by Mary Balogh
“Except love them,” he said. Now where had that come from?
“Love never seems to be enough either,” she said. “It is said to be everything, but I am not sure I believe that.”
He felt a bit chilled. This was not the first time she had run away, then. She had carried all her bewilderment and pain and guilt with her the first time. And this time? The very fact that she was talking about it suggested that she had not come unencumbered, as he had. Did he really want to be doing this? Yet he made no effort to stop the flow of her words. He lifted their clasped hands and set his lips to the back of hers. He kept his eyes on her face.
She was telling him that she had gone to London and made friends with the new Countess of Riverdale.
What the devil? Did she delight in punishing herself?
“It was possible?” he asked.
“They are a lovely family,” she told him. “Alexander is good and kind and has a strong sense of duty and responsibility. Wren is warm and earnest and truly generous. She is also strong and independent. She is a wealthy businesswoman in her own right and continues to be, with Alexander’s blessing. They epitomize for me what a true marriage ought to be but very few marriages are.”
Ah, yes. He remembered now reading about it. Riverdale had married the Heyden china heiress, said to be fabulously wealthy.
“You find both of them impossible to hate, then,” he said. “That must be a severe annoyance.”
She darted a look of amazed incomprehension at him and then . . . smiled. “Well,” she said. “I suppose it would be a comfort if I could dislike them. But I cannot. None of what happened was their fault. Alexander was genuinely dismayed when he was told the title was his. I know. I was there. I cannot dislike any of the Westcotts. None of it was their fault either, and they have gone out of their way to draw us back into the family. They have even all traveled to Bath several times in the last two years for our sakes. They are there now to spend a couple of weeks together following the christening of Camille and Joel’s son.”
“But you do not use the Westcott name,” he said.
“No.” She shrugged.
“And when I met you, you were running again from all this kindness and generosity and love,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “Again. I had not thought of it that way. And now—yet again. Perhaps I have just turned into a runner. A shirker of reality.”
“Reality can be much overestimated,” he said.
She sighed, and they were silent for a while. Tall trees lining the road on both sides obscured the view of fields and meadows beyond and shut out much of the sunlight.
“And you, Marcel,” she said. “What are you fleeing from?”
He had listened with unexpected interest to the tangle of love and hope and drama and fear and tedium that was her life. But listening was a passive thing. Her life was her own. It did not directly concern him. He had no real interest in her children, her mother, her brother, or the Westcotts—except as they affected her. Not that he was interested in shouldering her burdens and making them his own. Indeed, it was a little alarming to realize that she had brought them with her on this journey of supposedly mindless pleasure. But it was only because she had lived through such experiences and been involved in those relationships that she was the person she was now, he realized in a moment of strange insight. And somehow he was interested in the person who was Viola Kingsley. His interest in her should be entirely about sex if this affair was to proceed true to type. It did not feel quite like any type, however. It had not from the start.
What was he fleeing from?
“Merely the tedium of a visit home,” he said. “There are too many feuding women there. And men who want to take charge in my absence, and a steward who is complaining about them. And a housekeeper who is grumbling about being forced to pray. It is a place to be avoided whenever possible, though just occasionally one feels obliged to put in an appearance to assert one’s authority.”
“And does that work?” she asked.
“Oh, assuredly.” He looked at her, eyebrows raised. “I do not suffer fools gladly. Or at all, in fact.”
“Your family and servants are fools?” she asked him.
He gave the matter some thought. “I can see,” he said, “that I am going to have to choose my words carefully with you, Viola. No, they are not fools. At least, not all of them are. They are merely . . . tedious. Is that a more acceptable word?”
“I do not know the people concerned,” she said. “Are they all your family? Do you not have children? Surely your own children are not tedious.”
He sighed and settled his shoulders across the corner of the carriage seat, putting a little distance between them. He folded his arms over his chest. “They are not,” he said. “But those who have the charge of them would make them tedious if they could.”
“But can they?” she asked. “Do you not have the charge of them yourself?”
“Perhaps,” he said, “I am tedious, Viola.”
“How old are they?” She was not to be deterred, it seemed.
“Seventeen, almost eighteen,” he said.
“All of them?” It was the turn of her eyebrows to shoot up.
“Two,” he said. “Twins. Male and female.”
“And are they not—” She got no further. He had set one finger across her lips. Enough was enough.
“I am running away,” he said. “With you. I have the necessary baggage with me in the form of a few changes of clothes and my shaving gear. It is all I need. And your company. But not your probing questions.”
“Just my body,” she said, drawing back from his silencing finger.
“That,” he said softly, refolding his arms, “was uncalled for.”
“Was it?” she asked.
“I suppose that now we are embarked upon a thoroughly satisfactory affair you want more?” he said.
“Like most women?” She smiled, but the expression did not reach her eyes. “That is what your question implied. No, Marcel, I do not want to own your soul. I certainly do not want to own your name. But is an affair only about—” She stopped and frowned.
