Jem didn’t have that right to her comfort and confidence. Her friends had earned her trust and loyalty.
He hadn’t. The knowledge brought him lower than anything had since his mother died, taking away the last person in the world he had to depend on.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“Miss Lithwick.” Benedicta leaned around the partition that separated the door at the top of the stairs from the benches surrounding the magnificent pipes of the chapel’s organ. The girl had appointed herself junior stage manager and had been moving throughout the chapel all day, seeing that Lucasta’s orders were carried out.
People filled the lower and upper galleries of the beautiful wood-paneled room, and all fell silent as one of the Hospital’s governors took the pulpit and welcomed their guests. There were more people than Lucasta could have dreamed. Enough people to make her concert a resounding success if the performers pleased, and enough to make her a memorable failure if anything went awry.
Lucasta bent to hear the girl’s message and had to ask her to repeat it. “Someone wants to request a change to the program,” Benedicta said again.
“What? Now? We’ve nearly begun!” Lucasta hissed. “It will be impossible.”
“It’s the governors asking,” Benedicta explained. “Some special guest. They want to insert two pieces after the intermission.”
Lucasta’s heart twisted into a knot of worry. A change to the program would be taken in stride by the experienced performers, save perhaps Signor Marchesi, who had proven very exact about the accommodations he needed in order to perform. But a disruption might confuse her foundlings and throw them into disorder.
That was the reason that, earlier that day, when it had come time to ask for a change in the program for her own benefit—so she might perform along with her foundlings—Lucasta’s courage had failed her. There was simply too much fuss already, with her being gone so long and having to make so many decisions at the last minute. In all fairness, she couldn’t burden everyone who had helped her with a request to showcase her vanity.
There would be other times to perform. And she would. Performing was all she had left to her now, after she’d sacrificed everything else. She wouldn’t have Aunt Cornelia’s inheritance, not that she’d hoped for it anyway, but most certainly not now that she was revealed to be illegitimate. Trevor and Gale had both agreed there would be no more talk of marriage. She was free of their pursuits at least.
And she had already rejected Jem, though it made her feel she’d drunk acid. Every other minute, she regretted her decision and wanted to send him a note vowing she didn’t know what had possessed her and she’d be happy to be his bride. She’d turned down the opportunity to spend her life with the man shewantedto spend her life with, and for what? Nothing but speculation and the fear that she might grow bitter and resentful if she gave up her ambitions to marry him.
How foolish could she be? The chances that she would make her living on the stage were slim to none. Competition was fierce, that life was difficult, and she had no highly placed patrons to use their influence on her behalf. She could indeed found a music conservatory, and with no husband to concern hershe could run it as she wished. She might always be poor and struggling in that life; would she really choose that struggle over ease and comfort and wedded bliss with Jem?
But when she opened her mouth to say the words that might bring him back to her, she couldn’t force them out. Something in herknewthat she was not the kind who could nobly self-sacrifice to make others happy. She could say she would give up her dream of performing in order to marry him, and any girl with two wits to rub together would.
But Lucasta knew herself. She knew, lamentably, her own inability to bend. And she also knew what she believed, and what—and whom—she loved.
Her Aunt Patience had confessed openly that she was Lucasta’s mother, but Lucasta’s heart had not softened toward her, other than to pity the actions of a desperate woman, grasping to keep the man she loved. The news changed nothing about her childhood nor her feelings about it.
Felicity and Laurence Lithwick had been her loving and devoted parents. Felicity Lithwick had been the tender bosom Lucasta sobbed her childhood woes upon. Felicity Lithwick had held her infant hand as she learned to walk. Felicity Lithwick had taken Lucasta to the church and waited patiently for hours, knitting and talking with fellow parishioners, while Lucasta practiced on the church organ.
Felicity Lithwick had sewed Lucasta’s clothes, blistered her cuts and bruises, cooked her favorite pudding for her birthday, sat up with her when the night terrors came, and gave her a mother’s sacred blessing on her deathbed, before the fever left her insensible. Nothing about the reality of her birth made Lucasta feel any closer to Patience Pevensey, who had been a distant, disapproving, unpleasant part of their household for so many years.
And if she couldn’t find a bit of softness in her heart for the woman who had given her to her true parents, Lucasta knew she was right in believing that she would eventually come to resent giving up her musical ambitions for Jem. She loved him and she would love their family, but something in her would sicken and die if she could not reach for her heart’s deepest desire.
She would become spoiled and bitter, unable to fully appreciate or enjoy anything around her, just like Patience had in the years when the Baron had rejected her. And she would be no fit mother, no true wife for Jem, if she begrudged what she had given up.
Knowing she’d hurt Jem made her limbs heavy and she moved as if in a fog, but the preparations had been finished, and the concert was beginning. All she needed was to keep moving until the night was over, and then she would deal with the next day when it came. The distractions of the concert held off the full realization of the blow she had dealt her own heart. In spurning Jem she had cut off a limb, and in time the full pain would hit her.
Yet she had been right to sever herself. She couldn’t offer him what he truly craved, acceptance and belonging in thehaut ton. She was the daughter of an immigrant vicar and now she wasn’t even of respectable birth, the bare least he could ask for in a wife. She would struggle to become a hostess and a marchioness and a peer’s wife with causes and influence of her own.
He would be disappointed and he would come in time to resent her for these things, when he put so much stock in the opinions of society. She couldn’t bear losing his regard. And if she wasn’t willing to make one small sacrifice—of a possibility only, not even something she possessed already—to be the wife he wanted and needed, then she didn’t deserve him.
The knowledge hurt, and it would hurt all the more deeply when she had time to analyze it. For now she walked about withthe blade buried in her heart, suspecting that blood and pain would follow when she had time to yank it out.
Signor Marchesi strode onto the balcony overlooking the chapel and the crowd gasped to see him. He nodded and dipped his head, acknowledging the prolonged applause. Lucasta took the opportunity to whisper to Benedicta, “What instruments will we need for the new performers?”
“The pianoforte only, they said. The pieces aren’t long. But the guests are special.”
Lucasta sighed. “Very well. We’ll have one of the governors announce the change to the program after the intermission. The news will go over better coming from one of them.”
Signor Marchesi began to sing, and for all the hurt that awaited her later, the calm joy that flooded her told Lucasta she’d made the right decision. Music was her life’s blood.
Being part of this performance, even in the smallest way—seeing the joy on the faces of her foundlings, who lined the benches of the organ balcony with their neat gowns and caps and white scarves pinned to their bodices—seeing the expressions on the faces of the audience visible within the circle of golden light cast by the many-candled chandeliers—Lucasta knew that everything she’d sacrificed was worth it to have her music. Jem had told her it would be a sin to hide her gifts from the world, and he was right.
She would miss Jeremiah Falstead, that she knew. Not a day of her life would go by that she wouldn’t regret losing the chance to be with him. But giving up her voice to be the quiet, mannerly lord’s wife, to be constantly concerned over what would make her talked about, to pursue her music only as a hobby or an entertainment and put it aside as if it were not her breath and her soul—that would hurt worse. At least she had spared them all that.
