Simply Unforgettable (23 page)

She felt a yearning so profound that she had to break eye contact with him and look down hastily at her hands.

“My chances for either kind of happiness were ruined more than three years ago, Lord Sinclair,” she said.

“Were they?” he said as softly as before. “Three years?”

She ignored the question.

“I have cultivated contentment since then,” she said. “And incredibly I have found it and discovered that it is superior to anything else I have ever experienced. Don't ruin that too for me.”

There was a lengthy silence while the earl and Great-Aunt Martha laughed together over something one of them had said, and Amy's voice prattled on happily to Great-Aunt Gertrude.

“I believe I already have,” Viscount Sinclair said at last. “Or shaken it, anyway. Because I do not believe it ever was contentment, Frances, but only a sort of deadness from which you awakened when I hauled you out of that fossil of a carriage, spitting fire and brimstone at me.”

She looked up at him, very aware that they were not alone together in the room, that her great-aunts were only a few feet away and were very probably observing them surreptitiously and with great interest. She was quite unable therefore to allow any of the emotions she felt to show on her face.

“You are to be married,” she said.

“I am,” he agreed. “But one important question remains unanswered. Who is to be the bride?”

She drew breath to say something else, but her attention was drawn to the fact that the earl was getting to his feet with the obvious intention of bringing the visit to an end.

Viscount Sinclair rose too without another word and proceeded to thank the aunts for their hospitality. Amy hugged Frances and assured her that she would somehow persuade her mama to allow her to come downstairs when Mrs. Melford and Miss Driscoll and Miss Allard came for dinner.

“After all,” she said naively, “you are
my
special friend. Besides, I would not miss hearing you sing again for worlds. I may not perform music with any great flair, Miss Allard, but I can recognize when someone else does.”

The earl bowed over Frances's hand again.

“Prepare more than one song, if you will,” he said. “After listening to you once, I know that I will long for an encore.”

“Very well, my lord,” she promised.

Viscount Sinclair bowed to her with his hands clasped behind his back.

“Miss Allard,” he said.

“Lord Sinclair.”

It was an austere enough farewell, but it did not deter Frances's aunts from going into raptures after their guests had left.

“The Earl of Edgecombe is quite as charming as he was as a young man,” Aunt Martha said. “And almost as handsome too. And Miss Amy Marshall is a delight. But Viscount Sinclair—”

“—is handsome enough and charming enough to make any woman wish she were young again to set her cap at him,” Aunt Gertrude said. “But it is a good thing we are not young hopefuls, Martha. He had eyes for no one but Frances tonight.”

“He was very charming to us,” Aunt Martha said, “but every time he looked at Frances, his eyes fairly devoured her and he forgot our very existence. Did you notice how he went to sit beside her, Gertrude, the moment we drew the attention of Lord Edgecombe and Miss Marshall away from them?”

“Well, of course I noticed,” Great-Aunt Gertrude said. “I would have been severely disappointed if our ruse had not worked, Martha.”

“Oh, goodness,” Frances protested. “You must not see romance where there simply is none. Or try to promote it.”

“You, my love,” Aunt Martha said, “are going to be the Viscountess Sinclair before the summer is out unless I am much mistaken. Poor Miss Hunt is just going to have to find someone else.”

Frances held both hands to her cheeks, laughing despite herself.

“I absolutely agree with Martha,” Aunt Gertrude said. “And you cannot tell us that you are indifferent to him, Frances. We would not believe you, would we, Martha?”

Frances bade them a hasty good night and fled to her room.

They did not understand.

Neither did he.

Was
there such a thing as fate?

But if there were, why was it such a cruel thing? For what it had set in her path three separate times now since Christmas was quite, quite unattainable.

Did
fate
not understand?

But one important question remains unanswered. Who is to be the bride?

Did
he still want to marry her, then? Had it not been mere rash impulse that had prompted him to offer for her in Sydney Gardens while the rain poured down all around them?

Did he love her?

Did
he?

 

Frances had agreed to sing at Marshall House, though she had imposed a sort of condition.

