Diana felt a strange hollowness with his absence, as though she’d grown accustomed to him, despite having been unconscious. Her father’s eyes remained on her, seemingly assessing her. Diana suddenly lacked the proper words, couldn’t fully decipher how to feel, what to do next. She dropped her head back on the pillow, overwhelmed with a sudden cloud of fatigue.
“Maybe just a bit more sleep,” she told her father and her aunt and their staff members, before allowing her eyelids to flicker closed.
She prayed she wouldn’t lose three more days.
Chapter 5
When Diana awoke the next morning, it was due to a flock of birds arriving to the estate. Their chirping reminded her precisely of the birds that spent time at her own home—the one that had burnt—and she felt, in her inner mind, that she was lying in her own bed, tucked into her own sheets, preparing for a traditional day ahead. But when her eyelids broke open, she saw she was in the same bedroom she’d been in the day before—an ornate, beautiful one, entirely foreign to her inner psyche.
After a long, horrific pause, the events of the previous week revealed themselves to her. The fire. The fact that she was ill—that she’d been cast into a sort of coma for a few days. Now, she had to find the strength to move forward, despite everything.
She burst up, gasping, and then fell into another round of coughing. Her lungs quaked with both panic and pain. She forced herself to inhale, exhale, and then drink the water someone—assuredly the earl—had left out for her on the bedside table. Downstairs, she heard the chatter of several conversations, all of them mixing together and forming a kind of music.
Diana felt much better than she had the day before. Despite the cough, she felt that the colours around her were brighter, that the air was crisper. Before she knew fully what she was doing, she brought the sheets from over her legs and dropped her feet onto the chilly wooden floor beside the bed. Although the wood was foreign, she pressed forward, drawing herself out of bed. She was wearing her ordinarily nightgown, assuredly the one she’d been sleeping in the night the fire had broken out. It felt dreadful, knowing that she’d been wearing the same thing for days. How she yearned for a scrub. Anything.
To her delight, Diana noted that a water basin had been left out for her, along with a dress that suited her. Taking great pains, she scrubbed her body: her arms, her armpits, the back of her neck. It was funny to fall into such familiar motions in such a strange place. Before long, she’d stitched herself into her dress, then traced a path toward the door. She felt the allure of the conversation downstairs, wanting only to be a part of something more than the inner workings of her own mind.
Diana tapped down the hallways in her bare feet, as no one had left out any stockings or shoes—surely an oversight, although she assumed it hadn’t been an ordinarily chore, leaving things out for a near-unconscious girl. She reached the grand staircase, far more ornate than the one that had burnt at home, and wound her way down, her heart thumping.
Her mind was awash with emotion, knowing that the earl would be waiting down there, perhaps eating his breakfast—such an ordinary thing for a man to do. Why did she think such wild thoughts about him? Why, for her, did he seem like this impossibly beautiful triumph, this ideal above all things?
Diana forced herself down the rest of the ground-floor hallway, her heart beating somewhere in her throat. She reached the doorway and then brought herself through it, blinking into the beautiful light of the dining room. At the breakfast table sat her father, her aunt, the earl himself, and a beautiful girl she didn’t recognize. Immediately, their conversation faltered. They looked at her with curious eyes, as though she was a creature they couldn’t comprehend.
“There she is,” her father said, using the same expression he’d utilized several times throughout her life, when she’d been a much younger girl and she’d arrived at the breakfast table. The memory echoed through her and made her stomach ache.
“Good morning,” the earl said, his eyes like a sort of gravity she had to follow. “I trust you slept well?”
“Perhaps too long,” Diana confessed. Her feet felt impossibly bare, now, the skin like a child’s. “But, as my father will tell you, I was never one to miss breakfast.”
“Darling, you’ve missed breakfast for days,” Aunt Renata scoffed, raising her teacup. “Please. Sit down. You look terribly peckish.”
Diana dropped herself into the only empty seat, blinking at the crew before her. The girl she didn’t recognize couldn’t have been more than 16 years old. She pulled her fork over her eggs and blinked at Diana with curiosity, then drew an enormous smile between her cheeks. This sudden burst of emotion felt in stunning contrast to everything else Diana had encountered throughout the previous days.
It warmed her heart more than she could possibly describe.
“Pardon me. I don’t mean to be rude,” Ernest cut in. “This is my younger sister, Rose. Rose Bannerman.”
“At your service,” Rose said, her voice lathered with sarcasm.
Diana had been a rather similar teenager—a girl apt to draw attention to herself with her snarky behaviour. She grinned at Rose, arching her brow.
“I’m glad to know who to turn to for any and all assistance,” she returned, adding her own dose of sarcasm.
This seemed to tilt Rose off-kilter. She smiled at Diana, rather puzzled, before returning her eyes to her eggs. It seemed Diana had won this war.
