Chapter 29
Please forgive me. I love you. Let me set things right.
—from the papers of Arthur Baird
Mrs. Hope-Wallace, as usual, had responded to disappointment with millinery.
“What do you think of this one, my darling?” She held up a stiffened silk bonnet, which she had trimmed entirely around the front, sides, and top with shiny grapes of a magenta decidedly not found in nature.
She really must be concerned, Lydia reflected. Normally she had excellent taste in hats.
Lydia tucked her legs farther beneath her on the settee and held her teacup between her palms. “Lovely, Mother.”
Georgiana, across the sitting room, gave a scoff so vehement that Bacon, who had scarcely left her side since their reunion, clambered off her lap in a huff.
Mrs. Hope-Wallace turned her gaze on Georgiana. “I beg your pardon?”
Georgiana gave her a rather wooden smile. “A tickle in my throat, Mrs. Hope-Wallace. It’s—ah—lovely. That is the only word I can think of.”
Mrs. Hope-Wallace threw the bonnet down in disgust and leapt to her feet. Several discarded plumes fell from her skirts to the ground, as though she had begun slowly and decorously molting.
“This is ridiculous,” she declared. She began to circumnavigate the room with the general air of an outraged pigeon.
Lydia set her teacup down. “Mother.”
Huw Trefor, who had mostly spent the last day or two hiding from Lydia’s mother, peered out from a wingback chair, half-concealed behind a book on hoof diseases he had discovered in the Hope-Wallace library. At the sight of Mrs. Hope-Wallace’s small form striding toward him—a coronet of roses bristling with outrage on the top of her head—he ducked back behind the tome. Lydia admired his equanimity.
“How much longer does he expect us to wait upon him?” Mrs. Hope-Wallace demanded. She extended one delicate finger and nudged Huw’s book aside.
“Mother,” Lydia said again. Her voice was still quiet but her tone this time was firmer.
There was a part of her, even now, that wanted to make herself small. Perhaps there always would be. She would never be the model of social ease that Georgiana was, at home in any circumstance. She would never command a room like Selina.
But her own voice—soft and sometimes wobbly as it was—was enough.
She was trying very hard, despite everything, to believe that that was so. She was trying to share in Huw’s steady calm.
“Ah,” Huw said, “I am afraid I haven’t a precise timetable for his return, but I assure you, if you’ll only be patient—”
Mrs. Hope-Wallace spun on her heel. “Be patient!” She threw up her hands, and one of the roses succumbed to the power of her emotions and toppled off her head. “Be patient! When that—that— nincompoop returns to my household, I shall show him where to put his patience—”
There was a sudden, vociferous, and very familiar clamor in the hall. Something crashed—from the sound of it, something made of porcelain. Muffled shouting was followed by the thud of bone meeting flesh.
Lydia leapt to her feet.
“Over my—dead—body!” That was Ned, who’d quite lost his head this last week. “I—will—murder—you—first—”
Something else smashed. This time it sounded like furniture.
Arthur burst through the door.
Lydia’s hand, which had been tangled in her skirts, flew up to her mouth to hold in an indelicate sound of alarm.
His curls were standing on end. He had a brilliant red contusion across one cheekbone, and nearly two weeks’ growth of beard. His jacket had come off one arm, and Ned was clinging wild-eyed to the dangling fabric like a dog on a leash.
Arthur shook off Ned and crossed the room to Lydia in three long strides. “Lydia!” His hands rose as if to pull her into his arms, then dropped helplessly to his sides. He searched her face. His left eye was rapidly swelling closed. “Am I too late? Oh Christ, please tell me I’m not too late.”
She paused to consider the question, her heart in her throat.
“No,” she managed finally. “No, you’re not too late.”
He made a wordless, torn-off sound. Instead of dragging her to him, he only touched the side of her face with the tips of his fingers, gentle and searching and afraid. “Lydia,” he said hoarsely.
Mrs. Hope-Wallace, whose remaining roses were now hang ing drunkenly off the side of her head, interposed herself between them, jabbing one small finger into Arthur’s broad chest. “You,” she snapped. “How dare you?”
“I’m sorry—” he began, looking rather desperately between Lydia and her mother, but Mrs. Hope-Wallace cut him off.
