Lady Pemberthy stood up from the desk.
Her niece wasn’t there.
He might have laughed, if he’d been capable of such a thing. Wasn’t this just the opposite of what had happened on his first visit here? He’d asked for the aunt and been shown to the niece. Now it was the other way around. But why did that surprise him? Wasn’t everything about his life recently the opposite of what he wanted?
“Lord Cotereigh.” Lady Pemberthy curtsied, very polite, very formal, as though she wasn’t a daily visitor to his house and halfway towards becoming his new mother. But he’d hardly spoken to her since that fateful day, the last time they were here together in this house. Yes, he had been avoiding her, though he’d told himself it was a kindness to her and not because he was a coward.
“Lady Pemberthy.” He inclined his head, just as politely, just as formal. She was dressed in her old, ragged velvets again.Hernew clothes hadn’t been in the piles returned to him, but she was obviously refusing to wear them, a show of loyalty to her niece. “I hope you are well?”
“Perfectly well, my lord, thank you. And you?” The look she gave him was a knowing one. She already knew the answer.No, no he was not at all well.
He smiled, repeating, “Perfectly well. Thank you.”
She held her hands clasped demurely in front. And yet, for a rotund and shabbily dressed female, past middle age and below average height, there was something suddenly forbidding in her chill stillness. The small discourtesy of the short silence she allowed to pass might as well have been a queenly cut. She raised her plump, stout chin.
“I presume you are here on society business, my lord?”
For what other reason would he dare show his face?
“No, my lady. I am here to see Mrs Ardingly.”
Her clasped hands tightened, her rounded shoulders stiffening further. “My niece is not here.”
“When will she return?”
There was no kindness in the look she gave him. And kindness was such an essential part of her character that she seemed almost inhuman without it. “Next year. Perhaps.”
“Next…” The floor tipped under him, the tilting deck of a boat. Only an effort of will kept him standing.
“She has returned home to Sussex.”
Without saying goodbye?was the first stupid thought he had. Then the rest crowded in, too loud to hear.
Gone.
She’d gone.
His first instinct was to turn and run to his stables and call for his horse. But something held him still. A spear pinned him, hard and dreadful, realisation pinning him in place.
“She told me not to give you her direction, if you asked,” Lady Pemberthy said. Her words were dull, remote. A cold wind was blowing, muffling everything. “Though knowing her father’s profession, you could work it out easily enough. I only plead, on your honour as a gentleman, that you do not. Please respect my niece’s wishes, Lord Cotereigh. She does not want to see you ever again.”
Twenty-Seven
It was indeed duskby the time the familiar wooded hill of Winchelsea came into view. Madelaine had been leaning forward in her seat for some time, looking past the bobbing postillion to the road ahead, hands braced on the seat either side of her legs.
There was the church, squat and ancient. Her heart gave a strange leap, both forwards and back, up and down, as though it tried to split itself in two.
Or perhaps that was just the hours of the coach’s swaying travel. She was glad to tap on the glass window, drop it down, and call to the postillion to stop.
She would walk up the hill, she told him, getting out stiffly. It would spare the horses. He gave her an odd look, eyes flicking to the weight of the coach, to her luggage strapped aboard it, as though wondering what difference it would make. But gentry folk were gentry folk, so he touched his cap and urged the horses on to walk, straining, up the hill.
Madelaine paused, letting them get ahead. She would probably overtake them, knowing a shortcut, a footpath that wound up the steeper flank of the hill, through rabbit-bitten grass and humped tussocks, the cupped valley at her back holding the setting sun like a vase of amber. She hitched her skirts and began.
The parsonage was at the back of town anyway, the brown curve of the river cupping the rise to her left. She couldn’t see the sea from here on the northern slope. And it was a mile or so to the shore, the marshes starting at the bottom of the cliff on which Winchelsea stood. She could picture it, though. The light of the sea mellowed at this hour, sprinkled with bronze wave crests, the blinding mirror of liquid lead dimming as the sun moved over to light up a distant sea…a Caribbean sea…
She passed a copse of spindly pines. They did better here on the leeward side of the hill, protected somewhat from the fierce shore breezes. It was all softer here, domestic, really, compared to the wild marsh. Brambles were growing, green and vigorous, soon to be starred with white blossom. Their cousins, the wild roses, sprawled higher, prettier, reaching for the sun. Moss grew in the old flint walls of the first houses she passed. She turned right, onto the lane, hearing the coach some distance behind her, still straining up the hill.
Her thigh muscles burned. She had climbed quickly. Now she breathed hard, touching the trunk of an old oak as she passed, knowing every tree and branch that canopied the lane. And there…there was the turning on the right, her home at the end of it.
