by Mary Balogh
“Oh, do be quiet,” the viscountess said. “You are being quite deliberately obtuse, Lucius. You know very well that Portia has been expecting a marriage offer from you every day for the past month and more. We have all expected it.”
“Then you have all been wrong,” he said. “I promised to choose a bride this spring, not Portia Hunt.”
Amy clapped her hands.
“I am glad, Luce,” Caroline said. “I have not liked Portia’s attitude this spring. I have not liked her.”
“And you believe Miss Allard is a suitable choice?” his mother asked, frowning.
“I cannot see why not,” he said, “except that she has refused me more than once.”
“What?” That was Emily.
“Is she mad?” That was Margaret.
Tait grimaced.
“Oh, no, Luce,” Amy said. “No! She would not do that.”
“Oh, do be quiet, all of you,” Lady Sinclair said. “You will be waking your grandfather.”
“He is still sleeping?” Lucius asked.
“He has overtaxed his strength, I am afraid,” his mother said. “He is not at all the thing today. And now this. He will be very upset, Lucius. He has had his heart set on your marrying Portia. Are you sure you did not act with more than usual impulsiveness this afternoon? Perhaps if you were to call at Berkeley Square and apologize—”
“I’ll not do it,” Lucius said. “And while I am standing here talking, I am wasting valuable time. Pardon me, but I have to change my clothes. My curricle should be at the door within half an hour.”
“Where are you going?” His mother looked pained.
“After Frances, of course,” he said, heading for the next flight of stairs. “Where else?”
Amy, he could hear, whooped with delight before being shushed by their mother.
Frances was aching in every limb. It was impossible to find a comfortable position on the hard seat of the carriage. And whenever she did think that perhaps she had found one, the vehicle was sure to bounce over a hard rut or else jar through a pothole and she was reminded that if the carriage had ever been well sprung it was no longer so.
Even so she found herself near to dozing as evening approached. Soon it would be dusk and they would be forced to stop, she knew. She had refused her great-aunts’ offer of a maid to accompany her for respectability. She did not mind being alone. They would not stop at a busy or fashionable posting inn, and her serviceable clothes would prevent her hosts and fellow guests from being too scandalized.
Tomorrow she would be back at the school. There would be little rest, of course. She would have to find out exactly what the temporary teacher had been doing with her classes and she would have to prepare to take over the next day. It would not be easy. She had never before taken even as much as a day off work. But she welcomed the thought of being busy again.
And every passing day would push the glorious wonder of last evening’s concert and the terrible moment of saying a final good-bye to Lucius farther and farther back in memory until finally a whole day would pass when she would not think of either the height or the depth of emotion the last week had brought her.
She was dreaming of being inside a block of snow hiding from Charles. She was dreaming that she was singing and holding a high note when a snowball collided with her mouth and she saw Lucius grinning broadly and applauding with enthusiasm. She was dreaming that the senior madrigal choir was singing for Lord Heath but everyone was flat and singing at a different tempo while she flapped her arms in an ineffectual attempt to restore order.
She dreamed a dozen other meaningless, disjointed, vivid dreams before starting awake as the carriage swayed and tipped, seemingly out of control.
Frances grabbed for the worn leather strap above her head and waited for disaster to strike. There were the sounds of thundering hooves and yelling voices, and then horses came into view—traveling in the same direction as her own carriage was taking. They were pulling a gentleman’s curricle, Frances could see, her eyes widening in indignation. A curricle on the road to Bath? And traveling at such a breakneck speed? It was thundering past on what seemed to be a particularly narrow stretch of road. What if there was something coming the other way?
She pressed her face to the window and peered up at the driver on his high perch. He was very smartly clad in a long buff riding coat with several capes and a tall hat set at a slight angle.
Frances, eyes wide as saucers, was not quite sure she recognized him. He was up high and almost past her line of vision. But the groom up behind him was neither. He was looking utterly contemptuous and yelling something, presumably at Thomas, that she mercifully could not hear. Just the expression on his face told her that it was not complimentary, though.
She had not been mistaken, then. If the man was Peters, the driver was certain to be Viscount Sinclair.
Why was she somehow not surprised?
She leaned back in her seat after the light vehicle was past. She closed her eyes, caught between fury and a totally inappropriate hilarity.
He talked about banishing the word pleasant from the English language. But it seemed that he had already totally obliterated the word good-bye from his own personal vocabulary.
She did not relinquish her hold on the strap. When Thomas pulled the carriage to an abrupt halt she was ready for the resulting jars and jolts that might have catapulted her across to the seat opposite and flattened her nose against its backrest had she been unprepared.
She looked out the window and ahead along the road. But the scene was very much what she had expected. The curricle, now in the care of Peters alone, was stationary and positioned right across the road. Viscount Sinclair was striding toward the carriage, his long coattails flapping against his glossy boots, his riding whip tapping against both. He was looking decidedly grim.
“If you would only choose to travel the king’s highway in a carriage instead of an apology for an old boat, Frances,” he said after yanking the door open, “you might have been to Bath and back by now. Move over.”
Frances gazed helplessly at him and moved.
