Only Enchanting: A Survivors' Club Novel

by Mary Balogh

  “Not n-necessarily, ma’am,” he said. “I will possibly tell her. She ought to know. What she decides to do with the knowledge is up to her.”

  As much as anything, she needed to know that she was Debbins’s daughter. And undoubtedly she was.

  “Besides,” he said, “someone has been trying to find out something about my wife—preferably something that can be turned to spite. Already someone knows of the divorce.”

  “Ah,” she said.

  Havell said nothing.

  Flavian got to his feet, and Havell followed suit.

  “Thank you for receiving me,” Flavian said. He crossed the room and took Lady Havell’s hand in his. After a moment’s hesitation, he raised it to his lips. “G-good-bye, ma’am.”

  “Good-bye, Lord Ponsonby.” Her eyes turned suspiciously bright.

  Havell accompanied him to the door.

  “Life is never a simple matter, Ponsonby,” he said as he stood in the doorway watching Flavian climb back to the seat of his curricle and possess himself of the ribbons. “Decisions that we make in the blink of an eye, often both unexpected and impulsive, can affect the whole of the rest of our lives in a drastic, irreversible way.”

  It was hardly an earth-shatteringly original thought. It was nevertheless a true one, Flavian thought. Only consider what had happened to him recently.

  “I came for the knowledge,” he said, “because it is b-better to know than forever to w-wonder. I did not come to judge. Good day to you, Havell.”

  “She adored those girls,” Havell said, “if it is any consolation to Lady Ponsonby when you tell her of this visit. Both of them, the older one and the little child. She adored them.”

  But not enough to sacrifice her own happiness for their sakes, Flavian thought as he drove back out into the world—as though for the past hour he had somehow stepped right out of it. But who was he to judge? A mother ought never to abandon her children. It seemed a fundamental truth. A woman, once owned by a man, ought never to seek her own freedom and happiness, if that man would not help her to achieve both. Yet it was unfair, unjust. Debbins, it seemed, had publicly humiliated his wife and threatened worse. What would her life have been like if she had defied him and stayed and renounced the one man who had seemed to offer her a bit of happiness? What would Dora Debbins’s life have been if she had stayed? And Agnes’s? One thing was for sure: he would not have met her if her mother had stayed with her husband all those years ago.

  How strangely random a thing life was.

  And now he had the problem of what to do with his knowledge. Tell Agnes, when she had specifically told him she did not want to know? Withhold it from her? He might have been tempted to do the latter if there was not the risk that someone else would unearth the details and spring them on her without any warning in some very public manner.

  Anyway, he thought as he made his way closer to home, if this week of his marriage had taught him anything, it was that openness and truth between partners were necessary if the marriage was to have a chance of bringing them any sort of happiness.

  Now that he knew, he must tell her, even if only the fact that he had found and visited her mother.

  He did not look forward to telling her.

  He wished suddenly that Lady Darleigh had not asked him last autumn to grant her the favor of dancing with her particular friend at the harvest ball, lest she be a wallflower. He wished he had not gone back without any coercion at all for the after-supper waltz and had not therefore allowed himself to be enchanted. And he wished Vince could have waited six months or so before proving to the world how fertile he was, so that the Survivors’ Club gathering this year might have been at Penderris Hall, as usual.

  And he might as well carry this line of thinking to its logical and absurd conclusion. He wished he had not been injured in the war. He wished he had not been born. He wished his parents had not . . .

  Well.

  * * *

  Agnes was dressed in one of her new evening gowns—white lace over silk of a deep rose pink. She had been dubious about it until Madeline had given it the nod of approval, though she had directed Madame Martin to abandon the large pink silk bows that were to have caught up the lace skirt in deep scallops and to replace them with tiny rosebuds and far shallower scallops. Agnes thought the neckline was a little too revealing, but her maid laughed at her misgivings.

  “That’s not revealing, my lady,” she said. “You just wait till you see some.”

  She had just finished pinning Agnes’s hair up in a style of smooth elegance when Flavian appeared in the dressing room doorway. He was dressed as he had been for the autumn ball last year in black and white with a silver waistcoat. He paused in the doorway and raised his quizzing glass to his eye. He looked her over unhurriedly.

  “Enchanting, I feel compelled to say,” he said and lowered the glass.

  Madeline smirked and bobbed a curtsy and slipped out of the room.

  Agnes got to her feet and turned. She smiled at him. It seemed a little extravagant to her that they were both dressed with such formal magnificence for what was to be little more than a family gathering at Lord Shields’s home, but she was looking forward to the evening with some pleasure and only a little nervousness. The dowager’s sister, who had told Agnes to call her Aunt DeeDee, and her daughters had treated her with kindness earlier today, after an initial half hour or so of reserve. The rest of Flavian’s family would have had time to learn of his marriage and to recover from any surprise and disapproval at its suddenness. They would be polite, at the very least.

  Flavian had been rather quiet at the early dinner of which they had partaken a couple of hours ago. He looked a bit somber now too, despite calling her enchanting.

