He smiled back and caught Agnes’s eye across the table. She was still looking flushed and tumbled. He closed one eyelid in a slow wink, and she flushed brighter and half smiled before returning her attention to Lady Darleigh and Lady Trentham.
He wanted her again and found himself wondering what sex in a closed carriage bumping and swaying over English roads would feel like. Cramped and uncomfortable and dangerous and very, very good, he suspected. Perhaps he would put his theory to the test later.
But now everyone was rising from the table. It was time to leave Middlebury Park and one another. It was that most dreary day of the whole year. Except that this year he would not be leaving alone. This year he had a wife to take with him.
And his mother to face in Candlebury, when he got up the courage to go there. And Marianne.
And Velma.
He was glad he had not eaten any of the kidneys. He felt slightly sick to his stomach as it was.
***
Everyone was leaving at the same time in a flurry of carriages and horses and grooms and voices and laughter—and tears. Everyone hugged everyone else and held the hug for several long moments. And Agnes was included in it.
They were different from yesterday’s hugs. Yesterday she had been a bride, and people always hugged brides. It was almost an impersonal thing.
Today she was hugged, and today she hugged back because in a way she was one of the group—the Survivors’ Club and their spouses.
She had never been an emotional sort of person, not since her early childhood, anyway. She was not the sort who went about touching others, beyond the occasional social handshake. She rarely hugged anyone, and people rarely hugged her. Normally she shrank from such contact. Just as she had shrunk somewhat from the physical contacts of her first marriage—though only ever inwardly, never outwardly—and had been relieved when they dwindled in frequency and finally came to an end.
Last night she had been consumed by an intense physical passion, and this morning she gave hug for hug to people she scarcely knew, except for Sophia. And she felt a bond, a warmth about the heart, a fondness that defied reason and common sense.
She felt fully alive for perhaps the first time ever. Oh, and deliriously in love, of course, though she would not let her mind dwell upon that, or her heart. She was Flavian’s wife, and for now that would suffice.
She touched her fingers to the back of his hand as they drove away from the house and circled about the formal flower parterres to join the driveway between the topiary gardens and on toward the trees and the gates. And he took hers in his own and held it warmly, though he did not look at her or say anything. She knew that it was impossible for her to understand fully the ties that bound that group of seven. They went deeper than the bonds of family, though, she knew.
But the good-byes had not all been said.
Dora was standing in the garden outside the cottage, watching the carriages go by, smiling and raising her hand as each slowed and farewells were exchanged through opened windows. She was still smiling when Flavian’s carriage stopped and his coachman descended from the box to open the door and set down the steps. Flavian got out and handed Agnes down, and she was enveloped in Dora’s arms, the gate between them. For a few moments neither of them spoke.
“You look beautiful, Agnes,” Dora said when they broke apart. Which was a strange thing to say when her sister was wearing a traveling dress and bonnet she had worn a thousand times before. But she repeated the words with more emphasis. “You lookbeautiful.”
“And do I look b-beautiful too, Miss Debbins?” Flavian asked in his languid, sighing voice.
Dora looked him over critically.
“Well, yes,” she said. “But you always do. I would not trust you an inch farther than I could throw you, though. And you had better call me Dora, since I am your sister-in-law. Flavian.”
He grinned at her and opened the gate to catch her up in a tight hug.
“I will t-take c-care of her, Dora,” he said. “I p-promise.”
“I will hold you to it,” she said.
And then Agnes hugged her again, and she was being handed back into the carriage, and the door was being shut with a decisive click, and the coachman was throwing her trunk and other bags into the boot, and a few moments later the carriage rocked slightly on its luxurious springs and moved forward. Agnes leaned close to the window and raised a hand. She watched her smiling, straight-backed sister until she could not see her any longer, and even then she kept her hand raised.
“I lived there for scarcely a year,” she said, “yet I feel as if my heart were being ripped out.” Which was perhaps not a very complimentary thing to say to one’s new husband.
“It is your s-sister you are leaving behind, Agnes,” he said, “not a village. And she was once more your m-mother than your sister. You will see plenty of her, though. When we go to Candlebury Abbey to live, we will have her come to s-stay with us—for as long as she l-likes. She can stay with us f-forever if she w-wants, though my guess is that she would p-prefer her independence. But you will see l-lots of her.”
Agnes sat back in her seat, her face averted, but he set an arm about her shoulders and drew her against him until her head had nowhere to go but onto his shoulder. He pulled free the bow beneath her chin and tossed her bonnet onto the seat opposite with his hat.
“Good-byes are the most wretched things in this w-world,” he said. “Never say good-bye to me, Agnes.”
Almost, she thought,almosthe was telling her that he really cared. But he quickly ruined that impression.
“I have been w-wondering,” he said on a familiar-sounding sigh, “how possible or impossible and how s-satisfactory or unsatisfactory it would be to have sex in the carriage.”
