Helen’s action had puzzled people through the ages. Some tried to make it a story of rape and abduction, but the ancient texts put the blame on female weakness and the power of lust. Ariana and her father had leaned toward some sort of derangement of the mind. Now she saw that what she and her father had failed to recognize was that love itself could be madness, especially an unrequited or a forbidden love.
Perhaps her father and mother and others like them, people who’d met in comfortable normality and progressed to marriage with universal approval, felt only the slightest flickers of love’s mad flame. Perhaps loveneeded the fuel of problems to create an inferno, as with Romeo and Juliet, Abelard and Héloïse, and Helen and Paris.
All tragedies, she noted.
Ariana shook her head, eyes closed, weighed down by the disastrous truth. She loved—no, she was possessed by a demented obsession with—the Earl of Kynaston. The awareness, the sensitivity to him, had always been there, but it had taken that corridor kiss to reveal the blazing truth.
Was this why every other man had been unpalatable to her?
Had she been infected for eight long years?
There’d been reasons to reject Churston and Blacknorton, though in Blacknorton’s case perhaps not reason enough. Dauntry was unavailable, and perhaps Wentforth as well—though she’d given up on Wentforth easily. She’d felt nothing for Arranbury and was hiding here because she didn’t truly want anything to do with acceptable Sellerden.
She wanted Kynaston.
Kynaston, who was addicted to brandy, no matter what he said, and who she was certain had wasted his inheritance. Kynaston, with his damnable beauty and charm, which he employed to trap and use women.
No, not charm. That was too sweet a word. It was a kind of magnetism, and all women were iron to it. She was astonished no woman had snared such a prize. Certainly he would have resisted having his freedom constrained, but there had to have been determined campaigns.
Were all women more sensible than she? Did they see how disastrous it would be?
She made herself stand, and it did help. She wasoverwrought, but she wasn’t mad and she wouldn’t be consumed by this. She needed an antidote. She left the room to seek normal company. But as she walked along the corridor, she heard the unmistakable sound of a lute. Slowly she turned her steps toward the drawing room. When she entered, she found a large audience silently attentive as Kynaston plucked strings to produce a calm and stately melody.
He was seated much as he had been eight years ago, but she thought perhaps not quite so much at ease. His attention was all on his instrument and his hands, perhaps because he was out of practice. All the same, the music had a pure clarity that seemed in conflict with all she knew about him now.
Was that why he’d been drawn to the lute? Because it lent itself better to coolness than more modern instruments like the violin and piano? A counterbalance to his nature?
Then, with a brief look up at his audience, he began to sing. His voice wasn’t as pure as it had been, but it had gained depth and a mellow timbre from time and perhaps hard living.
He sang in Italian, which surprised her. She didn’t know the language, but she knew Latin and could make out much of it. It was a love song of sorts, but lamenting his failings. She remembered his reaction to Cleo and knew she’d been right—the mummy had reminded him of some wrong he’d done to a young woman.
Causing her death?
Too melodramatic by far, but the song had power, and not just over her. The room was spellbound. She recognized the approaching end and that she was standing. She quickly sat down. Though he’d performed fora roomful of people, she felt as if she’d illicitly observed a private lament.
He finished, stood, bowed, and returned the lute to its place. There was a heartbeat gap before the applause, but then it came warmly, followed by appreciative comments. Ariana could hear surprise. Was he no longer in the habit of performing? Of course, he’d been traveling in recent years.
He was leaving the room, which brought him close to where she sat. He saw her and paused as if to speak, but then moved on.
Ariana was glad of it. He’d said he’d trouble her no more and she must cling to that, for the music had been the final straw. If he’d taken her hand then and led her from the room, out of the house, and to her destruction, she would have gone, just as Helen had left Menelaus. She would have been powerless to resist. It would not have led to war and devastation, but it would have wrecked her and her world and grievously wounded others around them.
Thank God he’d not tempted her. At that inopportune moment her mother smilingly called for her to perform. There was nothing she wanted less, but she had no choice other than to try to appear in calm good humor and sit at the harpsichord.
She chose a piece by Handel that she knew by heart, realizing only too late that it was in a minor key and had a dark, dramatic tone. Or was that merely her imagination? She cut it short after a few minutes and rose to curtsy thanks for the applause.
There were many eager to show their skills and a lady rose to perform in her place.
She was free—to do what? There was only one thingon her mind and so she went in search. She wouldn’t force her company on him, but she needed to see him, even from across a room.
A tour of the public rooms failed to find him. Secreted somewhere again with brandy? But when she asked the footman stationed in the hall, he told her that the Earl of Kynaston had left.
The house suddenly felt colder and emptier and she was in danger of revealing tears.
She must conquer this! If not, she’d end up like Lady Caroline Lamb, a scandal—and, worse, a figure of fun—for her shameless pursuit of Lord Byron. Reading of the scandal, Ariana had found it as inexplicable as Helen’s elopement with Paris, but now she understood.
Love was a form of madness and, if thwarted, fuel for tragedy and destruction.
“Lady Ariana?”
