One Night for Love (12 page)

Dolly laughed. “What funny jokes you make, my lady,” she said. “There are some I know as would kill for the curl in your hair. Look how it piles nice and stays high without falling like a loaf of bread when the oven door is opened too soon. And ooh, look, my lady, how it twists into ringlets without any rags or curling tongs.
I
would kill for this hair.”

Lily looked at the developing style in the looking glass, her eyes wide with astonishment. “How extraordinarily clever you are,” she said. “You have amazing skill, Dolly. I would not have thought it possible for my hair to look
tame.
”

Dolly flushed with pleasure and pushed the final pin into place. She picked up a small hand mirror from the dressing table and held it up at various angles behind Lily so that she could see the back of her head and the sides.

“That will do for tea, my lady,” she said. “For this evening we will need something more special. I will think of what to do. I hope your own maid does not arrive too soon, though I ought not to say so, ought I?” She was fluffing the short puffed sleeves of Lily’s dress as she talked, watching the effect in the looking glass. “There you are, my lady. You are ready whenever his lordship comes.”

It was not a comforting prospect. He was going to take her
to tea
. What did that mean exactly? But there was no time for reflection. Almost immediately there was a tap on one of the three doors of the dressing room and Dolly went to answer it—she seemed to know unerringly which one to open. Lily got to her feet.

He had changed out of his pale wedding clothes. He looked more familiar wearing a dark-green coat, though it was far more carefully tailored and form-fitting than his Rifleman’s jacket had been. He looked her over quickly from head to toe and bowed to her.

“You are looking better,” he said. “I trust you slept well?”

“Yes, thank you, sir,” she said, and grimaced. She
must
remember not to call him that.

“You were fast asleep when I looked in on you earlier,” he told her. “You are looking very pretty.”

“Thanks to Dolly,” she said, smiling at the maid. “She ironed my dress and tamed my hair. Was that not kind of her?”

“Indeed.” He raised his eyebrows. “You may leave us … Dolly.”

“Yes, my lord.” The maid curtsied deeply without raising her eyes to him and scurried from the room.

Well, Lily could understand
that
reaction. She had seen soldiers leave his presence in similar fashion—though they had not curtsied, of course—after he had turned his eyes on them. His men had always worshiped him—and been terrified of his displeasure. Lily had never felt the terror.

“My name is Neville, Lily,” he said. “You may use it, if you please. I am going to take you to the drawing room for tea. You must not mind. Several of my guests have already left so the numbers will not be quite overwhelming. They are mostly members of my family. I will stay close to you. Just be yourself.”

But
some
of those grand people she had seen last night and this morning would be there, gathered in the drawing room? And he was going to take her there to join them? How could she possibly meet them? What would she say? Or do? And what would they think of her? Not very much, she guessed. She had lived most of her life with the army and was well aware of the huge gap that had separated the men—her father included—from the officers. And here she was, an earl’s wife, making her first appearance at his
home on the very day he was to have married someone else—a lady from his own class, she did not doubt. It would be difficult to imagine a less desirable situation.

But all her life Lily had been led into difficult situations, none of them of her own choosing. She had grown up with an army at war. She had adjusted to all sorts of places and situations and people. She had even lived through seven months of what many women would have considered a fate worse than death.

And so she stepped forward and took Neville’s offered arm without showing any of her inward qualms, and they stepped out into the wide corridor she remembered from earlier. They descended one of the grand curved staircases. She looked down over the banister to the marble, tiled hall below and up to the gilded, windowed dome above. She had that feeling again of being dwarfed, overwhelmed.

“I expected a large cottage,” she said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Your home,” she said. “I expected a large cottage in a large garden.”

“Did you, Lily?” He looked gravely down at her. “And you found this instead? I am sorry.”

“I thought only kings lived in houses like this,” she said, and felt very foolish indeed, especially when his eyes crinkled at the corners and she realized she had said something to amuse him.

