by Mary Balogh
John Fairburn. Thoughts of him easily crowded out any worry over Minna. Rosamund put her head in her hands and sighed again deeply.
“Oh, ma’am.” Minna started out of her chair, tipping the delicate carved piece to the carpet in her rush to reach her friend’s side. “Is it the headache? Let me go and make you a tisane. I made sure to pack a good supply of every remedy, for Aunt told me I was not to trust foreign potions, and I was packing for a lifetime, you know.”
“No tisane, thank you, dear.” Rosamund raised her head and managed to smile. “Packing for a lifetime. My poor girl, you didn’t wish to leave England, did you?”
“You must know I did not.” Minna hung her head.
“No more did I, once upon a time.” Rosamund looked away, into the distance. “Yet India can wrap round you with its magic, Minna. You must give it a chance.”
The girl shivered, as though India were a cobra and she a helpless small animal. A rabbit, Rosamund thought again, wishing she had the wit to think of some other comparison.
If only Minna would meet somebody worthy of her! By which Rosamund supposed she meant somebody who had not yet reached old age, somebody fine, somebody understanding who would not demand too much in the way of intellect from a bride. For though Rosamund had been honest when she had agreed to shelter Minna forever, if need be, she was already convinced the girl was not companion material for her.
Moreover, Rosamund knew in her heart that the young woman’s best chance for happiness lay in a home of her own. And children. Minna was an angel with little Sam and talked incessantly of the crowd of younger siblings she had left behind in England.
Hers was an old story. Minna’s parents had been gently bred, the father a clergyman. After his death and the subsequent impoverishment of the family, well-meaning relations took over as they were obliged to do. A clergyman’s fine family of children was an encumbrance to all and sundry once the clergyman was gone. The mother found a position as housekeeper in a great house. The children were deposited wherever there were spare corners. The eldest girl, deemed too silly for governessing, was sent to India.
The tale was indeed familiar, too familiar to Rosamund. Yet aside from a similarity of background—she too was a vicar’s daughter—she did not see much of herself in Minna. She did wish the girl the same happiness she herself had found in India, a place she had approached with as much loathing as Minna’s when she had been a young miss of eighteen.
“I’m so grateful to you, ma’am,” Minna was saying earnestly. “I do hope you’re not worrying over my prospects. I’ll come about, perhaps find some post, and meantime I’m so lucky that someone like you has taken an interest in me. Why, you’ve already taught me so many things I never would have guessed about this awful—about this place. Fancy whalebone stays rotting in the heat! I was never more distressed than to hear that, though to be sure these metal things are scarcely more uncomfortable than my old ones…”
Minna chattered on, not asking for a response. This was a talent of the child’s that Rosamund sometimes regretted. Now the prattle was most welcome as a distraction, for Rosamund was suddenly in no mood to take a real interest in her young guest’s prospects or problems. Her own were at issue.
———
Would he call? Would he dare to call? Once breakfast was over, Rosamund deposited Minna in the morning room and helped her over the hard place in her needle-work, then roved about the lower floor of her house, remembering too many things—and too few. A shame how memory faded in ten years’ time.
Why, pray tell, had she been daft enough to kiss him? That experience had not brought back her buried memories as she expected; it had merely set her on the road to imagining blissful new encounters.
The kiss had restored his memory, though, and serve him right. She had hoped kissing him would jar him into recognition; she had done it for that reason and no other. Certainly she’d had no wish to be in his arms for the activity’s own sake.
Rosamund caught herself on that thought and admitted she was being less than honest. Yes, she hated him. At one time she had thought he had ruined her life. Yet no matter how she felt about him, she had to admit he was a fine specimen. He was handsomer than ever, drat the man. The dark hair, the deep blue eyes that had once so entranced her, were the same, and added to the old attractions was a something that had been missing in the lad of twenty: a new air of maturity, the vigor of a man who knew what he wanted and how to get it. Yes, she had wanted to be in his arms.
Her attraction was madness, of course. She had loved her husband Sam and would be true to his memory. She would not profane it by thinking of John.
