Only Enchanting (5 page)

“Viscount Ponsonby?” Agnes said, and her heart began its heavy thumping again, threatening to deafen her and make her voice breathless. “Yes, you are quite right. I passed him farther along the street, and he actually acknowledged me and bade me a good afternoon. He could not remember my name, however. I could almost hear him searching his mind for it. He called me
ma’am
instead.”

Goodness, had she really noticed that much?

“And just a few minutes ago,” Dora said, “there were a couple of carriages. There were two people in the first, a lady and gentleman. The second was loaded down with a prodigious pile of baggage and contained a man who looked so superior that he was either a duke or a valet. I suspect the latter. I almost called up to you, but if I had done that, then Mrs. Henry would have heard too and come bustling to one of the front windows, and all three of us would have been seen to be gawking outward and
not
minding our own business as genteel ladies ought.”

“Absolutely no one would have paid us any heed,” Agnes said. “Everyone else would have been too busy gawking on their own account.”

They both laughed and took their seats on either side of the fireplace, while Mrs. Henry carried in the tray and informed them that the guests had begun to arrive at Middlebury Park, but she expected Miss Debbins had been too engrossed in her music to notice.

Agnes and Dora smirked at each other when she had left, and then got to their feet to see who was
approaching along the village street this time. It was a young gentleman driving himself in a very smart curricle, with a young tiger in livery up behind him. The driver looked like another lithe and handsome man, except that a wicked scar slashing across the cheek nearest their window was horribly visible despite his hat. It gave him a ferocious, piratical appearance.

“I quite despise myself,” Dora said. “But this really is fun.”

“It is,” Agnes agreed. Though she wished it was not happening. She had really not wanted to see him again. Oh, yes, of course she had. No, she had not. Oh, she
hated
this . . . this juvenile turmoil over a man who had scarcely noticed her five months ago and had forgotten even her name since then.

Sophia had told her about the Survivors’ Club and had explained about their annual gatherings in Cornwall, and how she had persuaded them all to come to Middlebury Park instead this year because her husband, the foolish dear—Sophia’s words—had refused to leave her so soon after her confinement. There were seven of them, including Viscount Darleigh—six men and one woman. Three of them were married, all within the past year. They were going to be here for three weeks. The whole neighborhood was agog with excitement, even though it was to be a mainly private gathering. Every one of the Survivors was titled: the least illustrious of them a baronet, the most illustrious a duke.

Agnes had decided to keep well out of their way. It should not be difficult, she had thought, although she often went up to the house to see Sophia, especially during the last couple of months before Thomas was born, when it had been increasingly difficult for Sophia to come to see her, and during the month since his birth. She would stop going while there were houseguests. She
would have stopped even if
he
was not one of the Survivors, for Sophia would be busy entertaining them all. And though Agnes often went into the park to sketch, at the express invitation of both Sophia and Lord Darleigh, she would avoid the parts of it where the guests were most likely to stroll, and she would be very careful not to be seen coming and going.

She had been careful today—until she had lost track of time. None of the guests would be likely to arrive before the middle of the afternoon, Sophia had told her. Agnes had gone, then, to paint the daffodils, when it was still morning. She could not delay altogether for three weeks, because the daffodils would not delay. She would be home soon after noon, well before anyone could be expected to arrive, she had told Dora before she left. But then she had started to paint and had forgotten the time.

Even then she had taken great care while walking home. She had been painting way over beyond the lake and the trees, close to the summerhouse, not even nearly within sight of the main house. The park about Middlebury was vast, after all. She did not return around the lake and across the bottom of the lawn to the drive. That would have brought her within distant sight of the house for a few minutes, and she would have been exposed along much of the length of the driveway too. No, she had walked down into the woods that grew in a thick band inside the southern wall of the park, and had threaded her way about the ancient trunks, enjoying the green-hued solitude and the lovely smells of the trees. She had emerged far down the driveway, only a few yards from the gates, which stood wide-open, as they usually did during the daytime. Then she had proceeded along the village street toward home. There had been no one in sight except Mrs. Jones, who was standing at the gate outside the vicarage indulging in a gossip with Mrs. Lewis, the
apothecary’s wife. And Mr. Henchley was brushing sawdust out through the door of his butcher’s shop at the far end of the street for someone else to have to deal with. Agnes had put her head down and hurried toward home.

She had thought herself safe until she heard the clopping hooves of an approaching horse. She had not looked up. Horses were not an uncommon sight in the village, after all. But she had had no choice as it drew closer. It would be very ill-mannered of her not to acknowledge a neighbor. So she raised her head and looked straight into the sleepy green eyes of the very guest she had most wanted to avoid. Indeed she had no reason to avoid any of the others, all of whom were strangers to her.

It was wretchedly bad luck.

And she had despised herself anew as she looked at him. She had shaken off the whole nonsense of falling in love only weeks after that infernal ball. Nothing like it had ever happened to her before, and she would make good and sure nothing like it ever happened again. Then Sophia had told her about the Survivors’ Club coming here. And Agnes had convinced herself that if she set eyes upon him—which she would take great pains
not
to do—she would be able to look at him quite dispassionately and see him merely as one of Lord Darleigh’s aristocratic friends with whom she happened to have a slight acquaintance.

He was quite impossibly handsome. And a whole lot of other things she would prefer not to put into words—or even thoughts, if the wretched things could only be suppressed.

Which they could not.

All the nonsense from last autumn had come rushing back, just as if she did not have a droplet of common sense in her whole body or brain.

