“I’ll go if that’s what you wish, but this conversation isn’t over.” He reached for his hat. “Not by a long chalk.”
He stepped out of the carriage, donned his hat, and pulled his notecase out of the breast pocket of his jacket. “Take her to the Savoy,” he ordered the driver as he pulled a note from the case in payment of the fare and put it in the man’s hand. Then he bowed to her, turned away, and began walking across Trafalgar Square.
The driver folded up the step and closed the door. But Lola leaned forward, her nose pressed to the rain-streaked window glass, her eyes on Denys as he started across the square. Then the carriage jerked into motion and pulled forward, and he was gone from her view.
Desperate, she shoved down the window and stuck her head out, craning her neck, wanting to watch him as long as possible. “I love you,” she whispered, but he had already vanished behind Nelson’s Column, and her soft confession was lost in the mist.
Chapter 19
Denys had no intention of being deterred by one refusal. Not now, not when he had her in his sights again, not when they had another chance. The moment he’d seen her face through the window of that taxi, it had reaffirmed what he’d felt from the first moment he’d ever seen her. She was his woman. He belonged to her, and she to him. The question was how to make her see it that way.
Denys walked to the taxi stand on the west side of Nelson’s statue, and as he waited for a hansom, he considered what to do next.
He’d told her their conversation on the topic wasn’t over, but he knew more conversation about this wasn’t going to change anything. He could understand her reluctance to face down society—the ton could be a vicious, unrelenting gauntlet. But the fact that her reluctance was on his behalf, not her own, was frustrating as hell, for he’d face them all down until the end of his days and die with no regrets. He could tell her that until he was blue in the face, however, and he doubted it would make a particle of difference. No, in circumstances such as these, words were useless. Action was what was needed here.
And since he’d rather cut off his right arm than see her looking as she had earlier today in Regent’s Park, whatever action he took would involve much more than persuading her to the altar. It would have to be monumental, something along the line of melting a glacier or moving a mountain, which meant he couldn’t do it alone. He’d need help.
And he’d need time. Time to plan, to make arrangements, to give Lola room to breathe, and hopefully, the opportunity to miss him. Fortunately, time was something he had a bit of, for she had said she wouldn’t leave until the play was finished, and since she was an equal partner, the earl couldn’t close down the theater or shut the play down without her consent.
In the interim, however, his family would need to be dealt with. If they hadn’t already guessed, the flower show and his break with Georgiana would surely show them which way the wind was blowing, and he did not want to reveal his intentions and ignite a family quarrel prematurely. He remembered quite vividly the rows he’d had with his father on Lola’s account the first time around, his mother’s tearful pleas, the endless rounds of calls on him by aunts, uncles, and cousins, the reminders to think of his position and his duty and his family name. He had no illusions that it would play out any other way the second time around.
When it all proved futile, the reckoning would come, and when it did, he wanted it to be on his terms, in a time and place of his choosing. In the meantime, his best course was to go to Arcady. Going to Kent enabled him to avoid, for now, the parade of concerned relatives, and it might also pacify his family and quiet the gossip. It would also ensure that he wasn’t tempted to see Lola, and it would eliminate the possibility he would encounter her accidentally. Leaving town was clearly his best course.
A hansom pulled up to the curb in front of him and stopped. “Where to, guv’nor?” the driver asked, hopping down from the back to pull open the hansom’s wooden doors.
Denys considered a moment, then pulled out his watch and turned toward the streetlight to read its face. It was just past six, which meant he had plenty of time to put the wheels of his plan in motion and still catch the last train for Kent.
“White’s,” he said, and tucked the watch back in his waistcoat pocket. “And there’s half a crown above the fare if we arrive there within fifteen minutes.”
The driver earned that half a crown, depositing him in front of his club with three minutes to spare. By the time those three minutes were up, he had ordered dinner for five in a private dining room and dispatched a footman to South Audley Street with instructions for his valet. Althorp was to pack his things, inform his family he was off to Arcady, and meet him at Victoria Station in time to catch the nine o’clock train for Kent.
He then made liberal use of the club’s telephone. His account was charged an exorbitant amount for the privilege, but he didn’t mind that in the least. After all, when a man called out his heaviest guns, he ought to do it with flair.
Lola tried to be strong. She tried to focus all her attention on her work because that was the only thing she could control. She couldn’t change the world, not Denys’s world, anyway. She tried to tell herself that once she was gone, he’d be able to forget her, and she’d forget him, though she feared that sort of self-deceit wasn’t going to work a second time. Most of all, she tried not to miss him.
In all aspects, she failed miserably. Every morning on her way to rehearsal, she studied his office as she passed, hoping to catch a glimpse of him—alighting from his carriage, walking along the street, or perhaps standing by his office window up above. She could have spared herself that particular torture by turning onto Southampton Street and entering the rehearsal hall by the side entrance, but though it was painful, she couldn’t spare herself that pain.
Nor could she resist reading the society pages. That was an equally painful exercise, but she craved any information about him she could find. She wanted to know everything—the activities he was engaged in, the places he went, the people he might be with. By the time three days had passed, the papers had made it clear no announcement of engagement between Lord Somerton and Lady Georgiana Prescott would be forthcoming and that it was Lola Valentine’s appearance at the flower show and her wanton disregard for propriety that had caused the breach. Somerton, it was said, was so pained by Miss Valentine’s breathtaking lack of discretion that he’d gone to his estates in Kent to recuperate.
Lola stopped reading the papers after that, but during the three weeks that followed, avoiding the scandal sheets did little to help her to forget him. This was London, and reminders of him seemed to be everywhere—in the lifts of the Savoy, in the growlers that rolled past her on the street, in the flowers of the parks and those sold by the flower sellers around Covent Garden.
She tried to lose herself in work, but that, too, did little to relieve her heartache. She was grateful that her part in Othello was the minor one of Bianca and not the leading role of Desdemona, for she could summon little interest in the play, and this sudden bout of apathy both surprised and frustrated her. After years of training, dreaming, working toward a goal, to have it seem so colorless and unimportant was something she had never anticipated, and she didn’t know quite how to cope. And though she’d been through all this emotional turmoil with Denys once before, it seemed so much harder this time. Unlike last time, she could not run away until the play had run, which meant she was stuck, like a fly in amber, until Othello came to an end. And then, she would have to go as far away as she could get. He’d said their discussion of marriage wasn’t over, and she couldn’t bear to keep having that conversation, for she knew at some point her resistance would disintegrate and she would give in. Where Denys was concerned, she’d always been weak as water.