Someone to Cherish

by Balogh, Mary

  “She has been indiscreet,” the dowager countess reminded them. “We ought not to forget that. But she does have backbone. And I never did say I did not like her, Louise, to get back to your original question.”

  “We are forgetting something, however,” Louise said. “Three young ladies have come here to Hinsford in the hope that Harry will marry one of them. And we are responsible for bringing them and raising their hopes.”

  There was a pained silence for a moment.

  “Fanny is both a pretty and a sensible girl,” Mildred said, speaking of the sister of her son’s betrothed. “I thought she might suit Harry admirably. But I did not give that as a specific reason when I invited her and her mother to join us here. I spoke more of celebrating the new betrothal.”

  “Besides, Aunt Mildred,” Estelle Lamarr said, “her sister confided to me earlier today that she suspects Fanny of having not only an attachment to a neighbor of theirs but also a secret agreement with him.”

  “Gordon warned me,” Edith Monteith said, “that Miranda is not interested in marriage even though she is twenty-two years of age. It is not what her mother told me or what I expected. But I have seen for myself now that she is not as other girls are. If she were a man, it would not surprise me at all if she were to disappear into the bowels of a university somewhere—no doubt in Scotland—and gather dust there as a professor or a don. But she is not, alas, a man.”

  “Poor lady,” Wren said. “It is not easy to be an independent woman in a man’s world.”

  “And then there is Sally,” Matilda said with a rueful shake of the head. “She is a sweet child, and Charles and Adrian and his sisters all dote on her. Since she is now eighteen and making her come-out this year, it seemed to me that she would be a desirable match for Harry. However, she shows far more interest in Ivan and Gordon, who are closer to her in age. And really, I have found myself ever since we left London thinking of her as a child rather than as a young woman. She will not do, will she?”

  “Fortunately, Matilda,” Althea said, “she seems to have not one ounce of interest in Harry. There are, of course, the local girls for us to consider. Miss Hill and her younger sister, for example. Miss Ardreigh, their cousin, who is visiting them. The magistrate’s daughter—Miss Raymore, I believe?”

  Everyone gazed at her. No one took her up on her suggestion.

  “As I thought,” she said, nodding, and a few of them laughed.

  “But she will not have Harry,” Mildred said.

  No one asked to whom she was referring.

  “What does that have to say to anything?” her mother asked.

  No one offered an answer.

  “Mrs. Tavernor it is, then?” Louise said at last.

  “What we need,” Matilda said briskly, “is a plan.”

  Twenty-one

  They did not have tea. Or go to bed. They were sitting on the sofa in the living room, Harry slouched comfortably but rather inelegantly in its depths, Lydia across his lap, her head on his shoulder, one arm about his waist. Snowball was curled in her usual spot before the fireplace.

  Harry kissed Lydia again, their lips lingering together. They smiled lazily into each other’s eyes when he drew back his head.

  I adore you. And I trust you. She had said both things out by the fence. Infinitely precious gifts, both of them. But it was the trust he most cherished. After all she had endured, after all her determination to live independently and trust only herself for the rest of her life, she had chosen to trust him.

  He ought to find it terrifying. He did not, for he trusted himself. He would never let her down.

  “So,” he said, “sooner than soon. We could announce our betrothal on Friday, Lydia, at this infernal birthday ball. That would make it seem altogether less infernal.”

  “So soon?” Her smile was still a bit lazy, but she did not immediately protest that Friday would be far too soon.

  “Or,” he said, twining the fingers of his free hand with hers, “we could announce our marriage at the ball.”

  Her smile was arrested. Her eyes narrowed. “What?” She frowned.

  “We could get married,” he said. “On Friday morning. And announce our marriage at the ball.”

  She sat up slowly on his lap and continued to gaze narrow-eyed at him. “What?” she said. “This is Monday. Friday is four days from now.”

  “I could shoot up to London tomorrow for a special license,” he said, “and be back before Wednesday evening. I could have a word with the Reverend Bailey before I go. We could pick out two witnesses and ask them—Mrs. Bailey, perhaps. And maybe Gil—Gil Bennington, my brother-in-law.”

