Page 81 of The Luckiest Lady in London

Her cheek tingled until well past midnight.

* * *

A week before Christmas Eve, a freezing rain fell. Louisa’s husband strongly cautioned all the guests to remain indoors, to minimize the risk of unpleasant spills.

With the usual shooting crowd and the usual walking crowd all stuck inside, Louisa couldn’t seem to take a step outside her own rooms without running into someone with whom she must make pleasant small talk.

Late in the morning she found herself climbing up to the schoolroom. At least there she could be sure of being alone. Or so she thought, only to see Felix standing before the window, his hands in the pockets of his trousers, looking down.

He turned around.

Several of the wall sconces had been lit, but it was the kind of overwhelmingly dreary day that seemed to sap all warmth and brightness from such minor flames. The room felt grey and anemic, and yet he…he seemed to be illuminated by mysterious sources, bright and vivid against a receding backdrop.

She should have uttered an apology and made herself scarce; instead, she entered and closed the door behind her.

“Anything I can do for you, my dear?” he asked.

She cast about for something to say that wouldn’t make it seem as if she had been drawn in despite her better judgment. “I understand Mr. Weston and Mr. Harris have gone out, against your advice.”

“And taken two of my best horses with them, those young hooligans.”

“Will they be all right?”

“I certainly hope so. It would be hazardous to send out a search party in this weather.” He moved to the desk and closed a notebook that had been lying open. “If you’d like to use the schoolroom, I will be glad to see myself out.”

She chose not to give a direct answer, but pointed her chin at the notebook. “Were you in the middle of something?”

“Trying to time a particular lesson.”

She noticed only then that the standing blackboard to the side of the desk was full of equations and that he held a watch in his hand—he seemed to have already devoted a monumental number of hours to these not-yet-begun lessons. The awful tug at her heart was one of both pain and painful pleasure.

“And does this particular lesson require you to study the weather?” she said, trying not to betray the more turbulent of her emotions.

“It might, when you are solving problems at the board.” He pointed to the bigger blackboard that hung on the wall.

She approached the newly repainted blackboard and examined its currently spotless surface. When she solved those future problems, would he be standing next to her, his scent of summer rain distracting her from what she needed to do?

It was some time before she realized that she had put her hand on the blackboard to feel its texture, in a motion that might be termed a caress. In the silence, there was only the pitter-patter of the rain and his irregular intakes of breath.

She pressed her lips together and dropped her hand. Without turning around, she asked the question that had troubled her for days. “When we spoke in the gallery some time ago, you said something about your mother. That she did not quite understand that, in her wrath, she was punishing herself as well.”

A beat of silence. “What of it?”

“She was punishing herself as well, you said. So whom else did she punish?”

A longer stretch of silence. “She would have preferred to punish her father, I believe, for forcing her into a marriage she did not want. But he died almost before her honeymoon ended, so it was my father who bore the brunt of her anger, for his mistake of taking his suit to her father when she’d already refused him.”

She picked up a piece of chalk from the trough beneath the blackboard. “What did she do? Ignore him?”

He sighed. “Has anyone ever told you that you are an immensely good person, my love? That your idea of punishment amounts to no more than a pointed spurning? My father’s punishment was the belief my mother instilled in him that I was most likely not his flesh and blood—an idea made plausible by the fact that I resembled him not at all.”

She clutched the chalk in her hand. She could not accept cruelty of such magnitude, of deploying one’s own child as an instrument of vengeance.

And him, caught in the middle of his mother’s rage and his father’s misery.

As she turned around to face him, someone rapped at the door, startling them both.

“My lord!” came Mr. Sturgess’s urgent voice. “Mr. Harris’s horse has returned to the stables without him, sir.”