by Fanny Finch
The late duke had been an unreasonable man in many ways but Robert had to face the fact that some people would not consider him unreasonable at all in expecting his daughter to marry a man with a title. She was the daughter of a duke, after all.
Had he been too hasty and bitter in his judgment after all? As Mrs. Weston had suggested?
Robert’s fingers ached from the urge to reach out and touch her. To comfort her as he once had been able to. Whatever had been hurting her? What had been worrying her?
Was it something to do with her family? Were things not as well as she said? Or was it the Weston family? He would not be surprised if Mrs. Weston’s health was worse than people were letting on.
If only he could speak to her as he once had. If only he knew the things to say to make it better. He had once. Now… he was not so sure.
Mr. Tomlinson greeted Miss Reginald and began asking after her. He inquired if she had gotten around to trying the wine. He asked if she had enjoyed the night air. He asked about where she had gotten her dress.
All rather trivial matters to ask about and yet he had not cared at all to ask them of Miss Everett. Robert felt that angry envy clawing up inside of him again.
“Tell me,” Mr. Tomlinson said, “are you engaged for the next dance?”
Miss Reginald was going to say no. Robert could see it in her eyes. She did not have a partner.
Before he could even begin to ask himself why he did it, he said, “Actually, she is engaged to dance with me. I hope that is all right, Mr. Tomlinson. I assure you that I shall pass her onto you next if the lady is of a mind to accept it.”
“I see no problem with the arrangement,” Miss Reginald said. She looked at Robert with wide eyes, her face a trifle paler than usual. She seemed to be quite frightened of dancing with him.
Perhaps she was afraid that he would scold her for her behavior all those years ago. Or that he would find something new to scold her about.
Had she been so upset by him then? Had he hurt her so much?
He had thought that she did not care but perhaps she had. He knew better than almost anyone how well Miss Reginald could smother her true emotions when she wanted to.
She never laughed or cried without giving herself permission to do so. She had hidden her great dislike for her father from nearly everyone in society, including her father himself. As far as he knew, she’d managed that until the day her father had unexpectedly died.
Why should she not then manage to hide her heartbreak from her fiancé? Of course, he had thought that he knew her well enough that he and he alone could tell what she was feeling at every moment.
That might have been his own arrogance. Why shouldn’t she be able to hide herself from him in that moment?
She had been the one breaking off the engagement, after all. It was probably not right of her, at least in her mind, to show distress about it. She wouldn’t have thought that she had the right to be upset while she did it.
Could she have been truly upset? Had he missed it and thought her cold-hearted?
Now Miss Reginald was looking up at him with parted lips and wide eyes, the slightest tremor in her fingertips as she took the arm he offered.
He worried that she might faint or burst into tears or do something equally uncontrollable. Not that she truly would. She would never allow herself. But she looked as though she wanted to.
“Shall we?” he asked her, keeping his voice low.
Miss Reginald nodded.
He drew her out onto the dance floor. They had used to dance with each other every ball if they could help it. It was one of the few times they could be together without being under the watchful eye of an escort.
Normally he would visit her at the Weston residence, as Mrs. Weston had been reminiscing. He had wondered at that and thought at the time that it was only that Miss Reginald did not want to be in her father’s house any more than she could help it. She was usually at the Weston place as often as she could be anyway, courtship or no courtship.
But could it be that she knew the whole time that her father would not approve? And she had been struggling with her courage the entire courtship?
Robert had so many questions—questions that he was not sure he had a right to ask. Certainly not in the middle of a dance where many other couples might overhear them and start to gossip.
People talking about either himself or Miss Reginald was the last thing that either of them needed.
Robert was unsure how to start the conversation. Miss Reginald seemed to be waiting for him to do it. In fact, she seemed surprised that he had asked her to dance at all.
“I saw you earlier today,” he blurted out. “You were out with Miss Weston and seemed to be studying the houses quite intently.”
“Do not tell anyone,” Miss Reginald asked, “but I am thinking of taking up a little residence here. Nothing much, you understand.”
“Have you grown to like Bath so much in the short time that you have been here? I thought that you only arrived yesterday morning.”
“That I did.”
“And yet it has already worked its charms on you.”
“It had its charms for me before I even arrived,” Miss Reginald said.
Robert drew in a breath. “I do not like the idea of you finding a residence here. It suggests to me that you are planning for a future that you do not deserve.”
“Do you expect that any other sort of future awaits me?” Miss Reginald replied. “A woman must be practical, you know.”
