Simply Perfect (32 page)

“Or in mine,” Joseph said firmly.

“We are going to live at Willowgreen, the three of us,” Lizzie said, walking toward Claudia with her hands outstretched until Claudia took them in hers. “And Horace. It is Papa's home in the country. And you will teach me things, and Papa too, and I will have all my stories written down and make a book of them, and perhaps some of my friends can come and visit us sometimes, and when there is a baby I will hold it and rock it every day and…”

The pink in Claudia's cheeks had turned to flame.

“Lizzie,” she said, squeezing the girl's hands, “I have a school to run in Bath. I have girls waiting for me there and teachers. I have a
life
waiting for me there.”

Lizzie's face was upturned. Her eyelids were fluttering, her lips moving even before she spoke.

“Are those girls more important than me, then?” she asked. “Are those teachers more important than Papa? Is that school nicer than Willowgreen?”

Joseph spoke at last.

“Lizzie,” he said, “that is unfair. Miss Martin has her own life to live. We cannot expect her to marry me and come to Willowgreen with us just because we want her to—because we love her and do not know quite how we will live without her.”

He was looking at Claudia, who was obviously in deep distress—until his final words. Then she looked indignant. He risked a grin.

Lizzie drew her hands free.

“Do you not love Papa?” she asked.

Claudia sighed. “Oh, I do,” she said. “But life is not that simple, Lizzie.”

“Why not?” Lizzie asked. “People always say that.
Why
is life not simple? If you love me and you love Papa and we love you, what could be simpler?”

“I think,” Joseph said, “we had better go out for a walk. This triangular discussion is definitely not fair to Miss Martin, Lizzie. It is two against one. I will raise the matter with her again when we are alone together. Here, take the dog's leash and show us how you can find your way out of the house and around to the lake without any other help.”

“Oh, I can,” she said, taking the leash. “Watch me.”

“I intend to,” he assured her.

But as the three of them stepped outside a couple of minutes later, Lizzie stopped and cocked her head. Even above the sound of the water gushing from the great fountain she could hear something else, it seemed. Miss Thompson and the other girls were approaching. She held up a hand in greeting and called to them.

“Molly?” she cried. “Doris? Agnes?”

The whole group approached and bobbed curtsies.

“I am going to come with you,” Lizzie announced. “My papa wants to be alone with Miss Martin. He says it is unfair to her for there to be two against one.”

Miss Thompson regarded her employer with pursed lips and eyes that danced with merriment.

“You will not be leaving today after all, then, Claudia?” she said. “I shall let Wulfric know. Go and enjoy your walk.”

And she shepherded the girls—Lizzie included—back into the house.

“Right,” Joseph said, offering his arm. “It is one on one, fair odds, a fair fight. If you
wish
to fight, that is. I would far prefer to plan a wedding.”

She clasped her hands firmly at her waist and turned in the direction of the lake. The brim of her straw hat—the same one as usual—waved in the wind.

         

Eleanor had been waiting up for her last night—or rather early this morning. Claudia had poured out much of the evening's proceedings, and Eleanor had quite possibly guessed the rest.

She had repeated her offer to take over the running of the school, even to purchase it. She had urged Claudia to think carefully, not to choose impulsively, and not to think in terms of what she
ought
to do rather than what she
wished
to do.

“I suppose,” she had said, “it is a cliché and an oversimplification to advise you to follow your heart, Claudia, and I am not at all qualified to offer such advice, am I? But…Well, this is really not my business, and it certainly is
long
past my bedtime. Good night.”

But she had poked her head back about the door seconds after leaving the room.

“I am going to say it anyway,” she had said. “Follow your heart, for goodness' sake, Claudia, you silly thing.”

By this morning it seemed that everyone
knew
.

It was all excruciatingly embarrassing, to say the least.

“I feel,” she said as she strode in the direction of the lake, Joseph beside her, “as if I were on the stage of a theater with a vast audience gathered all about me.”

“Waiting with bated breath for your final lines?” he said. “I cannot decide if I am part of the audience, Claudia, or a fellow actor. But if I am the latter, I cannot have rehearsed with you or I would know what those final lines are.”

They walked in silence until they came to the bank of the lake.

“It is impossible,” she said, noticing that the wind was creating white-topped waves on the water.

“No,” he said, “not that. Not even improbable. I would call it probable, but by no means certain. It is that small amount of uncertainty that has my heart knocking against my ribs and my knees feeling inadequate to the task of holding me upright and my stomach attempting to turn somersaults inside me.”

“Your family would never accept me,” she said.

“My mother and my sister already have,” he told her, “and my father has not disinherited me.”

“
Could
he?” she asked.

“No.” He smiled. “But he could make my life dashed uncomfortable. He will not do so. He is far fonder of his children than he will ever admit. And he is far more firmly under my mother's thumb than he knows.”

“I cannot give you children,” she said.

“Do you know that for certain?” he asked her.

“No,” she admitted.

“Any girl fresh from the schoolroom might not be able to if I married her,” he said. “Many women cannot, you know. And perhaps you can. I
hope
you can, I must confess. There is all that dreary business of securing the succession, of course, but more important than that, I would
like
to have children with you, Claudia. But all I
really
want is to spend the rest of my life with you. And we would not be childless. We would have Lizzie.”

“I cannot be a marchioness,” she said, “or a duchess. I know nothing about what would be expected of me, and I am far too old to learn. I am not sure I would want to learn anyway. I like myself as I am. That is a conceited thing to say, perhaps, and suggests an unwillingness ever to change and grow. I
am
willing to do both, but I would rather choose ways in which to grow.”

“Choose to change sufficiently to allow me into your life, then,” he said. “Please, Claudia. It is all I ask. If you are not willing to have Lizzie and me live in Bath with you, then come to live at Willowgreen with us. Make it your home. Make it your life. Make it anything you want. But come. Please come.”

