Only Enchanting (39 page)

“I heard someone say yesterday,” Flavian said before she started reading it, “that we are b-bound to suffer for all this lovely spring weather we are having. One can always depend upon at least o-one person to say it. But on the chance that he may be right, shall we make the m-most of the sunshine before the suffering begins? Shall we walk in Hyde Park?”

“Today? This morning?” She gave him her full attention. “Alongside Rotten Row? To see and be seen?”

He lifted one eyebrow.

“Your new outfits are very fetching,” he said, “and I can understand your d-desire to show them off. B-but I was hoping to be more selfish and have you to m-myself. There are other, more secluded paths to walk.”

Her heart turned over.

“I would like nothing better,” she assured him.

He closed his paper and got to his feet.

“Is half an hour long enough to r-read your letters and get ready?” he asked.

“Flavian!” his mother protested. “Agnes will need at least an hour just to get ready.”

Agnes smiled. She could have been ready in ten minutes.

“Shall we say three-quarters of an hour?” she suggested.

An hour later they were strolling in an area of Hyde Park that felt more like the countryside than part of one of the largest metropolises in the world. The path was rough underfoot, the trees thick and green around them, the stretches of grass visible between their trunks slightly more overgrown than the lawns elsewhere. Best of all, there was no one else in sight, and the occasional sounds of voices and horses were distant and only served to emphasize their near seclusion.

Agnes inhaled the smell of greenery and felt a rush of contentment. If only every day could be like this.

“Do you miss the countryside, Agnes?” he asked her.

“Oh, I do,” she said in a rush. “But how foolish I am. Any number of people would give a great deal to be in London as I am, to be looking forward to the social Season, to have a dressing room full of new clothes and the prospect of balls and parties and concerts at which to wear them.”

They had stopped walking at the top of a slight rise in
the path as though by mutual consent, and they both tipped back their heads to gaze upward through the branches of a particularly large and elderly oak to the blue sky above. He turned about in a complete circle.

“Are you all right?” he asked her. “After last night?”

“Yes.” She laughed slightly. “Is that what is known as a baptism by fire, do you suppose? But who would so diligently have sought out the skeletons in my closet? And why?”

“Velma,” he said. “Because she d-did not get her way.”

She had suspected it,
known
it, really. But what did the countess have to gain now? Flavian was not going to divorce
her
, after all, merely on the strength of who her mother was.

Because she did not get her way,
he had just said. Was that sufficient motive? Simple spite?

She drew a deep breath and released it slowly.

“Tell me what you know about her,” she said. “About Lady Havell, that is. My mother.”

Neither of them was looking at the sky any longer. They moved off the path into the even-deeper seclusion of the ancient trees, and she stood with her back against the trunk of an oak, while he stood in front of her, one hand braced against the trunk on one side of her head.

“They have been shunned by society ever since their m-marriage, I would guess,” he said. “I believe they are fond of each other but not particularly h-happy.”

“He is definitely
not
my father?” she asked him.

He shook his head. “I am as sure as I can be that she was faithful to your father until after she left him. You were five years old by then.”

She closed her eyes and lifted one gloved hand to set against his chest. At the same moment they both heard a group of people approaching along the path, talking and laughing until they must have spotted the two of
them. There was a self-conscious silence then as the footsteps went past, and some stifled giggling after that until the group had passed out of earshot.

“One can only h-hope,” Flavian said on a sigh, “that we were not r-recognized, Agnes. There is nothing more damaging to a man’s reputation than to be seen in close and clandestine embrace with his own
w-wife
.”

“What a pity,” she said, “that they misinterpreted what they saw.”

“And
that
,” he said, “is even more lowering.”

He took a firm step closer, pressing her to the tree along her full length before kissing her openmouthed. She laughed in delighted surprise when he lifted his head a moment later and regarded her lazily. And she wrapped her arms about him as his came about her, and they kissed at far greater length and with warm enthusiasm.

“Mmm,” he said.

“Mmm,” she agreed.

He took a step back and clasped his hands behind his back.

“She admits,” he said, “that you have every right to hate her. She admits that she abandoned you and your s-sister—and your brother too—when she might have stayed. She r-ran away, she told me, after your father had denounced her at an assembly and told her for all to hear he would divorce her for adultery. She had f-flirted rather too incautiously with Havell, she said, but had done nothing more indiscreet than that until she ran away. She might have returned. Apparently your f-father had had too much to d-drink, and everything might have been patched up if she had gone home a few days later. But she d-did not go.”

Agnes closed her eyes again, and there was a long silence, during which he stood where he was, not touching
her. It was all so believable. Her father did not drink to excess very often. It was very rare, in fact. But when he did, he could say and do foolish, embarrassing things. Everyone knew it. Everyone made allowances and conveniently forgot his lapses.

And her mother, it seemed, had acted upon the sudden impulse not to return home when she might have done so and had chosen to remain with the man who then became her lover and, later, her husband. A sudden, impulsive decision. She might just as easily have decided the other way. Just as she, Agnes, might just as easily have said no to Flavian the night he returned from London with a special license.

The course of one’s whole life—and the lives of those intertwined with one’s own—could be changed forever on the strength of such abrupt and unconsidered decisions.

“You did not say I would call on her?” she asked him.

“I did not,” he said.

“Maybe one day I will go,” she said. “But not yet. Maybe never. But you are right. It is as well to know. And to know that Dora and Oliver are my full sister and brother. Thank you for going, and for rescuing me from shock and embarrassment last evening. Thank you.”

She opened her eyes and smiled at him.

From a distance they could hear the sound of other people drawing closer.

“Shall we move on?” He offered his arm, and she took it.

They walked in silence until they had passed an older couple, exchanging smiles and nods as they did so. The day was growing warmer.

