Chapter 11
Chapter
Eleven
Lydia entered her chamber feeling emotionally drained.
Tired in a way that she had not been in a very long time.
Because for a dozen years she’d only been going through the motions of living.
There had been no depth of feeling, no emotionally charged moments, no passion or joy or fear or sadness.
There had just been one endless day bleeding into the next—nothing to anticipate and nothing to dread. Just existence.
But that exhaustion vanished the moment she heard a familiar voice from the chair in the corner of the room.
“I thought it best we speak privately and I had hoped this might be the best place to do so… I’d like to think neither you nor my son have lost touch with propriety to the degree that he’d be here, as well.”
Lydia looked at her with a kind of resolve that was typically reserved for taking unpleasant remedies.
It had to be done, but that did not mean she had to like it.
“Lord Hartwell has been a gentleman in every regard. And contrary to your opinions about me, I have not behaved with impropriety.” Except once.
One weak moment in the corridor. But they had, both of them without speaking of it, avoided such situations since.
“That is a relief, I suppose… I’m not here to belabor the point, Miss Whitby… I refuse, here in the privacy of this chamber, to use that ridiculous moniker when we both know it to be untrue—”
“Mercer was my mother’s family name. When I left London, I did not wish to be found. And I knew he would look for me. It seemed the best option for us both to take on a new identity. There was nothing nefarious in the choice… I did what I did because I thought it best for Oliver,” Lydia protested.
“Then do what is best for him now… and leave.”
Lydia was silent for a moment, then she asked the question at the heart of it all, “Don’t you think that should be his decision to make?”
“How can he make any decisions when it comes to you?” Lady Charlotte demanded.
“You muddle his thinking. You bring the past to life for him in a way that cannot help but sway him… Who, after all, does not want to revisit their youth? That’s what you represent to him. A more carefree time in his life—.”
“A happy time. He was happy. And so was I… I want him to be happy again. That doesn’t mean he and I will be together or that he would even desire such a thing.
But I made the mistake once of taking such choices out of his hands and have since come to the shocking realization that what I thought was so very important, so vital, mattered not at all.
I’m willing to trust him, Lady Charlotte. Why can’t you?”
She stared down her nose at Lydia. “Because I was the one to witness his heartbreak after, the sleepless nights where he worried for your safety and feared something terrible and had become of you, then the anger and the bitterness where he questioned whether or not it had all been a lie… If you hurt him again, and if you hurt that dear child who has clearly lain her heart at your feet, I will follow you to the ends of the earth. Is that clear, Miss Whitby?”
“Perfectly clear, Lady Charlotte. I have no desire to hurt either of them… nor any intention of doing so. That is why I have remained here in the face of your disapproval. Because to leave now— well, before I did it for what I thought was the good of Oliver. If I leave now, it’ll only be for the good of myself—so I would not have to face the consequences of what I had wrought in the name of doing what I thought was best for him without ever bothering to ask his opinion. ”
Lady Charlotte made for the door then, her bearing as regal as ever.
At the door she paused and looked back at Lydia.
“At one time, I had thought to call you my daughter. I had accepted you into this family and I had believed, with all my heart, that you loved him… I’m not convinced, even now, that was untrue.
The question isn’t whether you love him…
it’s whether you love him enough to stay if he needs you, or leave if he does not. ”
With that, Lady Charlotte strode from the room, that pointed remark lingering in her wake like a haze of smoke—acrid and breath-stealing.
It was midnight. Oliver stood near the window of his study, his gaze focused not on the darkness outside, but on the reflection in the glass of the study door as he watched for her. In his hand, his brandy was untouched, poured more out of habit than desire for the potent spirit.
The door opened almost silently, only the widening arc of light visible in the glass revealed her entrance. He glanced over his shoulder at her, “I was beginning to think you would not come.”
“I had… when I went to my room, your mother was waiting for me. She wished to have a conversation.”
His lips quirked in a smile that was more bitter than amused. “I’m certain she did. You are unscathed?”
“No. But I am here regardless, and I daresay I shall endure and survive her much deserved doubt in me… You wanted an explanation. All along you’ve wanted—no you have deserved an explanation— and I’ve been reluctant to give it,” Lydia said softly.
“Because in retrospect, I’m uncertain that the choice I made was the right one, though at the time I thought it was my only one. ”
He turned fully then, setting his drink aside. Settling in, one hip propped on the desk and his hands clasped in front of him, he did not interrupt or prod. He simply waited, giving her the space to breathe as she tried to explain the reason they had both endured hell.
“When I returned home from the ball that night, I was stunned to see bailiffs carting out our family’s possessions…
I’d begun the evening like so many others.
Draped in satin, wearing jewels I later learned were nothing but paste, and thinking that I held the entire world in my hands.
We were to be married, my dowry would secure Hartwell Hall’s future—our future and our children’s future—and then the awful truth, that my family had been living solely on credit and appearances for years… ”
She’d trailed off, clearly overtaken by the memory of such a traumatic event.
