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  “And his wife?” Annabelle asked, as much to Katie as to Leonora.

  “No one knows,” Leonora said sadly, “for she was from the remote North country and not from the West where Severne’s principal family seat lies, and she never came to Town at all. She did marry again, but she died of a fever not two years past.”

  “Unhappy lady,” Katie murmured, earning a sharp glance from her mistress, for Leonora well remembered her maid’s initial reaction to the news when she had it back at home. Katie had positively slavered over the gossip then, with not a hint of the pious sympathy she was treating them to now.

  “Still,” Annabelle persisted, more animated in this discussion than her relative could ever remember her having been before, “if it were a meritorious thing, cousin, why are there not more such divorces?”

  “Ah well,” Leonora said with a shrug, “it is no easy thing. Even our Prince, you know, would give much to be rid of his Caroline. But it drags on in its legalities, and costs the earth. And then one must testify to all sorts of shameful things. Severne, you see, said it was his fault. He said,” and here she dropped her voice and looked down at her toes, “that it was his inability to consummate the marriage.” Katie snickered at that and Leonora’s head came up, even as her shoulders did. “Well,” she declared fiercely, her fine brown eyes blazing, “since everyone and their uncle here in Town seems to know that that’s not true, we must assume it was a gentlemanly lie in order to save his wife the agony of testifying in front of a legion of strangers.

  “Then too,” Leonora continued into the thoughtful silence which followed her words, “a divorce does forever exclude one from certain parts of society. I am not saying that it has made Severne a pariah, for it has obviously not done so. But he did have to join a different club, and some of his acquaintances dropped off. Your reaction, I assure you, is only a fraction of a larger tide of censure. I cannot say who his late wife remarried, but Severne himself may have a great deal of difficulty marrying another high-born lady.” Here, Leonora’s expression clearly showed what she thought of such lofty ladies.

  Leonora fell silent, abruptly realizing that her discussion was showing a knowledge of divorce and all its laws and their repercussions that went far beyond the common. Her listeners might never guess the actual hours of reading and subtle questioning that she had done to obtain her information, but they must if they had any wit, be aware by now of how very interested she was in the subject.

  Katie was aware of it, and had been far before her mistress’s outburst The only revelation she had been treated to this morning was the one involving Miss Greyling. For, Katie thought, it only went to show that even she could be wrong once in a lifetime. Because it now was clear the chit was wide awake to Lady Leonora’s obsession, and was caring enough to have it out with her. There wasn’t a doubt that she’d not budged the lady an inch from her opinions, despite her objections to Severne, but it showed some heart and spirit to at least have tried. Katie thought for a moment of offering the girl some help with that flyaway blond hair of hers, but then stopped herself. There wasn’t any point, she sniffed, in going overboard.

  “But cousin,” Annabelle said softly now, “you said it cost the earth. How is it that the marquess can still live in such style? Could it be that his wife’s family was so eager to be rid of him that they willingly bankrupted themselves to do so?”

  But now both Leonora and Katie laughed. “Oh Belle,” Leonora said, smiling, when she saw that Annabelle hadn’t joined in, “No, we weren’t mocking you. It’s only that it’s well known that Severne is very well to grass. Why he could obtain a divorce for himself and all the gentlemen in his club and not feel the pinch. He’s very warm in the pocket.”

  At that, even Katie chuckled, but Annabelle still did not. All she said, as though to herself, softly, interestedly, and with great seriousness, was, “Ahh!”

  Leonora ran her palms down the side of her frock so that they might not show the tell-tale signs of dampness should the gentleman take her hand. She was diverted from her nervousness for a moment by the thought that perhaps a lady ought use her handkerchief for such a purpose, and the immediate ridiculous following thought that a lady, of course, would always have cool, dry hands. A lady, Leonora remembered from her schoolroom days, only required a handkerchief for those infrequent tears caused by her exquisite sensibility.