Very well, then. I will come and sing, my lord, just for you and my aunts.

They were words that echoed in Lucius's head during the coming days while he schemed ruthlessly to thwart her modest will. She had not meant those words literally, he told himself.

At least, she probably
had,
he conceded, since there was something very strange, almost unnatural, about Frances's attitude to her own talent. But she
ought
not to have meant them. Anyone with her voice ought to be eager to sing for an audience of a million if that many persons could only be packed within one room. It would be a criminal waste to allow her to sing just for his grandfather and her great-aunts—and presumably for his mother and sisters and him too.

Frances Allard had shuttered herself—body, mind, and soul—behind the walls of Miss Martin's School for Girls for far too long, and it was time she came out and faced reality. And if she would not do it voluntarily, then by God he would take the initiative and drag her out. Perhaps she would never give him the chance to make her happy in any personal sense—though even on that matter he had not yet conceded final defeat. But he would force her to see that a glorious future as a singer awaited her. He would do everything in his power to help her to that future.

Frances had not been born to teach. Not that he had ever been present in one of her classrooms to discover that she was not up to the task, it was true. She very probably was, in fact. But she had so clearly been born to make music and to share it with the world that any other occupation was simply a waste of her God-given talent.

He was going to bring her out into the light. He was going to help her—force her, if necessary—to be all she had been born to be.

And so he ignored the words she had spoken to his grandfather—
I will come and sing, my lord, just for you and my aunts.

He knew someone. The man was a friend of his and had only recently married. He was a renowned connoisseur of the arts, notably music, and was particularly well known for the concert he gave at his own home each year, at which he entertained a select gathering of guests with prominent musicians from all over the Continent and with new discoveries of his own. Just this past Christmas his star performer had been a young boy soprano whom he had discovered among a group of inferior church carolers out on Bond Street. He had married the boy's mother in January.

It was strange to think of Baron Heath as a married man with two young stepchildren. But it seemed to happen to all of them eventually, Lucius thought gloomily—marriage, that was. At least Heath had had the satisfaction of choosing his own bride and marrying for love.

Lucius invited him to attend a concert at Marshall House and promised him a musical treat that would make his hair stand on end.

“She has an extraordinarily lovely voice,” he explained, “but has had no one to bring her to the attention of people who can do something to sponsor her career.”

“And I will soon be clamoring to be that sponsor, I suppose,” Lord Heath said. “I hear this with tedious frequency, Sinclair. But I do trust your taste—provided we are talking of taste in voices, that is, and not in women.”

Lucius felt a touch of anger, but he quelled it.

“Come,” he said, “and bring Lady Heath. You may listen and judge for yourself whether her singing voice does not equal her beauty.”

But a singer needed an audience, Lucius believed. How could Frances sing as she had in Bath with only his family and hers and the Heaths looking on? Yet even in Bath the audience had been modest in size.

The music room in Marshall House would seat thirty people in some comfort. If the panels between it and the ballroom were removed, there would be room for many more, and the size of the combined rooms would give range for the power of a great voice.

And a concert needed more than one performer . . .

His schemes became more grandiose by the hour.

“I am thinking of inviting a few people to join us in the music room after dinner on the evening Miss Allard comes here with her great-aunts to dine, sir,” he told his grandfather at tea three days before the said dinner. “Including Baron Heath and his wife.”

“Ah, a good idea, Lucius,” the earl said. “I should have thought of it for myself—and of Heath. He can do something for her. I do not imagine Miss Allard will have any objection.”

She well might, Lucius suspected. He knew her better than his grandfather did. But he held his peace.

“I have the distinct impression,” the viscountess said, “that it is this Miss Allard rather than Mrs. Melford and Miss Driscoll who is to be the guest of honor at our table. It is extraordinary when one remembers that she is a schoolteacher.”

“You will see, Louisa,” the earl told her, “that it is
she
who is extraordinary.”

Caroline meanwhile had uttered a muffled shriek at Lucius's words.

“And I am expected to accompany Miss Allard before an audience that includes
Baron Heath
?” she said. “When is she coming here to practice, Luce?”

