by Mary Balogh
She was laughing and tapping Mr. Maddox on one arm after he suggested that she was Venus and was rivaling the stars in brightness when someone else joined the group. Someone who made her insides jump even before she looked at him. She had known he was coming to London, of course, but she had not known that he had arrived. Still, she told herself, she should have been prepared.
Fortunately she was locked safely inside the mask she had chosen to wear since her arrival in London. She turned her dazzling smile on him.
Unlike every other man present, he wore no wig. Neither was his hair powdered, as hers was. His hair, correctly rolled at the sides, neatly tied back, and bagged in black silk behind, looked startlingly dark. His face was still thinner than it should have been, angular, ascetic, handsome. He was dressed in dark blue velvet, a contrast to the pastel-shaded silks and satins of the other gentlemen.
It had been less than a month. It seemed an eternity. It was difficult to believe that those events at Bowden had really happened. She had come to feel that they had happened to a different person, someone who was no longer herself.
“Hello, Emmy,” he said. His eyes were soft on her, though he did not really smile.
She raised her fan to her nose and kept her eyes sparkling. He turned to greet his sister and the other occupants of the box, then accepted an invitation to step inside and seated himself between Aunt Marjorie and Lord Quinn.
“Egad,” one of her followers said just as she turned her eyes on him, “someone who has been granted the privilege of addressing you familiarly. Shall I call him out, Lady Emily? Or shall I put a bullet through my brain?”
Emily tapped him sharply on the arm.
“Do you not know Lord Ashley Kendrick, Max?” Viscount Burdett said. “Harndon’s brother?”
“Ah,” the other young man said. “Merely family. I will live on to hope, then.” He held one hand theatrically over his heart.
But there were too many participating in the conversation. It was too dizzying to try to watch the right one. And they had nothing important to say. Emily smiled brightly and looked around her—everywhere except at him.
“If you will pardon us,” Viscount Burdett said, taking Emily’s hand and setting it on his sleeve again, “the ballet is about to begin. I would appreciate it if my invited guests could watch the dancing unobstructed.”
The other gentlemen all grumbled good-naturedly and moved off. Emily looked at Lord Burdett, who pointed at the orchestra. They were tuning their instruments. She had never seen ballet, and had been looking forward to it. She directed her eyes at the stage and resisted the urge to remove her hand from the viscount’s arm.
Ashley had moved to Aunt Marjorie’s other side, so that he was in the far corner of the box. He leaned back in his chair rather than forward as most people were doing as they waited for the performance to begin. He was watching her. She did not turn her head by even a fraction of an inch, but she had felt his every move. And she felt his eyes.
Something inside her threatened to crumble. Everything that she had built so determinedly and so eagerly during the past weeks. She was not going to let it happen. It was herself she had created since coming to London—her free and happy self. She refused to crawl back into misery and slavery to a love that had held her in thrall for eight years and had brought her precious few moments of happiness. She was happy with this new life. More than happy.
She realized suddenly, with something of a jolt, that the ballet was in progress and had been for some time. Her eyes had watched it but had seen nothing at all. She thought for one moment that her smile had slipped, but it had not. She turned it briefly on the viscount and he returned it and touched her hand again with his free one.
The visual spectacle of the ballet was magnificent. It was music for the eyes. The dancers moved with precision and grace to a silent melody. For a short while she felt the same connection she did when she was alone with nature.
But she also felt Ashley watching her.
• • •
He had arrived in London late in the morning and had called upon his uncle just an hour later. Ashley was staying at Harndon House, which had been opened in imminent expectation of the duke’s arrival with his family. Luke had written to invite him to stay there, and after a brief hesitation he had accepted. He would not cower from his family like a whipped schoolboy. What was past was past—as far as his relations with his family were concerned, anyway.
His uncle had pumped his hand and slapped his shoulder and shown every sign of being delighted to see him. Ashley had wondered if the invitation had been a mere courtesy, if perhaps they would have preferred it if he had refused. He must pay his respects to Lady Sterne without delay, he was told, but the gels—his uncle’s quite inappropriate word for his betrothed and Emmy—were to attend a private garden party during the afternoon. They were all going to Vauxhall that evening, though, as guests of Viscount Burdett. Ashley must come too—his uncle would send around to Burdett’s to make the arrangements.
A note was delivered to Harndon House later in the day expressing the viscount’s wish that Lord Ashley Kendrick would honor him by being one of his guests for the evening.
Who the devil was Viscount Burdett? Ashley wondered. And he wondered too if Emmy was one of his guests. But she must be, he reasoned, if Lady Sterne was to be there. Poor Emmy. He did not like the thought of her being dragged about to all the social entertainments. She would not like them.
He found himself aching to see her again. To see what he had done to her. She must have felt obliged to take herself away from Bowden and away from her brother and sisters for a while, he mused, and so she had come here, to exactly the wrong place for someone like Emmy. He expected to find her lost and wan and listless. Perhaps she would be ready to listen to another marriage offer. He was not particularly happy at Penshurst, but he could offer her countryside there, hills, a river, trees.