Even as she had these pure thoughts, she realized Sam would not wish such fidelity from her. He would be the first to tell her she was alive and must live; she could nearly hear the emphasis in his weak voice, insisting just that as he lay on his deathbed. She was even certain that he would urge her to claim her first love if she could.
She smiled, and a glance into a convenient mirror told her it was a poor excuse for a smile. If not for John, she would never have known half of Sam’s perfections. Her husband’s kindness, his angelic tolerance, had earned her gratitude at first, then her love.
Sam had been gone four years, and sometimes, to her shame, she couldn’t even recall his face.
She sank down upon an ottoman and started to cry.
“Forgive me, ma’am,” said a familiar voice. “I don’t believe your servant knew you were in here. He told me I was to wait while he ascertained whether you were receiving.”
Rosamund looked up into Colonel John Fairburn’s face. “Come now, I know my banyan better than that. He doubtless said, ‘You wait. I see,’ for that’s Hari’s answer to any domestic problem.”
“I’m a domestic problem, am I?” Fairburn said with a crooked smile. “Sorry to have disturbed you, ma’am. I’ll leave quietly.” He turned on his heel.
“Wait!” Rosamund stretched out one hand, furiously wiping the tears from her face with the back of the other.
He turned to look at her, a quizzical look. His gaze lingered on the outstretched hand, and she jerked it back to her lap.
“Why did you come?” she asked quietly.
“Why were you crying?” he countered.
She lifted her chin. “I was thinking of my late husband.”
“Was he so precious to you, then?”
“Yes!” she snapped, turning from his cold eyes. “He was the best man in the world, and I loved him dearly. Not the least of his virtues was his gallantry. Would you—would any man but the most chivalrous one in the world take a soiled bride?”
“Soiled.” He repeated the word softly. “Is that what you call it? Is that how you remember our night together? The night we pledged to marry?”
She shivered. “It is none of your business how I remember something you couldn’t even recall until—until you were beaten over the head.”
“I think it is my business, Rosamund. The name suits you, you know. You never seemed an Elizabeth to me.”
“I undoubtedly seemed a Magdalen,” she muttered, half to herself.
He caught the words and had the gall to laugh. “You know better than that, I hope. My night with you was magic; a turning point, or so I thought. The quiet young girl I had been dreaming of became my lover, my bride-to-be. When I awoke to find you gone I was broken-hearted. I searched for you, you blasted stubborn female. But I never found you, and so I acted in self-defense. I put you out of my mind and actually succeeded in forgetting your face.” Another laugh, a harsh one.
“Broken-hearted.” She repeated his words, shaking her head. “I was nothing to you. I could have been nothing, so poor and plain as I was.”
“You think little of yourself, Lady Ashburnham.”
“You mistake, sir.” She set her shoulders proudly. “I was naive ten years ago, John, naive enough to believe your convenient professions of love, but I’m not so green now. I told you where I was going; you knew I was to
leave that day. So you searched, did you? Not very hard.”
“I went directly to Portsmouth and combed every vessel,” Fairburn said stiffly. “There was no sign of you. Only one deuced ship in the whole harbor was en route to the East and you were not on board.”
“Portsmouth? I didn’t sail out of Portsmouth,” Rosamund said in surprise. “What made you think so?”
“Good God! I assumed when I didn’t find you that you had been lying to me about your plans.”
“Lying to you?” She repeated the words in disbelief. “But why?”
“Because you didn’t mean for me to find you. Because you didn’t really want to marry me, a poor younger son.”
She stared at him incredulously, nearly shrinking at the hard expression in the blue eyes.
“Where was your ship?” He crossed the room and knelt by her couch. “Tell me, damn you.”
“London,” she said, still staring into his eyes. His profanity didn’t disturb her in the least. She welcomed the freedom it gave her. “London, damn you. As you must have known.”
“Elizabeth—Rosamund, I give you my word I did not,” he said. His rugged face softened; he looked, for a moment, exactly like the boy she had fallen in love with so many years ago. The boy she had made love to in defiance of every rule of conduct.
