“But Sydnam is not a tragic figure,” Lauren said, smiling at Anne. “You must have discovered that for yourself, Anne. He has made a meaningful new life for himself, difficult as it has been with his disabilities. And now he has a wife and family for his personal happiness.”
Her smile seemed to possess genuine warmth.
“You will come visiting with Lauren and me this afternoon, Anne,” the countess said in a tone that brooked no contradiction. “You must be presented to our neighbors, and the hasty, secret nature of your marriage must be somehow explained. We willnottake your son with us.”
Lauren laughed softly and got to her feet.
“David is delightful,” she said. “He was playing with Andrew and Sophie when I went up to the nursery to feed Geoffrey last evening and even settled a quarrel between them before I could intervene. Shall we go up there now, Anne?”
They spent the rest of the morning there, though there was no need to amuse the children. Andrew was clearly delighted to have an older cousin willing and able to build an impressive castle with him out of painted wooden bricks, and Sophia was content with gazing at her new cousin and edging closer to him until she was able to reach out and touch his hair. David turned and smiled at her, and she was permitted to hand him the bricks, though Andrew forbade her to touch the castle.
David was simply happy.
Geoffrey, plump and contented, lay in Anne’s arms after he had been fed, his eyelids fighting a losing battle with sleep. He had his mother’s startlingly violet eyes, she noticed.
“I think,” Lauren said after a while, “it is going to be remarkably pleasant to have another sister. And for my children to have another aunt and more cousins.”
“You have sisters of your own, then?” Anne asked.
“Cousins by marriage, with whom I grew up,” Lauren told her. “I still think of Gwen as a sister and of her brother Neville as my brother. I almost married him at one time. Indeed, I had arrived at the church for our wedding.”
Anne stared at her. “What happened?” she asked.
Lauren told her about the death of her father, Viscount Whitleaf, when she was an infant and her mother’s remarriage within the year to a younger brother of the Earl of Kilbourne. She told of her mother’s leaving on a wedding trip overseas and never returning, though they were now back in communication with each other. Lauren had grown up in the Earl of Kilbourne’s home with the earl’s son and daughter and the expectation that she and Neville would wed when they were grown up. Neville went to war and told her not to wait for him, but she waited anyway, and eventually he came home and courted her and their wedding day dawned. But just as she arrived at the church, another woman—a woman who looked like a beggar—arrived there too, claiming that Neville was her husband, that he had married her in the Peninsula.
“And the ghastly thing was,” Lauren said, running one hand softly over the almost-bald head of her sleeping baby as he lay in Anne’s arms, “that she was telling the truth.”
“Oh,” Anne said. “Oh, poor Lauren.”
“I thought the world had come to an end,” Lauren admitted. “As I was growing up my adoptive family could not have been kinder to me if I had been a daughter of the house, but I was always aware that I was not. I spent my growing years trying to be worthy, trying to be lovable—though I already was loved. And all I ever wanted of life was to marry Neville.”
The refined and perfect Lauren had known unbearable pain too, then, Anne thought. Everyone had, she supposed, at some time in life. It was always a mistake to believe that one had been singled out for unusual suffering.
“And then a year later,” Lauren said, “I met Kit. We did not by any means have a smooth courtship, but it did not take me very long to understand why Lily had had to come back into Neville’s life and why I had had to be cut adrift. Fate was saving me for Kit. I do believe in fate, Anne—not a blind fate that gives one no freedom of choice, but a fate that sets down a pattern for each of our lives and gives us choices,numerouschoices, by which to find that pattern and be happy.”
“Oh,” Anne said, “I believe that too. I really do.”
“Fate led you to meet Sydnam and he you, I daresay,” Lauren said. “Despite appearances—forgive me!—I can see quite clearly that you are fond of each other.”
They smiled at each other, and soon the conversation moved into other channels, but Anne felt enormously comforted, as if some blessing had been bestowed. She felt that she and her sister-in-law would be friends—perhaps evensisters.
And her mother-in-law had looked on her with approval for staying with Sydnam last night and was to take her visiting this afternoon.
Perhaps families did not always reject. Perhaps at least sometimes they opened their arms in welcome. Perhaps sometimes love was to be trusted.
Sydnam’s day started well enough.
It started with hope. Anne had smiled this morning and even joked with him. She had not repeated her wish to go home without further delay, and she had not objected to being left alone with Lauren and his mother. He and she were, he thought, still friends. And for a while he was content—hemust becontent—with friendship and with a mutual compassion for the dark places in each other’s life.
The morning proceeded well as he rode about the home farm with his father and Kit, meeting farmworkers and their wives whom he had not seen in years, since he had been steward here, in fact. It was all very enjoyable.
But the afternoon brought home to him a reality that depressed him and might, he feared, put yet another strain on his marriage. Anne had been taken visiting by his mother and Lauren. He went up to the nursery while she was gone to suggest taking David—and the other children too, if they wished—for a walk about the lake. But Kit was there before him to take Andrew out for a riding lesson.
“You must come too, David,” he said.
“But I cannot ride,” the boy protested.
“You have never ridden?” Kit said, setting a hand on his shoulder. “We are going to have to set that right without any further delay.”
