There was a young woman in what the company had best approximated as a castaway’s costume kneeling amongst the wreckage, singing in a tone so sweet and lonely that Gerard, who had never been very versatile with the German language, could guess nonetheless that she was singing about a land or a love lost.
Still, as enchanting as all that was, he found his eyes searching the audience instead of the stage. He was looking for his own lost love, while the discarded lady sang of hers.
Chapter 38
Nora couldn’t help thinking with a smile that Gerard would have liked the scene before her. It was a dismal thing, to be sure, the maiden who had been washed up on the shore after losing all that she loved and held dear. But Nora had seen the hero already in the distance and knew that soon he would be waging battles on the lady’s behalf. In the stories, the hero always came for the maiden, just when it seemed that it would be too late. She looked down at her hands, choking back the tears that threatened at this thought, for in real life it was not so neat and tidy. Sometimes nobody came, and for Nora it was already too late.
Beside her, Lady Colbourne was watching the scene as one transfixed. Clearly an aficionado of the musical world, she had gone on and on about how gifted this soprano was, and now seemed blissfully lost in the skill of the woman. On the other side, Diana was sitting in a cloud of pale blue silk, trying her best to follow along with the words in the playbook in her lap.
“I don’t understand that translation of ‘sky’,” she whispered quietly to Nora. “It’s not what I learned when father was teaching us this language. It sounds so boorish, doesn’t it? Not at all like the lovely French opera that Gerard –” she stopped suddenly, awkwardly. It was a cycle they’d repeated often over the past few days: Diana getting carried away in the moment and speaking about her brother out of turn. But it wasn’t really out of turn, was it? Nora knew that it was only right and proper that Diana, who loved her brother dearly, ought to speak at length about him in public. She tried to pretend she hadn’t heard and smiled back.
“I think that with German it is best not to attempt to understand every word,” she said gently, “but to instead just close your eyes and feel the music go through you. That’s what your brother said, after all, when we were at Griselda.” She had hoped that speaking of him herself would ease the blow, but instead she just felt a sick loss opening up again in her chest.
Diana, however, seemed relieved at the mention and smiled weakly back at her friend. “Yes, I suppose we can feel the music. But I won’t close my eyes for the world lest I miss one of this lady’s magnificent expressions. Have you ever seen such eyes?”
“I suspect the world still hasn’t seen such eyes,” Nora teased in response, pretending more blithe of a nature than she actually felt. “They have likely been painted on or charcoaled beforehand.”
Diana giggled behind her fan, and at that moment Nora looked up and caught sight of the last person she expected to see sitting directly across from her in the box at the far end of the crescent arrangement upon which they sat. It was Gerard, sitting in the Barringtons’ box and looking down on the scene below. He had not seen her, or if he had, he was taking pains not to show it.
They were separated by quite a bit of distance and an entire audience of people, and yet she felt suddenly as though she was sitting in the box beside him, her heart beating out of her chest. The Barrington box. Of course. Diana looked up and, following her gaze, opened wide her eyes in surprise.
“Why,” she ventured weakly. “I thought Gerard would stay in the country until we’d departed. I hardly thought…” She trailed off and then added cryptically. “He must have read the letter.”
“What letter?” Nora asked.
“It is no matter,” Diana said slowly. “I wonder why he hasn’t come down to find us yet?”
Nora was wondering the same thing, and yet as soon as she was tempted to feel hurt she remembered the letter that she had sent and realised that it would have been even more strange if the man she had spurned had chosen to join them in their box. She turned her attention back to the stage, but now she felt drawn to the Barringtons’ box as though by some invisible force.
When she looked back up, she saw the flash of scarlet from Katherine’s gown and winced inwardly. She had known, of course, that in breaking off her relationship would mean Gerard would have a chance at last to pursue a more fitting arrangement. But the evidence of his choice being so recent and so very near that of the woman who had been her rival all along cut to her heart.
She saw Katherine turn and look up at Gerard and say something, and the answering smile on his face tore at her. She looked away from him and found Lady Colbourne looking at the Barrington box as well with a smile. She clearly didn’t realise yet that Nora was watching her, or she wouldn’t have been so obvious in her satisfaction. She caught sight of her son in the theatre box of the woman she’d been driving him towards for months and smiled lightly before looking back at the stage.
Nora fought back the added insult this brought upon her pride, a task easily done when her heart was the more wounded party. She wished quietly, desperately, that the opera might have been finished at once and afford her an opportunity to slip away before the Colbourne and Barrington worlds must surely collide at the close of the evening. She could hardly manage to sit across from Gerard separated by all the space and people between them. She could scarcely imagine standing with him in the same room.
