Authors: Mary Balogh
And then, just as those gentlemen were moving on in the opposite direction from the one the curricle was taking and Cassandra looked around again, she saw a familiar face—that of an auburn-haired, good-looking young man, who was sitting in an open barouche beside a pretty young lady in pink. He was smiling at something she was saying to a couple of scarlet-clad officers on horseback.
The Earl of Merton’s curricle was almost upon them. The officers rode on, the young lady smiled at the smiling young man, and they both turned their heads to look about at the crowd.
Their eyes alit upon Cassandra at almost the same moment. The two carriages were almost abreast of each other. Without thought Cassandra smiled warmly and half leaned forward.
“
Wesley
!” she cried.
The young lady put both hands up to her mouth and turned her head sharply away—as several others had done to a lesser degree during the past fifteen minutes or so. The young man’s smile faded, and his eyes regarded Cassandra with dismay, wavered, and then looked away from her.
“Move on,” he said with some impatience to the coachman, who really had nowhere to go until all the carriages in front of him moved on too.
The Earl of Merton had a little more space in front of his curricle. Even so, it seemed to take an excruciatingly long time for the two vehicles to have completely passed each other.
“Someone you know?” Lord Merton asked quietly.
“Take me home,” she said. “Please. I have had enough.”
It took him a little while to draw free of the crowd, but at last
they were moving at a faster pace along a path that was blessedly free of much other traffic.
“Young, was it not?” he said. “Sir Wesley Young? I have only a slight acquaintance with him.”
“I would not know,” she said foolishly, spreading her hands in her lap. “I have never seen him before.”
“He just
looked
like a Wesley, then, did he?” He glanced across at her, smiling. “Don’t let him worry you. Giving the cut direct is something some members of the
ton
delight in doing. Many others have
not
given it. I believe you will find more and more people accepting you and treating you with open good manners as the days go on.”
“Yes,” she said. And she watched her hands begin to tremble and then shake. She curled one into a hard fist and gripped the handrail beside her with the other. She clamped her teeth hard together so that they would not chatter.
“Ah,” he said as they approached the park entrance at Marble Arch, and for a moment his gloved hand covered hers on her lap, “you really
do
know him, then.”
“My brother,” she said, and clamped her teeth together again.
He had come to visit her a few times during her marriage. He had come to the funeral last year. And he had hugged her tightly afterward and assured her that he did not for a moment believe that she had had anything to do with the death. He had told her he loved her and always would. He had urged her to return to London with him, to live with him until she was over her mourning and grief and was healed enough to return home to live at the dower house.
And then, after she had said no and he had gone, he had written to her—twice. And then suddenly silence, even though she had continued to write to
him
. Until a month ago, when she had written to tell him that her life had become so intolerable that she had to leave, that she would have to impose upon his good nature until she had her life in order and somehow found a way to move on. He had
written back then to tell her that she must on no account come to London since her notoriety had preceded her. Besides, he would be unable to offer her any help in the immediate future as he had promised friends to travel to Scotland with them to explore the Highlands. He expected to be gone for at least a year. He was allowing the lease on his rooms to lapse.
He loved her, Wesley had assured her in that final letter. But it was impossible for him to change his plans—too many other people would be inconvenienced. And Cassie
must not
—he had underlined the words twice and so heavily that the ink had splattered into tiny blots above and below—come to London. He did not want her to be hurt.
“Your brother,” Lord Merton said. “You were a Young, then?”
“Yes,” she said.
He turned his team out onto the street, slowing to avoid a crossing sweep, who jumped back out of the way and then reached out to pluck out of the air the coin Stephen threw.
“I am sorry,” he said.
That she was a Young? Or that her own brother had just given her the cut direct? Or both?
It was only after the funeral, of course, that things had got really nasty, that the accusations had started to fly, that
murder
had been spoken of rather
than accident
.
Cassandra wanted to be at home. She wanted to be in her own room, the door firmly shut behind her, the bedcovers over her body and her head. She wanted to sleep—deeply and dreamlessly.
“You need not apologize for something you did not do,” she said, raising her chin and speaking as haughtily as she was able. “I was surprised to see him, that is all. I thought he was in Scotland. I daresay something happened to cause him to change his mind.”
Gentlemen did not go touring Scotland during the spring, when the whole of the fashionable world was in London for the Season. And gentlemen who were really not very wealthy at all did not go
touring for a whole year. Gentlemen who were traveling in a group would not find it difficult to excuse one of their number who needed to change his plans because of a pressing family concern.
She surely had not believed him when she read his letter—so much shorter and terser than the letters he had used to write. She had chosen to believe because the alternative was too painful.
Now she could disbelieve no longer.
“Tell me about him,” Lord Merton said.
She laughed.
“I daresay, Lord Merton,” she said, “you know him far better than I. Perhaps
you
ought to tell
me
about him.”
The streets seemed unusually crowded. Their progress was slow. Or perhaps it only seemed that way because she was so desperate to be home and alone.
He did not say anything.
“Our mother died giving birth to him,” she said. “I was five years old, and I played mother to him from that day forward. I gave him something he would have lacked otherwise—undivided and total affection and attention. Hugs and kisses and endless monologues. And he gave me something, someone, to love in place of my mother. We adored each other, which is unusual in a brother and sister, I believe. But though I had a governess from a very young age, and though Wesley was sent to school eventually, we clung to each other all through our growing years—or until my marriage when I was eighteen and he was thirteen, anyway. Our father was so often gone.”
He had been a compulsive and notorious gambler. Their fortunes had fluctuated from day to day. There was never any fixed home or security, even in the good times. There had always been the knowledge, understood even by young children, that desperate times were just the turn of a card away.
