by Mary Balogh
“Let me call on you tomorrow afternoon,” he said. “Or this afternoon, I suppose I mean. A formal call. On you and your former governess. Pardon me, remind me of her name.”
“Alice Haytor,” she said.
“Let me call on you and Miss Haytor,” he said.
She was swinging her foot again.
“She knows,” she said.
“And doubtless believes I am the devil incarnate,” he said. “Shall we see if I can charm her out of her strong disapproval of me?”
“She also knows,” she said, “that it is all my fault, that I seduced you.”
“She can know no such thing,” he said, “because it is not true, Cassandra. You signaled strong interest in me. I was not seduced. I chose to be interested in return. You are beautiful. And desirable. I deserve Miss Haytor’s disapproval. I made the wrong decisions concerning you and my attraction to you. Allow me to try to win her respect.”
She sighed again.
“You will not just go away, will you?” she said.
They looked at each other.
“I will,” he said. “If you tell me to go away and stay away, I will do it. If the real Lady Paget tells me, that is. Do you want me to leave, Cassandra? Do you want me out of your life for now and always?”
She stared at him and then closed her eyes.
“I do,” she said after a few moments, “but I cannot say it with my eyes open. Stephen, why did I meet you?”
“I do not know,” he said. “Shall we discover the answer together?”
“You will regret it,” she said.
“Perhaps,” he agreed.
“I already regret it,” she said.
“Tomorrow afternoon?” he said.
“Oh, very well.” She opened her eyes and gazed at him again. “Come if you must.”
He raised his eyebrows.
“Come,” she said. “And I shall tell Mary not to put a spider in your teacup.”
He smiled.
“And now go,” she said. “I need some sleep even if you do not.”
He crossed the room to put on his cloak and take up his hat. He turned toward her. She was standing in front of the chair.
“Good night, Cassandra,” he said.
“Good night, Stephen.”
He walked home wondering what on earth he had got himself into now. His life seemed to have been turned upside down in the past two days.
Had they really been fated to meet? For what possible reason—except that he help keep her and her friends from starvation?
But the reason was for them to discover. Some events, some moments, were dropped deliberately into one’s life, he believed, by an unseen hand. But that hand had no power to dictate one’s response. It was up to the individual concerned to make something out of those events and moments. Or not.
It rained all morning, but by early afternoon the rain had stopped, the clouds had moved on, the sun was shining, and the roads and pavements had dried off.
“It is a perfect afternoon for a walk,” Alice said stubbornly, having crossed to the sitting room window to prove with her own eyes that she was quite right. “We have been promising ourselves a walk in Green Park, Cassie. It will be less crowded than Hyde Park.”
“When you arrived home for luncheon,” Cassandra reminded her, “you declared that your feet would surely drop off if you had to walk one more step today.”
Alice had spent the morning trying to discover agencies she had missed yesterday and revisiting those at which she had left her name, in the hope that something had turned up overnight.
She had said that about her feet before Cassandra had finally plucked up the courage to mention very casually that the Earl of Merton was to call this afternoon—a formal social visit to take tea with them, not official business.
“It is amazing what a little luncheon and a cup of tea and an hour’s sit-down can do to restore one’s energy,” Alice said brightly. “I am ready to go again—and this afternoon I will not even get wet.”
“I agreed that I would be here when he came, Alice,” Cassandra said. “It would be ill-mannered to be from home after all, and you taught me never to be bad-mannered. Besides …”
“Besides what?” Alice was cross. She had turned from the window, a frown on her face.
Cassandra had no work on her lap—she could not seem to settle to anything these days. She had no excuse to look anywhere else but back at her old governess.
“I think our … liaison is at an end, Allie,” she said. “In fact, it is. He found it distasteful—mainly, I believe, because Belinda lives here. He said something about sullying innocence. Though it was not only that. I think he really must be an angel. I led an angel astray. He feels guilty. He wants to make amends. He wants to start again, and he wants us to be friends. Have you ever heard anything so absurd in your life? But he wants to keep on paying me too, and I do not know how I am going to make myself say no, though of course I ought. I cannot accept a handsome salary just for being someone’s friend, can I?”
“Come for a walk,” Alice said firmly, “before it is too late. Just get your bonnet, Cassie, and never mind about changing your dress.”
Cassandra shook her head and looked down at her hands in her lap. She examined her fingernails. They needed cutting. She was wearing her sprigged muslin dress for the occasion. Pretty clothes were something she did have left. Nigel had always insisted that she dress well.
“I do not want even to set eyes on him,” Alice said, “let alone sit and take tea with him. I don’t like him, Cassie, and I do not need to meet him to know that. He hurt you.”
“No, he did not.” Cassandra looked up with troubled eyes. “If any hurting was done, it was the other way around. He has not hurt me. He is … lovely, Allie.”
Lovely and terribly troubling.
All morning—and all last night after he had left—she had thought about his lovemaking and the aches and yearnings it had aroused in her. And that pain that was not pain. It was sexual desire she had been feeling. She had admitted that eventually. She had never before felt sexual desire. She had not even known there was such a thing for women.
