by Mary Balogh
“I’ll find some other way of convincing him of that,” Nathaniel said. “I may not be allowed the pleasure of killing him, but by God, I’ll be rearranging his features for him before I have finished with him.”
“Perhaps you had better let me do it, Nat,” Eden said with a chuckle. “Lady Gullis may not like you with a battered face.”
“Perhaps we should draw for it,” Kenneth said. “You two cannot horde all the pleasure to yourselves.”
“If you all want a go at him too,” Nathaniel said, “you are going to have to stand in line and await your turn, I am afraid. This one is going to be for Sophie, and I am going to be the one doing it. Just as Rex did for Catherine.”
He spurred his horse into a gallop and left his friends temporarily behind him, looking after him in some surprise.
EIGHTEEN
DESPITE A NIGHT OF VERY little sleep, Sophia spent a busy morning and felt invigorated and even exhilarated.
She did not go back to bed after Nathaniel had left, but dressed warmly against the early-morning chill and took Lass for a long and brisk walk in the park. She even played with the dog for a while, throwing a stick for her to fetch, then taking it from her when she brought it back and running with it, while the collie tore along after her, barking excitedly. And then she teased the dog with the stick, holding it out invitingly, lifting it just beyond reach as Lass came for it, waving it from side to side when the dog jumped, and laughing gaily the whole while. Then she hurled the stick once more, beginning the game all over again.
She had a hearty breakfast after returning home—far more hearty than usual—and engaged Samuel in conversation until he put an end to it by entertaining her with a monologue on his silent sufferings with an ingrown toenail on his left foot. Mrs. Armitage did not know what torments his cheerful outward demeanor hid day after day, he informed her. Sophia suggested various remedies and, looking down critically at his shoes, suggested that he might wish to try wearing ones that were wider at the toe. Having tramped over half a continent with an army, she told him kindly, she had seen her fair share of corns and blisters and ingrown toenails and ... Well, yes, thank you, she believed she would have another cup of coffee.
She went out again after spending some time at her escritoire writing a few letters. She went first to see a lawyer, a man with whom she had done business before. She put the matter of the sale of her house into his hands, discussed another matter, and left, perfectly confident that he would handle everything for her. She was not going to worry or even think about what she had done.
Though she did think anyway, of course. How could she not? She had somehow assumed that she would live out the rest of her life in the house on Sloan Terrace. She had been happy at the prospect, happy with her life, with her limited prospects. She was only eight and twenty years old even now, but she had settled quite contentedly into a comfortable middle age.
It seemed unbelievable now that she had been willing to settle for quiet contentment. She was still young. She still had a great deal of living to do—and she was free to do it. Oh, yes she was. And besides all that, she was beautiful. She felt beautiful this morning, and more than that, she knew that she was beautiful. He had said so.
She did not go home immediately after visiting the lawyer. She went shopping. She had very little money in her purse and might well not have any more there for some time. She looked at the bracelets and necklaces and earrings in a jeweler’s window and passed on by. She admired bonnets and fans and reticules and parasols but was content to look. But she could not resist the ready-made dress in a mantua maker’s window—made for a customer who had changed her mind about purchasing it, Sophia guessed, and therefore on sale. It looked too small for her. It was of simple design in a light calico cotton fabric. It was the palest blue.
She went inside.
When she tried it on, she discovered that the dress was indeed smaller than her other clothes—she had got into the habit while following the drum of having clothes made to fit loosely so that they would also be comfortable. The dress draped itself attractively over her bosom and about her hips, revealing a figure that was feminine and nicely proportioned even if it was not voluptuous. It made her look dainty and pretty. When the modiste’s assistant told her so, Sophia smiled and believed her.
She bought the dress, the blood hammering at her temples as she did so. It was not an expensive dress, but it was far beyond her means. And yet, as she left the shop, the parcel beneath her arm, it was not fear or guilt she felt but sheer delight. She had something pretty to wear. Her mood threatened to falter when she remembered that he would never see her wearing it, but she smiled and lengthened her stride. The sun was shining again this morning. She lifted her face to it.
She depended upon no one for a sense of her own worth. She had done that for long enough. She was going to go to Gloucestershire, where she had grown up, where her brother and his family still lived, and she was going to begin a wholly new life there. Perhaps in time she would even marry again. Someone would surely ask her—she was beautiful. Perhaps she would still even be young enough to have a child or two. She had trained herself years ago to stop thinking about children of her own.
When she returned home, she handed her parcel to Pamela with instructions to iron the creases from the dress, and she took one of the boxes of Walter’s things she had found in the attic the day before into the sitting room, where she sat for a long time polishing with meticulous care the pistol that was inside. She had done it before. Not often, it was true. Walter, like most soldiers, had preferred to clean his own guns, and she had always been somewhat squeamish about handling them especially when she remembered that each of them had been used to kill and would be so used again. But occasionally she had done it. She knew exactly how to do it.