  “And no one else?” she said. “Harry, are you mad?”

  He thought about it. “Possibly,” he conceded. “It is just that I can remember Abby and Gil’s wedding here, Lydia. Just the two of them and the vicar and two witnesses—I was one—and I have always considered it the perfect wedding. If we tell my family, there will be a fuss to end fusses. And we would not be able to do it on Friday because there would be all of them here but not a single person from your family. That would be unthinkable. I cannot bear to wait, though. For everyone would still fuss. And would they all stay here while plans were being made and your family was being summoned? Or would they all go home and plan from afar and try luring us to a different location for the wedding? I— Lydia, I just want to marry you. Now. Sooner. Even Friday seems too far off.”

  “Harry.” She was still frowning. “Is this the protective male in you speaking? Are you intent upon protecting me from all this stupid gossip?”

  “I have not given it a single thought since you said yes out there by the fence,” he said quite truthfully. “No, my love. It is the deep-in-love and admittedly deep-in-lust male in me speaking. Lydia, I—”

  But she had set her hands on his cheeks, cupping his face, and her eyes were suspiciously bright. “You are mad,” she said. “This Friday? On your birthday? Just the two of us and the vicar and two witnesses? Oh, Harry …”

  She kissed him.

  “I’ll go tomorrow,” he said against her lips. “Early. I’ll have a word with the Reverend Bailey now before I go home and with Gil this evening. And on Friday morning, while everyone is busy with preparations for the ball, we will go to church, you and I, and get married. Will we? Say yes again, Lydia. Say it. Please say yes.”

  “Yes, then,” she said, breathing the words into his mouth. “If I am to have a mad husband, I might as well be mad too, I suppose.”

  “But a mad husband you trust,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  She settled her head on his shoulder again after kissing him and sighed. “We are mad.” She laughed softly.

  Good God, they were. He was not going to be popular with his family on Friday evening.

  “Harry,” she said after they had been quiet for a few minutes, “are your nightmares still bad?”

  “Nightmares by very definition are bad,” he said after thinking about it. “Mine come less frequently as time goes by unless something happens to provoke them. Then they come in clusters. I do not suppose they will ever go away entirely. And perhaps that is as it ought to be. I see endless lines of faceless soldiers coming at me—not to kill me so much as to be killed. Cannon fodder, they were sometimes called. It is how Wellington referred to our own side. Men. Human beings. As human as you or me. I am responsible for hundreds of their deaths.” He was quiet for a minute. “There are all sorts of perfectly sound arguments, of course, to convince military men that they are not, in fact, murderers. Nevertheless, I am responsible. And if the only way I can pay homage to the humanness of those French soldiers, the vast majority of whom had no choice but to be there, is to have nightmares about them, then I will suffer them. Though not gladly.”

  She touched her fingertips to his cheek and kissed him. “Tell me,” she said softly. “It took you two years of recovery after the Battle of Waterloo even before you came home, and then another year or more here. I can re
member that when I first came here with Isaiah you were thin and pale.”

  He tried not even to think about it. It was in the past. Another lifetime. But his life belonged to her too now. All of it, even the past. Just as her life belonged to him— including the terrible pain of her first marriage, which she had confided to him earlier.

  “Joining the military seemed to me the obvious thing to do after I lost everything that had given shape and meaning to my life,” he said. “I hated it from the first moment—or perhaps my life was such at that time that anything would have seemed hateful. I wrote cheerful letters home from the Peninsula, telling everyone what a lark and a jolly good time it all was. It was death and blood and mud and mayhem, Lydia. It was dehumanizing. One had to fight constantly to retain one’s humanity. Sometimes it was impossible. It would have been impossible to fight in any pitched battle if one did not allow the energy of the moment to convert one into a savage whose only instinct was to slaughter the enemy. I beg your pardon. This is not the sort of conversation—”

  She set three fingers lightly across his lips. “I asked,” she said. “Tell.”