“The afternoon after tomorrow,” he said. “You had better not mention Lord Heath to her, though, Caroline, or any other guests. You will only make her nervous.”

“Make
her
nervous!” Her voice had risen almost to a squeak. “How about
me
?”

“When she begins to sing,” Amy said kindly, “no one will even notice your playing, Caroline.”

“Well, thank you for that,” Caroline said before laughing suddenly.

Amy laughed with her. “I did not mean it quite the way it sounded,” she said. “Your playing is quite superior—far better than mine.”

“Which is not much of a compliment, Amy, when one really thinks about it,” Emily said dryly.

“And
you,
Father,” the viscountess said firmly, “are looking tired. Lucius will help you to your room, and you will lie down until dinnertime.”

“Yes, ma'am,” the earl said with a twinkle in his eye—and a slight gray tinge to his complexion.

No one had voiced any objection to the idea of making the musical part of the evening into a full-blown concert, though, Lucius thought as he climbed the stairs slowly, his grandfather leaning heavily on his arm. Not that he had used those words exactly, of course, to describe his plans. But any small—or large—gathering of people for the purpose of listening to a few musical performances could be loosely defined as a concert.

He had three days during which to gather a respectably sized audience to do Frances Allard's talent justice—at the height of the Season, when every day brought a flood of invitations to every
ton
household. But it could be done, by Jove, and he would do it. Her feet were going to be set firmly on the road to success and fame that evening. He had no doubt of it.

And it would be all his doing.

That might prove small comfort in the years ahead, of course.

But all was not yet lost on the personal front. He was not married yet, or even betrothed—not officially anyway. The Balderstons were back in town, but he had contrived to avoid them for all of twenty-four hours.

He had never been a man to give up lightly on what he badly wanted. And new leaf or no new leaf, he had not changed in that particular.

He desperately wanted Frances Allard.

19

Marshall House was a grand mansion on Cavendish Square
in the heart of Mayfair, Frances discovered on the afternoon of the day before she was to dine there. She might have expected as much, of course, since it was the town house of the Earl of Edgecombe. But she felt apprehensive and strangely conspicuous as she bowed her head and hurried inside after Thomas had handed her down from the ancient carriage outside the doors.

She was very aware that she really was back in London.

She saw no one within, though, except for a few servants and the young lady who awaited her in the room to which she was shown and introduced herself as Miss Caroline Marshall. She was tall and poised and pretty and bore little resemblance to her brother.

Of him there was no sign.

The room was massive and gorgeously decorated, with its high ceiling painted with a scene from mythology and gilded friezes and crystal chandeliers and mirrored walls and a gleaming wood floor. It fairly took Frances's breath away.
This
was where she was to sing for the earl and her aunts tomorrow evening?

It was very clearly not the family drawing room.

Miss Marshall offered an explanation that partly reassured her, though.

“The pianoforte in here is superior to the one in the drawing room,” she explained, “and my grandfather insists that nothing but the best is good enough for you, Miss Allard. I cannot understand why the panels have been removed, though. This is the music room and the ballroom combined. Tomorrow evening they will have been replaced, I do not doubt, and your voice will not have to fill such a vast space. But really this is not good enough. You ought to be able to practice in the space you will be singing in.”

How glorious it would be, though, Frances thought wistfully as her eyes feasted upon the opulent splendor of the double chamber, to rise to the challenge of singing to an audience that filled this vast space. She had once dreamed of singing in just such a place.

As she warmed up her voice with scales and exercises she had learned as a girl, she fit her voice to the room, well aware though she was that tomorrow evening she would have to make an adjustment to a smaller space.

“Oh, goodness,” Miss Marshall said even before they began to practice either of the pieces they had chosen for the occasion, “the combined room is not too big for you after all, is it? How extraordinary!”

They practiced in earnest then, and Frances reveled in the chance just to sing. She did sing at school, of course, but not often or at great length—or to the full power of her voice. The purpose of the school and her role as teacher there, after all, was to draw music out of her pupils, not to indulge her desire to create music of her own. It was a noble purpose, she had always thought. It was a joy to help young people realize their full potential.

