Simply Unforgettable

by Mary Balogh

  The low to follow the high began far sooner than she had expected, though.

  The Earl of Edgecombe did not need a carriage to take him back home as his house on Brock Street was very close. And since there was such a press of carriages about the Upper Rooms, Viscount Sinclair had directed his own to wait outside the house. Frances strolled back there with Amy, the girl’s arm linked through her own, while the two gentlemen came some distance behind.

  “I have never had a more wonderful time in my life,” Amy said with a heartfelt sigh as they walked down onto the Circus. “Have you, Miss Allard?”

  “Indeed,” Frances said, “I do not believe I have.”

  “Everyone wanted to dance with me,” the girl said naively. “And with you too. You did not miss a single set, did you? I was delighted to see Luce dancing with you a second time. He drives Mama to distraction because he never dances.”

  “Then I must consider myself honored,” Frances said.

  “Of course,” Amy continued, “he will have to dance any number of times this Season, I daresay. He promised Grandpapa at Christmas that he would take a bride this year, and I suppose she will be Miss Hunt, who has been waiting for him forever. She is in town already with her mama and papa and the Marquess of Godsworthy, her grandfather, a particular friend of my grandpapa. But I will not be able to dance again until next year, when I am to make my come-out. It is most provoking.”

  Frances’s heart was hammering against her ribs. She had very sensibly sent him on his way after Christmas, and she certainly had not been foolish enough during the last few days to expect any renewal of his attentions. She did not want their renewal. But of course knowing that he was about to marry, that he had already chosen his bride, in fact, did hurt. Quite unreasonably so. But then reason had nothing to say to affairs of the heart. She had once spent the night with him. He was the only man with whom she had had sexual relations. It was understandable, then, that she should feel hurt—or if not hurt, then . . . depressed.

  “Having to wait for something one desires greatly is provoking,” Frances said. “But your come-out will be glorious when the time finally comes, and it will be even more so because you have waited so long. But those are sensible words you have doubtless heard a dozen times. In your place, I would be very inclined to throw a noisy tantrum.”

  Amy laughed with delight and squeezed her arm.

  “Oh, I do like you,” she said. “And when I return to Bath—though I do not know when that will be—I shall write and tell you so and come to the school to see you. I wish we did not have to leave Bath so soon as I feel just like a grown-up here, away from my sisters. But Luce says we must return to London tomorrow or the next day.”

  Ah! Another blow. Though in reality it was no such thing, of course. She must not make any grand tragedy out of the events of the past four days. She had not expected to see any of them after tonight—at least, with her intellect she had not expected it.

  “I shall look forward to seeing you again at some time in the future, then,” Frances said as they came to a stop outside the house on Brock Street. Viscount Sinclair’s carriage waited there, Peters up on the box. She wondered if she could suggest riding alone back to the school, but she knew it would not be allowed. Besides . . .

  Well, besides, she could not deprive herself of the last few minutes of agony in his company, could she?

  Agony?

  What sentimental drivel!

  She drew her borrowed shawl more tightly about her shoulders. It was still only springtime and the air was cool.

  Amy hugged her as the gentlemen came up to them. The earl held out his right hand and, when Frances set her own in it, covered it with his other hand.

  “Miss Allard,” he said, “I thank you most sincerely for coming with us tonight. Your company has meant a great deal to Amy, I know. I will be going to London with my grandchildren within the next day or two. But when I return, I shall invite you to sing for me. I hope you will agree to do it.”

  “I would be delighted, my lord,” she said.

  “Lucius will take you home now,” he said. “Good night, Miss Allard.”

  “Good night, my lord,” she said. “Good night, Amy.”

  She was back inside the carriage with Viscount Sinclair again a minute later, and it was proceeding on its way. The journey would take ten minutes, she estimated. She had ten minutes left.

  How foolish to feel panic at the thought.

  “Tell me you enjoyed yourself tonight,” he said abruptly after the first minute or so had passed in silence.

  “Oh, I did,” she assured him. “It was very—”

  “If you say pleasant,” he said, “I shall throttle you, Frances.”

  “—delightful,” she said, and smiled in the darkness.

  “Tell me you found it delightful because I was there,” he said. “Tell me you would not have enjoyed it nearly as much if I had not been.”

  The inside of the carriage was very dark. She could not see his face when she turned her head to look at him.

  “I will tell you no such thing,” she said indignantly. “The very idea! The arrogance of it! Of course I would have enjoyed the evening just as much—better!—if you had not been there.”

  “Liar!” he said softly.

  “You appear to be under the delusion, Lord Sinclair,” she said, “that you are God’s gift to women.”

  “A cliché unworthy of you,” he said. “Tell me you have regretted rejecting me after Christmas.”

  “I have not!” she cried.

  “Not even one tiny little bit?” he asked.

  “Not even half that much,” she said.

  “A quarter, then?” He laughed softly. “You are a terrible liar, Frances.”

  “And you,” she said, “are more conceited than any man I have ever met in my life.”

