by Balogh, Mary
“Oh, there they are,” she said, pointing downward. “They have stayed all together.”
“I can spot no budding romance between any of them,” he said, “with the possible exception of Bertrand Lamarr and Miss Keithley. They are merely enjoying one another’s company.”
“Yes,” she said.
“In a similar situation we were only too eager to snatch time for ourselves,” he said. “And we were fortunate enough to have a pair of chaperons who were happy to remain well below the top story of the pagoda.”
He had kissed her here, maybe on this very spot. He had told her he loved her and she had not for a moment doubted the truth of his words. She had told him she loved him and had meant the words with all the passion of her young heart. But not a month later she had sent him away, told him she would not speak with him or even see him again. She had told him when pressed, when it had seemed the only way to convince him, that she did not love him, that she never really had.
“Did you mean it?” he asked now, and she knew he had turned his face toward hers, was no longer looking at the view but at her. “I have often wondered.”
“Did I mean what?” she asked, but she knew what he meant. It was as though he had read her thoughts.
“That you loved me,” he said.
She frowned and watched a horse and cart inching along a ribbon of roadway on the distant landscape.
“I do not remember,” she said. “Are you talking about the time we were here together all those years ago? How am I to recall what I said or what I meant?”
“You told me you loved me,” he said, “after I had said I loved you. And then, not long after, you turned me away. But the cruelest cut of all came with the words you spoke as you did it. You did not love me, you said, and never had. But you did love me when we were here. You did mean it, did you not?”
From beneath contracted eyebrows she returned his gaze. Why was the answer important to him? “You have lived a lifetime of memory-bringing events since then,” she said. “You fathered Gil. You married Lady Dirkson and had children and then grandchildren. You lived through years filled with … with riotous living. Why try to remember now what happened or did not happen here years and years ago when we were young and foolish and could not possibly have known our own minds? Why bother to remember? We have scarcely seen each other since. We have spoken only a few times, all of them very recently. What is the point of all this, Charles? If we ever had a … a chance, it is long gone. Those things happened to other people in another lifetime. We are not the same people now. Not even close.”
“Were we foolish?” he asked her. He had turned to look downward again. Matilda could see the young people, still in a group together, making their way along a grassy avenue toward one of the domed temples. “But yes, of course I was. I was young and in love and then hurt as only the young can be. I was blinded by hurt. Instead of waiting for a year and then trying during the next Season to get you to change your mind and to get your father to see that I had changed, I immediately leaped into wild pleasure seeking in an attempt to forget you and soothe my bruised sense of self. I never did try to win you back. Yes, I was foolish. Were you?”
“Foolish?” she said. “No. I had always been obedient to my parents. I had always believed they knew what was best for me and loved me. I believed them when they told me you were no suitable husband for me, that your wild debaucheries would bring me nothing but misery.”
“Debaucheries?” He turned to look at her again. “At that stage of my life? Hardly. So you were wise to break off with me? To tell me you did not love me?”
“Yes,” she said.
He was looking steadily at her, and almost inevitably she had to turn her own head and look back.
“Tell me,” he said, “that that at least was not true. And please do not tell me you do not remember.”
“Why should I remember?” she asked. “It was a lifetime ago. Oh, Charles, of course I loved you. We were young as these young people are young now.” She gestured with one hand toward the window, though she did not look out. “You were handsome and you were paying court to me. You danced with me and talked endlessly with me and smiled and laughed for me alone, it seemed. Of course I loved you. It would have been strange if I had not.”
“But you stopped?”
“Of course I stopped,” she said, remembering her broken heart, her shattered dreams, her conviction that she would surely not be able to live on. “Did you imagine that I have been nursing a tendre for you all these years? Do you see me as a poor, frustrated spinster, sighing herself to sleep each night with memories of the one man with whom she shared a romance when she was no more than a girl? That is both absurd and insulting.”
“Did I say I imagined any such thing?” he asked. “I am sorry. I have upset you.”
“I am not upset,” she said, swiping at her cheeks with the heels of both gloved hands and feeling the humiliating wetness of tears there—she, who never wept.
“Let us not talk or even think about all the years between,” he said. “I loved you when we were last here together, Matilda, and you loved me. It is a bitter memory because of all that came so soon after. But there is a very definite sweetness about it too. We were a young couple in love. I have never been in love since.”
“What nonsense,” she said.
“Perhaps,” he said. “But true nevertheless. I do not believe you have either, have you?”
“Me?” she said. “Of course I have—No, I have not. Is there anything shameful about that? I had chances. But I would not marry without love. I was a stubborn young woman.”
“Yes,” he said. “I know.”
“Well,” she said, “it is a sweet memory, Charles. It was also something that happened to two people who no longer exist.”
