by Mary Balogh
After she had gone, Frances heard the echo of Claudia’s words and frowned at the closed door—We all learn to bury a broken heart . . .
Had Claudia ever done that?
Had she?
I am not yet betrothed to Portia Hunt.
Not yet. But you soon will be.
She got wearily to her feet and began to undress.
Although the Earl of Edgecombe rose early the following morning for his usual visit to the Pump Room to drink the waters, it was obvious to Lucius that he was weary from his exertions of the night before. He was certainly in no state to travel all the way to London. Yet he still insisted that when his grandchildren returned there, he would go with them rather than go home to Barclay Court. He wanted to see his friend Godsworthy again. He wanted to witness the progress of the courtship between Lucius and Portia Hunt—though he did not mention her by name.
He wanted, Lucius knew, though he did not say as much, to be part of the excitement that would surround their betrothal and planned wedding.
Lucius was desperate to leave Bath even though only London and Portia and marriage awaited him. He had behaved badly after the assembly—and even during it, by Jove. He had gone out of his way to remind her of the first time they had danced together and to arouse her out of her controlled enjoyment of the evening. And then, in the carriage, when as her escort he was supposed to be protecting her from harm . . .
Well, he had been unable to deny himself the indulgence of that one last kiss. That was the trouble with him—he was not accustomed to exercising self-control, to thinking before he acted. Heaven knew where that embrace would have led if she had not put a firm stop to it.
And yet the very fact that she was always so sensible and controlled when he knew that passion throbbed just behind the facade and occasionally burst through for tantalizingly brief moments—that very fact irritated him almost beyond endurance.
They did not leave Bath the day after the assembly, then. Neither did they leave the next day since Amy, who had gone shopping with Mrs. Abbotsford and her daughter the day before, had been invited to join them and young Algernon Abbotsford on an excursion to some village not far from Bristol and begged permission to be allowed to go with such tragic certainty that she would be denied the treat that Lucius could not resist giving in to her.
One day longer was neither here nor there, he supposed.
His grandfather too went off to visit a friend during the afternoon, leaving Lucius with altogether too much time on his hands and too many unwelcome thoughts to weigh on his mind.
Dash it all, when had the promise he had made his grandfather come to be seen as a definite commitment to marry Portia Hunt? Had he ever stated aloud to anyone that she was going to be the one? But then, if not Portia, who? He had committed himself to choosing a bride—an eligible bride.
There could be no less appealing prospect.
The perfect and perfectly eligible bride!
The word perfect and all its derivatives should be stricken from the English language together with the word pleasant. The world would be a better place without them.
He sat with a book and brooded and fumed and schemed and despaired and cursed his lot in life for a whole hour before snapping the book shut—he had not read a single page—and striding out of the sitting room. He set out on a brisk walk down into the center of the city, along by the river, over the Pulteney Bridge, and along Great Pulteney Street. By the time he reached the end of it, he had stopped even pretending to himself that he had come walking for the benefit of his health, that his direction had been random, but that since he had come this way he might as well take a solitary turn about Sydney Gardens.
He was not a man much given to aimless or solitary walking. He favored far more vigorous exercise for his health. Besides, it was not a day that invited a pleasure stroll. It was gray and blustery and chilly. He might have spared a pitying thought for Amy, who had set out on the excursion with such exuberant hopes, except that he was quite sure the presence of young Algernon in the party would render her totally oblivious to inclement weather.
No, he was not out for a pleasure stroll. Here he was turning onto Sutton Street instead of crossing the road to Sydney Gardens, eyeing the school on the corner with Daniel Street, and remembering that it was Saturday and there would be no classes today—a fact that did not necessarily mean that she would be free, of course. It was a boarding school. Someone had to look after the girls and entertain them even at the weekends.
What the devil was he doing here?
He stood for a moment frowning at the front door, wondering if it would be more cowardly to knock or to turn tail and flee. He was not by nature a ditherer—or a coward. Or a thinker, for that matter.
He stepped up to the door, raised the brass door knocker, and let it fall against the door.
All of two minutes must have passed without any response, leading Lucius to the conclusion that the porter did not actually live in the hall, within one foot of the front door, but only occupied it when he was expecting someone. But it was he who eventually opened the door and peered out. His expression immediately turned both sour and suspicious.
“Ask Miss Allard if she will grant me a few minutes of her time,” Lucius said briskly, stepping over the threshold without an invitation.
“She is giving a lesson in the music room,” the porter told him.
“And?” Lucius raised his eyebrows.
The man turned and walked away, his boot heels squeaking on the hard floor.
“You had better go and wait in there,” he said ungraciously, nodding his head in the direction of the visitors’ sitting room.
When he was alone inside the room, Lucius stood at the window looking out on the meadows beyond Daniel Street and wishing he were anywhere else on earth but where he actually was. He was not in the habit of pursuing unwilling females, especially when the world was so full of willing ones. But it was too late to run away now.