  “Is it conceited of me,” he asked her, “to have met someone and felt an overwhelming attraction to her, to have felt her equal attraction to me, to have consummated that attraction, and then to believe that she must have felt some twinge of regret at saying good-bye to me, especially when she did not need to do so?”

  “It was better to suffer that little twinge,” she said tartly, “than to become your mistress.”

  “Aha!” he said. “So you do admit to some twinge, do you?”

  She bit her lip but did not answer him.

  “I never did say that making you my mistress was my intention,” he said.

  “But you would not say that your intention was marriage either,” she said. “Pardon me, Lord Sinclair, but I am unaware of any other relationship that would have been possible between us if I had gone away with you.”

  “Courtship?” he suggested. “We needed more time together, Frances. We were not nearly finished with each other.”

  “You speak from the perspective of the idle rich,” she said. “I need to work for my living. And my work is here.”

  “I offered to stay here,” he reminded her, “but you would have none of it. And I offered to take you to London with me and find you somewhere to live and some decent female to stay with you for respectability.”

  “And you would have paid all the expenses, I suppose,” she said.

  “Yes, of course.” She knew from the tone of his voice that his eyebrows had arched arrogantly above his eyes.

  “I would have been a kept woman,” she cried. “Can you not see that? I would have been your mistress no matter what other name you might have attempted to put upon our connection.”

  “Lord!” he exclaimed. “You would argue that black is white, Frances, if I dared to suggest otherwise. But arguing gives me a headache, and I avoid headaches at all costs. There is no discussing any matter sensibly with you, is there? You must always have the last word.”

  She turned toward him again to make some retort, but he turned to her first, set one arm about her shoulders, held her chin firm with the other hand, and kissed her hard on the mouth.

  The shock
of it caused her mind to shatter into incoherence.

  “Mmm.” Her hand came up to his shoulder to push him away.

  “Don’t fight me,” he murmured fiercely against her lips. “Don’t fight me, Frances.”

  And because his very touch had destroyed all rational thought processes for the moment, she gave up her instinctive resistance to his embrace. She slid her fingers up into his hair instead and kissed him back with all the ardor she had been suppressing for three long months.

  He parted her lips with his own, and his tongue came deep into her mouth, filling her with warmth and longing and raw need. For a while she gave in to pure sensation and turned in order to set both arms about him and press her bosom to his chest.

  Ah, it had been so long.

  It had been forever.

  She had missed him so much.

  His hands roamed over her and then strained her to him.

  But powerful as physical passion could be, it could not entirely obliterate thought for longer than a few moments. She was not free to give in to his ardor as she had been after Christmas because she knew that he was not free. He had promised to marry, and he was going to London tomorrow or the next day to do just that. Actually, he had made that promise even before he met her in the snowstorm.

  That realization caused her stomach to somersault.

  She lowered her hand and pushed against his shoulder.

  “No!” she said against his lips.

  “Damn it, Frances,” he said, lifting his head a few inches from hers. “Goddamn it all to hell!”

  She did not reprove him for the shockingly blasphemous language. She bit her lip instead and blinked her eyes in the darkness so that she would not openly weep.

  He tried to renew the interrupted embrace, but she turned her face sharply away.

  “Miss Hunt might not approve,” she said.

  “Miss—? Who the devil told you about Portia?” he asked.

  Ah, so she was Portia to him, was she?

  “Amy, I suppose.” He answered his own question.

  “Yes, Amy,” she admitted. “I wish you joy, Lord Sinclair.”

  “If you Lord Sinclair me one more time,” he said, “I might well have to do violence to your person, Frances. I am not yet betrothed to Portia Hunt.”

  “Not yet,” she said. “But you soon will be. Take your arm from about my shoulders if you please.”

  He obeyed abruptly, leaving her feeling so bereft that even dragging air into her lungs seemed like a physical effort almost beyond her power to perform.

  They rode side by side in silence for the rest of the way. When the carriage made its big turn from Great Pulteney Street onto Sydney Place and then Sutton Road, they both reached for the leather straps over their heads so that they would not touch each other. When the carriage rocked to a halt outside the school, there was suddenly total silence except for the snorting and stamping of the horses.

  The door opened and the steps were set down.

  Viscount Sinclair sat where he was. So did Frances.

  “Some people,” Peters muttered from outside on the pavement, “would like to get to their beds sometime tonight.”

  “Damn your impudence!” Viscount Sinclair exploded with what sounded like genuine wrath and was out of the carriage in a flash. “If I choose to keep you up past your bedtime, Peters, you may choose at any time to quit my service and good riddance.”

  “Right you are, guv,” the coachman said, sounding quite uncowed. “I’ll let you know when that time comes.”

  Viscount Sinclair turned to hand Frances down. He led her to the door of the school, which opened as they approached it. Keeble stood peering out like a suspicious parent, a frown on his face.

  “Well, Frances,” Viscount Sinclair said, his hands clasped at his back. “It would seem that this is good-bye—again.”

  “Yes.” She fought panic.

  They gazed at each other for a long moment in the faint light of the lamp burning in the hall. He looked very grim and square-jawed. Then he nodded his head twice, turned abruptly, and strode away back to his carriage.

