Simply Magic (26 page)

“Susanna,” Edith said, jumping up too, “do call on us again. Perhaps we can go walking together or shopping. Perhaps—”

“No,” Susanna said. “My teaching duties occupy me almost all day every day, Edith, and there is the Christmas concert coming up to keep me even busier. I had last evening off and this afternoon. I have used up my quota of free time for quite a while. I…You have your husband and son now to occupy your life. We move in different worlds. It would be best to leave it that way.”

Edith folded her hands at her waist. She looked hurt.

“I shall write to you,” she said. “I daresay you will be able to find a few spare minutes in which to read a letter.”

“Thank you.” Susanna gave her a tight smile.

“This
has
been a pleasure,” Lady Markham said. “You will never know, Susanna, how many times over the years I have lain awake wondering what happened to you, wondering if you were alive or dead and if we could have done anything more at the time to find you. I am delighted that you came. You will see her safely back to Miss Martin's school, Whitleaf?”

“I will, ma'am,” he said, bowing.

But it seemed to him as they stepped out onto the street a few minutes later that the visit had not settled a great deal. Perhaps it did not have to, though. Susanna seemed not to want to find out exactly what had happened eleven years ago and why. Perhaps the comfort of knowing that her father
had
written to her was enough. It would not be enough for
him,
but that was not the point, was it?

And at least the visit had given pleasure to Lady Markham and Edith and had perhaps persuaded Susanna that she had not been the unwanted burden she had thought she was.

“Are you glad you came?” he asked, drawing her arm through his.

She turned her head to look at him briefly.

“Yes,” she said. “I would have been afraid to set foot beyond the school doors for fear of running into them. Now I have come face-to-face with them and discovered that they are just people and just as I remember them. Edith is pretty, is she not? I hope she will be happy with Mr. Morley.”

“Even though you never could be?” He chuckled.

“But I was not asked to be, was I?” She laughed too.

It was good to hear her laugh again.

         

And so the end had come. She might have been celebrating her betrothal now. Instead she was about to say good-bye.

By her own choice.

Susanna knew as they walked along Great Pulteney Street in silence and turned onto Sydney Place that memories of her visit to Lady Markham and Edith would return to haunt her for some time to come, along with her decision not to press on with inquiries into the contents of her father's letter to Sir Charles Markham or into the possible continued existence of the letter he had written her.

But she could not think of any of that now.

Her heart was heavy. She felt that with every step she took she trod on it, increasing her pain.

Yet at the beginning of the afternoon she had been so hopeful that it could all end cheerfully and amicably. The fact that she loved him was of little significance. Given the circumstances of her life, it would have been strange indeed if she had
not
fallen in love with him. She would recover. How could she not? A happy marriage between them would be impossible for all sorts of reasons, and she would rather lose him altogether and forever than have an
unhappy
marriage with him.

But, oh, at the moment it was very hard to think such sensible thoughts. In an hour's time she would think them, perhaps. Tonight she would think them, and next week, and next month. But now…

“I shall be making an early start for London in the morning,” he said as they turned onto Sutton Street and the school came into sight.

“Yes,” she said. “There cannot be much to keep a visitor in Bath, especially at this time of year.”

“I have spent a pleasant few days here, though,” he said.

“I am glad.”

They spoke to each other like cheerful, polite strangers.

“It has been good to see you again,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Perhaps,” he said, “we will meet again sometime.”

“Yes, that would be pleasant.”

Their footsteps slowed and then stopped altogether before they turned onto Daniel Street.

“Susanna,” he said, his hand covering hers on his arm, though he did not turn his head to look down at her. “I want you to know before I leave that I
do
care for you. I know you do not like me half the time or approve of me the other half, but I do care. I think we were friends once. I think in many ways we still are. But when we became more than friends on that one afternoon, it really
was
more. I was not just a lustful man taking advantage of being alone with an innocent woman. I
cared
for you. I know you do not want me or need me. I know you are happy with the life you have. But I think perhaps in some way you have cared too, and I wanted you to know that…Well. Was there ever a more muddled monologue, and just at the time when I most wanted to be eloquent and say something memorable?”

“Oh, Peter,” she said, clinging to his arm, “I
do
like you. Of course I do. And of course I approve of most of what I see in you. How could I not? You are always so very kind. And I care for you too.”

“But not enough to marry me?” he asked her, still not looking at her.

“No.” It was easier just to say no than try to explain—it was impossible, anyway, to explain all her reasons. “I do thank you, but no, we would not suit.”

