Only Enchanting (14 page)

“Your friends do not fear you,” she said.

“But I do not w-wish to bed any of my friends,” he said. “Even Imogen.”

Her cheeks turned a deeper pink.

“Someone cannot be both a friend and a lover?” she asked.

“Only in a m-marital relationship where there is love,” he said.

“Is this why you warn me away from you, Lord Ponsonby?” she asked. “Not because you may turn violent but because you do not have either love or marriage in mind?”

“I w-will never have either of those to offer any woman,” he told her.

“Never?”

“Happy endings can t-turn without warning to v-very b-bad endings,” he said.

She paused at his words and looked steadily into his eyes, as if she saw something there. “Did you once believe in happy endings?” Her voice was very soft.

He felt suddenly as though he were looking at her down a long tunnel.
Had
he? It was strange that he could not remember. He must have believed in them, though, on that glittering night of the betrothal ball in London. He had abandoned his dying brother for it. For Velma.

His hands curled into tight fists on either side of him on the seat, and he saw her glance down at them.

“There is no such thing, Mrs. Keeping,” he said,
spreading his fingers to curl lightly over the edge of the seat. “You know that as w-well as I.”

“I ought not to have married William, then,” she said, “because he would die? But we had five years of companionship. I do not regret marrying him.”

“Companionship.” He mocked her again. “But no p-passion.”

“I believe passion is much overrated,” she told him. “And perhaps companionship and contentment are much underrated by people who have not known them.”

“People l-like me?”

“I think,” she said, “you have known much unhappiness, Lord Ponsonby, and that it has made you cynical.
Personal
unhappiness unconnected with your injuries. And now you have persuaded yourself that passion is of greater importance than quiet contentment and committed love, because passion requires no real commitment but makes you feel alive when much has died in you since your life changed irrevocably.”

Good Lord! He sucked in air that did not seem to be there in any abundance and forced his hands to remain relaxed. But his temper was suddenly close to snapping.

“And I think, m-ma’am,” he retorted, “you are indulging in s-speculation upon s-something you know n-nothing of.”

“I have made you angry,” she said. “I am sorry. And you are quite right. I do not know you at all.”

It would
not
snap. It took a great deal to make him lose control these days. He did not enjoy watching that madman who was himself destroy his outer world because he could not sort out his inner world. It was strange how there was always an inner watcher when the madman burst into action. Who was that man?

“Well, Mrs. Keeping,” he said, looking lazily at her
and lowering his voice, “we might set
that
r-right anytime you w-want.”

“By . . .
being
together?” she asked.

He folded his arms. “You have only to say the w-word.”

She looked down at the hands in her lap and took her time about answering. She laughed softly.

“I keep expecting to wake up,” she said, “to find this is all a bizarre dream. I do not have conversations like this. I do not spend time alone with gentlemen. I do not listen to propositions so improper that I really ought to crumple to the floor in a dead swoon.”

“But it is all happening.”

“I am twenty-six years old,” she said, “and almost three years a widow. Perhaps at some time in the future, if too much time does not pass in the meanwhile, someone else will offer for me, though I do not know who in this neighborhood. Perhaps there is marriage, even motherhood, in my future. Or perhaps not. Perhaps my life will remain as it is now until I die. Perhaps I will never know . . .
passion
, as you call it. And perhaps I will regret that when I am older. Or perhaps, if I give in to temptation, I will regret
that
. We can never know, can we? We can never benefit today from the wisdom we will have gained tomorrow.”

What he ought to do was get to his feet and hurry off back to the house and never return. If he had imagined a pleasant, mindless sort of dalliance with her, even perhaps a brief affair, he was beginning to realize that nothing would be simple and straightforward with Mrs. Agnes Keeping. He did not want to be her one chance at passion, her one experiment at breaking free of the dull mold of her life. Heaven help him. He did not want to leave her with regret that she had given in to the temptation to explore passion. He did not want to break her heart—
if
he had the power to do that.

