Simply Perfect (22 page)

“Oh, yes, of course,” she said, “but I seriously doubt there is such a corner.” She touched his hand and lowered her voice. “Are you regretting this, Joseph? Did Uncle Webster force you into it?”

“My engagement?” He laughed lightly. “No, of course not. Portia will make an admirable duchess.”

“And an admirable wife too?” She looked closely at him. “I do want to see you happy, Joseph. You have always been my favorite cousin, I must confess. My favorite
male
cousin, at least, since I cannot claim to have loved you more than I do Lauren. But then Lauren and I grew up more as sisters than cousins.”

As if summoned by the mention of her name, Lauren joined them at that moment, bringing Miss Martin with her.

“Gwen,” she said after a few minutes, “come to the supper room with me for a minute, will you? There is something upon which I need your opinion.”

Neville and Lily were leaving the room via the French windows, Joseph could see. They were taking Portia and McLeith with them, presumably for a stroll outside.

And so they were virtually alone together again, he and Miss Martin. She was wearing a dark blue gown that he had seen more than once in London. Her hair was dressed as severely as it ever had been. Once again she looked unmistakably a schoolteacher, remarkably plainly turned out in contrast with all the other ladies. But he could no longer see her with the old eyes. He could see only the firmness of character, the kindness, the intelligence, the…yes, the
passion
for life that had endeared her to him.

“Are you happy to be back with some of your pupils?” he asked her.

“I am,” she said. “It is with them I belong.”

“I want to see them,” he said. “I want to see Lizzie.”

“And she wants to see you,” she told him. “She knows you are here, not far away from her. At the same time, she is convinced that the girls will no longer like her if they know she has a father, and such a wealthy one. She has told me that if you come she will pretend not to know you. She thinks it would be a funny game.”

And of course it would suit his purposes admirably. But he felt grim at the very thought that for different reasons they must hide their relationship from others.

Miss Martin touched his hand, just as Gwen had done a few minutes ago.

“She is really quite happy,” she told him. “She thinks of these weeks as a marvelous adventure, though she told me last night that she still does not want to go to school. She wants to go home.”

He felt strangely comforted by the thought—strange when it would be far more convenient for him if she went away.

“She may change her mind,” she said.

“Is she educable, then?” he asked her.

“I think she may be,” she said, “and Eleanor Thompson agrees with me. It would take some ingenuity, of course, to fit her into our routine with tasks that are both meaningful and possible for her, but we have never shunned a doable challenge.”

“What personal satisfaction do you draw from your life?” he asked, leaning a little closer to her. And then he wished fervently that he had not asked such an impulsive and impertinent question.

“There are many persons in my life, Lord Attingsborough,” she said, “whom I can love in both an abstract, emotional sense and in practical ways. Not everyone can say as much.”

It was not a good enough answer.

“But does there not have to be one special someone?” he asked her.

“Like Lizzie for you?” she asked.

It was not what he had meant. Even Lizzie was not enough. Oh, she was, she
was
—but…But not for that deep core of himself that craved a mate, an equal, a sexual partner.

He completely forgot for the moment that he already had such a person in his life. He had a betrothed.

“Yes,” he said.

“But it is not what you meant, is it?” she asked him, searching his eyes with her own. “We are not all fated to find that special someone, Lord Attingsborough. Or if we are, sometimes we are fated also to lose that person. And what do we do when it happens? Sit around moping and feeling tragic for the rest of our lives? Or find other people to love, other people to benefit from the love that wells constantly from within ourselves if we do not deliberately stop the flow?”

He sat back in his chair, his eyes still on her. Ah, but he did indeed have that special someone in his life. But only on the periphery of it—and always to remain there. She had come too late. Though there would never have been the right time, would there? Miss Martin was not of his world—and he was not of hers.

“I choose to love others,” she said. “I love all my girls, even those who are least lovable. And, believe me, there are plenty of those.” She smiled.

But she had admitted to what he had always suspected, always sensed in her. She was an essentially lonely woman. As he was essentially lonely—on the very evening when a large company of relatives and friends had gathered to celebrate his betrothal and he had persuaded himself that he was happy.

He was going to have to make this up to Portia. He was going to have to love her with all the deliberate power of his will.

“I must try to emulate you, Miss Martin,” he said.

“It is perhaps enough,” she said, “that you love Lizzie.”

Ah, she knew, then. Or she knew, at least, that he did not love Portia as he ought.

