Chapter Eighteen
This time, Augustus did not wait for a decent hour before calling on Olivia. And, this time, he was heartened that he did not need to stew in the pretty parlor, wondering if she would appear. When he called and the butler admitted him, he was told that Olivia was already sitting there—quite at home and quite alone.
When he first took her in, as usual, he struggled to breathe. She was in a dress of striped, candy-yellow that made him want to strip it off of her and lick her until he forgot any taste but hers. But he was not there for that, he admonished himself. He was there to get to the bottom of what had happened between them all those years ago. Finally.
“Augustus,” she said, rising to meet him, and he took her hand. He brought it to his mouth and kissed it, reveling in the smooth feel of her skin on his lips.
“Olivia. May I sit with you?”
She nodded and reseated herself on the sofa. When he sat beside her, he took her hand once more. She let him.
“I couldn’t sleep for thinking about what you told me last night.”
It was, of course, the truth. He had hardly been able to keep himself from tearing her away again last night. He had wanted so badly to demand an explanation. But he knew he couldn’t. He had to be careful. They deserved it. So he had lain in his bed, mind whirring, until it was time to dress again and come here.
“Neither could I.” She shook her head, sending one curling, brown tress spiraling from her pins and down towards her bodice.
For a moment, a thick silence pervaded the room. There was so much to say and yet he struggled with where to start. However, when she met his gaze, her brown lashes, so exquisite, lifting to reveal her honey-colored glance, he knew he had to find a way.
“I never left that note for you, Olivia. Or the ten guineas.”
She said nothing at first, her eyes merely flitting down to their intertwined hands.
Finally, she looked back up at him.
“Are you sure?”
“Of course,” he said, automatically. He swallowed. He knew he needed to say more. It was the only way to make her believe him. “Olivia, when you disappeared—and that is what it was to me, a disappearance—I was…”
She peered up at him, questioning in her eyes. The open look, the vulnerability he saw there, made it easier for him to keep speaking.
“I was devastated. I didn’t understand.” He struggled for the words that would convey the depth of his sorrow. “For years, I mourned you, Olivia. The first year was the worst. I scared my friends. My family. I know I did. I drank to excess. It was a foolish reaction, I know, wasteful and stupid, but it felt like the only path before me. The only thing that helped the pain a little was to forget who I was. To feel nothing.”
He met her gaze again. She had that little furrow between her brows.
“I don’t understand. When we were”—she paused, seemingly uncertain as to how to characterize their relationship back then—“involved, you never… you never said anything that indicated that you imagined a lasting attachment.”
“I should have, Olivia.” His heart pounded at the justness of this reproach. “It’s no defense, but I was practically a boy. I should have known better. I should have understood that I needed to tell you what I felt, what I intended for us.”
“When I received that note, I believed it. After all, I had no reason to think that I was anything more to you than a passing fancy.”
His heart clenched at those words, even as he felt a rising tide of indignation.
“You must have known that I felt more for you than that. I told you at the time.” He paused and then realized he needed to say the words. “I told you that I loved you.”
Her gaze flared. “Yes, you told me that you loved me when you were inside of me, or when you had your mouth on me and were near to spending yourself.”
“How does that change the matter?” He felt his cheeks heat as she recounted the tender passion of those past scenes. These moments, which had been some of the most intimate of his life, he could not see in another light than how he had experienced them. They had been pure emotion, pure sensation, pure her.
“Augustus. Don’t mistake me. Those times when I was with you, like that, they are some of my happiest memories—or they would be, if they hadn’t been tainted by what came after. How humiliated I felt.”
She withdrew her hand from his own and clenched her hands together.
“Even though I knew you cared for me—and I did, or I thought I did—I was still a maid in your house. Who knows how many lords have said such things to maids and never think of it again? You were young and passionate and, while I had hoped that you felt more for me, while you had indicated that you did, when I got that note, it seemed clear that you didn’t. That I had hoped for too much.”
Her words pierced him.
“I do see. Now,” he said, realizing the magnitude of their misunderstanding, “And I might have even back then, if I had known about the note. But I didn’t. I thought you were the one who didn’t care for me. That you had picked up and left when another, better situation had presented itself. Or that perhaps you had found another lover. And that I was just a love-struck fool.” He smiled. “Perhaps, I was, either way. As I recall, you never said it back. When I told you I loved you, even then.”
She gave him a small smile. “I didn’t need to. How you made me feel, how I opened myself for you, how I couldn’t resist you—I was totally in your power. You must have known it.”
“I never saw it that way.”
“Augustus. Please. I—”
“What?” He reached again for her hand again and she yielded it back to him. “Tell me.”
“I was an orphan. A young woman with nothing. I had never known family—or care. The way you spoke to me, and listened to me, and comforted me…I had never known anything like it. Of course, I was besotted with you. I was beyond besotted. I would have followed you anywhere. I would have done anything that you asked.”
