His mouth twitched. “I think it highly unlikely.”
Annabelle sighed. “Perhaps I’ll get a cat. Who knows, there might be an accident involving a bird cage.”
Alex laughed aloud and swung his legs down to the floor. “If you can get away with it, you have my blessing. But if you fail, expect a drumhead court-martial from Hattie.” He leaned over and brushed his sister’s hair. “I’m glad you’re here.”
“I always will be. I plan on cultivating the eccentricities suitable in a maiden aunt.”
“I will be highly surprised if I don’t have post office packets chasing me all over the Atlantic, begging for your hand.”
Annabelle wrinkled her nose. “I have decided that in the future I will prefer quality to quantity when it comes to courtship. Shall I ring for some tea?” Without waiting for a reply, she pulled the cord. If she wasn’t to have much more time with her brother, she intended to make the best of what was left.
* * *
The Earl of Radcliffe was feted and welcomed everywhere in the three weeks after his miraculous return home. He had always been a popular young man, and his apparent demise had been sincerely mourned. Though London was thin of company, he had numerous invitations, and Radcliffe House was flooded with letters from friends around the country rejoicing in his survival.
No longer quite the carefree young man about town, Charles regarded the furor with a slightly jaundiced eye. He would always be a sociable creature, but the forms of the beau monde mattered a good deal less to him than they had in the past. Nearly two years as a prisoner and a fugitive will concentrate the mind wonderfully, and matters that had seemed important in the past could only appear trivial now.
Whatwasimportant was family, and observation convinced him that something was seriously troubling his sister. No one would have guessed who didn’t know Christa as well as he did, but he sensed sadness under her bright manner.
Charles leaned against the door frame of the music room and watched her play the pianoforte, rippling out a bright sonata that he recognized as Viennese in origin. Christa made a charming picture in the early afternoon sun, every inch the society lady in her flowing high-waisted gown and her stylishly tousled black curls. As she finished the composition, she glanced up with a welcoming smile, then turned on the bench to face him.
“Good afternoon, Charles. Isn’t that a lovely bit of music? Broadwood’s English action piano has a much more powerful tone than the German instrument we had in Paris.”
The earl straightened up and entered the room, sitting down on a sofa where he could see her face clearly. “Yes, it has, and you play it very well. It must be all the practice you have been doing. In fact, you’ve been playing the pianoforte so much lately that I’m beginning to wonder if you’re going into a decline.”
Christa’s laughter was light, but she didn’t meet his eyes. “Why would I do that? I feel like a fairy princess. My family and fortune have been restored. What more could I ask?”
Charles decided on a direct approach. “That is exactly what I’ve been wondering. You just don’t seem the same.”
She looked at him levelly. “Areyouthe same as you were two years ago?”
“No, of course not,” he admitted. “I defy anyone to spend a year and a half in a filthy prison under sentence of death and come out the same. I’ll never be able to take the cut of a waistcoat or the turn of a card quite so seriously again. But that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy the pleasures of society.
“You, however, have walled yourself up in here like a hibernating bear. You’re in a position to take London by storm, yet you spend all your time reading or playing the piano or wearing out horses and grooms in Richmond Park.” Charles frowned as he studied her face. “I’m getting worried.”
Christa sighed and turned her head, one hand stroking the keyboard in absent accompaniment to her thoughts. She was grateful to the depths of her soul that her mother and brother were alive and well, and she herself restored to name and fortune. She would have made a good life for herself working with Suzanne, but only a fool would prefer such an existence to the freedom that wealth and position provided.
But all the wealth and family in the world could not heal the pain of losing Alex. Most of her life she had kept her emotions under firm control, responding to trouble with logic and laughter. Then Alex had created holes in her defenses that could be repaired only by him. Christa’s rational mind occasionally suggested that someday she might meet and love another man as much, but her heart flatly refused to believe it.
How could she possibly explain to Charles that when she had found she was not carrying Alex’s child, her intellectual reaction of relief had been swept away by a rending, primitive sense of loss that had shaken her to her bones? Christa knew that she couldn’t have Alex, but she hadn’t known how much she had hoped to have his child until the possibility was gone.
She glanced at Charles’s intent gray eyes and smiled inwardly. No, her mother might understand, but it was not the sort of thing one could explain to a protective big brother.
Christa was briefly tempted to confide in Charles, but the experience of loving Alex was too precious to share with anyone, and her foolish pride didn’t want to admit that the young Comtesse d’Estelle, the belle of Paris, had been unable to win the love of the one man she wanted. She doubted that Alex loved either Sybil Debenham or her, but his sense of obligation and commitment to the Peacock was stronger than the physical attraction he felt toward his sister’s maid.
She appreciated Charles’s concern, for it was good to have someone who cared enough to worry about her after being so long alone. Since her brother knew her too well to believe that all was well, she decided to tell him a portion of the truth. “I feel . . . disoriented, Charles. The last two years have been so strange. The first year was interminable, I felt entirely alone, and as if the world would never be right again.
“This last year has gone much more quickly, and most of the time I was happy. It was good to be busy and to make friends, to stand on my own feet. As my father told us both, there is dignity in work, and it gave me back myself.”
Christa moved her hands restlessly as she sought words to explain herself. “But in order to be a servant, I had tobecomea servant. I never forgot my old life, but I had completely convinced myself that it was gone beyond recall. If I had not truly believed that, I might have destroyed myself with self-pity and anger against the injustice of life.
“Even when it might have been to my advantage to speak of my birth, I never did.” She stopped abruptly. She had tormented herself with wondering if it would have made a difference if she had told Alex who she was that night in the library when he had asked her to become his mistress. Instead, her reflexive pride had sealed her lips, and Alex had turned to Sybil Debenham.
When Christa was sure her voice would be steady, she continued, “I find it strange now to be waited on, to be a lady of leisure. I look at your servants, and I understand their position in a way that was impossible to a wealthy aristocrat, no matter how liberal my education and sympathies. Can you imagine how that has changed the way I see the world?”
Charles considered seriously before answering. “I think so. In France, I shared a twenty-foot-square cell with two dozen men of all classes and ages. None of them except Jean-Claude Bohnet knew my background, and we were very much equal in that cell. Strength and compassion had nothing to do with breeding, and I can’t look at people now and see them as simply servants or peasants or tradesmen. Before, I had an abstract belief in equality, but now Iknowthat while I may be luckier than most men, I am inherently no better. Is that what you feel?”
“Yes, and the thought of going back to the frivolous games of polite society takes a good deal of getting used to.” Christa gave a sunny smile. “I promise that I shall not become a recluse, and I will learn again how to flirt and act the part of a young lady. But I am not ready yet.”
