‘My aunt sent me to London for a season and we were introduced. I imagined myself in love with him.’
Madly, deeply, wildly in love. She had begged her uncle to permit the marriage. He had tried to warn her but she would not hear a word against him. Anthony had offered for her, her aunt approved, and her uncle could only agree. Like the smuggled romances she had read at school, she would marry Anthony and live happily ever after.
‘Anthony needed an heiress and he got what he wanted: a wealthy wife with a good dowry.’
‘And you?’
‘I escaped my aunt’s cold house for a gilded cage of another making.’ She could not keep the bitterness from her words.
When she raised her eyes to look at him, she saw the undisguised shock in his face and said with a hollow laugh, ‘That is how it is done, Lord Somerton, and if you have any sense you will do something similar. Find yourself a wealthy wife and restore the fortune of the Somertons. I think I know you well enough to know you will not squander the windfall the way Anthony did.’
She could hear the acrimony in her voice but felt powerless to prevent it.
He frowned, his gaze burning into hers through the gloom of the carriage as he said, ‘When I wed, Lady Somerton, it will not be for the sake of a convenient business arrangement.’
‘Then you are a romantic, Sebastian.’
Once she had been a romantic. At the school for young ladies she had been sent to, like the other girls, she had sighed over distant, unattainable young men and buried her nose in unsuitable novels, but after a few months of marriage, she had turned her thoughts to loftier ideals. If there was nothing to be done about her marriage, perhaps in some small way, she could help other women.
Now she sat in a coach with a man who professed that he would only wed for love and wondered what real love was. How did it feel? How did you know when you were in love? She knew it had not been the breathtaking desperation she had felt when the devilishly handsome Anthony Kingsley sauntered into a room.
Had it been the happiness she had known in those months after William’s birth when Anthony had sloughed off his veneer of callousness and indifference and had been attentive to her every wish? There had been no visits to London. He had stayed at Brantstone. They had laughed together and, once again, her heart lifted when he walked into the room.
William’s death had ended all of that. When she had needed him the most he had withdrawn from her, retreated to London and his old life. On the few occasions he had returned to Brantstone, the visits were marked with deliberate cruelty and long visits to Lady Kendall.
‘Isabel?’ Sebastian’s voice jerked her out of her maudlin reverie. ‘Did I say something out of turn?’
She shook her head. ‘I was just thinking that love did not help your parents, Lord Somerton. Your father disinherited, and your mother cast out of her family.’
He rested a long finger against his cheek and leaned on his hand.
‘I cannot answer for my parents, Isabel. I never knew them together but I do know my mother found both love and happiness with the Reverend Alder. That was the pattern of my childhood, and that is all I ask for my children. To be brought up with two parents who both love and respect each other.’
‘You ask a lot, Sebastian.’ Isabel shook her head. ‘In my experience, romantic love is a foolish concept.’
He tilted his head to one side. ‘My cousin has a great deal to answer for, Isabel, to have left you so wounded and bitter.’
Was it so obvious?
She straightened her shoulders and shrugged. ‘No, Sebastian, you’re wrong. I have a title and status in society, even if I have no money to my name. As for love, I’ve nothing to compare. Even when they lived, my parents spent little time in my company. In Jamaica I was raised by the slaves and then an aunt and uncle who kept their distance. That was my lot in life, and I accepted it. Had Anthony not died when he did, I would have endured.’
‘Endured? Endured is what I did on the Peninsula, Lady Somerton. It is not my idea of marriage.’
‘It is marriage in our class, Sebastian. And it is as well you learn that now or you will find yourself equally as cynical before long.’
His mouth tightened. ‘If that is indeed what I am to expect, it is a bleak outlook and it is as well that I was not raised of your class. I do know what it is to love and be loved. My wife—’ His voice caught and he looked away.
She looked up at him, remembering his fevered cry for Inez.
‘Your wife?’ she prompted, inviting his confidence.
He responded with a brusque, ‘She died.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
It seemed an inadequate response for what she took to be a deep and gnawing loss.
He took a deep breath and glanced back at her. ‘It was a long time ago.’
