Only Enchanting by Mary Balogh
6
Agnes avoided Middlebury, both the house and the park, for three days after the musical evening. It was a decision made easy for two of those days by the fact that it rained.
Middlebury Park came to the cottage, however, in the form of two visits—one from Sophia, Lady Trentham, and Lady Harper the first day, and one from the Duke of Stanbrook and the Earl of Berwick on the third. Sophia brought the baby with her, and he was very much the focus of attention during the visit, as babies almost always were. Both groups came to thank them for coming to dine and to commend Dora on the superiority of her playing. The duke expressed the polite hope that they would hear her again before their visit was at an end.
On the morning of the fourth day, the sun was shining again, though it had to contend with some high clouds, and Dora set off on foot to give the viscount his regular music lesson. Agnes stood in their small front garden to wave her on her way. Often she went with her sister and spent an hour with Sophia while the lesson was in progress, but she would not go this week despite Sophia’s assurances just three days ago that she would be very welcome anytime and must not stay away on account of the visitors.
There were horses approaching along the street—four of them. Their riders paused to greet Dora. Agnes would have ducked back into the house, but she feared she had already been seen and it would seem impolite not to wait to bid them a good morning as they passed. And then one of them detached himself from the group and rode ahead and toward her.
Lord Ponsonby.
Agnes clasped her hands at her waist and tried to look cool and unconcerned or at least as though she had not spent far too long during the past four nights—oh, and the days too—reliving that waltz and that kiss. She was like a schoolgirl dizzy with a romantic infatuation, and she could not seem to summon the resolve to shake off the foolishness.
“Ma’am.” He touched the brim of his tall hat with his whip and looked down at her with eyes that seemed to burn into her own—foolish fancy. Or perhaps not. Once again she observed that he was very obviously a practiced flirt.
“My lord.” She inclined her head to him and clasped her hands more tightly until his eyes dipped to observe them.
“You are not p-painting the daffodils today?” he asked.
“I thought I might later,” she told him. It really did bother her that she might miss them at their best and would have to wait a whole year before they bloomed again.
That was the extent of their conversation. He was joined in the roadway by his three fellow riders, all of whom bade her a cheerful good-morning before they rode on. They were going to Gloucester, the duke informed Agnes, to have a look at the cathedral.
It was a fair distance away. Even if they spent no longer than an hour there, they could not possibly be back before late afternoon. Here was her opportunity, then. She would go and paint.
Usually there was joy and serenity in the very thought, for she did most of her painting out of doors, and her subjects were almost always the wildflowers that grew in the hedgerows and meadows beyond the village. While she painted, she could forget her lingering sadness over the end of her all-too-brief marriage, the essential tedium of her days, the loneliness she tried to hide even from herself, the sense that life was passing her by—as it was, of course, for thousands of women like her. She was not unique in that way. She must never give in to the dreadful affliction of self-pity.
There was no particular serenity today, however, as she set off with her easel and her supplies. There was only a determination to quell her whirling emotions and live her life as she normally did, so that in two weeks’ time, when the guests had left Middlebury Park, she would not fancy that she had been left behind with a broken heart.
Being in love was not at all a pleasant thing—except perhaps when one relived a certain waltz without music and a certain kiss that had seemed shockingly lascivious at the time but probably had not been by any worldly standards. One could not live forever, though, upon memories and dreams. One could not forever ignore the fact that one was alone and that perhaps one would be alone for the rest of one’s life.
She strode off in the direction of the far side of the park.
* * *
Flavian did not go all the way to Gloucester. After half an hour or so, he fancied his horse was favoring its right foreleg. Ralph hopped down from his saddle, uninvited, to take a look, making it necessary for Flavian to get down and have a look too. There was nothing obviously wrong, and Imogen, who had been riding a little behind them, remarked that she had not noticed the horse limping. But Flavian declared himself afraid to risk riding farther from home and perhaps laming the horse altogether. He would go back and get Vincent’s head groom to examine that leg just to make sure.
He would not hear of everyone else’s turning back with him. No, no, they must continue on their way and enjoy Gloucester.
Ralph gave him a hard look before riding on with the others, but he said nothing. Ralph was the only one who had remarked upon his absence with Mrs. Keeping a few evenings ago.