  “I was wounded more times than I can recount,” he said. “I suppose I ought not even to have been fighting at Waterloo. How I survived it the Lord only knows. I fell from my horse in the end, and the horse fell on me. I had numerous saber cuts and three bullet wounds—one bullet was lodged below my shoulder, close to my heart, and remained there for longer than a year before a surgeon dug it out. I had one broken leg and internal injuries that were probably never fully diagnosed or treated. I knocked myself senseless and had memory lapses for a few years. I had an almost constant fever. Perhaps what made everything worse than it might have been was the treatment. The favorite was bleeding to reduce the fever. Over the two years I spent in hospital I must have had enough blood removed to keep ten men alive. The other favorite was to keep me in bed in a darkened room, feeding on thin gruels and jellies. I would have died there in Paris if I had not eventually insisted upon coming home—and if Gil had not been there to insist for me, and if Avery and Alexander had not come to bring me.”

  One of her hands was smoothing back his hair. She was kissing the underside of his chin.

  “The very worst of it, though,” he said, “was the hopelessness, the lethargy, the conviction that I would never be myself again. The bone-wearying depression. And the memories and the guilt. And the lingering resentment over all that had happened to expose me to the hell of those years. The lingering … hatred. Of my father. And of Alexander and Anna. Even sometimes of my mother. But then, after I had been here awhile, I somehow found the will to get better, to make myself better. And the time came, Lydia, when I understood the full miracle of what had happened to me. For somehow, without my even realizing it, Hinsford seeped into my bones. Not just as my home. But as … the peace that became the heart of me. The understanding that this—not just this place, but this … life—is who I am, who I was always supposed to be. It is hard to put into words. Nothing is static, of course. Lately I have known that peace and contentment, wondrous as they have been, are not sufficient. I have known that I needed something more vivid. Someone. You, in fact.”

  He turned his head to look into her face. She was gazing back.

  “So you see,” he said, “why the nightmares, horrible as they are, are somehow necessary. They are a reminder that I must not live in a cocoon of contentment without remembering the journey that has brought me here. Peace is hard won, and the effort to keep it is ongoing. We must never become complacent in life. We must never feel we have arrived and there is nothing left to do but enjoy.”

  “You have the Earl of Riverdale and the Duchess of Netherby here with you now,” she said, her smile almost mischievous, “as a constant reminder of all you have gone through.”

  “Alexander has grown in dignity in the past ten years,” he said. “He did not want the life he is now leading, but he has put everything that is himself into doing a conscientious job of it, both at Brambledean and in London during parliamentary sessions. He is very obviously happy with Wren and their children. He would not have met or married her if he had not had the title foisted upon him. When I look at him now, I see the Earl of Riverdale. And a cousin of whom I am proud and very fond. The title does not seem part of me any longer. I do not want it. I feel aghast when I realize that if my father had only waited a month or two to marry my mother, the title and all the rest of it would be mine. I would hate the life I started to live after he died. Or at least the man I have become would hate it. I would have been a totally different person if my father had waited, of course, because the past ten years would have unfolded differently and I would have been different as a result. So many differents. Am I making any sense?”

  “Yes, you are,” she said.

  “As for Anna, I have unfinished business with her,” he said. “It must be finished, though. Soon. I have not treated her well. I have not been cruel, except perhaps at the start. I have not been openly unkind either. I have not shunned her or treated her with less civility than I have shown other members of the family.”

  “But … ?” she said when he did not proceed.

  “But I have not treated her as I treat Cam and Abby,” he said. “I have not fully accepted her as my sister. Yet I believe it is what she needed and craved more than anything else when she learned of our existence and our relationship to her. I have to put that right.”

  “You said soon,” she said. “Before you leave tomorrow?”

  He gazed at her. “Yes,” he said. “Before I go.”

  She smiled and burrowed her head more comfortably between his shoulder and his neck.

  “Your father may disapprove of me,” he said.

