They both watched Mina go into the house, hand in hand with her nursemaid.
“Shall we keep walking?” Henry asked. He did not want to end this time with her.
“Yes,” she said.
He turned and led her away from the house.
“I hope I have not ruined this beautiful day for you, Miss Beasley.”
“No, of course not. I only hope I haven’t— No, I know I have overstepped. I let my feelings carry me away. You did not ask for my advice, but I was very generous with it anyway.”
“You meant well.” She always meant well. She could only mean well. It would be impossible for her to do otherwise. “But shall we talk of other things?”
“I would talk of anything with you,” she said.
He hoped that was true. They wandered, and she asked about his life before he became the earl, before he married. He had already told her the stories from his time in the army that were fit for her ears, and he knew she had wanted to go to London, so he told her about his visits there when he was a youth. About the crowds of people, the theaters, the museums, the shops.
He remembered. “The Manwaring Brothers want you to write to them in London.”
“Oh?” She did not seem interested, and he was glad in the most childish, selfish way.
He then told her about the wonders of Vauxhall Gardens and the fireworks there. He did not have her gift for making pictures with words, but he did his best to describe the spectacle of a night sky full of falling embers. He wanted her to see it, and he thought she did.
But he had unthinkingly steered them towards the mausoleum, to where Diana and Hal lay. And his brother and his nephew and his parents and so many other Delameres.
He hoped she might think the building was just another folly, but she knew what it was.
“I loved my mother,” she said thoughtfully as they turned away from the mausoleum and towards the lake. “But when she died, it was a relief. And not just because it ended her suffering. It ended some of mine.”
“You had been nurse to her for many years.” Andmother-in-her-stead to five boys for many more years before that. Only Susannah could have borne up under it.
“Yes, true love is not poetry or heroic deeds. It’s emptying endless chamber pots.” She made a face and laughed, and although he did not think it humorous, he almost laughed, too.
For the first time, he acknowledged what he had known since his arrival home. Henry Delamere might not survive Susannah Beasley with his heart intact.
Twelve
At the feasting table, the concubine sat on her king’s left when custom would have her sit on his right.
Her king did not object. Indeed, he would not let her change positions.
Because, during a long feast, the concubine often relieved her boredom by putting her right hand in his lap.
—The Concubine and Her King.Unpublished MS.
Her bedchamber held what the housekeeper Mrs. Rumney said was an escritoire but what Susannah would have called a desk. It was of mahogany, very fine and feminine, with long tapered legs, and Susannah had taken to writing there at night.
She would spend an hour or two after dinner with the earl, but it seemed far too risky to talk into the night, too perilous to sit with him as the dark closed in around them because that could only lead to her thinking about being in the dark withhim in other ways. So she went to her room and told herself stories and wrote them down.
But she did not write of Tommy Treadwell and his new adventures. She wrote about a woman who cared for a man of great power and great sadness. This woman tended her love the way Susannah wanted to tend to Henry.
It was not the same kind of tending she had given her brothers.
She wrote all her yearning out, and, in the light of day, she could congratulate herself on having her own adventure and not wasting her precious time at Bledsoe Park with wishing for what could never be.
They planned a picnic and chose a shady spot under an enormous oak not far from the house. Henry—he was Henry more and more to her every day, but she must not slip up and call him that—saw they’d forgotten to bring anything to drink and insisted he be the one to walk back and fetch the lemonade.
While Susannah and Mina spread out the blanket and took the sandwiches from the hamper, Mina told Susannah about the search for a grandmother and how a great and powerful marchioness—who was Mina’s great-great-aunt, think of that, Miss Beasley—was searching out a wife for the earl.