And all morning she had been thinking about their conversation afterward.
I suppose there was a reason why you noticed me in Hyde Park a few days ago, and why I noticed you … And there was a reason why we met again just the following day at Meg’s ball. I believe in causes. And effects.
If there was a reason for everything, why had she met Nigel?
Some things happen for a reason. I am sure of it. We met for a reason, Cassandra. We can choose to explore that reason—or not. No effect is fated.
He had found a way for fate and free will to exist side by side. How clever of him.
Let us start again, Cassandra. Let us give ourselves a chance at least to be friends. Let me get to know you. Get to know me. Perhaps I am worth knowing.
Did he not feel he knew enough about her? She had told him—twice—that she had killed Nigel. What was there more to know about someone who had admitted to doing that?
Perhaps I am worth knowing.
“Perhaps,” she said to Alice, “he is worth knowing.”
“After what he has done to you?” Alice came back to her place and sat down with a thump. “And don’t talk to me about your having seduced him, Cassie. You had reason to do it, though heaven knows I opposed it quite vigorously from the start. He had no such excuse for allowing himself to be seduced, except that he is a man. If he needs a woman that badly, why does he not marry? That is what wives are for!”
Cassandra looked at her and, for the first time all day, smiled with genuine amusement.
“Well.” Alice’s cheeks turned pink. “It is one thing they are for. Don’t you go misunderstanding me, Cassie. Women are worth a great deal more than that, as I have tried to instill in you from childhood on. I still think we ought to go to Green Park. It may be raining again tomorrow. And it is I who ought to be finding some source o
f income. And I will. I bought a paper this morning. It was a dreadful extravagance, but there is notice there of several positions for which I intend to apply. Some of them are unsuitable, it is true, but there are several distinct possibilities. A woman’s usefulness cannot possibly be over at the age of forty-two. I refuse to believe it.”
Cassandra smiled at her and noticed that her former governess’s eyes were swimming in tears.
“Cassie,” she said again, “it is I who must look after us. You know it as well as I do.”
“It is you who have always looked after me, Allie,” Cassandra said. “Always.”
Alice dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief.
“It is important to you that we receive the Earl of Merton, then, is it?” she asked.
“Yes.” Cassandra nodded. “And he asked particularly that you be with me, you know—as a chaperone.”
Alice made a rather ugly sound, like a snort.
“I must have told you that story sometime during your growing years,” she said, “about the stable doors being shut after the horse had bolted.”
It was too late for them to go walking now even if they wanted to. A carriage that was passing along the street outside drew to a halt outside the door. Cassandra could hear it clearly from where she was sitting.
Their visitor had arrived.
12
STEPHEN called upon Katherine, Lady Montford, late in the morning after leaving the House of Lords. He went with the intention of asking her to accompany him when he called upon Cassandra. But Meg was with her, having brought Toby and Sally to play with Hal in the nursery, and he was able to ask both of them to go with him.
“I ought to have asked about yesterday afternoon and your ride in the park as soon as I saw you, Stephen,” Meg said. “You have taken it upon yourself to bring Lady Paget into fashion, then, have you? It is very kind of you. She is not particularly easy to like, is she? There is a habitual look on her face that suggests —well, a certain contempt for everyone she beholds, as though she held herself superior. I know it is probably just her way of protecting herself against what really is a very difficult situation, but even so her manner does not invite intimacy.”
“I told her I would call this afternoon,” Stephen said, “but it would not be quite the thing to go alone, would it?”
“She certainly does not need even the whisper of more gossip,” Kate agreed. “You are quite right about her manner, of course, Meg, but I daresay that if I were all alone in London and everyone believed I had murdered my husband—with an axe—I would behave in much the same way. If I had the courage to appear in public at all, that is. One must admire her. I will be pleased to come with you this afternoon, Stephen. Hal will be ready for a rest after a busy morning, and Jasper is going to the races.”
“So is Duncan,” Meg added. “They are going together, in fact. I will come too.”
It had been easier than Stephen had feared. There had been no awkward questions. It was obviously not clear to his sisters that he was nursing a guilty conscience.
When he arrived outside Cassandra’s door on Portman Street during the afternoon, then, it was in a manner that was above reproach. He arrived openly, for every neighbor on the street to see if they wished, and he handed down two eminently respectable ladies to the pavement while the footman who had accompanied his coachman rapped the knocker against the door.
A few minutes later, they were seated in the sitting room, making polite conversation with Cassandra, who was pouring the tea, and with Miss Haytor, whom Stephen recognized from Hyde Park a few afternoons ago. She was sitting straight-backed in her chair, a prunish look on her face, but she was not an unhandsome woman.
And the prunish look was understandable. He just hoped he would not lose this gamble he had taken. He hoped she would not say anything that would reveal to his sisters the truth of his relationship to Cassandra. He doubted she would, though. She was clearly a lady.
In the meanwhile he set out to charm her, concentrating much of his conversation on her while the other ladies talked among themselves.