He went alone to Vauxhall and found his way to Viscount Burdett’s box. He was not the first to arrive. He spotted Doris and Weims. The other occupants were blocked from his view by the press of men in front of the box. It was only as he drew closer that he saw what the attraction was—or who.
She looked much as she had looked at Luke’s ball—fashionable, elegant, and quite extraordinarily beautiful. Except that there she had not worn cosmetics. Or a small black patch placed just where it would draw attention to her eyes. And there, though she had smiled and shone with delight at the occasion and at her first minuet, she had not been exuberant and laughing and—coquettish. She was tapping some foppish-looking gentleman in lavender on the arm and drawing to herself all the foolery of flattery and mindless gallantry. Burdett—it must be he, Ashley figured—who sat beside her, looked like the cat who had drunk the cream or caught the canary or some such cliché. Emmy was flirting with the lot of them.
Ashley’s first instinct, thankfully contained, was to lash about him with his fists.
She became aware of him. He expected her smile to soften on him. She had refused to marry him, but they had parted on affectionate terms. He remembered that last hour they had spent together, both rashly sitting on the soaked grass, almost knee to knee, while she learned to speak her first word. And he remembered too that at the ball he had known as soon as he looked into her eyes that she was Emmy.
Her eyes—her very shallow eyes—continued to sparkle as she smiled at him and raised her fan to her nose. She looked wonderfully happy. But her smile chilled him. She did not look like Emmy. He was sorry he had come. To Vauxhall. To London.
He entered the box and sat between his uncle and Lady Sterne after nodding to Doris and Weims and exchanging a few pleasantries with them. He congratulated Lady Sterne on her betrothal, kissed her hand, concentrated all his attention on her. But just as all the gentlemen clustered outside the box began to move away and the orchestra began to tune their instruments so that the ballet mi
ght begin, Lady Sterne leaned toward him and tapped him on the knee.
“I will change places with you if I may, dear boy,” she said, “and sit next to Theo.”
Ashley was briefly amused. The two of them had been lovers for twenty years or more and had always behaved with perfect good breeding in public, and yet it was important to them now to sit next to each other? He almost expected to see them linking hands. But his amusement soon waned. From the chair that Lady Sterne had occupied, he had no choice but to look across the box and see Emmy.
He might have turned his head, of course, to watch the ballet—it was rude to stare at one of the box’s occupants. But he could not stop himself from doing just that.
She was watching the ballet, but she did not look absorbed, with the look of wonder he would have expected to see in her eyes. She still had the smile on her face, the coquettish smile that was not Emmy’s at all. And her hand lay along Burdett’s arm, her fingers splayed on his wide cuff. Her chin was lifted in a gesture of pride.
Was this what he had done to her?
He remembered—it was when he was dancing with her at Bowden—asking her if it was a disguise she wore or if that was what they had done to her. Have they tamed you and your heart has not cried out for the wild? he had asked her. Do they have you singing prettily here, like a linnet in a cage?
No, they had not done that to her. She had still been free. The next morning she had been out at the falls, painting, looking like his little fawn. She had painted the life force, bursting passionately through every living thing and out into the universe itself. It was he who had now done it to her. He had tamed her spirit and caged it.
There was an ache in his chest and his throat. He felt like crying.
Viscount Burdett rose and bowed over her hand and took her walking along one of the lamp-lit paths after the ballet was over. Lady Sterne looked at Doris and raised her eyebrows, and she and Weims followed them to offer chaperonage. Ashley stayed where he was. Soon, he saw, there were other gentlemen walking with Burdett and Emmy.
“Lud,” Lady Sterne said, “but ’twas the best thing I ever did to bring Emily to town, Theo. She is enjoying herself immensely and has almost the largest court of any lady here this Season. I am in daily expectation of offers for her hand.”
“’Twould not surprise me, Marj,” Lord Quinn said. “She is the loveliest gel here, and she has those speaking eyes. Burdett has been marked in his attentions. A viscount too, egad. She could do worse.”
Ashley clamped his teeth together and said nothing, though the conversation continued on the same subject for a while longer—almost as if the newly betrothed couple had forgotten both his presence and the fact that if Emmy was ever to marry, he was the only possible candidate for her hand.
15
SHE had been shopping all morning on Oxford Street and Bond Street with Lady Sterne. She had spent money quite unnecessarily on a cornflower-trimmed straw hat. She had enough hats already to wear for a month without wearing the same one twice, she was sure. She also had scarcely slept the night before—for the first time since she came to London. And there was a connection between the purchase of the hat and the sleepless night. Ashley was going to take her walking during the afternoon in the Mall.
He had not spoken a word to her at Vauxhall after his initial greeting, not until he took his leave, early, before the rest of them. She had just returned from her stroll with Viscount Burdett, Doris, and Andrew. He had bowed over her hand after standing and speaking with the others first. She had thought he was going to leave without speaking to her at all. But he had.
