Chapter One The Bride Who Wasn’t #3
“It has absolutely none. If you ever repeat it, I shall deny inviting you.”
“Then I accept.”
Augusta looked sideways at her.
“Just like that?”
“You promised wine and improper opinions.”
“I knew there was hope for you.”
Clara found herself smiling. Across the room, Lucy had returned from the conservatory, pink-cheeked and evidently pleased with both orchids and Mr. Bellamy. She saw Lady Winterbourne and immediately rearranged her expression into decorum. Augusta followed Clara’s gaze.
“You have brought out two young relations now, have you not?”
“Two and a half.”
“Half?”
“My cousin Emily fled to Scotland with a naval lieutenant before I could complete the Season.”
Augusta’s brows rose.
“And you permitted this?”
“I was in Bath at the time.”
“Careless.”
“They are very happy.”
“How inconsiderate of them.”
Clara laughed again. It occurred to her that she had done more laughing in ten minutes beside Lady Winterbourne than during the previous three social engagements combined.
Perhaps Thursday supper would not be unbearable.
The harpist finished, and applause moved across the room.
Then something changed. It was not a sound precisely, but Clara noticed it because she had spent years learning how gossip traveled.
A room possessed currents, invisible but unmistakable.
A murmur beginning near a doorway could reach the opposite wall before a servant crossed with a tea tray, carried through lifted brows, half-turned heads and sudden silences.
A gentleman had entered. He spoke quietly to Lord Davenham. Lord Davenham’s face altered. Lady Davenham noticed. Another gentleman approached. Conversation near the doorway faltered. Augusta set down her cup.
“What has happened?”
Clara could not say why unease moved through her. Lucy reached her side.
“Clara?”
“I don’t know.”
The pianist for the next performance had seated himself but had not yet begun.
Lady Davenham crossed the room toward her husband, clearly annoyed at the interruption, then stopped when he spoke into her ear.
Her hand went to her throat. Someone near the fireplace whispered a name.
Clara did not hear it. Another voice repeated it. This time she did.
“Harcourt.”
Her fingers went cold. Lucy turned sharply. A man she vaguely recognized as Lord Esmond approached Lady Winterbourne. His expression was grave.
“Augusta.”
“What is it?”
He lowered his voice.
“Lord Adrian Harcourt died this morning.”
For one impossible moment, Clara thought there must be another Lord Adrian Harcourt. The idea passed almost before it formed. Lady Winterbourne’s gaze went immediately to Clara. Lucy made a small sound. Clara heard herself ask, “How?” Lord Esmond looked uncomfortable.
“I am told he was found at his house in St. James’s. His valet went to wake him and…” He stopped. “It appears to have been sudden.”
“Was he ill?”
“I don’t know.”
The room continued existing. This offended Clara.
A servant carried away empty glasses. Somebody near the windows dropped a fan.
The dying narcissi remained upright in their bowl.
Beyond the glass, a carriage passed along the street, its wheels rattling over damp stones.
Adrian was dead. The sentence would not settle into meaning.
Adrian had been thirty-two. She had not seen him properly in years.
Once or twice she had glimpsed him across a theater or at an assembly, but each had perfected the art of looking elsewhere.
He had occupied London at a distance from her, not exactly part of her life but never entirely absent from it either.
For eleven years, there had remained the theoretical possibility that one day he might explain. Clara had not expected him to. She had not wanted him back. She had not imagined forgiveness. But somewhere, apparently, she had preserved the possibility of an answer. Now there would never be one.
“How terrible,” Lucy whispered.
Clara did not know whether it was. That frightened her. Should she grieve? Was she permitted not to? Did one mourn the man a person had been before he injured you, or did the injury rewrite everything that preceded it? Lady Winterbourne touched Clara’s wrist. The gesture was brief and discreet.
“Would you like to leave?”
The same question came from Lucy almost immediately.
“Yes, we should go home.”
Clara heard herself answer before she had considered it.
“No.”
Lucy stared.
“Clara—”
“If we leave now, every person in this room will watch us.”
“They already are.”
Clara looked around. Lucy was right. Not openly.
Nothing in London was ever openly cruel when discretion might make it more entertaining.
But faces had turned. People who had spent eleven years discussing the woman Adrian Harcourt refused to marry were now discovering the irresistible sequel.
What expression would she wear? Would she faint?
Cry? Express satisfaction? Clara straightened.
“We shall stay.”
