Matilda could think of no answer.Whyhad he suggested her? He had said nothing during or after the journey home from Kew about seeing her again. There had been nothing from him since. She had assumed he was bitterly regretting some of the things he had said. Not to mention that kiss.
“Did you enjoy the day at Kew?” her mother asked.
“Yes, of course I did,” Matilda said. “The young people were delightful. I was touched when Mr. Sawyer came the following day with Boris and Bertrand and Estelle to thank me. It was thoughtful of them.”
“And was Viscount Dirkson delightful?” her mother asked.
Matilda sat back down. “He was pleasant company, Mama,” she said. “I believe all the young people liked him.”
“But did you, Matilda?” her mother asked.
“Yes, of course,” she said.He kissed me. Me, a fifty-six-year-old spinster.
“Then you must go to Vauxhall with him and his family,” her mother told her.
“Mama,” Matilda began, but her mother held up a hand.
“Matilda,” she said, “you have driven me to the brink of insanity several times in the years since your papa died.”
“I know,” Matilda said. “I want to care for you, Mama, but I know you resent my every move.”
“You drive me insane withguilt,” her mother said. “Believe me when I tell you I did not understand just how much you loved him, Matilda. Perhaps the advice your father and I gave you was sound. It seemed so at the time. But I have looked upon you in all the years since as a millstone of regret and guilt about my neck. We ought to have advised you and then trusted you to make your own decision. We ought at least to have put a time limit on our refusal. We could have insisted that your young man wait a year before applying to your father again for permission to address you.”
“Mama!” Matilda cried, hearing only that she had been a millstone about her mother’s neck.
“Matilda,” her mother said, getting to her feet while her daughter shot to hers in order to rush to her assistance—an impulse she reined in before she had taken more than two steps. “Matilda,I love you.When I snap at you, it is because my heart hurts for you and I know I am to blame for everything you have become. Now, I am going to my sitting room to read the morning papers. I can get up the stairs with the assistance of the banister rail and my own feet. You are to go to the morning room to write to Mrs. Dewhurst. You are to thank her for the kind invitation and inform her that you will be delighted to make one of the party. Or you may write to refuse. The choice is yours.”
Matilda, dumbfounded, watched her mother leave the room. For the first time in what must be years she did not rush after her to offer assistance that was not solicited. It took a great deal of resolution.
She accepted the invitation. Having placed it on the silver tray in the hall and drawn the attention of the butler to it, she went up to her room and lay down on her bed, something she never did in the daytime, and stared up at the canopy.
I love you.
Not in the voice of a man from years and years ago, but in her mother’s voice. For perhaps the first time ever. If her mother had said it before, Matilda had no memory of it. She had always chosen to believe it must be true anyway, though she had doubted of late. But oh, the craving to hear those words from one’s own mother. And now they had been spoken.
I love you.
Matilda rolled over onto her side, hid her face against the pillow, and wept.
I love you.
Whydid he want her to go to Vauxhall with his family?
Didhe regret that kiss at the top of the pagoda in Kew Gardens?
I love you.
He too had spoken those words to her once upon a time long, long ago.
Life, her dreary, endless life, had suddenly become too full of emotion to be borne. She was not accustomed to strong emotion. She did not know what to do with it.
Except weep.
Something she never did.
She wept.
As soon as he had heard from Barbara that Matilda had accepted the invitation to Vauxhall, Charles wrote to inform her that he would bring his carriage to her mother’s house and escort her there himself. He did not look forward to calling at the house, but it was the correct thing to do, and he was not really afraid of the dragon. Was he? But when he arrived on the appointed evening and was conducted to the drawing room, it was to find that the dowager countess was alone there.