“I have asked Lady Sterne if she will be at home tomorrow afternoon, Emmy,” he had said. “I will call and take you walking in St. James’s Park, if I may?”
She had smiled and nodded. In that moment there had been only Ashley and no consideration at all of the wisdom of being close to him. He had left before she saw the annoyance on Viscount Burdett’s face. But he had no reason to be annoyed. She did not belong to him and did not intend to. Besides, she walked and drove with other gentlemen. She liked it that way.
“Lord Ashley Kendrick is a member of your family, Lady Emily?” he had asked her, leaning toward her so that, she guessed, no one else in the box would hear what he was saying. “A type of brother?”
She had smiled, opening her fan and cooling her face with it.
“Then I take it unkindly in a mere brother to monopolize your time for a whole afternoon, madam,” he had said. “How will I live with the disappointment?”
She had laughed at his foolish gallantry and stretched out her arm to fan his face for a few moments.
But she had slept very little all night. Less than a month ago she had expected never to see him again. And then Aunt Marjorie and Lord Quinn had decided to marry, and she had known that Ashley would come for the wedding. She had been dismayed. She had not wanted him to come to London, just as a little more than a month ago she had not wanted him to come home to Bowden. Her life had to be lived without Ashley, and it was just too painful to see him.
Especially now. All last evening, after he had joined Viscount Burdett’s party, although she had not once looked at him until he took his leave of her, she had felt him with every part of herself. Not just with her heart. Not even just with aching arms and yearning lips. She had felt him with a throbbing in her womb and lower, where his body had known hers. It had been not so much desire she had felt as—knowledge.
He should not have asked her to walk with him. It was unfair. He wanted to resume the relationship with her that had always been comfortable for him. He wanted to be her brother, her friend. Did he not know now, as she had always known, that such a relationship was impossible? Would he be a friend and a brother during their walk? Or would he try again to persuade her to marry him? But surely not that. He must have seen at Vauxhall how happy she was, how much she was enjoying the Season and the company of other gentlemen. He should not have asked her.
And so she tossed and turned more than she slept during the night. And so too she went shopping during the morning and bought a new straw hat.
• • •
Before going to Lady Sterne’s, Ashley had a call to make on South Audley Street. It was one he had told himself all the way to London and again all morning that he need not make and should not make. Even though Lady Verney had given him her son’s address when she knew he was going to London and had urged him to leave his card there—Henry and Barbara would be honored by such a marked courtesy, she had told him—there was really no compulsion on him to call on complete strangers.
But curiosity got the better of him. He wanted—no, it was almost as if he needed—to see the man Alice had loved and lain with before she went to India. Perhaps if he could understand that relationship, he thought foolishly, he would somehow be able to put to rest the terrible memories.
He would see if Sir Henry and Miss Verney were at home, the butler told him after he knocked on the door at South Audley Street and deposited his card on a silver tray. Ashley almost hoped that they were not, or that they would choose not to be. Verney might well wish to avoid him, after all. But the butler returned within a couple of minutes, bowed, and asked if his lordship would follow him up to the drawing room.
A man and a woman were rising to their feet as Ashley followed the butler’s announcement into the room. The man came striding toward him, right hand extended. He was a powerful-looking man of about his own age, Ashley guessed. He was not as tall as Ashley, but he was broad-shouldered and wide-chested and gave the impression of size though he was not in any way portly. He was fashionably, though not foppishly, dressed. He wore his own fair hair tied neatly at the neck. His face was good-humored and smiling.
“Lord Ashley Kendrick,” he said. “What an honor this is. I had heard from my mother that you had returned from India and taken up residence at Penshurst. I was sorry to be from home and unab
le to call on you to pay my respects. And so you have called upon me instead. May I present my sister, Barbara?”
Ashley shook the offered hand and bowed to the lady, who curtsied and smiled at him. She was somewhat darker than her brother in coloring, but she shared his quiet elegance and air of good humor. She was not pretty, but then she was not quite plain either.
“Madam,” he said. “Verney. You will be pleased to hear that I left Lady Verney in good health. She sends her affectionate regards.”
“How kind of you to bring them. Do have a seat, my lord,” Barbara Verney said. “I have given directions for the tea tray to be sent up.”
Ashley sat. The suffocating hatred he had begun to feel had taken him completely by surprise. He had expected a dark, brooding, morose-looking man, the sort of man one could easily imagine to have seduced and abandoned a woman who was besotted with him. He had not expected this smiling, genial man, who would perhaps be attractive to women more for his personality than for his looks. He could almost have forgiven wariness and surliness. He could only hate the warm hospitality.
“It must be admitted,” Sir Henry said, seating himself after his sister had settled into a chair across from Ashley’s, “that we have been curious to meet the man Alice married. Have we not, Barbara? We were devastated, by the way, when news reached us a few months ago of the tragedy that befell her and your son. We wrote to you immediately, not realizing that you were on your way to England. May we express our heartfelt condolences now?”