It offended Lucius’s Corinthian soul to have to ride in the old fossil. But there was no avoiding such a fate—the carriage would offer more privacy than his curricle, especially with Peters—and, more important, Peters’s ears—riding up behind. He very much hoped that none of his friends was tooling along the road to Bath to see the vehicle in which he traveled, though. He would never recover from the ignominy.
“Thanks to you I have lost a perfectly perfect bride today,” he said, slamming the door and taking the seat beside Frances—he remained firmly on the surface of it instead of sinking comfortably into it, he noticed. “And I want recompense, Frances.”
Understandably she sat across the corner to which she had retreated and stared at him with hostile eyes.
There was a good deal of bad-tempered shouting going on outside, presumably while Peters and Thomas exchanged genealogies again, and then Peters must have driven the curricle onward, as instructed. A posting chaise rumbled past in the opposite direction, its coachman’s face purple with rage, and then the carriage in which Lucius sat with Frances creaked and jarred into slow motion and proceeded on its way.
“Miss Hunt actually refused you?” she asked at last. “I am surprised, I must confess. But in what sense am I responsible, pray?”
“She did not refuse me,” he said. “She was not given a chance. I announced in her hearing and her mama’s that I was off to Portman Street to offer you my compliments and my hand. By the time I discovered you gone and crept home again, both ladies had left Marshall House in high dudgeon, and in my mother’s considered opinion Portia would no longer have me if I crawled toward her on my hands and knees, eating dirt as I went, or humble pie—whichever happened to be available.”
“And would you do it if you were given the opportunity?” she asked.
“Crawl on my hands and knees?” he asked. “Good Lord, no. My valet would resign on the spot, and
I am partial to the way he ties a neckcloth. Besides which, Frances, I have no wish to marry Portia Hunt—never have had and never will. I believe I would rather be dead.”
“She is very lovely,” she said.
“Exceedingly,” he agreed. “But we had this conversation last evening, Frances. I would rather talk about you.”
He was babbling, he knew—making a joke of things that were not really funny at all. Truth to tell, he had no business being where he was. But he was not about to admit that.
“There is nothing to say about me,” she said. “I think you had better summon your curricle and go back to London, Lord Sinclair.”
“On the contrary,” he said, “there is a great deal to talk about. The fact that you are a Frenchwoman masquerading as an Englishwoman, for example. How is one to know that you are not a spy?”
She clucked her tongue.
“You knew that I was French,” she said. “Does it matter whether I choose to be known as Françoise Halard or Frances Allard? Somehow people expect a Frenchwoman to be flamboyant, to talk with her hands, to flutter with emotion. They expect her to be foreign. I grew up in England. I am an Englishwoman in every way that matters.”
If he had to travel very far in this carriage, he thought, his spine would surely suffer permanent damage—not to mention his hindquarters.
“I will release you from suspicion as a spy, then,” he said. “But what about the fact that you were singing at orgies before you became a teacher, Frances? You must have some interesting anecdotes to relate about that.”
Suddenly he felt grim again. And she looked tight-lipped.
“Orgies,” she said softly.
“Lady Lyle did not use that exact word,” he said. “She was speaking to Portia and so would have felt obliged to temper her language. But that is what she meant.”
She turned her head to look out the window. She was not wearing a bonnet—it was lying on the seat opposite. Her profile, he could see, looked as if it were carved out of marble. It was about that color too.
“I do not have to justify myself to you, Lord Sinclair, when you take that tone with me,” she said. “Or even when you do not, for that matter. You may get out of my aunts’ carriage and go back to town.”
He heaved an audible sigh of exasperation.
“I cannot do it, though, you see,” he told her. “I cannot simply go away, Frances. Not until our story has been ended. I remember reading a book as a boy—an ancient tome from my grandfather’s library. I became totally immersed in the story and let two perfectly decent summer days go by outdoors while I remained indoors and lapped up its contents. And then the story came to an abrupt halt—the last who-knows-how-many pages were missing. I was left feeling as if I were hanging over the edge of a cliff by my fingernails with no hope of rescue. And no one I questioned had ever read the infernal thing. When I hurled the book across the library, it sailed through a window, taking a large pane of glass with it, and I lost my allowance for at least the next six months. But I have never forgotten my wrath and frustration. They have been rekindled lately. I like stories to have neat endings.”
“We are not living within the pages of a book,” she said.
“And therefore the story can end however we wish it to end,” he said. “I no longer demand a happily-ever-after, Frances. It takes two to make a happy marriage, and so far we seem to have a total of one willing partner. But I do need to know why—why you have spurned me, why you rejected an opportunity last evening with Heath that many musicians with half your talent would kill for. Deuce take it, what happened in your past? What skeleton are you hiding in your wardrobe?”
She almost noticeably slumped into her corner.
“You are right,” she said. “You deserve an explanation. Perhaps I would have offered it in Sydney Gardens if I had realized that you were really serious in your offer and not merely acting from romantic impulse. I ought to have told you when you took me walking in Hyde Park—but I did not. I intended to write to you from Bath. But now I will have to say it in person.”
