Chapter 41
Forty-One
Aurora saw that everyone had a light meal sent up to their respective rooms, but she found herself too restless to eat more than a few bites. Finally, she left her own room and headed toward her parents’.
Mr. and Mrs. Hardcastle retained the old custom of sharing a bedchamber.
It had never fully struck Aurora before—when they had attained a more substantial income and moved to the new house, her mother could have taken the fashionable way and created a separate suite of rooms for herself.
But she never had. The realization made Aurora both smile and feel another flush of shame at how much she had misjudged and rejected her mother over the years.
Why had she never seen that quiet connection, that caring between her parents?
She had been too busy fretting under her mother’s directives on how to behave—she could recognize that now.
She quietly scratched on the door, and her mother swiftly opened it, clad for sleep in her nightgown and cap, with an old, thickly knitted shawl around her shoulders.
Mrs. Hardcastle’s finger was on her lips to shush whoever was there, but she relaxed and smiled at her daughter, stepped into the hall, and gently shut the door behind her.
“How is he, Mama?”
“Tired, very tired, Aurora. But he is asleep now. Sleep is one of the best cures for him at present.”
“And how are you, Mama?” Aurora looked into her mother’s drawn face, her once bright hair faded and blurred with gray.
Deep circles ringed her eyes, giving them an almost purple cast. Glancing down at her mother’s once-steady hands, Aurora noted they were thin and shook slightly, the rings she always wore loose around the knuckles.
Impulsively, she reached out and took her mother’s hands in hers.
Mrs. Hardcastle was startled by the unfamiliar gesture, but then a grateful smile rose on her face. “I am tired. But there will be time for all of that later. Now, you are here. And you have grown so. I can—” She did not finish.
Aurora’s heart went out to her. She saw her mother in a new light, not simply as the disciplinarian who worked so very hard to turn Aurora into a proper lady, but the woman who was desperately trying to keep her husband alive and watching him slip through her fingers regardless.
Her mother’s heartbreak was a painful revelation, and Aurora felt guilty for all the childish ways she had misread and dismissed her over the years.
“Then sleep, Mama. I shall come and see you in the morning. Is there else you need?”
Her mother sadly shook her head, extracted her hands, then patted Aurora’s own before turning to grasp the doorknob.
“Sleep well, daughter. I shall see you in the morning.” As her mother stepped inside and pulled the door softly closed behind her, Aurora thought she heard her mother say, “Thank you.” But she couldn’t be sure.
Returning to her own room, Aurora attempted to get ready for bed.
She had dismissed the maid sent to assist her an hour ago, perhaps longer.
But sleep did not come. Overwhelmed, she tossed and turned until finally she got up, poured some of the water from the ewer into the bowl, and splashed her hot face to cool it down.
After the events of today, she was exhausted, but her brain was in no state to settle.
Fragments of what had taken place that evening seemed to come at her from all sides.
What Missie had done to Marjorie. The strained, stunned look on Alec’s face as Missie spat out her venom, aiming not at Aurora, the adult she was angry with, but on the head of a bewildered child. It was unforgivable.
Giving the bed a regretful look, Aurora went and sat in a chair near the window. She drew her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. She used a hand to pull the hem of her nightdress over the tops of her cold toes.
She had tried. One last time, she had tried to find the friend she believed she knew.
Was Missie still inside the woman behind the porcelain mask which had grown harder and more brittle over these weeks in London?
Aurora imagined, for one moment, she had found her again.
Oh, but the bitterness. The selfishness.
How could she have been so wrong about her?
Or maybe, this had always been a part of Missie; that she could have developed in many ways, but that the years of training and this time in London had finally crushed the piece of Millicent Wentworth that Aurora Hardcastle had been friends with.
Maybe there was a way to find that person still in there, but Aurora would not try again.
The betrayal by the woman she considered her closest friend still felt raw. But it had not destroyed her.
What hurt much more deeply was watching her father and knowing his time was brief.
So much pain. She had not only come home to that pain, but she had also brought some of it with her in having the Wentworths chaperone her return.
Oh, how she wished that had not been a necessity.
Respectability—hah! How could anyone call this evening a respectable one?