Then they were approaching two huge double doors and one of those liveried footmen waited to open them. He was the footman she’d encountered last evening, Lily saw. She could even remember what the superior servant had called him. Her life with the army had made her skilled in remembering faces and the names that went with them. She smiled warmly.

“How do you do, Mr. Jones?” she asked.

The footman looked startled, blushed noticeably beneath
his white wig, bobbed his head, and opened the doors. Lily glanced upward to see that Neville’s eyes were crinkled at the corners again. He was also pursing his lips to keep from laughing.

But she had no chance to consider the matter further because as soon as they stepped inside the drawing room, she was assaulted by so many impressions at once that she was struck quite dumb and breathless. There was the hugeness and magnificence of the room itself—four of her imagined cottages would surely have fit inside it with ease. But more daunting than the room was the number of people who occupied it. Was it possible that any of the wedding guests had already left for home? Everyone was dressed with somewhat less magnificence than either last evening or this morning, but even so Lily suddenly realized that her own prized muslin dress was quite ordinary and her wonderful coiffure very plain. Not to mention her
shoes
!

Neville took her, in the hush that followed their entrance, toward an older lady of regal bearing and attractively graying dark hair. She was seated, a delicate saucer in one hand, a cup in the other. She looked as if she had frozen in position. Her eyebrows were arched finely upward.

“Mama,” Neville said, bowing to her, “may I present Lily, my wife? This is my mother, Lily, the Countess of Kilbourne.” He drew breath audibly and spoke more quietly. “Pardon me—the
dowager
Countess of Kilbourne.”

She was the lady who had stood up at the front of the church during the morning and spoken his name, Lily realized. She was his mother—she set down her cup and saucer and got to her feet. She was tall.

“Lily,” she said, smiling, “welcome to Newbury Abbey, my dear, and to our family.” And she took one of Lily’s hands from her side and leaned forward to kiss her on the cheek.

Lily smelled a whiff of some expensive and exquisite perfume. “I am pleased to meet you,” she said, not at all sure that either of them spoke with any degree of sincerity.

“Let me present you to everyone else, Lily,” Neville said. The room was remarkably silent. “Or perhaps not. It might prove too overwhelming for you. Perhaps a general introduction for now?” He turned and smiled about him.

But the dowager countess had other ideas and told him so. “Of course Lily must be presented to everyone, Neville,” she said, drawing Lily’s arm through her own. “She is your countess. Come, Lily, and meet our family and friends.”

There followed a bewildering spell that felt hours long to Lily though it was doubtful it exceeded a quarter of an hour. She was presented to the silver-haired gentleman and the lady with all the rings she had seen downstairs last evening and understood that they were the Duke and Duchess of Anburey, the dowager countess’s brother and sister-in-law. She was presented to their son, the Marquess of something impossibly long. And then she was aware only of faces, all of which belonged to persons with first names and last names and—all too often—titles too. Some were aunts or uncles. Some were cousins—either first or second or at some remove. Some were family friends or her husband’s particular friends or someone else’s friends. Some of them inclined their heads to her. Several of the younger people bowed or curtsied to her. Most smiled; some did not. All too many of them spoke to her; she could think of nothing to say in reply except that she was pleased to meet them all.

“Poor Lily. You look thoroughly bewildered,” the lady behind the tea tray said when Lily and the dowager countess finally reached her. “Enough for now, Clara. Come and sit on this empty chair, Lily, and have a cup of tea and a sandwich. I am Elizabeth. I daresay you did not hear it the
first time, and really it does not matter if you forget it the next time you see me. We have only one name to remember while you have a whole host. Eventually you will sort us all out. Here, my dear.”

She had been pouring a cup of tea as she spoke and handed it to Lily now with a plate of tiny sandwiches with the crusts cut off. Lily was not hungry, but she did not want to refuse. She took a sandwich and then discovered that if she was to drink, as she dearly wished to do, she must eat the sandwich first so that she might have a hand free with which to lift the cup. The china was so very delicate and pretty that she felt a sudden terror of dropping some of it and smashing it.

Neville’s hand came to rest on her shoulder.