It wasn’t losing the things. Possessions were not something she’d ever prized.
He’d given her a locket once, a valuable piece, and she’d been just as thrilled with a crown of clover he’d woven for her in the park one day.
For Lydia, the moment wasn’t about the loss of valuables but the loss of trust. The deception had felt like a betrayal to her, and rightly so.
Still, he remained silent and waited for her to collect herself before she continued.
“I foolishly went to my father and told him that he need not worry, that while you needed my dowry to settle Hartwell’s debts, there would be more than enough to help him and mother put things right…
Because I stupidly and naively assumed that my dowry, left by my grandfather, was somehow secure.
Separate from my father’s ever dwindling finances. But I was very wrong.”
“That’s why you left? Because you thought I wouldn’t want you without a dowry? Did you really think so little of me?” He asked, insulted at the very notion.
“No, Oliver. I thought that much of you. Because I knew you would not care. Oh you might worry about it, but I knew it would not change your plans for us you would marry me regardless. But how could I do that to you? How could I allow you to marry me when it would mean losing your ancestral home? I feared that if I did go through with it, if I allowed you to go through with it, you would one day hate me for it.”
“Then your self-proclaimed foolishness has as much to do with your understanding of me as your understanding of your father,” he stated, his voice surprisingly flat given the content of his words.
“Because even now, when you have hurt me more than any other person living or dead, I cannot hate you.”
Lydia said nothing to that. But there was something in her that seemed to just sink. She looked, in that moment, lost and forlorn in a way that made him regret his statement. But truth was rarely kind, especially when applied to a history as complicated as theirs.
“Where did you go?” He asked, hoping that shifting the topic slightly might give her some chance to recover.
“To Bath, first. There I had a friend forge a false letter of reference and I went to an agency and was given a position as a governess in Southampton. Then another a few years later in Essex. I’ve moved frequently over the years…
when my charges went away to school or when they had transitioned from governesses to dancing masters and pianoforte lessons.
My expertise was in teaching them the ins and outs of society, after all.
And there is an entire legion of newly wealthy people—the middle class so looked down upon—who desperately want to enter the world I fled. ”
“I find of late that I have more in common with these individuals than with the titled gentlemen who are supposedly my equal.”
She shook her head. “You have no equal, Oliver. You never have. You were always the kindest, most honorable and wonderful man.”
He couldn’t stop the laughter then. “You make me sound terribly dull, Lydia.”
“On the contrary, you were anything but. While you had all those wonderful attributes, you also had a hint of mischief about you… there was this sense that you might do something slightly wicked at any moment. It was glorious. And I feel somehow responsible for that change.”
Oliver rose then, leaving his perch at the edge of the desk and walking toward her.
He stopped only when there was less than an arm’s length between them.
“You cannot take the full blame for that. Much of that has come from age and responsibility… and from a marriage that should never have taken place. You are not the only one whose conscience plagues them. Marrying Amelia—” He stopped there searching for a way to say it that feel less raw, less agonizing.
But it was not the moment to hesitate or camouflage his feelings.
If ever a moment called for naked vulnerability, it was the one they were currently wrapped up in.
“It felt like a betrayal of you—of us. She was my wife and I felt I was being too unfaithful to the memory of a woman who’d abandoned me.
I often felt that, had I been a better husband—a more present one—she might have…
well, things might have been different and Gemma would not be growing up without her mother. ”
“Oh, Oliver, no. You might thought those things, but I know you,” Lydia said.
“I know your kindness and you would never have let her see that. And you were working to save Hartwell. How present could you be when the fate of so many rested on your shoulders? What happened to her was a tragedy… but so was what happened to you, because you were left to navigate the aftermath,” As she’d said it, she’d reached out, her hand resting on his forearm as she implored him to give up his long held guilt.
Oliver looked down at her hand, resting on his shirt sleeve.
And it was all suddenly too much. The time and the distance and the longing…
they were intolerable. So he shifted slightly, grasping her wrist and pulled her closer, until she was pressed fully against him.
Her indrawn gasp was a balm to his battered heart because it was a sound he recalled so clearly, a sound that had haunted his dreams for more than a decade. “Tell me to stop and I will.”
“I don’t want to do that… I don’t want you to stop,” she whispered. “When you touch me I feel like I’ve come alive again.”
Her words were both invitation and permission.
And a catalyst. Closing his arms around her, he captured her lips with his.
The kiss was hungry, angry, almost consuming at first with the rawness and neediness of it.
But it settled, shifting and transforming into something else.
Something that eased the ache of loneliness that had plagued them both for so many years.
It stopped being about the past or the future and started being only about the present.
About the weight of her against him, the softness of her flesh beneath his hands and the sweetness of her mouth yielding to his.
When he maneuvered her toward a nearby settee, sinking down on it and pulling her with him until she sprawled across his lap, her skirts tangling about them both, she offered no protest. Instead, she wrapped her arms about his neck and held on to him, as if he might be the one to break away.
It was a night that had been more than twelve years in the making, and he would not refuse it any more than he would rush through it.