This . . . tryst was not developing at all as he had imagined when he devised a way of coming here to find her.

Suddenly, and quite unfairly, he resented her. And this place and the change of venue this year. Nothing like this ever happened at Penderris.

He got abruptly to his feet and stood by the door, gazing along the length of the cedar avenue.

“You will paint tomorrow?” he asked her.

“I do not know.”

And he did just what he had told himself he ought to do. He opened the door and stepped outside, stood undecided for a few moments, and then strode off down the avenue without her.

If he had turned back, he might have made love to her. And she would not have stopped him, idiot woman. At least he did not think she would.

Perhaps tomorrow . . .

And perhaps not.

He needed time to think.

*   *   *

Agnes worked at home for the next week. She painted the daffodils from memory, even though she really was almost sick of them, and she was pleased with her very first effort. Indeed she was quite sure it was the best work she had ever done. Surprisingly, she found herself painting them from above, as though she were the sun looking down on them. There was no sky in the painting, only grass and flowers.

Time crawled by when she was not painting, and sometimes even when she was. She could not see the Middlebury Park visitors leaving quickly enough. Perhaps her peace would be restored when they had gone away.

When
he
had gone away.

She was
never
again going to make the mistake of
falling in love. It was an emotional state that was supposed to bring great happiness, even euphoria. She had felt almost none of either. Of course, poetry and literature in general were full of stories of tragic love lost or spurned. She ought to have taken more notice when she was reading. Except that caution would not have helped her. She had had no intention whatsoever of falling in love with Viscount Ponsonby, who was unsuitable and ineligible in almost every imaginable way. She missed William with a dull ache of longing for the plodding contentment of their life together.

Would
Lord Ponsonby’s leaving bring her peace?

Once in, when did one fall out of love? It had taken several weeks back in October—though it seemed the feeling had merely lain dormant instead of going away altogether. How long would it take this time? And when would it be gone forever?

And why had he let a whole week—no, eight days—go by without seeking her out? Every time she heard a horse on the street or a knock on the door, she held her breath and waited, hoping it was not him. Hoping it was.

And then, on the morning of the eighth day, Sophia sent Agnes a note apologizing abjectly for so neglecting her friend and begging both Agnes and Miss Debbins to come and take tea with her and the other two wives.

I have a new story with new illustrations to show you,
she had written.
We told it to Thomas, and he gurgled. I showed him the pictures and he almost smiled.

Agnes did smile as she folded the note. Thomas was not even two months old.

“We are invited to Middlebury for tea with Sophia and two of the lady guests,” she told Dora when her sister had finished giving a music lesson to a
twelve-year-old who had had the misfortune to be born with ten thumbs and an incurably prosaic soul—or so said Dora with growing exasperation almost every week. And with doting parents who were tone-deaf and determined to believe that their daughter was a prodigy.

“Oh, that will be delightful,” Dora said, brightening. “And it will be good for you. You have been in the mopes lately.”

“Oh, I have not,” Agnes protested. She had been making a determined effort to appear cheerful.

Tea in the drawing room at Middlebury Park really was just for the three married ladies and their two guests. Lady Barclay had gone off somewhere with the other six members of the club, Sophia reported.

“I was afraid,” she said, “that coming here this year instead of going to Penderris Hall as usual, and having three wives here too this time, would spoil things for them, but I do not believe it has.”

“Ben told me last night when he finally came to bed,” Lady Harper said with her slight trace of a Welsh accent, “that this gathering with his friends has been the very best part of his honeymoon so far. And then he had the grace to do some smart verbal scrambling to assure me that it is
entirely
because I am with him this year.”

They all laughed.

Sophia read the new story aloud at the request of Lady Trentham, and the illustrations were passed from hand to hand so that they could all admire and chuckle over them.

“Bertha and Dan,” Agnes said, “are my very favorite literary characters.”

Sophia laughed gleefully. “You have very unsophisticated tastes, Agnes. Have you painted the daffodils yet? You said you were going to.”