“But we do,” he said. “We are those very same two people thirty-six years later. There are gray hairs—more for me than for you—and lines carving themselves on our faces and somewhat thickening figures. But you still look very good. Perhaps I can say so because I look at you through fifty-six-year-old eyes. To me you look good, though I would like to see your mouth primmed less often and smiling instead—as it has smiled today whenever we are in company with the young people. I would like to kiss that mouth again.”
She stared at him as though she were welded to the floor. She was too shocked to smack his face. At the same time she felt a renewed rush of awareness—of their aloneness up here, of the last kiss they had shared here, of him, of his solid presence, of his continued good looks, of his maleness. Of his mouth. But she was middle-aged. On the far side of middle age, in fact. Kissing was for the young. She no longer knew how to do it. The last time she had been kissed was … thirty-six years ago. It would be embarrassing. It would be bizarre. It would be …
She licked her lips, and his eyes dipped to follow the gesture. Her nipples were tingling. There was an ache between her thighs. She had not experienced such things for many years. She was past the age … But even before then she had suppressed the nagging needs that brought her nothing but empty frustration and misery. She could not now …
She took a step closer to him, and when he stepped closer to her, she ignored the instinct to jump back in fright and she let herself rest against him instead, closing her eyes as she did so. Even through his coat and waistcoat and shirt she could feel that he was warm and firm muscled and male. She felt enclosed by the smell of him, his cologne, the starch that must have been used on his cravat and neckcloth, the essence that was Charles himself. It was ridiculous, perhaps, to feel that it was all somehow familiar, but it was nevertheless. With her thighs she could feel the powerful muscles of his own. With her lower legs she could feel the supple leather of his Hessian boots. It was all surely sufficient to make her swoon—if she knew how to do it.
She would remember this, she thought, just as she had always remembered the last time. She would remember for the rest of her life. With her dying breath she would remember that sh
e loved him, that she had always loved him even if there had been days, weeks, even perhaps months through her life when she had not thought of him a single time. Oh no, never months. Or even weeks. Love never quite goes away. It was always there, dormant, waiting to be revived. Broken hearts were always aching to be mended.
His arms had come down along hers and he found her hands with his and twined his fingers with hers as their arms rested against their sides. He lowered his head and tipped it slightly to one side. She felt his breath against one cheek and opened her eyes. His own searched hers from a mere few inches away and somehow she did not feel like an embarrassed and dried-up old spinster for whom such things were merely a present embarrassment and a dream of what might have been a long time ago and could never be again. He did not look like an aging man who surely should be past such things.
“Allow me?” he murmured, his lips almost against hers.
For answer, she shut her eyes again and closed the distance. And—
Oh my.
Oh my.
Oh … my goodness me.
Her thoughts were no more coherent than that for however long the kiss lasted. It was probably a few seconds. No, surely longer than that. Minutes? Hours?
Had it been like this all those years ago? All the physical sensations? All the emotional yearnings? All the inability to think? But if it had been, how could she possibly have let him go?
Ah, how could she have let him go?
Charles.
“Charles?”
He had moved his mouth away from hers and was gazing at her with eyes that were impossible to read. They were still touching along their full length. Their fingers were still entwined at their sides. It had been really, she thought, by any objective standard, a rather chaste kiss. It had also been nothing short of earth-shattering. No, that was far too mild a term. It had been universe-shattering.
For her anyway.
He, of course, must have participated in a thousand such kisses with as many women.
Don’t exaggerate, Matilda.
Was it an exaggeration?
“We are neglecting our duty,” she said.
A wave of something so fleeting that it was impossible to name passed across his face. Amusement, perhaps? Regret? Longing? None of those? All of them?
“You are the one who told the young people you trusted them,” he said. “I would have remained right behind them, treading upon the heels of the last in line.”
“Oh, you would not,” she said. “You were the one who told them you needed ten minutes up here before following them.”
“Because I am an old man and needed to catch my breath and give my arthritic knees a rest,” he said.
“Nonsense.” She was very aware that they were still touching each other, front to front, and their fingers were still tangled up together.
He released her and took a step back. There was definite laughter in his eyes now. “I am sorry for discomposing you, Matilda,” he said.
“You have done no such thing,” she assured him.
“There is another reason why you are cross, then?” he asked.
“I am not cross,” she protested, running a hand over the front of her dress and making sure her bonnet was still straight. “But we came as chaperons and …”
“And ended up needing some of our own,” he said. “Come. We will go down. I will go first so that you do not have to peer into the abyss with every step.”
Oh. Oh. He had surely said exactly the same thing the last time. But how ridiculous to believe that she could remember such a trivial act of gallantry thirty-six years later.
“Thank you,” she said, and wanted to weep.
Yet again.
Five
During the week following the excursion to Kew Gardens, Charles concentrated upon getting his life back to normal. The only trouble was that he was not sure it was going to be possible—not, at least, if normal meant the way it had been until a month or so ago.
