by Mary Balogh
It was strange how yesterday seemed to have obliterated seventeen years of awkwardness—on Jane’s side, anyway. She felt a welling of fondness for Mrs. Mitford.
“Thank you, my dear,” that lady said as Jane positioned a stool for her feet. “You are kindness itself. I have looked forward to seeing you again this evening.”
Jane sat down beside her.
Her father and Louisa were greeting Mr. and Mrs. Burton with their eldest son and their two eldest daughters. Edna was telling Amelia that she was suffering from a sore side today after having been forced to ride three abreast in the gig yesterday when it was a conveyance intended to seat only two. Not that Mrs. Mitford had taken more than her fair share of the seat on the way home, but Jane certainly had on the way to the vicarage. Edna was not complaining, of course. That was not her way, and no one paid her ailments any attention anyway, so there was no point in complaining, was there?
Captain Mitford was standing with his brother.
“Robert admires you greatly,” Mrs. Mitford said, patting her hand as if she sensed Jane’s awareness.
“That is very kind of him,” Jane said, and finally she risked a glance in his direction. He and the vicar were speaking with Mr. Burton and William—and he was looking at her with a very direct gaze.
She looked hastily away. But not before her stomach turned a complete somersault—or felt as if it did—and her heart leaped into her throat. She had held his hand yesterday, their fingers laced together. She had kissed him. She had listened to his protestations of love. She had fallen in love with him.
He had asked her to marry him.
She glanced at him again. Could all that possibly have happened? He was gazing just as directly at her as before. He smiled slowly—a private, almost intimate smile.
Jane turned sharply away to say something to Mrs. Mitford, hoping that her cheeks did not look as hot as they felt.
“He has always been a favorite with me,” Mrs. Mitford said, making it obvious that she had seen. “As have you, Miss Jane.”
Jane felt ashamed. She had always kept as much distance between herself and Mrs. Mitford as possible, even though they lived in the same village and attended much the same social events.
Edna spoke up loudly for dancing. But Sir Horace Everett of Goodrich Hall was far too genteel to allow an informal dance in his drawing room with a mere pianoforte for music. After half an hour of conversation following everyone’s arrival, the card tables were set up and everyone was assigned a partner and a group. Except, that was, for one person, since the group was not divisible by four. Jane was quite happy to be assigned to play the pianoforte instead.
She wondered as she played if their neighbors were as excited by the infrequent invitations to Goodrich Hall as her father and Louisa always believed they were. Or did they sigh and search about in their heads for some excuse to avoid the inevitable?
The playing of cards was serious business to her father, who did not encourage conversation during the games. Jane looked about several times during the next two hours but could see no real sign of enjoyment on any of the faces of the players, with the possible exception of elderly Mrs. Mitford, who enjoyed company but had all too little of it.
Captain Mitford had Helena Burton for a partner and was giving her his undivided attention. Helena was clearly smitten by his attentions.
Jane was not jealous. Gracious heaven!
Finally, Louisa rose, signaling the end of play and the arrival of the tea tray. Jane folded her music and rose to her feet.
And discovered that Captain Mitford was standing at her shoulder.
“Alas,” he said. “I am too late to turn the pages of your music.”
“You are indeed,” she said. “Did you win your games?”
“All but half of them,” he said.
She laughed and gathered enough courage to look fully into his eyes at last. They were smiling back into hers. She felt that knee-weakening sense of familiarity and attraction again. Oh, why did she feel so strongly that she knew him? His own explanation could not possibly be true.
“Is it permitted,” he asked her, “to seek out cooler air by walking outside on the terrace?”
“It is warm in here, is it not?” she said, and she turned toward the French windows, opened them back and stepped through ahead of him without stopping to fetch a shawl or consult anyone else. She had to be alone with him for just a little while. Oh, she had to. She would have died if he had not come tonight—or if he had come and made no move to seek out her exclusive company.
“I hope,” she said, “you enjoy playing cards.”
“I do,” he said, “when there is good music to listen to. You play well.”
“Thank you,” she said. “But I lay no claim to anything greater than competence at the keyboard.”
She turned her head to smile at him. He was walking with his cane, but she could tell that he was making an effort not to limp too noticeably.
“Great-Aunt Dinah is fond of you,” he said, “though she did remark yesterday after I returned to the vicarage that she fears she frightened you away a long time ago when you were a small child, after something you said caused her to faint. She wishes now she had had the courage to come and see you a day or two after. I suppose she was referring to the incident you mentioned yesterday.”
“Yes,” she said. “I shall start calling upon her more often. I—Well, even if she was not once as dear to me as my own mother, I still feel a fondness for her. And she just told me that I have always been a favorite of hers. I felt very ashamed that I have always avoided being close to her.”
“There is always time to make up for lost opportunities,” he said.
“In the next life if not in this?” she said, smiling.
“Or in the life after that.” He chuckled softly.
