One Night for Love (11 page)

“And you loved her too,” Lauren added when he had finished.

For her sake he wished he could deny it. Not that it would make any difference to essentials. He said nothing.

“That is no excuse,” Gwendoline said.
“You
were not eighteen, Neville. You were a man. You should have known better. You should have had more of a sense of duty to your family and position than to marry a sergeant’s daughter for such a stupid reason. Marriage is for
life
.”

“I will have to learn to love her too,” Lauren said as if Gwendoline had not spoken. “I am sure it will be possible. If
you
love her, Neville, then I …” But her words trailed away. She set the swing in motion with one foot.

Neville wondered if it would help her if he strode all the way to the swing, hauled her off it by both shoulders, and shook her soundly. But he remembered his own shock of a few hours before. He had walked all the way from the church to the water’s edge on the beach without knowing he had even moved from the altar. He could not take the alternative to shaking her of lifting her off the swing into the sheltering comfort of his arms.

“Lauren,” he said, “I am so very sorry, my dear. I wish there were more to say, something to comfort you, something to make you feel less … abandoned. I could say all sorts of meaningless things to assure you that eventually this will be in the past and … But they would not comfort now and would be presumptuous in me. Know, though, that you are loved by this family, which is yours as much as it is mine or Gwen’s.” Pompous, empty words despite their truth. He did not belive he had ever felt more helpless in his life.

“But nothing is ever going to be the
same
,” Gwendoline cried. “When Vernon died and I came home a widow and then Papa died, I thought the world was at an end. But then you came back and we three were together again and I could see that you would marry Lauren and … But now everything is ended, shattered beyond repair.”

Neville ran a hand through his hair. Lauren swung gently.

Gwendoline had married for love while he was away in the Peninsula. He had never met Viscount Muir. But it had been a short, tragic marriage, over in two years. First Gwen had had a dreadful riding accident that had caused a miscarriage and left her with a permanent limp after her broken leg had healed, and then just a year later, Muir had died in a fall through a broken banister from the balcony of his own home to the marble hall below. Gwen had fled to the familiar comfort of home rather than remain at her husband’s house.

“And how I despise my own selfishness,” Gwendoline said when no one responded to her words. “I am thinking of my own unhappiness when it is
nothing
to poor Lauren’s. Oh, what a brute I am.” She gathered up her skirts and dashed toward the house, avoiding Neville’s outstretched arm as she passed him.

“Poor Gwen,” Lauren said. “She wanted so very much to go back in time after Lord Muir’s death, Neville. She wanted life to be as it was when we were children, and it seemed to her that her dream was coming true. But we can never go back. Only forward. We cannot go back to yesterday or early this morning. There is Lily now.”

“Yes”

“I have been selfish too,” she told him. “I have been preoccupied by my own disappointment. But you must be so very happy, Neville, even though in your kindness you are sad for me and have taken time to come and talk with me. Lily is alive and she has come to you. How wonderful for you.”

“Lauren,” he said softly. “My dear, don’t do this. Please don’t.”

“You want me to tell you how much I hate her, then?” she said. “How much I wish she had died and stayed dead? How much I wish even now that she would die? You want me to tell you how much I resent your going away after
telling me not to wait and then marrying a sergeant’s daughter on mere impulse? You want me to tell you how much I hate you for not telling me? For caring so little for me that you did not mention the fact that this would be your second marriage? For causing me such humiliation this morning?”

He drew a slow breath. “Yes,” he said. “This is what I want to hear, Lauren. Let it out. Yell at me. Throw things at me. Hit me. Don’t just sit there.” He ran his fingers through his hair again. “Oh, dear God, Lauren. I am so wretchedly
sorry
. If I could only—”

“But you cannot,” she said quietly, though there was an edge to her voice at last. “You cannot, Neville. And hatred is pointless. As are violent emotions. Will you go now, please? I wish to be alone.”

“Of course,” he said. It was the only thing he could do for her. To take himself out of her sight.

She was still pushing the swing with one foot when he turned to leave. Nursing her shock. Her conviction that if she just stayed calm and rational, everything would be all right. Her intense hatred for the sergeant’s daughter who had destroyed her hopes and her dreams, her very life, in one stroke. And for the man she had loved all her life.

It did not help Neville to know beyond all doubt that she had always loved him with a far deeper intensity than he had ever loved her.

He thought suddenly, as he made his way back up the drive, of Lauren as she had been the night before—radiant, glowing with happiness, asking him if anyone could possible deserve to be so happy.

She could, as he had told her then. But life did not always give what one deserved.

What had he done to deserve Lily’s return? His footsteps quickened as he thought of her even then asleep,
alive
, in the countess’s bed.

  
6
  

T
he food and the tea had satisfied Lily; the deep, hot bath with perfumed soap and large, fluffy towel had soothed and lulled her; she had slept long and deep and had woken refreshed but bewildered. For several moments she was unable to remember where she was or how she had got there. She could not recall when she had last slept so well.

It did not take long for everything to come back to her, of course. She had arrived. She had reached the end of a journey that had begun she did not know how long ago when Manuel had come to her and told her she could go. Just like that—after seven months of captivity and enslavement. She had been somewhere in Spain. All she had known to do was set her face for the west, where Portugal lay, to search for him—for Neville, Major Lord Newbury, her husband. She had not even known if he was still alive. He might have died in the ambush that had wounded and made a prisoner of her. But she had begun the journey anyway. There had been nothing else to do. Her father was dead.

