by Mary Balogh
How could any man look at her and not love her?
How could Lucius . . .
Miss Hunt’s smile was gracious and refined.
“That was a very commendable performance, Miss Allard,” she said. “The headmistress and teachers at your school must be proud indeed of you. Your pupils are fortunate to have you as their teacher.”
She spoke with well-mannered condescension—that latter fact was immediately apparent.
“Thank you,” Frances said. “I am honored to have the opportunity to shape the minds and talents of the young.”
“Lucius,” Miss Hunt said, turning to him, “I shall take the liberty of accompanying Amy upstairs to her room now that the concert has ended.”
Lucius. She called him Lucius. And clearly she was familiar with the family and with Marshall House. She was going to marry him, after all. He might deny it, clinging to the strict truth of the fact that he was not betrothed to her yet, but here was reality right before Frances’s eyes.
And did it matter?
“You must not trouble yourself, Portia,” he told her. “My mother will send her to bed when she thinks the time appropriate.”
Miss Hunt smiled again before turning away to join her parents, who were now talking with Lady Sinclair. But the smile, Frances noticed, did not quite reach her eyes.
Frances turned to Lord Sinclair to find him looking back at her with one eyebrow cocked.
“One of those excruciating moments sprung to life from one’s worst nightmare,” he said. “But behold me still alive and standing at the end of it.”
He was speaking, she supposed, of the fact that she and Miss Hunt had come face-to-face.
“She is lovely,” she said.
“She is perfect.” His other eyebrow rose to join the first. “But the trouble is, Frances, that I am not and have never wanted to be. Perfection is an infernal thing. You are far from perfect.”
She laughed despite herself and would have turned away then to join her great-aunts, but two more people were approaching, and she turned to them, still smiling.
Ah!
The gentleman, who was ahead of the lady, still looked boyishly handsome with his baby-blond hair and blue eyes and rather round face. He also looked somewhat pale, his eyes slightly wounded.
“Françoise,” he said with eyes only for her. “Françoise Halard.”
She had known before she entered the music room on Lord Sinclair’s arm that something like this might happen. She even remembered thinking that it would be a minor miracle if it did not. But from the moment she had started singing until now she had forgotten her fears—and her knowledge that she ought not to be here.
But here was the very person she had most wished to avoid seeing—unless that honor fell to the woman behind him.
“Charles,” she said and extended one hand to him. He took it and bowed over it, but he did not carry it to his lips or retain it in his own.
“You know the Earl of Fontbridge, then?” Lord Sinclair asked as Frances felt that she was looking down a long, dark tunnel at the man she had once loved and come close to marrying over three years ago. “And the countess, his mother?”
She turned her eyes on the woman standing behind him. The Countess of Fontbridge was as large and as formidable as ever, almost dwarfing her son, though more by her girth and the force of her presence than by her height.
“Lady Fontbridge,” she said.
“Mademoiselle Halard.” The countess did not even try to hide the hostility from her face or the harshness from her voice. “I see you have returned to London. When you decide to give a concert in future, Sinclair, you may wish to divulge the identity of those persons who are to perform for your guests so that they may make an informed decision about whether it is worth attending or not. Though on this occasion it is altogether possible that my son and I would not have understood that Miss Frances Allard was the same person as the Mademoiselle Françoise Halard with whom we once had an unfortunate acquaintance.”
“Françoise,” the earl said, gazing at her as if he had not even heard what his mother had just said, “where have you been? Did your disappearance have something to do with—”
But his mother had laid a firm hand on his arm. “Come, Charles,” she said. “We are expected elsewhere. Good evening to you, Sinclair.”
She pointedly ignored Frances.
Charles bent one lingering, wounded look upon Frances before submitting to being led away by the countess, whose hair plumes nodded indignantly above her head as she swept from the room without looking to left or right.
“Your own excruciating little moment sprung to life from nightmare, Frances?” Viscount Sinclair asked. “Or should I say Françoise? I take it Fontbridge is a discarded lover from your past?”
“I had better leave,” she said. “I daresay my aunts are ready to go. It has been a busy evening for them.”
“Ah, yes, run away,” he said. “It is what you do best, Frances. But first perhaps I can cheer you up a little. Let me take you to Lady Lyle.”
“She is here?” Frances actually found herself laughing. All she needed to complete the disaster of the evening now was to find that George Ralston was here too.
“I thought that she would like to hear you,” he said. “And that you would like to see her once more. I invited her to come.”
“Did you?” She smiled up at him. “Did you really? Do you not suppose I would have called upon Lady Lyle before now if I had wished for a tender reunion with her?”
He sighed out loud.
“I remember,” he said, “that on a certain snowy road several months ago I informed you that you were going to have to ride up with me in my carriage and you gave me a flat refusal. At that moment, Frances, I made the greatest mistake of my life. I gave in to a chivalrous impulse, albeit grudgingly, and stayed to argue. I ought to have driven away and left you to your fate.”
“Yes,” she said, “you ought. And I ought to have stuck with my first decision.”
