by Mary Balogh
She was to be his, and though he knew his mind would run the gamut of misgivings when he was alone again later, he felt curiously … moved by her.
“Miss Fry,” he said against the top of her head—but that sounded all wrong when he was holding her, getting to know her in a manner more intimate than with a mere passing acquaintance. “Or may I call you Sophia?”
Her voice when she answered was muffled against the folds of his neckcloth. “Will you call me Sophie?” she asked. “Please? No one ever has.”
He frowned slightly. There had been some pain in that plea. No, perhaps not pain exactly. But some yearning, surely.
“You will always be Sophie to me, then,” he said. “Sophie, I believe you are pretty. And before you protest that it is not so, that your glass tells a different story, that I would say no such thing if I could see you, let me add that a pearl probably does not look so very remarkable either while it is still hidden inside its shell.”
He heard a soft gurgle of laughter against his chest, and then she drew free. A moment later he felt his cane against the back of his right hand and took it from her.
Had he said the wrong thing?
“We should walk down by the river,” she said, “and perhaps sit on the bank. I shall make a daisy chain, and you can insist that the daisies are as lovely as the most costly of rosebuds. What shall I call you, my lord?”
“Vincent,” he said as she busied herself, presumably with putting her cloak and bonnet back on.
He smiled. Perhaps what he was doing was not so very rash after all. He had the distinct feeling that he might grow to like her—not just because he was determined to do so, but because…
Well, because she was likable.
Or seemed to be.
It was too soon to know for certain. Would she grow to like him? Was he likable? He thought he was.
It was too soon to know if she agreed with him.
And it was too soon to think about the long-term future he had so rashly offered. It always was. The future had a habit of being nothing like what one expected or planned for.
The future would take care of itself.
7
“Will you come to Covington House for tea before I return you to the vicarage?” Lord Darleigh asked when they were making their way homeward later. “We need to make some plans.”
We.
Nothing on the subject of their future had been broached during their walk along the river bank or while they sat there. He had talked about Barton Coombs and his boyhood here, and she had made a daisy chain, which he had touched and explored when she announced she was finished. Then he had taken it from her hands and looped it rather awkwardly over her head and about her neck after it had stuck on the brim of her bonnet.
They had both laughed.
That was what she had found so incredible—that they had laughed together more than once. Oh, and there were other things too, even more incredible. He had touched her. She knew he had done it only because he could not see her, but he had touched her nevertheless, with fingers that had been warm and gentle and respectful. And with his lips…
And he had held her. That had been most incredible of all. He had held the whole length of her body against his. And while there had been the shock of his hard-muscled maleness, there had also been the wonder—ah, the sheer wonder—of just being held. As if he cared. As if somehow she was precious to him. As if somehow she had an identity for him.
This had been an incredibly strange day. How could a day that had begun so disastrously—it had started just after midnight, when Sir Clarence and Aunt Martha and Henrietta had returned from the assembly sometime after her and had all come into her bedchamber without knocking, even though she was already in bed with the candle extinguished. How could a day that had begun that way end this way? And it was not even over yet. He wished to discuss their plans for the future over tea at Covington House.
Without a chaperon. She did not suppose that mattered, though. They were betrothed, and it was full daylight. They had not been chaperoned during their walk. Indeed, she had never thought of chaperons in connection with herself.
“Thank you,” she said.
She rather believed she was going to like him, and the thought brought tears welling into her eyes and a soreness to her throat. There had been so few people to like in the past five years and precious few even before that. Oh, and what sort of self-pitying thought was that! She had learned long ago that self-pity was also self-defeating. She had turned it to satire and had found an outlet through her sketches. There was nothing satirical about Viscount Darleigh, nothing to laugh at—not even the fumbling way he had draped the daisy chain about her neck.
She wondered if she was likable. She had never asked herself the question before.
When they arrived at Covington House, Mr. Fisk, Lord Darleigh’s valet, opened the door to them. His eyes held Sophia’s while the viscount asked him to bring them tea to the drawing room. His face was expressionless, as the faces of servants usually were. But Sophia read accusation, even dislike, in his eyes. She would have been intimidated by him even without that. He was taller and broader than his master and looked more like a blacksmith than a valet.
Sophia did not smile at him. One did not smile at servants. They would despise one. She had discovered that when she went to live with Aunt Mary.
The house, about which she had woven fantasies of family and friendship for the past two years, was more imposing on the inside than she had expected. The drawing room was large and square with some comfortable-looking old furniture, a big fireplace, and French windows opening out onto what must once have been a flower garden and was still neatly kept. There was a pianoforte at one end of the room and a violin case on top of it.
“Do have a seat,” Lord Darleigh said, gesturing in the direction of the fireplace, and Sophia made her way to an armchair on one side of it. She already recognized the slight tilt of his head when he was listening intently. He made his way unerringly to the chair on the other side of the fireplace and sat down.