  Frances stepped inside the hall without looking back, and the door closed behind her.

  It was over.

  Again.

  But it was over.

  14

  It was an enormous relief to Frances to find the school in darkness apart from the single lamp burning in the hall and a candle at the top of the stairs. She had half expected to find her friends waiting for her in the hallway as they had been when she left for the assembly.

  Keeble made some comment to the effect that he had been just about to lock up for the night and go to bed. But instead of laughing at his little joke, as she normally would have done, she dashed past him with no more than a hasty thank-you and good night and hurried upstairs before he could say anything more.

  She was almost safely past Miss Martin’s sitting room on the way to her own room before the door opened.

  “Not now, Claudia,” she said. “I hope I have not kept you up. Good night.”

  As soon as she was in her room, she cast herself across the narrow bed, facedown, and covered her head with both arms as if she could thereby shut out everything that threatened her, even thought.

  He promised Grandpapa at Christmas that he would take a bride this year, and I suppose she will be Miss Hunt, who has been waiting for him forever.

  How foolish—how utterly ridiculous of her to have been so upset by those words.

  I am not yet betrothed to Portia Hunt.

  Not yet.

  And between the two—between hearing of his impending engagement and marriage from Amy and his own admission of it in the carriage, she had let him kiss her. She had even kissed him back.

  Though a kiss was a very mild way of describing their hot embrace.

  She half heard the tap on her door and ignored it. But a few moments later she was aware that someone had come into the room and was sitting quietly on the chair beside her bed. Someone touched her arm, rubbed it lightly, patted it.

  “I suppose,” Frances said, removing her arms from over her head though she did not turn her face, “if I said I had a wonderful time and am now so tired that I am too weary even to undress for bed, you would not believe me.”

  “Not for a single moment,” Claudia said.

  “I did not think so.” Frances turned her head without lifting it. Claudia was sitting very upright, her hands folded in her lap, looking her usual composed, rather severe self. “I did have a wonderful time. I danced every set, including one with Mr. Blake and one with Mr. Huckerby’s brother-in-law. And then I made an idiot of myself when Viscount Sinclair brought me back here. I allowed him to kiss me in the carriage—indeed I did somewhat more than just allow it. But I already knew that he is about to be betrothed, that soon he will be married.”

  Claudia looked at her tight-lipped.

  “It was as much my fault as his,” Frances said. “I allowed the kiss. I wanted it. I was eager for it.”

  “But you,” Claudia said, “are not about to be betrothed, Frances. And I suppose he initiated the embrace. It was his fault.”

  Yes, it was. If it was true that Miss Portia Hunt was waiting for him in London, that he was to marry her this year—and it was true—then he ought not to have spoken to her as he had in the carriage. And he ought not to have kissed her.

  “What is it about me, Claudia?” she asked wearily. “Why do I always attract the wrong men? And why is it that when I do attract the right man I cannot fall in love with him? Is there something wrong with me?”

  “Sometimes,” Claudia said, “particularly when I hear you sing, Frances, I understand that you are a deeply passionate woman with a romantic heart. It is a dangerous combination for a woman, all the more so perhaps because women are expected to be nothing else but a bundle of tender sensibilities and there are plenty of men who are quite ready to take advantage of the fact. Life can be a tragic thing for us. It is safer, I have come to
believe, for a woman to make a person of herself, to be proud of who or what she is and to grow comfortable with herself, regardless of what others say of her or expect of her—particularly the male world. If she is very fortunate—though admittedly it is rare—a woman can live independently of men and draw contentment from the world she has created for herself.”

  She got to her feet and crossed the room to the window, where she stood looking out into darkness, her spine very straight.

  “That is what I did three years ago,” Frances said wearily, “when I came here. And I have been happy, Claudia. I thought nothing could shake me from that contentment, until I ran into a snowstorm while I was returning here after Christmas.”

  “I suppose,” Claudia said, her voice soft and pensive, “there is no such thing in this life as perfect happiness, Frances. We can only do the best we are able to make our lives tolerable. I sometimes think there must be more to being a woman than this, but this is what I have chosen for myself, and I would rather my life as it is than as it might be if I were the possession of some man, or else dependent upon the males of my own family.”

  “And when one falls,” Frances said, pulling herself up into a sitting position at the edge of the bed, “one must simply pick oneself up and start all over again. The most simple of adages are often the wisest.”

  “Except that in your case,” Claudia said, turning her head and half smiling, “you do not have to start right from the beginning again. Your classes await you tomorrow and your choirs and music pupils—and they all adore you, Frances. And your friends will be waiting eagerly at the breakfast table to hear all about the splendor of an assembly at the Upper Rooms. They so much want and even need to hear that you enjoyed yourself.”

  Frances smiled wanly. “I will not disappoint them,” she said. “And then I will be ready to administer a French oral examination to the middle class, and to smile and praise my music pupils so that they will be inspired to reach greater heights. I will not let you down, Claudia.”

  “I am absolutely certain you will not,” Claudia said. “We all learn to bury a broken heart beneath layers of dignity, Frances. You have done it for more than three years, and you will do it again. Good night.”