“Got lost between the music room and the drawing room, did you, Flave?” he had asked.
Flavian had raised his quizzing glass.
“Quite so, old chap,” he had said. “I shall h-have to ask the viscountess for a ball of yarn to unwind so that I can f-find my way from room to room.”
“Or you could ask Vince for a loan of his dog,” Ralph had said. “Though it is said three is a crowd.”
Flavian had put his glass all the way to his eye to survey his friend through it, but Ralph had just grinned.
He rode slowly back to Middlebury. Last night the conversation had deepened when Ralph had told them about the letter he had received earlier in the day. Damned letters! It was from Miss Courtney, the sister of one of Ralph’s three friends who had been killed moments before he himself was severely wounded on the battlefield in Spain. It was not proper for a single young lady to write to a single gentleman, but she had done so periodically ever since her brother’s death, claiming the privilege of a sort of honorary sister. Now, at the rather advanced age of twenty-two, she was to marry a prosperous, well-connected clergyman from somewhere near the Scottish border.
“But she still has a tendre for you, Ralph?” Ben had asked.
“Probably not,” Ralph had said, “else she would not be marrying Reverend Whatshisname, would she?”
But they all knew she had had a tendre for Ralph when he was still no more than a lad and she was still in the schoolroom. And that she had worshipped her only brother and turned to Ralph in the desperation of her grief, writing to him at Penderris Hall, seeking him out in London after he had gone back there. He had not answered most of her letters, pleading ill health in the few brief notes he had written, and he had avoided her whenever he could. He had even gone to the extent of excusing himself at one ball to fetch her a glass of lemonade and then leaving her thirsty by walking right out of the house and quitting London the next day.
“You feel guilty,” George had said last night, “for not having married her yourself long since.”
Guilt again! Nothing but damned guilt. Did life exist without it for some people? Flavian wondered.
“They were inordinately fond of each other,” Ralph had explained. “Max and Miss Courtney, that is. There were just the two of them. If I had really been Max’s friend, as I always professed to be, I would have looked after his sister, would I not? It is what he would have expected of me.”
“Even to the extent of marrying her?” Imogen had said. “Surely he would not have wished the sister he loved so dearly to be married for duty alone, Ralph. And that is what it would have been on your part. She would have known it, if not at first, then eventually. And she would have been unhappy. You would have done her no lasting favor.”
“I might at least,” he had said, “have shown her some compassion, some affection, some . . . God damn it all to hell, I used to be able to feel such fine emotions. Sorry for the language, Imogen.”
Ralph had been claiming for years that the worst of his many injuries had been the death of his emotions. He was wrong, of course. He felt guilt and sorrow. Clearly, though, there was a great chunk of his emotional life missing that only he could know about.
“One day you will feel love again, Ralph,” Hugo had told him. “Have patience with yourself.”
“As spoken by the world’s g-greatest lover,” Flavian had said, raising both an eyebrow and his quizzing glass in Hugo’s direction and winning for himself one of Hugo’s most ferocious scowls in return.
“Ralph already feels love,” Vincent had said. “He loves us.”
And that had brought tears to Ralph’s eyes.
He and three longtime friends had ridden off to war at the age of seventeen with glorious ideals and even more glorious visions of brave deeds of honor to be accomplished in military combat. A short while later, three of them had been blown into a red shower of blood and guts and brains in an ill-conceived cavalry charge that had been met with the great guns of the French army. Ralph had watched in helpless horror before he too was felled.
“It sounds like a decent marriage Miss Courtney is making,” George had said. “I daresay she will be happy.”
Flavian had not mentioned his own letter from Marianne, his sister. She and her husband and their children were at Candlebury, she had explained, and would remain there over Easter before proceeding to London for the Season. Velma had arrived at Farthings Hall. Had he heard? Marianne was going to call there with their mother. Did Flavian intend coming there after he left Middlebury Park? She sincerely hoped so. The children would be ecstatic to see him, as their uncle had been their favorite person in the world since he took them to the Tower of London last year and then to Gunter’s for ices.
