It was just that he knew how Mr. Cassidy looked at Lillias when he thought no one was watching. That mixture of wonderment and fury mixed with something like tender amusement and... awe. He suspected it was precisely the way Cassidy looked at the Hudson River Valley.
And he recalled how he had leaped to shield herwhen that fateful curtain opened. Had touched her elbow in the ballroom. Helped her into carriages. A father notices these things.
And he’d of course done the absolutely right thing by Lillias, at the cost of his own dreams.
The earl looked down. He kept returning to the last sentence of Mr. Cassidy’s letter.
He rubbed his forehead, where he was certain another wrinkle was forming at this very moment.
He did not look forward to explaining any of this to his wife.
He sighed gustily and handed the letter back to Giles.
“You know I hold you in the utmost esteem, Giles,” he said slowly, only a little ironically, “and I think of you almost as a son. It would be a fine thing to have you as a member of our family and I see no objection to this match. No settlement funds have been transferred to Mr. Cassidy as of yet. As entanglements go, it is one easily enough undone.”
If this was not precisely the warm and wholehearted endorsement Giles had hoped to hear—he’d envisioned the earl exaggeratedly mopping his brow at the notion of ridding himself of the difficult American—it was understandably English and understated.My mother used to shoot dinner from the porch.Good heavens. Giles would shudder every time he remembered those words in Mr. Cassidy’s voice.
“But...” the earl said. “...I have two stipulations. The first one is that I leave the decision entirely in Lillias’s hands.”
Giles nodded. He anticipated no difficulty there. Lillias had been all brooding silence last night andall listless silence this morning. She wasnota person of passions and moods, typically. So this meant she was done with Mr. Cassidy, of a certainty, and required only rescuing from her predicament. What a pleasure it would be to rescue her.
He didn’t share with the earl the remarkable conversation he’d had with Cassidy the previous evening. That was between the two men, and he was certain Cassidy would like it to remain that way.
The grace of Cassidy’s gesture wasn’t something Giles would soon forget.
“And the second is... I request that you wait to speak to her until after we return to London and have moved out of our fine accommodations at The Grand Palace on the Thames and back into our townhouse. She’s had an eventful week and I do think she will be in a more receptive frame of mind. We will depart this morning from Heatherfield and you may set a date to speak to her in London a week hence. Are we understood, young Bankham?”
Giles thought about Lillias as a girl, riding her horse at breakneck speed, shooting a target dead center just yesterday, sliding down a banister, wading into a creek. For all her delicate beauty, she’d never struck him as fragile. Perhaps she was now. He felt even fonder of her at the notion.
“Thank you, sir,” Giles said. “Understood.”
“I’ll miss it,” Claire said wistfully.
Lillias stared numbly out the carriage window at the little gated park with its valiant sturdy greenery, the shining white building, The Grand Palaceon the Thames’s sign with its ghostly “rogue” still visible, the modest gargoyles. The rooftop where she’d sat and looked out over a part of London she would otherwise have never seen, with a man she would otherwise have never met let alone kissed, beneath stars, mist, and a half-moon.
She would not likely see any of them ever again. This strange, mad interlude in her life was over. Things would now go back to the way they were, and that’s the way they would remain, forever.
Of course, nothing had explicitly been said. That wasn’t the English way.
But Giles had said to her gently, after breakfast, “I’d like to call upon your father, Lillias, on Friday at five o’clock on St. James Square. I hope this is happy news to you.”
Lillias had stared at him.
So Hugh had indeed spoken to Giles. And had apparently reassured Giles that he did not intend to run him through if she should wish to end the engagement.
She wondered what on earth had actually been said.
“It’s always a pleasure to see you,” she said. Truthfully.
By this time next year she would be married to Giles. Lady Bankham. One day mistress of Heatherfield.
It was everything she’d dreamed of. She supposed she even had Hugh to thank for it. It had been a remarkable detour in her life, and one day, perhaps, she would look back upon it and understand why it needed to happen.
Their driver snapped the ribbons and the Vaughn carriage lurched forward, out of the little courtyard, away from The Grand Palace on the Thames, forever.
By the time they’d gotten to the little bridge near the Barking Road, they found themselves stopped by what appeared to be bedlam. A clot of carriages and a crowd of milling men on horseback and on foot, shouting and gesturing wildly at each other, lamps held aloft.
There was a polite knock on the carriage door.
