Elizabeth remained where she was. She felt a little as though she had been caught up in some sort of whirlwind, unable to extricate herself or make her point. Except that there was her anger, her point of calm at the center of the storm.
“I will not be seated, thank you,” she said. “I will not be staying long. You began your campaign against me, Lady Hodges, after my betrothal to Sir Geoffrey Codaire ended and you feared that I might convince Colin that the honorable thing to do was to offer for me. He did, in fact, offer, and I refused. You might have saved yourself the trouble. But the effect of your efforts was actually the opposite of what you intended. I did not either crumble or flee to the country, and Colin came back and persuaded me not only that I wished to marry him, but that he wished to marry me.”
“Someone has clearly been telling lies about me,” Lady Hodges said. “I—”
“I would be obliged if you would not interrupt,” Elizabeth said. “We will be marrying, Lady Hodges, whether you like it or not, whether you decide to continue with your campaign or not. I would rather you did not continue, but I am prepared to deal with it if you do. Though I would warn you that running away is no longer how I deal with adversity. I will be Lady Hodges after my marriage, while you will become the dowager. I will be mistress of Roxingley and intend to make a home of it for Colin and myself and any children with whom we may be blessed. You will be welcome to continue to make it your home. But there will be room for only one mistress there, and I will be she. If there is to be a house party during the summer, as there very well may be, it will be planned and organized by Colin and me. The guest list will be one compiled and approved by us. I daresay we will pay you the courtesy of asking if there are one or two special friends you will wish us to invite.”
“I wonder if my son will be so eager to marry an older woman, who, by the way, does not even have the saving grace of any remarkable beauty, when he learns that she has claws,” Lady Hodges said. “I shall be obliged to warn him, you know. He may not like the prospect of not being the man in his own home. He was a lovely boy, Lady Overfield. Sweet and innocent and the most beautiful of all my children, though all of them were lovely.”
“Except Wren, I have heard,” Elizabeth said.
“Well.” Lady Hodges made a dismissive gesture. “Rowena’s disfigurement was unfortunate and quite grotesque. Impossible to look upon. She was a judgment upon me, I daresay. Though I did handsomely for her. I gave her to Megan and her wealthy admirer, and he married her and allowed Rowena to live with them and left his fortune to her. She has much for which to thank me, though she has proved ungrateful so far. I have yet to hear a word of thanks from her.”
“I believe,” Elizabeth said, “you will have to wait a long time, ma’am. Though I have heard Wren express a great deal of heartfelt gratitude to her aunt and uncle for the love they showered upon her when her life before they adopted her had been so devoid of affection from her own parents.” But she did not wish to get drawn into open anger and spite. She would not give Lady Hodges the satisfaction of having discomposed her. “I shall bid you a good afternoon now. But before I do, I will add this. It is Colin’s dearest wish that he have a family of his own to love and be loved by, just as I have on both my mother’s and my father’s side. And his dearest wish will always be mine. I hope you will come to our wedding. We will send invitations to you and to Sir Nelson and Lady Elwood. I hope you will all spend time with us at Roxingley. I hope you will be part of our lives and contribute to our happiness as we hope to contribute to yours.”
Lady Hodges plied her fan and for once said nothing.
“Good afternoon, ma’am.” Elizabeth inclined her head politely to her future mother-in-law and left the room. By the time she exited the house less than a minute later, her hands were tingling with pins and needles, her thoughts were spinning wildly in her head, and she felt short of breath. But she stood on the steps outside the house, pulling on her gloves and composing herself while she glanced across the pavement to where her carriage was awaiting her.
Except that it was not there. In its place was Colin’s carriage. The door was open and Colin himself was leaning against the frame, his arms folded over his chest, one booted foot crossed nonchalantly over the other.
•••
Colin had decided during last night’s ball that the time had come to confront his mother. She had wreaked havoc in the lives of many people over the years, not least of whom were Wren and Justin and their father. He, Colin, had taken the path of least resistance after his father’s death and stayed away from her. It was understandable. He had been only eighteen. But he had been feeling uneasy about it more recently, certainly since his discovery of Wren, alive and thriving, when for almost twenty years he had thought her dead. He had planned to do something about the situation this year and had indeed been trying, with mixed results. But though one of the most brilliant results was his betrothal to Elizabeth, that brilliance was overshadowed by the viciousness of the attack his mother had mounted against her and by what she had tried to do last evening when she had sent Blanche and Nelson to the ball. Meanwhile she had doubtless caused additional damage to Miss Dunmore, an innocent young girl.