She felt all the unreality of the situation suddenly. It was as if she took a step back from herself and saw him as a stranger again—as he had first appeared to her in the visitors' parlor at school. She saw how very handsome and elegant and aristocratic and self-assured he was. Could he possibly now be begging her to marry him? Could he possibly love her? But she knew he did. And she knew she could hold this image of him in her mind for no longer than a few seconds. Looking at him again, she saw only her beloved Joseph.

“I think we should make Willowgreen like my school,” she said. “Only different. The challenge of educating Lizzie, when I thought she might be a pupil, has excited me, for of course I have seen that it is altogether possible to fill her with the joy of learning. I do not know why I have never thought of including children with handicaps among my pupils. There could be some at Willowgreen. We could take some in, even adopt some—other blind children, children with other handicaps, both physical and mental. Anne was once governess to the Marquess of Hallmere's cousin, who was thought of as simpleminded. She is the sweetest young woman imaginable. She married a fisherman and bore him sturdy sons and runs his home and is as happy as it is possible to be.”

“We will adopt a dozen such children,” he said quietly, “and Willowgreen will be their school and their home. We will love them, Claudia.”

She looked at him and sighed.

“It would not work,” she said. “It is altogether too ambitious a dream.”

“But that is what life is all about,” he said. “It is about dreaming and making those dreams come true with effort and determination—and love.”

She stared mutely at him.

That was when they were interrupted.

The Marquess and Marchioness of Hallmere with their two elder children and the Earl and Countess of Rosthorn with their boys appeared from among the trees, returning, it seemed, from a walk. They all waved cheerfully from some distance away and would soon have been out of sight if the marchioness had not stopped suddenly to stare intently at them. Then she detached herself from the group and came striding toward them. The marquess came after her more slowly while the others continued on their way to the house.

Claudia had made the grudging admission to herself during the past week that the former Lady Freyja Bedwyn really was not the monster she had been as a girl. Even so, she deeply resented this intrusion upon what was obviously a private tête-à-tête.

“Miss Martin,” she said after favoring Joseph with a mere nod, “I hear you are thinking of giving up your school to Eleanor.”

Claudia raised her eyebrows.

“I am glad you presume to know what I am thinking,” she said.

She half noticed the two men exchange a poker-faced glance.

“It seems an odd sort of thing to do just at the time when you have achieved full independence,” Lady Hallmere said. “But I must say I approve. I always admired you—after you had the courage to walk out on me—but I never liked you until this past week. You deserve your chance at happiness.”

“Freyja,” the marquess said, taking her by the elbow, “I think we are interrupting something here. And your words are only going to cause embarrassment.”

But Claudia scarcely heard him. She was looking intently at Lady Hallmere.

“How do you know,” she asked, “that I have just achieved independence? How do you
know
about my benefactor?”

Lady Hallmere opened her mouth as if she were about to speak, and then closed it again and shrugged.

“Is it not common knowledge?” she asked carelessly.

Perhaps Eleanor had said something. Or Susanna. Or Anne. Or even Joseph.

But Claudia felt somehow as if someone had just taken a large mallet and hit her over the head with it. Except that such violence might have clouded her thoughts, whereas she felt now as if her mind had never been more crystal clear. She was able to think of several things all at once.

She thought of Anne by some very strange coincidence applying to Mr. Hatchard for a teaching position at her school when she lived a mere stone's throw from the Marquess of Hallmere's home in Cornwall.

She thought of Susanna being sent to the school as a charity girl at the age of twelve just shortly after the coincidence of having applied for a position as Lady Freyja's maid.

She thought about Lady Freyja Bedwyn paying a call at the school one morning several years ago.
But how had she known about the school or where to find it?

She thought about Edna's telling her just a few weeks ago that Lady Freyja knew about the murder of her parents in their shop years ago—just before Edna was sent to the school in Bath.

She thought about Anne and Susanna trying to tell her down the years that perhaps Lady Freyja, Marchioness of Hallmere, was not quite as bad as Claudia remembered her.

She thought about the fact that when Lady Hallmere and her sister-in-law had needed new governesses for their children, they had looked for them in her school.

She thought…

If the truth were a large mallet, she thought, it surely would have flattened her head to her shoulders years ago.

“It was you,” she said. The words came out as little more than a whisper.
“It was you!”

Lady Hallmere raised haughty eyebrows.

“It was you,” Claudia said again. “
You
were the school's benefactor.”

“Oh, the devil!” Joseph said.

“Now you have done it,” the Marquess of Hallmere said, sounding amused. “The proverbial cat is out of the proverbial bag, Free.”

“It
was
you.” Claudia stared at her former pupil, horrified.

Lady Hallmere shrugged. “I am very wealthy,” she said.

“You were a
girl
when I opened the school.”

“Wulf was a Gothic guardian in many ways,” Lady Hallmere said. “But he was remarkably enlightened when it came to money. We all had access to our fortunes when we were very young.”

“Why?”

Lady Hallmere tapped her hand against her side, and Claudia sensed that she would have been more comfortable if she had been holding a riding crop. She shrugged again.

“Nobody but you ever stood up to me,” she said, “until I met Joshua. Wulfric did, of course, but that was different. He was my brother. I resented the fact that my father and mother had died and left us, I suppose. I wanted to be noticed. I wanted someone other than Wulfric to force me to behave myself. You did it by walking out on me. But you were not dead, Miss Martin. I could wreak revenge on you as I could not with my mother. You cannot know what satisfaction it has given me over the years to know that you depended upon me even while you despised me.”

“I did not—”

“Oh, yes, you did.”

“Yes, I did.”