Chapter Twenty-Two #2
The count waved his hand in the air. “Unimportant details.”
“And what, precisely, do you intend to offer Lady Montague after this unimportant detail has been completed?” Gabriel pressed.
The count lifted his chin. “My name.”
“Which name?” Gabriel asked.
Count Bellarosa looked offended.
Gabriel set the fraudulent license upon the table. “You have no title, no accessible estates, and no means of supporting Lady Montague.”
“I have prospects,” the count insisted.
“Do any involve money?” Gabriel barked.
The count drew himself up to his full height. “Money is the least imaginative measure of a man.”
Gabriel’s nostrils flared. “It is not the least relevant measure when the man wishes to marry a widow because he believes she possesses it.”
Lady Viva’s eyes widened.
Poppy looked at her.
Gabriel’s tone remained level. “You believed Lady Montague had a fortune.”
Count Bellarosa seemed to realize that silence might have served him better some minutes earlier.
“Madam possesses an air of abundance,” he said at last.
Mama stared at him. “You thought I had money?”
“I thought you had resources.”
“You told me you had resources,” Lady Viva pointed out.
“I have charm.”
“So do I, darling. One cannot pay a wine merchant with it. I have tried.”
Despite herself, Poppy nearly laughed.
Count Bellarosa’s wounded grandeur deepened. “Then we have both been misled by appearances.”
Mr. Pottle edged toward the door.
Gabriel glanced at him. “Do not attempt another ceremony.”
“I had begun to think better of it.” Mr. Pottle vanished into the passage with an alacrity that suggested undeclared talents in escape.
Count Bellarosa swept up his hat. “Lady Montague, I regret that the universe has once again placed vulgar obstacles in our path.”
Lady Viva turned, and, for one terrible moment, Poppy thought Mama might defend him.
Instead, Lady Viva removed the enormous ring from her finger and held it out. “You forgot your paste, darling.”
Count Bellarosa took the ring with what remained of his dignity. Then he looked toward Poppy, bowed expansively, and said, “Miss Montfort. A pleasure, despite the atmosphere of persecution.”
Poppy scowled. “The feeling has not been mutual.”
His hand went to his heart.
Gabriel opened the door, and the count departed with all the grandeur available to a man fleeing a false wedding.
Poppy waited until his footsteps retreated down the passage. Then she turned to her mother.
Mama stood beside the sofa in her rose cloak, the champagne glass still in one hand. Without Bellarosa’s grand presence filling the room, she appeared smaller.
Not small. Lady Viva could never be small. But suddenly, unmistakably vulnerable.
Poppy felt anger rise first. Hot, sharp, and frightening in its force. “What were you thinking?”
Mama’s chin lifted. “I told you. I was solving our difficulties.”
“By attempting to marry a charlatan in a hotel parlor?”
“He said he was a count.” Mama sniffed.
“He also said history required him in Vienna.”
“Darling, I admit that part ought to have concerned me more.”
Poppy clenched her fists. “This is not amusing.”
The words struck hard enough that Mama flinched.
Poppy had seen her mother embarrassed, offended, tipsy, delighted, theatrical, and wounded in a dozen fleeting ways. She had never seen Lady Viva with no defense ready.
Gabriel stepped away toward the window. He did not leave. He did not intrude. He simply remained near enough that Poppy knew she would not have to manage the fallout alone. He was there if she needed him.
That steadied her enough to continue. “Mama, you packed a valise. You left the house without telling anyone where you were going. You meant to entrust yourself to a man we scarcely know.”
Lady Viva’s nose wrinkled. “I know him somewhat.”
“You do not even know his name.”
“That has been an unexpected difficulty.”
“Mama.”
Lady Viva looked down at the champagne in her glass.
The silence stretched.
When she spoke again, the airy brightness had gone from her voice. “I could not allow you to do it.”
Poppy frowned. “Allow me to do what?”
“Marry someone who does not love you merely because Algernon is coming.”
The anger in Poppy’s chest shifted.
Mama set the glass upon the table. Her hand trembled slightly as she did so.
“You have spent years putting everything right,” Lady Viva said.
“Bills. Servants. Guests. My foolishness. Every dreary little consequence I could not bear to examine closely. And now you are to marry whichever gentleman is willing to take on the inconvenience because I have left you no other choice.”
“Mama—”
“No, darling. Let me say it.”
The plea silenced Poppy.
Lady Viva folded her hands together. Without the glass, she seemed uncertain what to do with them.
