Chapter 28 #2
He arrived at the absolute stroke of the hour and was ushered by her butler to the sitting room where she waited. She did her best to take in his appearance, which was nice enough, hoping she would better remember that he had pale blue eyes, a straight nose, and brown hair.
“Good day, Lady Birchall,” he said as he kissed her hand. “You look well today.”
“Thank you, Lord Wexford,” she said as she rose and gestured to a chair across from her. “Please, do have a seat.”
“Thank you, Lady Birchall. I admire your taste in furnishings.”
“I was lucky enough to have come about it fully furnished and have done little with it. I had spent the last year in the country, and this is my first item using it.”
“Well, how fine of you to have come about it.”
His manners were impeccably polished as he took the cup from her.
A man like this would never talk out of style or embarrass her.
This was a plus for Anna. Yet as with their dances, the conversation did not flow so much as march through, moving with admirable, exhausting thoroughness through a checklist of safe topics.
He began with the unseasonable heat of the weather once more, then transitioned to the yields of his estates in Derbyshire and concluded with a lengthy debate on the relative merits of two horses he was considering for the autumn.
Anna was all but bored to tears.
“…while both have thoroughbred fathers, I am struggling to choose between the Cleveland Bay or Irish Draft mothers. It is a terrible conundrum.”
“Indeed, quite a conundrum,” Anna repeated as she refilled his tea, trying to imagine a life where conversations were like this.
“Yes, I have to make a decision soon,” he said with a wide smile.
“I have no doubt you will make the correct one.”
“Thank you, Lady Birchall.”
By the time the conversation lapsed, Anna had learned a great deal about his taste in horses and found herself with nothing in particular to say in return.
He was nice enough, and she supposed his face was nice enough, but she sat in the middle of all that pleasantness feeling entirely, irrevocably unstirred. And oh, how she wished to be stirred.
It is not the horses.
She had no objection to horses. It was the absence of anything that pushed back. She had spent too long in the company of a certain kind of mind to be comfortable without it now. Her thoughts almost drifted to a certain duke when Lord Wexford spoke.
“May I call on you later in the week? Perhaps Thursday?” He asked as he rose to his feet.
“Yes, you may.”
“Same time?”
“Yes, thank you, Lord Wexford.”
“The pleasure is mine, Lady Birchall.”
He called again as promised at precisely the time he had promised, punctuated by the bells that rang in the distance. That day, he brought a fresh opinion on a third horse.
“This new horse has a Cleveland Bay mother and is supposed to be an excellent hunter. It will be quite a price, but no doubt worth it… Do you agree, Lady Birchall?”
“Yes, quite so!”
Anna did her best to keep her attention focused as they all but repeated the motions of the prior visit, again with no stirring.
She was grateful when he left an hour later.
Rachel was due for luncheon that afternoon, and she so badly missed her friend.
They dined on Anna’s terrace and enjoyed cucumber sandwiches, fresh lemonade, and seasonal fruits.
“You seem to like him,” Rachel said as she sipped her drink, which was not quite an observation and not quite a question. It was a quality of speaking she shared with her brother.
“Who?”
“Who? Oh, come now, Anna. Lord Wexford! I saw his carriage departing as I arrived. No hiding it from me.”
“Ah yes… he is very amiable,” Anna said.
“That is not the same thing as liking someone,” she said as she reached for a sandwich.
“No,” Anna agreed with a small laugh. “It isn’t.”
Rachel took a bite and looked at the garden behind them, her focus seemingly distracted.
“What is it, Rachel?”
“It is a dangerous business, marrying a man simply because he gives you no reason not to marry him,” Rachel said, her voice dropping.
“Who said anything about marrying Lord Wexford? I’ve only let him call on me, as I feel I must…”
“Amiability is easy to live with, I suppose. But it is a very cold comfort when your mind is stubbornly fixed… elsewhere.”
Anna looked up from her fruit plate and set her fork down.
“Elsewhere?”
Rachel murmured something under her breath, and her gaze was up at the afternoon sky rather than at Anna. A faint, uncharacteristic softness stole over her features as she stared into the distance. For a moment, Anna wondered if she were talking about herself instead.
“You deserve someone whose name you find yourself writing in the margins of your thoughts, entirely against your own good sense,” she said finally.
“What do you mean, Rachel? I don’t understand what you speak of,” Anna asked, her heart racing.
“I am speaking of no one in particular,” Rachel interrupted briskly. “I just always imagined a love match for you, after all you have been through.”
“A love match? In the ton?”
“It’s what any of us can hope for…”
“I see,” Anna said, picking up her fork and eating again.
“I merely suggest you do not mistake Wexford’s lack of vices for the presence of an interesting personality,” Rachel recovered as her personality snapped back into place, her focus fully back on Anna.
“It makes for a very quiet parlor, and a terribly lonely life. What will we talk about at dinner with Wexford?”
“Horses.”
“A reasonable topic,” Rachel said, and they laughed.
Anna tried, that evening, to be reasonable about it all. She had enjoyed a quiet supper and retired to her quarters immediately after. Her mind raced as she considered all she had been through, and all that may be.
Much as she wanted to secure a good match, there was something to Rachel’s words that stirred within her. She sat at her dressing table and brushed her hair. She looked at herself with something approaching detachment. She was young, and beautiful to some, she supposed, but that wouldn’t last.
I must be wise. Lord Wexford is a good man. He would be a kind husband. I could do worse… I have done worse.
She cataloged their interactions as she stroked her hair.
There was no mistake that he had indicated that he found her company agreeable.
She knew he would not be averse to finding it on a permanent basis.
There was not a single thing about him that she could identify as a flaw worth objecting to.
Yet, he made her feel entirely, completely nothing.
In many ways, this is more than I could have ever dreamed of.
She looked at herself in the mirror for a while longer. When she realized she had been brushing her hair for an hour, she blew out the candle and went to bed.
At Lady Fontaine’s musicale, as Anna learned there could never be too many musicales, Frederick stood at the back of the room with Lord Larthby.
Both men paid rapt attention to the string quartet.
Anna sat three rows ahead, and she was aware of him with the irritating, helpless precision of a compass aware of north.
She heard a small rustle next to her and turned slightly to the right.
She watched from the corner of her eye the moment Lord Wexford settled into the empty seat beside her.
She did not look toward the back of the room to see whether Frederick noticed.
She was very careful not to look. She did, however, possess the sense to isolate the sounds in the room, the string instruments, whispering voices, the clinking of glasses, to note a small cough from the back of the room.
Check.
Later, she was equally careful not to notice the way Frederick’s gaze tracked Wexford across the room during the interval.
She also did not outwardly note the flatness that settled over his expression when Wexford brought her a glass of lemonade and leaned in to say something that made her laugh.
Anna did not notice any of this because she was a grown woman who told herself that there was nothing to notice.
She was absolutely determined to believe it or at least play the part.