Her voice broke on the last word and, suddenly, he felt too far from her. He pulled her towards him. She didn’t resist. He folded her into him. He felt, rather than heard, her tears. He put his hand to her head and tried to soothe her, whispering sweet nonsense into her ears as he did so. After a few minutes, she quieted and pulled back again, the veins around her eyes swollen. She pressed her fingers to her face, wiping away the lingering moisture.
“When I received that note,” she said, her voice softer than it had been, “I was destroyed. I was so humiliated that I had believed in our relationship. The other girls in the kitchens, I don’t know if they still work there, Hannah and Astrid—”
“Astrid does,” he supplied, thinking of the sallow woman who had grown up from the awkward girl.
“They knew about our relationship. I shared a room with them. I could hardly hide it. And they were cruel to me about it—or, at least, it felt that way at the time. They made clear what they thought of my wantonness and what they thought I was to you. I had never been close with them, as some girls grow to be in such situations, because they always looked down on me. They had families who visited them, who helped them and cherished them to the extent that they could. Whereas I was a workhouse orphan.”
“I remember once,” Montaigne said, recalling now what he hadn’t thought of in years, “that they upset you. But you wouldn’t tell me what they had said.”
“You told me it could be the same with your friends,” she said, with a smile. “That, at times, you felt apart from them, that they shared jokes you didn’t find funny, or laughed at your expense.”
“Yes,” he said, surprised to hear from her that he had felt that distance with his friends as far back as that. That he had talked about it so frankly thirteen years ago. He didn’t realize that he had felt that way for so long.
“You thought they were my friends and we had quarreled—and I let you think that. It didn’t seem fair to complain of them to you. If our relationship had led to their dismissal, if you had gotten indignant on my behalf—”
“I would have.”
“It didn’t seem fair. And while their words about our relationship were cruel, I also did think they were genuinely trying to warn me. They told me that men like you only got girls like us with child and then abandoned us. That once you got me with child, I would lose my place.”
He scoffed. “I always took care.”
“I tried to tell them that you were careful. But they didn’t believe it. They had been told these things by their parents to warn them against ruin. And it was doubtlessly good advice. Their parents wanted respectable marriages for them—either in service or out of it. They were under strict orders from their families not to dally with aristocrats or anyone else.”
“It is a wise warning, undoubtedly.”
“I do suspect, though, that they were jealous, too.”
“Stop,” he said, feeling ridiculous, knowing his cheeks were heating again. “I was a young, pompous fool.”
“To the girls below stairs, you were a prince. More than one talked of what it might be like to bed you. For Astrid and Hannah it was rather much that I, the workhouse girl, had ensnared your attention.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this at the time?” He wished he had understood more of her world, of her experience, back then. That way, when she vanished, he would have known the right questions to ask.
“I told you—it felt like I was betraying them. And all of the servants. If I complained of conditions downstairs. Even though we were—you were still—”
He nodded. “I wasn’t one of you.”
“You were our master. We were in service to you.”
“I do understand,” he said, meeting her eye again. “I know it might seem like I couldn’t, but I do. As least as well as I can.”
She nodded. He wasn’t sure she believed him. He wasn’t sure that he believed himself. Could he really understand what it was like to be a servant? He couldn’t say. But for her, he would try.
“When I got that note, I could only think that Astrid and Hannah had been right. They had been counseled by their parents, after all—they must know more of the world than an orphan who had been valued and loved by no one. It made it easy to believe.”
“Do you still have it?”
“The note?”
He nodded.
“No, I destroyed it long ago. I kept it, for a time, but it was far too painful to read over.” She paused. “Augustus, if you didn’t send the note, then who did?”
That was the question that had haunted him for half the night. The other half of the evening, he had spent consumed by thoughts of all the time they had lost, all the sorrow he had wasted on such a horrific misunderstanding. The other half of the hours between one and seven in the morning had been consumed by this question. He had been unable to land on any definite answer. Many people could have imitated his hand—certainly, he had never kept his study under lock and key. He had much correspondence there. All one would need was a deft hand for imitation and a letter of his own to craft such a thing.
“I have no idea. I have thought of it again and again since last night. It could have been anyone in the house, I suppose. My old secretary, Mr. Brownlow, frequently wrote in my stead—he had been my father’s secretary. He has been dead years now. He could have done it. Perhaps, he heard of our affair and thought he should take care of it.”
“Do you think he would have?”
“It is hard for me to believe. He was such a dry man—but it is possible. He may have felt he owed it to my father to watch after me. But he has been dead these past ten years, if it was him, we’d never be able to confirm it.” He paused, wondering if he should tell her the next part. He wanted to be as honest with her. “At different times, I have suspected my mother. That perhaps she knew about us and that she somehow dismissed you. I questioned her about it, recently, in fact. She denied it. Now that I know about the note, I believe her more than I already did.”