“But is it enough that I will not acknowledge her publicly?” he asked.

She tipped her head slightly to one side and thought—a characteristic reaction of hers when other persons might have rushed into a glib answer.

“I know you feel guilty about that,” she said, “and perhaps with good reason. But not for the reason you always fear. You are
not
ashamed of her. I have seen you with her and I can assure you of that. But you are trapped between two worlds—the one you have inherited and to which you are firmly committed by the fact that you are the heir to a dukedom, and the one you made for yourself when you created Lizzie with your mistress. Both worlds are important to you—the one because you are impelled by duty, the other because you are enmeshed in love. And both are worlds that will pull at you forever.”

“Forever.” He smiled ruefully at her.

“Yes,” she said. “Duty and love. But especially love.”

He was about to reach out for her hand, forgetting his surroundings again, when Portfrey and Elizabeth joined them. Elizabeth wanted to know about the little blind girl she had heard Miss Martin had brought to Lindsey Hall.

Miss Martin told her about Lizzie.

“How very brave and admirable of you, Miss Martin,” Elizabeth said. “I would love to meet her and all your other charity girls too. May I? Or would it appear to be an intrusion, as if I thought them merely an amusing curiosity? Lyndon and I have extended the school at home so that all local children are eligible to attend, but I have toyed with the idea of making it also a boarding school to accommodate children from farther distances.”

“I think,” Miss Martin said, “the girls would be delighted to meet you.”

“I have just persuaded Miss Martin to let me come on the same errand,” Joseph said. “I met two of her former pupils when I escorted them and her to London several weeks ago, and now they are at Lindsey Hall too, one as governess to the Hallmere children, the other as governess to Aidan Bedwyn's children.”

“Ah,” Elizabeth said, “then we will go together, Joseph. Will tomorrow afternoon suit you, Miss Martin, weather permitting?”

And so it was arranged—as simply as that.

Tomorrow he would see Lizzie.

And Miss Martin again.

Lily and Neville were coming inside, he noticed.

Portia and McLeith remained outside.

When she came back in, Joseph thought, he was going to have to spend the rest of the evening with her, perhaps in private conversation if it could be arranged. He was going to love her, by Jove, even if he could never
fall
in love with her. He owed her that much.

Miss Martin got to her feet, bade him good night, and went to join the Butlers and the Whitleafs. Soon she was glowing with animation.

15

Some of the older girls had gone out for a walk. One of the younger
ones was playing quietly and ploddingly on the spinet in the schoolroom at Lindsey Hall. Another read silently to herself, curled up on the window seat. A third was embroidering a large daisy across the corner of a cotton handkerchief. Molly was reading aloud from
Robinson Crusoe
, and Becky, Lady Aidan's elder daughter, was listening with rapt attention. Claudia was teaching Lizzie to knit, having cast on twenty stitches and knitted up a few rows to get her started. The collie lay at their feet, his head on his paws, his eyes turned upward.

Claudia looked up when the door opened. It was Eleanor, who had been enjoying a prolonged breakfast with the duchess.

“Miss Martin,” she said, “the Duke of McLeith has ridden over from Alvesley again and wishes to see you. I will stay with the girls while you are gone. Oh, Lizzie is learning to knit, is she? Let me see if I can help. And I do apologize, Molly. I have interrupted your reading. Please continue.”

Her eyes twinkled at Claudia. They had had a long talk after Charlie's last visit. Eleanor was convinced that his interest was more than just fraternal.

Claudia found him in the morning room downstairs, in conversation with the Duke of Bewcastle and Lord Aidan. Both withdrew soon after her arrival.

She sat. Charlie did not. He crossed the room to the window instead and stood looking out. His clasped hands tapped against his back.

“Ever since you forced me to remember,” he said, “the flood-gates of memory have opened, Claudia. Not just remembered
events,
which are relatively easy to forget, but remembered
feelings,
which never can be. They can only be suppressed. In the last week I have done nothing but remember how wretchedly unhappy I was after I left you, and how totally unable I was to come back to face you when I felt obliged to marry someone else. I really had no choice, you know. I had to marry—”

“Someone from your own world,” she said, interrupting him. “Someone who would not shame or embarrass you with the inferiority of her birth and manners.”

He turned his head to look at her.

“That was not it,” he said. “I never thought those things about you, Claudia.”