“I should hope so! Why, if Mr. Trefor here had not assured us that you were called away on emergency business, I would have thought you had abandoned my daughter after one of the most terrifying experiences of her life!” She pursed her lips, glaring up at Arthur. “To leave your wife for so long with no word of when you would return! I am gravely disappointed in you, Strathrannoch. You may call me Mrs. Hope-Wallace until further notice.”
Arthur looked as though he had been struck in the head. His bewildered gaze sought out Huw, still in the corner in the wingback chair. “Huw said—” His eyes, a thousand shades of blue and green and gold, came back to Lydia’s face. “You’re not—”
“Mother,” Lydia said. “Ned. Everyone. Perhaps Lord Strathrannoch and I could have a few moments alone.”
And to her great surprise, without a word of argument, everyone filed out the door, even Sir Francis Bacon. Huw, as he passed, gave her upper arm a comforting squeeze and murmured something under his breath to Arthur that sounded rather like Grovel.
But perhaps she had not heard correctly.
Before the door had even closed behind her family, Arthur had her hands in his. “Lydia,” he said again, as if her name were the only word he knew, the only thing that was certain in a madly spinning world.
Her heart made a slow and dizzy swoop in her chest. She had hoped—oh God, how she had hoped.
He squeezed her hands, worrying his thumb across her fingers. “I’m sorry. Oh God, I’m so sorry I left. It was a mistake, I knew as soon as I went that it was a mistake—only I did not—I could not—”
He looked down at their joined hands, her pale fingers in his larger ones. “Bertie told me you were getting married. He said that Huw had come down to London for your wedding. You’re… not married?”
She stared up into his face in frank astonishment. “He told you what ? Huw came to London days ago to return Georgiana’s dog, not for my—” A sudden hot anger boiled up in her, and she yanked her hands out of Arthur’s grasp. “My wedding ? You came racing back in a dither because you thought I was marrying your brother ?”
She whirled and stalked away, her pulse skipping and her cheeks growing hot with outrage.
Arthur chased after her, spinning her back to face him. “You told Davis no? You turned him down?”
“Of course I turned him down! I was under the impression that I was marrying you !”
Arthur caught her shoulders and held, as if he did not know whether to draw her to him or push her away. “But you wanted him first. I thought—when you knew that he was not a traitor—when you learned that his intentions had been good—”
“You thought I would flit from your bed to his, is that it? You thought I would have whichever Baird brother I was in closest proximity to?” She jerked up her chin, furious for once at the difference in their heights. She would have liked to tower over him in righteous anger. She would have liked at this particular juncture not to feel the desire—still, always—to lean into his strength.
“No!” he said, and now he did drag her closer, burying his face in her hair and enclosing her in his arms. “No. Oh God, Lydia, I’ve not had a rational thought in days. Weeks. Possibly since the first moment I saw you at Strathrannoch.”
She tried to hold herself stiffly in his embrace, but it was no good. He smelled of soap and sweat and burnt honey, and he was Arthur, and he was here. She tucked her cheek against his chest, and felt his whole body shudder with relief.
She knew him—had known he would not abandon her. But oh God, every part of him was solid and warm, and she was glad—so glad —he was here.
“Huw told my mother that you had been called away on business,” she said, “but I knew better, of course. He told me to give you time. He told me not to judge you too harshly for running away. He said you’d be back.” She pressed her face harder into him, into the thin linen of his shirtfront and the sturdy muscle of his chest. All the tears that she had suppressed the last nine days overflowed silently, dampening his shirt. “I trusted you. I did. But I could not help—feeling afraid—”
“Oh Christ,” he groaned. His hands traced her shoulder blades, the back of her neck, tangled in her hair. “Lydia. I do not deserve you. I’m sorry. I love you. I’m so goddamned sorry I left.”
She pulled back from his chest and looked up into his battered and lovely face. “Why did you do it? Surely you cannot have thought—after what passed between us—that I—”
He gave a strangled croak that might have been a laugh. “My love. My beloved. I’ve been trying to find the words to tell you for days now. Bertie must have grown tired of my folly and decided to prod me along.”
He broke off and untangled his fingers from her hair to rifle through the pocket of his dangling jacket. He unearthed a remarkable assortment of papers—torn notes, a bit of newspaper, one extremely large folded-up sheet of foolscap—all covered in pencil and blotched ink.