“I thought if I married Bellarosa, you would be free. He said he had estates. A title. Villas. Or perhaps one villa. The number altered, but that seemed unimportant at the time. I thought I could go away with him. You could too if you wished. You would not need to provide for me. You could marry someone you love, or refuse to marry altogether, or take a cottage and fill it with books and dogs and not one single dying poet unless you invited him yourself.”
Her mouth trembled.
Poppy took one small step toward her, then stopped, the ache in her chest too large for speech.
Mama’s voice dropped to something almost inaudible. “I thought I could do one useful thing for you.”
The anger inside Poppy did not vanish. It became more complicated. “Mama,” she said, gentler now, “you cannot save me by handing yourself to a stranger.”
“I was trying.”
“I know.”
“I do try, sometimes.” Lady Viva looked toward the window, though she did not seem to see the street below. “I know it does not appear so.”
Poppy crossed the room slowly. “Mama.”
Lady Viva’s face tightened. Then, impossibly, tears filled her eyes.
Poppy stopped. She had never seen her mother cry.
Not when Papa died. Not at the funeral. Not in the terrible weeks afterward, when people filled the house with flowers and lowered voices.
Lady Viva had laughed too loudly, invited more guests, poured more wine.
She had turned grief into motion and refused to stand still long enough for anyone to name it.
Now a tear slipped down her cheek.
Mama brushed it away with an impatient movement. “I miss him,” she whispered.
Poppy’s throat closed.
Lady Viva shook her head once. “I miss him every day. It is silly. Ten years, and I still wake expecting him to be there. I still think of something dreadful or funny and turn to tell him. And he is not there, Poppy. He is never there.”
Another tear followed the first. Then another.
Mama pressed one hand to her mouth, but the sob escaped. Small at first. Startled. A sound she had carried so long she no longer recognized it.
Poppy reached for her. Mama folded against her with a broken sound.
For one breathless moment, Poppy became thirteen again. Frightened, bewildered, longing for the mother who had vanished into laughter and wine when Papa disappeared.
Then she wrapped both arms around Lady Viva and held her.
Mama wept. It wasn’t pretty or theatrical. Her body shook with ten years of grief she had outrun until there was nowhere left to go. Poppy stroked her hair and murmured the same gentle nonsense Mama had once offered whenever Poppy woke from a bad dream.
“It is all right.”
It was not. But perhaps someday it would be.
“Let it out.”
Mama clutched at the back of Poppy’s gown. “I loved him.”
“I know.”
“I did not know how to be here without him.”
Poppy closed her eyes. “I know.”
The answer held truth and sorrow and, beneath both, something that still ached too deeply to soften into easy forgiveness.
Poppy had always loved her mother. Now, she understood her more fully than she ever had.
But understanding did not make the last ten years disappear.
“Mama,” she said quietly, “I miss him too.”
Lady Viva’s grip tightened.
“And I needed you,” Poppy continued.
Mama went still.
Poppy’s own eyes burned, but she forced the words out because she had carried them too long.
“I was thirteen. I did not know how to settle bills or answer tradesmen or determine which guests meant well and which merely wanted a place at your table. I learned because someone had to learn. I kept smiling because someone had to make the house seem all right when it was not.” Her voice shook. “But I needed my mother.”
Lady Viva lifted her head. Rouge streaked faintly beneath one eye. She looked nothing like the dazzling woman who always descended their staircase in silk and diamonds, treating sorrow as an unwelcome caller beneath her notice.
“Oh, darling,” she whispered. “Oh, my sweet girl.”
Poppy swallowed.
“I never meant to leave you alone,” Mama said. “I did not. But meaning a thing and doing it are not the same, are they? I filled the house with noise because I could not bear the quiet, and you were left to keep it standing.”
The hurt in Poppy’s heart was so sharp she could scarcely breathe. Part of her wanted to say it was all right, because soothing Mama had become an instinct older than judgment. But it had not been all right.
“No,” she whispered. “It was too much.”
A tear streaked down Mama’s cheek. “I am sorry.”
The apology was not neat. It could not mend the accounts, reclaim the years, or turn Lady Viva into a mother who had known how to protect her daughter from grief rather than ask her to manage its consequences.
But it was real.
Perhaps that was enough for this moment.
Behind them, Gabriel shifted softly near the window. Poppy had almost forgotten he was there. He had seen enough to understand the shape of it now. The laughter. The disaster. The love. The harm.
He did not intrude. Poppy was grateful for that.
“Mama,” she said, “come home.”
Lady Viva drew back and dabbed at her face with a handkerchief so fine it seemed unsuitable for actual tears. “Is there cake?”
Poppy laughed. She could not help it. One sob escaped with the laugh, which made the sound uneven and ridiculous and entirely Montfort. “Mama.”