While she polished, she composed in her head the letters she would write when she was finished. The letter to Thomas, explaining that she was selling her house and moving back to Gloucestershire, asking him to expect her within the next week or so. The letter to Boris Pinter, informing him that she would call upon him tomorrow morning if he would be so good as to remain at home. She would have to strike just the right balance in that letter between courtesy and obsequiousness, she thought. And the letter to Nathaniel. But she found she could not even begin to compose that in her head.
It was not any easier to write it when she sat at the escritoire later, pen in hand, the other two letters already written. She brushed the quill back and forth across her chin as she thought. Crumpled-up pieces of paper, which she could ill afford to waste, dotted the floor about her. Finally she could only be brief and abrupt.
“Dear Nathaniel,” she wrote, “I must thank you again for every kindness you have shown me.” Kindness seemed somehow an inappropriate word, especially to describe the night before, but she could not think of a more suitable one. “You mentioned coming tonight. I beg you not to. I beg you not to come here again. I bear you no ill will. I will remember you fondly. But please do not come here again. Your friend, Sophia.”
A brief letter, she thought, reading it over, very tempted to crumple it up and send it to join the others on the floor. Brief and yet repetitive. But it would have to do. There was really nothing else to say, and that one point needed to be repeated lest he believe she did not really mean it.
She did mean it. She knew that this morning she was being borne along on a strange sort of euphoria, that in some ways she was in a state of denial. She knew that when she returned to herself she was going to suffer dreadfully. But she knew too that she had been changed permanently for the better in the course of the past day and night. She had gained confidence in herself both as a person and as a woman—and of course he had been largely responsible for the latter.
She loved him desperately. And the memories of last night—not just the passion and the tenderness, but also the sheer joy—would haunt her for a long time to come, perhaps forever. But she knew that she did not need him except with her d
eepest emotions. She could live her life without him. She could live a new, exciting life without him. Certainly remaining for the rest of the Season merely to prolong an affair that would inevitably end at its end—she was the one who had suggested it—would do her no good at all. Only harm.
She sealed the letter and rang for Samuel to take all three and send them on their way, before she could change her mind. She had tea brought up.
And she sat in her favorite chair beside the fireplace, Lass heavy and contented across her feet, her cup of tea growing cold at her side, holding in her hands something else she had found in the box with Walter’s pistol. Something she had put there determinedly after his death, though it had not been his. Something she had almost forgotten about, though she had looked eagerly for it as soon as she had opened that particular box.
She spread the folded linen handkerchief across her palm and with the forefinger of the other hand traced the smooth embroidery of the initial G across one comer. She lifted the handkerchief to her face. It smelled musty, though she had laundered it and kept it in lavender after he had handed it to her on that day he had taken her up before him on his horse, covered from head to toe with mud.
She had always told herself that she would return it to him, that she simply never thought of it when he was present, only when he was absent. But the truth was she had almost held her breath whenever she saw him for weeks afterward, fearing that he would ask for it.
She had used to take it out from between its lavender bags inside her small trunk occasionally—no, more often than occasionally—and hold it to her nose and her lips as she was doing now. And all the while she had convinced herself that she was only a little in love with him as she was with the other three, as every other wife and camp follower with the regiment were.
Oh, Sophie, she thought, you have told yourself so many lies over the years. You have never been free.
But now at last she was going to be free. She thought of the pistol wrapped in a clean cloth in the box and felt a fluttering of unsteadiness in her stomach. And she thought of the note on its way to Nathaniel.
She was going to be free. She closed her eyes and rubbed her cheek back and forth across the soft musty linen of the handkerchief with G for Gascoigne embroidered across one corner.
Nathaniel spent a busy day, even though he was anxious at every moment for it to pass. He returned invigorated from his ride in the park despite an almost sleepless night. Sleeplessness in a good cause, he thought with a grin as he took the stairs two at a time up to his dressing room to change for breakfast, did not make one tired as sleeplessness for any other reason invariably did.
He looked at his eyes in the looking glass. His friends had exaggerated. Indeed, they had seen only what they had wished to see. His eyes were not bloodshot at all.
He had promised to take Lavinia to the library during the morning.
He noticed as they walked how pleasant a day it was. He could hardly wait for tonight. Not that he anticipated a repetition of last night. They would simply not be able to find sufficient energy. But just to lie with her, to hold her close, to talk with her, to kiss her, and—best of all—to sleep with her and to wake to her. Yes, he could scarcely wait.
“You are looking very pleased with yourself this morning, Nat,” Lavinia said, bringing him back to the present with a start. He fervently hoped that she was not good at reading minds.
“It is a lovely day,” he said. “Did you enjoy last night’s ball?”
She blushed. Lavinia blushing? His interest—and his hope—was piqued for a moment until he remembered what had happened at last evening’s ball.
“Very well, thank you,” she said.
“Eden told me you had him blushing from the tips of his toenails up,” he said.
“Oh?” Her own blush spread to her neck. Nathaniel was glad to see that she had a conscience.
“You ought not to have cornered him like that, you know,” he said. “He is, after all, almost a stranger to you.”
