Simply Unforgettable

by Mary Balogh

  “Oh, goodness,” Miss Marshall said even before they began to practice either of the pieces they had chosen for the occasion, “the combined room is not too big for you after all, is it? How extraordinary!”

  They practiced in earnest then, and Frances reveled in the chance just to sing. She did sing at school, of course, but not often or at great length—or to the full power of her voice. The purpose of the school and her role as teacher there, after all, was to draw music out of her pupils, not to indulge her desire to create music of her own. It was a noble purpose, she had always thought. It was a joy to help young people realize their full potential.

  She still did think so, but, oh, it felt good to indulge in a whole selfish hour of singing.

  “Now I know what Amy meant,” Miss Marshall said when they were finished and she was folding the sheets of music neatly on the stand, “when she assured me that no one would notice my accompaniment once you had started to sing. I have never heard a lovelier voice, Miss Allard.”

  “Well, thank you.” Frances smiled warmly at her. “But you are a very accomplished pianist, you know, and need never fear an audience. You have no cause to feel nervous about tomorrow evening, though, do you, when there will be only your family and my great-aunts to hear us. My aunts are quite unthreatening, I do assure you.”

  She drew on her bonnet and tied the ribbons beneath her chin, taking one last awed look about the ballroom, which would be hidden from view behind panels tomorrow evening. But when Miss Marshall spoke next, it was not to her, she realized.

  “How long have you been standing there?” she asked. “I thought you were escorting Miss Hunt to Muriel Hemmings’s garden party.”

  She was speaking, of course, to Viscount Sinclair, who was lounging in the doorway of the music room as if he had been there for some time.

  “Some cousins arrived from the country,” he said, “and the garden party had to be abandoned in favor of entertaining them.”

  “Well, you might have made your presence known, Luce,” his sister said crossly. “Were you listening?”

  “I was,” he admitted. “But if you hit one wrong note, Caroline, I did not hear it. I am certain that Miss Allard did not.”

  “You must give the order for the panels to be put back between the rooms,” she said. “It has been most inconvenient to practice in this space. Miss Allard’s voice is more than up to it, though, I might add.”

  “Yes,” he said, pushing himself away from the doorjamb in order to stand upright, “I noticed that too.”

  Frances did not quite look at him.

  “I must go,” she said. “I have been here ten minutes longer than I intended to be. Poor Thomas will be tired of waiting for me.”

  “Poor Thomas is probably sipping his ale by now,” Viscount Sinclair said, “if he is capable of driving that carriage at a pace faster than a sedate crawl, that is. I sent him away.”

  “You did what?” She raised her eyes to his and glared indignantly at him. “Now I will have to walk home.”

  He clucked his tongue. “It is such a long way,” he said, “especially on a sunny, warm day like this.”

  He did not understand. She might be seen if she wandered the streets of fashionable Mayfair.

  “Luce,” his sister said severely, “Miss Allard did not bring a maid with her.”

  “I will escort her,” he said.

  “I do not need a maid,” Frances said. “I am not a girl. And I would not put you to such trouble, Lord Sinclair.”

  “It will be no trouble at all,” he said. “I need the exercise.”

  What else could she say with Miss Marshall present? He knew very well that she would not make a scene. There was a gleam in his eyes that was beginning to look familiar.

  For someone whom she had twice rejected—she, a mere schoolteacher—he was being remarkably persistent. But she had known from the start that he was a determined, sometimes belligerent man. And she had learned since that he was impulsive and reckless and not easily persuaded to give up what he had set his mind on.

  For some reason he had set his mind on getting her to agree to some sort of relationship with him. Whether it was still marriage she did not know. But it did not matter anyway. She had said no once, and she must continue to say it.

  She walked silently beside him down the long, curving stairway to the great hall and the front doors. She must just hope that the streets between Cavendish Square and Portman Street would be deserted this late in the afternoon.

  Lucius had been invited to take tea at Berkeley Square with the Balderstons and Portia and the Balderston cousins. But though he might have felt honor bound to attend the garden party since he had said long ago that he would, he felt no such compunction after the plans were changed. He sent a polite excuse and remained at home.

  He had been pacing the hallway outside the ballroom—and occasionally standing stock still—since a few minutes after Frances’s arrival, which he had observed from an upper window. He could hardly believe what he had heard. He had thought her magnificent at the Reynolds’ soiree, but what he had not realized there was that her voice had been on a leash because of the relatively small size of the drawing room.

  This afternoon it had been unleashed, though she had kept perfect control over it nevertheless.

  Heath’s hair was going to do more than stand on end. He would be fortunate indeed if it did not fly right off his head.

  But Lucius had not arranged to walk her back to Portman Street only to talk about her singing or quarrel with her. Devil take it, he was in love with the woman and yet he knew so little about her. Not knowing a woman had never seemed important to him before. Women were strange, contrary, irrational, oversensitive people anyway, and he had always been contented to keep his distance from his mother and sisters and never even to try to know or understand the women he bedded. It had never really occurred to him until he thought about it now that he did not know Portia either, although he had been acquainted with her most of his life. It had not seemed to matter—and still did not.

