by Mary Balogh
It was almost time for the ball to begin. The gentlemen did not linger in the dining room after the ladies left. They all adjourned together to the ballroom to await the arrival of the first guests.
Constantine’s new title was to be announced at supper, Hannah knew. And so was their betrothal. It was the beginning of a new era. She glanced down at the lovely turquoise of her gown and was glad she had changed out of her white dress even though doing so had made her late. She did not have to hide any longer. She did not have to fortify herself with any armor of ice and diamonds.
She was the Duchess of Dunbarton, soon to be the Countess of Ainsley. But most important of all, she was Hannah. She was herself as life and her own character and experiences had made her. She liked herself. And she was in love.
She was happy.
Guests began to arrive, and Constantine took her hand and set it on his sleeve. They strolled together about the ballroom, stopping briefly to talk to acquaintances as they went. They were both smiling.
“Have you noticed,” Constantine asked, “that everyone who enters the ballroom looks at you twice, once with a simple appreciation for your beauty, and once with sudden, shocked recognition?”
“I think it is you they are looking at,” she said. “You look quite dazzling when you smile.”
“You are happy about Warren Hall?” he asked.
“I am,” she said. “You will have all your family close by, Constantine. Including Jonathan.”
“Yes,” he said. “And you, Hannah?”
She looked at him and her smile faded.
“Will you have your family close by?” he asked.
“I will invite Barbara and Mr. Newcombe,” she said. “Perhaps they will be willing to travel again for my wedding.”
“When you are not going to theirs?” he said. “Is that real friendship?”
Why was he talking about this now? The ballroom was filling. The air was growing warm. The level of conversation was rising. The orchestra members were tuning their instruments.
“Very well,” she said, lifting both her chin and her fan and becoming for the moment the Duchess of Dunbarton. “I will invite my father and my sister and brother-in-law and my nephews and nieces. I will even invite the Reverend and Mrs. Leavensworth. And I will go to Barbara’s wedding. We will both go. Are you satisfied?”
“I am,” he said. “My love.”
And very briefly and very scandalously, especially in light of an announcement that had not yet been made, he touched his lips to hers.
“You are going to have to marry me after that, sir,” she said.
“Dash it all,” he said, grinning, “and so I am.”
“None of them will come,” she warned him. “Except perhaps Barbara. Even she will probably not.”
“The reaching out is everything, my love,” he said. “It is all you can do. It is all any of us can ever do. Come and dance with me. And then I will with the greatest reluctance obey all the rules and dance with you only once more—after supper and the announcements. It is to be a waltz. I wrestled Stephen to the floor and held him there until he agreed that a waltz it would be.”
She laughed.
“And if my card is full?” she asked.
“Then I will wrestle your waltz partner to the floor and hold him there until he remembers that he is wearing new dancing shoes and they are pinching and blistering his toes horribly,” he said.
“Absurd,” she said, still laughing.
SOMETHING ELSE they had discussed both yesterday and today was where they would live after their marriage. It had been an easier matter to settle.
At Ainsley Park, Constantine had already moved out of the house in order to accommodate more residents. The dower house had been perfectly satisfactory for his bachelor needs, but it would be less so for a wife and—it was to be hoped—a family. And if he spent less time there, he explained to Hannah, then some of the rooms at the dower house could be opened up too—perhaps for his manager and the instructors. All they themselves would need was one suite of rooms for their use when they went there for visits.
He would go a few times a year, of course. Those people were precious to him, and he dared believe that he was precious to them too.
At Copeland Hannah would be close to Land’s End and the elderly people there of whom she was so fond. But Copeland itself would be their own private domain. And it was lovely indeed with its unspoiled park and house on a rise with breathtaking views in every direction. It would be a child’s paradise in the years to come. It was close to London.
And London would, of course, be their home during the spring. Next year he would have to take his place in the Upper House of Parliament. They would live at his house there even though it was not in the most fashionable part of town. They did not need anything ostentatious.
Copeland, then, was to be their primary home.
He was happy about that, Constantine thought as he danced and watched Hannah dance. He would be happy actually to live in a hovel with her—though perhaps it would be as well if no one ever put that theory to the test.
And then it was suppertime and Stephen announced to the gathered ton that his cousin, Constantine Huxtable, was to be honored by His Majesty the King with the title Earl of Ainsley before the Season ended. And that the Earl of Ainsley would take the Duchess of Dunbarton as his countess soon afterward in a private ceremony at Warren Hall.
How many weeks was it, Constantine wondered, since he had ridden in Hyde Park with Monty and Stephen and seen Hannah for the first time in two years—and looked upon her with disapproval? It was not very many, but it was hard to remember quite how she had looked to him then. It was strange how very different a person looked when one knew her inside as well as out.
He had been starting to think about marrying even then. Little had he realized, though, as he looked upon her in the park, that she was the one.
The one.
His only love.
The dancing was late resuming. Everyone wanted to congratulate them and wish them well. A large number of men swore they would wear black armbands for a whole year, starting tomorrow. Hannah tapped them all sharply on the sleeve with her fan.
And then it was time to waltz.