Olivia shook her head. “I couldn’t believe it. Your mother was always very kind to me.”
“She liked you,” he said, the truth giving him pleasure to share. “And she would never do something so underhanded.”
“No,” Olivia said, “Not your mother. If she would have dismissed me over such a thing, which I don’t believe she would have, it would have been with an explanation and a new post elsewhere.”
She was right, he knew. “Do you have any notion of who it could have been?”
“I do think I know, rather. Or I have a strong suspicion.”
“Really?” he startled. He was shocked that she would know when he hadn’t the slightest clue.
“If I tell you, you must promise to do nothing. I couldn’t stand the thought of it. Even for all the pain it has caused.”
“Of course,” he said, agreeing without thinking.
“I suspect it was Astrid.”
Anger flashed in him at the thought of the woman interfering between him and Olivia. But, for her sake, he controlled himself.
Nevertheless, his mind wandered to the pallid scullery maid who still worked for him. Whenever he thought of her, he thought of her hair—a pale, lightless blond. While she once may have been called willowy, she now was wiry, her hands reddened from years of work. His mother ran her household with compassion, but, on certain people, no matter how benevolent the conditions, the labor still aged them quickly. She had once been a fair-looking girl, no beauty like Olivia, but pretty in a pale, sly kind of way. But it had been years since he had heard anyone describe her in such a fashion.
“Tell me why you suspect her.”
“I only tell you this now in order to explain,” she said, once more not meeting his gaze. “But she was in love with you. She idolized you. When you left that first note for me, I half resisted your advances because of her—even when I was half in love with you myself. Because while I admired you, as all the girls below stairs did, Astrid had a full-blown calf love for you. Everyone knew it. You would pass her in the corridor and she would hardly be able to talk about anything else for a week. When she found out about our relationship, I was surprised she wasn’t crueler to me, given her infatuation.”
“I had no idea.” It had never occurred to Montaigne that any of the servant girls in his house thought of him as anything remarkable. He had grown up, in a fashion, with many of them and they appeared to him as fixtures as unremarkable and familiar as the furniture of the place or his own family. Until Olivia, he had never given them any thought.
“Yes,” Olivia said, “Since she still works for you, I beg you not to do or say anything to her. It wouldn’t be fair. If she did write that note, she must have done it out of terrible bitterness. And I would not have her suffer now for what she did as a girl.”
“Do you think she would have been able to do it? To copy my hand?”
“Yes,” Olivia nodded. “She used to collect scraps of your handwriting from the waste bin, I remember. Little things that you had thrown away. We would catch her mooning over them, Hannah and I, and Hannah would tease her. And she had a way, back then at least, with artful things. When the housekeeper needed place cards for the guests at table, she would always do them.”
He nodded, dimly aware that, at some point, he had been told that the handiwork on certain pieces of such finery had been done by Astrid.
Still, ten guineas, as he well knew from the past thirteen years, was too much money for a servant to spend on a petty rivalry.
“How would Astrid have had the ten guineas? It is too much for a maid to give away.”
Olivia nodded. “That is what I thought at first, too. But then I remembered that Astrid had saved up nearly twice that amount. She was very frugal—she was known for it. Her parents had helped her, too, seeing it as a kind of dowry for her. And she was so besotted with you. Any girl of that age, and especially Astrid as she was then, might behave the same.”
Montaigne sighed. He had to admit that Astrid made a rather uninspiring target for his anger. Especially given how meek and unassuming she had become in recent years. If she had been the means of separating him and Olivia, life certainly hadn’t rewarded her for it. If he had been clearer with Olivia about his intentions, if he hadn’t been so foolish, then Astrid would have never been able to come between them.
“Of course. I will abide by your wishes. And I am sorry to say that I suspect life has not been kind to her. My mother would know better than me, but I believe she takes care of her father, who used to drive a hackney cab and has for some years been an invalid. I know she has never married.”
“I am sorry to hear it.” She sounded so genuine in her contrition for Astrid that it moved him—and made him resolve, finally, to not bring up the matter with his mother or Astrid herself.
“In the end, it does not matter. I will not blame Astrid for my own failings,” he said, exhaling. “It is a horrible waste that we have spent all of these years thinking so ill of the other. But we must accept it.”
“Yes,” she said, sounding uncertain.
“And I am not about to let the past stand in the way of what I want now.”
“No?” she said, her honey-brown eyes meeting his once again. Her expression looked oddly timid.
“No, Olivia,” he said, knowing it was time to say what he had wanted to utter from the moment she had reappeared in London.
“I want to marry you. Please, will you do me the honor of becoming my wife?”