“I wonder,” Dora said as they returned to their chairs,
“if we will be invited to the house at all, Agnes. I suppose not, but you are a particular friend of the viscountess, and I am her music teacher as well as Lord Darleigh’s. Indeed, he remarked to me just last week that since his friends will merely ridicule his efforts on the harp, I had better come and play it for them as it ought to be played, and
then
they would not laugh. But
he
was laughing as he said it. I think his friends tease him a great deal, and that means that they love him, does it not? I believe they must be very close friends. I do not suppose Lord Darleigh
will
invite me to play, will he?”

Agnes shook off her own foolish palpitations and focused her attention upon her sister, who both looked and sounded wistful. Dora was twelve years her senior and had never married. She had lived at home in Lancashire until their father remarried, a year before Agnes’s own marriage. Then she had expressed her intention to answer the advertisement she had seen for a resident music teacher in the village of Inglebrook in Gloucestershire. Her application had been accepted, and she had moved here and stayed and prospered in a modest way. She was well liked and respected here, and her talent was recognized. She always had more work than she could accept.

Was she happy, though? She had a whole neighborhood of friendly acquaintances but no particular friend. And no beau. She and Agnes had grown very close since they had lived together here—as they had always been at home. But they were for all intents and purposes of different generations. Dora was contented, Agnes believed. But happy?

“Perhaps you will indeed be invited to play,” she said. “All hosts like to entertain their houseguests, and what better way than with a musical evening? And Lord Darleigh is blind and therefore more attached to music than any other form of entertainment. Unless there is a great
deal of musical talent among the guests, it would make perfect sense for him to invite you to play for them. You have more talent than anyone else I have known, Dora.”

Perhaps it was not wise to raise her sister’s hopes. But how insensitive not to have realized until this moment that Dora too had feelings and anxieties related to the arrival of these guests and that she dreamed of playing for an appreciative audience.

“But confess, dear,” Dora said, a twinkle in her eye. “You have not known many people, talented or otherwise.”

“You are quite right,” Agnes admitted. “But if I
had
known everyone in the polite world and had heard them all display their talents at musical evenings galore, I would absolutely have discovered that there is no one to match you.”

“What I love about you, Agnes, dear,” her sister said, “is your remarkable lack of partiality.”

They both laughed and then scrambled to their feet again to watch yet another carriage go by, this one with a distinguished-looking older gentleman and a young lady inside—and a ducal crest emblazoned on the door.

“All I need to be entirely happy,” Dora said, “is a discreet and genteel little telescope.”

They laughed again.

3

F
or what remained of that first day, after they had all arrived, and for all of the next day as well as much of the night between and the night following, they stayed together as a group and talked almost without ceasing. It was always thus when there was a year’s worth of news to share, and it was still so this year, despite the fact that most of them had met a few times since last spring’s gathering at Penderris Hall and when three of them had married.

Flavian had been a bit afraid that those marriages would somehow affect their closeness. He had been a lot afraid, if the truth were told. It was not that he resented his friends’ happiness or the three wives they had acquired, all of whom were at Middlebury Park with them. But the seven of them had been through hell together and had come out of it together as a tightly knit group. They knew one another as no one else did or could. There was a bond that would be impossible to describe in words. It was a bond without which they would surely crumble—or explode—into a million pieces. At least,
he
would.

All three wives seemed to know it and respect it, though. Without being in any way overt about it, they
gave space to their husbands and the others, though they did not hold themselves entirely aloof either. It was all very well-done of them. Flavian soon had a definite affection for them all, as well as the liking he had felt when he had first met each of them.

One thing he had always valued as much as anything else about the annual gatherings of the Survivors’ Club, though, was that the seven of them did not cling together as an inseparable unit for the whole of their three-week gatherings. There was always the company of friends when one wanted or needed it, but there could always be solitude too when one chose to be alone.

Penderris was perfectly suited for both company and solitude, spacious as the house and park were and situated as they were above a private beach and the sea. Middlebury Park was hardly inferior, however, even though it was inland. The park was large and had been designed in such a way that there were public areas—the formal gardens, the wide lawns, the lake—and more secluded ones such as the wilderness walk through the hills behind the house, and the cedar avenue and summerhouse and meadows behind the trees at the far side of the lake. There would even soon be a five-mile-long riding track around the inner edge of the north and east walls and part of the south; the construction of it was almost finished. The track was to allow Vincent the freedom to ride and to run despite his blindness, and had been his viscountess’s idea, as had the guide dog and other additions to the house and park.

On the second morning, they all had breakfast together after Ben—Sir Benedict Harper—and Vincent had come up from what Ralph Stockwood, Earl of Berwick, described as the dungeon but was in reality an extension of the wine cellar, which had been turned into an exercise room. It was a sunny day again.

“Gwen and Samantha are going to stroll down to the lake,” Lady Darleigh said, indicating Lady Trentham, Hugo’s wife, and Lady Harper, Sir Benedict’s, “while I spend an hour in the nursery, and then I am going to join them. Anyone else is quite welcome to come too, of course.”

“I must spend some time in the music room,” Vincent said. “I have to keep my fingers nimble. It is amazing how quickly they develop into ten thumbs when they are not exercised.”

“Lord love us,” Flavian said. “The v-violin, Vince? The p-pianoforte?”

“Both,” Vincent said with a grin, “as well as the harp.”

“You have persevered with the harp, then, despite all your frustrations with it, Vincent?” Imogen Hayes, Lady Barclay, said. “You are a marvel of determination.”

“You are not planning to favor us with a recital by any chance, Vince?” Ralph asked. “It would be sporting of you to give us all fair warning if you are.”

“Consider it duly given.” Vincent was still grinning.

George Crabbe, Duke of Stanbrook, and Hugo Emes, Lord Trentham, were going to walk over to see how the riding track was coming along. Ralph and Imogen were going to explore the wilderness walk. Ben, who was still very much in the honeymoon stage of his marriage, having been wed to Lady Harper for less than two months, chose to accompany her and Lady Trentham to the lake.