even a laugh. She had a pretty laugh, though he had been given the distinct impression the day before yesterday that laughing was something she rarely did. She had led a brutally lonely life, judging by the little she had told him of it.
Before he could speak, she did.
“Just look at that church spire,” she said, her voice bright and eager. “I have noticed it before, and it always amazes me that something so very tall and slender can remain standing in a strong wind.”
He waited for realization to hit her, as it did very quickly. He heard her draw a sharp inward breath.
“I am so sorry,” she said, her voice far more subdued.
“Tell me about it,” he said.
“It belongs to a church in the little village we are approaching,” she told him. “It is a remarkably pretty village. But that tells you absolutely nothing of any significance, does it? Let me see. There are some old whitewashed, thatched cottages along the sides of the road here. Oh, one of them is bright pink. How cheerful it looks. I wonder who lives in it. The church is farther in. There, now I can see the whole of it. It is on one side of the village green and is really quite unremarkable except for the spire. I daresay the villagers were so dissatisfied with the church and so ashamed in the company of people from other, more fortunate villages that they decided to build the spire to restore their pride. There are some children playing cricket on the green. You used to play cricket. I have heard people talk about it.”
He listened with interest. She had a sharp eye and the imagination with which to embellish details in an amusing way. And there was warmth and animation in her voice.
“I cannot tell you the name of the village,” she continued. “There is nothing to say. Perhaps it does not matter. We do not have to give a name to everything that is pretty, do we? Do you realize that a rose does not call itself a rose? Nor do any of the flowers and trees surrounding it.”
He found himself grinning in her direction.
“How do you know?” he asked her. “Do you speak rose or flower language?”
She laughed, the light, pretty sound he remembered from two days ago.
He hesitated, and then decided to trust what he was beginning to suspect about her.
“I believe it was one of those boys on the village green,” he said, “or actually it was probably his father, or even his grandfather, who once hit the ball in such a high arc that it landed on the church roof. That was before the spire was built, of course.”
“But you do not even know what village that was,” she protested, sounding a little bewildered.
Ah. Perhaps he was wrong.
“The parishioners,” he continued, “were so annoyed with the boys for climbing up the ivy on the church walls to retrieve the ball, and leaving it patchy-looking and not at all picturesque—the ivy, that is—that they decided to build the spire and prevent any repetition of the sacrilege.”
There was a short silence.
“And they built it extra high,” Sophia said, “to discourage Bertha from climbing it.”
Bertha? He grinned.
“Bertha was the girl, was she,” he asked, “who climbed everything in sight even before she could walk? No one could stop her?”
“The very one,” she said. “She was a severe trial to her parents, who were forever rescuing her from trees and chimney tops and were terrified that one day she would fall and break her head.”
“Not to mention her neck,” he said. “And of course it did not help that she could climb up but never down. Indeed, she could not even bear to look down.”
“And then came the fateful day,” she said, “when the very same cricketer, who was brilliant at hitting the ball as high as he could without ever realizing that it was distance, not height, that really counted, impaled it on the very tip of the church spire.”
“And as fate would have it,” he said, “Bertha, who was supposed to be visiting her maternal grandparents twenty miles away on that day, had not gone after all because the grandfather had a chill and the incompetent physician who examined him pronounced his ailment to be typhoid and put the whole village into quarantine.”
“And so Bertha climbed the spire,” Sophia said, “and tossed the ball down while all the children cheered wildly and all the adults held their hands over their eyes and held their breath at the same time, and the vicar and the whole church choir went down on their knees to pray. Those members of the choir, that was, who were not cheering.”
“And then,” Vincent said. “And then. Blind-as-a-bat Dan, who had been looked upon as the village idiot all his seventeen years because he could not see even … well, a bat, to coin a pun, finally came into his own and was forever after the great hero of village myth. There is even a statue of him somewhere, though not on the village green at the special request of several generations of cricketers. He climbed onto the roof and shinned up the spire and brought Bertha down because he, of course, did not fear heights, as every
one else did, for the simple reason that he could not see them. She might still be up there if Dan had not climbed to her rescue.”
