Chapter 8 #2
Then he heard that the Viscount and Viscountess Tregaron, both of whom he had never met, would not come to Sommerleigh, after all.
Mary, the eldest of the Lovelock daughters, was to have twins—the two heartbeats had been heard clearly by a London physician—and the couple would travel straight from London to their home in Wales.
Better and better. An even more intimate party.
It would be just Thomas and Harry and daughter Hypatia along with the Duke and Duchess of Middlewich and their young son Sebastian and, most importantly, Arabella.
He was fitted for new clothes. He had a waistcoat made up in a fine green wool that the tailor told him was a good match for his eyes.
He had already read all the extant works of Mr. Walter Scott, Arabella’s favorite author, but now he stayed up late, reading them again.
So many of them were concerned with Scotland.
That was a good sign, surely. Scott’s most recent novel, the three volume Ivanhoe, was not set in Scotland, but Alasdair thought this aberration was unlikely to be among Arabella’s favorites.
Still, he reread it along with the others in case she would like to discuss that work with him.
His first invitation was for a dinner three days before Christmas Day. He dressed and shaved with care. He was nervous but hopeful.
Arabella was not there.
He asked. He was compelled to. Driven to.
Was Miss Lovelock well? Her mother, the duchess, said yes.
Would she not be coming for Christmas? No?
She was away? Visiting? Where? The answers he got were vague and unsatisfactory.
In fact, the duchess looked distressed, and the duke and Thomas looked ominous.
On Christmas Day, he cornered Harry. The others were playing with Hypatia and Sebastian and their new Christmas toys in the nursery. He invented a rather stupid question about logarithms and took Harry into the library to have her answer it on paper.
As Harry’s quill raced across the paper, she said offhandedly, “I will have another confinement this year, Alasdair. In June, I believe. I would like you to be present just as you were with Hypatia.”
“Certainly.” That accounted for Thomas putting his hand on Harry’s still-flat abdomen several times today. “I am glad for ye and Lord Drake. Perhaps an heir apparent?”
“Perhaps. You will be the first to know, of course.” She finished writing and sprinkled pounce on the paper and blew on it before handing it to him. He did not even pretend to glance at the equations she offered him.
“Harry, where is Arabella? I mean, Miss Lovelock.” He betrayed himself with every word.
Harry averted her eyes. “I’m not supposed to talk about it,” she muttered.
Alasdair waited.
She looked at him and narrowed her eyes. She seemed to make a decision and looked away again.
“She was seduced by a man two months ago. He is married, my stepmother says. The seduction was made known to the public, and Arabella left London. She has written she is safe, but she has been clever, and we don’t know where she is, exactly.”
Emotions warred within Alasdair. Fury at the immoral monster who had seduced Arabella. Selfish disappointment that Arabella had given herself to another. But primarily, a very strong and almost suffocating anxiety about the safety of Arabella.
Anxiety. He, who had the reputation as the calmest of men.
The most steady-handed of surgeons when he was in the navy and amputated five limbs in the matter of an hour on a rolling ship under cannon fire from the French, with himself and his saw covered in blood, his boots slipping on the deck, not able to find purchase in the gore.
But now he was flooded with fear.
Harry peered at his face again.
“Sit down. Now. I’ll get you a whisky.”
He obeyed her. Harry poured him a finger from one of her husband’s decanters and brought it to him. He drank.
She said nothing more but sat opposite him, slumped in a chair, her fingers steepled, studying him.
“Where was her letter from?” Alasdair choked out.
“Glasgow. That was where she left the duke’s coach and told it to go back to London.”
“Glasgow?”
“Yes.”
“Does she have any acquaintance in Glasgow?”
“No. But she is not there now,” Harry said with the same surety she had when she discussed the natural numbers. “It is a misdirection. As I said, she is clever. She has gone on to some other place. She did promise to write again, but I think she doesn’t want to be found.”
“Is there to be a child?”
“My stepmother doesn’t think so.”
Alasdair eventually came out of the library with Harry and made an excuse to Thomas and went home to have Christmas night in his very lonely house and his very lonely bed.
The pain was deep. Not just the pain of loss but also the pain of responsibility.
If he had had more courage, if he had felt himself more worthy, might he have been able to engage Arabella’s affections and prevent this unhappiness for her? He did not know. He only knew he had not. He had been weak and shy, and she had been damaged by evil.
Better he had risked his heart and approached her. But he had waited. And what he thought might be his one chance of joy had now slipped through his fingers.
He deserved his pain. She did not deserve hers. How natural it would be for a spirited and affectionate young woman like her to abandon propriety in search of love. Oh, poor Arabella.
In the months and years that followed, he had not liked to ask Harry for further news of Arabella.
However, Harry let him know she wrote to and received letters from her sister every month.
But Harry did not say where the letters came from or their content.
And he did not feel he had the right to ask.
He wondered if Arabella had taken a ship from Glasgow to America. Or, more likely, a ship from Glasgow to Liverpool and then on to America or Canada. He did not know why, but he imagined the dauntless Arabella in the New World.