The Golden Season (25 page)

She sank to her side on her bed, curling in on herself. If she married with no thought to wealth or status, she would be forced to rely on her husband to provide the emotional connections she needed, the sense of closeness, of being more than important to someone, of being necessary. Of being
loved
. What if Ned could not provide that? What if he was, as Childe suggested, incapable of the sort of passion she wanted him to feel for her?

What if he could
? Her breath caught with elation over the possibility before cold reason extinguished it. How could she take that chance?
What chance
? He hadn’t asked for her hand. He had obligations and responsibilities as pressing as her own. Her speculations were all moot. Ned needed a rich wife and she required a rich husband and that was the end of it.

Some time later, not long after Lydia had finally fallen into a fitful sleep, a light, insistent tapping awoke her. She shifted up onto her elbows, looking about groggily. The night was still black outside her bedroom windows and her room was steeped in shadows. Not yet dawn.

“Lady Lydia?” She heard the whisper of her maid’s voice as the door opened a crack.

“Come in,” Lydia said, sitting up.

The door swung silently open and the last remaining maid in Lydia’s once-large staff entered, fully clad, the only sign she hadn’t been awake all night the untidy braid coiled around her head. She held a single lit taper in her hand.

“What is it, Peach?”

“Mrs. Marchland, milady. She is downstairs and insists on seeing you. She is waiting in the morning room.”

Sarah? Here? Lydia swung her legs over the side of the bed and the maid hurried over, sweeping a dressing gown from the foot of the bed, holding it open for Lydia to don.

“Is she all right?” Lydia asked, thrusting her arms into the sleeves. “What time is it?”

“It is half past five, milady, and Mrs. Marchland seems agitated, but otherwise in good health.”

Hurriedly, Lydia twisted her hair into a knot at the back of her neck and hastened from her room, alarmed. Something dire must have happened for Sarah to come to her at such an hour.

“That will be all, Peach,” she said upon reaching the door to the morning room.

The maid bobbed a curtsy and vanished as Lydia pushed open the door to the morning room. Sarah stood inside, her hands knit at her waist, her face anxious and her eyes brilliant. She was dressed for travel.

“What is it, Sarah?” Lydia exclaimed. “What has happened?”

Sarah rushed forward, her hands outstretched to clasp Lydia’s. Briefly, Sarah embraced her before drawing her over to the settee in front of the cold hearth. Sarah sat down and faced her. “I am leaving Marchland to go to the Continent with Carvelli this morning,” she said without preamble.

Lydia blinked at her, not certain she had heard aright. Sarah couldn’t mean it.

“I know, my dear,” Sarah said, nodding as if Lydia had spoken. “I have quite shocked you and you are thinking how to best dissuade me from eloping. Pray, spare yourself the effort. I will not be deterred.”

“Sarah, you can’t,” Lydia said.

Sarah smiled ruefully. “Lydie, dearest, I did not come to confer with you. I came to advise you of my plans and”—her voice softened—“say good-bye.”

Good-bye
. Lydia’s heartbeat jumped in her throat. If Sarah did this thing then they would indeed be parted, not only by physical distance but by a far more unbridgeable chasm. Eloping with Carvelli would make Sarah a social pariah. None of their mutual friends would meet her. No one would acknowledge her. No one would have her in their homes. Sarah would be relegated to the ranks of the demireps and lightskirts. This was madness.

“Sarah, you aren’t thinking properly. You are not yourself.”

“But I am, Lydia,” Sarah said. “Never more so than now. Carvelli makes me happy and I make him happy.”

“Happiness,” Lydia repeated incredulously. She could not believe this was the same woman who only a few months ago had advised her to marry someone accommodating who promised to be accommodatingly absent. “Sarah, how many times have gentlemen ‘made you happy’? And how long did that happiness last?”

Sarah flushed and Lydia’s heart twisted at her own harshness, but this was no time to spare Sarah’s feelings.

“Think of what you are giving up,” she persisted.

Sarah’s gaze met hers. “I have, Lydie. I know you will not be convinced, but I have thought of nothing else for a week.”

“A week?” Lydia echoed.

