Someone to Cherish by Mary Balogh

Eight

For someone who had made the very firm decision to put an end to a relationship that had actually scarcely even begun, Lydia took an inordinate amount of time deciding what to wear. She did not want to look overdressed—she rejected her new pink dress. But she did not want to look drab or dowdy either—definitely nothing black or gray or even lavender. The evenings were still too chilly for muslins or short sleeves, but long sleeves and high, round necks could look very matronly. And downright plain.

She was behaving, she thought as she finally donned a pale blue wool dress with long sleeves and a high, round neck, as though she had twenty wardrobes stuffed full of dresses in a wide variety of colors and styles. She did not. Isaiah had not encouraged either extravagance or vanity. No, correction. He had actively discouraged both.

Then there was her hair. At first there seemed to be no real choices with that, at least. There was only one way to wear it that would fit neatly beneath a cap—in a simple coil pinned flat to the back of her head. But which cap should she choose? She had several, all white, all very similar. They were not worth dithering over, in fact.

But then a question asked itself in her head and threw her into total confusion. Did she have to wear a cap? She had started wearing one a few days after her wedding because Isaiah had thought the modesty of it befitted her status as a married lady and his helpmeet, and she had worn one ever since. She thought she might feel a bit naked without one now. Yet she was only twenty-eight years old. She was not a girl, it was true, and she was a widow. But she was not in her dotage.

Could she remember any other way to style her hair, though? Even if she could, could she do it without the help of a maid?

Did she dare try?

But why would she even want to? She was about to put a firm end to whatever it was that was developing between her and Harry Westcott. Since he was coming anyway, though … She had said he could come when he asked her this morning. It was only fair, then, to spend an hour with him, sitting and talking. Perhaps even joking and laughing a little. It was not sinful to do either. She had never believed it was, but it had been easier to behave for six years as though she did instead of trying to explain her opposing point of view.

She was not going to wear a cap.

It took her an hour to dress her hair in a style that looked, when it was finished, as though it had taken her five minutes, if that. She had to be content with hair brushed smooth over her head and above her ears and up off her neck and twisted into a knot high on the back of her head. By accident a few tendrils refused to stay with the rest and hung in waves over her temples and along her neck. She left them where they were. They did not look entirely bad. In fact, they looked almost deliberate, and thank goodness for that bit of a curl in her hair. The rest of it—the smooth, scraped back, utterly uninteresting bulk of it—at least shone in the candlelight.

She did indeed feel funny without her cap. But even as she might have dashed after all to find one there was a knock upon the front door and Snowball darted out of Lydia’s bedchamber, yipping and barking.

He seemed almost sinister standing on her doorstep in the dusk of evening. He looked taller than usual in a long black evening cloak. But when he swept off his hat, he was instantly transformed by his fair hair and his smile. He stooped down to scratch Snowball under the chin, and her dog licked his hand and turned to trot back into the house, all ferocity forgotten. He looked up and smiled again at Lydia as he stepped inside and she closed the door. For a moment she stayed facing it, her hand still on the doorknob while she drew a breath and released it.

She was aware of him hanging his hat and cloak on an empty hook behind the door. His physical presence always had a more powerful impact upon her than merely thinking about him did—or dreaming about him. She should know that by now. She ought to have opened the door, smiled at him, apologized for bringing him all the way from the house at this hour, and explained that she could neither invite him inside nor see him privately ever again. It would be all over by now if she had done that. But of course she had not.

Let there be this present moment, then, she thought as she turned from the door. Let there be this hour.

He was turning at the same moment from hanging up his cloak, and they ended up gazing at each other, no more than a foot apart. Neither of them had spoken a word yet. He was no longer smiling, and his face looked less youthful than usual, less purely good-humored, more handsome. He had a far more powerful presence than he had ever had in the dreams she had dreamed of him.

He raised his hands and cupped them gently about her face before running his thumbs lightly along her lips, from the center to the outer corners. Lydia inhaled very slowly and licked her lips as she gazed into his eyes. Her stomach was unsteady. So were her knees.

He closed the gap between them and set his mouth to hers. Just as he had this morning. But there was a difference. His lips were slightly parted this time. So were hers. She spread her hands over his chest and felt the kiss as a raw ache in her mouth, down into her throat and her breasts and through her womb to settle between her thighs and even reach down to her toes, which curled into the soles of her slippers as though to anchor her to the floor.