Enough was enough, he had decided during the night. Yes, she was his mother, and one ought to honor one’s parents and treat them with deference and respect. But there were limits to what one ought to overlook in exchange, and his mother had overstepped those limits long ago. Now she had gone after Elizabeth.
There was no point in calling upon her before noon, he knew, or even soon after. He went first to South Audley Street, where he asked for Wren and was shown up to the nursery, where she was bouncing the baby gently on her lap. Colin smoothed a hand over the child’s head and leaned across him to kiss his sister on the cheek.
“Was last evening horribly upsetting for you?” he asked.
“The ball?” She raised her eyebrows. “Oh, I suppose you mean Blanche’s appearance. What on earth was that all about, Colin? Disruption? I suppose our mother sent her to cause trouble. But poor Blanche was never of Mother’s caliber. No, I was not upset.”
“Elizabeth and I want to invite them to our wedding,” he said, “and to the wedding breakfast. But we will not do so if you would rather we did not. No—” He held up a hand as she drew breath to speak. “You do not need to say what I am sure you think you ought to say, Wren. Say what youwantto say. I know Elizabeth will respect your feelings and put your wishes first, as I do.”
“She has already done so,” she told him. “She spoke to me about it at breakfast. This is your wedding, Colin, and it must be just as the two of you wish it to be. Your relationship to our mother is necessarily different from mine. I can ignore her. You cannot, not if you plan to make Roxingley your home and Elizabeth’s and exercise the full responsibilities of your position. Our mother is one of those responsibilities. You must by all means invite her to the wedding. But do you think she will come?”
“I have no idea,” he said. “WhereisElizabeth?”
“She has gone out,” she told him. “I daresay she will be home soon.”
“In the meantime,” he said, “may I hold my nephew? He does not look undernourished, does he? Just look at those cheeks.”
He left before Elizabeth returned home. He did not wish to be too late arriving at Curzon Street lest he find his mother’s drawing room filled with guests and hangers-on when he arrived. He got there at one o’clock, only to discover that the carriage in which Elizabeth and her mother usually traveled about town was standing outside the door. Their coachman informed him that Lady Overfield had entered the house at noon—and yes, she was alone.
Colin’s first instinct was to bound up the steps, hammer on the door, and dash upstairs to the drawing room to save his betrothed from being devoured whole by his mother. Fortunately, perhaps, he stopped to consider. She had come here quite deliberately, and she had come alone. And she was Elizabeth. He had assured her more than once that he trusted her to do her own living in her own way. He had told her—at least, he hoped he had made himself quite clear—that he would never play the heavy-handed husband and try to control her every move or rush to her rescue before she had appealed to him for help.
She was a woman with backbone and was perhaps—though not probably—even a match for his mother. She must be allowed to do what she had come to do, whether she succeeded or failed.
Sometimes it was not easy to be a man.
He flexed his hands at his sides, but there was no one to punch, except for two coachmen—hers and his own—who had done absolutely nothing to provoke him, and even if they had, he would have no excuse to resort to violence. So he resorted to waiting outside instead. After ten minutes he sent her carriage away. The coachman hesitated, but Colin raised his eyebrows, and the man, perhaps reading the desire to be provoked in his lordship’s eyes, decided it was in his best interests to obey. Colin waited inside his own carriage and then outside, his arms folded across his chest, his feet crossed at the ankle, his eyes focused upon the door lest she slip away while he was not looking.
It was the hardest thing in the world to trust when the instinct to protect warred with it. It was very possible that she was being devoured in there, and how could she appeal to him for help when she did not even know he was at hand?
Perhaps she reallyhadbeen devoured, he thought ten minutes later. How much longer would he wait before bursting in there without stopping to ply the door knocker first? But even as he asked himself the question, the door opened and she stepped out, looking cool and poised and perfectly in command of herself. Looking, in fact, like Elizabeth.
Until she noticed the change of carriage, that was, and him standing there waiting for her. Not that anything noticeably changed—nothing, at least that anyone else would have seen who did not know her. But he did. He knew her, and hecared. A great vulnerability gazed at him through her eyes, and he straightened up as she came down the steps, ready to open his arms and scoop her up and generally behave like the prince of fairy tales. But she recovered herself long before her leading foot touched the pavement, and she took his offered hand and got into the carriage without speaking.