“Did you not?” she said. “Was it someone impersonating your handwriting who wrote that final letter to me, then?”

“I did not write those things,” he protested.

“You were sorry to be so plain with me,” she said, “but really you ought not to have been taken to live with Papa and me in the first place since there was always the possibility that you would inherit a dukedom one day. You ought to have been given a home and upbringing more suited to your station. The fact that you had lived with us all those years had put you in an awkward position with your peers. I must understand why you felt it necessary to break off all connection with me. You were a
duke
now. You must not be seen to associate too closely with people who were beneath your notice. You were to marry Lady Mona Chesterton, who was everything a duchess and your wife ought to be.”

“Claudia!” He looked pale and aghast. “I did not write those things.”

“Then I wonder who did,” she said. “Losing someone one loves is one of the worst things that can happen to anyone, Charlie. But to be rejected because one is inferior, because one is despised, because one simply is not good enough…It took me years to gain back my self-respect, my self-confidence. And to put the pieces of my heart back together. Do you
wonder
that I was less than delighted to see you again in London a few weeks ago?”

“Claudia!” He passed a hand through his thinning hair. “My God! I must have been so upset that I was out of my mind.”

She did not believe it for a moment. Becoming a
duke
had gone to his head. It had made him conceited and arrogant and any number of other nasty things she would never have suspected him capable of.

He sat down on a chair close to the window and stared at her.

“Forgive me,” he said. “Lord, Claudia, forgive me. I was even more of an ass than I remember. But you
did
recover. You did magnificently well, in fact.”

“Did I?” she said.

“You proved,” he said, “that you were the strong person I always knew you were. And I have paid my dues to whatever power decreed that I be snatched from my familiar life—twice, once when I was five and once when I was eighteen—and plunged into a completely alien one. There is no longer any reason, though, why either of us cannot return to where we were when I was eighteen and you were seventeen. Is there?”

What exactly did he mean? Return to
what
?

“I have a life,” she said, “that involves responsibility to others. I have my school. And you have duties to others that only you can perform. You have your son.”

“There is no obstacle,” he said, “that cannot be overcome. We have been apart for eighteen years, Claudia—half my life. Are we going to remain apart for the rest of our lives too just because you have a school and I have a son—who, by the way, is almost grown up? Or will you marry me at last?”

She very much feared afterward that her jaw had dropped.

If only she had seen this coming, she thought—if only she had believed Eleanor—she might have prepared herself. Instead she stared stupidly and mutely at him.

He came across the room to her and bent over her to take both her hands in his.

“Remember how we were together, Claudia,” he said. “Remember how we loved each other with the sort of all-consuming passion the very young are not afraid of. Remember how we made love up on that hill—surely the only time in my life I have really
made love
. It has been a long, weary time, but it is not too late for us. Marry me, my love, and I will make up for that letter and for the eighteen years of emptiness in your life.”

“My life has not been empty, Charlie,” she told him.

Though it had been—in some ways at least.

He looked into her eyes. “Tell me you did not love me,” he said. “Tell me you
do
not love me.”

“I did,” she said, closing her eyes. “You know I did.”

“And you do.”

She felt dreadfully upset, remembering that long-ago love, its physical consummation, and the anguish of the yearlong separation and then its cruel, abrupt ending. It was not possible to go back, to forget that even as boy he had been capable of destroying the one person he had professed to love more than life.

Besides, it was too late for him.

He was the wrong man.

“Charlie,” she said, “we have both changed in eighteen years. We are different people.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “I have less hair and you are a woman rather than a girl. But at heart, Claudia? Are we not the same as we ever were, the same as we always will be? You have never married even though you had plenty of would-be suitors even before I left home. That tells me something. And I have admitted to you that I was never happy with Mona, though I was rarely unfaithful to her.”

Rarely?
Oh, Charlie!

“I cannot marry you,” she said, leaning a little toward him. “If we had married then, Charlie, we would have grown together and I daresay I would have loved you all my life. But we did not marry then.”

“And love dies?” he asked her. “Did you ever love me truly, then?”

She felt a spurt of anger. Had
he
truly loved
her
?

“Some forms of love die,” she said. “If they are not fed, they die. I have gradually been coming to like you again since we met in London—as the friend you were through our childhood.”

His jaw was hard-set as she remembered its being whenever he was angry or upset.