“We have been the plague of each other’s lives ever since,” he said.
“You have been the plague of mine,” she said.
“And you have been nothing but sweetness and light to me, I suppose,” he said.
“I have never wanted to be anything at all to you,” she told him. “I have always been firm on that.”
“Except on one memorable night,” he said, “when you joined your body with mine three separate times, Frances. I do not believe it was ravishment.”
Oh, goodness, she thought, they were quarreling in full sight of a whole ballroomful of people. And she had just spotted Lady Lyle, sitting slightly apart from everyone else just inside the ballroom. She was looking as elegant as ever, her distinctive silver hair piled high and decorated with plumes. She was also looking slightly amused, her eyes fixed upon Frances.
“I have no wish to speak with Lady Lyle,” Frances said. “And I have no wish to remain here any longer. I am going to join my great-aunts now. Thank you for what you tried to do for me this evening, Lord Sinclair. I realize that you thought it would please me, and for a while it really did. But I am going to go back to Bath within the next few days. This is good-bye.”
“Again?” One of his eyebrows lifted once more and he smiled. But for all that, she thought, there was a certain bleakness in his eyes—a bleakness that was echoed in her heart. “Does this not become a little tedious, Frances?”
She could have reminded him that it would not have been necessary this time if he had left well enough alone and not suggested that Great-Aunt Martha summon her to London, supposedly to Great-Aunt Gertrude’s deathbed.
“Good-bye,” she said, and realized only when the word was out that she had whispered it.
He nodded his head a few times and then turned abruptly to stride away into the ballroom.
Frances watched him go and wondered if this now finally was the end.
But how could it not be?
The Countess of Fontbrid
ge knew that she had come back to London.
So did Charles.
And so did Lady Lyle.
It would not take long for George Ralston to discover it too.
All she was left to hope for was that Bath would still be a safe enough refuge.
22
Lucius fully intended to honor his vow to let Frances go this time. He had made his feelings and intentions clear to her, he had done his utmost to get her to admit that she was not indifferent to him, he had even tried to be selfless and further the singing career that ought to have been hers a long time ago even if he could not at the same time further any romance between them.
But she had remained stubborn.
He had no choice but to let her go—unless he was prepared to make even more of an ass of himself than he already had.
He was simply going to have to keep himself busy with wedding plans.
His own, perish the thought.
When he sat through an afternoon visit with Portia and her mama, however, the very day after the concert, he found himself feeling trapped rather than joyful or even resigned. He had just brought Amy home from a visit to the Tower of London and had poked his head around the door of the drawing room to inform his mother that he did not expect to be home for dinner.
A moment later he cursed himself for not checking with the servants to see if anyone was with her. But curses, even silent ones, were now pointless. There they all were—his mother, Margaret, Caroline, and Emily, with Lady Balderston and Portia. If Tait had not been there too, looking hopefully toward the door as if for rescue, Lucius might have withdrawn after a brief exchange of pleasantries. But he did not have the heart to abandon his brother-in-law to his lonely fate.
And so two minutes later he was sitting on a sofa beside Portia, a cup of tea in his hands.
It seemed that he had interrupted a lengthy discussion on bonnets. He exchanged an almost imperceptible grimace with Tait as it resumed.
But Portia turned to him after everything that could possibly be said on the subject had been said.
“Mama has explained to Lady Sinclair that it really was a mistake to allow Amy to attend the concert here last evening,” she said.
“Indeed?” Instant irritation set in.
“The whole thing was a mistake, in fact,” she continued, “and will doubtless be an embarrassment to you for the next few days. But I daresay you did not know, and that must be your defense. It will be my defense on your behalf. Mistakes need not be quite disastrous, though, unless we refuse to learn from them. I am assured that you will learn caution, Lucius, especially when you have someone with a more level head to advise you.”
He was looking at her with both eyebrows raised. What the deuce was she talking about? And was she offering her level head as his future adviser? But of course she was. She was not offering, though—she was assuming.
“In future you must choose the musical talent at your concerts with greater care,” she said kindly. “You ought to have checked Miss Allard’s credentials more carefully, Lucius, though one really ought to be able to assume that a schoolteacher is respectable. Mama and Papa and I certainly made that assumption when we condescended to seek an introduction to her.”
Everyone was listening, of course. But they seemed to be content to allow Portia to do the talking.
Lucius’s eyes narrowed. Irritation was no longer an option. He had moved beyond it to something more dangerous. But he kept his feelings leashed.
“And what exactly is it, Portia,” he asked, “that makes Miss Allard unrespectable? What sort of gossip have you been listening to?”
“I really do not believe, Lord Sinclair,” Lady Balderston said, her voice stiff with suppressed indignation, “we can ever be accused of being vulgar enough to listen to gossip. We heard it from Lady Lyle’s own lips last evening, and Lady Lyle was once kind and misguided enough to give a home to that French girl, who is now trying to pass herself off as an Englishwoman.”
