Ashley.
He was the same and different. His eyes were the same, his blue eyes that searched desperately for meaning, for peace. His smile was the same—boyish, mischievous, reckless. His restless energy was the same. He was the Ashley she had known and adored. But he was different. Peace had forsaken him, and with it... hope? Was it despair that impelled him forward now? It looked very like despair to her searching eyes. And he was no longer a boy to whom restlessness and eagerness were appropriate. He was a man, hard and harsh beneath the surface gaiety. He was thin, haggard. Not with the paleness of one who has traveled long and far, but with the paleness of one who has suffered almost more than he can bear.
He looked like a man who was close to breaking and who might yet break.
Ashley!
Yet he was there before her. He had come home. And he needed her to dance with him. Not only wanted it, but needed it. She sensed his need like a tangible thing. Even such a small thing as her refusal might snap him in two.
But despite that realization, there was magic. Irresistible, wonderful magic. He was asking her todance.He did not doubt for a moment that she could dance. And he knew instinctively that she wished to dance, that she had always wanted to dance. She had almost forgotten how well Ashley had always understood her. Perhaps it was one reason she had loved him so dearly. He had seemed so nearly the other half of herself.
He was asking her todance.
How could she possibly resist? How could she possibly say no? The temptation was just too powerful. Though at the time she did not even think of it as temptation. If she had, perhaps she would also have paused to realize that there was something wrong about accepting. But she did not realize it—until later.
And so she danced. A minuet. With Ashley.
It was not as easy as she had expected. Now that she was moving herself, she was not at liberty to watch as she always could when she sat at the edge of the floor, sometimes with her eyes half closed, seeing the rhythm and patterns of the dance as an ordered, visual kaleidoscope. Feeling them in the pulsing of her blood. Although she knew the steps, now that she was part of the kaleidoscope, she was not quite sure of the timing. But Ashley grinned encouragement at her and the magic caught at her again. She closed her eyes for several moments, not even trying to watch the other dancers, merely feeling the vibrations of their feet on the floor and of the instruments playing the tune. And then it was almost easy. She could feel the rhythm pulsing in her body. She moved her feet in time to the pulse, using the remembered steps and patterns of the minuet. As if she had stepped into a painting and had become part of the perfect symmetry of its composition.
It was, she thought, the most glorious moment of her life. She was dancing. With Ashley. And then she was smiling at him, feeling all her happiness flowing out to him, feeling all the joy of the music she had never consciously heard and never would hear.
“Ah, Emmy,” he said after a half hour, when sadly the set was coming to an end, “you need to throw off the disguise of fashionable woman and become again my little fawn. Though you never can be quite that again. You are all grown up.Isit a disguise you wear? Or is this what they have done to you? Have they tamed you and your heart has not cried out for the wild? Do they have you singing prettily here, like a linnet in a cage?”
She saw his words. In addition she could see the harshness and bitterness in his face. Ashley’s face, also in disguise. Like a grotesque mask that needed to be peeled away.
“Ashley.” Doris had come up to them and had taken her brother’s arm. She was laughing. “You came back downstairs. I thought you were exhausted. And Emily, you candance.How very clever of you. How do you do it when you cannot hear?”
“Emmy can feel the music,” Ashley said. “’Tis inside her, Doris, whereas ’tis merely outside you and me.”
“Oh, fie,” she said, laughing, “how strangely you talk, Ashley. You are to take me in to supper. I have a thousand questions to ask, eight hundred of them about young Thomas. Here is Lord Powell for Emily.”
It was then that Emily too saw Lord Powell approach and that the magic was broken. She realized what she had done. She turned to smile uncertainly at her suitor.
•••
“Egad,but the lad has the energy of a twenty-year-old,” Lord Quinn said to Lady Sterne as they sat at the supper table, watching Ashley talking and laughing with his sister and her husband, with his mother, and with Agnes and William. “One would have sworn when he first arrived, Marj, that he was on the verge of collapsing with exhaustion. He is happy to be home, I warrant you.”
“Lud, but so thin,” Lady Sterne said. “He looks ill, Theo, though he is as handsome as the devil when he smiles, it must be admitted.”
“Aye, but ’tis the voyage that has done that to him,” Lord Quinn said. “A few English dinners and a few draughts of English ale will soon coat his ribs and plump him out again.”
“Is he here to stay?” she asked. “’Twill mean much to Anna and Luke if he is. He has been sorely missed.”
“I daresay,” Lord Quinn stated. “He has made his fortune in India, or so ’tis said, and he has married a rich wife into the bargain. Her papa has died and left everything to her, and therefore to my nephy too. They have come home to stay, I warrant you, Marj. There is the young lad to be considered, after all. England is the place to raise children.”
“Yes.” Lady Sterne smiled. “And so I may drift into old age and know my adopted family and yours to be happily settled, Theo. ’Tis a comfortable feeling. All will be complete by the time this night is out, think you?” She raised her eyebrows and nodded in the direction of the dining room door. Lord Powell and Emily, having finished their supper early, were leaving the room together.
“Aye, by my life,” Lord Quinn said. “A wedding in June, would you say, Marj? And Lady Powell will be delivered of a boy come nine months following that same night?”
Lady Sterne sighed, too accustomed to the bluntness of her lover’s language to be shocked by the indelicacy of his remark. “Faith, but ’tis to be hoped,” she said. “My little Emily settled. I did not think to see the day, Theo. I thought no man would be willing to overlook the affliction.”
“Nay, but the gel is as pretty as a picture, Marj,” he said, handing her a large linen handkerchief, with which she dabbed at her eyes. He chuckled. “And not daunted by her affliction. She can dance, by Jove. Egad, but my nephy had some audacity to lead her out into the set as he did.”
“Dear Emily,” Lady Sterne said. “And dear Anna. Who will make the announcement after supper, do you think, Theo? Luke or Victor? I can scarce wait.”
4
“LUKE?”Anna touched his arm and looked in the direction of the dining room door. “They are leaving.”
