CHAPTER 15 #3
“I believe she is,” Miss Martin said. “I hope she does not grow overbold too soon. I do not expect it, though. She knows she needs Molly or Agnes or one of the other girls—and Horace, of course. This summer will be a very good experience for her.”
“Let’s sit for a little while, shall we?” he suggested, and they sat side by side on the bank of the lake. She drew up her knees and wrapped her arms about them.
He picked up one more stone and bounced it across the water.
“Oh,” she said, “I used to be able to do that when I was a girl. I still remember the memorable occasion when I made a stone bounce six times. But I had no witness, alas, and no one ever believed me.”
He chuckled. “Your pupils are fortunate indeed to have you for a headmistress,” he said.
“Ah, but you must remember that this is a holiday,” she told him. “I am rather different during term time. I am a stern task-mistress, Lord Attingsborough. I have to be.”
He remembered how all the senior girls had fallen silent as soon as she stepped out onto the pavement just before she left Bath with him.
“Discipline can be achieved without humor or feeling,” he said, “or with both. You achieve it with. I am quite sure of that.”
She hugged her knees and did not answer.
“Do you ever wish for a different life?” he asked her.
“I could have had one,” she said. “Just this morning I had a marriage offer.”
McLeith! He had ridden over here this morning to call on her.
“McLeith?” he said. “And could have? You said no, then?”
“I did,” she said.
He was damnably glad.
“You cannot forgive him?” he asked.
“Forgiveness is not a straightforward thing,” she said.
“Some things can be forgiven but never quite forgotten. I have forgiven him, but nothing can ever be the same between us. I can be his friend perhaps, but I can never be more than that. I could never trust that he would not do something similar again.”
“But you do not still love him?” he asked.
“No.”
“Love does not last forever, then?”
“He asked me the same thing this morning,” she said. “No, it does not—not love that has been betrayed. One realizes that one has loved a mirage, someone who never really existed. Not that love dies immediately or soon, even then. But it does die and cannot be revived.”
“I never thought I would stop loving Barbara,” he told her. “But I did. I look upon her fondly whenever I see her, but I doubt I could love her again even if we were both free.”
She was looking directly at him, and he turned his head to look back.
“It is a consolation,” she said, “to know that love dies eventually. Not a very strong consolation at first, it is true, but some comfort nevertheless.”
“Is it?” he asked softly.
He did not know if she was talking about them. But the air suddenly seemed charged between them.
“No,” she said, her voice almost a whisper. “Not at all really. What absurdities we sometimes speak. Future indifference is no consolation for present pain.”
And when he leaned toward her and set his lips to hers, she did not draw away. Her lips trembled against his and then pressed back against them and parted as his tongue pushed between them and into the warm cavity of her mouth.
“Claudia,” he said a few moments later, closing his eyes and touching his forehead to hers.
“No!” she said, withdrawing and getting to her feet. She stood looking out over the lake.
“I am so sorry,” he said. And he was too—sorry for what he had done to her and for the disrespect he had shown Portia, to whom he was betrothed. Sorry for his lack of control.
“I wonder if it is a pattern doomed to repeat itself every eighteen years or so of my life,” she said. “A duke and a duke-in-waiting choosing a bride for her suitability for the position and leaving me behind to grieve.”
Oh, dash it all! He drew a slow breath.
“And what have I said?” she asked him. “What have I just admitted? It does not matter, though, does it? You must have guessed. How pathetic I must seem.”
“Good God!” he cried, getting to his feet too and standing a short distance behind her. “Do you think I kissed you because I pity you? I kissed you because I—”
“No!” She swung around, holding up one hand, palm out. “Don’t say it. Please don’t say it even if you mean it. Either way, I could not bear to hear it spoken aloud.”
“Claudia…” he said softly.
“Miss Martin to you, Lord Attingsborough,” she said, lifting her chin and looking very much the schoolmistress again despite her disheveled appearance. “We will forget what happened here and what happened at Vauxhall and at the Kingston ball. We will forget.”
“Will we?” he said. “I am so sorry to have upset you like this. It was inexcusable of me.”
“I am not blaming you,” she said. “I am quite old enough to know better. I will never even be able to convince myself that I fell prey to the lures of a practiced rake, though that is what I expected you to be when I first set eyes on you. Instead you are a gentleman whom I like and admire. That has been the whole problem, I suppose. And I am prattling. Let us return or everyone—Miss Hunt in particular—will be wondering what I am up to.”
And yet, he thought as they made their way back to the far lawn, not touching and not talking, they could be no more than a few minutes behind the girls.
Minutes that had done infinite damage to both their lives. No longer could he even pretend that he did not love her. No longer could she pretend that she did not love him.
And no longer would they be able to trust themselves to be alone together.
He felt his loss like a hard fist to the stomach.