“Would you like to go to Candlebury, Agnes?” he asked her.

“Now?” she asked in surprise. “But there is the
Season, my presentation at court, the ball to introduce me to the
ton
. Everything else.”

“If you want them,” he said, “we will stay. But everything can wait if we choose—if
you
choose. It can all wait a month or two months or a year or ten. Or f-forever. Shall we go to Candlebury? Shall we go h-home?”

She stopped walking again and drew him to a halt. She could see the Serpentine in the near distance. Soon they would be among other people walking beside the water.

“But you have been avoiding Candlebury Abbey for years,” she said. “Are you sure you want to go there now? Are you doing this for me?”

“For us,” he said.

She searched his eyes, longing welling up inside her.
Shall we go home?
he had said. There were memories there for him. Conscious, painful ones of his brother’s last days. And unconscious ones, she suspected. She suspected too that it was both facts that had made him reluctant for so long to return there. Now he wanted to go—for her sake and for theirs.

She smiled slowly at him.

“Let’s go home, then,” she said.

22

M
y love,
he had called her at Marianne’s party, entirely for the ears of all the guests there.
My love,
he had called her a short time later in the refreshment room, in order to tease away the stress of the past half hour or so.

My love,
he thought now, sitting beside her in his carriage, watching her profile as they approached the top of the rise above Candlebury after turning through the gates a short while ago. He wanted to see her expression when she saw the house. It almost always took the breath away, even when one had a lifetime of familiarity with it.

My love.
The words sounded silly when spoken in the silence of his own thoughts. Would he ever speak them aloud so that she knew he meant them? And
did
he mean them? He was a bit afraid of love. Love was painful.

He watched her, he realized, because he did not want to have that first glimpse of Candlebury himself. He really did not want to be where he was, moving ever nearer to it. Yet he would not be anywhere else on earth for all the money in the world. Was there anyone more muddleheaded than he?

She was looking prim and trim and beautiful beside
him, clad in a dark blue carriage dress, which was expertly and elegantly cut to hug her figure in all the right places and to fall in soft folds elsewhere. Her chip straw bonnet trimmed with tiny cornflowers had a small enough brim that he could see around it. Her gloved hands were folded neatly in her lap. Her head was half-turned from him, and he knew she was gazing at the half-wild meadowland beyond her window and seeing all the wildflowers growing there and imagining herself tramping among them, an easel under one arm, a bag of painting supplies in the other hand.

And then the carriage topped the rise, and her head turned to look into the great bowl-like depression below. Her hands tightened in her lap, her eyes grew larger, and her mouth formed a silent O.

“Flavian,” she said. “Oh, it is
beautiful
.”

She turned to smile at him and reached out a hand to squeeze one of his, and if he had been in any doubt before this moment, he doubted no longer. He loved her. Idiot that he was, he could not be content with safety. He had had to go and fall in love with her.

“It is, is it not?” he said, and he looked beyond her shoulder and felt somehow as if the bottom had fallen out of his stomach.

There it was.

The house was built on the far slope of the bowl, a horseshoe-shaped mansion of gray stone that often gleamed almost white when the sun shone on it at a certain angle in the evenings. To one side of it and connected with it were the remains of the old abbey, most of them virtually unrecognizable moss-covered ruins, though the cloisters were still almost intact, and usable with their walkway and pillars and central garden, which his grandmother had made into a rose arbor.

It was the only really cultivated part of the whole
park, apart from the kitchen gardens at the back. The rest was rolling, tree-dotted grassland and wooded copses and graveled walking paths and rides, in the style of Capability Brown, though not designed by him. This inner bowl had been planned to look secluded and rural and peaceful, and it succeeded admirably, Flavian had always thought. There was a river and a deep natural lake and a waterfall out of sight over the rise to the left of the house. And a genuine stone hermitage. Follies had always been unnecessary at Candlebury.

“It is very d-different from Middlebury Park,” he said.

Middlebury was actually rather old-fashioned, with its carefully tended topiary garden and formal floral parterres forming the approach to the house. But it was grand and lovely, nevertheless.

“Yes.” She looked back out through the window, but her hand remained covering his. “I
love
this.”

And he felt like weeping. Home.
His
home. But the latter thought served only to remind him of how he had always been quite adamant about thinking of it as
David’s
home, even though he had known from a relatively young age that it would be his before he had grown far into adulthood. But David had loved it with all the passion of his soul.

“We will p-probably be called upon to inspect the servants,” Flavian said.

They had remained in London for two days after deciding to come here. He had felt obliged to give the servants some notice of his coming. And there was a tea at his aunt Sadie’s that Agnes had promised to attend. Delivery of the rest of her new clothes, as well as a pair of new riding boots for which he had been fitted at Hoby’s, was expected within a day or two. And Agnes wanted to call upon her cousin, who lived in London—or rather the late William Keeping’s cousin, Dennis Fitzharris. He was
the man who published Vincent and Lady Darleigh’s children’s stories, so Flavian gladly accompanied her and enjoyed himself greatly.

His mother had been less upset than he had expected by their decision to come to Candlebury. Perhaps it would be as well, she had said, for them to leave town over Easter and even for a few weeks after. By that time the new Lady Ponsonby and her story would be old news and only sufficiently interesting to bring everyone out in force to meet her at the ball they would give at Arnott House. Flavian had let his mother believe they would return in a month or so. And who knew? Perhaps they would.

At least she had not suggested accompanying them.

“Will that be a formidable experience?” Agnes asked, referring to the parade of servants that probably awaited them at the house.

“One must remember that they will be agog with eagerness to see us,” he said. “Both of us. They have not seen me since I inherited the title. And I am returning with a b-bride. This will be a h-happy day of celebration for them, I daresay.”