“I have,” Agnes told her. “But they were very resistant to being captured in paint.”

“Agnes has been in the dismals for that very reason, I think,” Dora said. “But I have seen the finished painting and it is remarkably lovely.”

Agnes smiled fondly at her. “You say that about all my paintings, Dora. You are quite indiscriminately biased.”

“As all sisters ought to be,” Lady Harper said. “I always wanted a sister.”

And then, just when it was almost time to get up and take their leave, the others arrived home and came into the drawing room in a noisy body, bringing the outside world in with them, or so it seemed.

Tab, Sophia’s cat, who had been curled at Dora’s side, rose to his feet, arched his back, hissed at Lord Darleigh’s dog, and settled back to dozing; Lord Darleigh smiled about him, just as though he could see them all; Sir Benedict Harper commented on the fact that he would not have believed the new racetrack was five miles long if he had not just propelled himself along almost a third of the length of it in his chair; the Duke of Stanbrook bowed to the newcomers and bade them a good afternoon; Lady Barclay accepted a cup of tea from Sophia’s hands and sat down to converse with Dora; Lord Trentham set an arm briefly about his wife’s waist and pecked her on the lips before frowning ferociously as if he hoped no one had noticed; the Earl of Berwick helped himself to an iced cake from the tea tray and made sounds of appreciation as he bit into it; and Viscount Ponsonby stood just inside the door, looking sleepy.

And Agnes hated him. No, she hated
herself
. For she was aware of no one else even half as much as she was of him.

“I believe we have all walked our feet down to stumps,” the earl remarked. “We tried to bribe Ben out
of his chair, but he was selfish and obstinate as always and would not budge.” He winked at Lady Harper.

“Is that your newest book, Lady Darleigh?” the duke asked. “May we be permitted to see it?”

“It is brilliant,” Lord Darleigh said as he felt the seat of his chair by the fireplace before lowering himself into it. “See for yourselves.”

“Author, violinist, harpist, pianist,” Lord Trentham said. “There will soon be no living with the lad.”

“But only Sophie is called upon to do it,” Lord Darleigh said, smiling sweetly.

“The illustrations are so very clever, Lady Darleigh,” Lady Barclay said as she looked at them over the duke’s shoulder. “I wonder who had the silly notion that children’s books are not also for adults.”

“There is a child in all of us, is there not, Imogen?” the earl asked.

“Yes, precisely, Ralph,” she said, glancing up at him with a look of such raw longing in her eyes that Agnes felt jolted.

Viscount Ponsonby was the only one of them who had said nothing.

After a few minutes Dora got to her feet, and Agnes followed her lead.

“We must take our leave, Lady Darleigh,” Dora said. “Thank you for inviting us. It has been delightful.”

“It has,” Agnes agreed. “Thank you, Sophia.”

Lord Ponsonby was still standing squarely in the doorway, she noticed.

“I will give myself the pleasure of escorting you home, if I may,” the Duke of Stanbrook said.

Dora looked at him in some surprise. “After your long walk, Your Grace?”

“It will be like dessert to a banquet,” he assured her. “And the dessert is always the best part.”

But he spoke with a twinkle in his eye and no suggestion of flirtatiousness. Dora, who was terrified of his titled magnificence, actually laughed.

“I’ll come with you, George,” Viscount Ponsonby announced in that languid way he had, almost as if he spoke on a sigh.

Inevitably, when they set off, they divided into two couples, and since the duke had offered Dora his arm even before they left the house, Agnes had little choice but to take Lord Ponsonby’s.

“This was unnecessary,” she said after a minute or so of silence. Dora and the duke, striding along and deep in conversation, had already outdistanced them.

“You are being ungracious, Mrs. K-Keeping,” he said.

She was. Though she would have been happy not to have to endure this.

“Have you been b-back?” he asked her.

She did not need to ask what he meant or, rather,
where
he meant.

“No,” she said. “I have painted at home. The weather has been chilly.”

Had
he
? Gone back, that was. But she would not ask him.