“And this,” Lucius said, raising his eyebrows, “is Miss Allard’s sin, ma’am? That some people pronounce her name Halard? That she had a French father—and an Italian mother? She was planted here as a baby, perhaps, so that she might grow into a French spy? How exciting that would be! Perhaps we should dash off to capture her and drag her in chains to the Tower of London to await her fate.”
Tait turned a snort of laughter into a throat-clearing exercise.
“Lucius,” his mother said, “this is hardly the time for levity.”
“Did someone say it was, then?” he asked, turning his eyes on her and noticing that Emily beyond her was regarding him with dancing eyes and her dimple in full view.
“I like the French pronunciation of her name,” Caroline said, “and wonder that she changed it.”
“The truth is, Lucius,” Portia said, “that Lady Lyle was compelled to turn Miss Allard out of her home because she was consorting with the wrong people and singing at private parties no respectable lady should even know about, let alone attend, and building a scandalous reputation. Who knows what else she was involved in.”
“Portia, my love,” her mother said, “it is better not to talk of such things.”
“It is painful to do so, Mama,” Portia admitted. “But it is necessary that Lucius know how perilously close he brought Lady Sinclair and his sisters to scandal last evening. The truth must be broken very gently to Lord Edgecombe, who is resting in his bed this afternoon. We will rely upon the discretion of Lady Lyle to tell no one else what she told us. And we will certainly not spread the word. She swore us to secrecy, but we would not dream of saying anything to anyone anyway.”
“She swore you to secrecy.” Lucius’s eyes had narrowed again.
“She would not wish anyone to know how she was once deceived by her charge, would she?” Portia asked. “But she felt that Mama and Papa should know. And that I should know.”
“Why?” Lucius asked.
For once Portia looked almost nonplussed. But she recovered quickly.
“She knows, I suppose,” she said, “of the close connection between our families, Lucius.”
“I wonder,” he said, “that she did not simply speak to me.”
“What I believe,” Margaret said, “is that Lady Lyle was chagrined that she could not claim any of the glory for Miss Allard’s performance last evening and contrived a way of introducing some spiteful gossip into our family circle so that we would drop our acquaintance with her. I believe it is all a pile of nonsense.”
“So do I, Marg,” Emily said. “Who cares what Miss Allard once did?”
“I would be honored to accompany her again anytime,” Caroline said. “I wonder that you would want to repeat such silliness, Portia.”
“Oh, but we must thank Lady Balderston and Portia for bringing what they heard to our attention,” Lady Sinclair said, ever the diplomat. “Better that than discover it was being whispered behind our backs. Miss Allard appears to have corrected any faults there were in her nature when she stayed with Lady Lyle, though, and that does her credit. And I will be forever glad that I did not miss the opportunity of hearing her glorious voice last evening. Perhaps, Emily, someone would like another cup of tea.”
Lucius got abruptly to his feet.
“You are leaving, Lucius?” his mother asked.
“I am,” he said curtly. “I have just remembered that I must call upon Miss Allard.”
“To thank her in person for last evening?” his mother asked. “I do think that is a good idea, Lucius. Perhaps your grandfather will wish to accompany you if he is up from his afternoon rest. Even Amy—”
“I will go alone,” Lucius said. “I thanked her last evening. I have another mission today.”
He did pause, but it was too late not to complete what he had begun to say—they were all, without exception, looking expectantly at him.
“I am going to ask her to marry me,” he said.
Although the drawing room floor was covered from wall to wa
ll with a thick carpet, a pin might nevertheless have been heard to drop as he strode from the room.
And now what the devil had he gone and done? he asked himself as he took the stairs two at a time up to his room.
He had opened his mouth and rammed his foot in it, boot and all, that was what.
But the thing was, he was not even sorry.
Frances spent a busy morning. She had not expected to do so after the excitement and upsets and general turmoil of the evening before. And she had had an almost sleepless night to boot.
But her great-aunts remained in bed late, and so she was alone in the breakfast room when the letter from Charles was delivered into her hand.
He begged to see her again. He had never understood why she had run away without a word. It was true that they had quarreled during their final meeting, but they had always made up their disagreements before that. He was no longer angry with her, if that was what she feared. He could see that she had redeemed herself since leaving. He understood that she had been teaching quietly and respectably in Bath ever since she left London.
She folded the letter and set it beside her plate. But her appetite was gone.
She had met the Earl of Fontbridge early in her come-out Season, and they had quickly fallen in love. He had wanted to marry her—but it would take some time to bring his mother around to accepting the daughter of a French émigré as his wife. And then her father had died. And then his mother would have to be reconciled to the fact that she had no fortune. And then he did not think that his future wife ought to be known as a singer who actually sang for her living. As Frances had wondered if he would ever consider the time and circumstances just right for them to marry, she had also started to fall out of love with him. And then they had had a bitter quarrel after he had heard of one particular party at which she had sung. She had defended her right to do as she wished since they were not even officially betrothed, and then she had told him that that was the end, that she never wanted to see him again.