“Oh, and so am I,” she said on a rush. “It was horrible, and it was a ghastly shock for your mother and sister. But you were hardly to blame, Flavian.”
Her brushes had already been set out on the dressing table. She moved closer to rearrange them.
“The thing is,” he said, “that I have n-never asserted myself. I have been Ponsonby for longer than eight years, and I have n-never established my authority. They would not have behaved as they did today if I had. I am s-sorry.”
She positioned two candleholders more to her liking on either side of the dressing table and then moved them together on the same side.
“You were ill for several of those years,” she said.
It was a pretty room, furnished mostly in mossy greens and cream, very different from the rich wine brocades and velvets in his own room. It was here he would most enjoy making love to her, he suspected.
Good God, Velma! It had felt like walking through some warp in time. Seven years had fallen away just as if they had never happened, and there she was again, but moving toward him rather than away, smiling joyfully instead of weeping in grief and agony. And looking every bit as lovely as ever.
He rubbed the edge of a closed fist across his forehead. There was a headache trying to move in.
“Who is Velma?” Agnes asked him, just as if she could read the direction of his thoughts. She was looking at him over her shoulder.
“The Countess of Hazeltine?” He frowned.
“You called her Velma at first,” she said. “And she called you Flavian.”
He sighed.
“We were n-neighbors,” he said. “She told you that. Farthings Hall is eight miles from Candlebury. Our families were always quite close.”
She sat on the padded bench before the dressing table, facing him, her hands clasped in her lap.
“Velma was intended for D-David,” he said. “They were to be betrothed when she t-turned eighteen. He was b-besotted with her. But when the time came, he w-would not do it. It was already obvious he had c-consumption and was not getting any better. He r-refused even though everyone tried to insist that he could still father an heir and m-maybe even a spare. He w-would not do it. And his heart b-broke.”
“Oh,” she said softly. “Did she love him?”
“She w-would have done her d-duty,” he said.
“But she did not love him?”
“No.”
“Poor David,” she said, looking at him. “And your heart broke for him?”
He wandered restlessly to the window and drummed his fingers on the sill. Her window, like his in the adjoining room, looked down on the square and the immaculately kept garden in the center of it. The headache niggled. Something snatched at the edge of his mind and made it worse.
“I had him purchase a commission for me,” he said, “and I went off to join my regiment.”
It seemed like a non sequitur. It was not. He had refused to be betrothed to her himself when David would not. He had had to get away. It had been the only way he could save himself—by running away.
The headache started to pound like a heavy pulse.
“And Velma?” she asked.
“She married the Earl of Hazeltine a few years l-later,” he said. “He died last year. There is a daughter, or so I h-have heard. No son, though. She must have been d-disappointed about that.”
He wondered whether Len had been too. But of course he must have been. Why had he even wondered? Drat this wretched headache.
“Did David die before she married?” Agnes asked.
“Yes.” He kept his back to her.
“You must have been glad about that for his sake,” she said.
