Ashley had moved to Aunt Marjorie’s other side, so that he was in the far corner of the box. He leaned back in his chair rather than forward as most people were doing as they waited for the performance to begin. He was watching her. She did not turn her head by even a fraction of an inch, but she had felt his every move. And she felt his eyes.
Something inside her threatened to crumble. Everything that she had built so determinedly and so eagerly during the past weeks. She was not going to let it happen. It was herself she had created since coming to London—her free and happy self. She refused to crawl back into misery and slavery to a love that had held her in thrall for eight years and had brought her precious few moments of happiness. She was happy with this new life. More than happy.
She realized suddenly, with something of a jolt, that the ballet was in progress and had been for some time. Her eyes had watched it but had seen nothing at all. She thought for one moment that her smile had slipped, but it had not. She turned it briefly on the viscount and he returned it and touched her hand again with his free one.
The visual spectacle of the ballet was magnificent. It was music for the eyes. The dancers moved with precision and grace to a silent melody. For a short while she felt the same connection she did when she was alone with nature.
But she also felt Ashley watching her.
•••
Hehad arrived in London late in the morning and had called upon his uncle just an hour later. Ashley was staying at Harndon House, which had been opened in imminent expectation of the duke’s arrival with his family. Luke had written to invite him to stay there, and after a brief hesitation he had accepted. He would not cower from his family like a whipped schoolboy. What was past was past—as far as his relations with his family were concerned, anyway.
His uncle had pumped his hand and slapped his shoulder and shown every sign of being delighted to see him. Ashley had wondered if the invitation had been a mere courtesy, if perhaps they would have preferred it if he had refused. He must pay his respects to Lady Sterne without delay, he was told, but the gels—his uncle’s quite inappropriate word for his betrothed and Emmy—were to attend a private garden party during the afternoon. They were all going to Vauxhall that evening, though, as guests of Viscount Burdett. Ashley must come too—his uncle would send around to Burdett’s to make the arrangements.
A note was delivered to Harndon House later in the day expressing the viscount’s wish that Lord Ashley Kendrick would honor him by being one of his guests for the evening.
Who the devil was Viscount Burdett? Ashley wondered. And he wondered too if Emmy was one of his guests. But she must be, he reasoned, if Lady Sterne was to be there. Poor Emmy. He did not like the thought of her being dragged about to all the social entertainments. She would not like them.
He found himself aching to see her again. To see what he had done to her. She must have felt obliged to take herself away from Bowden and away from her brother and sisters for a while, he mused, and so she had come here, to exactly the wrong place for someone like Emmy. He expected to find her lost and wan and listless. Perhaps she would be ready to listen to another marriage offer. He was not particularly happy at Penshurst, but he could offer her countryside there, hills, a river, trees.
He went alone to Vauxhall and found his way to Viscount Burdett’s box. He was not the first to arrive. He spotted Doris and Weims. The other occupants were blocked from his view by the press of men in front of the box. It was only as he drew closer that he saw what the attraction was—or who.
She looked much as she had looked at Luke’s ball—fashionable, elegant, and quite extraordinarily beautiful. Except that there she had not worn cosmetics. Or a small black patch placed just where it would draw attention to her eyes. And there, though she had smiled and shone with delight at the occasion and at her first minuet, she had not been exuberant and laughing and—coquettish. She was tapping some foppish-looking gentleman in lavender on the arm and drawing to herself all the foolery of flattery and mindless gallantry. Burdett—it must be he, Ashley figured—who sat beside her, looked like the cat who had drunk the cream or caught the canary or some such cliché. Emmy was flirting with the lot of them.
Ashley’s first instinct, thankfully contained, was to lash about him with his fists.
She became aware of him. He expected her smile to soften on him. She had refused to marry him, but they had parted on affectionate terms. He remembered that last hour they had spent together, both rashly sitting on the soaked grass, almost knee to knee, while she learned to speak her first word. And he remembered too that at the ball he had known as soon as he looked into her eyes that she was Emmy.
Her eyes—her very shallow eyes—continued to sparkle as she smiled at him and raised her fan to her nose. She looked wonderfully happy. But her smile chilled him. She did not look like Emmy. He was sorry he had come. To Vauxhall. To London.
He entered the box and sat between his uncle and Lady Sterne after nodding to Doris and Weims and exchanging a few pleasantries with them. He congratulated Lady Sterne on her betrothal, kissed her hand, concentrated all his attention on her. But just as all the gentlemen clustered outside the box began to move away and the orchestra began to tune their instruments so that the ballet might begin, Lady Sterne leaned toward him and tapped him on the knee.
“I will change places with you if I may, dear boy,” she said, “and sit next to Theo.”
Ashley was briefly amused. The two of them had been lovers for twenty years or more and had always behaved with perfect good breeding in public, and yet it was important to them now to sit next to each other? He almost expected to see them linking hands. But his amusement soon waned. From the chair that Lady Sterne had occupied, he had no choice but to look across the box and see Emmy.
He might have turned his head, of course, to watch the ballet—it was rude to stare at one of the box’s occupants. But he could not stop himself from doing just that.
She was watching the ballet, but she did not look absorbed, with the look of wonder he would have expected to see in her eyes. She still had the smile on her face, the coquettish smile that was not Emmy’s at all. And her hand lay along Burdett’s arm, her fingers splayed on his wide cuff. Her chin was lifted in a gesture of pride.
Was this what he had done to her?
He remembered—it was when he was dancing with her at Bowden—asking her if it was a disguise she wore or if that was what they had done to her.Have they tamed you and your heart has not cried out for the wild?he had asked her.Do they have you singing prettily here, like a linnet in a cage?
No, they had not done that to her. She had still been free. The next morning she had been out at the falls, painting, looking like his little fawn. She had painted the life force, bursting passionately through every living thing and out into the universe itself. It was he who had now done it to her. He had tamed her spirit and caged it.
There was an ache in his chest and his throat. He felt like crying.
Viscount Burdett rose and bowed over her hand and took her walking along one of the lamp-lit paths after the ballet was over. Lady Sterne looked at Doris and raised her eyebrows, and she and Weims followed them to offer chaperonage. Ashley stayed where he was. Soon, he saw, there were other gentlemen walking with Burdett and Emmy.
“Lud,” Lady Sterne said, “but ’twas the best thing I ever did to bring Emily to town, Theo. She is enjoying herself immensely and has almost the largest court of any lady here this Season. I am in daily expectation of offers for her hand.”
“’Twould not surprise me, Marj,” Lord Quinn said. “She is the loveliest gel here, and she has those speaking eyes. Burdett has been marked in his attentions. A viscount too, egad. She could do worse.”
Ashley clamped his teeth together and said nothing, though the conversation continued on the same subject for a while longer—almost as if the newly betrothed couple had forgotten both his presence and the fact that if Emmy was ever to marry, he was the only possible candidate for her hand.
15