Flavian was not fooled by the brief, almost offhand mention of Velma. It was as obvious to him as the nose on his face when he crossed his eyes that his family and hers were hoping to rekindle the grand love story that had ended in tragedy after he had got knocked from his horse in battle and left his mind on the field when he was carried off it, and Velma and Len had consoled themselves by marrying each other. How fortunate for such hopes that Len had died a scant seven years later. It had been very obliging of him.
Velma had married Len because he, Flavian, was incapacitated, dead for all intents and purposes even though he was still alive in body. No one had expected him to recover, even the physician who came at regular intervals to shake his head and cluck his tongue and look grave and learned. They had all said so in his hearing, and whereas he did not understand even half of what people were saying, what he did understand was almost invariably the things he would rather not have heard. He was mad, his mind gone forever. Someone was going to have to do something about it one of these days instead of clinging to a hope that just was not realistic. Velma and Len had been the first to face up to reality. They had turned to each other in their mutually inconsolable grief and found some comfort in the fact that together they would be able to remember him as he had used to be.
That was the story that was always told within the family, anyway. His mother, his sister, his aunts and uncles and cousins to the third and fourth remove trotted it out at every family gathering. It made an affecting story and always drew tears to more than one set of eyes. The poignant epilogue to it all, of course, had been the fact that he had more or less recovered his wits after all during his long stay at Penderris. It always reminded one of his aunts—bedamned if he could remember which one—of Juliet awaking from her drugged sleep just after Romeo killed himself, believing her dead.
But now Len was dead. It was no wonder there were stirrings of hope among a certain contingent for a happily-ever-after at long last.
Flavian, however, had never forgiven either one of them.
He had still been unable to speak with any clarity or coherence when Velma had come to tell him less than two months after he had been brought home that the notice of the end of their engagement was to appear in the morning papers the next day, and that three days after that her new engagement announcement was to appear. He had not been able to speak, but he had understood well enough. She had patted his hand gently and wept copiously.
“You will never recover, Flavian,” she had told him. “We both know that—at least, no, I do not suppose you do or ever will. Perhaps it is merciful that you know nothing—more merciful than what has happened to me. I love you. I will love you to my dying day. But I cannot remain bound to you. I need more of life, and I will try to find that with Leonard. I am sure if you understood and could speak to me, you would agree wholeheartedly. I am sure you would be happy for me—for us. You would be happy that I will spend my life with Leonard and he with me—two of the people who love you most dearly.”
He had tried desperately to speak, but he had not got beyond a few stuttered and meaningless sounds. Anyway, in those days his mind still had not recovered the concept of sentences. Even a recognizable word or two would not have sufficed if by some miracle he had spilled them out. And chances were they would have been the wrong words, something quite different from what his mind was intending, most probably some horrible blasphemies. His mother had sometimes begged him to stop swearing. But the nature of his injury was such that he lost control of his speech and of the words he used when he could utter a sound.
“I am sure you would give us your blessing,” Velma had told him, stroking his hand. “I am certain you would, and so I have assured Leonard. We will always love you. I will always love you.”
After she had gone, leaving behind the familiar scent of lilies of the valley, he had virtually destroyed the drawing room, where he had been lying on a daybed. It had taken two burly footmen and his valet to subdue him, and they had succeeded only because eventually there was nothing left to destroy.
Len had not come, even if he had intended to, and who could blame him? That had not been Flavian’s first violent rage. More and more he found that the frustration caused by the consequences of his injury—his missing memories, his confused mind, his frozen tongue—manifested itself in an urge to physical violence he could not control.
Three days later, the very day the notice of the engagement of Miss Velma Frome to Leonard Burton, Earl of Hazeltine, appeared in all the London papers, George, Duke of Stanbrook, had come to call on Flavian at Arnott House.
Flavian had sworn foully at this new stranger and hurled a water glass at his head, missing by a yard but enjoying the satisfying sound of smashing glass. He had not been in the best of humors, having been locked in his bare room ever since the tirade following Velma’s visit. It was amazing, looking back, that there had even been a glass to throw. Someone must have been careless.
