Susanne clapped her hands. Alice turned away with a shrug. She probably would have done the same thing. But now, with her new circumstances, the wastefulness of butter-soft kid leather slippers being worn outside and the impracticality of hurt toes reigned supreme over fashion. Her charge was already peering out the front window.
“He’s here,” Susanne yelled to her mother who was still standing on the landing.
“I told you to stop yelling. Go on, then. His lordship needn’t come inside. We can relax our decorum a little now that first, second, and even third impressions have been made.”
With that, Alice found herself on the other side of the door, looking once more into the handsome face of Lord Diamond. An evening stretched before them in which she hoped to tamp down the stirrings she felt for him while trying to decide if he was playing false with Susanne.
The first inkling came when he managed to sit between them at the Gothic Hall, then proceeded to turn his head and ask her questions. Naturally, Susanne was also looking at her, but since she was on the far side of Lord Diamond, her charge took it upon herself to make moon eyes at the man’s left ear.
Susanne also sniffed him surreptitiously, something Alice wished to do, too, for the man must be wearing the most expensive and manly cologne ever to come out of a London perfumery.
“It will be mostly Handel tonight, I assume. And I hope we shall be treated to hisFuneral Anthem for Queen Caroline.”
“Afuneralanthem,” Susanne exclaimed. “How dreadful!”
“It’s a complex and passionate piece,” Alice told her. “It made many believe he and the queen were more than friends.”
“An entirely forbidden romance,” Lord Diamond remarked, his gaze flickering across her face.
“Yes,” she agreed, trying to calm her rapidly beating heart. “The piece was first heard in Westminster Abbey. The acoustics must have made it seem as though Heaven itself was mourning.”
“The acoustics?” Susanne asked, but neither did Lord Diamond’s head turn toward her, nor did Alice respond. She couldn’t take her eyes from his. “I doubt we shall hear the vocals tonight, but no matter, the music speaks for itself, written miraculously over the period of a single week.”
Shivers danced down her spine, and she leaned closer to him. “A week, can you imagine?”
“I cannot,” he whispered.
She could see her own twin images in his eyes and sat back.What had gotten into her?
“What areacoustics?” came Susanne’s question interrupting —thankfully— the mesmerizing moment.
As expected, the anthem was the third piece played. Not all the ode, of course, although Alice would have gladly sat through the entire length of it. As it was, she closed her eyes and let the music wash over her and seep through her, startled when tears pricked her eyes.
As a few rolled down her cheeks, she felt his lordship pat her gloved hand. And then Susanne said, too loudly, “It is rather dour. I think I prefer a tidy, sentimental song like ‘The Troubadour Was a Gallant Youth,’ or ‘Mary Anne.’”
Alice shook her head, but the young lady’s words had certainly pulled her from the somber melancholy. She snickered at Handel being compared to tediously simple, drawing-room music, sung so softly by young ladies one couldn’t hear it whileseated a few yards away. And then she heard Lord Diamond chuckle.
Unable to help herself, Alice started to laugh. It erupted out of her before she could clamp her hand over her mouth, drawing the attention of those around her.
Embarrassed but unable to stop, she rose and ran down the makeshift aisle on either side of which chairs had been set up in the venue.
Bursting through the doors, Alice ran across the Sydney Gardens’ main path toward the bowling green, where she leaned against an oak and tried to collect herself. However, after the uncontrollable laughter, she reverted to warm, salty tears and worse, to deep wracking sobs.
“Stop it!” she scolded herself, frightened by the wildly swinging depth of her emotions. “Alice, be still.” It was something her mother used to say when she was an active child.
“Alice?” came Lord Diamond’s voice. “Are you speaking to that tree by name?”
“No,” she said, slightly affronted and realizing he was close. “What are you doing here?”
“Gathering myself. I couldn’t stop laughing, so I followed you.”
“And Lady Susanne?” she asked.
“I told her to stay put.” He fell silent, and she was glad that in the dim light he couldn’t see her face, which was probably blotchy.
She knew she should insist they return at once to the Gothic Hall, but she needed a moment.Alone.
“Will you leave me, please?”
