Perhaps this—these furtive gestures, this little secret safety net he had built for her, the acts of service he performed as part of his role as MP—was the only way he could love now.
What if she’d said yes to his proposal? Would he have been hers forever?
But it seemed to her there was a part of him that would not allow her to love him or himself to love her and she simply couldn’t imagine a life lived that way. How empty it would be.
She’d once thought being married to him would be like yearning after something while it was clutched in your fist. Somehow she’d known from the first.
And surely a man who could speak so eloquently and at length about so many things could get out those three important little words if they were true?
Perhaps he hadn’t said them because they simply weren’t.
Perhaps he could only love once, and he had spent his love on Anna.
Because if he was willing to fight for everyone and everything else, why hadn’t he fought for her?
He hadn’t. Which must mean that he could do without her.
Leaving London was the right thing to do, she understood.
Still, in essence, she was ruined, in every sense of the word. She had been ruined even before the gossip item. Because she could not now imagine herself with any other man.
Yet practicalities demanded that one day she do exactly that.
Lady Wisterberg was undaunted. She gave Catherine a little thigh pat.
“There, there, dear,” she soothed. “You’ll be home soon. The gossip will stop—eventually. Your aunt and I will see about finding a landed country gentleman for you. Perhaps a nice widower who won’t care about any silly rumors.”
She handed Catherine a handkerchief, as the tears she could no longer contain spilled again.
Her father and Mrs. Cartwright were surprised and delighted when Catherine and her trunk appeared at the door of the home they all shared.
“I missed you both, and I missed the country. I had a wonderful time in London, and I made some nice friends, but this is where I want to be.”
“Well, you’re a sight for sore eyes and we’re happy you are here,” her father said comfortingly.
There was undeniable happiness in being the source of his happiness; her heart lifted a little.
“So are you, Papa!”
But to her alarm, he felt slighter in her arms when she hugged him. His white hair was longer and a little fluffier, as if he might drift away from her, like a cloud, at any moment.
But the most difficult part was that she could tell—by the way he’d studied her, eyebrows pitchedtogether—that her father knew she was lying in some fashion about why she was home, because he was no fool. And because he knew what grief looked like. It soaked into one’s bones, changed the way you walked and the rhythms of your speech. It hovered behind your expressions, no matter how much care you took to arrange your features in such a way as not to worry anyone else around you.
And if she hadn’t already known that she loved Dominic all along, the grief would have told her. Grief was the price—the gift—of love.
Her father didn’t press her for details. And she refused to say or do anything that would worry him.
And while she had local friends who were peacefully married; she could not imagine they could commiserate about London gossip, or tristes with a notorious baron in a carriage, or the garden of a mansion, or up against the wall of her cozy room.
The irony was that of all the confidants she could imagine, the only person with whom she could fully imagine discussing such a thing was with Lord Kirke.
So mainly she extolled the joys of The Grand Palace on the Thames, and she described in detail the fine houses at which all the balls took place, including the fact that all of them featured healthy potted plants.
She’d left the blue dress behind in her room at the boardinghouse.
In comparison to London, she found the quiet of the country somehow both deafening and as soothing as the coverlet at The Grand Palace on the Thames.
She’d arrived with her entire being ringing from a terrible blow, as if she had toppled from on high,from perhaps a desk. She let the familiar soft, green hills cool and comfort her until the tumult in her settled enough for something else to be clear:
