Delicious (41 page)

He looked at her. Then he drained his cup and reached toward the bottle of gin again.

“Michael, that’s enough.”

To her shock, after a moment of hesitation, he put the bottle of gin back in the cupboard. “At school the rumor has always been that I’m a Very Important Man’s bastard—that’s why they tolerate me, I suppose. I wonder what people would say if they knew the truth.”

“I don’t believe the worth of a man lies solely in his parentage, or even mostly. Of course it is enviable to know with perfect confidence where you belong from the very beginning, but it’s not so terrible to find your own place.”

“You say that because you know where
you
came from.”

“A place that I can never go back to. I’m still searching for my place, like you.”

He made no response for long seconds. Then he nodded slowly.

She rose. It was time for her to leave: Mrs. Robbins would be anxious to talk to him. “Come to the Servants’ Ball tonight. I’ll have a good cold supper buffet laid out. It will be a good time.”

“I don’t know. Some of the servants look at me funny.”

“Some of the servants have always looked at me funny, doesn’t stop me from going every year. Come and bring your mum. She’ll enjoy playing on a proper piano—Mr. Somerset gave one to the staff for Christmas, they uncrated it just this morning.”

“I’ll ask her if she wants to go.”

“And I’ll need someone to help me keep an eye on Marjorie, of course. I’m going to be too busy dancing and flirting.”

“Don’t talk like that. You are too old for it.”

She gave him a hard whack across the chest. “We’ll see how ancient you feel when you are thirty-three.”

He caught her hand and held it. She looked at him and her chest tightened. Such a hard life she had chosen for him, pushing him always to rise above his humble station, to find a place among people who’d rather not give him a place. And he’d never complained.

She embraced him. In her arms he was all skeleton, long, strong bones under worsted wool. “Come and see me sometime in the evenings, before I go.”

“I will,” he said. And hugged her back.

The panic was sudden and complete.

One minute Stuart was calmly discussing the proposed Customs and Inland Revenue Act with the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the next minute every last bit of his logic and rationality had deserted him.

Perhaps things would have come to a head sooner had he seen more of Lizzy. But Lizzy had become something of a hermit in the past two weeks. And Stuart, existing in a strange limbo, away from both the woman he loved and the woman to whom he was promised, postponed his final decision again and again—because he knew Verity wouldn’t leave without seeing Michael one more time and because he knew from his conversation with Michael that the boy wouldn’t return to Fairleigh Park until a week before Christmas.

A week before Christmas was yesterday.

What if she’d met Michael and left already? What if she did not want to be found? The false sense of security that came from knowing where she was evaporated in a second.

He was, all at once, frantic to leave London. But one did not quit the Chancellor of the Exchequer abruptly and without reason. Worse, on his way out of 9 Downing Street, where he maintained his Chief Whip’s office, he had to settle squabbles between MPs, adjust the legislative schedule, and reassure everyone and his son-in-law—who were all worried sick over what Mr. Gladstone was doing with the Irish Home Rule bill—that everything was under control.

By the time he flagged down a hansom he’d become hopelessly unnerved, convinced he was too late for everything, even though logic told him that she hadn’t left yet, that her resignation became effective only at the end of the month.

Outside the train station he bought a penny’s worth of treacle rock for luck. But it, like everything else he’d eaten in a fortnight, tasted like so much peat: When he’d cast Verity out, he’d lost his newly rediscovered sense of taste, too. And he missed it. God, he missed it.

He wanted to love food again. He wanted to be surprised, bewildered, or even assailed by his dinner. He wanted to be vulnerably, pleasurably, and dangerously alive.

He wanted
her.

He’d tried to get on with his life, tried to pretend that everything would be all right if he simply carried on as before. But it was impossible when she was both Cinderella and Verity Durant; when he seemed destined to fall in love with her, no matter what little fraction of her he knew.

London raced by outside his first-class compartment. He lit a cigarette and stared, unseeing. He had no idea what he would do were he to see her this day. What if she wanted nothing to do with him? And, almost as terrifying, what if she did want something to do with him?

If he truly lost her again, he would lose the best part of himself. On the other hand, he’d spent decades building up his reputation and his career, neither of which would escape unscathed were he to take up with her.

He exhaled and watched the smoke obscure the air before him. It didn’t matter. He would cross that bridge when he came to it. Only let her be there. Let her still be there.

Since Stuart hadn’t sent a cable ahead—he was half-afraid that if she knew he was coming, she might leave—he walked the mile from the village to his estate. As he approached the manor, he heard the piano that he’d given to his staff as a Christmas present.

For a few short months when he was five, or perhaps four, with his mother claiming to be a respectable widow, he’d lived in a lodging house for women. The place, kept by a pinched-face spinster, had been dark and glum, except during the evenings, when the parlor came alive with music and singing, around an ancient spinet that had first seen service in the reign of the Mad King.