  She was feeling far more cheerful than she had this time yesterday. He had not loved Lady Hazeltine—not before he went to the Peninsula, anyway, and she suspected there were other lost memories surrounding that leave of his, when his brother had died and he had celebrated his betrothal, though not quite in that order. She did not know exactly what had happened, apart from the bare, indisputable facts, but she hoped to find out. For his sake, she hoped to find out.

  He had propped his shoulder against the doorframe and crossed his arms over his chest.

  “I paid a call earlier today,” he said. There was a longish pause, during which she raised her eyebrows. “On your mother.”

  She wished then that she had not stood up. She reached behind her with one hand to clutch the edge of the dressing table.

  “My mother.” She fixed her eyes on his.

  “She was remarkably easy to f-find, actually,” he said. “Divorces are rare and always a bit scandalous, and people remember them. I did not expect, however, to discover her whereabouts so easily. She lives not too f-far from here.”

  Agnes took a step back until she felt the dressing table bench with the backs of her knees. She sat down heavily.

  “You went looking for my mother,” she said. “You went looking for her against my express wishes.”

  “I did.” He was regarding her with hooded eyes.

  “How dare you,” she said. “Oh, how dare you! You know that she has been dead to me for twenty years. You know that I do not want to hear of her or from her. Ever. I do not want to know her name or her whereabouts or her circumstances. I do not want to know. Oh, how dare you go asking about her and finding out who she is and where she is. And how dare you call upon her.”

  She was alarmed to realize that she had raised her voice and was shouting at him. If she was not careful, she would be attracting the attention of her mother-in-law and the servants. She got to her feet and hurried toward him.

  “How dare you!” she said more softly, thrusting her face close to his.

  He did not move, even though she had come too close for comfort.

  “Do you not think,” she said, “that if I had wanted to know more about her or to find her anytime in the years since I grew up, I could have done it? Do you not th
ink Dora could have done it if she had wanted? What my mother did to Dora was ten times worse than what she did to me. She destroyed Dora’s whole life. And she must have caused our father unbearable pain and embarrassment. She must have hurt Oliver dreadfully. Do you think we could not have found her if we had wished? Any of us? We did not wish. I did not wish. I do not wish. She abandoned us, Flavian. For a lover. I hate her. Hate, do you hear me? But I do not enjoy hating. I choose rather not to remember her at all, not to think of her, not to be curious about her. I will never forgive you for finding her and going to see her.”

  She was gasping out her words, trying not to let her voice rise again. She stopped talking and glared at him.

  “I am sorry,” he said.

  “How could you?” She brushed past him and went into her bedchamber. She stood at the foot of the bed, clutching the bedpost.

  “Blocked memories, s-suppressed memories, memories we do not even know we are supposed to have—they all damage our lives, Agnes,” he said. “And our relationships.”

  “This is about you, then, is it?” she asked him, whipping her head about to glare at him.

  He had turned, though he still stood in the doorway. He looked broodingly at her.

  “I think, rather, it is about us,” he said.

  “Us?”

  “You were the one who s-said more than once that we did not know each other,” he reminded her, “and that if we w-were to marry, we needed that knowledge. We married anyway, b-but you were right. We need to know each other.”

  “And that gives you the right to pry into my past and seek out my mother?” she asked him.

  “And we n-need to know ourselves,” he added.

  “I know myself very well,” she retorted.

  He did not say anything. But he shook his head.

  His words repeated themselves in her head and left her feeling shaken. His knowledge of his own past, and therefore of himself, was marred by an uncertain memory. But that was not the same thing as a memory one had deliberately chosen to turn off for very good reason, was it?

  “I will help you remember, if I can,” she said. “And we will work on our marriage. I am determined that we will.”

  “You are determined,” he said. “You will help me r-remember. So that I will be all better, and everything will be well with our marriage. By all give on your part, all take on mine. Because you need nothing. Because you have never needed anything but a little quiet c-control over your world. You gave in b-briefly to the wonderful chaos of life by marrying me against all your better instincts, but now you can control your m-marriage by helping me remember—if there is more to remember.”

  She turned suddenly to sit on the side of the bed, though she kept one hand on the bedpost.

  “Is that why you went?” She was almost whispering. “To do something for me?”

  “I thought perhaps you n-needed to know,” he said. “Even if what I discovered was no more savory than you expected. Even if the knowing did not change anything. Even if you never w-wanted to see her for yourself. I just thought you needed to know. So that your mind would no longer keep touching upon the wound that has been festering deep inside since you were a child.”

  “Is that what has been happening?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “I just thought it was something I could do for you.”

  She gazed at him, and their eyes locked on each other’s.

  “By the time I w-went, though,” he said, “there was another, more urgent reason.”

  She continued to gaze.

  “Divorces applied for by petition to Parliament are rare enough and p-public enough to be remembered,” he said. “Someone wanting to know more about a Mr. D-Debbins of Lancashire and asking a few questions would almost inevitably discover that he had once m-made such a petition and had b-been granted his divorce.”

  Her eyes widened.

