“What do you mean? I have missed knowing him dreadfully,” she said quickly, a slight whine to her tone now. “I have, Leam. You must believe that.”
“I don’t, really.” He downed the spirit, then lowered the empty glass from his lips and set it on the table. “Especially since you left him in the care of a man you feared would do you serious harm. For years.”
Her mouth opened and closed.
Taking up his hat and crop, he moved toward the door. The rustle of her skirts preceded her light footsteps across the floor. She grasped his sleeve.
“Don’t go, Leam. Please.”
He looked down at her small hand wrapped around his arm like a talon, her knuckles white.
“Do not worry yourself needlessly, my dear,” he said, drawing air into his compressed lungs. “I will return. And when I do, I expect you to still be here.”
She released him. “I—I will be.”
“Cornelia?”
“Yes, Leam?”
He looked into her face, so close now, and saw fear and uncertainty behind her blue eyes. “Why did you reveal yourself now?”
“Mama and Papa said you had thrown off your ungentlemanly ways quite abruptly,” she whispered. “As long as you adopted them, I knew you would not remarry.” Her pink lips curved into a quivering smile, and for a moment her dimples flickered to life. “My Leam would not court a lady looking like anything but a perfect prince.”
She reached to touch him again. He moved away.
Not swiftly enough he was on the street, mounting his horse, and riding—he knew not where, he knew not for how long. Only that he sought motion to give rest to his careening mind. He would move until he could no longer, then he would drink. In the activity or alcohol he might find sanity.
Something in her eyes and tone rang false. Falser than years ago. He would discover it and finally lay his ghosts to rest.
Kitty did not receive callers or pay calls. She kept to her personal chambers, once daily walking to her brother’s house. She read to Serena, and brought over interesting books and music. When her sister-in-law wished to rest she went home and locked herself in her rooms once more.
She told her mother she was unwell and disinterested in company, and indeed felt perfectly wretched, inside a welter of unhappiness. At lunch near the end of the week her mother questioned her.
“You look pale, Kitty. This malady is persisting far longer than I like.”
“Oh, no doubt I will be well enough shortly.” In a hundred years or so. Dear Lord, she hadn’t imagined anything could hurt so much. Her heartbreak over Lambert Poole held nothing to the pain inside her over losing Leam to his dead wife. She felt faint perpetually, as though living in a terrible dream.
“You are not eating.”
“It is a stomach complaint, Mama.” Nausea beyond anything she had ever felt, thorough, endless, filling her heart and head. She folded her napkin and placed it on the table. The footman came forward to pull out her chair.
“John, Lady Katherine is not yet ready to retire from the table,” the dowager said. “That will be all.”
“Yes, mum.” He left them alone.
“Mama, truly I feel quite peaked. Allow me to wish you a pleasant afternoon at the salon with Lord Chamberlayne and—”
“Kitty.” Her mother’s voice was soft and firm. “Lord Blackwood has called on you several times daily for nearly a sennight.”
Kitty barely managed to lift her brow in an attitude of curiosity. It was difficult to do so and not succumb to tears.
“Oh, really?” John and Mrs. Hopkins had delivered each of his calling cards to her personally.
“How persistent of him.” She should speak with him. But once they spoke it would be truly over and she was not yet ready for that. She needed time to accustom herself to losing him before she had ever really had him.
“You have heard, no doubt, the remarkable news?”
“What news is that, Mama?”
“His wife appears to have returned from the dead. Apparently she suffered an accident and amnesia. Her parents have only just discovered her in an Italian convent.”
“How nice for them all.” She pushed out her chair, holding the tears at bay as she had been doing for days. “Mama, I really feel quite ill. Please excuse me.”
She went to her room and, sitting on her bed, she did not cry. Instead, she grabbed the chamber pot and cast up her accounts.
She cleaned herself up and went to the clothes press for a fresh gown. Misery, it seemed, would not be tidy.
Her new riding habit beckoned to her. Charcoal gray, with black lace about the high neckline and cuffs and a matching pillbox hat, it suited her. But she hadn’t any place to wear funereal garb.
Except, perhaps, she did.
She rang for her maid and dressed, calmer than she had been in weeks.
Within a half an hour she was dismounting before a modestly stylish town house on a quiet street.
The gated park across the way was charming, the neighborhood of good quality, the homes of genteel ladies and well-to-do merchants and such. A pair of school-aged boys played at spinning wheels on the corner and gave her friendly tugs on their caps before she ascended the steps to the front door.
The drawing room was elegant, devoid of pretension yet fashionable, with silk hangings in the Oriental style and Chinese and East Indian vases and urns all about. A half-dozen ladies sat around the tea table. The butler announced her.
The chamber went silent. A single titter sounded, a lady pressed her kerchief to her lips. Then silence once more.
“Do come in, Lady Katherine. My friends were just leaving.” The lady’s voice was smooth and perfectly modulated.
Mrs. Cecelia Graves had always, in Kitty’s memory, seemed enormously elegant. She still did. Her taffeta gown of mauve was modestly cut and trimmed in black fur and embroidery with tiny black beads sewn in for glimmer. It was a gown much like Kitty might someday choose for herself, suitable to a woman of mature yet not advanced years. Her hair, dark gold with only a hint of gray, curled neatly beneath a cap of the finest Belgian lace, and on her ears and neck shone deep, rich amethysts set in gold.
Kitty’s father had given Mrs. Graves those amethysts. She knew this because one day shortly after her return from Barbados, she had stolen into her father’s study late at night, searching for some correspondence from Lambert indicating that he sought Kitty’s hand.
Instead, on her father’s desk, she had noticed a receipt for the amethysts from the jeweler’s. But, contrary to her expectations, Kitty had never seen them on her mother. One day she asked her mother about them, and the countess told her all that she had not known before.
The lady had been widowed at a very young age. She lived alone in town and off-season in Derbyshire, with an elderly female relative as a companion. She was something of an heiress and had no need to remarry.
Her mother never told her the lady’s name. But eventually, when Kitty made her own bows to society, she heard it from girls who called themselves friends, from girls who pretended to disapprove yet were secretly titillated, Kitty understood now.
One by one the other ladies stood, said their good-byes, and departed, each giving Kitty a curtsy or nod, a few even a smile as they passed her. Finally the room was empty. Kitty could not move, attached to the threshold of the drawing room of the woman she had never once spoken to although she had shared her father’s life for decades.
“Come now. You have come here of your own accord, and I shan’t bite.”
She went forward. Mrs. Graves’s expression of benign interest did not change. Without a word, she shifted her cool blue gaze from Kitty’s face down her person, then back up again.