“No,” he said softly, “I suppose not. I will leave you here, then.”

“Yes.” Panic grabbed at her stomach, her knees, her throat. She slid her hand from his arm.

He turned then and took both her hands in his, squeezing them so tightly for a moment that she almost winced. He lifted them one at a time and set her gloved palms to his lips.

He raised his eyes to hers—and smiled.

“An already glorious November day has seemed warmer and brighter because of your presence in it,” he said, misquoting his very first words to her. “Thank you, Susanna.”

And so he drew a smile from her even though her heart was breaking.

“Foolish,” she said. “Ah, foolish.”

And somehow they both laughed.

“Good-bye, Peter,” she said.

And because she could not bear any more, she dashed with ungainly haste around the corner and up to the door of the school, and she lifted the knocker and let it fall with more force than was necessary.

She glanced toward the corner as Mr. Keeble opened the door, but there was no one there. She stepped inside, and the door closed behind her.

And now it seemed to her that there was nothing left to live for. Nothing at all. She was in too much distress to notice the melodrama of the thought.

I want you to know before I leave that I do care for you.

Mary Fisher, one of the middle school boarders, was on her way up the stairs. She turned back when she saw who had come through the door.

“Oh, Miss Osbourne,” she cried, all excitement, “we and Mr. Upton have made the changes you wanted to the sketches for the scenery and finished them. They are ever so gorgeous. Do come and see.”

“Of course. I can hardly wait. Lead the way, then, Mary,” Susanna said, smiling brightly as she pulled loose the ribbons of her bonnet. “Have you been working all afternoon? How splendid of you.”

I want you to know before I leave that I do care for you
.

…
before I leave…

And now he was gone.

20

Peter went straight from Bath to Sidley Park—to stay.

Will you do one thing for me?
And this was it. She might never know he had done as she asked, and how his coming here could benefit her anyway he did not know. But here he was. He loved her, and so he had honored her final request.

He hoped that love would go away again as suddenly as it had come. He did not like the feeling at all. It was a dashed miserable thing, if the truth were known.

His mother was ecstatic to see him. She scarcely stopped talking about Christmas, which would be absolutely perfect now that he was home to enjoy all that she had planned for him. Four of his sisters—Barbara, Doris, Amy, and Belinda—were to come to Sidley Park for Christmas, all except Josephine, in fact, the middle one in age, who lived in Scotland with her husband and his family. And of course the presence of four sisters was going to mean too the presence of their spouses and children—nine of the latter among the four of them. And because it was Christmas, numbers of their in-laws of all ages had been invited too. None of his uncles—he
had
made himself clear to them five years ago, though in the intervening years since he had seen them occasionally in London and learned to be cordial with them.

And of course the Flynn-Posys were coming for Christmas.

Well, he would endure it. He would even enjoy it. He would establish himself as host.

His mother took him into the dining room the day after his arrival and explained to him all that she planned to have done in there for his comfort and delight.

“I'll think about it, Mama,” he said. “I may have some ideas of my own.”

“But of course, my love,” she said, beaming happily at him. “Whatever you want provided it will not ruin the overall effect of what I have planned. How
lovely
it is to have you home again.”

He left it at that. It had never been easy to talk to his mother—it had always seemed something akin to dashing one's brains against a rock.

Will you talk to your mother, Peter? Really talk?…Tell her who you are. Perhaps she has been so intent upon loving you all your life that really she does not know you at all. Perhaps—probably—she does not know your dreams.

He had never really talked to his mother, or she to him. He had confronted her once, of course—ghastly memory—but they had both been horribly upset at the time, and they had not used the opportunity to open their hearts to each other, to establish a new and equal relationship of adult mother and adult son.

That would change. He would talk to her. He
would
hold firm against her iron will. It just seemed somewhat absurd that the provocation was probably going to be a lavender dining room.

He spent a good deal of the time before Christmas away from the house. He liked to go and sit in the dower house, sometimes for hours on end, lighting a fire in the sitting room and enjoying the peace he found there. He had always loved the house, and it had always been well kept even though it had been inhabited during his lifetime only by the girls' governesses and the tutors he had had before going away to school and sometimes during school holidays. It was a small manor in its own right and was set in the middle of a pretty garden in a secluded corner of the park.

It would, in fact, be the ideal home for his mother…

He visited his neighbors again. And he called on Theo.

