“My dear boy. I would positively adore meeting her. But I am to travel to Italy tomorrow.” She paused, her gaze drifting. “I am accompanying Auersee.”
Her newest lover, no doubt.
“I am very much in love with him.”
Ah. Of course. He repressed a harsh comment. After a moment, he said, “I suppose you shall not be back for the wedding, either.” He kept his voice light.
“When is it?”
“In the summer.”
“Ah.” She tilted her head aside, pondering. “I would very much like to be. But I might be in Rome by that time. Oh! I have just the idea. Why do you not come and visit me there? Together with your wife. I should like that very much. I think.” She smiled again, that empty smile that never reached her eyes. “What do you think, Georg? Would that not be fabulous?” She clasped her hands together.
He regarded his mother in silence. “It would be fabulous indeed.”
She gave him another smile. “How wonderful, Georg. Let us do that, then. But I must leave now. My dearest loveis awaiting me.” She gathered her shawl and drifted out of the room.
He knew he was not to see her again for a year, or longer.
And that, Georg told himself almost savagely as he poured himself a drink, was precisely why he refused to believe in passion and love.
He walked homefrom his mother’s residence, sending his coachman ahead. It was snowing again, but not the pretty, flurrying kind that drifted through the air; this was sleet, the sort that stuck to his woollen overcoat and turned to mush underfoot. His boots and trousers would be splattered before he arrived. He did not mind it.
He did not know what, exactly, he’d expected from visiting his mother. Or why he’d imagined it could have turned out any differently than it had. Still, the sinking feeling of disappointment settled over him, familiar as an old wound, the same that had haunted his childhood.
Cursing softly, he stepped straight into a puddle and paused, staring at the water as it slid off his Hessian boots.
When it came to women, his mother had dominated his life through her absence. He had not been fully aware of it until now. His resistance to forming close attachments; his refusal to believe in love. She had constantly been in love with all sorts of men. Just never with him. Him, she seemed to regard as a sort of accessory that she did not entirely know what to do with. Dispensable, and better out of the way.
The image of his bride floated again in front of his mind. Evie, with her wide, gentle mouth tilted up and a glowing, hopeful look in her eyes.
She clearly wanted things he could not give. Love, and all that.
He had made it clear early on that he was not the one to give it.
Seeing that light again in her eyes on the night of their betrothal had left a sense of disquiet in him, a pang he could not quite account for. And the odd desire to live up to it.
Evie, his bride, who was so very different from his mother, or from any other woman he’d ever met. He was guarding himself from her as though she were the sum of all enemy forces.
Which was, of course, absurd.
He took a turn into the street where his town house was located. He had preferred to rent it, separate from the family residence where his mother was currently staying. It was his bachelor quarters, his safe haven; he’d not allowed any woman in it. If he were honest, he’d not allowed any woman inside his immediate private sphere at all, and that did not only include his home. He’d drawn a wall so high, so impenetrable, that no one was able to see beyond it, save for Julius and Klemens.
He paused in front of the heavy, oak door, wondering whether he would make an exception with Evie. Whether that would not make his life so much easier, more bearable. Whether it would finally lift the burden.
What burden, confound it?
He shook his head and wiped the moisture from his coat, half amused, half vexed with himself.
“Her ladyship, Lady Evangeline, is here to see you, Your Excellency,” his butler said as he took his hat. “She is awaiting you in the drawing room.”
Ah.
There it was, that immediate lightening of, confound it, what was it exactly? An easing, a lifting of some sort.
Gladness.
His bride had come to visit him. He glanced down at his sleet-damp coat, his mud-spattered boots, and ran a hand briefly over his jaw. He was not, by any measure, in a state to receive a lady. He ought to change. Shave, possibly. Take a bath.