  It mattered with Frances.

  “This is not the way back to Portman Street,” she said as he drew her hand through his arm and set out from Cavendish Square with her.

  “There are any number of ways of getting there,” he said, “some faster and more direct than others. You are not going to tell me, are you, Frances, that you have so little physical stamina that we must take the shortest route.”

  “It has nothing to do with stamina,” she said. “My great-aunts are expecting me back for tea.”

  “No, they are not,” he said. “I sent back a message with Thomas, informing them that I was taking you for a walk in the park before bringing you home. They will be charmed. They like me.”

  “You what?” She turned an indignant face on him and drew her hand free before he could clamp it to his side. “You had no business sending any message at all, Lord Sinclair. You had no business sending my carriage away. I have no wish to walk in the park. And how conceited of you to believe that my aunts like you. How do you know they do?”

  “You look lovely when you are angry,” he said. “You lose the cool, classical madonna look and become the passionate Italian beauty that you are deep down.”

  “I am English,” she said curtly. “And I do not wish to go to the park.”

  “Because it is I who am escorting you?” he asked. “Or because you are not—forgive me—dressed in the first stare of fashion?”

  “I care nothing for fashion,” she said.

  “Then you are very different from any other lady I have ever known,” he said. “Or any gentleman, for that matter. We will not take the paths that will be frequented by the fashionable multitude at this hour, Frances. I am too selfish to share you. We will take some shady path and talk. And if you were dressed in rags you would still look more beautiful to me than any other woman I have ever known.”

  “You mock me, Lord Sinclair,” she said, but she fell into step beside him agai
n, her hands clasped firmly at her back. “I do not believe you take life very seriously at all.”

  “Sometimes it is more amusing not to,” he said. “But there are certain things I take very seriously, Frances. I am serious at the moment. I have a hankering to know exactly what it is that I have lost since you will not have me.”

  That silenced her. She looked up at him with uncomprehending eyes and then dipped her head sharply as two people approached them and then passed with murmured greetings.

  “I know a number of facts about you,” he said. “I know that your mother was Italian and your father some sort of French nobleman. I know that you are related to Baron Clifton. I know you grew up in London and left it two years after your father’s death in order to teach music and French and writing at Miss Martin’s school in Bath. I know that you are a very good cook. I know you have one of the loveliest soprano voices—perhaps even the loveliest—of our generation. I know other things about your character. I know that you are devoted to duty and can be stubborn and sometimes downright belligerent and also amiable and affectionate to those you love. I know you are sexually passionate. I even know you biblically. But I do not really know you at all, do I?”

  “You do not need to,” she said firmly as they reached a side gate into Hyde Park and entered it and turned onto a narrow, shaded path that ran parallel to the street outside though thick trees hid it from view. “No one can be a totally open book to another person even if there is the intimacy of a close relationship between them.”

  “And there is no such intimacy between us?” he asked.

  “No. Absolutely not.”

  He wondered how much of a fool he was making of himself. He tried to imagine their roles reversed. What if she had pursued him and twice he had told her quite clearly that he did not want her? How would he feel if she came after him again anyway, maneuvered matters so that she could get him alone, and then demanded to know who he was?

  It was an uncomfortable picture.

  But what if the signs he had given her were mixed? What if, while his lips had said no, his whole being had said yes?

  “Tell me about your childhood,” he said.

  Good Lord, had he taken leave of his senses? He had never been interested in anyone’s childhood!

  She sighed aloud and for a few moments he thought she was going to keep silent.

  “Why not?” she said eventually, as if to herself. “We are taking a very long way home and might as well have something to talk about.”

  He looked down at her. She was dressed in cream-colored muslin, with a plain straw bonnet. She looked quite unfashionable. Yet she looked neat and pretty and adorable. Bars of sunlight and shade danced over her as they walked.

  “That is the spirit,” he said.

  For the first time a smile played about her lips as she glanced up at him.

  “It would serve you right,” she said, “if I talked for the next several hours without pausing for breath about every single detail I can remember of my childhood.”

  “It would,” he agreed. “But the thing is, Frances, that I doubt I would be bored.”

  She shook her head.

  “It was a happy, secure childhood,” she said. “I never knew my mother and so did not miss her. My father was all in all to me, though I was surrounded with nurses and governesses and other servants. I had everything money could buy. But unlike many privileged children, I was not emotionally neglected. My father played with me, read to me, took me about with him, spent hours of every day with me. He encouraged me to read and learn and make music and do and be all I was capable of doing and being. He taught me to reach for the stars and settle for nothing less.”

  He could have asked her why she had forgotten that particular lesson, but he did not want to argue with her again or cause her to turn silent again.

  “You lived in London?” he asked her.

  “Most of the time,” she said. “I loved it here. There was always somewhere new to go, some other church to admire or museum or art gallery to wander about or market to explore. There was so much history to absorb and so many people to observe. And there were always shops and libraries and tearooms and parks to be taken to. And the river to sail on.”

