“I know now,” he said, smiling at her, “what I will give you as a wedding gift. Something unusual, perhaps, but something I am sure will please you. I shall engage the services of the best drawing master I can find for you. I could see this morning that you very much wish to paint but do not know how. I shall see to it that you learn how—from an expert. And I will predict that before a year is out I shall be replacing my sisters’ paintings in my bedchamber with paintings of my wife’s.”
She had watched intently. She had understood what he said. But he had so totallynotunderstood that she could only stand now and stare at him. And feel the hurt and frustration again despite herself. What was worse, he did not even realize that he did not understand. She thought unwillingly of Ashley. He had understood instantly when she had explained that there were both passion and meaning in that wretched painting. And afterward he had put into words exactly what she had been telling him with her hands and her body.
But Ashley had always understood. He had always known that there was a person behind the silence—not just a person who listened with her eyes and would have responded in similar words if she could have, but one who inhabited a world of her own and lived in it quite as richly as anyone in his world. With Ashley there had always been a language. There had always been a way of giving him glimpses of herself.
“I could see the anger in your painting,” Lord Powell said. “The impossibility you felt of ever painting what you wanted to paint, of ever reproducing what you saw with your eyes. ’Tis something you feel often?” His eyes were warm with sympathy.
She saw his words—and his intended kindness. He had entirely misinterpreted the emotion that lay behind her painting. How could she marry a man who knew her so little that he believed her unhappy and frustrated, all locked up inside herself, wanting only to be able to hear and to speak?
“Harndon told me you can read and write,” he said. “When you are in my home, Lady Emily, as my wife, I shall give instructions that there are to be paper, ink, and quill pens in every room in the house. You must write down what you wish to express. I would not have you unhappy with suppressed anger and frustration. I would know what you have to say. I would listen to you—to the writings of your hand—as you listen to the motions of my lips.”
But he was a kind man. He wanted to help unlock her from her perceived misery. He was willing to give her a voice and to listen to her. He could not know that when Emily wrote it was for merely practical purposes, not for the revelation of self. She did not have enough skill with language to translate her world into written words.
But hewaskind. She smiled at him.
Their attention was distracted. Someone had come hurrying out of the house and down the steps into the garden and almost collided with them before he saw them. Ashley. He stopped abruptly, said nothing, laughed, and skirted around them to go scurrying on down through the terraces and over the low hedge at the bottom to the lawn beyond. He was hatless.
“Strange,” Lord Powell said, looking again at Emily. “Lord Ashley Kendrick is rather peculiar. It must be the effect of a foreign clime.”
Ashley had been different this morning, she thought. He had been as friendly toward her as ever. He had listened to her and understood what she had said to him. He had accepted her, both her appearance and her painting. He had neither condemned nor covertly criticized. But he had not talked to her as he used to do. He had spoken to her, yes—even at some length. But it was more what he had not spoken of than what he had actually said that had put the bitterness, the tautness, the haunted suffering in his face. There was a great deal shut up inside him. Once he would have sat there with her, time forgotten, and poured out his whole heart to her. But no longer. He had sent her away this morning. He had told her to go.
She was aware of him striding away down the lawn in the direction of the stone bridge.
It was as well. This morning at the falls had been the end. The end of everything that was past. This now was the beginning of everything that was future. Perhaps she would not so easily be able to put the past behind her, where it belonged, if she carried the burden of Ashley’s confidences in her heart.
Yet even now, knowing nothing, her heart ached for him. She had seen him laugh just now, but the look on his face had not been one of amusement. It had been a grimace. There had been wildness in it.
Lord Powell had both her hands in his, and she gave him her full and determined attention. “I was very annoyed with him for forcing you against your will to dance last evening,” he said. “I was almost ready to call him out, but I would not create a scene and embarrass you or my host. If he had succeeded in drawing you into making a spectacle of yourself, though, I believe I would not have been able to contain my anger. But you acquitted yourself well. I was proud of you.” He squeezed her hands.
Against her will. He thought she had danced against her will. She knew that she would never ever forget the exhilaration and the sheer wonder of that half hour and that minuet. Her heart already ached with the memory.
“I would have our betrothal announced today if you will,” he said. “Your family is almost all gathered here, and Lord and Lady Severidge are to come from Wycherly later for dinner, I believe.”
Yes, it would be a good time for the announcement. Suddenly she wanted it to be soon. She regretted that she had not allowed it last evening. She wanted her future to be final and irrevocable.
Ashley, she was aware though she did not look in that direction, was standing on the bridge.
“May I speak with Royce?” Lord Powell asked.
Victor would make the announcement at dinner. Everyone would be pleased. Even Anna, who kept insisting that Emily did not have to marry anyone.
She nodded and smiled and was rewarded by a wide smile in return.
“You have made me very happy, Lady Emily,” he said. “The happiest man in the world.”
•••
Shehad to share her news. Lord Powell had gone to the library to write to his mother. Anna and Luke often spent a half hour or so together in Anna’s private sitting room in the middle of the morning, between the hour they spent playing with the children or taking them outside and the separate duties they busied themselves with for the rest of the morning. The household was not following quite its normal routine this week, of course, what with all the guests. And Luke was supposed to be setting out for London this morning. But perhaps he had not left yet.
She knocked on the door and, after a decent pause, opened it gingerly and peered around it.
At first she was embarrassed. She thought she had walked in on a very private moment. Luke and Anna were standing in the middle of the room, clasped in each other’s arms. But then she saw the pallor of Luke’s face and the shaking of Anna’s shoulders.
“My dear.” Luke held up a staying hand. “Do not go away, I beg of you.”
Anna lifted her head, apparently only just becoming aware of Emily’s presence. Her face was red from crying.
“Oh, Emmy,” she said, “Emmy. Ashley’s Alice and Thomas aredead.They perished in a fire more than a year ago and we were not there to comfort him. He has borne the burden entirely alone. And the burden too of having been from home himself when it happened. How he must blame himself. He has come home for comfort, Emmy.”