She had arrived, she thought, flinging back the bedcovers and stepping out onto the soft pile of the pink and green carpet. She had to hold up the hem of her nightgown in order not to trip over it. It was at least six inches too long, or she was six inches too short—probably the latter. She had arrived in spectacularly embarrassing circumstances, and distressing ones too. But she had not yet been turned away even though she had admitted the essential
truth that might have caused him to dismiss her without further ado.

He might still do it, of course. But he had treated her kindly despite the fact that she had ruined his future plans. Surely he would at least give, or lend, her enough money to get her back to London. Perhaps Mrs. Harris would be good enough to help her find some employment, though she did not know what she was capable of doing.

She turned the handle of the dressing room door as gingerly as she had done earlier. But this time she was not so fortunate. There was someone else in there.

“Oh, I am sorry,” she said, closing the door quickly.

But it opened again almost immediately and the startled face of a young girl about Lily’s own age looked in at her. The girl was wearing one of those pretty mob caps the servant who had brought the food had worn.

“I beg your pardon, I am sure, my lady,” the girl said. “I just come up with your clothes, and Mrs. Ailsham told me to stay to help you dress and do your hair. She said his lordship is to come for you in half an hour, my lady, to take you to tea.”

“Oh.” Lily smiled and held out her right hand. “You are a
maid
. What a relief to learn that. How do you do? I am Lily.”

The maid eyed her outstretched hand askance. She did not take it but curtsied instead. “I am pleased to make your acquaintance, my lady,” she said. “I am Dolly. My mum and dad had me christened Dorothy, but everyone has always called me just Dolly. I am to be your personal maid, Mrs. Ailsham says, until your own arrives.”

“Mrs. Ailsham?” Lily stepped into the dressing room and looked about her. The bathtub had been removed, she saw.

“The housekeeper, my lady,” Dolly explained.

And then Lily saw her bag lying on the stool before the dressing table. She rushed toward it and searched anxiously inside. But all was well. Her hand closed about her locket at the bottom of the bag. She drew it out and clasped it comfortingly in her hand. She would have felt she had lost part of herself if she had lost the locket. Some other things were missing, though. She looked about the room.

“I took the liberty of taking a dress and shift out of your bag, my lady,” Dolly said. “I ironed them. They was creased bad.”

There they were laid carefully over the back of a chair, her cotton shift and the precious, pretty pale-green muslin dress Mrs. Harris had insisted on buying for her in Lisbon.

“You
ironed
them?” she said, smiling warmly at the maid. “How very kind of you, Dolly. I could have done it myself. But I am glad not to have to do so. However would I find my way to the kitchen?” She laughed.

Dolly laughed too, a little uncertainly. “You are funny, my lady,” she said. “How everyone would
look
if you was to walk into the kitchen with your dress over your arm, asking for the iron.” The idea seemed to tickle her enormously.

“Especially dressed as I am now,” Lily said, grasping her nightgown at the sides and raising it until her bare toes showed. “Tripping all over my hem.”

They laughed together like a pair of children.

“I’ll help you dress, my lady,” Dolly told her.

“Help me? Whatever for?” Lily asked her.

Dolly did not answer. She pointed to Lily’s rather battered shoes, the only pair she owned. Mrs. Harris had bought those for her too, but she had told Lily that the army was paying for them. The army, in Mrs. Harris’s opinion, owed Lily something. The army had bought her bag too and her passage on the ship that had brought them to England.

“I had them polished, my lady,” Dolly said. “But you need new ones, if you was to ask me.”

“I do not believe I need to ask,” Lily said as she dressed quickly. She was feeling curiously lighthearted. “One day soon I am going to take a step forward and my shoes are going to decide to remain where they are, and that will be the end of them.”

Lily could not remember laughing with such merriment for a long, long time—until now as she did so yet again with Dolly.

“You have a pretty figure, my lady,” Dolly said, looking critically at her when she was dressed. “Small and dainty, not all arms and legs and elbows like me. You will dress up nice when all your trunks have arrived.”

“But I wish I had some of your height,” Lily said with a sigh. “Is there a ribbon anywhere, Dolly, with which to tie back my hair? I do believe I have lost all my hairpins.”

“Oh, a ribbon will not be enough, my lady.” Dolly sounded shocked. “Not to go down to
tea
. You sit down on the stool now—here, I will move the bag to this chair—and I will dress your hair for you. You need not worry that I will make a mess of it. I dressed Lady Gwendoline’s hair sometimes before she moved to the dower house, and I even patched up Lady Elizabeth’s hair last night when some of it fell down during the ball and her own maid was nowhere to be found. She said I done a nice job. I want to be a lady’s maid all the time instead of just a chambermaid. That’s what my big ambition is, my lady. You got lovely hair.”

Lily sat. “I do not know what you can do with it, though, Dolly,” she said dubiously. “It curls hopelessly and
is
like a
bush
. It is more than usually unruly today because I washed it. Oh, how novel—I have never had anyone do my hair for me.”