“I must thank you, by the way,” Theo said as they sat in his library sipping brandy, “for taking Susanna Osbourne to call on my mother and Edith in Bath. They both wrote to tell me all about it the very next day. I suppose because I was away at school at the time of Osbourne's death and Susanna's disappearance, I did not realize quite how upsetting it all was for them. My mother has been thinking all these years that she must be dead.”

“Are the letters still in existence?” Peter asked.

“Yes, indeed,” Theo said, stretching out his booted feet to the blaze in the hearth. “They were at the back of the safe in Osbourne's old office where I never look—it is stuffed with old papers that I must go through one of these days. I had never even read the letter Osbourne wrote my father until I found both letters after my mother wrote. Susanna's is still sealed. I suppose I ought to send it on to her even though my mother seems to think she is not interested in seeing it. Queer, that.”

“I think it is more that she is afraid to read it,” Peter said.

“Eh?” Theo said, giving a log a shove farther onto the fire with the toe of one boot. “What would she be afraid of? Ghosts? I suppose it might put the wind up someone, though, to see a letter written more than a decade ago in the hand of a dead man.”

“I think she is afraid of what she will find there,” Peter said. “Sometimes it seems better not to know what one thought forever lost in the past. But I do wonder if the not knowing will fester in her now that she knows about the letter. Does she know it still exists?”

“Not unless my mother has told her,” Theo said. “Sometimes I wish I had a secretary of my own. Writing letters is not my favorite occupation. I suppose I must write one, though. I can hardly just bundle up her father's and send it off to her without comment, can I?”

“Is there likely to be something in your father's letter that would not be in in hers?” Peter asked. “Remember that hers was written to a twelve-year-old.”

Theo raised his eyebrows and considered the question as he gazed into the fire and took two more sips from his glass. Then he looked at Peter.

“I say, Whitleaf,” he said, “what the devil is your interest in all this?”

“Just that,” Peter said. “Interest.”

“You told me you had met Susanna during the summer,” Theo said. “And then you were with her in Bath of all places, at a concert in Bath Abbey, and then in Sydney Gardens, and then at Edith's. She isn't your mistress by any chance, is she? Morley won't like it if you took your mistress to call on him and Edith.”

But he chose to find the mental picture amusing, and first chuckled and then threw back his head and laughed outright.

“He would probably have a fit of the vapors,” he said. “Lord knows what Edith sees in him, but it
was
a love match.”

“Susanna is not my mistress,” Peter said, without joining in the laughter. “And I would thank you, Theo, for not making that suggestion ever again. I offered her marriage, and she refused me.”

“Eh?” Theo frowned. “Why the devil? She is a
schoolteacher,
isn't she? And last time I looked you were a viscount. It would be a brilliant match for her, wouldn't it? And that's a colossal understatement.”

Peter did not answer the question.

“I think she needs to know the full truth,” he said. “Everything you know and everything your mother knows and everything both letters can tell her. It may be upsetting for her, but I don't think she will be able to put the past fully behind her until she knows all there is to know. He was all she had, Theo, and he deliberately put a bullet through his brain.”

“Well, yes,” Theo said. “Poor devil. I say, I wonder if she would like to come here for Christmas. I'll wager Edith would be ecstatic, and I think my mother would be pleased too—she is coming home the day after tomorrow, by the way. I'll see what she says. Come to think of it, though, I have a hankering to see Susanna again myself. I used to be rather fond of her. I can remember teaching her to row a boat one summer. She was damned good at it too for all she was just a little bit of a thing with sticks for arms and a shock of red hair. Does she still have the hair?”

“It is auburn,” Peter said.

He had
not
been trying to lead Theo in the direction of inviting her to Fincham. He had been thinking more of Theo's going down to Bath, taking Lady Markham with him and both letters so that the two of them could spend some time with her and help her deal with the past.

“You
will
invite her?” he asked.

Theo looked at him and chuckled before getting to his feet to fetch the brandy decanter.

“I will indeed,” he said, “and you can decide whether to give Fincham a wide berth over Christmas or haunt it every day. How firmly did she mean no when she said it? And how disappointed were you? They are rhetorical questions, Whitleaf—another fellow's love life is not my concern. But I'll fetch Susanna here if she will come. She may not, of course. It sounds to me as if she is a lady with a mind of her own—something that showed up when she was twelve years old, I suppose. More brandy?”

He held the decanter suspended over Peter's glass.

“It's dashed good,” Peter said, holding his glass up. “Smuggled, I suppose?”