She still did think so, but, oh, it felt good to indulge in a whole selfish hour of singing.

“Now I know what Amy meant,” Miss Marshall said when they were finished and she was folding the sheets of music neatly on the stand, “when she assured me that no one would notice my accompaniment once you had started to sing. I have never heard a lovelier voice, Miss Allard.”

“Well, thank you.” Frances smiled warmly at her. “But you are a very accomplished pianist, you know, and need never fear an audience. You have no cause to feel nervous about tomorrow evening, though, do you, when there will be only your family and my great-aunts to hear us. My aunts are quite unthreatening, I do assure you.”

She drew on her bonnet and tied the ribbons beneath her chin, taking one last awed look about the ballroom, which would be hidden from view behind panels tomorrow evening. But when Miss Marshall spoke next, it was not to her, she realized.

“How long have
you
been standing there?” she asked. “I thought you were escorting Miss Hunt to Muriel Hemmings's garden party.”

She was speaking, of course, to Viscount Sinclair, who was lounging in the doorway of the music room as if he had been there for some time.

“Some cousins arrived from the country,” he said, “and the garden party had to be abandoned in favor of entertaining them.”

“Well, you might have made your presence known, Luce,” his sister said crossly. “Were you
listening
?”

“I was,” he admitted. “But if you hit one wrong note, Caroline, I did not hear it. I am certain that Miss Allard did not.”

“You must give the order for the panels to be put back between the rooms,” she said. “It has been most inconvenient to practice in this space. Miss Allard's voice is more than up to it, though, I might add.”

“Yes,” he said, pushing himself away from the doorjamb in order to stand upright, “I noticed that too.”

Frances did not quite look at him.

“I must go,” she said. “I have been here ten minutes longer than I intended to be. Poor Thomas will be tired of waiting for me.”

“Poor Thomas is probably sipping his ale by now,” Viscount Sinclair said, “if he is capable of driving that carriage at a pace faster than a sedate crawl, that is. I sent him away.”

“You did what?” She raised her eyes to his and glared indignantly at him. “Now I will have to
walk
home.”

He clucked his tongue. “It is
such
a long way,” he said, “especially on a sunny, warm day like this.”

He did not understand. She might be
seen
if she wandered the streets of fashionable Mayfair.

“Luce,” his sister said severely, “Miss Allard did not bring a maid with her.”

“I will escort her,” he said.

“I do not need a maid,” Frances said. “I am not a girl. And I would not put you to such trouble, Lord Sinclair.”

“It will be no trouble at all,” he said. “I need the exercise.”

What else could she say with Miss Marshall present? He knew very well that she would not make a scene. There was a gleam in his eyes that was beginning to look familiar.

For someone whom she had twice rejected—she, a mere schoolteacher—he was being remarkably persistent. But she had known from the start that he was a determined, sometimes belligerent man. And she had learned since that he was impulsive and reckless and not easily persuaded to give up what he had set his mind on.

For some reason he had set his mind on getting her to agree to some sort of relationship with him. Whether it was still marriage she did not know. But it did not matter anyway. She had said no once, and she must continue to say it.

She walked silently beside him down the long, curving stairway to the great hall and the front doors. She must just hope that the streets between Cavendish Square and Portman Street would be deserted this late in the afternoon.

 

Lucius had been invited to take tea at Berkeley Square with the Balderstons and Portia and the Balderston cousins. But though he might have felt honor bound to attend the garden party since he had said long ago that he would, he felt no such compunction after the plans were changed. He sent a polite excuse and remained at home.

He had been pacing the hallway outside the ballroom—and occasionally standing stock still—since a few minutes after Frances's arrival, which he had observed from an upper window. He could hardly believe what he had heard. He had thought her magnificent at the Reynolds' soiree, but what he had not realized there was that her voice had been on a leash because of the relatively small size of the drawing room.

This afternoon it had been unleashed, though she had kept perfect control over it nevertheless.

Heath's hair was going to do more than stand on end. He would be fortunate indeed if it did not fly right off his head.