“And you have always been practical.” He could not completely keep the bitterness out of his voice.
Asking him to be practical was one of the things that Miss Reginald had said to him when she had broken off the engagement.
Miss Reginald appeared to be in great distress upon hearing him say such a thing. “I see that you continue to lick your wounds over what was said between us.
“Captain, I hope that you will believe me when I say that I have always regretted the words that I said to you, even as I said them. I never wanted to hurt you.”
“How could you not expect to hurt me?” Robert asked. “I was—I possessed the deepest of feelings for you. Surely you were not unaware of that at the time. My behavior could not have been more obvious than if I had taken out an advertisement in the paper.”
“And was my own behavior so mysterious to you? Were my feelings not also plain? Or did you expect that the letters I had so tenderly written were all for my own amusement?” Miss Reginald replied. “It was not to hurt you that I told you we must end things. Surely you know that.”
“And yet, hurt me it did. You had to know that it must, no matter how kind your intentions or how well you tried to phrase the rejection. I had pinned my dearest hopes and dreams to you.”
“And I had pinned mine to you. You were the brightest star in my life. You know how unhappy I was. My brother was often away. I had no one but you and Miss Weston. And I certainly never felt for her the way that I felt about you.”
“I am glad to know that I do not have competition from Miss Weston then. I fear I should lose that one.”
Miss Reginald bit her lip, trying to hide her smile. Robert could not prevent the thrill that shot through him at knowing that he had made her genuinely smile once more.
“You are exactly the same,” she admitted. “Well, not exactly, of course. Time has changed us all. But you are in so many ways still the same man that I knew.”
“You must find it quite dull,” Robert said. “Everyone expects an educated man because of my new wealth, or a great war hero with marvelous stories because of my profession. Yet, I am the same, simple man as I always was.”
“I think it is wonderful,” Miss Reginald admitted. Her blue eyes were locked onto him. It was a testament to her skill as a dancer that she was able to continue to move without missing a step, despite clearly not paying attention to a single thing she was doing. Her eyes were fixed on him.
“This world is constantly c
hanging around me. And it feels as though I am failing to change with it. And that it is not a good thing. But then I see you and your constant nature and I am encouraged by it. Refreshed by it. Dare I even say, comforted by it.”
Robert stared at her as they circled around one another. “I find that you are unchanged as well. I had thought that you would be many different things, things that I did not know. Yet here you are. And here we are. The same as we were. Or mostly the same.”
“The important things are the same,” Miss Reginald said. She said it so quietly that Robert had to strain to hear her.
“Such as your feeling towards poetry?” he asked her.
He could hardly dare to think that she meant what he thought that she meant. Would she risk herself like that to tell him so? To let him know that her feelings towards him were also unchanged?
Was this all just a flight of fancy? Was he reading too much into perfectly innocent phrases and looks?
How he wished he could take her by the shoulders and shake her and simply ask her. Do you still love me? Have you always still loved me? I fear that I have always loved you and always will. Do you know what you still do to me? How you throw me into melancholy and despair?
The only way he could directly ask her would be, of course, to either write her a letter or to ask her in private. He could not risk asking her in a ballroom where anyone might hear.
But he could not write her or see her privately without people talking. Or without showing too much of his hand. If he was wrong…
It was a predicament, to be certain.
“Such as my feelings towards poetry,” Miss Reginald acknowledged. “And my feelings towards my old acquaintances.”
She looked up at him, her blue eyes full of earnestness. It was as if she was silently begging him to understand what she was saying.
He stared down at her. Could it be? She was saying, wasn’t she, that her feelings towards him were unchanged? That she loved him now as she loved him then?
All thoughts of Miss Everett or of any other woman were flown completely out of his head. He could not recall the face or name of any other lady. Only Miss Reginald.
He was still in love with her. He had always been in love with her. He might continue to be in love with her until the day he died. Even if she rejected him another time.
He could see it now—being married to another woman but loving Miss Reginald. How unfair to every party involved!
“I wonder, though,” Miss Reginald went on. She sounded a little as though she were stuck in a snowstorm and forcing herself to move forward despite the difficulty and the possible pain. “I wonder if my former acquaintances still think of me in the same manner.
“I have made mistakes with them, you know. Or rather, circumstances did not allow me to make the choices that I wanted to in regards to them.
“Rather sad, do you not think?”
“Very,” he replied.
Miss Reginald’s mouth turned up the slightest bit at the corner before she grew sober again. “Well, I had lost all hope of amending those mistakes. As I’m sure most of us would have.