For one thing, he had let go the mistress he had employed since not long after his wife’s death. He had paid her off abruptly the very evening after Matilda had made her unexpected call at his house, though at the time he had not believed there was any connection between the two events. He had assumed that he would replace his mistress soon. But he had not done so in the ensuing weeks, though he was not at all sure celibacy suited him. Neither was he sure it did not. Actually, it was sex for sex’s sake that no longer satisfied him, but he did not know what would satisfy him instead. Or if he did, he was not willing to give it serious thought.
For another thing, there was Gil. His son had been in his life for thirty-four years, in a purely peripheral way, but that had changed with all the business over the custody battle and then the breakfast to which his son’s wife had invited him and his first-ever face-to-face meeting with his son. To say that meeting was uncomfortable would be to severely understate the case, but it had been difficult afterward to accept the possibility that he would never see Gil or hear from him again.
But hear from him he had a couple of days after Kew—or at least about him from Abigail, Gil’s wife. She had written a letter filled with cheerful details about the Gloucestershire village in which they lived and their house and garden, which was dominated by both the sight and smell of roses. Interspersed with those details were seemingly random anecdotes about Katy, his granddaughter. And there had been one mention of Gil, who was being transformed from soldier to farmer, complete with muddy boots, for which Abigail had scolded him when he stepped inside the house with them one day without cleaning them off adequately on the boot scraper outside the door. Charles found reading the letter painful more than pleasurable, yet he read it at least a dozen times in the course of the rest of the day.
Then there was Adrian, who had renewed the friendship he had enjoyed with Bertrand Lamarr at university. He had also become friendly with Lamarr’s sister and with Boris Wayne. The four of them had apparently called upon the Dowager Countess of Riverdale the day after Kew in order to thank Lady Matilda Westcott for accompanying them and making the day such fun for them—Adrian’s word. She had apparently tried to persuade her mother to put her feet up on a stool while they were there, but the dowager had declared she was quite capable of keeping her feet on the floor and became quite cross with her daughter for fussing.
“And I ended up feeling quite cross too,” Adrian reported. “There were none of the smiles and twinkly eyes from Lady Matilda that we saw yesterday, or the mock severe admonitions. I think the dowager countess stifles her, Papa. It is a shame, and it is not right. It is not easy to be a woman, is it? Especially a spinster. I wonder why she never married.”
“Perhaps she chose not to,” Charles suggested.
“But the alternative …” his son protested.
Charles ended up feeling irritated himself—but as much with Matilda as with her mother. Why did she behave like that? Why had she allowed herself to become the stereotypical fussy spinster daughter of an autocratic mother? He did not want to think about Matilda. He wished he could erase the memory of the day at Kew, especially of that half hour or so at the top of the pagoda. He did not know what to make of what had happened there. She had aroused in him memories that had been so deeply buried that he would have thought them completely obliterated if her reappearance in his life had not brought them flooding back. Not just memories of facts, however, but memories also of feelings and passions that should be laughable now but were not.
Matilda! There was no way on earth he wanted to become involved with her again. It would be ridiculous. And his guess was that she would agree with him.
Then there were his daughters. Barbara and her family returned from her in-laws’ anniversary celebrations on the same day as Jane arrived in town with her family after recovering from her bouts of nausea. They came together the following day to call upon Charles, bringing their children with them. He talked and played with all three of his grandchildren and admired various toys and t
reasures they had
brought with them for his approval—including the proud treasure of a bruise the size of a bird’s egg acquired from slipping off the back of a pony that had become suddenly frisky. The children were then taken up to the nursery by Barbara’s nurse, and Charles was left alone with his daughters. Barbara had an invitation for him. Her birthday was coming up soon.
“I know,” Charles said. “I never forget birthdays, do I?”
“I wish every man were like you in that regard, Papa,” Jane said, shaking her head, and clucked her tongue. “Wallace, for example.” Wallace, Lord Frater, was her husband.
“Instead of having a family dinner at home as usual,” Barbara continued, “we are going to have a family celebration at Vauxhall Gardens. Edward has reserved a box and we will feast there and listen to the orchestra and dance and watch the fireworks. It must be three years or more since I was last there.”
“We went last year,” Jane said. “But I am always happy to have an excuse to go to Vauxhall. It is sheer magic if the weather is good.”
“Oh, the weather will be perfect for my birthday,” Barbara assured her. “It would not dare be otherwise. Adrian will be coming. He has asked Lady Estelle Lamarr to accompany him. Do you know her, Papa? She is making her debut this year, though she is well past the usual age. I have seen her once or twice. She is a beauty—very dark coloring.”
“I have an acquaintance with her,” Charles said. “Her twin brother was at Oxford with Adrian.”
“It would be lovely, in order to keep numbers even,” Barbara said, “if you would invite someone too, Papa.”
“Mrs. Summoner, perhaps?” Jane suggested.