“It is not unfair,” Susanna said firmly, pulling her hands free. “Except perhaps to the hundreds and thousands of other girls who were not so privileged. And you know how much I love the school and all the girls and Claudia and Anne and even Mr. Keeble and the other teachers.”
Mr. Keeble was the elderly school porter.
“I do know it,” Frances said with a sigh. “Just as I loved teaching until Lucius forced me to admit how much more I wanted to sing-and how very much more I wanted him. Well, I will say nothing else on the subject. And here comes the tea.”
They were quiet while the tray was brought in and set down and while Frances poured the tea and handed Susanna her cup.
“And so there is to be an assembly in the village the week after next,” Frances said. “We arrived home at the perfect time.”
“An assembly will be wonderfully exciting,” Susanna said. “Even a little frightening. I have never been to any such thing.”
“Oh.” Frances looked at her with sudden realization. “Of course you have not. But you have danced at the school forever, Susanna, demonstrating steps for the girls. Now at last you will be able to put your skills to work at a real dance. And you need not be afraid that you will make a cake of yourself and everyone will notice. This is a country assembly with country people who will go to enjoy themselves, not to observe one another critically. And if that suddenly wary look has anything to do with the fact that Viscount Whitleaf will be there too, you silly goose, I will be wishing that he were to take himself off back home to Sidley Park before the fateful night. You must not allow yourself to be intimidated by him.”
Sidley Park. Susanna’s heart sank again at the name. Why did Viscount Whitleaf have to be a friend of Mr. Raycroft? And why did he have to be staying with him at Hareford House now of all times? For so many years-eleven, in fact-there had been no real reminders of her childhood and its abrupt, ghastly ending. She had been able to convince herself that she had forgotten.
“Oh,” Frances continued, “and Lucius has bullied the vicar into seeing to it that there will be at least one waltz at the assembly. Have I ever told you about our first waltz together-in a dusty assembly room above a deserted inn with no one else present, no heat though it was the dead of winter, and no music?”
“No music?” Susanna laughed.
“I hummed it,” Frances said. “It was the most glorious waltz ever waltzed, Susanna. Believe me it was.”
They lapsed into a companionable silence while Frances’s dreamy expression and slightly flushed cheeks indicated that she was reliving that waltz and Susanna wondered if anyone would dance with her at the assembly. Oh, how she hoped so! She would not even think about the waltz. Just one set- any set.
She knew the steps of the waltz, though. It was a dance Mr. Huckerby, the dancing master, always taught the girls at school. He was not, however, allowed to dance it with any of them, but only with any teacher who was willing to oblige for demonstration purposes. That had used to be Frances. Now Susanna and Anne and sometimes Mademoiselle Étienne, the French teacher, took turns.
Susanna loved the waltz more than any other dance. Not that there was anything even faintly romantic about performing the steps with Mr. Huckerby, it was true, especially when an audience of girls, many of them stifling giggles, looked on. But she had always dreamed of waltzing in a glittering, candlelit ballroom in the arms of a tall, handsome gentleman who smiled down into her eyes as if no one else existed in the world but the two of them.
I am not a romantic,she had said earlier to Viscount Whitleaf. What an absolute bouncer of a fib! She lived a busy, disciplined life as a schoolteacher, and she did indeed love her job-she had spoken the truth about that. But her dreams were rich with romance-with love and marriage and motherhood.
All those things she would never experience in the real world.
As if I had stepped into a moment that was simply magic.
She had wanted to weep when he spoke those words, so meaningless to him, so achingly evocative to her. How she longed for the magic of someone to love more than anyone or anything else in life. Of someone to love her in the same way.
For an unguarded moment she pictured herself waltzing with Viscount Whitleaf, those laughing violet eyes softened by tenderness as they gazed into her own.
But she shuddered slightly as she shook off the image and reached for a ginger biscuit. She must certainly not begin sullying the splendor of her dreams by imposing his image on them.
And then she thought of something else he had said.
You wounded me to the heart-to that chest organ, that mundane pump.
She almost ruined her aversion to him by chuckling aloud with amusement.
Frances would think she had taken leave of her senses.
And then she thought again of Sidley Park. She had lived until the age of twelve only a few miles away from it, though she had never actually been there. She had known it as the home of Viscountess Whitleaf, though she had always known too that the young viscount lived there as well as his five sisters, who bore the name of Edgeworth. She recalled that when she had first heard Frances speak of the Earl of Edgecombe she had had a nasty turn, wondering if he was of the same family-until she had realized that the names were not identical.
But apart from that, she had done a good job of holding the memories at bay. They were just too excruciatingly painful. She had heard that some people blocked painful memories so effectively that they completely forgot them. She sometimes wished that could have happened to her.
A specific memory came back to her then. She must have been five or six years old at the time and was playing close to the lake with Edith Markham when they had been joined by a young boy a few years older than they. He had asked them with great good humor and open interest what they were doing and had squatted next to Susanna on the bank to see if there was a fish on the end of her makeshift fishing line.
“Oh, hard luck!” he had said when he had seen that there was not. “I daresay the fish are not biting today. Sometimes they do not-or so I have heard. My mama will not let me go fishing. She is afraid I will fall in or catch a chill-instead of a fish, ha-ha. Did you get it? Catching a chill instead of a fish? Does your mama fuss you all the time? Oh, I say! You have the greenest eyes, don’t you? I have never seen eyes of just that color before. They are very fine, and they look very well with your red hair. I daresay you will be pretty when you grow up. Not that you are not pretty now. I do beg your pardon-I forgot my manners for a moment. A gentleman never lets a lady believe that perhaps she is not pretty. May I hold the rod? Perhaps I will have better luck than you though I daresay you have had more practice.”
But no sooner had he seated himself on the bank and taken the rod from her, looking bright and happy and friendly, than an older girl had appeared and told him in a hushed, rather shocked voice that he ought not to be playing with that little girl, and then another girl, even older, had come rushing up to catch him by the hand and pull him firmly away from the bank and tell him that he must never, never go so close to the water again. He would fall in and die, she had said, and then what would they all do to console themselves?
Edith had gone off with them, and later Susanna had learned that they had come from Sidley Park on an afternoon visit-Viscountess Whitleaf with the young viscount, her son, and her daughters.
Susanna had not thought of that incident for years and years. She was surprised she remembered it at all.