“I have spoken too soon,” he said. “I must confess that the violence of my feelings has surprised even me. I will give you time to catch up with me. Don't say an outright no today. You already have, but let us agree to forget that you spoke the words. Give me time to woo you—and to make you forget what I once wrote to you.”

He released her hands after squeezing them.

“Goodness, Charlie,” she said, “look at me. I am a thirty-five-year-old spinster schoolteacher.”

He smiled slowly.

“You are Claudia Martin,” he said, “that bold, vital girl I loved, now masquerading as a spinster schoolteacher.
What a lark,
you would have said then if you could have looked ahead.”

If she could have looked ahead, she would have been consumed with horror.

“It is no masquerade,” she said.

“I beg to disagree,” he told her. “I had better go now—I am expected back at Alvesley for luncheon. But I will come again if I may.”

But after he had gone she stared at her hands in her lap. How very strange life could be. For years and years now her school had been her whole world, all thoughts of love and romance and marriage long suppressed. Yet she had made the seemingly harmless decision to accompany Flora and Edna to London so that she could talk to Mr. Hatchard in person and her whole world—her whole
universe
—had changed.

She wondered in some trepidation how she was going to be able to recapture the relative contentment and tranquillity of her life when she returned to Bath.

There was a tap on the door and it opened to reveal Eleanor.

“Ah, you
are
still here,” she said, coming inside. “I have just seen the duke riding away. Louise is still playing the spinet, but the others have gone outside—except Molly and Lizzie. Becky has taken them to the nursery to meet her little sister, Hannah, and her new governess as well as numerous cousins, all of whom are very young. Lizzie is doing very well, Claudia, even if you did find her crying to herself in her bed this morning.”

“This is all very bewildering but very exciting for her,” Claudia said.

“Poor girl,” Eleanor said. “One wonders what her life has been like until now. Did Mr. Hatchard say?”

“No,” Claudia said.

“The Duke of McLeith did not stay long this morning,” Eleanor said.

“He asked me to marry him,” Claudia told her.

“No!”
Eleanor looked at her, arrested. “And…?”

“I said no, of course,” Claudia said.

“Of course?”
Eleanor sat down in the nearest chair. “Are you quite sure, Claudia? Is it because of the school? I have never mentioned this to you because it seemed inappropriate, but I have often thought how I would not mind if it were mine. And I do believe I would be able to run it in a manner worthy of you. I mentioned it to Christine at one time and she thought it a wonderful idea and even said she would sponsor me with a loan or an outright gift if I would accept one—and if the time ever came. And Wulfric, who was reading a book at the time, looked up and said it would certainly be a gift. So if your refusal had anything to do with misgivings about—”

“Oh, Eleanor,” Claudia said, laughing, “it did not, though I suppose it might have if I had wanted to say yes.”

“But you did not?” Eleanor asked. “He is so very amiable, and he seems inordinately fond of you. And he must have pots of money, if one wants to be mercenary about such matters. Of course he
is
a duke, which puts him at a horrid disadvantage, poor man.”

“I loved him once,” Claudia admitted, “but no longer. And I am comfortable and really quite happy with my life as it is. The time when I might have thought of marriage is long past. I prefer to keep my independence even if my fortune
is
minuscule.”

“As I do,” Eleanor said. “I loved once too—quite passionately. But he was killed in Spain during the wars and I have never been tempted to find someone to replace him in my affections. I would rather be alone. If you should ever change your mind, though, know that concerns for the school need not stand in your way.”

She laughed, and Claudia smiled.

“I will remember that,” she said, “if I should ever fall violently in love with someone else. Thank you, Eleanor.”

         

The morning clouds had moved off by noon. As a result several other people decided to ride with Joseph and Elizabeth from Alvesley to Lindsey Hall—Lily and Portfrey and Portia and three of Kit's cousins. Lily tried to persuade McLeith to come too, but he had been over during the morning.

A large number of people were out of doors at Lindsey Hall, Joseph could see as they rode up the driveway, including surely all the children—and the visiting schoolgirls. His eyes searched their number eagerly even before he was close enough to distinguish individuals.

He left his horse at the stables, as did all the others, and walked across the lawn with Portia, Lily, and Elizabeth while the others made their way toward the house.

The schoolgirls were dancing about a makeshift maypole, to the accompaniment of vocal music by one of their number and a great deal of laughter and confusion. Joseph could see no sign of Lizzie until he realized with a start that she was one of the dancers. Indeed, it was she who was causing the confusion—and the laughter.