Barbara Verney was pouring the tea. She smiled as she handed Ashley a cup. “I do believe Mama had hopes at one time that Alice and Henry would make a match of it,” she said. “Happily for you, it did not happen.”
“But then,” Sir Henry said with a laugh, “neither did you make a match with Gregory, Barbara. Sometimes, Kendrick, as you may know from personal experience, mothers have tidy visions of their children’s lives that in no way match what their children want for themselves. I was pleased when I heard that Alice had married you, a man with impressive connections and a respected colleague of her father’s. She was a very unhappy young lady when she left Penshurst.”
He had no feelings of regret or guilt at all, Ashley decided. He had beengladto hear of her marriage to someone else. Wouldhefeel glad to hear of Emmy’s marriage to another man? Would he be able to look the other man in the eye some years in the future and tell him he had been pleased to hear of her marriage? When he himself had had carnal knowledge of her? And did Verney wonder if he knew? Did his smile hide a certain contempt for the man who had taken his leavings? But he did not wish to think of Alice like that. He had not loved her; indeed, he had in many ways hated her. But she had been a person, and a desperately unhappy person.
“Yes,” Ashley said. “She had recently lost her only brother. I gather they were close, though she rarely talked about him. I understood it was too painful for her to do so.”
Brother and sister exchanged glances. “Yes,” Sir Henry said. “They were close. His death was a dreadful shock to her, as it was to all of us.”
Gregory Kersey had been shot in a hunting accident. That much Ashley had learned from Sir Alexander Kersey, long before he met Alice. She herself had almost never mentioned her brother.
“How did it happen?” Ashley asked.
For the first time Verney looked uncomfortable. He scratched his head and looked at his sister.
“’Twas early in the morning,” she said. “He was out shooting with several other gentlemen from the neighborhood.”
“Myself among them,” Sir Henry added.
“Yes,” she said. “They had decided to finish for the day, and were all beginning to make their separate ways home when there was a shot.”
“None of us paid it any heed,” Sir Henry offered. “Someone had seen a bird and had been unable to resist one more shot, we all thought. ’Twould not have been unusual. Binchley found the body at noon. Alice had sent him to discover why Gregory had not come home from hunting.”
“No one remembered having fired that late shot,” Barbara Verney said.
“Or no one would admit it,” her brother added. “Doubtless it was an accidental shooting. Greg had no enemies. But ’twould be difficult to face the fact—and to admit publicly to it—that one had shot and killed a fellow human.”
“Where?” Ashley asked. “Where was he shot?”
“In the hills north of Penshurst,” Sir Henry said. “Inside the park.”
“Through the head,” Miss Verney added quietly. “’Twas what his lordship meant, Henry. ’Twas dreadful. Suspicion attached to almost every man in the neighborhood. Henry included. Henry was his closest friend.”
Had Gregory Kersey found out about his closest friend and his sister? Ashley wondered unwillingly. He pushed the thought aside. He had not intended to wade into waters as deep as this.
“Hearing about Alice and her son—your son—was like a nightmare,” Sir Henry said. “It seemed almost as if that family had been doomed. But we become morbid. I am sure you have done enough grieving in the past year and more to last you a lifetime. You have come to town to take in part of the Season?” He smiled.
“For that reason,” Ashley said, “and to attend the marriage of my uncle.”
The conversation proceeded into comfortable, impersonal topics. They talked about weddings and fashions and entertainments and even the weather.
Sir Henry Verney was a man who had taken pleasure but felt no guilt, Ashley thought as he left South Audley Street a half hour after arriving there. An essentially shallow man. It was difficult to understand why Alice had been so fanatically attached to him. But then love was difficult to understand. It was not always a rational thing.
Itseemed almost as if that family had been doomed.
The remembered words were chilling. And yet, Ashley thought, there could not possibly have been any connection between the tragic accident that had taken Gregory Kersey’s life and the one that had taken Alice’s four years later. It was merely a disturbing coincidence. But he could not shake those words from his mind.
It seemed almost as if that family had been doomed.
•••
Shewas wearing her new blue and white striped silk open gown. Beneath it, in the newest fashion, she wore not hoops but a white silk quilted petticoat. Her hair was braided and coiled at the back of her head. The coils were covered with a lace cap. Over all she wore her new straw hat, tipped forward to shade her eyes, secured with a ribbon bow at the back of her neck.
She wondered if he would like her appearance. It did not matter except that she wanted him to see how she had changed, how very happy she was. If he had come with any sense of guilt still remaining, with any lingering conviction that he owed her marriage, she wished to reassure him. He had done her a favor, she thought. If he had not come home, she would have married Lord Powell and spent the rest of her life in the country fighting to assert herself over his mother—probably an impossibility. She would not have discovered, at the very elderly age of two-and-twenty, how much life had to offer even a deaf woman.
Emily leaned forward and looked closely at herself in the glass of her dressing room. She would smile at him and he would know that she did not need him at all. Yet when she caught her eye in the glass, she looked away quickly, concentrating on every part of her appearance except her eyes.
He was waiting in the hallway with Aunt Marjorie when she went downstairs. He was early. He wore a dark green skirted coat, fashionably pleated at the back with a matching waistcoat beneath, and buff breeches. His hair, as usual, was unpowdered. He held his three-cornered hat beneath one arm. His blue eyes smiled at her. She was becoming accustomed to his thin face. It made him look quite impossibly handsome.