“I am sorry,” Lord Merton said again, and Cassandra realized that he was slowing before her house. She had not even noticed turning into Portman Street.
He secured the ribbons, jumped down from his seat, and came around the curricle to lift her down to the pavement.
“You have nothing to be sorry for,” she said again. “No love is ever unconditional, Lord Merton. And no love is ever eternal. If you learn nothing else from me, learn that. It may save you from some pain and heartache in the future.”
He took her hand in his and raised it to his lips.
“May I expect you tonight?” she asked him.
“Yes,” he said. “I have some commitments this evening, but I will come afterward if I may.”
“
If you may
.” She smiled rather scornfully at him. “I am yours whenever you choose, Lord Merton. You are paying well enough for me.”
She saw his lips tighten and understood what she was doing to herself. She was showing him only darkness. Yet he was all light. And if light was stronger than darkness—though she was not at all convinced that it was—then it would not take him long to draw away from the aura of gloom she was no doubt casting over him.
She smiled a little differently, with facial muscles that were stiff with disuse.
“And if I may throw some of your own words from this morning back at you,” she said, “you are mine whenever I choose. I choose tonight. I look forward to it with the greatest pleasure. I look forward to giving
you
pleasure. And I will. That is a promise. I cannot bear to take without giving in equal measure, you see.”
He stepped up to the door and rattled the knocker against it.
“I shall see you later, then,” he said. “Think of those who have been kind to you today. Forget those who have not.”
She held on to her smile. She added a sparkle to her eyes.
“I shall be too busy thinking of just one person,” she said. “I shall think of no one but you.”
The door opened and Mary looked out. Belinda was clinging to her skirt and peeping out from behind it. Roger came padding past
them, bobbing down the steps on his three legs. He rubbed against her, his tongue lolling. He looked at the Earl of Merton and let out a token woof, which would not have scared a mouse within two feet of him.
Lord Merton looked from one to another of them, rubbed Roger’s head briefly, touched the brim of his hat, and strode around his curricle to climb into the seat again. Cassandra watched him drive along the street.
“Is that
him
, my lady?” Mary asked rather stiffly.
Cassandra looked at her in some surprise. But there was no keeping anything from servants, even when there was a houseful of them.
“The Earl of Merton?” she said. “Yes.”
Mary said no more and Cassandra swept past her into the house. It was a relief not to see Alice waiting there for her. She hurried upstairs to her room, Roger bobbing along beside her.
9
A
LICE
arrived home soon after Cassandra.
She had trudged about London for four hours in the heat of the afternoon, going from one employment agency to another without any success. Her age was against her in almost any form of employment that was available. The fact that she had had only one employer and two forms of employment—as governess and lady’s companion—in all her working life for the past twenty-two years was against her, despite her effort to explain that the very longevity of her employment proved that she must be both steady and trustworthy She could not expect to be employed as a housekeeper, one of the few forms of employment for which her age might qualify her, since she had no experience in the tasks involved, and she could not expect to be anyone’s chef for the very simple reason that she did not know how to cook anything more complex than a boiled egg.
The best she had been able to do was leave her name and letters of introduction and recommendation at the two agencies that were willing to take them, in the faint hope that something would turn up.
Alice was well aware that it was a very faint hope.
The only really good thing that
had
happened to her during the
afternoon was that she had encountered an old friend while she was sitting on a bench beneath the shade of a tree on the outer edges of a churchyard to rest her aching feet. She was amazed that she had recognized him after so many years. She was even more amazed that
he
had recognized
her
. But they both had, and he had stopped to talk with her and even sit beside her for a few minutes. Did Cassie remember Mr. Golding?
“Wesley’s tutor?” Cassandra said after thinking for a moment.
“You
do
remember,” Alice said, beaming.
Cassandra remembered him. He had been a whole head shorter than her father, a thin, dark-haired, earnest young man with wire-framed spectacles. He had been hired when Wesley was eight and their father had just won one of his rare windfalls. Less than a month later the inevitable crash had come and Mr. Golding had been forced to leave, unable to stay when his employer could not pay him—though Alice had stayed, as always.
Cassandra remembered him only because she had been thirteen at the time, just the age when girls began to develop an awareness of men. She had fallen secretly and passionately in love with him after he had smiled at her one day and called her Miss Young and inclined his head to her with flattering deference as though she were an adult. She had mourned his departure for a whole week after he left, convinced that she would never
ever
either forget him or love another.
“How is he?” she asked.
“Very well indeed,” Alice said. “He is secretary to a
cabinet
minister, Cassie, and is looking very prosperous and very smart indeed. His hair has turned gray at the temples. He looks very distinguished.”
It struck Cassandra then that perhaps she had not been the only one in love with him fifteen years ago. He and Alice had probably been close in age, and for a whole month they had worked in near proximity to each other.
“He asked after you,” Alice said, “and was surprised to hear that I
am still with you. He called you
Miss Young
. Perhaps he did not hear of your marriage.”
And Alice did not tell him? Cassandra did not blame her.
“I told him you were now Lady Paget and a widow,” Alice said. “He sent his regards.”
Ah.
And that was the last they would ever hear of Mr. Allan Golding, Cassandra thought, smiling at an unusually flushed Alice. She felt sorry for Alice’s sake. She could not recall a time when Alice had had a close friend of her own.
They had dinner together and sat in the small sitting room afterward. Cassandra glanced wistfully more than once at the fireplace, in which kindling and coal had been set ready to be lit. But there was so very little coal left in the bin outside the kitchen door and, though she had some money now, there was not enough to allow for extravagances. She must save every penny she was able. Summer was coming, and all the
ton
would leave town then, including, no doubt, the Earl of Merton. She dared not think far enough ahead to decide what she would do then. But in preparation for the time when she must consider it, she must save as much as she could.