  “I do not know to how many p-people you have mentioned your father’s name,” he said. “I m-mentioned it the afternoon I called upon Frome and his lady and Velma. I am sorry. It did not occur to m-me that—”

  Agnes had jumped to her feet. “My father’s identity is no secret,” she said. “I am not ashamed of my father.”

  “If the search for information was m-malicious,” he said, “then more will be discovered. It was easy enough for me to discover, Lord knows. There could be gossip, Agnes.”

  Lady Hazeltine had done this, she realized. And, oh, her motives would be malicious. Agnes felt no doubt about that.

  “Tonight?” she asked.

  “Unlikely,” he said, “though even the fact that your father was d-divorced from your mother will cause talk, even among my family. I am sorry, but I had to w-warn you. If you would rather not go tonight but stay at home—”

  “Stay at home?” She glared at him. “Cower at home, you mean? Never. And we are in danger of being late, which I understand is fashionable in town. I am not of London, however, or of the ton. I prefer to do my hosts the courtesy of being on time when I am expected or even early. Where are my shawl and my reticule?”

  She brushed past him back into the dressing room, but he caught her by the arm as she passed. He was, amazingly, grinning.

  “That’s my girl,” he said softly. “That’s my Agnes.”

  And he kissed her hard and openmouthed on the lips before letting her go.

  “Who is she?” she asked briskly as she picked up her things. “Just in case I should need the knowledge tonight. And where does she live?”

  “Lady Havell,” he said, “wife of Sir Everard Havell. They live in Kensington. And he is not your father.”

  She felt a little dizzy. Lady Havell. Sir Everard Havell. They were strangers to her. And she wished they might remain so. Kensington was very close.

  She nodded and looked at him.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you, Flavian.”

  He offered his arm and she took it.

  . . . He is not your father.

  Flavian would not have added that if he was not sure.

  . . . He is not your father.

  21

  It had always amused Flavian that any ton party described in advance as “small” and “intimate,” even one given before the spring Season proper began, almost invariably filled several rooms with guests. Anything larger was a “squeeze” and was the very ultimate in success for any hostess.

  Marianne’s small evening party looked to be just that when he arrived with his wife and mother, for of course they were early despite the delay his confession in Agnes’s dressing room had caused. Flavian suspected, with an inward, half-amused grimace, that he was fated to become notorious for always arriving early to any social gathering. It hardly bore contemplating.

  It did not take long for Shields’s drawing room to fill, however, and for the guests to spill over into the adjoining music room. The dedicated cardplayers among them soon discovered the salon across the hallway, where tables had been set up for their convenience, and the refreshment room next to it did not go long undiscovered.

  Of course, any house except perhaps the largest mansion could be filled quite respectably just with his family members. Not that all of them had come to town yet, but there were enough, by Jove. And all of them wanted to pump Flavian by the hand, even if they had seen him during the past few days and already done so. They also wanted to kiss Agnes’s cheek, and say all that was proper to the occasion, and—in the case of a few of the younger male cousins—a few things that were improper, for Flavian’s ears alone, to the accompaniment of bawdy guffaws that brought frowns from the uncles, reproachful glances from the aunts, and the fluttering of fans from the female cousins, who suspected they were missing something interesting.

  There were other guests who were not family, of course. Marianne took it upon herself to introduce Agnes, who looked lovely enough and dignified enough to be a duchess, Flavian thought with considerable pride, though this evening must be a severe trial to her. And this was only the beg
inning.

  Perhaps, he thought after a while, his warning to her had been unnecessary. Even if word had spread about her father and his divorce, no one seemed inclined either to remark upon it or to shun the man’s daughter.

  Even as he thought it, he heard Sir Winston and Lady Frome and the Countess of Hazeltine being announced. He was halfway between the drawing room and the music room, talking with a group of relatives and other acquaintances. Agnes was on the other side of the drawing room with Marianne, who was leaving her side to hurry toward the door, her right hand extended, a smile of welcome on her face.

  Well, of course they had been invited. They were not even mere acquaintances, after all. They were neighbors in the country.

  And was it his imagination, Flavian wondered, or had the buzz of conversation faltered slightly while people glanced from the new arrivals to him and to Agnes? But it was over in a moment, and the Fromes and Velma proceeded farther into the room to mingle with the other guests.

  Though it had not been his imagination. Mrs. Dressler had set one gloved hand on his sleeve.

  “I daresay your mama was disappointed, Lord Ponsonby,” she said, “when you married before you could meet Lady Hazeltine again this spring. It was a very sad thing when your betrothal to her came to an end all those years ago. You were such a handsome couple. Were they not, Hester?”

  The lady applied to—Flavian could not at the moment recall her last name—looked a trifle embarrassed.

  “Indeed they were, Beryl,” she said, “but Lady Ponsonby is really quite lovely, my lord.”

  His mother and Marianne and Shields, as well as the Fromes and Velma, had been in London for a few days before he arrived with Agnes, Flavian recalled. He wondered, belatedly, whether during those days they had kept their matchmaking plans to themselves, all of them, or whether they had divulged their hopes to a select few of their acquaintances.

  He would wager upon the latter.