“I believe we ought to go to London to marry, Sophie,” he said. “By special license. It can be done within a week, I would think, and then I will take you home to Gloucestershire. Middlebury is a vast, stately mansion. The park is huge and is ringed by farms. It is a busy, prosperous place. It is a daunting prospect for you, I know. But—”
He stopped as Mr. Fisk came in with the tea tray. He set it down on a small table close to Sophia, looked directly into her eyes, his own still expressionless, and withdrew.
“Thank you, Martin,” the viscount said.
“Sir.”
Sophia poured the tea and set a cup and saucer down beside Viscount Darleigh. She set a small currant cake on a plate and put it in his hand.
“Thank you, Sophie,” he said. “I am sorry. I did say we needed to make plans, did I not? And then I told you what they were.”
“Within a week?” she said.
Reality was threatening to smite her. She was going to leave here with Viscount Darleigh. They were going to go to London and get married there. Within a week. She was going to be a married lady—Lady Darleigh. With a home of her own. And a husband.
“It would be the best plan, I believe,” he said. “I have a close and loving family, Sophie. They are especially loving and protective of me because I am the only male and I am the youngest. And to top it off, I am blind. They would suffocate me if they were allowed to arrange our wedding. You have no family of your own to balance their enthusiasm, to fuss over and suffocate you. It would be unfair to take you directly to Middlebury.”
She had two aunts, two uncles, and two cousins, if one counted Sebastian, who was Uncle Terrence’s stepson. But he was right. She had nobody who would be interested in coming to her wedding, let alone helping to plan it.
“Sophie,” he said, “that bag you had with you in the church this morning. I was told it was not large. Did you leave most of your clothes and belongings at Barton
Hall? Do I need to send Martin over there to fetch your things? Or did you bring everything?”
“I left behind a few clothes,” she said.
“Do you want them?”
She hesitated. She had almost nothing without them, but they were all hand-me-downs from Henrietta, and they were all ill-fitting. Some of them were shabby. She had her sketch pad and charcoal in her bag and a change of clothes.
“No.”
“Good,” he said. “Then you will have everything new. London is the place to buy whatever you will need.”
“I have no money,” she said, frowning. Her cup clattered back onto her saucer. “And I cannot ask you—”
“You did not,” he said. “But you are to be my wife, Sophie. I will care for all your needs. I will certainly clothe you in a manner befitting your station.”
She set her cup and saucer back on the tray and sat back in her chair. She bit down on one side of her forefinger.
“I would love to be able to whisk you off to London, send you shopping while I acquire a special license, and marry you all within one day,” he said. “But it will not be possible to do things quite so quickly. I am confident, though, that you will be welcomed in the home of my friend Hugo, Lord Trentham. I mentioned him earlier.”
The very thought of it all terrified her—and filled her with such excitement that she felt almost bilious and was glad she had not eaten a cake.
“Sophie?” he said. “I am dictating to you, after all, am I not? But I cannot think of any alternatives. Can you?”
Only getting on the stagecoach tomorrow and riding off alone into the unknown. But she knew she would not do that. Not now that she had an alternative that was all too tempting.
“No,” she said. “But are you sure—”
“Oh,” he said, “I am quite, quite sure. We will make this work. We will. Tell me you believe me.”
She closed her eyes. She wanted this marriage so very badly. She wanted him very badly—his sweetness, his sense of honor, his dreams and enthusiasms, even his vulnerability. She wanted someone of her own. Someone who called her by name and held her for comfort and laughed with her. Someone beautiful and achingly attractive.
Someone to give her back her shattered image of herself.
And someone who—
“You intend to support me even after I have left you?” she said.
“Even after you have—” He stared in her direction. “You will always be my wife and therefore my responsibility, Sophie. And I shall, of course, make adequate provision for you in my will. But—must we think of the distant future already? I would prefer to think of the immediate future. We are about to wed. Let us think about marrying and going home, and leave the rest to take care of itself. Shall we?”
He looked eager and anxious again.
And she was anxious too—not that her dream might not come true, but that it might.
“Yes,” she said, and he smiled.
“We will leave in the morning, then,” he said. “Will that suit you?”
So soon?
“Yes, my lord.”
He tipped his head to one side.
“Yes, Vincent.”
“Shall I play my violin for you?” he asked. “Which is another way of announcing that I will play it for you, for I am sure you are far too polite to voice a protest.”
“That is your violin?” she asked. “I would like it of all things if you will play for me.”
He laughed as he got to his feet and made his way across the room to the pianoforte, feeling his way there but not by any means groping.
He opened the violin case and removed the instrument. He positioned it beneath his chin, took the bow in his hand and tightened it, adjusted the tuning, and then played, half turned toward her. She thought it might be Mozart, but she was not sure. She had not encountered much music. It did not matter. She clasped her hands, held them to her mouth, and thought she had never heard anything even half as lovely in her life. His body moved slightly to the music, as though he was completely engrossed in it.