“Sex?” he said. “But sex is very pleasurable when it is good, Viola. As I believe you would agree.”
“Yes,” she said, and laid her head back against the cushions and closed her eyes. Shutting him out. Leaving him feeling somehow shallow for wanting nothing but sex from this brief escape from responsibility. She was the ice queen of memory, lips in a thin, straight line. He wanted her.
“None of them will miss us,” he said after a few minutes of irritated silence—irritated from his point of view, anyway. She looked perfectly serene, apart from her lips. He might almost have thought she had dozed off except that her head had not flopped to the side. “Do you realize that, Viola? None of your numerous family members will even notice you are gone. They think you have returned to whatever-the-devil house you live in—”
“Hinsford Manor,” she said without opening her eyes.
“Hinsford Manor,” he said. “They will continue to enjoy themselves in Bath and not spare you another thought.”
She had no comment on that. No protest to make. She knew he was right.
“And no one will miss me,” he said. “When André arrives with word that I have fallen by the wayside but will put in an appearance when I put in an appearance, they will breathe a collective sigh of relief and carry on with their lives. Their tedious, sometimes fractious lives. And they will all write me another letter of complaint, and then complain to one another when they realize there is nowhere to send it.”
Her lips softened and curled at the corners in the suggestion of a smile. “You are out of sorts,” she said.
He pursed his lips and glared at her, but she would not give him the satisfaction of opening her eyes. And he would not give her the satisfaction of
speaking another word, even to deny her charge.
He was not out of sorts.
After a few minutes her head tipped to the left. He unfolded his arms, slid away from his corner, and lifted her head to rest on his shoulder.
They had had their first quarrel.
But he was right. No one would miss them. And he was not going to start feeling self-pitying about that. Though he did permit himself some small indignation on her part. They had let her go—in a hired carriage, no less—when the raw wound of what she had suffered a few years ago had not even begun to heal. They had let her go, and they would not even miss her.
He would miss her when she left him, he thought. Which was, of course, utter nonsense.
Eight
Viola’s family began to miss her after just a few days, when no letter came from Hampshire to inform them that she had arrived home safely. It was unlike her not to let at least her daughters know, especially when she must realize they would be more anxious than usual. They had tried everything they could to dissuade her from leaving in a hired carriage with no servant for protection or company, not to mention respectability.
Camille and Abigail had each since written to her. So had their maternal grandmother and Viola’s sister-in-law on the Kingsley side and two of her erstwhile sisters-in-law on the Westcott side, they discovered when they mentioned the matter during a family dinner at their grandmother’s home on the Royal Crescent. And so had Wren, the Countess of Riverdale, and Elizabeth, Lady Overfield, Wren’s sister- in-law, Alexander’s sister. One of a lady’s daily duties, after all, was to write letters, and they had all been concerned about Viola and her abrupt decision to return home so soon after the christening of her grandson.
A little more than a week after her departure a letter finally did arrive from Hinsford, addressed to both Camille and Abigail. It was beside Camille’s plate in the breakfast parlor when they arrived there together, having come directly from the nursery. It was not from their mother, however, but from Mrs. Sullivan, the housekeeper, who explained that she had got in a whole pile of provisions in expectation of her ladyship’s return home—she had flatly refused to stop addressing Viola thus even after the title was no longer hers. She had given most of the food away after a couple of days before it could go bad, as she was sure her ladyship would have wished her to do. It was unusual for her ladyship not to let her know she had changed her mind about coming, but Mrs. Sullivan had not been too concerned until a number of letters started arriving for her, all from Bath. Her question for Mrs. Cunningham and Miss Westcott, then, if she might make so bold, was this: If her ladyship was not either in Bath or at Hinsford, where was she?
The realization that their mother had neither arrived home nor written to explain why was alarming indeed to the sisters. Joel Cunningham found them severely agitated when he strolled into the breakfast parlor five minutes after them with a cheerful smile on his face and good morning greetings on his lips.
“Mama has disappeared,” Camille told him without preamble, the letter open in her hand, her face ashen. “She has not arrived home yet, and she has not written either to us or to Mrs. Sullivan.”
“I knew I ought to have gone with her,” Abigail wailed. “She was behaving very strangely—we all noticed it. How could we not? She was abrupt and even rude with a few of us, and she is never either of those things. It was selfish of me to remain here and let her go alone.”
“It was no such thing,” Joel assured her. “I think she actually wanted to be alone for a while, Abby. Now where would she have gone if not home? To stay with some relative?”
Both ladies gazed at him in incomprehension. “But everyone is here in Bath,” Camille said.
“Right.” He rubbed his hands together. “Some particular friend, then?”
“There is no one who does not live within a couple of miles of Hinsford,” Abigail said. “There is nowhere she could have gone.”
“Well clearly,” he said, “there is somewhere. She cannot just have disappeared off the face of the globe.”
“But she has not even written.” Abigail covered her mouth with one hand while tears welled in her eyes and threatened to spill over.