  “Because you are illegitimate?” she asked. “You are also a Westcott, son of the late Earl of Riverdale and of the present Marchioness of Dorchester. You have a ridiculous number of titled relatives.”

  “Ridiculous?” he asked. “You had better not let any of them hear you call them that, Lydia, or you will find yourself cast into outer darkness.”

  “Oh.” She laughed softly. “I took the measure of the Dowager Countess of Riverdale almost the moment I met her. She wants to be seen as the crusty matriarch at the head of the family. In reality she loves you dearly and wants desperately for you to be happy, not to become the victim of a woman who might bring you shame. I suspect she feels the same of all her family.”

  He grinned back at her. “You saw all that in one brief meeting?” he asked. “Even while she was trying to squash you like a bug?”

  “I did,” she said. “I like her. She cares. But, Harry, what my father thinks of you and my marrying you will be his concern. I do believe, though, that he will be happy to know that I have a man again to support and protect me and guide me through all the dangers of life.”

  They smiled at each other and rubbed noses.

  “Well, you know,” he said, “you must allow me if ever you are attacked by bears or wolves to do the manly thing and come roaring to your rescue and tear them limb from limb with my bare hands.”

  “Or force them to their knees and then to attention before apologizing for frightening me,” she said. “You do that awfully well, Harry.”

  “You made me redundant when I tried it, though,” he told her. “You tore young Piper limb from limb without even raising your voice, Lydia. I do not believe, alas, that you are ever going to need me to ride into the lists to your defense.”

  “Thank you anyway,” she said, settling her head against his shoulder again, “for forcing him to his knees.”

  “I will be leaving you to face the gossips alone for two whole days,” he said.

  “So you will,” she said. “How dreadful. I shall be quite without male protection. I might crumble. I might—”

  He stopped her by settling his mouth over hers.

  “I must go,” he said with a sigh a minute or so later.

  “Yes, you must,” she agreed.


  And he did indeed leave less than twenty minutes later.

  Dinner at Hinsford was half an hour early that evening and ended with the men leaving the dining room with the women rather than remaining to enjoy their port and their male conversation. Everyone headed for the music room rather than the drawing room.

  The children were to perform a show for their entertainment, organized by Winifred, Elizabeth, and Joel. Sarah and Alice Cunningham, Josephine Archer, and Eve Handrich, dressed in flowing white with floral wreaths in their hair and floral streamers in their hands, danced to accompaniment provided by Elizabeth; Jacob Cunningham and George Handrich in black, and Jonah Archer and Nathan Westcott in white, engaged in a ferocious fencing match with wooden swords to rescue a wilting Rebecca Archer, who was bound with pink silk ribbons and jealously guarded by Robbie Cunningham, who was dressed all in black with matching fingernails that were hooked into claws as he hovered, hissing and panting, over his intended prey. Winifred played a gentle rhythm on the lower keys of the pianoforte while her brother Samuel plonked out an almost-accurate tune on the upper keys. All the children, with the exception of the babies and Andrew, who was deaf, had been conscripted into a choir and sang a few folk songs with lusty good cheer and questionable musicality, to Elizabeth’s accompaniment.

  Andrew disappeared with Joel during the singing and came back afterward carrying a large rock—“which came with us all the way from Bath,” Joel explained with a grimace that turned to a grin when he saw Camille toss a glance at the ceiling. The rock was set carefully down on a small table Colin had placed in front of the pianoforte, and Andrew, smiling broadly at his audience, indicated it with one hand and beckoned with the other. When they all came for a closer look, they could see that the stone enclosed on three sides the chiseled form of a cat—a domestic cat, surely—curled up and contentedly asleep with its head turned to rest on its paws. Yes, contentedly. One could almost hear the cat purr.

  “I have a talented boy here,” Joel said, ruffling his son’s hair while everyone exclaimed with wonder and smiled at the boy or hugged him. “I could not get him interested in drawing or painting. Then I found him one day doing this sort of thing, with a knife he had borrowed—and ruined— from the kitchen.”