He could hear the distant sounds of girlish laughter and a pianoforte playing—and then not playing. Across the meadow a group of girls, presumably from the school, was playing some organized game. The teacher supervising them looked like the auburn-haired one—Miss Osbourne. He had not noticed them when he arrived—which said something about his preoccupation. They were probably all shrieking their heads off.
When the door opened behind him, he half expected to turn and see Miss Martin again. But it was Frances herself, looking white to the very lips, who stepped inside. She closed the door behind her back.
“What are you doing here?” Her voice was actually shaking, but whether from shock or anger or some other emotion it was hard to say.
He knew something at that moment with ghastly clarity.
He was not going to be able to let her go this time.
It was that simple.
“I came to see you,” he said.
“Why?” Two spots of color had appeared in her cheeks. Her eyes had turned hard.
“Because there is something still to be said between us,” he said, “and I do not like to leave things unsaid when they should be spoken.”
“There is nothing else to be said between us, Lord Sinclair,” she said. “Nothing whatsoever.”
“There you are wrong, Frances,” he said. “Come out with me. Come walking in Sydney Gardens.”
“I am in the middle of giving a music lesson,” she told him.
“Dismiss the girl early,”he said. “She will be ecstatic. Do you have other lessons to follow this one?”
She compressed her lips for a moment before answering. “No,” she admitted.
“Then come walking with me,” he said.
“Have you noticed the weather today?” she asked him. “It is going to rain.”
“But it is not raining yet,” he said. “It may not rain all day—just as it did not snow all over Christmas. Bring an umbrella. You cannot claim to be English, Frances, and yet fear stepping outdoors lest it rain. You would be
housebound all your life.”
“I do not want anything more to do with you,” she told him.
“If I thought you truly meant that,” he said, “I would be gone in a flash. But I think you lie. Or if you do not do so quite consciously, then I believe you deceive yourself.”
“You are a betrothed man,” she said. “Miss Portia Hunt—”
“I am not betrothed yet,” he told her.
“But you soon will be.”
“The future,” he said, “is just a theory, Frances. It is not fact. How can any of us know what we will be doing soon? Now, at this precise moment, I am not a betrothed man. And you and I have unfinished business.”
“We do not—”
“You are such a coward, Frances.” He was beginning to feel frustrated, angry. Was she really going to refuse to come? And why the devil was he pressing her when she was so clearly reluctant to have any more dealings with him?
But he knew—he knew beyond any doubt—that her attraction to him was just as powerful as his to her.
“It is not cowardly,” she said, “to avoid inevitable and pointless pain.”
“I cause you pain, then?” His incipient anger disappeared in a moment. She had finally admitted to more than just a twinge.
But she would not answer him. She clasped her hands at her waist and looked composed and pale again. She gazed very steadily into his eyes.
“Give me one more hour of your life,” he said. “It is not a great deal to ask, is it?”
There was an almost imperceptible slumping of her shoulders and he knew that she would not deny him.
“One hour, then,” she said. “I will go and dismiss Rhiannon Jones and let Miss Martin know that I am going out for a while.”
He stared broodingly at the door after she had left the room. He ought, he supposed, to have stopped to think, to consider, before coming here. But, devil take it, it was his life, and there must be a way of living it to his own satisfaction and doing his duty by his family and position at the same time.
But how could he have thought or considered? When he had left the house on Brock Street, he had not known where he was going.
He had certainly not known why.
Or had he?
He gazed out the window with unseeing eyes, looking back wistfully on the time, not too long ago, when his life had been uncomplicated and perfectly satisfactory.
Well, it would be satisfactory again, dash it all.
It would.
He had promised to find the perfect bride.
But there was more than one kind of perfection.
15
He paid their way into Sydney Gardens, just on the other side of the road at Sydney Place, and they walked along beside a bowling green until the path wound upward, twisting and turning as it did so between lawns and among trees whose branches swayed and tossed in the wind.
It was not by any means an ideal day for strolling in any park. There was not another soul in sight apart from the two of them.
Frances shivered even though she was dressed warmly—in the exact cloak and bonnet and half-boots she had been wearing the first time she met him, in fact, she realized suddenly. She felt chilled to the bone, but not so much from the buffeting of the weather as from the fact that she was actually walking here beside him again, one day after she thought he had returned to London, two days after they had said good-bye forever—again.
She had already lived through a day of pain so intense that it had seemed like stark despair. Was she to have to endure the same all over again later today and tomorrow?
Would he never go away and stay away?
Would she never have the resolve to send him away and mean it?