His mother had bartered the stitching of new curtains for the entire house for music lessons from the spinster and soon she was playing for him and the other women who lived at the lodging house. She played ballads she’d known in her youth and the latest songs she’d learned from the other women at the mill.

The melodic evenings came to an abrupt end when his mother was discovered with her new beau in her room. They had to move to a frightful new place. The beau disappeared and she cried often. And whenever Stuart put his arms around her and asked her to tell him what was wrong, she’d say, her voice breaking, that she missed the spinet, she missed the music.

The front door of the manor was locked, but the service entrance in the rear wasn’t. He followed the music to the servants’ hall. Before its door he closed his eyes a moment.

Let her be there.

The servants’ hall was festive—there were garlands of evergreen and swags of holly and a Christmas tree full of candles—and crowded: Stuart had stumbled upon the Servants’ Ball.

The indoor servants were in their dress uniforms, the outdoor servants in their Sunday best. A footman played the piano. Mrs. Boyce and Mr. Prior, in the absence of the master of the house, had led off the Grand March—a procession around the hall in a pattern of straight and serpentine lines. The Robbinses were all there, Michael with a sprig of holly at his lapel, walking with a maid who looked as if she didn’t quite know what was going on. Two pairs of giggling maids—the women outnumbered the men—brought up the tail end of the procession.

But
she
was not among the servants.

Someone saw him. Soon everyone saw him. So he danced the quadrille with Mrs. Boyce—the highest-ranked female servant—while Mr. Prior partnered Mrs. Robbins, who, despite her marriage to the gamekeeper, was still considered a lady around these parts.

It was the longest dance of his life. All he could think was how stupid he had been, to not come for her sooner. He’d been a wiser man at twenty-seven: He’d known then that she was everything he ever wanted, that the two of them were meant to be each other’s comfort and refuge. But now, at thirty-seven, he was a fool. He’d pushed her away and she might never return again.

At the end of the quadrille, everyone clapped. Stuart pasted on a smile and did likewise. Then the door to the servants’ hall opened and in walked Verity Durant.

She was bareheaded, her dark golden hair pinned up in a simple top knot. Unlike the other servants, she wore neither her dress uniform nor her Sunday best, but an honest-to-goodness evening gown of cobalt blue velvet.

The gown was a decade out of fashion, its bodice and hems unadorned, its neckline so modest—baring only an inch of skin below her collarbone—that it could have garnered approval from the Puritans. But with the blue velvet choker at her throat and the long white gloves that reached past her elbow, the gown was nothing less than ravishing.
She
was nothing less than ravishing.

After all these years, Cinderella had arrived at the ball.

And suddenly Stuart could breathe again.

Conversation halted; mugs of beer raised toward lips went still in midair. Simmons, the head gardener, leaped up to intercept her. Prior, who outranked Simmons, cut into the latter’s path. When Stuart rose, however, all the other men backed down.

She’d been walking toward Michael. But when Michael glanced Stuart’s way, she did too, and stopped dead. Stuart did something he’d never done to a servant: He bowed. After a moment of unresponsiveness on her part, she curtsied to him.

“Let us have a waltz,” Stuart said to the footman at the piano. “Do you know one?”

The footman didn’t. But Mrs. Robbins did. As the first strains of a Strauss waltz wafted from the piano, Stuart held out his hand toward Verity. She didn’t move. He didn’t care. She was still here—it was the only thing that mattered. He would gladly keep his hand extended all night if that was what it took.

She stepped into his arms only when it would have caused a scene otherwise.

“What are you doing here?” she said in French, without the Provencal accent. Her voice was tight, her expression tight, her entire person taut as a pulled bow.

“I have come to apologize and ask for your forgiveness.”

“So you may go to your wedding with a clear conscience?”

“I won’t marry Miss Bessler,” he said. Strange how a choice that had so agonized him earlier now seemed so clear, so inevitable. “I want to be with you—if you will have me—for the rest of my days.”

“It sounds very pretty,” she said, an edge of what sounded like anxious anticipation to her otherwise flat tone. “But what are you offering me exactly?”

“An arrangement that I hope will suit both of us.”

They spun halfway around the servants hall before she spoke again. “You want me to be your mistress, in other words.”

“I know I offered marriage last time. I—”

“You don’t need to tell me why you can’t marry me,” she said brusquely. “I know. Last time I did not accept your offer for precisely those reasons.”

She smelled wonderful, of freshly peeled oranges and simmered cream. With a start, he realized that he was hungry—for the first time in two weeks. Marvelously hungry and ready to demolish the entire cold buffet.

“I could have compelled you to marry me then,” she went on. “You swore up and down that you would marry me no matter what.”

“Yes, you could have.” And he’d have honored his words if she’d held him to them. But the outcome of such a marriage—with resentment on all sides—would have been disastrous and they both knew it. “This time it will be a marriage in everything but name.”