“Is there any other kind?” Theo asked.

She would say no, Peter thought. Of course she would say no.

There was not even any point in wondering how he would behave if she did come.
Would
he stay away from Fincham? Or would he haunt it every day?

But he would never know, would he? She would not come.

Eleanor Thompson did indeed join the staff of Miss Martin's school as geography and mathematics teacher. At first Claudia expected that she would come after Christmas, but she was very eager to start immediately and so moved into the school directly from her hotel and began her duties as soon as Claudia had adjusted the timetable and teaching loads.

She proved an instant favorite with the girls and her fellow teachers alike. She was a strict enough disciplinarian, but she also conducted her classes with humor and good sense. She was too late to do anything spectacular—her own word—for the Christmas concert, like directing a play or a choir or organizing maypole dancing. She would busy herself instead with the less glorious work behind the scenes, she announced the day after her arrival, and she worked during almost every spare moment after that, guiding a group of volunteer girls as they brought alive Mr. Upton's sketches for the various sets, and as often as not wielding a brush herself.

“And to think,” she said with a weary sigh late one evening in Claudia's sitting room as she rubbed at a stubborn spot of paint on her right forefinger, “that until Christine married Bewcastle and turned all our lives on their collective head I considered that the perfect life was sitting quietly at home in our cottage with an open book in my hand.”

“And do you still think the same thing?” Susanna asked with a twinkle in her eye.

Eleanor laughed. “Just occasionally,” she admitted. “Like this morning, for example, when Agnes Ryde uttered a Cockney curse when she could not solve a problem in mathematics and I had to resist the temptation to pretend I did not understand. It does help, I suppose, that Agnes is a favorite of mine, even though I am sure you would tell me, Claudia, that teachers ought not to have favorites. Agnes has
character
.”

“Altogether too much of it at times, I am afraid,” Claudia said ruefully. “But one cannot help liking the girl.”

“She actually told me yesterday,” Lila said, “that learning to speak correctly by pretending to be a duchess as I had suggested is
fun
. She even smiled when she said it. And she cocked one haughty eyebrow and presented her hand to me as if she expected me to kiss it.”

They all laughed, and Susanna got to her feet to pour them each a second cup of tea.

“Did your letter this morning upset you, Susanna?” Claudia asked after they had all settled again.

At first Susanna had thought it must be from Frances or Anne, but then she had seen that it was addressed in an unfamiliar hand.

“It came from Lady Markham at Fincham Manor,” she said. “That is in Hertfordshire, where I grew up,” she added for the benefit of Lila and Eleanor.

“And?” Claudia said, her cup suspended halfway to her mouth.

“I have been invited to spend Christmas there,” Susanna said. “Edith and Mr. Morley and their son will be going too. My invitation comes directly from Sir Theodore Markham himself. It is exceedingly kind of him and of Lady Markham, who told him, I suppose, of our meeting in Bath a few weeks ago, but I will say no, of course. I would have written back today if I had not been so busy with drama and a set of essays to mark after classes were over.”

“Susanna,” Lila said, her voice incredulous, “you have a chance to spend the holiday with a baronet and his family at a country home, and you are going to say
no
?”

“But of course,” Susanna said, still smiling. “I had a two-week holiday at the end of August. It would be too, too greedy to ask for another now.”

“And yet Lila and I will be here over the holiday, as well as Claudia, to look after the girls who will remain,” Eleanor said.

“But I have no wish to go,” Susanna protested. “I would far rather stay here with all of you.”

They talked for a few minutes longer until Eleanor got to her feet and declared cheerfully that she needed her sleep if she was to survive another day as a schoolteacher. Lila left with her. Susanna would have followed them after stacking the dishes neatly on the tray if Claudia had not spoken to her.

“Something in that letter upset you more than a simple invitation to spend Christmas would have done,” she said. “Do you wish to talk about it, Susanna? But
only
if you wish.”

Susanna stared at her for a moment before sighing and sinking back into her chair.

“I cannot go back to Fincham Manor, Claudia,” she said. “There are too many unhappy memories associated with it.”

“And it is too close to Sidley Park,” Claudia said. It was not a question.

“Yes.” Susanna looked down at her hands.

They sat in silence for a few moments. Viscount Whitleaf's name had not been spoken between them since the afternoon when Susanna had said good-bye to him. The pain had been too intense to share with even the dearest of friends, and Claudia, as usual, had sensed and respected that fact.