“Don’t sneer, Lydia. A week is a long time for me,” Sarah said with unexpected dignity. “Despite your pose of insouciance, I well know you are wont to worry at a thing, and turn it over and examine it from all sides, pondering and fretting it to death.” This time Lydia flushed as she recalled the earlier hours of the night. “A week for you is nothing, but for me it demonstrates the deepest introspection.”

Here, at last, in a roguish smile Lydia glimpsed a peek of the Sarah she loved so well. Then it was gone. “I love Carvelli and he loves me and we wish to live together as man and wife.”

“But you
aren’t
man and wife, Sarah,” Lydia protested. “You
have
a husband and Carvelli
has
a wife. And if that does not influence you, let me remind you that you also have two children.”

Sarah paled. “
Gerald
has children. He refuses to allow me to see them. He says my influence would be detrimental to their moral character.”

Lydia had known Gerald kept the children with him, but she had always assumed the choice was mutual. She had never suspected Gerald of purposefully keeping Sarah apart from her children, but one look into her friend’s tense and strained face and she did not now doubt it. The tragedy and unfairness of it astounded her. Sarah, of course, had no recourse to fight Gerald’s decision. None. Children were their father’s responsibility and property.

“So I do not have children, Lydia. But if I am very fortunate,” she said wistfully, “I shall bear Carvelli a child someday. He desires that I should above all things.”

Lydia pulled her hands from Sarah’s. “And should he wish, Gerald could take that child, too.” It was the law.

At this, Sarah’s mouth closed in a stubborn line. “He wouldn’t. He doesn’t care enough to want to hurt me and there would be no other reason to take our child.”

“Listen to yourself, Sarah,” Lydia begged. “You are trying to spin some girlish romance out of a simple, sordid tale. Think past next month or even next year, when the idyll has played itself out and Carvelli returns to Italy. Where will you go then?”

Sarah’s face remained mulishly closed.

“Gerald will put you aside,” Lydia said. “He must. You will be exiled to some cold, dreary house far from the Society you have always known and enjoyed and there you will stay, separated from family and friends.” The picture she painted appalled her, doubly so as it so closely resembled a scene she had imagined for herself, should she throw everything over to marry Ned.
Had
he asked her to marry him. Which he had not.

But she had no time to think on that now; Sarah must be convinced to abandon her plan.

When Sarah finally spoke, she did so without the anger or affront Lydia expected. She looked suddenly tired, far older than her twenty- four years and jaded in a manner Lydia had never before discerned. “I did not come here for your approval, Lydia. I never thought to have it. And I realize the potential consequences of my action far better than you assume. I would be practical if I could, Lydia, but I cannot. If I do not go with Carvelli, I shall regret it every day of my life.” She held up her hand as Lydia opened her mouth to speak, forestalling her. “Doubtless all you say is correct, my dear, but it is a price I am willing to pay. So . . .” Her gaze flickered away from Lydia and back again. “Can you not find it in your heart to wish me well despite your disapproval?”

Lydia flung her arms around Sarah’s shoulders and embraced her tightly. “Dear heaven, Sarah. Of course, I want what is best for you. That is why I am trying to convince you to forgo this madness.”

“Then, Lydia, don’t want what is
best
for me,” Sarah murmured, returning Lydia’s embrace. “Want my happiness.”

“The two are not exclusive of each other.”

“For me they are,” Sarah replied softly.

Lydia had never heard her so subdued or thoughtful. She clasped Sarah by the shoulders and held her away, gazing intently into her face. “This is not any path to happiness,” she persisted.

“Perhaps not, but it is
a
path and I have been standing still casting about without direction for so long I never thought to find one.” She stood up. “Now wish me well.”

Lydia rose to her feet beside her, a hand on her forearm. “Sarah,” she said. “How can I stand by and ‘wish,’ when my love for you insists that I protest? You are ruining yourself.”

“Let her go, Lydia.” Emily spoke from the doorway.

Lydia looked around. Emily stood in the hall just outside the cast of candlelight. She was in dishabille, clutching a shawl around her round shoulders, the sleeping cap atop her head slightly askew.

