by Mary Balogh
His sister was scolding him as they walked away.
“I am sorry, Lydia,” Harry said.
“Why?” she asked. “You cannot be responsible for what other people say and do, Harry. Neither can I. I believe we have learned that in the past few days. And there is no need for you to accompany me, you know, especially as you have guests here to entertain. I believe I can make my way back down the drive without losing my way.”
“Lydia! Have mercy on me,” he said. “My grandmother Westcott—probably both grandmothers, in fact, and all the aunts—would scold me into next week if I did anything as improper as allow a lady to walk home alone.”
She sighed.
“I believe,” she said, “that was exactly how and why all this got started, Harry. First Tom Corning and then you would not hear of my walking home alone. Should I now proceed to ask you if you are ever lonely?”
* * *
* * *
Harry did not follow her beyond her gate. He did not turn away after she had stepped into her garden and shut the gate, however. He stood against the fence, his hands resting on top of it. She could sense him there and turned when she was halfway along the path, while Snowball curled up into a ball of fluff on the doorstep and waited to be let inside.
“Did I ever give you a definitive answer?” he asked her.
They had talked about a number of things on their way home, but Lydia knew to which question he alluded. It was the one that had come to define their whole relationship.
Are you ever lonely?
She gazed at him and waited.
“It is yes,” he said. His eyes were softly smiling, yet he looked sad, Lydia thought. Just as she was feeling.
“Even now, with all your family surrounding you?” she asked.
He answered with a question of his own. “When you went home to your father’s house,” he said, “were you lonely? Perhaps more so than when you were here?”
“It would be illogical, would it not?” she said. “All those who are closest to me were there—my father, my brothers, my sister-in-law. I live alone here, apart from Snowball.”
“As I do at Hinsford,” he said. “Apart from an army of servants.”
“Yes,” she said after they had gazed at each other in silence for a few moments. “I was lonely.”
“There needs to be a special someone, does there not?” he said. “Or rather . . . No. There does not need to be. One ought to be able to live alone. One ought to have all the inner resources to live contentedly with one’s own company. We have to love ourselves, do we not? Or we are incapable of loving anyone else. I think we have both learned those lessons. And we have both been contented and perhaps will be again. But sometimes there is loneliness. And then—sometimes—there is a longing for someone special. Someone to move us from quiet contentment into a warmer happiness. Someone we do not need, but someone we want in order to fill in all the blanks in our lives. I am talking a pile of nonsense.”
“No, you are not,” she said, taking a step closer to the fence and then walking right up to it and grasping the top of it, her hands on the outsides of his. “There is a need . . . Ah, perhaps it is not actually a need. You are quite right about that. But there is a craving to trust. The loss of it, the loss of the ability to trust, is a terrible thing. It destroys so much. I have come to understand that my life is broken, and I have not been fully able to piece it back together. I dare not trust.”
His eyes continued to smile. And they still looked unhappy. He nodded.
“Harry,” she said. “Tell me I am wrong.”
He shook his head slowly. “Only you can tell yourself that,” he said. “When you are ready.”
“Do you love me?” She gripped the fence more tightly. Oh, her impetuous tongue again. It happened when she was tired. And she was bone weary now. This day had seemed a week long.
“Yes.” The word was so softly spoken that she read his lips more than she heard the sound.
“Am I your someone special?” she asked. “Am I someone you could . . . cherish?”
“Yes,” he said again.
“I adore you.” She blinked rapidly. She was not going to become a watering pot again. “And I trust you. I have thought about it from every possible angle during the past hour or so, but I cannot talk myself out of trusting you. The trouble with trust, of course, is that it is a future thing, and one can never be certain of anything in the future. One can only . . . trust. Or not.”
“And you choose to trust me,” he said.
“Yes.” She had blinked back her own tears, but now there were tears swimming in his eyes. “And you are someone I could cherish, Harry. My someone special. Oh, I did not plan any of this. It is most brazen of me. I—”
His hands came down on top of hers and curled around them. “Lydia,” he said. “I still cannot recall any of my pretty speech except the word ardent and the phrase happiest of men. But it was a grand piece of pomposity anyway, I daresay. Will you marry me?” He smiled at her suddenly, leftover tears and all. “Will you make me the happiest of men? I most ardently love you.”
“Oh, Harry—”
“You were saying?” he said when she did not immediately continue, raising her hands to hold palm-in against his chest. Lydia had to take a step closer to the fence.