“Perhaps she has arrived by now,” Camille said, handing the letter to her husband and making a visible effort to pull herself together. “Perhaps there was carriage trouble and she was delayed. I daresay she is home by now.”
“But for a whole week? And if it was that, why did she not write?” Abigail asked.
No one could think of an explanation. Camille set an arm about her sister’s shoulders while Joel read the letter, a frown on his face. There was no further enlightenment to be found from that single page, however.
“I tell you what I will do,” he said, folding it as he spoke. “I will go down into Bath and see if the hired carriage that took her has returned. If it has, I will talk to the man who drove it. He is bound to know where she went.”
“Oh yes,” Camille said with visible relief while Abigail gazed hopefully at her brother-in-law. “Of course he will. Let us go and find him.”
An argument ensued about whether he would go alone, as he wished to do for the sake of speed, or if his wife and sister-in-law would accompany him. As he pointed out, if Camille went, she would have to take Jacob with her, since it was impossible to predict how long they would be, and if Jacob was going, it would be difficult to leave Sarah and Winifred behind. In the end, they all had their way. Joel went ahead on horseback, and the rest of the family followed in the carriage, for, as Abigail pointed out, their grandmother would want to know about their letter and about what Joel discovered, as would the rest of the family, who were staying at the Royal York.
Joel rode down the long hill into Bath and left his horse at a livery stable before striding off on foot. He passed Bath Abbey on the way and was hailed by someone in a group of people standing and conversing outside the Pump Room. He recognized Anna, his dearest friend when they were growing up together at the orphanage and for a number of years afterward. She was now the Duchess of Netherby. The duke was with her, as were Camille’s aunt Louise, the Dowager Duchess of Netherby, and Elizabeth, the widowed Lady Overfield. He hesitated for a moment, but then turned in their direction and returned Anna’s hug when she stepped forward to greet him.
“You look as if you are in a vast hurry over something,” she said.
“Is anything amiss, Joel?” Elizabeth asked, a frown of concern on her face. “One of the children?”
“Camille and Abby are worried sick,” he said. “There was a letter this morning from the housekeeper at Hinsford. She wants to know where my mother-in-law is. She still had not arrived there.”
“Hired carriages are an abomination,” the Dowager Duchess of Netherby said. “You may depend upon it that it broke down somewhere. She should have accepted the loan of my carriage. I have no use for it while I am here, as I was at pains to explain to her. But dearly as I love Viola, I have to say she is one of the most stubborn women of my acquaintance. She was bound and determined to do it her way.”
“But why has she not written to say so?” Anna asked.
“I daresay,” Avery, Duke of Netherby, said, “that before we delayed him, Joel was on his way to demand answers of the coachman who drove her.”
“I was,” Joel said. “I still am. If the carriage has returned, that is.”
“If.” Anna’s hand crept to her throat.
“I shall come with you,” Avery said. “If you will excuse me, that is, my love?”
“Oh yes, do go, Avery,” Anna urged. “We will return to the hotel and wait to hear what you discover. Oh, what on earth could have happened?”
“Camille and Abigail are on their way to the Royal Crescent,” Joel said. “They were too worried to wait at home.”
“Then we will go there too and wait for you,” the dowager said.
The coach
man who had driven the hired carriage was not present when they arrived at the company’s office. He was out on a call, but it was a local one and he could be expected back at any moment. Any moment proved to be an hour long. When he finally arrived, the man removed his greasy hat in order to scratch his greasy hair after Joel had hailed him and explained why he was there.
“I lost a good-paying customer back here on account of that there fare,” he said. “Had to replace the axle, I did, though the old one wasn’t exactly broke. Not good enough to fix, though. I lost a whole day and a pile of money. That gent did not make good for the day I lost either. I suppose a day’s pay is neither here nor there to the likes of him. Some has it easy.”
“The gent?” Joel said.
“My carriage wasn’t good enough for Mr. High and Mighty,” the coachman said bitterly. “Oh no, not him. He had to go looking for another one, he did, even after I went and changed the axle. Got me to take him to where he could find one. I only hope he got fleeced and all the wheels fell off before it had gone five miles.”
“You left Bath with Miss Kingsley,” Joel said. “Who is this gentleman you speak of? And what happened to Miss Kingsley after the mishap with the axle?”
The coachman scratched his head again. “Didn’t know him from Adam,” he said. “But he thought he was the king of England, he did. She was with him when I took him into town after the carriage was fixed. He had the cheek to say he wouldn’t insist that I pay her back for the cost of the night at the inn. Can you believe it? I hope that after I left them they couldn’t find nothing else to hire for the wheels to fall off of. It would serve him right, it would, if they was stranded there for the rest of their lives.”
“My temper would be considerably happier if you would confine your remarks to answering the questions that have been put to you,” Avery said, regarding the man with languid disfavor. “Where exactly did this slight accident with the axle occur? Where exactly was Miss Kingsley stranded for the night? To which town did you convey her and the mysterious male stranger the following day?”