She had been married to him already in her mind, as he had sworn they would be by law as soon as he could manage all the details. She had felt no guilt, only a blessed lightness, the same sense of peace that stole over her now as she looked at his face…
Then the spell was broken, and he was only the man who hadn’t recognized her the night before. The man who by his own admission had done quite well for ten years without a thought of her.
“Please leave me now,” she said in a wooden voice.
He did. “This isn’t finished,” he said, pausing at the door but not turning his head. Then he was gone.
Rosamund sank back down upon the ottoman and gave way to gloom. Had he really tried to find her? Had she been wrong to hate him all these years?
In the end, it mattered little. Fate had taken its own turn, and it was too late for her and John. Ten years too late.
She had known him for so short a time—only a few days at the country-house gathering in February, her last month in England.
She, like Minna so many years later, was being sent to India because she was orphaned, poor, and had no prospects at home. The very thought of being shipped abroad to make a match with a stranger had revolted her. After she met John, her desperation grew along with her love.
She had thought carefully and finally made up her mind. John was dependent and as poor as she was. He couldn’t marry her if he wanted to. But she did love him so, with the fierceness of one who has not loved before and expects never to love again.
She did the unthinkable. On the night before Saint Valentine’s Day, on her last night at the house, she went to his room after all was quiet and offered herself to him.
“Are you out of your mind?” she remembered him whispering as he drew her into his room from the corridor.
“No, John. I’m going away forever, and I’ll be forced to marry some old nabob, and submit to being touched by him, and you simply must be the first, I love you so.” Her sentences ran together in her nervousness, but she never faltered.
She remembered the joy dawning in his eyes. “You love me? But I love you, my darling. I was afraid to speak, afraid to hurry you.”
“Hurry me? When I’m to be bundled off out of the country tomorrow?” And, dizzy with relief, she threw herself into his arms. He loved her. She would carry the knowledge with her always.
When they paused for breath, he murmured, “I don’t know how, but we’ll find a way to marry. No money on either side, but someone will help us. Someone must. I’ll take up a profession—I’ll contrive something.”
More kisses, and he was gently urging her to go back to her room. “Come. If anyone sees you, you’ll be ruined.”
Then came the worst mistake of her life—or was it? Even from a distance of ten years, Rosamund didn’t know.
“No, John. I can’t leave you. What if they won’t let us marry? I’ll have nothing to take with me. Please, I’m so afraid something will go wrong. Make me yours now. Tonight.”
They were both so young. His chivalry held out a little longer, but his desire and hers won out in the end.
She had not meant to disappear that Saint Valentine’s morning. But Mrs. Fallow, her chaperon, surprised her in the act of sneaking back into her room. And for what? Only some silly feminine vanity. As a young girl, Rosamund had not been very pretty; she had known it despite John’s flattery. When she had awakened, rumpled, by his side, every instinct insisted she go at once to her dressing table. It was not yet morning. She could be back before he awoke.
“So, miss! You’ve been up to no good,” Mrs. Fallow had said with her grimmest frown. And she matter-of-factly locked her charge into her room. Rosamund hadn’t had the courage to cry out and bring the whole house running. She would wait for morning and John’s support.
She had waited in desperation for John to appear at breakfast; and when he did not come down—too tired, she supposed, from the exertions of the night that had so enchanted her—she had trusted he would find her before her gruesome keeper could bundle her away to India. It was Valentine’s Day, for heaven’s sake, and they were true lovers. He had to find her.
He didn’t. She had to face the facts that his promise of marriage had been a clever ploy. She had seemed to be the one to insist on her own ruin, but he had probably led her on somehow.
She soon found out she had no stomach for the sea. She became sick before the ship was out of the harbor. The most vivid memory of the seven-month voyage into a life of gloom had occurred when her monthly courses arrived, a couple of weeks late and unusually painful, in the wake of a particularly severe storm.