  But she, Leonora grimaced, as she paced her room and waited for the expected summons, would likely need a large sponge for her hands by the time her interview took place. She had sent Katie on errands, which today involved the hastily invented necessity of acquiring a quantity of ribbons, and she had also gently, and then rather more ungently, given Annabelle to understand that she wished to be alone this afternoon. So far as she knew, Annabelle was now cloistered with one of several books that she had pressed upon her, given as much in atonement as in sincerity, since she knew and regretted the fact that her defection would cause her cousin to spend a solitary afternoon. Despite attendance at several teas and simple suppers since they had come to Town, Annabelle had not as yet made any friends of her own to pass the last of this misty afternoon with.

  But then, Leonora thought, glad to have a respite from her own pressing problems for a moment, Annabelle was in a curiously difficult position. Having no family or fortune of her own, she could not have a presentation of her own. Since she was a relation of the viscount’s, however distant, she could share in everything but the actual riches of the house. Yet again, even though personally impoverished, being of good family, she could scarcely be expected to go out and earn her own way. And so she was neither servant nor cosseted daughter, and she could befriend neither sort of female that she met in Town.

  Had it been herself who wore Annabelle’s little slippers, Leonora thought, she would have struck out on her own long before this time. But, she remembered, it was easy to say what one would do if one’s life were different, quite impossible to know what would actually be true. She was no one to criticize Annabelle, she admitted to herself with a scowl, especially since she scarcely knew what to do with her own life now.

  At least she would not remain passive, Leonora decided. And that was why she paced, and sat, and walked the length of her room, and stood again, waiting for her father to have an audience with her. She could not bear inaction. Even if it meant that she must face her father alone to ask a favor of him, she would do that For no matter how grueling, it would be better than doing nothing.

  She must beg Severne’s pardon. She might gain no more from it than the felicity of seeing him register her sincerity and penitence in those quick deep eyes of his. But that would be enough. No, she thought suddenly, drooping and dropping into a chair, no, to be honest it would not But it would be better than nothing.

  She realized she was entirely preoccupied with the marquess, but knew from experience that there was not a thing she could do about it. For so she had been for the past five years. It wasn’t a morbid fascination because of his unhappy marital circumstances. Leonora’s father had a wide circle of acquaintances. There were other divorced gentlemen in the kingdom and she had met them, too. But none of them, not the Marquess of Anglesey nor the wealthy Mr. Rowan, nor even the sensational Baron Hyde, had ever caused her heart to flutter by merely one flicker of their lashes as they gave her an amused sidewise glance. Then too, she wasn’t the sort of female whose heart ever reacted so, unless she rapidly ascended a flight of stairs. But so Severne affected her, and so he had from the day she’d first clapped eyes upon him.

  Five years is a very long time to maintain an interest, but Leonora had a constant sort of mind. Her sister had included him now and again in the general run of gossip in her letters and on her occasional visits home, and if she sometimes neglected the matter, an exquisitely subtle hint or two would be enough to keep an interested party au courant. Leonora knew that her father had continued an association with the marquess, and she regretted that any such business (and business she knew it must be
) was always conducted in London. If any one thing had often tempted her to renounce her long exile from Town, it was the notion that there she might see Severne again. The sight of him was about all that she hoped to have of him. Now she had blighted even that little dream.

  If things had gone differently, had she not seen and heard her father at his play those years ago, had Sybil not enlightened her as to the truth of her adult world, she might well have set her cap for the marquess then. Her mother’s objections wouldn’t have weighed with her, her father might have countenanced it, and in those days she had believed in her desirability with all the confidence of youth. She’d been a headstrong girl, he had affected her strongly, and she’d thought she might just snare him.

  He had totally ensnared her interest. She thought his looks unmatched by any other gentleman’s. His voice was balm to her, his wit, which she stored up examples of, warmed her, even as the tales of his wenching, rather than dissuading her, warmed her in other ways. She secretly wept for his excommunication from society, and the sight of his tall, spare frame held stiffly erect even as he was snubbed at some gathering, brought real physical pain to her. She excused him the divorce without ever knowing its cause, only believing its cause could never have been his doing. For a rational, sensible young woman, this attitude was radical and a little frightening. And thoroughly delightful in its intensity.