And then his mouth was no longer touching hers, and his eyes were gazing back at her again, heavy lidded.

“Kiss me,” he murmured.

At first the words puzzled her. Was not that what they had just been doing—kissing? But then she remembered what he had said this morning about her kissing him. She sank her teeth into her lower lip, and his eyes followed the gesture.

Oh, this was not what she had wanted of this hour—this standing here with him, just inside her front door, his hands cupping her cheeks, hers spread over his chest, her fingers nestled among the crisp folds of his neckcloth. Not touching him anywhere else, though she could feel the heat of him with every part of her body. She could smell the subtle musk of his shaving soap or cologne.

Kiss me.

She slid her hands upward to his shoulders, broad and firm beneath her grip, leaned closer, and kissed him. His lips were soft and warm, still slightly parted. Terribly masculine. So was the rest of him. For, in moving her hands and stepping closer, she had brought her bosom to his chest and the rest of her body against his. She could feel the muscled hardness of his body against the length of hers and the strength of his thighs through the light wool of her dress. A sharp stabbing of sheer raw desire sliced through her, and she pushed back from him, breathless and a bit panicked.

He looked back at her, his hands on either side of her waist, and said nothing.

“Harry,” she said, and wished her voice were not quite so breathless. “I must apologize. For what I asked you when you walked me home from the Cornings’ house, for what I then went on to say and imply, for inviting you in last evening, for letting you come to chop my wood this morning, for agreeing to your coming again this evening. It must end. Now. It cannot continue. We would only be courting disaster.”

His eyes were smiling even if the rest of his face was not. He had removed his hands from her waist and clasped them at his back.

“You are right,” he said. “I have been telling myself all day long—all week long—that it would be madness.”

And how totally illogical of her to feel disappointed, to know that now, within the next minute or so, he would be gone and the loneliness that sometimes needled at her would come slamming back like a blow to the stomach.

She smiled back at him.

“You look very different without your cap,” he said. “Very beautiful.”

The compliment warmed her even though it was a gross exaggeration. Her cheeks were still hot. Her heart was still hammering. “Thank you,” she said. “Harry, I am so sorry. But I will knit you your scarf.”

His smile reached his lips. “You are upset,” he said. “There is no need to be. You owe me nothing, not even a scarf. It was my idea and my pleasure to chop your wood. Sometimes one likes to feel manly, and what is more manly than hefting an axe, especially when one knows a woman is looking on?” His eyes were actually laughing now.

“Oh,” she said, stung. “What makes you believe I was watching you? I was baking, if you will remember.”

“My vanity made me think it,” he said. “You will do horrible things to my conceit if you now tell me you did not look even once.”

“Well,” she said, “I would hate to deflate your image of yourself as a man. Maybe I peeped once.”

“Thank you.” He laughed softly. “Shall we agree to forget about the kisses and part friends?”

Ah, but how could one forget …

“There are some biscuits left from this morning,” she said. “And the kettle is always close to boiling. Let me make some tea—”

“No tea. Or biscuits, even ginger ones. I came here straight from the dinner table,” he said. “But I think it would be a good idea for us to sit down together for a while. For surely we are friends, Lydia, and ought to remain so. We will inevitably keep on running into each other, after all. Those meetings ought not to be embarrassing for us, ought they?”

She turned in to the living room and plumped up the cushions on the back of the sofa even though she had done it earlier.

He came and sat on the sofa, where he had sat last evening, and she took her place beside him again instead of going to sit on her chair, as she probably ought to have done. Snowball looked from one to the other of them before curling up on the hearth before the fire Lydia had lit earlier.

“Isaiah did not like me to be seen without a cap,” she said for something to say. “He thought it unseemly for the vicar’s wife to be bareheaded in public.”

“But you are not the vicar’s wife now,” he said. “Nor are you in public.”

“No.” No, they were not in public and therefore ought not to be sitting here together. But it was such a relief that they were going to have this final hour after all. She liked talking with him. For he did not treat her merely as a listener to his monologues. He encouraged her to talk too, and he listened to her when she did. And looked at her.

“Lydia,” he said, immediately proving her point, “tell me why you have hidden for so many years and still do hide outside your own home.”

“Why I have hidden?” She frowned.

