Chapter 16
Quite where Viola had found the courage to speak to Lord Carrington so boldly, she did not know.
Perhaps it had come from the shock of hearing Lord Brookmire speak of Miss Galbraith as he had — or from the pleasure of hearing Lord Carrington declare, so firmly, that he had no intention of pursuing the lady, all the while sending quick, urgent looks her way.
Either way, she felt herself buoyed now as she walked at his side, the two of them of one purpose.
“There — is that not the lady in question?” Lord Carrington paused, gesturing to his right. “Lady Henderson?”
Viola sharpened her gaze and saw Lady Henderson throw back her head and laugh, then lay a hand on another lady’s arm. “Yes, I believe so,” she said slowly. “Though she is with five others at least.” Her stomach clenched. “What do you mean to do?”
“Speak with her.” He stepped forward, drawing Viola with him. “I intend to make it quite clear, to the lady and to her companions both, that I have no intention of courting her daughter.” His jaw tightened. “And to ask why she would say such a thing so publicly.”
“I pray you will not.”
A figure moved swiftly into their path. Miss Galbraith’s cheeks were flushed a deep red, her smile fixed, her eyes flashing. There was a brittleness to her, as if her composure might shatter at a touch.
“Miss Galbraith.” Viola glanced at Lord Carrington. “Lord Brookmire is searching for you.”
Her smile flickered. “I have avoided him for the moment. I saw you turn toward my mother, and I knew I must stop you.”
Viola blinked. “Stop us?”
“Yes.” The lady’s voice dropped, low and urgent, with an anxious glance toward her mother. “I beg you not to speak with her here, in the park, with so many of the ton about and the fashionable hour nearly upon us.”
A flicker of sympathy stirred in Viola. Miss Galbraith feared the rumors that any scene would feed. And yet — could she truly expect the lie to be left to spread?
It was Lord Carrington who answered. “Your plea is understandable, Miss Galbraith. But you must see that I cannot let society go on believing you and I are courting.”
The words fell with measured clarity, and the air between them thinned. Miss Galbraith closed her eyes briefly, her fingers gripping together.
“Why will you not consider me?” she asked. The question was soft, but a raw edge ran beneath it. “We have known one another for years, ever since you came as a boy to Lady Warrington’s house in Scotland.”
“That was a long time ago, and long before she set a tenant in it,” Lord Carrington said quietly. “We are long acquainted, yes. But I will not make a match on suitability alone.”
Miss Galbraith blinked, a dampness at her eyes.
“I intend to make a love match.” The simple truth sent a shiver of heat up Viola’s spine as he turned and looked directly at her. “I did not always mean to. But it is my only thought now. My only desire.”
No one gasped; there was no exclamation of surprise. And yet Viola felt the ripple of his words all the same. Warmth flooded her from crown to toe, a dizzying rush that left her light-headed, and she dropped her gaze to the ground a moment, her pulse racing.
Miss Galbraith sniffed, and Viola looked back to find the color pulling from her face.
“How very… unexpected,” she said, her composure sharpening into something colder.
“I had thought you a gentleman of more sense, Lord Carrington.” Her gaze flicked between them.
“A gentleman of your standing ought to consider what society will say of such a match — what controversy it will stir.”
Viola met her eyes without flinching, though her heart thudded. There was an unspoken hostility coming off the lady now, aimed at her alone.
“I care nothing for society’s whispers,” Lord Carrington said firmly. “My only consideration is what is in my heart.”
“Besides which,” Viola added, keeping her voice steady, “you of all people must understand him, Miss Galbraith, for you already have the affection of Lord Brookmire.”
The effect was immediate. The cold mask shattered, uncertainty breaking across her face. “Lord Brookmire?”
Viola nodded. “He has been most attentive, has he not?”
“But… ” Miss Galbraith passed a hand over her eyes. “He has never said a word to me of affection, nor of courtship. I presumed — ”
“My brother has been much caught up in the matter of Stoneleigh House,” Lord Carrington said, “and has taken on more than was his to carry. I should have urged him to mind his own affairs, but I did not. Be assured, Miss Galbraith — my brother has every intention of courting you, should you be willing to consider him.”
Lines formed across her brow.
“If he felt nothing, I do not think he would have marched across the park to fling angry words at his brother,” Viola put in gently. “Are you truly unaware of his interest?”
It took Miss Galbraith a moment, and then she nodded slowly, confusion lingering. A silence pressed in, and Viola sensed something had shifted that none of them had foreseen.
“My mother,” Miss Galbraith said at last, dragging in a shaking breath, “always insisted that you, Lord Carrington, were pleased to be in my company. She never marked Lord Brookmire’s interest, and I — I never let myself weigh it.”
“Because it was never made plain,” Lord Carrington said. “There has been a great deal of confusion. But I promise you, my brother holds you in real regard. He has only been distracted by Lady Warrington’s will, and by putting my troubles before his own.”
Miss Galbraith’s shoulders rounded. “I see,” she said faintly, her eyes on the ground. “Forgive me. I did not see his intentions clearly.”
Viola tilted her head, a question burning on her lips. “Is that why you sent those notes to me, Miss Galbraith? Because you were so eager for Lord Carrington’s notice? Because you thought I had wronged the gentleman you cared for?”
Miss Galbraith stepped back, her brows shooting up. “I have no affection for Lord Carrington, Miss Trent,” she said plainly. “It was only at my mother’s insistence that I believed I ought to consider him.” She frowned. “Whatever notes you speak of, I know nothing of them.”