But Lucius had not arranged to walk her back to Portman Street only to talk about her singing or quarrel with her. Devil take it, he was in love with the woman and yet he knew so little about her. Not knowing a woman had never seemed important to him before. Women were strange, contrary, irrational, oversensitive people anyway, and he had always been contented to keep his distance from his mother and sisters and never even to try to know or understand the women he bedded. It had never really occurred to him until he thought about it now that he did not know Portia either, although he had been acquainted with her most of his life. It had not seemed to matter—and still did not.

It mattered with Frances.

“This is not the way back to Portman Street,” she said as he drew her hand through his arm and set out from Cavendish Square with her.

“There are any number of ways of getting there,” he said, “some faster and more direct than others. You are not going to tell me, are you, Frances, that you have so little physical stamina that we must take the shortest route.”

“It has nothing to do with stamina,” she said. “My great-aunts are expecting me back for tea.”

“No, they are not,” he said. “I sent back a message with Thomas, informing them that I was taking you for a walk in the park before bringing you home. They will be charmed. They like me.”

“You
what
?” She turned an indignant face on him and drew her hand free before he could clamp it to his side. “You had no business sending any message at all, Lord Sinclair. You had no business sending my carriage away. I have no wish to walk in the park. And how conceited of you to believe that my aunts like you. How do you
know
they do?”

“You look lovely when you are angry,” he said. “You lose the cool, classical madonna look and become the passionate Italian beauty that you are deep down.”

“I am
English,
” she said curtly. “And I do not
wish
to go to the park.”

“Because it is I who am escorting you?” he asked. “Or because you are not—forgive me—dressed in the first stare of fashion?”

“I care nothing for fashion,” she said.

“Then you are very different from any other lady I have ever known,” he said. “Or any gentleman, for that matter. We will not take the paths that will be frequented by the fashionable multitude at this hour, Frances. I am too selfish to share you. We will take some shady path and talk. And if you were dressed in rags you would still look more beautiful to me than any other woman I have ever known.”

“You mock me, Lord Sinclair,” she said, but she fell into step beside him again, her hands clasped firmly at her back. “I do not believe you take life very seriously at all.”

“Sometimes it is more amusing not to,” he said. “But there are certain things I take very seriously, Frances. I am serious at the moment. I have a hankering to know exactly what it is that I have lost since you will not have me.”

That silenced her. She looked up at him with uncomprehending eyes and then dipped her head sharply as two people approached them and then passed with murmured greetings.

“I know a number of facts about you,” he said. “I know that your mother was Italian and your father some sort of French nobleman. I know that you are related to Baron Clifton. I know you grew up in London and left it two years after your father's death in order to teach music and French and writing at Miss Martin's school in Bath. I know that you are a very good cook. I know you have one of the loveliest soprano voices—perhaps even
the
loveliest—of our generation. I know other things about your character. I know that you are devoted to duty and can be stubborn and sometimes downright belligerent and also amiable and affectionate to those you love. I know you are sexually passionate. I even know you biblically. But I do not really
know
you at all, do I?”

“You do not need to,” she said firmly as they reached a side gate into Hyde Park and entered it and turned onto a narrow, shaded path that ran parallel to the street outside though thick trees hid it from view. “No one can be a totally open book to another person even if there is the intimacy of a close relationship between them.”

“And there is no such intimacy between us?” he asked.

“No. Absolutely not.”

He wondered how much of a fool he was making of himself. He tried to imagine their roles reversed. What if she had pursued him and twice he had told her quite clearly that he did not want her? How would he feel if she came after him again anyway, maneuvered matters so that she could get him alone, and then demanded to know who he was?

It was an uncomfortable picture.

But what if the signs he had given her were mixed? What if, while his lips had said no, his whole being had said yes?

“Tell me about your childhood,” he said.

Good Lord, had he taken leave of his senses? He had never been interested in anyone's
childhood
!

She sighed aloud and for a few moments he thought she was going to keep silent.

“Why not?” she said eventually, as if to herself. “We are taking a very long way home and might as well have
something
to talk about.”