“When you asked me if I was ever lonely,” he said, “I understood you to be admitting that you are. And I felt guilty over the fact that in all the time you have been in Fairfield, first with your husband as the vicar’s wife and more recently as his widow, I had scarcely noticed you. I did not know you and had never made any effort to get to know you. I was deeply ashamed of myself. Until, that was, it occurred to me that perhaps you wanted it that way. It struck me that perhaps you deliberately hid yourself from notice even if you were not literally a hermit. I set out to watch for it at Mr. Solway’s party last night, and it soon became clear to me that I was right. You constantly effaced yourself, even when you might have shone for a few moments as the maker of his birthday cake.”

“That was really nothing to boast about,” she said. “I enjoy baking, though I do not pretend to be an expert. Besides, it was a birthday cake. Everyone’s attention needed to be upon Mr. Solway, not upon me.”

“But you constantly efface yourself,” he persisted. “Your husband shone wherever he went. He had an unusually charismatic … what is the word? Presence? It must have been difficult as his wife not to seem to be his mere shadow. Perhaps you did not do it deliberately then. But since then? You have remained a shadow. I might never have noticed you if you had not asked that question about loneliness. Why do you do it? Why do you hide? In plain sight, paradoxically. Why do you not want people to see you and know you?”

She did not answer for a while as she transferred her gaze from his face to the hands in her lap. It shook her a bit that he had realized all that about her. Well. He had been honest with her this morning about something that must have been painful and a bit shameful to admit. And they were friends. That was what she was going to miss more than anything.

“I fell very deeply in love with Isaiah,” she told him. “I had been starting to fear that I would be a spinster all my life, for I was not going to have a come-out Season, and there was no one in our neighborhood. I did not like any of the suitors who were brought to the house on thinly veiled pretexts. And then Isaiah came. I had never met anyone so breathtakingly handsome, so firm of character, so full of purpose and energy. He talked of his beliefs and what he felt was his mission in life as though they really mattered. As of course they did. The church was not just a career to him. It was … oh, it was all in all. He was utterly sincere, wholly genuine.”

“I believe everyone who met him felt that about him,” Harry said.

“When I understood that he was singling me out for particular attention,” she continued, “I could not believe my good fortune. When he asked me to marry him, I thought I had reached the pinnacle of happiness. All I wanted of my life was to please him, to help him with his work, to be a part of what he envisioned, and to make him comfortable and happy at the same time. In such ways I would make myself happy too. I did not doubt that for a moment. I had found all I had ever dreamed of.”

She stopped there in order to draw a deep breath and release it slowly. She might not have continued if he had not sat silently waiting. The fire in the hearth crackled and shifted and sent sparks shooting up the chimney. Snowball, briefly disturbed, got to her feet, turned twice on the hearth rug, and settled for sleep again.

“He had very decided ideas about the role of a vicar’s wife,” Lydia said after a while. “As he did about everything. I was not to waste my time and energies on domestic duties. That was why there were servants—Mrs. Elsinore in particular. I had a more special role to play in his mission. I was his helpmeet. I must always be in the front pew at church services and by his side at church and community functions. I must serve on every women’s church committee and be his voice there. When we were in company together, I must defer to his superior knowledge and judgment so his authority in the parish was never undermined. I must not speak unless I was addressed directly, and even then I must allow him to answer for me if the topic was a weighty one or a question of faith. One of my main duties was to visit the elderly and the sick and new mothers and their children. I was to take food with me, but only the baskets Mrs. Elsinore provided. I was to serve anyone who came to the vicarage door in need of help. It was not my task—or his—to question the depth of the need. I pleased him and so pleased myself. I wanted to please him. I loved him.”

It was almost the truth. If there had been no more to their story it might have been the whole of it. She might so easily have been happy. And correspondingly heartbroken after his death. Heartbroken for herself too, that was, and not just for him. She really had mourned him.

She turned her head and raised her eyes to Harry’s when he did not immediately break the silence.

“And after you were widowed?” he asked her. “Why did you choose to remain hidden, Lydia?”

“I was in mourning,” she told him.

“Are you still?” he asked.

“No.” She spread her fingers on her lap, pleating the skirt of her dress between them. “After he died, I chose to remain here in Fairfield rather than go home with my father and brother. I wanted to be free and independent, but I did not know quite how it was to be done. I had no experience. I did not want any sort of interference, however well-meaning. I wanted to find my own way.”

“I understand,” he said.