Viola searched her face for artifice and found none.
“I understand now why you wish to speak with my mother, Lord Carrington,” Miss Galbraith went on, her eyes flashing to his. “But I am so afraid it will only stir further confusion, and all in the hearing of the ton.”
“You would have me speak with her privately?” At her nod, he pressed on. “But you must understand why the rumor concerns me. I have no connection to you, and no wish to court you. I cannot let it spread.”
“But must it be here, and now?” she asked, near desperate. “To have more said will only set society whispering the louder, and I cannot bear it.”
Slowly, Viola understood: Miss Galbraith was mortified by all her mother had done. Whether she would own it or not, the fright behind her eyes, the nervous flutter of her hands, told the truth, and Viola’s own heart softened with sympathy.
She sighed.
“I think it best that I take my leave, Lord Carrington.” She turned to face him, aware of Hannah waiting nearby.
Searching his face, she offered a small smile to ease his frown.
“I can see why Miss Galbraith asks it of you,” she said quietly, as the lady stepped back and turned away to grant them a little privacy.
“If what she says is true, she may be as surprised by her mother’s words as we are.
” Her shoulders lifted and fell. “She will not own it to us plainly. But the fear is there.”
“Fear that the ton will gossip about her, which every young lady fears,” he murmured. “Are you certain you must go?” His hand reached out and caught hers, a shiver running up her arm. “I would far rather have you beside me.”
Viola smiled, knowing that to linger would make a spectacle of the whole affair. “I think it best.”
His mouth flattened, but he nodded, and then, to her surprise and delight, lifted her hand to his lips. The kiss he pressed there was not light, nor careless, but offered with a firm intention that sent a tremor up her arm and straight into her heart.
“I will see to it that society understands there is no connection between Miss Galbraith and myself,” he said. “Of that you may be certain.”
He took a small step closer, and the whole world seemed to fall away, leaving only the two of them, gazing into one another’s eyes.
The library rose between them — the brief touch of his lips, Hannah’s voice at the door — and she saw in his face that he was remembering it too, and that he was no sorrier than she was.
“My heart belongs elsewhere.”
The longing to answer him, to tell him the truth of her own heart, swelled in her.
She opened her mouth — only for Hannah to move nearer, and Viola let out a soft breath, half contentment and half frustration.
“You cannot know the joy it brings me to hear such words from you, Lord Carrington,” she said.
“I hope that very soon we may both speak freely.”
“As do I, Viola.” He released her hand, and the wish to draw close again, not to lose his touch, drove itself into her very bones.
“Viola?”
She glanced at her sister, then stepped back from him, reluctant. “I shall be at Lord Linfield’s ball this evening.”
His eyes sparked. “Then I shall come in search of you the moment I enter the room.” The promise sent heat into her cheeks. “Might I be so bold as to ask you to save me the waltz?”
Viola nodded, a radiant smile breaking over her as Hannah touched her arm to lead her away. “I shall, Lord Carrington,” she said, barely above a whisper for the thrill of hope in her heart. “Until this evening.”
* * *
The cornflower silk had gone first to Lady Cordelia’s supper, as commanded. Tonight it had a greater errand.
Her maid dressed her hair by candlelight while Hannah sat on the end of the bed offering opinions that were not asked for and were mostly correct, and Viola watched the glass with a strange, gathering calm.
There had been a time, only weeks past, when the woman in the mirror had been a stranger to her: a girl got up in another person’s finery, waiting for someone to come and tell her the mistake had been discovered.
She looked now, and the stranger was gone.
The silk was hers. The house beneath her feet was hers.
The evening ahead, whatever it held, was hers as well — and she knew, with a certainty that had nothing of the old fear in it, what she meant to do with it.
She would dance the waltz with Lord Carrington.
And when the moment came, she would speak.
She had said it once already, softly, in the park, where only he could hear.
Tonight, if the evening asked it of her, she would not whisper it.
He had said his heart belonged elsewhere with his eyes full on her face, and a man could not be left to carry such a declaration about with him unanswered.
“You have gone very still,” Hannah observed from the bed. “The way you do when something has frightened you.”
“No.” Viola met her sister’s eyes in the glass and smiled, and the woman in the mirror smiled with her — familiar at last, from the pearl at her ear to the resolve in her face. “Not frightened. Decided.”
His letter had come that morning — the reply to the one she had sealed with her hand flat upon it — and it lay now on the dressing table, read to softness already.
You write that I was better loved than I knew, and then say nothing more of it.
What a thing to do to an old man, Viola.
I have read the line forty times and am no wiser, only gladder.
And, farther down, in the cramped hand he used when he had decided something: You ask me to London, and Hannah seconds you, and I find my objections have all worn out at last. When your great business there is done, send for me, and I shall come and see this house of yours, and you in it.
Send for me, and I shall come. She had the letter half by heart already, the way she had once memorized the other one — Lady Warrington’s.
It struck her, pinning the last curl, that she carried two letters now instead of one: the woman who had given her the future, and the man who was her whole past, and both of them, in their different hands, telling her the same thing. Go on. Be glad. It was meant.
She took up her father’s watch chain from the dressing table, wound it once about her wrist, where her glove would cover it, and rose.
Whatever the evening asked of her, she would go into it carrying the two things she had brought to London — her own name, and his gift — and all the rest that had been given her since.
“Come, Hannah.” She took up her fan. “I promised Lord Carrington a waltz.”