Ernest called out for the maid to prepare a plate for Diana. Like a wave, Diana suddenly encountered a level of hunger that she couldn’t fully recognize. She stretched her hands across her flat belly, feeling wild with it. Her father noted this and gave her a half-smile.
“You’ve been sleeping for days. Very little time for eating, I would say,” he pointed out. “I hope you had a few feasts in your dreams.”
Diana remembered her dreams as sort of imagistic blips: mostly about her sister and her mother, but also about Ernest, who’d been at her side throughout. This was difficult to verbalize, so she kept her lips pressed tightly closed. Unable to fully control herself, she allowed her eyes to creep toward him—perched at the far end of the table, his eyes burning toward her. The moment she met his gaze, his eyes dropped, as though she’d caught him in the midst of doing something off. Something wrong.
The maid appeared with a platter of eggs, of scones, of butter, of fruits. Diana gaped at the mighty amount of food, her fingers twitching toward the fork. She willed herself to remember the last time she’d eaten at her father’s mansion. How strange it was that she could have experienced those moments, without knowing fully what they would mean later. And yet, the images were still mere blips—nothing she’d fully recorded. She wished she could thrust herself back to that moment, whisper to herself: remember. Remember. But she couldn’t.
Now, it seemed urgent that she eat, if only to strive forward to whatever would happen next. So, she pushed her fork into a bit of egg and brought it to her tongue. The savoury flavour was almost too much to bear. She coughed once as she swallowed, unaccustomed to the feeling of food, but then kept going.
“Lord Bannerman,” her father began, his voice so frail—far more so than it had been the week before, Diana thought, “I wanted to mention how terribly sorry I am about the death of your father. It was something that we, in the Harrington household, absolutely regretted and mourned. Now, to meet you in person, so soon after it happened—and to learn of your endless generosity—it would be wretched of me not to note it, and to honour your father in this manner.”
Diana allowed her fork to drop to her plate. She blinked at the earl, remembering the news of his father’s passing, from mere months ago. A shadow passed over the man’s face. Although this darkness didn’t detract from his beauty, Diana sensed that his father’s death had been far more wretched on him than he could fully describe.
“Thank you, sir,” Ernest said. He glanced toward his sister. “It’s been rather difficult on both of us. Becoming orphans in this m
anner, especially when Rose is just 15. She and I expected many more years with our father, as did the earldom.”
“Yes, but—but your engagement!” Aunt Renata chirped now, drawing her palms together. “It’s marvellous news for the house, isn’t it? I always said, no matter the darkness, there is always a dawn coming soon. And your fiancée, what a beautiful girl she is.”
These words cut through Diana’s stomach like a sword. She balked, drawing herself tightly against the back of her chair. Rose’s eyes burned toward her, showing herself to be the only one in the group to note her physical reaction.
“Yes,” Ernest said, tapping his napkin across his lips. “Lady Bragg is quite a wonderful match. I know the earldom is quite pleased about the union. And just four weeks away.”
Was Diana imagining that his words were rather lacklustre in nature, almost hollow? She stared at his face for a moment too long, trying to analyse his features, the way he furrowed his brows. Was it possible that he didn’t entirely wish for this engagement?
But perhaps she was forcing this opinion. After all, she’d spent the majority of her dream-like coma in a sort of safe haven, wherein she’d imagined that Lord Bannerman was a part of her world, the man of her dreams. She’d even spoken such words to him upon waking, sounding like a schoolgirl. Surely Ernest thought of her as such, now. How foolish she’d been. How much she wished she could return to that moment—yet another moment of regret—and formulate a better sentiment!
“How was it you came to know Lady Bragg?” Aunt Renata asked.
“We grew up together,” Ernest explained. His words remained rather flat. “She roamed these halls with me throughout my youth. My friends and I would often tease her. Such a lady she always was, even at eight years old.”
“Isn’t it funny that we never really grow up?” Aunt Renata said, her voice heavy with a sigh. “I’m rather sure that Diana, you were precisely this same person at eight years old—this reckless, confident, wild woman we see before us. I always knew you to be so.”
Diana shifted. She turned her eyes back toward Ernest, who was gazing at her with curiosity. She allowed the connection to continue for only a moment more before dropping it. Her cheeks felt aflame.
“Father always said something similar about me,” Rose said, seemingly unable to allow the conversation to stray too far from topics regarding her. Ever the teenager. “He said that when I was little, I was just as sarcastic. Even before I could speak, my eyes would roll back in my head when he said something a bit less-than, a bit less clever. He said he almost wished he could give the earldom to me, rather than Ernest. He said I would put the people in their place.”
Ernest chuckled. “If only that were so.”