But all the while he was aware of Cassandra, who was playing the part of hostess with some ease of manner, though her face had that slightly scornful look that Meg had mentioned earlier. He wished she would relax and be herself. He wanted his sisters to like her, almost as if he really were paying her court.
She was wearing a mushroom-colored muslin dress that would have looked dowdy on most women, he thought. On her it looked simply stunning. It accentuated her figure and drew attention to the bright glow of her hair. She looked elegant.
She looked like a lady. She looked like someone to whom nothing sordid could possibly ever have occurred.
And then something happened to relax them all, though it caused Cassandra some initial dismay.
The sitting room door, which had seemed to be shut, clicked open and the shaggy, disreputable-looking dog came padding in with a bobbing gait and a lolling tongue.
“Oh, dear,” Cassandra said, standing as he approached, “the latch did not catch on the door again. I am so sorry. I will take him out of here.”
“I’ll do it, Cassie,” Miss Haytor said, getting to her feet too.
“Oh, but he is adorable,” Kate said. “Please let him stay—if he is allowed in the sitting room at all, that is.”
“Roger tends to be Cassandra’s shadow whenever he is given the opportunity” Miss Haytor said, sitting down again. “He believes the whole house is his and that he is lord and master here. And usually he is.”
For the first time she smiled. She even chuckled when Kate smiled back.
Cassandra took her seat again and half smiled too. Stephen, watching her, saw a look of pure affection on her face and felt something catch at his heart, something so elusive that it was quite impossible to grasp on to it or understand quite what it was.
“Roger,” he said as the dog padded past and he reached out a hand to scratch his good ear. “You have a distinguished name, sir.”
The dog stopped, set his chin on Stephen’s lap, and gazed up at him with one mournful eye. The other eye was glazed over and blind.
“You are either one very unfortunate dog,” Stephen continued, “who keeps running into trouble and coming out of it the worse for wear, or you are one very fortunate dog who survived a terrible disaster.”
“The latter,” Cassandra said.
“Oh, how very dreadful, Lady Paget,” Meg said. “It is only in very recent years that I have had pets in the house—my eldest son brought a whole litter of puppies inside when he could no longer stand having to go out to the stables every time he wanted to see them, and of course their mother had to come too, though she was not at all housebroken at the time. But I know how quickly pets become family, as precious in their own way as the human members.”
“I believe,” Cassandra said, her gaze still on Roger, “a part of me would have died with him had he not recovered from his injuries, Lady Sheringford, but he did. I refused to let him die.”
Her gaze moved up the short distance from the dog’s head to Stephen’s face before she looked away.
No one asked what the accident had been, and she did not volunteer the information.
“You are going to be covered with hairs, Lord Merton,” Miss Haytor said.
He smiled at her.
“My valet will doubtless scold, ma’am,” he said, “but he will brush off every last one of them. And a valet must be provided with something to scold about from time to time, you know, if he is to feel wanted and enjoy his work.”
She almost smiled back at him. But she had not forgiven him quite yet—if she ever would.
No one had thought to cross the room to close the sitting room door and make sure it was shut fast this time. As a result, a little curly haired, rosy-cheeked head appeared about it, as it had about the maid’s skirts the day before, and the child, seeing the dog, stepped inside the room. She was wearing a pink dress that was faded, though it was spotlessly
clean and had been crisply ironed.
“Doggie,” she said, laughing as she came.
But Roger seemed quite happy where he was, having his ear smoothed out and his head scratched, though he did humph a lazy welcome and opened his eye when she buried her fingers in the hair on his back and bent her head to kiss him.
“Oh, dear,” Cassandra said, sounding embarrassed again. “I am so sorry. I will take—”
But the child appeared suddenly to have noticed that there were people in the room as well as the dog, and that one of them was a lady wearing a flower-trimmed straw bonnet. She stepped away from Roger and Stephen and pointed at Meg’s bonnet.
“Pretty,” she said.
“Why thank you,” Meg said. “And your curls are pretty too. Perhaps you can spare one. I’ll cut it off with the scissors I have in my reticule and take it home with me and paste it onto my own head, shall I? Do you think it would look pretty on me?”
The child was giggling with glee.
“No-o!” she cried. “It would look s-silly.”
“I suppose you are right,” Meg said with a sigh. “I will have to leave it on your head, then, where it looks quite lovely.”
The child lifted one foot and held her leg behind the knee.
“I got new shoes,” she said.
Meg looked at them.
“They are very fine indeed,” she said.
“My others was too small,” the child said, “because I am a big girl now.”
“I can certainly see that,” Meg said. “I daresay the old shoes were very much too small. Would you like to sit on my knee?”
Cassandra sat down again, exchanging glances with Miss Haytor as she did so. But they need not have worried. It might not be perfect etiquette to allow a shaggy, decrepit dog and a servant’s child to wander into the sitting room while one was entertaining noble guests, but those noble guests were charmed. Stephen knew both Meg and Kate were. And he certainly was. This was a house, he realized, where children and pets were allowed to roam virtually at will. It was a home. He had felt it yesterday from without the door. Today he was sure of it.
Cassandra did not live in perpetual gloom. Even now she was looking at the child with exasperated affection.