And yet, perversely, the discovery left her feeling freshly bereft.
Now it was all definitely and finally over.
Her heart, her very life, had never felt more frighteningly empty.
It was not finally over for Anne.
One Saturday morning late in September a sudden deluge of rain sent Susanna and a class of girls under her supervision dashing back inside the school from the open meadows beyond Daniel Street, where they always went for their games lessons. Susanna sent the girls up to their dormitories to dry off and would have taken her own wet cloak and bonnet up to her room before meeting them in the grand hall for indoor games, but Mr. Keeble informed her that she was wanted in the office, that he had already asked Miss Walton to supervise the hall.
She found Claudia and Anne waiting for her and smiled when she saw a nice warm fire crackling in the grate. It was a chilly day outside.
“We are to lose Anne, Susanna,” Claudia said sternly and without preamble. “She is to marry Mr. Sydnam Butler, son of the Earl of Redfield and steward at the Welsh estate ofthe Duke of Bewcastle.”
Poor Claudia could never utter that last name without some venom in her voice. Her final position as a governess, which had been with Lady Freyja Bedwyn as her pupil and the Duke of Bewcastle as her employer, had left her with a lasting antipathy toward both. She heartily despised them though she did concede that without that more-than-unpleasant experience she might never have summoned the courage to open her own school.
But Susanna did not spare much thought for Claudia. She had looked into Anne’s ashen face, and she instantlyknew.
“Oh, Anne,” she said, closing the distance between them and hugging her friend tightly.
“I have told her that she need not do it,” Claudia said. “I have told her we will find some alternative. But she insists.”
“Of course I do.” Anne stepped back from Susanna’s arms and smiled with ghastly cheerfulness at both of them. “Iwantto marry Mr. Butler. I amfondof him. I am not marrying him just because I am with child. Iamwith child, Susanna.”
“We are all going to have a nice cup of tea,” Claudia said with iron calm. “And we are all going to sit down. Not necessarily in that order.”
Susanna was glad of the chair. She could guess exactly the way it was. Anne was more than fond of Mr. Butler, but Mr. Butler was the son of an earl. He had allowed Anne to return to Bath without offering her marriage. Yet now he was doing the honorable thing and marrying her after all—but only because he must.
Poor Anne! What a dreadful thing it was for her to be facing a marriage in which her feelings were engaged when she would always know that his were not.
And it could so easily have happened to her too, Susanna thought, a chill about her heart even while the fire warmed her toes and her face.
Except that she would never have let Viscount Whitleaf know if she had shared Anne’s fate. And she doubted he would have offered marriage even if she had.
Oh, but she did not know, did she, what she would have done if it really had happened. Or what he might have done if he had found out. Her knees turned weak at the thought of how close she had come to disaster.
Anne had not had her fortunate escape.
Susanna did not meet Mr. Butler until the day, two weeks later, when the wedding took place by special license in Claudia’s private sitting room. He had been badly maimed as a soldier during the Peninsular Wars—he had lost an arm and an eye and was badly burned all down the right side of his face. He was also, as Anne had told Susanna on the evening after her return from Somerset, tall, dark, and handsome. Susanna told him so with a twinkle in her eye after the brief service, when Anne was already his wife—but she said it only because it seemed to her that he was a good-humored man and she thought it altogether possible that he did care for Anne.
She hoped so. Oh, shehopedso.
And she tried very hard not to be envious—but how very foolish to eventhinkof being envious when she had been pitying Anne so deeply for the past fortnight. Sometimes human emotions made no sense at all.
She did dare to hope, though, that Anne had found her happily-ever-after despite everything. It appeared that Mr. Butler was even going to be kind to David, though it was not equally obvious that David was going to take kindly to the existence in his life of a new stepfather.
Susanna and Claudia stood on the pavement outside the school after the small reception they had given for the newlyweds, waving the three of them on their way back to Wales.
“Susanna,” Claudia said as the carriage turned the corner onto Sutton Street and moved out of sight, “I expected that my heart would break today. But maybe it does not have to after all. What do you think?”
“I believe,” Susanna said, “there is fondness on one side and honor on the other—and even that would offer promise for the future. But I think there is also a little bit of love on both sides.”
“Ah,” Claudia said with a sigh, “it is my thought too. Let us hope we are right and not just a couple of hopeless romantics. Ah, Anne! I suppose we will not see her again for a long time. Idoobject to losing my friends, not to mention my teachers. I will have to look about for her replacement, though Lila is coming along quite nicely, would you not agree?”
Lila Walton was a junior teacher, promoted at the end of the summer term from the ranks of the senior girls. Like Susanna before her, she had been a charity girl.
“She shows great promise, as I knew she would,” Susanna agreed as Claudia linked an arm through hers and they stepped back inside the school.
But they were to see Anne again far sooner than Claudia had expected. She and Mr. Butler did not go directly home to Wales, as it turned out, but instead went first to Alvesley Park in Wiltshire, family home of Mr. Butler, and then to Gloucestershire to visit Anne’s estranged family. The day after a letter arrived at the school from Anne at her father’s home, another letter came from Viscountess Ravensberg at Alvesley Park. Claudia held it open in one hand when Susanna answered a summons to her study at the end of a composition class—a subject she had taken over from Frances two years before.