But how could he? How could he possibly?

“You cannot know what it is like to be a woman,” she said, looking up at him again. “Always under the control of men, no matter how benevolent their rule. No matter how much appreciation and even love those men offer in exchange for the total hold they have over every facet of your life and even your mind.”

He gazed back into her eyes, a slight frown between his own.

“I know women have few if any rights according to law and the church,” he said. “It certainly is not fair and must be rectified in time. But life is not always lived strictly according to law. Custom can be just as strong a guide. Most of the women in my life, it seems to me, are strong, assertive persons, who hold their own against the men in their lives, usually resulting in a harmonious balance. Though I do have one cousin, it is true—Elizabeth—who was forced to flee her first, abusive marriage and stayed free of it only because Alexander, her brother, refused to give her up but confronted her husband instead and I believe knocked him flat and did some damage in the process. The law ought to have been on her side but was not. Brute force had to take its place to protect her.”

“No man has ever used physical violence on me,” she said. Though there were other kinds of violence.

“Alexander’s wife, Wren, the Countess of Riverdale, was the owner of a prosperous glassmaking factory when she met him,” he told her. “She was actively involved in the business and still is. I do not think Alex has ever tried to stop her or become involved himself. They are, I am certain, very happy. I can understand your craving for those twin dreams you speak of—freedom and independence. I can understand too your instinct to hide lest someone find you and spoil everything for you and put you back under the dominance of a man who will know better how to care for you than you know yourself. But life for women is not always as confining as it has been in your experience.”

How envious she was of Wren, Countess of Riverdale.

“I have never known women, Harry,” she said. “At least, not until very recently. I have a few friends here now and value them greatly. I enjoy their company. Until this past year all my living was done from within the world of men. Fortunately for me, none of them were violent men. I stay hidden now because I feel as though I am holding my breath and clinging on to my newfound freedom while I wait for someone to snatch it away. And while I try to discover if I really do have wings and can spread them and fly.”

“You have wings, Lydia,” he said. “And you will fly if you truly want to.”

She felt tears spring to her eyes before she could look away. All the men in her life so far had been strong and assertive. Even now her father and brothers wanted to come and take her home with them so they could look after her. Harry had been a soldier, a military officer, and she did not doubt that he too was strong and firm of character and had been ruthless in the performance of his duty. But it was kindness that most characterized him now. It was kindness that made him smile almost constantly, that made him amiable to everyone, old and young alike, of the lower class and his own upper class alike, men and women alike. She had thought of his smile very recently as a kind of mask, and in a way it was, because she did not doubt there was the weight of darkness inside him. Not the darkness of evil, but that of suffering. It was kindness upon which he had chosen to base his daily life, however, and the willingness to listen and empathize and comfort. It had bothered him to know that he had dismissed her as a mere shadow until very recently.

It would be awfully easy, and a terrible mistake, to fall in love with Major Harry Westcott.

She swiped away her tears with two fingers.

“I have made you sad,” he said. “Our conversation has turned somber, and the fault is entirely mine. Instead of asking why you have always chosen to hide, I ought to have told you how glad I am that you have gifted me with a glimpse of the real Lydia, even down to the absence of a cap this evening. Whenever I meet you from now on I will know you are someone whose friendship I would welcome.”

“You are very kind,” she said.

He got to his feet suddenly. “It is time I leave,” he said. “I will take care not to be seen, Lydia, and you will have your quiet independence back, with not the slightest stain upon your reputation. Nor will I upon mine, for that matter. I wish we could be closer friends, though perhaps we can at least settle for being friendlier acquaintances in the future than we have been in the past?” He smiled down at her.

“Yes,” she said. “Perhaps we can.”

She stayed where she was as he crossed the room and donned his cloak and took his hat in one hand. He would not even have to light his lantern. There was still a grayness visible through the curtains. It was not quite dark. He had not been here long at all. Far less than an hour.

He turned toward her, presumably to say good night. He was no longer smiling. And he did not immediately say the words.

Neither did she.

They merely gazed at each other, half a room apart.

Lydia got to her feet but hesitated even as she considered going to hold the door open for him and watching him leave.

“Lydia,” Harry said softly.

“Harry.” Her voice sounded unnaturally high-pitched. And she took one hesitant step toward him.

He set his hat down on the table beside the door without watching what he did and took one step toward her.

And then somehow they were in each other’s arms.