But soon he had found himself traveling to Penderris Hall in Cornwall with the duke—without any restraints or hefty guards in the guise of servants. George had conversed quietly and sensibly with him—or, rather, he had delivered monologues, maybe a quarter of the contents of which Flavian had understood—through most of the long, tedious journey, before Flavian discovered that Penderris was not the lunatic asylum he was expecting but a hospital with other patients—other veterans of the war—as badly messed up as he.
And he had loved George with a passionate attachment ever since. A funny thing, love. It was not always, or even mostly, a sexual thing.
He did not go out to the meadow immediately after his return to Middlebury. Indeed, he tried to talk himself out of going at all. Ben and Vincent, the latter’s music lesson at an end, were going to ride out to the racetrack with Martin Fisk, Vince’s trusty valet. Flavian might have gone with them. But his horse was lame, was it not, though he suspected the groom would be hard put to discover how. Hugo and his wife were going to sit for a while at the highest point of the wilderness walk, from where they could expect the best view. Flavian was invited to go with them, but he agreed with Ralph that three could sometimes be a crowd, and those two had been wed for less than a year and were obviously still delighted with each other. Lady Harper and Lady Darleigh were going to pay a few social calls and would have been happy to have Flavian’s escort. He told them that he had a few letters to write and really ought to get on with them before he lost the urge entirely. Then, of course, he felt obliged to write to his sister. He made it very clear that, when he left here, he was going straight to London. He even told her the date he expected to arrive there so that it would be clear that he intended to spend Easter, as he did every year, in London. It did not matter that Parliament would not sit or the Season swing to life until after the holiday. He liked London when it was relatively quiet. Being there was better than being at Candlebury, anyway—especially this year.
He had not been to Candlebury Abbey since four days before David died, two days before his and Velma’s grand betrothal ball in London.
What on earth had possessed him to go through with that? At such a time? He frowned, rubbing the feather of the quill pen back and forth across his chin, trying to remember the exact sequence of events during that most eventful and ghastly of weeks. Ghastly? But the deeper he thought, the more a headache loomed and the closer he got to the sort of frustration that had once been a prelude to a bout of uncontrolled violence.
He got abruptly to his feet, toppling the desk chair with the backs of his knees, and set out for the far side of the park. She would have left long before now, even if she had gone there rather than somewhere else to paint, he told himself. He tried to convince himself that he hoped she had left, though why the deuce he would walk so far just for the exercise he did not try to explain to himself. It was a long walk.
He would not be good company.
This morning she had been wearing a simple cotton dress and no bonnet. Her hair had been caught back in a plain knot at her neck. Her posture had been prim and self-contained, her expression placid. He had tried to tell himself that she was quite without sexual appeal, that he must be very bored indeed out here in the country if he was weaving fantasies about a plain, prim, virtuous widow.
Except that he was not bored. He had all his closest friends here, and three weeks was never a long enough time to enjoy their company to the fullest. One of those weeks had already gone by while he blinked. This was always his favorite three weeks of the year, and the change of venue had not affected that.
Perhaps he would have convinced himself this morning if he had not noticed the one thing that had betrayed her. Her hands clasped at her waist were white-knuckled, suggesting that she was not as at ease, as unconcerned at seeing him, as she seemed at first glance.
Sometimes sexuality was more compelling when it was not overt.
He had wanted her again at that moment with a quite alarming stab of longing.
And she was not plain. Or prim. And if she was virtuous—and he did not doubt she was—she was also full to the brim of repressed sexuality.
When he arrived at the far side of the park, he found she had not gone elsewhere to paint and she had not left.
She was where she had been five days ago, though she was not flat on her back this time. She was on her knees before her easel, sitting on her heels, painting. He knew why she was so low. She had explained to him that she wanted to see the daffodils as they saw themselves. And though he stopped some distance behind her, one shoulder propped against the trunk of a tree, his arms folded across his chest, he could see that her painting showed mostly sky, with grass below and daffodils reaching up between the two, connecting them. He was not close enough to judge the quality of the painting—not that he was a connoisseur anyway.
She seemed absorbed. Certainly she had neither heard nor sensed his approach, as she had last time.
His eyes moved over the pleasing curve of her spine, over her rounded bottom, over the soles of her shoes, the toes pointing in, the heels out. She was wearing a sun bonnet. He could see nothing of her face.