They had crossed the wide, cobbled terrace and stood for a few silent moments at the top of the flight of stone steps that led down to the formal parterre gardens. Moonlight bathed everything below them in soft light.
They turned their heads to look at each other again.
“Lovely,” they both said together and laughed like a couple of old friends—or lovers—who were so familiar with each other that they even thought and spoke alike.
It was all very disconcerting—and quite breathtaking.
Was it possible after all…
“I would have found some excuse to call upon you earlier today,” he said, “if I had not been coming this evening. The day has seemed endless.”
Yes. Ah, yes, it had.
“Perhaps,” she said, “we ought to forget about the strange events of yesterday afternoon. They really were quite…bizarre.”
“Agreed,” he said, still gazing into her eyes. “It is bizarre to sit beneath a trellis of roses on a summer afternoon and gaze through trees and across a lake and feel one’s senses almost overwhelmed by the intense beauty of it all. It is certainly bizarre to enjoy dipping one’s feet in the cool water of a lake on a hot afternoon. And to enjoy the company of someone similarly employed. Yes, we must forget. It is already done on my part. What is it I am not to remember?”
She smiled down at the garden. It had been a foolish suggestion on her part. She knew she would always treasure her memories of yesterday afternoon. It had been the most wonderful of her life so far.
She was in love.
There was a swell of voices and laughter behind them, and Jane turned her head to see Caroline Burton standing between the open French windows with Edna and William.
“Shall we stroll through the parterres?” Captain Mitford suggested, offering her his free arm.
She ought to refuse. She ought to suggest joining the others so that they could all converse and enjoy the air together. It was what Jane Everett would normally do.
Instead, she slipped her hand beneath his elbow and descended the steps with him. They walked silently between neatly clipped box hedges in the garden below as if they both feared drawing the
attention of the young people above if they spoke.
He broke the silence first.
“I love you,” he said softly.
They were surely the most magical words in the English language, Jane thought, closing her eyes briefly and reveling in their after-echo in her heart.
“You do not know me, Captain Mitford,” she said. “How can you love me? And please do not talk about other lifetimes and forever. Consider only this lifetime, which in reality is all we have. You cannot possibly love me. If it is attraction you feel, I am flattered. But it cannot be more than that. You cannot possibly know if attraction will bloom into something deeper.”
But I love you, too.
“And yet yesterday,” he said, “you spoke the same words to me. You told me you had fallen in love with me.”
“I must have been affected by the sun,” she protested.
“Or by genuine emotion,” he said.
“Emotion,” she told him, “is not a reliable guide for our words and actions.”
“There you are wrong,” he said. “Deep, true emotion is our surest guide. We make our greatest mistake when we allow our heads to rule our hearts.”
She did not believe it. She had always been taught otherwise. She had always believed otherwise. Though she wished he could be proved right. She had always been ruled by reason and common sense. Her life had never been exciting—until yesterday when she had been infected by very unreasonable emotion.
“Emotion is our human weakness,” she said, “reason our strength.”
“And love,” he said, “is our destiny.”
It was a non sequitur. It did not settle the argument.
Except that it did. It seemed somehow like a great truth that answered all the questions of existence.
Love is our destiny.
“Is that another lake down there?” he asked when they arrived at the east side of the parterre gardens. “I did not notice it yesterday.”
“Merely a lily pond,” she said, “with a wrought-iron seat beneath a weeping willow tree. I like to sit there in the daytime with a book.”
He led her down the sloping lawn toward the pond and she made no protest, though perhaps it was not quite the thing to wander so far from the house when the drawing room was filled with guests.
Ah, but how could she resist? She was twenty-one years old and had never had a beau. She had never met any man whose courtship she wished to encourage, though she hoped for marriage and children one day and a home of her own. She had always hoped for affection and companionship in marriage and an equality of mind and temperament. She had never dared dream of love.
Oh, she had, of course. But she had always told herself she must not expect it.
She was in love now, and it surpassed all dreams.
They sat on the seat, the overhanging branches of the willow hiding them from view and shading them from the moonlight, which gleamed on the water between the lily pads.
“Let us forget reason and emotion,” he said.
“Very well,” she agreed.
“Let us simply love,” he said.
She did not answer, but when he took her hand, she willingly laced her fingers with his and allowed him to rest their hands on one of his thighs.
She closed her eyes again. Surely, oh, surely she had known him longer than a few hours yesterday and a short while this evening. She knew the feel of him, the warmth of him, the male smell of him.
Surely she had always known him, always loved him.
But such thoughts were too dizzying.
“Tell me about India,” she said softly.
He did, enchanting her with his descriptions of the land and the people. It was very obvious to her that he had been happy there.
“What are your very fondest memories?” he asked her when he was finished.
“My mother,” she said.
“Tell me.”
And she told him stories of her mother and things they had done together.