“I’ve been trying to write to you.” He pressed the papers into her hands. “If you’ll only look. Oh God, Lydia, I’ve never been easy with words this way.”
She looked down at the papers in her hands.
You are the summer and the winter, the spring and the fall…
My body and my heart were formed for the loving of you…
If there is one thing I regret above all others, it is that. That I let you believe, even for one instant, that you were less than everything to me…
“What is this?” she asked.
“An apology,” Arthur said hoarsely. “A vow.” His fingers found her face again, one thumb brushing her cheek, the line of her jaw. “I love you. I have loved you for so long. My brave and brilliant Lydia. My heart. My home.”
His thumb brushed across her lips, first the upper and then the lower. She trembled.
“Your smile is my light,” he murmured. “Your laugh is my shelter. If you’ll”—he hesitated, then steeled himself, looking for all the world like a man facing the gallows—“if you’ll allow it, Lydia Hope-Wallace, I will spend the rest of my life trying to be worthy of you. I will never leave you again. I will stand at your side when you need a partner and I will shield you when you need a place to rest. Hell, I’ll move to London every Season and vote my seat in the Lords, if you want me to—only—”
He broke off. He pushed his fingers into her hair, a soft pressure against her scalp, a knotted plea. “Only say you’ll have me. Only say you’ll let me try to make things right. Please.”
She looked up at him, tousled and bruised and uncertain. She put one hand to his chest and felt the beat of his heart—rapid, but steady. Undeniable. Hers.
“Yes,” she said. “I love you, too.”
And then she curled her fingers in his damp disheveled shirt and dragged him down to her mouth.
“Oh Christ,” he groaned against her lips. “Oh fuck. Lydia.”
And then he was kissing her, frantic and hungry and probably too rough for the state of his bruises. She gasped, and he made a desperate sound into her open mouth, kissing her harder, pulling her tighter. His hands were everywhere—her hair, her back, beneath the leg she’d somehow wrapped around him.
He picked her up and carried her until her back pressed against the wainscoted wall. A small and breathless laugh escaped her, and he pressed his forehead against hers. “I love that sound. I was so afraid I would never hear it again.”
She let his letters slip to the carpet and then she wound her fingers into his hair. “I am still vexed with you, you know.” She squeezed her legs around his waist to emphasize the gravity of her words, and he groaned—a different sound this time, rougher, raspier—and rocked against her.
Her head grew slightly muddled. Perhaps she had chosen the wrong way to underscore her point.
“I know,” he muttered, his mouth finding her neck. “I’m glad. Be angry with me. I should like to spend the next decade making atonement.” He took her earlobe between his teeth and bit down. She whimpered, and his hands tightened around her hips, holding her in place while he sucked and nibbled at her skin.
She tipped her head to the side and let him.
“What do you want?” he murmured. “What can I give to you, my love? I have about a hundred rambling letters. I have a castle, if you’d like it, though I fear it has numerous windows that need replacing and very little furniture. I have sixteen zebras.” His voice was lower on the next words, almost inaudible, but she heard him anyway. “I have a family who loves you a great deal.”
She reached up and caught his face in her palms, moving him back so that she could look into his eyes. “I regret to inform you, Arthur Baird, that I do not want for anything except”—her voice caught at the sight of him, so hopeful, so precious to her—“except the man I love. He’s been notably absent of late.”
“Never again,” he vowed, and then he bent his head and brought his mouth back to hers.
Some minutes passed, in which Lydia was sensible of very little beyond Arthur and his hands and his whispers of Hush, my love, and then The hell with it, let your brothers kill me, I’ll die jubilant.
She was still breathless and panting when he lifted his head. “Lydia, will you—” He broke off. His eyes were blue with yearning, gold with devotion, green with hope.
“Ask,” she said. “Arthur. You can ask me anything.”
His thumb made small distracting circles against her waist. “Will you say it again?”
Her lips curved up as she looked at him. Love wasn’t a cautiously unfurling petal in her chest this time, but a garden, a profusion of glorious tangled blossoms.
“Which part?” she asked.
“Any of it. All of it.”
“I want you,” she said. “I choose you. I love you without end, without hesitation, and I will say it to you every day for the rest of our lives, if you’d like me to.”
“Oh God,” he said hoarsely, “I should like that very much.”
“I will, then,” she said. “I promise.”