That gave Evie pause. “He didn’t?”
“No. If you are looking for a word, I believe he is in the music room. At least, that’s where he was the last time I walked by.”
It was all Evie could do not to jump with excitement. “Thank you, Mrs. Grimsby!”
“Wait!” the housekeeper said with some alarm. “He’s not–”
But whatever Mrs. Grimsby said was drowned out by the excited elated buzzing in Evie’s ears as she picked up her skirts and dashed off down the hall.
She found the door to the music room slightly ajar. Out of habit born from eavesdropping on her sisters, she peered through the tiny gap in the wood before she announced her presence…and all of the blood drained from her face at what she saw.
At first, she didn’t believe it.
She blinked.
Rubbed her eyes.
Even pinched herself again, just to make sure she wasn’t dreaming.
But this was no dream.
It was a waking nightmare.
For there, in the middle of the room on a blue velvet sofa, sat Lady Martha Smethwick. And beside her, down on bended knee, was Weston.
Biting her lip to stifle her cry of dismay, Evie stumbled back from the door.
And then she ran.
All the way to London.
Chapter Twenty-Two
This time, thecarriage’s axle didnotbreak (a small miracle but, at this point, Evie would take whatever she could get) and she arrived in England’s busiest city by late afternoon. She had the driver bring her straight to Mrs. Privet’s Boarding House; the last place she knew Joanna to have been with any certainty.
It was strange to walk through the front door and into the velvet walled lobby with its sagging floors and moth chewed furniture. In some aspects, it felt as if only yesterday she and her sister had come here to request lodging. Fresh off the ship that had ferried them across the Atlantic, they’d been energetic and hopeful. Joanna more so than Evie, as she’d still been queasy from spending the better part of a month spitting up into a bucket. But they had both been looking forward to what London might bring them.
For Joanna, the secrets of her past.
For Evie, a handsome duke to marry, as if they were low-hanging fruit that she had only to pluck off the tree. A notion that she’d found herself quickly disabused of. While dukes were plentiful in all of the romantic novels that she’d occasionally stolen from Joanna’s bedside table, it immediately became clear that their abundance in real life had been greatly exaggerated.
The one thing Eviehadn’tbeen searching for?
Love.
Which made it an even crueler twist of fate that it was the one thing she’d found.
As she rang the bell on Mrs. Privet’s desk and waited for someone to come down the stairs to assist her, she could not help but reflect on how different she was now than she’d been then. If she were to stand in front of a mirror that somehow revealed all of her innermost thoughts and desires, she doubted if her past self would even recognize the woman that she’d become.
How vain she had been! Vain, and foolish, and appallingly arrogant to ever believe that she wanted a life without love. That money and social clout were the most important things a person could have, and everything was secondary. Including her own happiness. For while she might have had the respect and admiration of her peers had she married for wealth and status alone, she would have eventually lost the respect and admiration she had for herself.
And she never would have found true happiness.
The poets were right, it appeared.
Pompous literary lyrists that they were.
In the words of Alfred Tennyson, it reallywasbetter to have loved and lost then to have never loved at all. A difficult lesson that she was glad to have learned. For even though her heart was broken, the pain was a sign that she’d had a heart to break.