Throughout the rest of the breakfast, Diana had the sneaking suspicion that she and Ernest were having a far separate conversation from the one that existed in words. Whilst her aunt prattled on about various things in Diana’s own family—the fact that she’d moved in with her and her father in the wake of her sister and mother’s death, the fact that she’d never married, as she’d never found anyone she fancied enough—Diana and Ernest continued to gaze at one another. Neither of their lips moved. Diana felt as though they’d embarked on a far different language, as if they were stretching out what communication could possibly be. Her stomach bubbled with apprehension. She felt poised at the edge of a cliff, preparing to leap.
She wished she could turn back, find an alternate route. But Ernest’s eyes burned so brightly, she had nothing to do but move forward—knowing full-well that this path led toward even more devastation, even after she’d already lost so much.
Chapter 6
The afternoon stretched on with near-impossible bliss. In all the months since Ernest’s father had passed, he’d hardly had such joyous moments. He, Lord Harrington, Lady Harrington, Diana, and Rose sat in the rose garden behind the house, watching the clouds trickle across the April sky. Diana had selected the seat directly beside him and from where he sat, he inhaled the scent of her hair—a beautiful, natural one, which couldn’t have been helped with any sort of perfume, as he hadn’t set out any for her. He hadn’t considered it.
Throughout the first part of the afternoon, Diana spoke very little. Ernest suspected this was due to the intensity of her inner injuries, which had surely exhausted her. Rose perched beside Diana, seemingly unwilling to allow this fresh stranger to keep her lips pressed shut.
“Tell me, Diana,” Rose said, her eyes sparkling, “What do you do for fun?”
Ernest forced himself not to look toward Diana, knowing that this information was nothing he could use—not for pleasure, nor for interest. Rather, he required it to pass over him, untouched. Diana could mean nothing more to him.
“I love to be outdoors, I suppose,” Diana offered, sounding tentative. “I used to spend hours outside with my sister, Margery. We roamed the woods together. Sometimes, we would come in from these adventures all muddy and messy and ragged, and our mother, she would scream at us—until, suddenly, she would devolve into laughter, knowing that it all really didn’t matter so much. Then, she would toss us into the wash basin and scrub us clean before tucking us into bed.”
“I never got to know my mother,” Rose said, without malice. “I always wondered what it would be like to be yelled at by her. What it would mean to have that sort of love from someone, knowing that you could always come back to it, no matter how wretched you’d behaved.”
“It really was something,” agreed Diana.
Ernest’s heart lurched. He’d never heard anyone snap into such eager conversation with his sister. Did Rose sense something about Diana, something different? He glanced toward Rose, trying to read her face. As usual, she hid her cards well.
As the sun crept lower in the sky, the maid, Claire, approached from the side, announcing that dinner would be finished shortly. This surprised Ernest a great deal, as he hadn’t expected the Harrington’s staff members to assimilate into his world so quickly. He burst up from his seat and followed Claire to the edge of the garden. She beamed up at him.
“What is it, my lord?” she asked.
“Claire, it really isn’t necessary for you to work for me, you know,” he said. He scratched the back of his neck, feeling as though his words were lacklustre and flat. “I know you’ve just been through something incredibly traumatic. Perhaps it’s best if…”
Claire stitched her brows together. “Really, my lord, it would give me no greater honour than to serve you. You’ve done such a service to the Harringtons, to all of their staff. To me. Please, just let me do what I do best.”
At this, Ernest didn’t know precisely what to say. He hung back, watching as Claire cut across the garden path toward the house. She marched in a manner that suggested she already felt ownership over the place.
Ernest turned to find that the others were rising from their garden seats, preparing to disembark to the house to dress for dinner. Diana’s eyes were upon him. His heart dipped low in his chest, heavy and throbbing. He glanced across her bosom, how it swelled above her corset, and then forced his eyes away.
Lord Harrington staggered a bit as he walked, nearly falling into one side of the garden gate. Ernest reached for him, steadying his elbow.
“Thank you, son,” Lord Harrington said, coughing. “My muscles have been atrophying for years. The doctor isn’t quite sure.” He tapped the side of his nose. “Enjoy your youth, my lord. Every second of it, before it’s stripped away from you.”
Lord Harrington walked forward, leaving Ernest behind. Renata swept forward to link arms with her brother, and Rose skipped ahead, giving Ernest a wink as she passed. This left Ernest back with Diana, who walked slowly, seemingly taking her time so as not to activate her cough. Ernest turned toward her, overcome with emotion. The air filled with tension as their eyes met once more. Ernest could no longer remember a time in his life when he didn’t know this woman, when this woman didn’t affect his inner psyche.
Unexpected
ly, Ernest reached forth, gripping her hand. This was the precise mechanism that had caused him to grip her hand the previous day in bed. He felt overwhelmed with an inner urgency, a knowledge about who they were and what they could be for one another.
A Seductive Lady Rescued From Flames (Historical Regency Romance) Page 6