  She had been in the throes of a full-scale infatuation. Had she had more time, had she remained in Town, she might have plucked up her courage and begun a campaign to catch his eye and heart. But then, too, she might have discovered that no infatuation can ever survive its arch foe, familiarity. Sharing mundane experiences, such as head colds, boring musical evenings, or deadening family gatherings, begins to nibble away at the core of such ephemeral passions. Constant association would have transmuted it, like ore brought to fire, to its essential and true nature. It might have ended in boredom, disappointment, or even true love. But it would have ended.

  Instead, alone in the countryside, passing the years reading and dreaming of love when she ought to have been practicing it, her dream of the outcast Marquess of Severne had only grown sweeter. His divorce became more of a virtue in her eyes than any of his detractors had ever thought it a discredit. Whatever else he had been, she reasoned, he had not been a hypocrite, playing out a great charade of dutiful husband, as her own father and brother-in-law did. He was never long absent from her thoughts during her long absence from Town. And there he had loomed so large that perhaps in some corner of her otherwise sensible mind, she almost believed he knew of it and she was embarrassed for it. Because now she could scarcely look at him directly without her tongue cleaving to the roof of her mouth, and every time she’d met him, she’d disgraced herself.

  It was intolerable. She no longer had designs on his single state, for she’d given up all such thoughts those years ago. If she couldn’t think to wed any man after learning of their common practice of marital duplicity, how could she think of bearing the more enormous pain of having someone as wonderful as Severne constantly deceiving her? She had solved the problem by making such a possibility patently impossible.

  When her parents would not let her go home at once as she’d wished to do after what she had witnessed, so as to brood and think the thing out, she had gone and forced them to it There hadn’t been a rogue or roaring boy that she hadn’t taken up company with, nor a flat or fortune hunter that she hadn’t actively encouraged. She believed that it had only been her confusion and fastidious upbringing which had prevented her from offering them mare than her lips then, and her father’s fame that prevented them from taking advantage of that confusion to seek more, but she hadn’t remained in Town long enough to test her theory. For then, as if by some particularly malign act of fate, it had been Severne himself who had saved her from the worst fix she’d gotten into.

  She’d honestly only been thinking of how effectively it would shock everyone if she showed up at a soiree at the type of establishment that caddish fellow James Flowers had described to her. So she’d blithely gone with him to the place he’d called “Mother Carey’s house” that day. She hadn’t been thinking too clearly about anything at that point up until the time that she had seen everyone in the gilded room she’d just entered gaping at the handsome couple in their midst, she hadn’t cared about anything but her escape from London either. But the moment she had gotten close enough to see more than their heads and the distant, fixed smiles they wore, she’d realized that the young man and woman standing before everyone were not wearing anything else. Then, from the second later when it registered upon her shocked senses that the rhythmically moving pair were not dancing either, she’d become aware at last of her own danger and the degradation which could result from her dangerous self-absorption. Before more horror could set in, most fortunately, Severne had stepped in.

  But by then, it hardly mattered. She’d ruined her reputation so thoroughly that his witnessing the final touches to its destruction was unnecessary. If she wouldn’t think of wedding anyone, why then, she had seen to it there was no possibility he’d ever think of having her.

  Although in five years a reputation might be mended, and as in Leonora’s case, extreme youth, when gone, is a handy excuse for extreme folly, her own expectations had not altered a jot But sometimes dreams are so necessary for their creators that they do not disappear entirely upon awakening, but only change until they have become transmuted into something acceptable in the clear light of reality. Now Leonora only wished to convince the marquess of her goodwill, and she just wanted to have the pleasure of being able to chat with him now and again, and maybe, if things went as well as they possibly could, he might someday, perhaps, even call her “friend.” And that was why she must speak to Papa, for he was the only one who could help her achieve that last humble longing now.