She had received a card with the morning post from Mrs. Lund, Mr. Blake’s sister, inviting her to join Mr. Lund and herself at the theater next week. Mr. Blake was to be of the party too, she had added. Although Frances had hesitated, she had written back to accept. Life had to continue, she had reasoned. And perhaps now she would finally be able to put the past behind her and concentrate her attention upon the man who seemed eager to be her beau. It was not as if she had to make any final decision about him yet. She did not even have to tell him everything about herself yet. It was merely an evening at the theater to which she had been invited.
She had congratulated herself—again—upon her good sense. But here she was, just a few hours later, walking in Sydney Gardens with Lucius Marshall—who was soon to marry a Miss Portia Hunt.
“For someone who had something important to say,” she said, breaking a lengthy silence, “and who was granted merely one hour of my time, you are remarkably silent, Lord Sinclair.”
They walked onto a brightly painted and exquisitely carved Chinese bridge and paused for a few moments to gaze down into the slate-gray waters of the canal below. Under different circumstances, she was half aware, she would be feasting her senses on all the beauty that surrounded them, inclement weather notwithstanding.
“Do you believe in fate, Frances?” he asked her.
She considered her answer. Did she?
“I do believe in coincidence,” she said. “I believe that some unexpected things happen to catch our attention, and that what we do with those moments might affect or change the whole course of our life. But I do not believe we are blown about helplessly by a fate over which we have no control. There would be no point in free will if that were so. We all have the power to decide, to say yes or no, to do something or not to do it, to go in this direction or that.”
“Do you believe,” he asked her, “that the whole course of your life brought you to that snow-clogged road when it did, and that the whole course of my life brought me to the same place at the same time? And do you believe that coincidence as you call it willed it so? Or that in some quite unconscious way we did ourselves? Was it perhaps not simple, random accident that it was you who were there and not some other woman, or that it was me and not some other man?”
The strange, unlikely possibility made her feel breathless. Could life really be that . . . deliberate?
“You were warned that it would snow,” she said. “You might have chosen not to travel that day. I had seen all the signs of an approaching storm for days. I might have waited to see what would happen.”
“Precisely,” he said. “Either one of us or both could have heeded the warnings and warning signs, which appear to have deterred every other intended traveler in that area. But neither of us did. Has it struck you as curious that we met no one else on that road? That no one else stopped at that inn?”
No, it had not. She had never thought of it. But she thought of it now. She had wanted to set out earlier that morning, but her great-aunts had persuaded her to sit an extra hour with them over breakfast. If she had left when she had intended, she would very probably never have met him.
How she wished she had set out earlier!
Or did she?
What was he trying to say, anyway?
He set out along the path again, and she fell into step beside him. He did not offer his arm. He had not done so since they left the school, in fact. She was thankful for it. But she did not need to touch him in order to feel him with every fiber of her being.
Was it possible, she wondered, that it was not just the fact that she had lain with him that drew her so powerfully to him, that had made it impossible to forget him, that had made her life an agony during the past few days? She had loved before. Surely she had loved Charles. But she had never felt quite like this.
They walked onward in silence again. They still had not encountered anyone else since entering Sydney Gardens. Everyone else in Bath had more sense than they, it seemed.
When they reached the top of the hill, they paused again to look down on trees and lawns and winding paths. A roofed pavilion was in view to the left. So was the famed labyrinth a little lower down. Maps of the maze were available from the Sydney Hotel beside the entrance to the Gardens, Frances had heard, for use by those too af
raid of getting lost for an indeterminate length of time before finding their way out again. Behind them was a row of swings, one of them creaking in the wind.
There were all the signs of the fact that these were pleasure gardens, not least among them the sheer beauty of nature. Yet she felt the very antithesis of joy as she looked on them all. Where was this hour leading them? It was leading absolutely nowhere at all.
His silence unnerved her, though she had sworn to herself that she would not break it again. But when she looked across at him, she found him looking back, an unfathomable expression in his eyes.
His words took her totally by surprise.
“Do those swings beckon you as strongly as they do me?” he asked her.
What? For a moment her mind was catapulted back to the inn kitchen on the first morning they spent there, when they were eating breakfast and he had suddenly challenged her to a snowman-building contest. That, she realized then—yes, just that—had been the real start of everything between them. If she had refused . . .
She turned her head to look at the swings. The broad wooden seats were suspended from tree branches overhead on long, plaited ropes. Because they were set in a grove of trees, they looked as if they were sheltered from the wind. Only the one swing at the far end swayed and creaked.
“Even more strongly,” she said, and she turned, catching up the hems of her dress and cloak as she did so, and strode toward the nearest swing.
The need to break the terrible tension between them was overwhelming. What more sure way than to frolic on a child’s swing?
“Do you need a push?” he asked as she seated herself.
“Of course not,” she said, pushing off with both feet and then stretching out her legs and bending them back under the seat to set her swing in motion and propel herself higher and higher. “And I bet I’ll be first to kick the sky.”
“Ah, a challenge,” he said, taking the swing next to hers. “Did no one ever teach you that it is unladylike to make wagers?”