It was a dance Constantine had always enjoyed, provided he was allowed to choose his own partners. Fortunately, men had more control of such matters than women did. But Hannah did not look as if she was complaining when he led her onto the floor.
“Happy?” he asked her as he circled her waist with his right arm and took her right hand in his left.
“Oh, I am,” she said with a sigh. “But I am not at all sure I am going to enjoy all the fuss of these wedding preparations. Perhaps we ought to have eloped.”
“My cousins would never forgive us,” he said, grinning at her.
“I know,” she said. “But I just want to be with you.”
He had been trying valiantly to ignore similar feelings.
“You want to come tonight,” he asked her, “after the ball?”
She gazed into his eyes for several moments before sighing again.
“No,” she said at last. “I am no longer your lover, Constantine. I am your betrothed. There is a difference.”
He was disappointed—and relieved. There was a difference.
“We will be good, then,” he said, “and look forward to our wedding night.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “But it is not just that. I want … Oh, I do not know what I want. I want to be your wife.”
He smiled at her.
“And I have just remembered something,” she said, brightening visibly. “The duke taught me that I should never say I want, that it implies a lack in myself and leads to abjectness. I do not want to be your wife. I will be your wife, and I shall throw myself into preparations for my wedding with Margaret and the others so that the time may go faster. And oh, Constantine, it is wonderful indeed to have family to fuss over my wedding, even if part of me would prefer to elope.”
The music began.
They waltzed beneath chandeliers bright with candlelight and among banks of flowers and ferns and about other dancers with their swirling satins and silks of many colors and their gleaming jewels, and they had eyes only for each other.
He had always felt that he lived on the edges of life, Constantine realized, watching everyone else living, sometimes helping them do it. He had been hurt so deeply by Jon’s death because he had tried to live his brother’s life and discovered at the end that it could not be done. Jon had had to do his own dying. Which was only right and proper, he knew now. Jon had lived his own life, and he had lived it richly and then died when his time came.
And now it was his, Constantine’s, turn. Suddenly, and for the first time, he was at the center of his own life, living it and loving it.
Loving the woman who was at the center of it with him.
Loving Hannah.
She was smiling at him.
He twirled them about one corner of the ballroom and smiled back.
THE WEDDING of Hannah Reid, Duchess of Dunbarton, to Constantine Huxtable, Earl of Ainsley, was a small affair by ton standards. More surprising, to Hannah at least, it was a family affair, overrun by children, all of whom attended both the ceremony in the small chapel in the park of Warren Hall and the wedding breakfast at the house afterward.
Most surprisingly, it was not only Constantine’s family that was in attendance. Her father came. So did Dawn and Colin, her sister and brother-in-law, and their five children—Louisa, aged ten, Mary, eight, Andrew, seven, Frederick, five, and Thomas, three. And Barbara came with her parents—the Reverend Newcombe was unable to get away so soon after the last time and before his own wedding and honeymoon.
Her father had scarcely changed, Hannah discovered when he arrived at Finchley Park the day before her wedding. The same could not be said for either Colin or Dawn. Both had expanded in girth and looked noticeably older. Colin had lost some of his hair and his youthful good looks. Dawn, in contrast, looked rosy-cheeked and placidly contented—though not at the moment of her arrival.
It had taken some courage for them to come, Hannah guessed.
She had decided ahead of time to behave as though there had been no estrangement, and they had made the same decision, it seemed. They hugged one another, greeted one another, and smiled. And they hid the embarrassment they must all be feeling by turning to the children, who were spilling out of another carriage.
She had two nieces and three nephews she knew virtually nothing about, Hannah thought as she gazed at each of them in turn as they made their curtsy or bow. She had never allowed Barbara to speak of her family.
Under slightly altered circumstances, Colin could now have been her husband for ten years or more. He looked like a stranger she had once met long ago.
“Do come inside,” she said. “There are tea and cakes awaiting everyone.”
“Aunt Hannah,” Frederick said, slipping a hand into hers as she turned toward the house, “I have new shoes for the wedding. They are a size bigger than the last ones.”
“And mine,” Thomas said, trotting beside them as they entered the house.
“Then I am very glad I am having a wedding,” Hannah said. “We all need a good reason to have new shoes from time to time.”
Her heart constricted.
It was not until later that she had a chance to talk privately with her father. He was walking alone on the lawn beside the house after tea, when Hannah expected that he would be resting in his room as almost everyone else was.
She hesitated before going out to join him. But she had come this far toward reconciliation. Why stop now?
He looked up as she came to meet him and stopped walking. He clasped his hands behind his back.
“You are looking well, Hannah,” he said.
“I am feeling wonderful,” she said.
“And so you are to marry another aristocrat,” he said. “But a younger man this time. Is this one someone who is likely to bring you at least some happiness?”
Had he misunderstood all these years?
“I love him,” she said, “and he loves me. I expect a great deal of happiness from my marriage to Constantine. You will meet him later. He is coming for dinner. But, Papa, I knew a great deal of happiness in my first marriage. The duke was kind to me—more than kind. And I adored him in return.”
