She heard herself say softly: “Very well.”
He hesitated. Nodded once, shortly.
Then turned and strode off deeper into the little wood.
She watched him go.
Slowly, slowly she turned toward the cheerful voices of the people she’d known all her life.
Chapter Twenty-One
She had the sense that she had been talked about.
Their expressions—rather gentle, worried, a trifle indulgent, charged with some sort of secret understanding—gave her a hint of what her own expression might be. Her hair and skirts might have been restored to order, but internally she was nothing but a pulsating thundercloud. That flush in her cheeks could well be taken for temper.
“Mr. Cassidy thought he saw a... a hedgehog... and wanted to have a look.” She explained Hugh’s absence this way. It was met with bemused silence.
“Americans,” the earl said sympathetically, finally.
“I told him I’d like to go back with you. He said we oughtn’t to wait for him.”
If things were not going at all well with Mr. Cassidy, they were all on her side. That much was clear. She saw no judgment, no glee. Perhaps there was a little hope. Her engagement was all of two days old, after all. And they were her friends, people who loved her, and she felt the softness of their care as they all moved back toward the house.
She knew a little mordant amusement imagining how the disappearance of Hugh Cassidywould brighten the worlds of a group of benignly spoiled aristocrats.
Just the thought of Hugh made her being contract with a pang like a lightning strike. Swift in brilliance and thrill.
And how much darker than before it left everything when it was done.
How odd to feel soothed as her family surrounded her like a cradle and Hugh echoed in her body. If she raised her hands to her face now, she could smell him on her hands.
She did that just now. It went to her head like a drug. She nearly stumbled.
Giles fell in beside her, and that was comforting, too.
The rest of their party fell back just a little.
Subtle!
Despite herself, there was no denying it was comfortable and familiar, and just those two things began to soothe her roiled emotions, if only just a little. Her feet on the grass, the sun above, even the birds singing were probably the descendants of the same birds who had sung at Heatherfield for generations.
“Lilly... Lillias... it has been such a pleasure seeing you here again,” he said.
“It’s always a pleasure to spend time with you, Giles.”
“One could even imagine a lifetime of beautiful days just like this. Don’t you think?”
She managed to smile up at him.
He smiled back at her.
At least she could make someone smile. There was some relief to be had in that.
He was her dear friend and she loved him, she did. She truly did.
She struggled not to turn her head to look behind her.
And soon the house loomed into view again, as it had hundreds of times before.
