“No, Uncle.” Ashley smiled at him. “There is nothing to go back to, you see. I have resigned my post with the East India Company.”
“You haveabandonedAlice and Thomas?” Doris’s words were spoken in a near whisper, but they sounded loud in the breakfast parlor.
Ashley looked at her with a crooked smile. “It has to be spelled out, by my life,” he said. “No one understands. Or no one wants to understand. They are dead. They died together when my house burned to the ground a little more than a year ago. I was fortunate enough to be from home at the time.”
The only discernible movements were Luke’s hand gripping Anna’s more tightly and the Earl of Weims’s hand going to his wife’s shoulder.
“It seemed an appropriate moment to tell it,” Ashley said, “with the whole family gathered for breakfast. Pardon me for blurting such shocking news without sufficient preamble. As for myself, I have had a year in which to grow accustomed to the facts. A year in which to shrug off grief. I am free and I am wealthy. And I am home.”
He got to his feet and made them all a bow that seemed almost mocking in its elegance. He left the room as Luke, the first to react, got to his feet. But Luke did not follow him. He had a wife and a mother with whom to concern himself.
7
EMILYdid not go down to breakfast. She did not often do so. She preferred to eat alone. But since the arrival of Lord Powell six days before, she had been behaving as any normal young lady would. She had taken all her meals in the breakfast parlor or the dining room, watching the conversation about her, dazed by it, but smiling pleasantly to indicate that she was a participant, not merely a dumb spectator.
This morning, however, she could not face Lord Powell at the breakfast table. Or Luke. He would know by now. He would look at her with pursed lips and narrowed eyes and she would feel more dreadful than if he scolded her roundly for five whole minutes. That was the trouble with Luke. He had learned early in their relationship that a few well-chosen looks were far more effective with her than a thousand words.
And she could not face Ashley either.
She dressed herself carefully in her dressing room, without the assistance of a maid. She had no personal maid. What was the point, Anna had said some time ago with affectionate exasperation, when Emmy never made use of one? She wore one of her pretty open gowns, with its accompanying petticoat draped over small hoops. She dressed her hair smoothly in front and knotted at the back. She covered the knot with a lace-trimmed cap, and made sure that its long lappets flowed freely down her back to her waist.
There, she thought, she looked civilized again, if not particularly grand.
When she got to the nursery, she returned Anna’s smile and saw that Harry was lying quietly in her arms, his eyes fluttering closed. Beyond them Joy was lifting James off the rocking horse while Amy, Doris’s daughter, waited to be lifted on. George was doing something at the table with two of Charlotte’s children. James and the other children rushed toward Emily, demanding to be entertained. She laughed and obliged them. Soon Amy was scrambling down from the horse and joining them.
Children readily accepted abnormalities, Emily had realized long ago. Even the youngest of her nephews and nieces knew that they had to thrust their faces almost against hers and talk with slow clarity if she was to respond to their unceasing demands. They knew too that she alwaysdidrespond. Soon she was crawling on all fours, hoops notwithstanding, with two small infants drumming their heels against her sides.
Luke had once told her that she was more foolishly indulgent of infant tyranny than even he and Anna. It always pleased Luke to pretend to be under the thumb of his children. In reality Emily knew that a mere look from his cool gray eyes could quell inappropriately high spirits, and that a mere lifting of his eyebrows could put an instant end to incipient rebellion. Love there was in abundance in Luke’s family, but there was also total obedience.
Anna had just set a sleeping Harry down on his cot in an inner room and left the nursery when the door opened to admit Lord Powell. Emily felt hot and disheveled, but he smiled at her as she got to her feet and checked that her hair was still confined by its pins and her cap was still where it should be.
“Lady Emily,” he said, “will you do me the honor of stepping out into the garden with me?”
He had recovered from his frowns, she saw. She wondered if he had any inkling of exactly what he had witnessed that morning—a deaf woman in her own world, a world very different from his own. A world of sensation and feeling and thought, though not quite as people with hearing thought, perhaps. Did they think in words? She wondered if Lord Powell understood that she did not. Probably not. Probably he never would. But she would not feel hurt or angry. She had decided to marry, to move into that other world. The burden of adjustment was hers alone.
The children looked disconsolate. But ever resilient, they went in search of Joy, the eldest, the substitute playmate now that Aunt Emily was being taken away from them.
The sun was still shining. The air was considerably warmer than it had been when Emily had left the house earlier with her easel. Lord Powell led her down the steps onto the first terrace of the formal gardens, and they strolled together along the graveled walk there, her arm looped through his.
“I would make my apologies to you,” he said, drawing her to a halt at last and turning toward her. “You are in your own home. ’Twas unpardonable of me to be critical here of your appearance and your behavior. Forgive me?”
Criticalhere? Would he feel justified in being critical elsewhere, then? In his own home, perhaps? But it was a point too complex to be considered now. And it was a handsome apology. She nodded.
“You look remarkably lovely this morning,” he said. “It pleased me to see you playing with your nephews and nieces even at the risk of the perfection of your appearance. It pleases me to imagine you playing thus with your own children.”
Your own children.Yes, the effort, the sacrifice would be worthwhile. She ached with longing somewhere in the region of her stomach.Your own children.
He had taken her hand in his. He raised it now to his lips.
“I would ask only,” he said, “that when we are wed, Lady Emily, you will appear as you did earlier this morning to no one but me. I would not have my mother or sisters or—worse!—my brothers see you thus and think you wanton. Or even mad.” He smiled.
Mad. He had thought her mad. Merely because her dress had been too short and her hair had been down her back. She felt a flaring of anger again for a moment. But it was merely a word—mad. It meant essentially the same thing as improper. And she would admit that her appearance had definitely been that. She would not quarrel again over a word.
“For myself,” he said, “I could find your appearance thus almost appealing. If the gown were but richer... But ’tis improper to indulge such imaginings yet when we are merely betrothed.”
She saw the look in his eyes—admiration? He found her attractive? She wondered again what his lovemaking would be like. Would he, even then, be concerned with what was right and proper? But she did not know herself what was right and proper—or what was wrong and improper, for that matter.
She just hoped there would be some—oh, somepassion.The thought took her quite by surprise.
