“You will be the first to know, m’dear,” he said, catching Aunt Marjorie’s hand as she was about to remove it and bringing it back to his knee. “Marj here has done me the great honor of accepting my marriage offer. We are to be married, here in London, as soon as the banns have been called. At St. George’s, with half the world present.”
Emily bit her lower lip. She did not know which one of them to hug first. She looked from one to the other with shining eyes. She had known them both for a long time and loved them both. And she had always thought that there was a fondness between them stronger than mere friendship.
“I daresay all your family will come to town for the occasion,” Aunt Marjorie said. “My only relationship to any of you is as Anna’s godmother, but you have all been kind enough to call me aunt. I want you all present when I marry.”
She would see Anna, Emily thought. And Anna would see how happy she was. She had been so worried that London was not at all the place for her youngest sister.
“And all my family too,” Lord Quinn said. “Doris and my sister are already in town. Luke will come from Bowden and Ashley will come from Penshurst.”
Emily’s insides performed a complete and uncomfortable somersault.
“You may think it quite unseemly at the age of fifty, Emily,” Aunt Marjorie said, patting Emily’s arm with her free hand, “but ’tis going to be the happiest day of my life.”
Ashley would come from Penshurst. As soon as the banns had been called. For the wedding. Within a month. She would see him again.
Ashley would come.
Emily closed her eyes and rested her head against the cushions. Her eyes ached. Did other people’s ears ache from incessant conversation the way her eyes sometimes did? She longed suddenly for solitude and the sweet, undemanding companionship of nature.
But she had stepped out of that life into the real world. She had come to enjoy herself. Shewasenjoying herself.
She opened her eyes determinedly and smiled, first at Lord Quinn and then at Aunt Marjorie, both of whom were regarding her silently but rather intently.
Ashley would come.
14
THEREwas no separate breakfast parlor at Penshurst. All meals were taken in the huge dining room, with its gilded paneled walls and its coved and painted ceiling. The massive oak table had been made especially for the room.
Ashley sat in lone state at the head of the table, eating his breakfast and reading his mail. There was nothing from Bowden. He had leafed through the pile first to ascertain that. Of course, the news, if and when it came, might not come from Bowden. She had gone to London with Lady Sterne. Luke had already mentioned that in an earlier letter. Emmy in London, with the very sociable Lady Sterne. It was difficult to imagine. Poor Emmy!
He had been at Penshurst for almost three weeks. She would probably know by now, or at least suspect. Would she tell anyone immediately? Would she even understand? Emmy was such a curious mixture of wisdom and innocence that it was impossible to know. But the suspense was weighing heavily on him. And he could not at all decide if he wanted it to be so or not. Emmy with child—with his child—and forced after all to marry him.
Part of him hoped fervently that it would not happen. He did not want her in that way, and he did not want her forced into doing something she so clearly did not want to do. But part of him wished that she would be forced into allowing him to do the decent thing.
And part of him longed just for her, for her closeness, her companionship, her unconventionality, her—but he could never put into words exactly what it was about her that he longed for.
And part of him longed for a child. Son or daughter—it would not matter. A child of his own body. His first.
There was a letter from London, but it was from his uncle Theo and not from Lady Sterne. Theo would hardly be the one elected to send for him. Sometimes he considered going on his own. To London. It was the Season. He was newly returned to England. It would be easy to excuse his going there for a week or two. Just to see that she was in good health and good spirits. Just to see if she needed him.
He had always been the one to need her, not the other way around, he realized. It was quite the contrary to what an outside observer might have been led to believe. Emmy had always been the strong one, the independent one. Right to the end.
He looked down at his uncle’s bold handwriting when he had broken the seal of the letter. He read the short note twice and then smiled and chuckled. The old rogue! It was an open family secret that Theo and Lady Sterne had been lovers for as far back as Ashley could remember. Finally they were to be married. And they were not going to creep quietly off to the nearest clergyman with a special license. They were going to have a grand wedding at that most fashionable of all London churches, St. George’s, in the presence of as many members of the fashionable world as could be packed within its pews.
He wished them well. He had no doubt that they would be happy together. They knew each other well enough—in all possible ways, Ashley did not doubt. It would never be said of them that they had rushed into marriage after a mere few weeks of acquaintance. The smile faded from Ashley’s face.
And then the implication of what he had read struck him. The letter was more than an announcement. It was an invitation.
Ashley folded the paper and set it down. He drummed his fingers slowly on it. He had told himself that he would not go to London. She would not wish to see him. There was work to do here—he was still in the process of getting to know his new estate and of gradually taking charge of its administration. And there were invitations to honor from the neighbors who had been calling on him.
But the temptation to go had been strong even before the arrival of Theo’s invitation. He found the house oppressive despite its still very new splendor. It was a feminine house. There were signs of Alice in every flounced drapery and every frilled cushion, in every delicate landscape painting and in every porcelain ornament. He was reminded powerfully of how she had transformed his own very comfortable home in India and of how she had raged against his habit of leaving books and garments and snuffboxes lying around. And here at Penshurst there was one particular set of rooms that drew him like a magnet though he hated setting foot inside them. And yet he found himself unable to give the order to have them cleared out. Alice’s rooms, still full of her personal possessions, still with the distinctive perfume she had always worn clinging to the clothes in the wardrobes.
If only she had died naturally, he had thought one day, standing in the middle of her sitting room, his eyes tightly closed, or if only she had died in an accident for which he could not possibly feel personal blame, perhaps he would not feel so fettered by all this. She had been no wife to him. She had never even tried to deny that she had lovers. She had given birth to a red-haired child fourteen months after the only time she could possibly have conceived the child with him. She had told him they would be from home the night of the fire.
But nothing he had been able to say to himself in more than a year of mental torment had ever been able to convince him that he must not blame himself. While they were at home alone, dying in that fire, he had been taking repeated and delighted pleasure in the bed of a married woman—ironically his only foray into adultery.
And so, as Roderick Cunningham had predicted, he punished himself with the house which almost breathed her presence—and longed for an excuse to be away from it.