She turned back to the stage, this time fixing her gaze upon it with unwavering emotion. There was a young man on stage now, clinging to a spar that was set conveniently in centre stage. He was singing as well, and the lady from before was huddling behind a nearby tree and trying to decipher, it seemed, her counterpart’s meaning.
Diana read from her playbook in a soft voice. “The man was cast aside from the same shipwreck as the lady,” she read softly, “but before their stations were so removed that he was never afforded an opportunity to speak with her. Still, he was able to admire her from a distance and now mourns that so blooming a life might have been cut short so soon.”
Nora bit her lip at the words, but didn’t allow her gaze to drift again to the object of her own desires, the man that she herself had admired from a distance despite the fact their ill-fated romance had been so soon cut short. Tears formed in her eyes, and Diana, apparently noticing, said kindly, “It is a moving story, is it not?”
She nodded in response, but remained silent, for her emotion was too great to speak. It was all she could do to stay in the box as was proper and wait until the moment came to flee to safety.
Chapter 39
Gerard’s gaze fell on Nora at last when the young woman had ceased her singing and a young man had taken the stage in her place. It was Katherine who pointed her out at last, showing him that his mother and sister had taken an alternative box, perhaps because of the late notice, and were more directly across from him than usual.
Even from a distance, her presence took his breath away. Beside Diana and Lady Colbourne in their silks and satins, she looked rather simple. Only a white muslin gown with minimal lace and trim, a simple band of ribbon and pearl around her dark hair, and an embroidered shawl hanging down around her elbows.
She was sitting quite straight and still, focusing on the scene playing out below her with an intensity that seemed to belie the relaxed way she’d previously viewed the opera. Gerard remembered the way she’d been when they first attended the French opera together, annoyed with all the characters, uncertain of the length, anxious to attend the scandalous circus again.
Now he felt that he would trade the expression of intent on her face for a moment that she might glance in his direction. He even felt that he would have rather had her to himself, wholly intent upon him, even if it had meant carrying her out of the opera and to the door of the circus house that very minute.
“I should go over now,” he said quietly to Katherine.
She shook her head with a smile. “
They will have closed their box by now, Lord Colbourne. You know as much.”
“But surely at intermission…”
“This is a new piece that will be shorter than the usual three hours,” Katherine explained. “It is my understanding that we will not have a chance to speak to the other audience members until the close in an hour’s time or so. Patience, Lord Colbourne.”
He nodded and waited in silence, devising a plan to intercept Nora and his family on their way out. As he waited, he found the entirety of the show slipping by unnoticed. He had replaced whatever entertainment it might once have offered with the pure joy of watching Nora’s profile, and the agony of seeing it never turn – not even once – in his direction.
At long last, the final strains of the overture faded, and Gerard leapt at once from his seat and made for the door, not attending to anything but his ultimate aim. As he was about to leave, David was suddenly at his side with a sheepish grin on his face, blocking the door. David bowed and fixed his gaze on Lady Cecilia Barrington and Lady Katherine, reminding Gerard of their kindness by nodding to their good nature.
“Lady Barrington, Lady Katherine,” he said with a smile. “I’m sure Lord Colbourne and I are most grateful to you for offering up your box in service of our quest. You have been wholly of aid in a time of immediate difficulty, and I hope to see you again quite soon.”
Drawn back to himself enough to recall his manners, Gerard nodded as well and bowed to the Barringtons.
“I wish you all well,” he said, fixing his gaze lightly upon Katherine’s smiling face. “And I too thank you for offering up your box and your friendship to us this evening. I hope to cross paths with you soon.”
Lady Katherine smiled gently. “I’m sure we will. Please pass on our regards to your mother and sister, and to Miss Pembroke as well.”
As they left the box and were at last out of earshot, David turned to Gerard with mock astonishment in his eyes.
“To think I would see the day when the proper Lord Colbourne would forget to thank a wealthy family like the Barringtons for a service offered. It is truly astonishing. I cannot imagine what held your attention in such a fixed fashion that you might have been induced to lay aside your manners so completely.”
Gerard shot the younger man a sideways look and smiled wryly. “Can you not, young David?”
David’s grin widened at this wordless acknowledgment. “I believe that your acquaintance with my sister must have been rubbing off on you, as I’m sure yours has on her, for she sat through the entirety of an opera – a thing I know quite certainly that she despises – without moving a muscle or looking in our direction at all, while you could likely not tell me a single line of it, so focused as you were across the way at the other box.”