He should turn and leave, though he knew he would not do so. Not after coming all this way and forfeiting the company of friends and a visit to Gloucester.
He was badly smitten, he thought with some surprise and not a little unease.
And then she dipped her brush in water and paint and slashed it violently across the painting from corner to corner and again from the opposite corner to corner, leaving a large, dark X on the paper. She tore it from the easel, crumpled it, and tossed it to the grass. It was only then that he noticed other similar balls of paper scattered about her.
She was having a bad day.
Surely it was nothing to do with him. Apart from that brief encounter this morning, she had not seen him for four days.
She set her brush in the water and pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes. He heard her sigh.
“Behold the frustrated artist,” he said.
She did not whip her head about as he expected. For a moment she stayed as she was. Then she lowered her hands and turned her head slowly.
“Gloucester must have moved closer,” she said.
“Gloucester and I were not fated to m-meet today, a-alas,” he said. “My horse developed a limp.”
“Did it?” She looked skeptical.
“Perhaps not,” he said, uncrossing his arms, pushing his shoulder away from the tree, and strolling closer to her. “But it might have if I had gone f-farther.”
“It is always best to be cautious,” she said.
“Ah.” He stopped walking. “Double meanings, Mrs. Keeping?”
“If so,” she said, “I do not follow my own advice, do I? I meant to be here for an hour and have probably stayed for three or four. I might have guessed you would find a reason to return early.”
She sounded bitter.
“When you told me you would paint later,” he said softly, “were you inviting me to d-discover something amiss with my h-horse?”
“I do not know,” she said with the ghost of a smile. “Was I? I have no experience with dalliance, Lord Ponsonby. And I have no wish to acquire any.”
“Are you quite s-sure,” he asked her, “that you are not deceiving yourself, Mrs. Keeping?”
She turned her head to look back across the meadow.
“I cannot paint,” she told him. “The daffodils remain out there and I remain in here, and I can find no connection.”
“And I am to b-blame?”
“No.” She looked up at him. “No, you are not. I might have avoided that kiss here almost a week ago. I might have avoided going into the east wing with you the evening I was there with Dora, and, having gone there, I might have avoided dancing with you and kissing you again. You are a flirt, my lord, and probably a libertine, but I cannot pretend that you have forced anything upon me. No, you are not to blame.”
He was rather bowled over by her assessment of him.
A flirt? Was he?
A libertine? Was he?
And he was to blame. He had destroyed her tranquility. He was good at destruction.
He came up beside her, looked at the blank page on her easel, looked about at the discarded paintings, looked at the daffodils.
“Does your p-painting usually give you this much trouble?” he asked.
“No.” She sighed again and got to her feet. “Perhaps because I am usually content to grasp the simple beauty of wildflowers. But there is something about daffodils that demands more. Perhaps because they suggest boldness and sunshine and music, something more than just themselves. Hope, perhaps? I do not pretend to be a great artist with a large vision.”
She was looking at her hands, which were spread, palms down. She sounded on the verge of tears.
He took her hands in his. As he suspected, they were like twin blocks of ice. He placed them flat against his chest and spread his palms over the backs of them. She did not make any protest.
“Why did you t-tell me you were coming here?” he asked her.
Her eyebrows rose. “I did not,” she protested. “You asked if I was not painting today, and I answered that I might later.”
“You were telling me.” He dipped his head closer to hers.
“You think I was asking you to join me here?” Her voice was full of indignation. Her cheeks had turned pink.
“Were you?” He murmured the words, almost against her mouth.
She frowned. “I do not understand dalliance, Lord Ponsonby.”
“But you are d-drawn to it, Mrs. Keeping.”
She drew a deep breath, held it, and looked directly into his eyes. He waited for the denial, mockery in his eyes.
“Yes.”
The whole trouble seemed to be that she did not play by the rules—for the simple reason that she did not know the rules, perhaps. What did one do with a female who admitted to being drawn to dalliance?
Dally with her?
It did not help that he wanted her, that there was a niggling element of need in that wanting.
“If I go away,” he asked her, “will you paint any more today?”
She shook her head. “I am distracted. I was distracted even before you came. Even before I came.”
“Then p-put your things away,” he said, “and leave them here. And w-walk with me.”