Mrs. Fallow took in the situation with one of her condemning glances and told Miss Manton that she was lucky to be going out to India, where gentlemen couldn’t be as choosy as they were in England.
And Rosamund—she had decided sometime on the voyage to be called from now on by her second name—didn’t ask too many questions. She knew scarcely anything of female functions, but she suspected she had miscarried a child. Knowing she should be relieved, she felt a little more alone, a little sadder.
By the time she arrived in Calcutta she was a pale shadow, and she had never been blessed with a high color. Along with the other girls Mrs. Fallow was shepherding, she was paraded at church, taken to parties and on outings of every kind. She truly couldn’t believe it when handsome, if middle-aged, Sir Samuel Ashburnham looked twice at her. The circles under her eyes were surely disgusting, and she was thin as a wraith—a change from her former plumpness that was nowhere near as flattering as she had always expected it would be.
“Sir Samuel knows he can’t expect the best,” Mrs. Fallow said through tight lips. Rosamund was not her favorite, and Ashburnham was fabulously rich. “There is Levantine blood there, my dear. You might as well know.”
Rosamund listened quietly to Sir Samuel’s proposal and followed it, not with an answer, but with the story of her night with John. She felt she had to tell him.
“Did you love him?” her husband-to-be had asked gently.
She nodded, too embarrassed to look at him.
“Then I hope to be so fortunate one day,” he answered, and took her hand.
They had been happy. They were married on Twelfth Night of 1804, and each year thereafter gave a ball to commemorate the occasion. They became parents after a few years of marriage, and little Sam was their greatest joy.
Sir Samuel caught the fever one rainy season. It carried him off within a fortnight, and Rosamund became as quietly sad as she had been quietly happy.
After four years she had adjusted to widowhood. She could not imagine being unfaithful to Sam; she felt, almost, that what was living in her had b
een burned on his funeral pyre in a mental version of the infamous Hindustani custom of sati—though naturally Sir Samuel had not had a pyre, but an ordinary coffin like any Englishman.
Rosamund went back into society after a year of mourning, but she had not exerted herself to entertain until last night. She had decided on a whim to revive the Twelfth Night ball. And what was her reward? Her past had walked up to her and demanded a dance.
John’s claim to have been mistaken about her whereabouts, that long-ago February, was troubling. Even if he was telling the truth, she repeated to herself in desperation, it was too late for her and John.
Yet he had said he was not finished with her.
“And now what am I to do?”
“Ma’am?”
Rosamund whirled about. She had not realized she had spoken aloud. Minna was standing in the doorway, hesitant, a work bag dangling from her wrist.
“Oh, nothing, child. I was merely thinking of the housekeeping.” Not altogether untrue. How to keep John out of her house? That was the question. The servants would be of help, if need be, but John would certainly see reason after only a few hints. She could not have him in her house again, would not have him.
“I’ve come to another odd place in the embroidery, Lady Ashburnham, and if you could… you do such fine work…”
“Do sit down by me,” Rosamund said, summoning a welcoming smile as she patted the ottoman. “Then we must go out. I’m determined to introduce you to the Burleighs today. Did you see young Mr. Burleigh last night?”
“Red hair and a clubfoot?”
Rosamund winced at Minna’s offhand tone. The girl was meek and mild most of the time, but she had a certain heartlessness one would not have expected in a vicar’s daughter—if one were not a vicar’s daughter oneself, and perfectly cognizant that the breed was as full of human failings as any other. Minna would have to learn that people’s characters couldn’t be determined by their surface qualities.
But what a teacher fate had sent poor little Miss Peabody! Rosamund smiled in spite of herself. A wealth of surface qualities had once convinced her, a silly eighteen-year-old, that she loved John Fairburn to distraction. She was sure, from the vantage point of twenty-eight, that her infatuation and subsequent ruin had been the result of an inane calf love based on John’s handsome face. Yes, he had been kind as well as handsome, but he was probably kind to every young lady; the sympathy they had seemed to share, the understanding on all important points, was doubtless also a ploy to seduce unwary maidens.