Gerard smiled in response. He had felt the same thing, even before David put a point on it by recognising the way they were growing more alike. He wondered, however, if they were really changing that much, or if he and Nora happened to bring out and balance each other’s true natures.
The two men were the earliest theatre attendees to find themselves downstairs, so eagerly had they departed their boxes, and they waited together in the lobby while a few couples made their way down the great staircase before Gerard at last caught sight of the figures of his mother and sister and Nora. Nora was walking a little behind Diana and Lady Colbourne, something that Gerard had not seen before, and she looked different – beaten, almost, like a creature that had at last accepted its fate.
The three women descended the stairs without seeing either David or Gerard at first, giving Gerard ample time to look at Nora. She was even more beautiful up close, as he had come to expect, and looked like the lilies in the Holcombe lakes, or the wheat in the grass, so small and graceful did she seem amid the array of fine gowns and imperious lords and ladies. She kept her eyes fixed on the carpeting at her feet, and though Diana threw a few comments back in her direction she only raised them once to offer a weak smile and comment in response. It was distressing indeed, to see someone Gerard knew was so full of life diminish her own opinion so clearly.
He stepped forward as they neared the bottom of the stairs and bowed deeply.
“Ladies.”
The three reactions were quite different, and quite immediate. Lady Colbourne looked at once to his side, likely expecting to see him with the Barringtons, or at least Katherine, and clearly surprised that David Pembroke stood in their stead. Diana widened her eyes in delight, but Nora was uncharacteristically quiet, and when his eyes met hers for the briefest moment, she dropped them and looked in the direction of the door like a hunted animal.
“Gerard!” Lady Colbourne exclaimed. “I am truly surprised to see you here.”
Gerard walked past her as though she wasn’t there, his eyes still fixed on Nora’s downturned face, and came to stand in front of her. He reached down and took her hand, thrilling at the way she looked up in surprise at his touch. He held it briefly to his lips and kept her gaze as he did so, and when he dropped it, she was looking at him again. Her eyes held confusion and undeniable pain, but she didn’t look away.
“Miss Pembroke, it does me well to look upon your face again,” he said gravely. “I have come to the theatre this very evening in the hopes that our paths might cross. I would like to beg of you permission to call on you tomorrow at my family home in London. I have something very particular to ask you.”
“Gerard,” Lady Colbourne interjected. “What do you mean, call on her? Surely you will be staying at the same home?”
Still keeping his eyes on Nora, and answering her instead of his mother, he said gently, “I will be staying with your brother in his flat in town. He has agreed to afford me a place there until my particular request has been made, for the enduring comfort of all.”
There was a long moment of silence, and then he pressed again. “Miss Pembroke, might I call?”
She was still clearly shocked, and not at all hopeful despite his best intentions, but she nodded her head slowly.
“You will grant my request?” he asked.
“I will look for you tomorrow,” she answered him.
His mother seemed impatient now and stepped forward between him and Nora as best she could, clearing her throat gently.
“Pardon me, Gerard, but I saw you earlier in the Barrington box. Where is Lady Katherine?”
Gerard sighed. It seemed so obvious to him now, all his mother’s involvement in this matter that was clearly between only him and the bright-eyed woman yet again avoiding his gaze at the mention of Lady Katherine. He realised with a start, looking at Nora’s face, that she must have seen him after all, for the pain there was the pain of a woman who had been thinking about the matter of Lady Katherine for some time.
He turned to his mother and spoke in a careful, cautious tone. “Yes, Mother. The Barringtons are quite well, one and all. They allowed me and Mr David here to sit in their box when they heard that I had come in hopes of meeting with Miss Pembroke.” He turned his gaze back to Nora and met her eyes. “Lady Katherine said to give you her best regards, and to let you know that she hopes sincerely in the success of our conversation tomorrow.”
Nora dropped eyes again, and Gerard could hear his mother working up to another interjection. Before she could insult Nora further, he spoke himself.
“David, would you be willing to escort your sister and mine home? I have something I wish to discuss with Lady Colbourne immediately, and I’m afraid it cannot wait for a mutual travel arrangement.”
David nodded, bowed briefly, and then offered his arms to the two women respectively. Nora looked briefly over her shoulder as they walked away, and then was carried off into the evening air. Gerard stood for a moment watching the grace and poise of her retreating figure before turning his attention back to his mother. Still careful to keep his tone polite and gentle, he spoke.
“Mother, did you come in the carriage?”
“Of course I did,” she said, but there were a million un
spoken questions in the tone of her voice and her bearing.
A Baron Worth Loving: A Historical Regency Romance Book Page 25