Augusta studied her.
“You are not required to perform indifference for them.”
“I am not indifferent.”
“What are you?”
Clara looked toward the pianoforte.
“I don’t know yet.”
That, at least, was true. Lady Davenham spoke quietly to the musician, who began the next piece.
Clara sat through all of it. Later, she would remember watching his hands move across the keys.
She would remember a lady coughing near the fireplace, Lucy’s fingers wrapped tightly around her own and the way a beam of pale sunlight moved gradually across the carpet.
She would not remember a single note. The Whitcombe house in Brook Street looked more tired in the evening than it did by day.
Clara had known this for months but had never quite admitted it to herself.
In sunlight, the faded paint above the front windows might be blamed upon weather, while a worn carpet in the entrance hall could pass as evidence of a respectable family’s indifference to fashion.
By lamplight, there was less forgiveness.
Shadows collected in the cracks of old paneling, silver showed the thinness left by repeated polishing, and the place seemed to exhale the exhaustion of being maintained one year beyond what its owners could comfortably afford. Clara removed her gloves in the hall.
“Do you want me to stay?” Lucy asked.
Her aunt had gone directly upstairs with a headache, leaving Lucy reluctant to abandon Clara.
“No.”
“You are certain?”
“Yes.”
Lucy hesitated.
“You don’t have to be brave with me.”
Clara looked at her. The remark was so unexpectedly tender that something threatened beneath her ribs. She kissed Lucy’s forehead.
“I am not being brave. I am being hungry.”
Lucy laughed softly.
“That is much more like you.”
“Go upstairs. And do not write to Mr. Bellamy.”
“I was not going to.”
“Then we are both relieved.”
Lucy disappeared toward the staircase. Clara went in search of her father.
Sir Edmund usually spent the hour before dinner in the library, a modest room at the back of the house that had once been Clara’s favorite place.
It contained too many books for its shelves, two ancient leather chairs and a desk inherited from her grandfather, upon which her father had conducted family business for as long as she could remember.
The door was partly open. Clara saw the papers first. They covered the desk.
Her father sat among them with his spectacles in one hand and a letter in the other.
He did not look up when she entered.
“Papa?”
He started. That told her more than anything else might have.
Sir Edmund Whitcombe was sixty-three and had spent most of his adult life believing unpleasant facts improved if greeted cheerfully.
He had remained cheerful through harvest failures, an outbreak of influenza, Clara’s broken engagement and his wife’s long final illness.
It had become less a temperament than a discipline. Tonight he looked old.
“Clara. I did not hear you.”
“So I gathered.”
He began collecting papers too quickly. Clara closed the door.
“What has happened?”
“Nothing.”
“Papa.”
“A tiresome business matter.”
“What kind?”
He removed his spectacles and rubbed the bridge of his nose.
“Really, Clara, it is nothing you need concern yourself with.”
That was the wrong thing to say. Clara walked to the desk.
For nearly ten years, she had managed household accounts because Sir Edmund disliked figures that contradicted his optimism.
She knew what coal cost, what remained owing to the butcher, which silver pieces had already been sold and how long the stable roof could continue leaking before repair became unavoidable.
She had negotiated rents on their Gloucestershire estate and once prevented her father investing in a canal scheme proposed by a man who later disappeared to France.
There were very few things concerning Sir Edmund’s money that Clara did not regard as her concern.
“What is this?”
She picked up the nearest letter. Her father reached for it.
“Clara.”
She stepped away and read. The shipping firm of Farrow, Beckett and Lane had suspended payment. Her stomach tightened. She read further.
“How much?”
Sir Edmund did not answer. She lowered the letter.
“How much did you invest?”
“It was considered extremely sound.”
“How much?”
“Farrow has been in business for thirty years.”
“Papa.”
“Eighteen thousand.”
Clara stared at him. The room seemed to alter around her.
“Eighteen thousand pounds?”
“Not all at once.”
The distinction was so absurd she nearly laughed.
“Where did you obtain eighteen thousand pounds to invest?”
Her father looked away. And Clara understood.
“No.”
“It seemed sensible at the time.”
“The house?”
“Only partly.”
“Papa.”
“The mortgage had already been increased two years ago.”
She put the letter down with great care.
“How much is owed against Brook Street?”
He gave the figure. Clara sat. For several seconds neither spoke. The clock on the mantel ticked with obscene normality.
“And Gloucestershire?”