“But I was reminded tonight that of course we are to lose all of the chances that we do not take. And I have nothing to lose at this juncture. You saw what my business was about this morning.
“When that is what is facing me, what have I to lose by being plain with someone? Someone who I still trust, someone who I know even if they no longer care for me, they will not humiliate me or speak anything of what I might have dared to make known to them during a dance.”
Robert hardly dared to breathe. It felt as though his lungs had seized up.
“I have come to realize,” Miss Reginald went on, “that it is my own fault that I am still not wed. For what man wishes to love a woman when he knows that she is in love with someone else?
“Of course he may not know with whom she is in love. But we can tell, can’t we, when someone’s affections are already taken and we are receiving merely the pale imitation of it?
“It seems that I have dug my own grave, so to speak. I think that is rather ironic, do you not agree?
“In any case. I find it helpful to laugh at myself over it. You might not. But you are still as you have always been to me. You have never left the occupation that you held previously, at least in my heart.
“I know you must be horrified at me. To be so bold. But when and where else am I to say it? And so there is only left for me to ask if you revile me as I have feared all this time that you would. That you would scorn me. You know I was almost trembling with fear of it last night?
“You would have every right to treat me in such a fashion, you know. But there it is. And unfortunately I suppose that you are going to inform me that men are quickly recovered from such passions. That it is the realm of the romantic and silly woman only to remain constant in the face of such abject despair and lack of reciprocation.
“We are silly at times, I know. But I hope in this I have not been so. It was not that I was holding out hope. At least, not consciously. I struggled, truly I did, to put such thoughts from my mind. To banish them thoroughly.
“But I suppose that I must resign myself to the ridiculous workings of my heart. As we all must in time. After all, if the heart was something logical then we would all be able to fix the many incidences of history that have led to ruin. Romeo and Juliet would still be alive, to name but one example.”
Robert chuckled. “A fine example indeed. I hope that I am not to meet that sort of fate and that neither will you.”
Miss Reginald looked at him with eyes that were filled with agony and hope in equal measure.
He could not help but respect her for her choice. She was right in that she had little to lose. What was the risk in putting herself out there to a man that she cared for? What was the worst that could happen?
She was already going to be gossiped about for not marrying yet. She was already looking into staying at Bath permanently as spinsters did. She had no other prospects who could be offended by her statement should they hear of it.
If there was ever a time to throw caution to the wind and exhibit some bravery, this was it.
Robert was unsure of how to respond. Part of him wanted to flee. How could he be certain that risking his heart for her yet again would be worth it?
But another part of him wanted to confirm all that she had said. He wanted to agree with her and admit that yes, he had always felt as she did. She had never truly left his heart. He would take her in his arms in a moment’s notice.
There was so much to consider. So much to gain and so much to lose depending upon what he said next. Could he dare himself to trust in her this time after she had failed him so heartily the last time?
He was not sure that his own heart would survive yet another disappointment from her.
And yet, she was looking at him as though he alone held the key to her happiness. To even, indeed, her life.
He was unsure, still, of what to say.
He could tell her how he felt, perhaps, as though he was torn in two. He could admit that he was unsure of her and whether he could trust her. That he still cared for her and that he wanted to trust her. But he was not sure of her welcome and whether the heart he placed in her hands would stay there this time.
Perhaps he could tell her that there was at least some hope? That she would have to prove to him that she would remain true to him this time?
Before he could say anything, however, he dimly—as if from another room—heard the music drawing to a close. The dance was ending.
Almost as though he had materialized there, Mr. Tomlinson was at Miss Reginald’s elbow.
“I believe that means it is my turn to take the lady?” he said, smiling jovially.
It was clear that the man had no idea what was passing between Robert and Miss Reginald, the pleading, raw look that she was giving him with her eyes alone.
He wanted to snarl at Mr. Tomlinson to go away and while he was at it
to never come near Miss Reginald again. But Robert could not afford to be a possessive man with her. He did not have the right and it certainly would not become him. He had seen men be possessive of their women and it was not a pleasant sight to endure.
“Miss Reginald.” He bowed. “I suppose that we will have to continue our discussion at some other point.”
He told himself that he was not a coward for not answering her at once. Even if it was only to tell her that he needed time to think.
Could he truly risk it all again? She was asking him to, as surely as she was risking herself.
But he found himself admiring her bravery in speaking up and saying something. It was courageous of her. Despite having little to lose there was always the pain of rejection should she be wrong about him. That, he knew well, was a painful experience.