She felt some warmth creep back into her body as Luke murmured comforting words to her. She could tell he was doing so by the vibrations of his chest.
She loved Luke. She loved her family. But it was going to be very difficult to live on. Ashley had found purpose in life. How was she to find purpose in hers? Could it have meaning without Ashley?
But she knew, emerging as she was now from the blackest depths of despair, that she must live on and that she must do so without him. For he would not come back. She knew that. He might return at some distant time in the future. But the Ashley she knew and loved would change. And she would change.
Shewouldchange. She would grow up into the womanhood that was already changing her both physically and emotionally. And she would learn to live without him. She would not mope and pine her life away for what could not be had.
Ashley could not be had. He loved her, but she was not in any way central to his very being. He would soon consign her to nothing more important than a fond memory. She knew that. She had no illusions about what she meant to him.
She would grow up without him. She would live without him. No one would ever know how much he would always be a part of her. She would live as if her heart had not broken from love for him—although it had.
She would always love him, but from this moment on she would take her life back and live it as fully as she had before she set eyes on Ashley a year ago—and all else had faded into insignificance. And ithadbeen a full life, even if it had necessarily been an almost totally solitary one.
Even at its darkest moment, life was a precious gift.
1
1763
“FAITH,child,” Lady Sterne said, “but you are as lovely as all your sisters put together. With no offense meant to the two who are present.” She laughed, clasped her hands to her bosom, and let her eyes sweep once more over the young lady who stood in the middle of the dressing room.
“Oh, but she really is,” Lady Severidge said generously. “She really isbeautiful.”At the age of six-and-twenty, seven years and two children after her marriage, Agnes was still pretty, though she had grown almost plump.
“Of course she is as lovely as all of us put together,” Anna, Duchess of Harndon, said, smiling her bright, warm smile. “And lovelier even than that. Oh, Emmy, you lookwonderful.” But in truth Anna herself looked equally lovely. Although she was well past her thirtieth year and had given birth to her fourth child only three months before, her face was still youthful and unlined, and her figure was again as trim as it had been before her marriage.
“You will be the belle of the ball tonight, as I live,” Lady Sterne said. She was in the dressing room only partly by right of the fact that she was Anna’s godmother. Although she was no blood relation, she had assumed the role of favored aunt to Anna’s sisters as well as to Anna herself. After all, she always reminded them, when a woman had no daughters of her own, then she simply had to adopt a few. “’Tis a pity you cannot dance, child. But no matter. Dancing merely makes a lady flush and sweat—and smell.”
“Aunt Marjorie!” Agnes said, shocked.
Lady Emily Marlowe’s eyes followed their lips for a while, but it was a weary business and she knew she had missed at least half of what had been said—as she always did in a conversation that involved more than one person. But no matter. She had caught the trend of the conversation, and it pleased her to for once be called beautiful—as other women were beautiful. She turned her head to steal another glance at herself in the pier glass of Anna’s dressing room. She scarcely recognized herself. She was dressed in pale green, her favorite color, but all else was unfamiliar. Her petticoat, with its three deep frills, was held away from her legs by large hoops. Her open gown was trimmed with wide, ruched, gold-embroidered robings from bosom to hem. Her stomacher, low at the bosom, was heavily embroidered with the same gold thread. The three lace frills that edged the sleeves of her chemise flared at the elbows below the sleeves of the gown. Her shoes were gold. Her hair—ah, it was her hair that looked most unfamiliar.
Anna’s maid had dressed her hair rather high in front, in the newest fashion, and curled and coiled at the back. In the glass Emily could see the frills of the frivolous lace cap that was pinned back there somewhere, its lace lappets floating down her back. Her hair was powdered white. It was the first time she had allowed anyone to do that to her.
Beneath the gown she could feel the unfamiliar and uncomfortable tightness of her stays.
At the grand age of two-and-twenty, she was about to attend her first real ball. Oh, she had occasionally—when Luke, Duke of Harndon, had insisted—attended local entertainments with her sister and brother-in-law, and there had sometimes been dancing, which she had sat and watched. And she had always been present at the occasional balls held here at Bowden Abbey, though usually she had watched unseen, looking down from the gallery. Dancing had always fascinated her.
She had always wanted, almost more than anything else in the world, to dance.
She could not dance. She was totally deaf. She could not hear the music. Though sometimes she imagined that once upon a time she must have heard it. She could not remember music—or any sounds at all—but there was a feeling, an inner conviction that music must be more beautiful, more soul-lovely than almost anything she had ever seen with her eyes.
Tonight she was to attend a ball, and everyone was behaving as if the whole occasion were in her honor. Almost as if this were her come-out. In reality the ball was in honor of Anna. There was always a ball at Bowden a few months after Anna’s confinements, following the christening of the baby. There had been balls after Joy’s birth seven years ago, and after George’s and James’s more recently. Now there was to be this one, following Harry’s birth. He needed to demonstrate to his neighbors, Emily had once seen Luke say as he bent over Anna’s hand and kissed her fingers, that his duchess was just as beautiful now as she had been three months before, nine months swollen with child.
“Lud,” Lady Sterne said now, taking Emily’s hands in her own and bringing both her eyes and her mind back from the glass, “but you have not heard a word we have said, child. I vow your head has been turned by your own beauty.”
Emily blushed. She wished Aunt Marjorie would speak more slowly.
“Luke will approve, Emmy,” Anna said with her warm smile, cupping Emily’s chin with one gentle hand and turning her head so that she would see the words.
That would be no small accomplishment. Although Luke loved her unconditionally, Emily knew, he also did not always approve of her. He paid her the compliment of treating her as if she had no handicap. He often pushed her into doing things she had no wish to do, assuring her briskly that she could do anything in the world she set her mind to doing, even if she must do it silently. He was unlike Anna in that way, and the two of them sometimes exchanged hot words over her. Anna felt that her sister should be allowed to live her life in her own way, even if doing so made her unsociable and totally unconventional. The implication, loving though it was, was that Emily could never be quite as other women were. Luke was more capable of bullying.
There had been the time when she was fifteen, for example, and he had decided that it was time she learned to read and write. And she had learned too—slowly, painfully, sometimes rebelliously, with Luke himself as her patient but implacable teacher. After the first week, he had banished Anna from the schoolroom and had never allowed her back in. Enough of foolish tears, he had told her. Emily had learned in order to prove something to him—and more important, to herself. She had had everything to prove to herself at that painful stage of her life.
She had proved that she could learn, as other girls could. But she had learned the severe limits to her world. Books revealed to her universes of experience and thought she had never suspected and would never properly understand. Shewasdifferent—very different. On the other hand, there was in her intense relationship with the world close at hand something unique, she believed.
Luke’s approval, Emily thought now, smiling back at her eldest sister, was worth having. Sometimes she almost hated him, but always she loved him. He had been both father and brother to her during the almost eight years since she had come to live at Bowden.
“And Lord Powell will beenchanted,” Agnes said. “Oh, Emmy, he is such a very distinguished-looking gentleman. And he seems genuinely not to mind the fact of your affliction.”