  By the time that the viscount had returned from luncheon at his club, Leonora had almost exhausted herself preparing for her interview with him. She hadn’t sought him out privately for so long that she’d forgotten the look of the offices he maintained in a small room on the main floor, behind the library. For all she’d spent so many happy hours there with him in the past, as she came into his room when he bade her, it all looked new to her, or at the very least, like a revisited landscape from some childhood dream.

  Thus, as she stood and stared at the familiar yet unfamiliar furnishings and got her bearings, she did not see how quickly he had leaped to his feet, nor how nervous her father was, nor how he looked at her so eagerly. By the time she turned her eyes to him, he had seated himself again and was requesting that she do the same in his usual dry, bored tones.

  It was more awkward than she’d imagined. He didn’t help her at all, save for interjecting small inquiring sounds whenever her speech faltered. So she held her face as impassive as he kept his, and in as toneless a manner as she could, she “told him of how she had insulted the Marquess of Severne the previous night and compounded the insult while attempting to right matters this morning.

  “I wish to set the matter straight, Father,” she said coolly. “The difficulty lies in the fact that he is scarcely likely to hold still long enough when he sees me coming for me to do so. And I shouldn’t blame him in the least for taking flight at the mere mention of my name.”

  “I see,” said the viscount slowly, “so you wish me to have a word with him?”

  “No,” Leonora said flatly, “for he’d expect you to do the pretty, whether I meant you to or not I must speak with him, Father, but I can’t see how I can do that without your help. I cannot be so forward as to send him a note, and there’s small likelihood of our meeting in company, for you know that we don’t travel in the same circles. Sybil and Lord Benjamin don’t associate with him because of his reputation, and Mama must always follow Sybil’s lead. Neither can I lie in wait in the hallways here, hoping to accost him coming out of your offices. Can you think of a way that I might meet him on mutually safe ground, and tende
r my apologies to him? It is rather important to me,” she added with stress, but in as colorless a tone as she had recited all the rest.

  An awkward silence followed as she gazed at him and waited for him to speak. He seemed lost in thought. Then he looked up at her. Ah, my Nell, he thought with something very much like anguish, where have you been all these years? Why did you change so all out of recognition? And why did you suddenly turn your face from me? He had wanted to ask her that from the beginning, but anything that he had said to her then had remained unanswered, and then it had grown too late, too cold to ask with warmth.

  He had hesitated too long. If the estrangement were due to something he had done, he wanted to know of it, and yet didn’t. He’d done many things in the name of his country that he’d rather not explain. He couldn’t imagine what else it might have been, or if he could, he shrank from discussing such with her. For her good opinion had always meant so much to him. How he missed her, his dark, proud, laughing, headstrong daughter with her passionate beliefs. She had been his delight.

  She looked back at him serenely, her calm matching his, while all the time she yearned for him to throw back his head and laugh with her at the two silly persons in his office, staring at each other inscrutably, like opposing mandarins across a chessboard. Oh Papa, she thought, how I have missed you!

  “I think,” the viscount said coolly, at last, “that perhaps I may be able to arrange something.”

  “Very good,” Leonora answered levelly.

  And then they sat and nodded at each other, since there was nothing else to say.

  SIX

  He saw her at once, almost immediately after he had entered the room. It hardly mattered that he had been expecting to see her, and was prepared for the moment with fatalistic curiosity. That was forgotten when he saw her. She was easily the most beautiful creature he’d seen in years. It wasn’t only the unexpected brilliance of the silken scarlet frock she wore which glorified her luxuriant contours, or her elaborately dressed dark tresses that transformed her and disarmed him utterly. It was the look upon her lovely face when she caught sight of him, that radiant look of glad welcome, of whole and joyous greeting, that warmed him entirely and made him feel as though he were coming home at last.