Or, at least, an acceptable one. No, I will never be one of you, Missie.
And I am immensely grateful for that fact.
Aurora had plaited her hair before she had put herself to bed, and now she tugged on the end of the thick braid. Each tug was an attempt to, what—change the subject? Stop the whirling?
There was a bright spot in all of this, and it was Marjorie.
Aurora remembered the first time she felt that trusting hand on her arm, back at the Tower.
It was that trust which had gone straight to her heart.
Whatever she was able to do for Marjorie, she would do.
She knew now. And she had proven she could, today.
But where did that leave Alec? At that thought, she barely stopped herself from groaning out loud in frustration.
Just thinking of his name brought a heat with it.
Somewhere along the way, her feelings had shifted from the romantic sighs of a schoolgirl over a hero of romance into a warmth which filled her heart.
The way he had stepped up behind her and supported her when they had arrived back at her home, stunned at the extent of her father’s illness.
That counted for something. Even more, though, it was the touch of his hand on hers. His touch.
Because it was more than simple warmth or companionship.
Yesterday, at the meadow, Aurora felt something new, something different.
And it continued when they shared the blanket at the picnic today, Marjorie as a chaperone in between them.
It was much more than she had felt that night at Almack’s, when they waltzed and she had concluded, There is nothing more that can be felt than this.
Clearly, she had been na?ve and profoundly wrong.
Because yesterday? Yesterday she had not wanted him to stop.
And even today, she had wanted to ignore everyone else and pull him to her on that picnic blanket.
She didn’t know what exactly she wanted to happen—she had never been with a man; she did not know the specifics.
But she knew she wanted to be touched in all of the intimate places no one was supposed to touch. And not by simply anyone. But by Alec.
Partly, she had snapped at Missie when she accused Aurora of being soiled because she had desperately wanted all of that. She was guilty in thought, if not in deed.
Aurora’s cheeks burned, and she set her slightly cooler hands on them. If she kept on this way, she would need to return to the basin and splash some more water on her face.
She was in love with Alec Raeburn, Duke of Selkirk.
The relief—or was it alarm—of the clarity of that realization was immediately followed by another, drilled into her again and again by Missie: Aurora was only a business arrangement to Alec, a way to gain desperately needed funds to secure his estate and take care of his daughter.
She saw Alec was a kind man at heart. He was intelligent, warm, and possessed empathy. He had humor and could make her laugh. And he was well read and loved music. She did not fear he would beat her or treat her harshly. No, she did not fear him. Not anymore.
Suddenly, a new possibility struck her, and Aurora grabbed onto it as if it would stop her from drowning.
If this was to be a business arrangement on his part, perhaps he would be more amenable to accept her partnership in the manufactory.
She didn’t know how she could accept a marriage of kindness and not love.
Because there was no way he could love her.
He was clearly fond of her, but no. No, despite Missie’s behavior today, Missie was the person, or at least the type of person, whom Alec could or did love. Not her. Never her.
The truth was, even if she had fought back against Missie’s cruelty, she still believed her former friend. Aurora heard those words again, the threat explicit in them: “And whatever arrangement I eventually enter into, I believe I will be able to find a way to make him mine.”
Aurora shivered and turned her gaze to the window and sat looking out at the night. She would have to find a way to make all this work. But how?
* * *
Aurora awakened early after a night of more dozing than sleeping and listened to the sounds of bustle associated with a departure.
She did not call for the maid to help her get up and dressed, though, until she heard the carriage wheels retreating up the drive, taking its party back to London.
She felt a sudden pang of loneliness for Lucy.
Perhaps the young woman would not mind if Aurora took her away from London and home and family? Well, that was for another day.
Deciding to skip breakfast, and a chance encounter with Alec, she took the backstairs out to the stables and rode her horse as far away from everyone and everything as she could.
She stayed out all day, even skipping luncheon.
She was not hungry. And that night, like a coward, she pleaded a headache and kept to her own room.
If anything, the ride had only made things worse.
She crawled into bed and pulled the covers over her head.
Coward! Coward! Her dreams were filled with dark eyes and a pair of lips that kept curving into a smile, and Aurora wanted to drown in one and be covered all over by the other, while she kept backing away.