“Emily,” Lydia said, anticipating an ally, “add your voice to mine and convince our dear friend not to—”

“You must let her go, Lydia. You must say good-bye to her and you must let her go,” Emily broke in, her soft voice carrying a fatalistic weight. “She has decided.”

Lydia did not have time to wonder at Emily’s misalliance. She turned back to Sarah. “Have you spoken to Eleanor?”

Sarah laughed. “Ad nauseum
.
She was as relentless in her determination to dissuade me from my plan as you. I would have thought she would understand better given the circumstances of her own marriage.”

Sarah’s gaze moved past Lydia to where Emily stood like a mournful little dumpling of a ghost. “You understand, don’t you, Emily?”

She nodded. “Yes.”

Lydia stood by feeling oddly auxiliary and disoriented, her friends suddenly people she did not recognize or understand.

Emily’s word brought a fleeting smile to Sarah’s face. “I wish you well, Sarah,” Emily said, hugging her shawl tighter as if against a sudden chill.

Sarah nodded and turned to Lydia. “And you, Lydia, will you wish me well, too?”

“But I will see you again eventually,” Lydia protested. “Won’t I?”

“Of course,” Sarah said brightly, reaching out and taking hold of both of Lydia’s hands. “Just not in the same venues.” But Sarah’s eyes flickered toward Emily and with a near physical sensation of loss, Lydia realized how naive she sounded, how facile Sarah’s reassurance had been.

There would be no meetings. Sarah loved her too well to presume on a relationship that could only harm Lydia’s reputation.

“Sarah—”

“Enough, Lydie. Tell me you love me and wish me well,” Sarah said firmly.

There was nothing else to do. “I love you, Sarah”—Lydia spoke in a hushed voice—“and I wish you the utmost happiness.”

Sarah blinked and cleared her throat, dropping Lydia’s hands and manufacturing a bright smile. “There now,” she said, turning quickly away to collect her reticule from the settee where she’d left it. “That was not so hard. Good-bye, my dears.”

She did not pause, nor did she look back as she hurried through the door, disappearing into the darkness.

Lydia sat down heavily on the settee, staring after her.

“Nothing you could have said would have stopped her, Lydie,” Emily said, shuffling into the room.

Ah, Lydia thought with a hollow sort of objectivity, that is how Sarah had sought and won Emily’s sympathy. Both women had known tragic marriages. Only Sarah had taken action to escape it, action Emily must surely wish she’d taken, too.

“Will she be happy?” Lydia whispered. “Can she be happy?”

“For a while,” Emily answered quietly. “But that’s all some people are allotted in this life, m’dear.” She darted a glance at Lydia. “And they would rather take their small taste than never sip from the cup at all. It is those who have been given a full portion and waste it who are to be pitied.”

Not me
, Lydia thought.
I know how fortunate I have been, how the gods have smiled at me. I will not spill my portion and chase after chimerical hopes and dreams.

But then why was it, she thought unhappily, that Emily was looking at her with that sadness in her eyes?

Morning still stood a ways off by the time Ned let himself into his rented town house. His footman lay slouched on the bench by the door fast asleep, Ned’s failure to apprise his household of his doings necessitating the poor blighter to stay up all night waiting for him.

Ned hadn’t realized how long or far he had traveled until he found himself east of the London docks by St. George’s Church, rising like a dark obelisk in the pre-dawn gloom. He had walked away the afternoon and evening and most of the night. He had made his way down to the river to watch the mudlarks scavenging the low tide, their swaying lanterns like fireflies over the shoals. He’d found no respite and finally, determining that he would not find the answer he was seeking on foot, he had headed back to St. James Square.

He nudged the footman awake with his foot and then moved down the corridor, waiting until he heard the young man scramble to his feet before calling back over his shoulder, “Coffee.”

“Right away, sir!”

Jerking off his cravat, he tossed it on the back of a chair as he entered the library. He shrugged out of his coat and restlessly paced to the window, looking out unseeingly over the square as if he might find an answer there.

He had captained a ship through five years of war and engaged in three dozen battles. He had sat in on strategy meetings, his opinions well respected by the admiralty. He was known for his cool head, intelligence, and instincts. But where the battle for Lydia’s heart was concerned he was at a loss of how to go on. Or even if he should.