“He was old,” her father said. “He might have been my father. I have never forgiven myself for the part I played in causing you to act so impulsively as to marry him, Hannah. And I did nothing to stop you. I suppose at the time it seemed an easy answer to a nasty problem. Both my daughters loved the same man, and I wanted both to be happy. I thought you would more easily recover and find happiness with someone else since all the young men had an eye for you, and so I sided with Dawn. That was shortsighted of me, was it not? You married an old man you did not even know and went away and never came back and never wrote, and—Well. And I never had the courage to write either, did I?”
“Marrying the duke was the best thing I ever did,” she said. “And if I judged correctly at tea, marrying Colin was the best thing Dawn ever did.”
“They seem happy enough,” he said. “And my grandchildren are the light of my life. Perhaps—”
He stopped.
“Yes, perhaps,” she agreed. “I am only thirty, Papa. And a child is all I need to complete my happiness.”
“Thank you,” he said awkwardly, “for inviting us to your wedding, Hannah.”
“Constantine has no brothers or sisters,” she said, “but he has cousins on both sides of his family. And they are all very close. More than that, they are affectionate and welcoming. They have opened their hearts and their lives to include me. You could see that at tea, could you not, with Elliott and Vanessa, the Duke and Duchess of Moreland, and his mother and sisters? They have made me understand the importance of family. And Constantine persuaded me to reach out to my own again at last. I did not know if you would come. I believe I expected that you would not.”
He sighed deeply and audibly.
“I wept when your letter came,” he said. “There. I did not expect ever to admit that to a living soul. I felt—forgiven.”
She stepped forward and set her forehead on his shoulder. His hands came to her waist and held her.
HER CHANCE WITH DAWN did not come until the following morning—her wedding day. She was in her dressing room, holding her head still while Adèle curled a stubborn tendril of hair over her right temple more to her satisfaction.
She was wearing pale pink, a color she would not have expected to choose for her wedding. But when she had been shopping for fabrics, she had fallen in love with this shade. She had a new straw bonnet to wear with it, trimmed with pink rosebuds and greenery and pink silk ribbons a shade darker than the dress.
The sky, she could see through the window, was a clear blue. There was not a cloud in sight.
And then everyone, on their way to church, came to see her first. Vanessa and Averil and Jessica, Elliott’s sisters, exclaimed over her and smiled at her and declared they would not hug her and risk crushing either her dress or her hair. All agreed that Cecily, Elliott’s youngest sister, who was in imminent expectation of a happy event, would be very vexed indeed to be missing all this excitement. Mrs. Leavensworth clasped her hands to her bosom and declared that she had not been happier in her life—though she supposed she would be happier yet in three weeks’ time when it was Barbara’s turn.
Barbara did not care whether she crushed anything or not. She hugged Hannah tightly and wordlessly for a whole minute. Then she stood back and looked her over.
“This is what I have hoped and hoped would happen, Hannah,” she said. “I have even prayed about it. Laugh if you will. You have far too much love to give to squander it on mere flirtation. And Mr. Huxtable, or, rather, the Earl of Ainsley, is the right man. I thought so when we were at Copeland. I was almost sure when he scooped you up onto his horse in the
park. And when I saw the two of you together at dinner last evening, well, there was no doubt left in my mind. And now that I have delivered that little sermon, I had better get off to church with Mama and Papa before the bride races us there.” She laughed.
“Babs.” Hannah hugged her again. “How would I have done without you all these years?”
“No better than I would have done without you, I suppose,” Barbara said. “Oh, there you are, Dawn. Mama and I are on our way out and will leave you with more room.”
And they were gone and only Dawn remained, standing uncertainly just inside the door.
“I am ready, Adèle,” Hannah said. “I can put on my own bonnet before I leave.”
Her maid slipped from the room.
“I don’t know how you do it, Hannah,” Dawn said, sounding almost aggrieved, “but you are more beautiful now than you were eleven years ago.”
“I am in love,” Hannah said, smiling, “and this is my wedding day. It is easy to be beautiful under such circumstances.”
“It is not just that,” Dawn said. “I used to think it was just your looks. But it was always what was inside you too. And now there is even more of that. The Earl of Ainsley is very handsome, is he not, though it is a pity about his nose. I should call him Constantine, I suppose, as he invited me to do last evening, but it seems presumptuous. You have done well for yourself, though it must have seemed that the old duke was going to live forever. That must have been a severe trial to you.”
“I suppose the whole world believes that,” Hannah said. “It is not the truth, but it does not matter if no one knows that but me—and Constantine. And now I am about to marry a man I love with all my heart. If you ever look back and feel a twinge of guilt, Dawn, let it go. All things happen for a purpose—sometimes a larger purpose than we can possibly see at the time. What happened led me to the duke and ten years of surprising happiness. And marrying the duke led me by slow degrees to today.”
“I don’t feel guilt,” Dawn said. “You could have had anyone if you had set your mind to it. You chose Colin, and he was dazzled for a while as all men are when they see you. But he really loved me, and I loved him. We have a good marriage, and we have good, healthy children—which is more than you have. I do not feel guilt.”