Fleur sat.
But she turned her head aside sharply when he would have kissed her.
“Give me a chance, Isabella,” he said. “You are so beautiful.” He touched the hair at her neck with light fingers. “And I mean nothing dishonorable. Heron House was your father’s. Your mother was the baroness. You could have it all back for yourself.I would send my mother and Amelia to live elsewhere if you do not wish to live with them. Give me a chance.”
“Matthew,” she said, turning her head to look at him, “can you not understand? I do not love you. I do not feel the sort of regard for you that would make me a suitable wife for you. Can we not just go back and tell the truth of what happened and remain second cousins at some distance from each other? Can you not let me learn to respect you even if I cannot love you?”
“Love can grow,” he said. “Give me a chance.”
She shook her head.
He placed his hands loosely about her neck, as he had done once before, tightened them a little beneath her chin, and jerked upward. And he lowered his mouth to hers.
She waited for him to finish before getting to her feet and stepping outside the temple to look down at the lake. And for the first time there was an anger in her to equal the terror, a total weariness with being a puppet on a string, with being quite out of control of her own life.
“I won’t marry you, Matthew,” she said, “or be your mistress. And I will not spend any more time with you here at Willoughby Hall. You must do what you will, but that is my decision.”
And she closed her eyes and remembered his hands at her throat, the tightening, the upward jerk. Her breath came faster.
If it ever comes to that, he had said to her once—his grace, that was—if there is ever no one else to whom you can turn, then come to me. Will you?
There was a yearning in her to do just that—to tell him all, to feel those strong arms about her once more, to hear that steadily beating heart beneath her ear again, to unload all her burdens onto someone else.
And then she would watch his look of disdain, revulsion, condemnation. And she would be alone again, as she had always been alone ever since the death of her parents. The idea that there was someone who might care and help was anillusion. She had known that she could not go to Daniel; she knew now that she could not go to the Duke of Ridgeway. She was old enough, she had lived long enough to know that.
Matthew’s hands closed on her shoulders from behind. “You will change your mind,” he said. “We will give it a few more days, Isabella.”
She bit her lip instead of replying as she had been about to do. Would she? Change her mind? The alternative was so very appalling.
“We should return to the house,” he said. “You need to do some thinking, don’t you?”
When they entered the great hall from the horseshoe steps sometime later, his grace happened to be crossing it. He looked at her and at Matthew tight-lipped.
“Miss Hamilton?” he said. “I thought you were upstairs with my daughter.”
“I have been walking with Lord Brocklehurst, your grace,” she said.
He nodded curtly. “She was eager to talk to you,” he said. “You had better go up without delay.”
“Yes, your grace,” she said, curtsying. She fled from the hall and up to the nursery, her cheeks burning from the look of cold disapproval on his face. And she wondered if Matthew would explain to him that the invitation had come from him with her grace’s permission.
She looked forward so much to the following day and a whole afternoon away from Willoughby.
MASTERTIMOTHYCHAMBERLAIN WAScelebrating his seventh birthday with his brother and sister, Lady Pamela Kent from Willoughby Hall, and five other children from the neighborhood, including the vicar’s two.
It was entirely a blessing for their sanity, Mr. Chamberlain told Fleur when she arrived with her charge, that the weatherhad decided to cooperate. They would move outside once Timmy had shown the children the nursery, which they had all seen before, and the large bag of colored wooden building bricks that was his birthday present.
Miss Chamberlain greeted Fleur with a smile. “You would not guess from listening to him, would you, Miss Hamilton,” she said, “that the idea for a party was all Duncan’s? He revels in such occasions.”
Mr. Chamberlain grimaced as Fleur laughed. It had not taken her longer than her first day of acquaintance with him to realize that he quite doted on his children.
She was feeling wonderfully happy. She and Lady Pamela had left almost immediately after luncheon and would not return until almost dinnertime. And his grace had not come.
“Timothy had bricks. I am going to get Papa to buy me some,” Lady Pamela announced to Fleur in a shriek when the children came hurtling downstairs with demands to be taken outside.
They played hide-and-seek and chasing and ball in the large grounds behind the house, and Mr. Chamberlain organized races of various kinds until several of the children were stretched out on the grass, panting, while the others shrieked more loudly than ever.
Miss Chamberlain formed them all into a large circle to play some singing games—“to quieten them down,” she explained to Fleur, who had helped with the races. “Duncan always fails to realize that tiring children does not necessarily quieten them, but frequently has just the opposite effect.”