The room was no longer silent, Lily noticed in some relief, and all attention was no longer focused on her. Everyone was being polite, she gathered. She listened to the conversation that flowed around her as she ate her sandwich and succeeded in sipping her tea without mishap. But she was not being ignored either. People whose names she could not remember—what a time for her usual skill of memory to have deserted her!—kept trying to draw her into the conversation. A few of the ladies had been having a spirited discussion on the relative merits of two types of bonnet.

“What do
you
think, Lily?” one of them, a dashingly dressed red-haired lady, asked graciously. Was she one of the cousins?

“I do not know,” said Lily, to whom a bonnet was simply something to keep off the sun.

Then they talked about a certain theater in London and had differing opinions on whether its audiences preferred comedies or tragedies. Lily found herself remembering with pleased nostalgia the farces the soldiers had sometimes put on for the merriment of the regiment.

“What do you think, Lily?” one gentleman asked, a pleasant-faced youngish man with receding fair hair. Was he a relative or one of the friends?

“I do not know,” Lily replied.

They talked about a conceit several of them had attended in London a few weeks before. The Duchess of Anburey thought Mozart the greatest musical genius ever to have lived. A portly, florid-faced gentleman disagreed and put forward the claims of Beethoven. There were firm supporters of both sides.

“What do you think, Lily?” the duchess asked.

“I do not know,” Lily said, not having heard of either gentleman.

She began to wonder if they asked her opinion deliberately, knowing that she knew
nothing
, that she was almost as ignorant now as she had been on the day she was born. But perhaps not. They did not appear to be looking at her with malicious intent.

They were discussing books, the gentlemen speaking in favor of political and philosophical treatises, some of the ladies defending the novel as a legitimate art form.

“Which novels have you read, Lily?” an extremely elegantly dressed and coiffed young lady asked.

“I cannot read,” Lily admitted.

Everyone looked suddenly embarrassed on her behalf. There was an awkward little silence that no one seemed in a hurry to fill. Lily had always wanted to read. Her parents had told her stories when she was a child, and she had always thought it would be wonderful to be able to pick up a book and escape into those magical worlds of the imagination whenever she wished—or acquire knowledge of matters on which she was ignorant. She was so
very
ignorant. But there had never been the chance to go to school, and her father, who had been able to read a very little and to
write his name, had always declared himself incompetent to teach her himself.

Neville half bent over her from behind her chair. He was going to rescue her and take her from the room, she thought in some relief. But before he could do so, the lady behind the tea tray spoke up—Elizabeth. She was very beautiful, Lily had noticed earlier, though she was not young. She had a grace and elegance that Lily envied and a face full of character and hair as blond as Neville’s. She was his aunt.

“I daresay Lily is a
living
book,” she said, smiling kindly. “I have never been able to travel beyond these shores, Lily, because the wretched wars have been raging for almost the whole of my adult life. I would dearly love to travel and see all the countries and cultures I have only been able to read about. You must have seen several. Where have you been?”

“To India,” Lily said. “To Spain and Portugal. And now England.”

“India!” Elizabeth exclaimed, gazing admiringly at Lily. “Men come home from such places, you know, and tell us about this battle and that skirmish. How fortunate we are to have a
woman
who can tell us more interesting and important things. Do talk about India. No, that is too broad a question and will doubtless tie your tongue in knots. What about the people, Lily? Are they very different from us in any essential ways? Tell us about the women. How do they dress? What do they do? What are they
like
?”

“I
loved
India,” Lily said, memory bringing an instant glow to her face and a light to her eyes. “And the people were so very sensible. Far more so than our own people.”

“How so?” one of the young gentlemen asked her.

“They dressed so sensibly,” Lily said. “Both men and
women wore light, loose clothes for the heat. The men did not have to wear tight coats buttoned to the throat all day long and leather stocks to choke their windpipes and tight breeches and high leather boots to burn their legs and feet off. Not that it was the fault of our poor soldiers—they were merely following orders. But so often they looked like boiled beets.”