“Yes,” Neville said.
“I hate her!” Gwendoline cried. “Shabby, ugly,lowcreature.”
But Lauren would not participate. “We do not know her, Gwen,” she said. “Yes, Neville. Tell me. Tell us. There must be a perfectly good explanation, I am sure. Once I understand, I will be able to accept it. Everything will be perfectly all right.”
She was in shock, of course. In denial. Trying to convince herself that what had happened was not so disastrous after all but merely something bewildering that would be perfectly acceptable once she understood. The exquisitely scalloped and embroidered train of her wedding gown, Neville noticed, was trailing in the dust.
It was so typical of Lauren to react rationally rather than emotionally, even when therewasno rational way to act. She had always been thus, always the good one among the three of them, the one to think of consequences, the one to be concerned about upsetting the adults. Her story partly explained her, of course. She had come to Newbury Abbey at the age of three when her mother, the widowed Viscountess Whitleaf, married the late earl’s younger brother. She had stayed at the abbey when the newlyweds left on a wedding trip—from which they had never returned. There had been letters and a few parcels from various parts of the world for a number of years and then nothing. Not even word of their deaths.
Lauren’s paternal relatives had made no move to take her back. Indeed, when she had written to them on her eighteenth birthday, she had had a curt response from the viscount’s secretary to the effect that her acquaintance was not something his lordship sought. Lauren, Neville suspected, had never quite trusted her lovableness. And now there ware these circumstances to confirm her in her low opinion of herself.
“I do not want to understand,” Gwendoline said crossly. “And how can yousitthere, Lauren, sounding so calm and forbearing and forgiving? You should be scratching Neville’s eyes out.” She began to sob again.
“Neville?” Lauren said, motionless once more. “I need to understand. Tell me about—about L-Lily.”
“Lily!” Gwendoline said scornfully. “Ihatethat name. It is despicable.”
“She was a sergeant’s daughter,” Neville explained. “She grew up with the regiment, living with it, moving about with it. She always did her share of the work and she was everyone’s friend. The toughest of the men and the roughest of title women loved her. But she was her own person. There was something dreamlike, fairylike about her—I do not: know quite how to describe that quality in her. She had been untouched by the ugliness of the life by which she was surrounded. She was eighteen when I—when I married her.” He went on to give brief details of the circumstances of their marriage.
“And you loved her too,” Lauren added when he had finished.
For her sake he wished he could deny it. Not that it would make any difference to essentials. He said nothing.
“That is no excuse,” Gwendoline said.“Youwere not eighteen, Neville. You were a man. You should have known better. You should have had more of a sense of duty to your family and position than to marry a sergeant’s daughter for such a stupid reason. Marriage is forlife.”
“I will have to learn to love her too,” Lauren said as if Gwendoline had not spoken. “I am sure it will be possible. Ifyoulove her, Neville, then I…” But her words trailed away. She set the swing in motion with one foot.
Neville wondered if it would help her if he strode all the way to the swing, hauled her off it by both shoulders, and shook her soundly. But he remembered his own shock of a few hours before. He had walked all the way from the church to the water’s edge on the beach without knowing he had even moved from the altar. He could not take the alternative to shaking her of lifting her off the swing into the sheltering comfort of his arms.
“Lauren,” he said, “I am so very sorry, my dear. I wish there were more to say, something to comfort you, something to make you feel less…abandoned. I could say all sorts of meaningless things to assure you that eventually this will be in the past and…But they would not comfort now and would be presumptuous in me. Know, though, that you are loved by this family, which is yours as much as it is mine or Gwen’s.” Pompous, empty words despite their truth. He did not belive he had ever felt more helpless in his life.
“But nothing is ever going to be thesame,” Gwendoline cried. “When Vernon died and I came home a widow and then Papa died, I thought the world was at an end. But then you came back and we three were together again and I could see that you would marry Lauren and…But now everything is ended, shattered beyond repair.”
Neville ran a hand through his hair. Lauren swung gently.
Gwendoline had married for love while he was away in the Peninsula. He had never met Viscount Muir. But it had been a short, tragic marriage, over in two years. First Gwen had had a dreadful riding accident that had caused a miscarriage and left her with a permanent limp after her broken leg had healed, and then just a year later, Muir had died in a fall through a broken banister from the balcony of his own home to the marble hall below. Gwen had fled to the familiar comfort of home rather than remain at her husband’s house.
“And how I despise my own selfishness,” Gwendoline said when no one responded to her words. “I am thinking of my own unhappiness when it isnothingto poor Lauren’s. Oh, what a brute I am.” She gathered up her skirts and dashed toward the house, avoiding Neville’s outstretched arm as she passed him.
“Poor Gwen,” Lauren said. “She wanted so very much to go back in time after Lord Muir’s death, Neville. She wanted life to be as it was when we were children, and it seemed to her that her dream was coming true. But we can never go back. Only forward. We cannot go back to yesterday or early this morning. There is Lily now.”
“Yes”
“I have been selfish too,” she told him. “I have been preoccupied by my own disappointment. But you must be so very happy, Neville, even though in your kindness you are sad for me and have taken time to come and talk with me. Lily is alive and she has come to you. How wonderful for you.”
“Lauren,” he said softly. “My dear, don’t do this. Please don’t.”
“You want me to tell you how much I hate her, then?” she said. “How much I wish she had died and stayed dead? How much I wish even now that she would die? You want me to tell you how much I resent your going away after telling me not to wait and then marrying a sergeant’s daughter on mere impulse? You want me to tell you how much I hate you for not telling me? For caring so little for me that you did not mention the fact that this would be your second marriage? For causing me such humiliation this morning?”
He drew a slow breath. “Yes,” he said. “This is what I want to hear, Lauren. Let it out. Yell at me. Throw things at me. Hit me. Don’t just sit there.” He ran his fingers through his hair again. “Oh, dear God, Lauren. I am so wretchedlysorry. If I could only—”
“But you cannot,” she said quietly, though there was an edge to her voice at last. “You cannot, Neville. And hatred is pointless. As are violent emotions. Will you go now, please? I wish to be alone.”
“Of course,” he said. It was the only thing he could do for her. To take himself out of her sight.
She was still pushing the swing with one foot when he turned to leave. Nursing her shock. Her conviction that if she just stayed calm and rational, everything would be all right. Her intense hatred for the sergeant’s daughter who had destroyed her hopes and her dreams, her very life, in one stroke. And for the man she had loved all her life.
It did not help Neville to know beyond all doubt that she had always loved him with a far deeper intensity than he had ever loved her.