“From Bath?” he said. “Why not from London?”
“Because,” she said with a sigh, “I was afraid you would come to confront me after reading the letter. I was afraid that you would not see sense.”
She looked up at him, and he held her gaze. A smile tugged at the corners of her lips.
“Do you never see sense?” she asked him.
“There is a fine line between sense and nonsense,” he said. “I have not yet worked out exactly where you belong on the line, Frances. Tell me about the skeleton in the wardrobe.”
“Oh,” she said, “there are enough to fill a whole mansionful of wardrobes. It is not one single thing, but a whole host of things. I made a mess of my life after my father died, that is all. But I was fortunate enough to be able to break free and build a new life for myself. It is what I am going back to now. It is a life that cannot include you.”
“Because I am a viscount, I suppose,” he said irritably, “and heir to an earldom. Because I live much of my life in London and mingle with the ton.”
“Yes,” she said. “Precisely.”
“I am also Lucius Marshall,” he said, and had the satisfaction of seeing her eyes brighten with tears before she looked down at her hands.
The carriage had lumbered around a bend in the road, and the evening sunlight slanted through the window beside him to shine on her hair.
“Tell me about Lady Lyle,” he said. “You lived with her for a couple of years but almost bit my head off when I told you last evening that I had invited her to hear you sing. Then she dropped a word in Portia’s fertile ear. She could only have meant mischief.”
“She was very fond of my father,” she said. “I believe she was in love with him. Perhaps—no, probably—she was his mistress. She sponsored my come-out and was attentive to me in other ways too. When he died, she invited me to live with her and it seemed natural to me to go there. I do not believe she meant me harm. But he left enormous debts behind him, some of them to her. I was quite destitute, though I did have hopes of making an advantageous marriage.”
“To Fontbridge,” he said.
She nodded.
Fontbridge was something of a milksop, a mother’s boy. It was hard to picture Frances in love with him. But then it was notoriously difficult to understand anything she did. Besides, that had been several years ago. And Fontbridge was good-looking in the sort of way that might bring out the maternal instinct in some women.
“I was uncomfortable about being totally dependent upon Lady Lyle,” she said. “I was very grateful and very happy when she brought me to the attention of a man who was willing to sponsor and manage my singing career. And he was very complimentary and very sure that he could bring me fame and fortune. I signed a contract with him. It seemed like a dream come true. I could have my singing career, I could pay off all my father’s debts, and I could marry Charles and live happily ever after. I was a very naive girl, you must understand. I had lived a very sheltered life.”
“Who?” he asked. “Who was this sponsor?”
“George Ralston,” she said.
“Dash it all, Frances!” he exclaimed. “The man makes a career of preying upon helpless, foolish women. Did you know no better? But of course you did not. Did Lady Lyle know no better?”
“She had told me,” she said, “that singing would enable me to pay off my father’s debts to her and my own for the expenses I had incurred while living with her. I felt honor bound—though that was only later. At first I was so ecstatic just at the thought of finally singing as I had always dreamed of doing that the money and the debts were quite secondary considerations.”
“And so,” he said, “you sang at orgies.”
“At parties,” she said. “I was soon disappointed. I could not choose either the places at which I sang or the songs or even the clothes I wore—my contract stated that George Ralston had total control over such matters. And the audiences were alm
ost exclusively men. If the parties were also orgies I did not know, though I daresay they were. I received a few offers through my agent—none of them marriage offers, you will understand—and he tried to persuade me that they came from wealthy and influential men who could further my career even faster than he could. Soon, he kept telling me, I would be singing at large concert halls and would have the artistic freedom to sing whatever I wished to sing.”
“Good Lord, Frances.” He made a grab for one of her hands and held it tightly when she would have withdrawn it. “Is this the terrible past you have been keeping from me? What an idiot you are, my love.”
“I still moved in society,” she said. “I still went to ton parties. But word was beginning to leak out. Charles heard of where I was singing and for whom. He confronted me with it and commanded me to stop and we had a terrible quarrel. But even before that I had decided I could never marry him. He could not break away from beneath his mother’s thumb, and I knew his character was essentially weak. And he told me that it would be out of the question for me to sing in public after I had become his countess.”
“What an ass,” Lucius said.
“But it would be no different with you,” she said, looking sharply up at him and squinting a moment before the carriage moved around another bend and set her face in shadow again. “If it had been possible for me to take up Lord Heath’s offer—if I were not still under contract with George Ralston, that is—and if he could have arranged for me to sing at prestigious concerts in England and on the Continent, you would not still have wanted me as your wife. A viscountess does not do such things.”
“Devil take it, Frances.”
But he was too exasperated to be able to think of words to speak. He caught her up in his arms instead, pressed his mouth to hers, and held her tight until she relaxed and kissed him back.
“You always presume to know me so well,” he said when he finally lifted his head. “I am frequently an impulsive, ramshackle fellow, Frances, but I would have to be a raving lunatic to be asking you to marry me and then arranging for Heath to hear you sing if I thought having the singing career you ought to have and marriage to me were mutually exclusive activities. Damn it, you have made a great deal out of nothing.”