Their conversation, or their twin monologues, felt very like speaking to and listening to her own heart, she thought. She had never felt this comfortable with any other human being, male or female.
“I wish I had known Lady Everett,” he told her.
“And I wish I knew your family in India,” she said.
“But we know each other,” he said, “and we are partly a product of our times with them.”
She might have protested yet again that they did not know each other, that their acquaintance was still such a recent thing that they were virtually strangers. But somewhere at the heart level she knew that was not true.
She had never known anyone as well as she knew him.
He had lifted their clasped hands and was holding the back of hers against his lips. And then he released it and set his arm about her shoulders. He half turned on the seat, lifted her chin and kissed her.
She turned on the seat so that she could slide one arm behind his back and cup the other hand about the side of his face. She slid her fingers into the warmth of his hair. He drew her closer, wrapping both arms around her.
Jane had never felt desire, except for some vague, undefined yearnings on those nights when she could not sleep. She felt desire now like a raging furnace within. She opened her mouth to him and sucked his tongue deep. She pressed her bosom to his coat and reveled in the feel of his hand against the side of one breast and then moving in to her waist, out to the flair of her hip, and behind to spread over her buttocks.
What should have been shocking had her longing for more and pressing closer to him, her legs spreading on either side of one of his.
She wanted him. The startling thought presented itself with crystal clarity to her mind. And the meeting of mouths and the press of hands was not quite enough. She wanted him there, where she was throbbing and aching.
She had had him once upon a time. They had been together. It had been heaven.
It would be heaven again.
Someone was making sounds of longing, and it struck her that it must be she.
“Ah, my love,” he murmured against her lips.
“Robert,” she whispered back.
She could scarcely see him, but she knew that he smiled.
“Jane,” he said, “you must tell me that—”
But he stopped abruptly and turned his head to one side, listening. She looked beyond him. She had heard it, too, the sound of carriage wheels crunching on the cobbles of the terrace. The party was ending. The carriages had been summoned. The guests were leaving.
They both stood up, and he took hold of his cane while she brushed her hands over her skirt.
“I hope for your sake,” he said, “our long absence has not been remarked upon.”
She clasped her hands behind her and walked beside him up the lawn to the terrace and along it to join the chattering throng of guests who were finding their carriages and bidding one another goodnight and calling thanks to Jane’s father and Louisa, who were standing side by side in the doorway. No one seemed to notice Jane come up with Captain Mitford, who stepped forward to help his great-aunt into the carriage that Sir Horace had sent to bring her from the vicarage.
She looked through the open door at Jane when she was seated.
“I hope, my dear,” she said, “you will not catch your death of cold from being outside without a shawl. But blood runs warm in the veins of the young.”
Her eyes twinkled and turned to include Robert in her remark.
“It is a warm night,” Jane told her as Robert handed in his sister-in-law. He climbed in after them and was followed by the vicar.
And the carriage was on its way, as were all the others except Lady Percy’s.
He had said only a quick good-night. He had said nothing about tomorrow.
“It is after ten o’clock,” her father said from the doorway behind her. “I daresay everyone was most gratified to remain so long.”
“No one will talk of anything else for a week,” Louisa added.
“This night air will cause the ague,” he said. “You must be on your way without further delay, Lady Percy. I will not keep you any longer. “
“Jane will see me on my way,” she said. “You must not feel obliged to stand there any longer. Go on inside, Sir Horace. And you, too, Louisa.”
Her coachman handed her into the carriage as the front door closed.
“Did you have a pleasant evening, Jane?” she asked. “Captain Mitford seems a personable young man.”
“He has interesting conversation,” Jane said, thankful that the darkness hid her blush. Yet again she found herself unable simply to blurt out that she was in love.
“I shall see you soon,” Lady Percy said, arranging her skirts about her. “Good night, Jane.”
The coachman shut the door and climbed up onto the box, and Lady Percy and Jane waved to each other as the carriage rocked into motion.
Jane stood on the terrace for a few minutes before going back inside the house. She was in love. She wanted to throw back her head and shout it at the moon. It far surpassed her wildest dreams. She could never have foreseen anything as beautifully…carnal as the reality.
Or anything nearly as exhilarating.
She could still smell traces of his cologne on her skin. She could still taste him on her tongue and on her lips. She could still feel his hand tracing her curves, his knee and thigh wedged between her legs. She could still hear his voice—ah, my love.
Would he come tomorrow?
What would she do if he did not? If he never came again?
How would she live on?
But for tonight she was going to relive the memories of the past hour. One hour could have all the power of eternity.
Oh, she was in love.
She adored him.
And of course he would come tomorrow. He loved her, too.
CHAPTER 4
“I TOLD YOU,” MRS. MITFORD SAID THE NEXT morning while she and Robert were sipping tea out in the little flower garden behind the vicarage, “that something Miss Jane said when she was a child made me faint. I did not tell you what she said, did I?”