“Are you not to marry her?” she asked.
“Ah,” he said, “news travels on the wind. But we do not need to live in each other’s shadow, Miss Martin. That is not the way polite society works.”
She looked across the formal gardens and up to the terrace, where McLeith and Portia Hunt were standing at one of the food tables, plates in hand.
“Polite society is often a mystery to me,” she said. “Why would one choose not to spend as much time as one can with a loved one? But please do not answer.” She looked back into his eyes and held up one hand, palm out. “I do not believe I wish to hear that you gave up on love years ago and are now prepared to marry without it.”
She was startlingly forthright. He ought to have been angry with her. He was amused instead.
“Marriage,” he said, “is another of those obligations of rank. One dreams as a very young man of having both—love and marriage. As one grows older one becomes more practical. It is wise to marry a woman of one’s own rank, of one’s own world. It makes life so much easier.”
“That,” she said, “is exactly what Charlie did.” She shook her head as if astonished that she had made such an admission aloud. “I am going to the rose arbor. You may come with me if you wish. Or you may rejoin Miss Hunt. You must not feel in any way responsible for keeping me company.”
“No, Miss Martin.” He set his head to one side as he regarded her with eyes squinted against the sun. “I know you are perfectly capable of looking after yourself. But I have not yet seen the rose arbor, and I believe I have more of an appetite for roses than for food.MayI accompany you?”
Her lips quirked at the corners, and then she smiled outright before turning and walking diagonally across the parterres in the direction of the rose arbor.
That was where they spent the remaining half hour of the garden party, looking at the roses, a bloom at a time, dipping their heads to smell some of them, exchanging greetings with acquaintances—at least,hedid—and finally sitting on a wroughtiron seat beneath an arch of roses, gazing about at all the beauty and breathing in the fragrant air and listening to the music and speaking very little.
It was possible to sit silently with Miss Martin now that the discomfort he had felt out on the river had disappeared. With almost anyone else he would have felt obliged to keep a conversation going. Even with Miss Hunt. He wondered if it would always be so or if marriage would bring them enough contentment in each other’s company that they could be satisfied with a shared silence.
“Silence,” he said at last, “is not the absence of everything, is it? It is something very definite in its own right.”
“If it werenota very definite something,” she said, “we would not so assiduously avoid it through much of our lives. We tell ourselves that we are afraid of darkness, of the void, of silence, but it is of ourselves that we are afraid.”
He turned his head to look at her. She was sitting with straight spine, not quite touching the back of the seat, her feet side by side on the ground, her hands resting palm up, one on top of the other, in her lap—a growingly familiar pose. The slightly floppy brim of her hat did not quite hide the rather severe lines of her face in profile.
“That sounds bad,” he said. “Are we such nasty creatures at heart, then?”
“Not at all,” she said. “Quite the contrary, in fact. If we were to see the grandeur of our real selves, I suspect we would also see the necessity of living up to who we really are. And most of us are too lazy for that. Or else we are having too good a time enjoying our less than perfect lives to be bothered.”
She turned her face to his when he did not answer.
“You believe in the essential goodness of human nature, then,” he said. “You are an optimist.”
“Oh, always,” she agreed. “How could life be supported if one were not? There is a great deal to feel gloomy about—enough to fill a lifetime to the brim. But what a waste of a lifetime! There is at least as much to be happy about, and there is so much joy to be experienced in working toward happiness.”
“And so silence and…darkness hold happiness and joy?” he said softly.
“Assuredly,” she said, “provided one really listens to the silence and gazes deeply into the darkness. Everything is there.Everything.”
He made a sudden decision. Ever since deciding to call upon her in Bath, and especially since being shown around her school and talking with her on the road to London, he had been meaning to take matters further with her. Now was as good a time as any.
“Miss Martin,” he said, “do you have any plans for tomorrow? In the afternoon?”
Her eyes widened as she continued to look at him.
“I do not know what Susanna has planned,” she said. “Why do you ask?”
“I would like to take you somewhere,” he said.
She looked at him inquiringly.
“I own a house in town,” he said. “It is not my place of residence, though it is on a quiet, respectable street. It is where—”
“Lord Attingsborough,”she said in a voice that must surely have even the most intrepid of her pupils quaking in her shoes whenever she used it in school, “whereexactlyare you suggesting that you take me?”
Oh, Lord! As if…