“Will I make you happy?” she asked him. And here she went having to blink her eyes again to rid them of tears. “Will we be happy? Harry, I do not have much experience with happiness.”
“Neither do I,” he said, holding her gaze. “We will seek it and find it together, Lydia. But I think happiness comes in moments, not in great swaths of time. I do not think it is a future thing at all but only a present something we can carry forward with us if we choose. I feel awfully happy at this precise moment because I believe you are saying yes, and I want you to say it more than I can remember wanting anything else in my life. Take a chance with me, Lydia. Trust me. Trust yourself. Trust the future. For though we cannot control it or have any real idea of what lies ahead, we are not entirely helpless. We can promise ourselves and promise each other that we will work on a marriage to each other every day for the rest of our lives. Both of us. As equals.”
She gazed into his eyes—the loveliest eyes she had ever looked into, for there was kindness there as far back as she could see. As far back as the very essence of him, where darkness had led him to humility and empathy and kindness. And not just those things. There was love too. And right now it was focused entirely upon her—his someone special. She saw a little bit of uncertainty too and vulnerability because she had not yet actually spoken the word.
“Yes,” she said, and smiled. “I am saying yes.”
And nothing in her whole life, surely, had felt so right.
He gathered her against him, fence notwithstanding, but the brim of her bonnet got in the way as she tried to nestle her head beneath his chin, and they both laughed. And he kissed her.
Right out in the open, she in her front garden, he out on the road, the sun beaming down on them, for the whole world to see if the world chose to come and look.
“Soon,” he said when he drew back his head a few inches.
“Yes.
“Very soon.”
“Yes.”
“Sooner than soon?”
“Absurd.” She laughed, and he kissed her again.
“Lydia,” he said, “I think you had better invite me to tea. We have some plans to make.”
“Well,” she said, “since I seem to have very little reputation left to lose, I think you might as well come in.”
* * *
* * *
Lady Hill and her son and daughter did not remain long at Hinsford after Harry and Lydia left. They still had visitors at home, awaiting their return. A number of other members of the Westcott family had gathered on the terrace in the meanwhile—some of the cricketers, a cou
ple of the returning riders, those who had been at the summerhouse, and a few from inside. The men among them wandered away soon after the visitors had left.
“So, Mama,” Louise said, “you did not like the notorious Mrs. Tavernor?”
“Mama gave her a stinging setdown earlier, when Harry brought her here to introduce her,” Matilda explained to those who had not been present to hear it.
“And she gave it right back to me,” the dowager countess said. “The brazen minx.”
“You liked her, then, Grandmama?” Jessica asked, smiling.
“She has backbone,” the dowager admitted. “Which fact does not excuse the decision she made after her husband’s death to live alone, without even a servant to add respectability, and then to entertain gentlemen at night.”
“There is no evidence, is there, Grandmama,” Abigail said in her quiet, gentle voice, “that Mrs. Tavernor has ever entertained gentlemen? Harry is not plural.”
“And there is a difference,” Anna added, “between evening and night, Grandmama, when one is speaking of a gentleman calling upon a lady.”
“Do I have any other granddaughters who wish to offer me some witticism or reproach?” the dowager asked, looking about the group. “Camille?”
“I think you like her, Grandmama,” Camille said. “Because she stood up to you.”
“Hmph,” her grandmother said.
“Harry will be thirty years old before another week has passed, Eugenia,” Mrs. Kingsley said. “My guess is that Mrs. Tavernor is close to him in age. Perhaps what they do in private together—or what they do not do, for that matter—is their business and not ours. Or that Mrs. Piper’s.”
“Quite right, Mother,” Mary, her daughter-in-law, said.
“She handled herself admirably just a little while ago,” Anna said. And she proceeded to describe what had happened with Jeremy Piper. “Harry was nothing short of magnificent.”
“I do wish I had been there to witness it,” Elizabeth said.
“But,” Mildred said, “Mrs. Tavernor refused Harry’s marriage offer just a couple of days ago.”
“But of course she did,” Viola said. “We would all like her considerably less if she had accepted it.”
“You like her too, then, Viola?” Wren asked with a smile.
“Do not we all?” Viola asked.
“I have not met her,” Elizabeth said. “Neither has Mama. Perhaps we will call on her tomorrow.”
“I will come with you if I may,” Mary said. “I have not met her either.”
“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 differen
t 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.”