“They say at Penderris Hall,” he said when he had finished his piece and was putting the violin back into its case, “that when I play, I set all the household and neighborhood cats to howling. They must be wrong, do you not think? I do not hear a single cat howl here.”
He had told her during their walk about Penderris Hall in Cornwall, home of the Duke of Stanbrook. He had spent several years there after his return from the Peninsula, learning to cope with his blindness. And a group of seven—six men and one woman, including the duke—had formed a close friendship and called themselves the Survivors’ Club. They spent a few weeks of each year together at Penderris.
How very cruel of those friends, Sophia thought, to mock his playing. But he was smiling as if the memory of the insult was a fond one. They would have been joking, of course. They were his friends. He had told her how they all encouraged and teased one another out of the doldrums if any of them sank into a depression.
How lovely it must be to have friends. Friends who would even take the liberty of teasing.
“Perhaps,” she said, “that is because there are no cats here.”
Her heartbeat quickened.
“Ouch!” He winced theatrically and then laughed. “You are as bad as they are, Sophie. I am unappreciated, as all geniuses are, alas. I daresay the pianoforte is dreadfully out of tune. It cannot have been played for a number of years.”
She felt absurdly pleased. She had made a joke and he had laughed and accused her of being as bad as his friends.
“You play the pianoforte too?” she asked.
“I have taken lessons for both instruments in the last three years,” he said. “I am proficient at neither, alas, but I am improving. The harp is another matter. There are just too many strings, and I have been sorely tempted on more than one occasion to hurl the thing through the nearest window. But since the fault is mine, not the harp’s, and I would not particularly enjoy being hurled through a window myself, I usually conquer the urge. And I am determined that I will master the harp.”
“You did not learn to play the pianoforte as a boy?” she asked.
“No one ever thought of it,” he said, “including me. It was for the girls. On the whole, I am glad I did not learn then. I would have hated it.”
He sat down on the long pianoforte bench and raised the lid. Sophia watched as his fingers felt along the black keys until he found the middle white note with his right thumb.
He played something she had heard Henrietta play—a Bach fugue. He played it more slowly, more ploddingly than Henrietta, but with perfect accuracy. The instrument was out of tune, but only to a degree that made the melody sound rather melancholy.
“You may hold your thunderous applause until the recital is at an end,” he said when he lifted his hands.
She clapped her hands and smiled.
“Is that a hint that the recital is already ended?” he asked her.
“Not at all,” she said. “Applause usually calls for an encore.”
“And polite applause usually signals the end of a recital,” he said. “That applause was decidedly polite. Besides, I am about at the end of my repertoire. Do you want to try to coax music out of this sad instrument? Do you play?”
“I never learned,” she said.
“Ah.” He looked her way. “Was that a wistful note I heard in your voice? Soon, Sophie, you may do anything you please. Within reason.”
She closed her eyes briefly. It was too vast a notion to comprehend. She had always wanted to … oh, simply to learn.
“Do you sing?” he asked. “Do you know any folk songs? More specifically, do you know ‘Early One Morning’? It is the only song I can play with any degree of competency.”
He played the first few bars.
“I do know it,” she said, crossing the room toward him. “I can hold a tune, but I doubt I will ever be invited to sing at any of the world’s great opera houses.”
; “But how devoid of music our lives would be,” he said, “if we allowed the making of it only to those of outstanding talent. Sing while I play.”
His hands—those hands that had touched her face—were slender and well-shaped with short, neatly manicured nails.
He replayed the opening bars, and she sang.
“Early one morning, just as the sun was rising, I heard a maiden sing, in the valley below.”
His head was bowed over the keys, his eyelids lowered over his eyes.
Why were almost all folk songs sad? Was it because sadness tugged far more strongly upon the heartstrings than happiness did?
“Oh, don’t deceive me, oh, never leave me. How could you use a poor maiden so?”
She sang the song from beginning to end, and when she was finished, his hands rested on the keys and his head remained bowed.
There was a soreness in her throat again. Life was so often a sad business, full of deceptions and departures.
And then he played again, a different tune, more haltingly, missing several of the notes. And he sang.
“On Richmond Hill there lives a lass, more bright than May-day morn…”
He had a light, pleasant tenor voice, though he would surely never sing on the stage of any opera house either. She smiled at the thought.
“…I’d crowns resign to call thee mine, sweet lass of Richmond Hill.”
He was smiling when he finished.
“The language of love can be marvelously extravagant, can it not?” he said. “And yet it can smite one here.” He patted his abdomen with the outside of a lightly closed fist. “Would you believe a man who told you he would resign crowns for your sake, Sophie?”
“I doubt any man would,” she said. “He would have to be a king, would he not, and they tend to be in short supply. But I might believe the sentiment if I were sure he loved me above all else. And if I loved him with an everlasting kind of love in return. Do you believe in that kind of love, my lord?”