“By that time,” she said, “Bertha was sixteen, going on seventeen. And of course she fell in love with Dan, upon whom she had never really looked fully before. She discovered that he was wondrously strong and handsome and that he was not, of course, an idiot at all, only as blind as a bat. And he confessed that he had adored her in secret all his life because she had a voice like an angel. They married in the church with the great spire and lived happily ever after.”
“And she never climbed upon anything higher than a chair ever again,” Vincent said, “and even then it had to be a sturdy chair and only if a mouse ran underfoot. For she knew that Dan would always come to her rescue, and she feared that he might fall and kill himself and she would lose the love of her life. Their children were all cheerfully earthbound and never showed any inclination to climb even out of their cradles.”
“The end.” Sophia sighed.
“Amen,” Vincent said solemnly.
They both collapsed into laughter and snorts and giggles, until something—astonishment, perhaps, or embarrassment—hushed them.
“Have you always told stories?” he asked her after a short silence.
“I see stories,” she said. “Well, not real stories, with a beginning and middle and end. But moments in time. Foolish ones. I sketch them. Caricatures.”
“Do you?” He turned his head in her direction. “Of people you know?”
“Always,” she said, “though I believe I may try sketching a series of pictures of Bertha and Dan and the church spire. It would be an amusing new challenge.”
He smiled at her.
“And maybe I shall write the story to go with the pictures,” she said. “You must help with your parts of it. You have a way with words. Do you tell stories? Other than this one, I mean?”
“I used to invent fantastic stories to put Ursula, my youngest sister, to sleep when she was frightened by the dark or ghosts or thunder—there was always something,” he said. “Though she was older than me. And I can still invent bedtime stories for children. At Easter time, when all my family was at Middlebury Park, one of my nieces asked me to read them all a bedtime story. I could hear Amy, my oldest sister, shushing her, and I could imagine that she was also flapping her hands and making faces and otherwise trying to remind her daughter that Uncle Vincent is blind. I told the children about a dragon who freed a field mouse from a trap by breathing fire on the cords that held it imprisoned. Every evening after that I had to invent another adventure for the dragon and the mouse.”
“Oh,” she said, “I wonder if I could draw a dragon. I have a mouse in almost all my sketches—a little one in the corner.”
“Your signature?” he asked her. “Have you always been the little mouse observing the absurdities of life around you, Sophie?”
“The mouse in my sketches may be small,” she said, “but it does not always look meek and docile. Sometimes it has a wickedly gleeful smirk on its face.”
“I am glad,” he said.
They fell silent again, but for only a short while. The carriage swayed suddenly into a sharp turn, and Vincent, grasping the strap beside the door so that he would not bump against his companion, could hear the horses’ hooves clopping over cobblestones, presumably in the yard of a posting inn.
“It is a bit sooner than need be for a change of horses,” Martin said as he opened the carriage door and set down the steps. “But there is going to be a deluge any minute now, and it was in my own interest to persuade Handry to stop early since I have been forced to ride up alongside him on the box. Shall I bespeak a private parlor for you and Miss Fry, sir? And order luncheon?”
At least Martin was talking again, even if only with a clipped formality.
“Yes, please, Martin,” Vincent said, and he took his cane from the seat opposite, descended the steps without assistance—both servants knew not to offer any—and turned to hand Sophia down.
If only he could see her, he thought. And her sketches—her caricatures.
If only he could see. Just for one minute. He would not be greedy. Just one minute.
He concentrated upon his breathing. In. Out. In. Out.
He was something of an expert now at warding off these sudden, quite unpredictable bouts of panic. Not a total expert, though, he thought ruefully. Once his breath was under control, he had to fight the quite ignominious urge to shed tears, even to weep noisily with frustration and self-pity.
He smiled and offered his arm.
8
The carriage had entered London, where Sophia had spent most of her life before two years ago. And she had spent last spring here and part of this one, while her aunt and uncle took Henrietta on a round of social events in pursuit of a noble husband and Sophia remained in their rented lodgings and walked in the various parks.
This time she was coming here to be married.
It was a dizzying thought. She was not sure that even yet she comprehended the full reality of it.
They were on their way to the London home of Lord Trentham, Lord Darleigh’s friend, to ask if she might stay there until her wedding. Sophia dreaded the moment of their arrival. What would Lord Trentham and his relatives think of her? And of this situation? Would Lord Trentham look at her as Mr. Fisk did? Would he think that she was a fortune hunter taking advantage of a blind man?