Her eyes blazed. “I might have known,” she said, “that he would be unable to keep his mouth shut about it. Conceited idiot!”
“Oh,” he said, “he did not take credit for it, Lavinia. He was quite ready to admit that it was all your idea.”
“Did he?” She bristled and then she stopped walking abruptly and stared at him with suddenly sagging jaw. “Nat—what are you talking about?”
“About your suggestion that we give Pinter a dose of his own medicine, of course,” he said, frowning. “What did you think I was talking about?”
“Nothing,” she said, making it sound like everything. “We were not talking at cross-purposes after all. Yes, that is what we talked about. And it is as clear as the nose on your face, Nat, that it will be easy. Mr. Pinter probably cannot do it with women, and so ...”
“Stop right there,” Nathaniel said hastily, holding up one hand and looking about him to make sure no other pedestrian was within hearing distance. “I just wish you had come to me instead of embarrassing poor Eden.”
“You would have told me to run along and learn to be a proper lady,” she said.
“No, I would not.” He touched her hand on his arm. “I have learned a thing or two in the past few weeks, Lavinia. I am still hoping that during the rest of the Season you will meet a man you can like and respect enough to marry. But if you do not, we will go back to Bowood for the summer and discuss together what will be best for you—what you wish to do, and what will allow me still somehow to carry out the responsibilities of my guardianship. We will have to try to come to some sort of mutually agreeable decision. A cottage in the village or on the estate, perhaps, somewhere close so that I can feel reassured, but far enough away that you can feel independent. I might in time even be prevailed upon not to call on you more than two or three times in a day.” He smiled at her.
She cocked her head to one side and regarded him closely before startling him by throwing her arms about his neck and kissing one cheek with a resounding smack.
“Nat!” she exclaimed. “Oh, Nat, I always knew you could be likable if you only gave yourself a chance.”
“Oh, I say!” he said, thoroughly embarrassed. An elderly gentleman on the pavement opposite was winking broadly at him. “I believe we should walk on, Lavinia.”
They did so in a companionable silence. She was doubtless dreaming of living a life of independence, he thought. And he was dreaming of a blissful life at home without women. Though he did wonder what Bowood would be like with Sophie in it. In the house—he pictured her in each of the main rooms in turn, and in his bedchamber, in his bed. In the nursery, bending over a cradle. In the park, walking with him, her collie and his dogs running on ahead, a little toddler stopping every few feet to pick the heads off the daisies.
Alarming things were happening to him, he decided, catching the direction of his daydreams. Perhaps most alarming of all, though, was the fact that he was not alarmed.
The day continued busy, with a picnic to attend during the afternoon. There were letters on the desk in his study, his butler told him when he arrived home with Lavinia, but it was not a day for business. The reports from Bowood and anything else could wait. Georgina would have sifted out the invitations that arrived in considerable number every day and taken them upstairs.
The afternoon was perfect for a picnic, and the rural setting of Richmond Park could not have been better chosen. Perhaps it was a setting particularly conducive to romance, or perhaps what happened during the afternoon was inevitable anyway. Georgina strolled along one of the grassy, oak-lined avenues with Lewis Armitage for an hour before tea, and for half an hour after tea.
They were being a little indiscreet, Nathaniel thought, and wondered if he should do something to part them. But he did nothing. They were not so unwise as to step out of sight even for a moment and they looked comfortable together—and perhaps a little more than comfortable.
It was an impression that was borne out by Georgina’s reaction
when they arrived home later to being asked how she had enjoyed the picnic. They were alone, she and Nathaniel, Lavinia having gone straight upstairs to change her clothes. Georgina flung her arms about his neck—the second young lady to do so in one day. No, the third—there had been Sophie early in the morning.
“Oh, Nathaniel,” Georgina said, tears of what was obviously sheer joy shining in her eyes, “I am so happy.”
“Are you, Georgie?” he asked, hugging her. He felt a little uneasy. He would hate to see her hurt. “Lewis Armitage is the cause, I gather. Has he said anything?”
She colored up prettily. “How can he have,” she said, “when he has not spoken to you yet?”
“Quite so,” he agreed, and found himself exchanging a grin with his sister. She and Armitage had an understanding, then?
“Lord Perry has asked to call upon Lord Houghton tomorrow morning,” she said. “I daresay he is going to ask for Sarah’s hand. Lewis—Mr. Armitage, that is—says that his mother and father should be given a day or two to recover from that.”
“I see,” he said.
“But I am so happy,” she said.
“Then I am happy too,” he told her, kissing her forehead. “I will expect a call within the next week or so.”
She smiled brightly and turned to run up the stairs.
How many hours until midnight? Gazing after her, he drew his watch from his pocket. Five o‘clock—seven hours. An eternity. Seven hours less seven minutes. He had been that early last night and she had not minded. She would not mind tonight.
It was still an eternity.
This was the evening when he was to have dined with Lady Gullis and then attended the theater with her small party, Nathaniel remembered. Fortunately she had written to him the day before to beg to be excused as she had been invited to a house party in the country for a few days. Perhaps some other time?