  And yet now she shunned London. After Christmas he had been unable to lure her back here even though he had offered her an abundance of luxuries to replace those she seemed to have lost since childhood.

  What a comedown it must have been for her to have to remove to Bath to teach—and to wear clothes that were either several years old, like the two evening gowns he had seen her wear, or else inexpensively made like today’s muslin.

  “But I did go into the country too,” she said. “My great-aunts sometimes had me to stay with them. They would have taken me to live when I arrived in England—Great-Aunt Martha was already widowed then. I suppose they thought that a gentleman could not raise a daughter alone, especially in a country that was foreign to him. But though I love them dearly and have always been grateful for the affection they have lavished on me, I am glad my father would not give me up.”

  “He had ambitions for you as a singer?” he asked, noting again that she dipped her head sharply downward when an elderly couple he did not know strolled past them on the same deserted path as the one he had chosen.

  “Dreams more than ambitions,” she said. “He would not even hire a singing master for me until I was thirteen, and he would not allow me to sing at any auditions or public concerts even when my singing master said I was ready. It was to wait until I was eighteen, my father said, when my voice would have matured, and even then only if it was what I really wanted for myself. He was very adamant in his belief that a child ought not to be exploited even if she was talented.”

  “But did he not expect that you would be thinking of marriage at the age of eighteen?” he asked.

  “He recognized it as a possibility,” she said. “And indeed when Lady Lyle agreed to sponsor my come-out when I was eighteen, he insisted that we postpone doing anything about my music until after the summer was over. By then he was dead of a sudden heart seizure. But he had dreamed for me because he knew I had dreams. He would not have pushed me into anything against my will. That was what my mother’s father—my grandfather—had done to her when she was very young.”

  “Your mother was a singer?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “In Italy. She was a very good one too, according to my father. He fell in love with her and married her there.”

  “But did you allow your dream and your ambition to die with your father?” he asked her. “Did you make no attempt to sing at any auditions or to attract any sponsor?” Had not her aunts said that she had had a sponsor and even done some singing in public? “You went to live with Lady Lyle, did you not? Did she not offer you any help?”

  “She did.” There was a change in her voice. It was tighter, more emotionless. “And I did sing a few times to small audiences. I did not like it. When I saw the advertisement for a teacher at Miss Martin’s school in Bath, I applied for it and was offered the position. I have not regretted the decision I made to take it. I have been happy there—oh, contented, if you will. But there is nothing wrong with contentment, Lord Sinclair.”

  Ah. For a while he had felt drawn into her life. She had seemed to enjoy telling her story—there had been a glow in her face, a smile in her eyes, animation in her voice. But she had shut him out again. A lovely young lady who had been brought out under the sponsorship of a baroness must surely have had marriage prospects even if, as Lucius guessed, her father had left her without a penny. But even if there had been no particular beau in her life, there had been the dazzling prospect of an illustrious career as a singer stretching before her. It had been her father’s dream and her own for most of her life. Lady Lyle had been prepared to help her.

  Yet she had given it all up at the advanced age of twenty?

  Something was missing in her story. Something quite momentous, Lucius suspected. Somethi
ng that was quite possibly the key to the mystery that was Frances Allard.

  But she was not going to tell him.

  And why should she? She had rejected him at every turn. She owed him nothing.

  But someone should have done more for her at the time.

  It was not too late, though, for her dream to be reborn.

  He taught me to reach for the stars and settle for nothing less.

  Tomorrow evening she would touch those stars and even grasp them.

  He may have to say good-bye to her again and abide by it this time, but first he would, by Jove, restore her dream to her.

  She looked up at him with a half-smile.

  “I did not suspect, Lord Sinclair,” she said, “that you could be such a good listener.”

  “That is because you know me as little as I know you, Frances,” he said. “There are many things about me that you do not suspect.”

  “I do not think I dare ask for examples,” she said, and actually laughed.

  “Because you are afraid that you might grow to like me after all?” he asked her.

  She sobered instantly. “I do not dislike you,” she said.

  “Do you not?” he said. “But you will not marry me?”

  “There is no connection between the two,” she said. “We cannot marry everyone we like. We would live in a very bigamous society if we did.”

  “But if two people like each other enough,” he said, “a marriage between them stands a better chance of succeeding than if they do not like each other at all. Would you not agree?”

  “That,” she said, “is rather an absurd question. Will Miss Hunt not have you? Does she not like you?”

  “I might have guessed that you would bring the conversation around to Portia,” he said, taking her by the elbow and leading her out through the gate at the end of the path they had taken and back out onto the street. He took the most direct route to Portman Street from there. “I take it very unkindly in you, Frances, to have refused me. I have to marry someone this year after all, as Portia herself has pointed out to me, and if you will not have me then I suppose I will have to have her. And before you pour scorn upon my head and sympathies upon hers, let me add that she told me with the same breath that she also must marry someone and he might as well be me. There is no sentiment involved on either side, you see, and very little liking either. There is no danger that you would be breaking another woman’s heart if you made off with me yourself. Would you care to put the matter to the test?”