But how could he not think that?
She felt helpless and a little sick.
The carriage rocked to a stop outside a solidly respectable-looking house on a long street. Sophia looked out to see Mr. Fisk jump down from the box and run up the steps to bang the knocker against the door panel. It opened after a few moments and he spoke to the man who stood in the doorway—a servant, obviously. He peered out at the carriage and then disappeared from view, leaving the door ajar.
“I believe a servant has gone to see if someone is at home,” she said. “Oh, they will think this is very presumptuous of me.”
His hand reached across the seat and covered the back of hers.
“Hugo is one of my dearest friends in the world,” he said.
That, she thought, might be part of the trouble.
It was not the servant who appeared next in the doorway, filling it. But the man who stood there, looking at Mr. Fisk and then at the carriage, and then came bounding down the steps and across the pavement, surely could not be Lord Trentham. He was a great giant of a man with a fierce, frowning face and unfashionably close-cropped hair.
Whoever he was, he was going to tell them all about their presumption, and he was not going to mince words in the telling. She could see that in his eyes.
He tore open the carriage door and leaned inside.
“Vince, you damned rogue,” he bellowed while Sophia cowered in her corner, glad she was not sitting on his side of the carriage, “what is the meaning of this? Eh? You are two days late. You might as well turn around and go back wherever the devil you came from for all the good you are to me now.”
Lord Darleigh’s face lit up with smiles.
“I am delighted to see you too, Hugo,” he said. “Or at least, I would be if I was able.”
The fierce giant was Lord Trentham.
“Get out of there,” he bellowed, stooping briefly to set down the steps while the coachman hovered helplessly in the background. “If you are not going to drive away again, as any decent man would who was two days late, get out here so that I can go up one side of you and down the other. Why the devil did you not get here in time?”
And he half dragged, half helped Lord Darleigh down onto the pavement, where he proceeded to draw him into a bear hug that looked as if it would surely crush every bone in his body. But Lord Darleigh, rather than being alarmed, was laughing and hugging the giant back.
“In time for what?” he asked. “Two days late for what?”
“My wedding,” Lord Trentham roared. “You missed my wedding
and ruined my day. Ruined my life, in fact. George came, and Imogen and Flavian and Ralph. Ben is staying with his sister in the north of England and so had a half-decent excuse for neglecting me, especially when he does not have the legs with which to dash back here. But you had disappeared off the face of the earth without any thought to the wedding invitations you might miss. No one at Middlebury Park knew where you were. Not even your mother.”
“Your wedding?” Lord Darleigh said. “You are married, Hugo? To … Lady Muir?”
“None other,” Lord Trentham said. “Lady Trentham now. I had the devil’s own job persuading her, but how could she resist me forever? No woman in her right mind could. Come inside and see her, Vince. Or not see her, to be more accurate. She can add her reproaches to mine. You have blighted both our lives.”
It was at that moment that he glanced up at the carriage and his eyes met Sophia’s.
“I have brought someone with me,” Lord Darleigh said at the same moment.
“As I can see.” Lord Trentham’s eyes remained upon Sophia. “I beg your pardon, ma’am. I did not see you sitting there. Have I used any language I ought not to have used in a lady’s hearing? Doubtless I have. Do forgive me.”
Lord Darleigh turned toward the carriage, and Sophia could see how he located the step with the inside of his boot, moved his foot along to the edge of the step, and then held out a hand to help her alight—just as he had done at the stile a few days ago.
Lord Trentham appeared even larger when she was standing on the pavement looking up at him. And he was frowning and looking strangely embarrassed.
“This is Hugo Emes, Lord Trentham, Sophie,” Vincent said. “Hugo, I would like you to meet Miss Sophia Fry, my affianced bride.”
Sophia half curtsied.
“Affianced bride,” Lord Trentham said, his eyebrows almost meeting over the bridge of his nose. “Is this sudden, lad, or were you being very secretive at Penderris a few months ago?”
“No, you might call it a whirlwind affair,” Lord Darleigh said. “We are going to be wed, probably the day after tomorrow. It is why we are in London. I have to purchase a special license first. I was hoping your stepmother would be willing to allow her to stay here for the next two nights. Now that permission will have to be asked of Lady Muir—Lady Trentham.”
