The Luckiest Lady In London (24 page)

“I can’t imagine you saying anything like this six months, or even three months ago.”

“I know,” he said simply. “Stay with me tonight.”

“All right.” She’d always meant to, from before she’d opened the connecting door.

“I love you,” he told her, just before he fell asleep.

She remained awake for at least another hour, thinking of him, thinking of their future.

L
ouisa considered it a testament to their dedication that they succumbed to “distractions” during lecture only three more times in the four weeks since they were first overcome. She made speedy progress. At this rate, according to Felix, she’d be ready to tackle trigonometry by the beginning of April. And even with all the fuss of a London Season—their first together as a couple—that promised to be unusually busy, he was confident he could give her a taste of calculus by the end of the year.

They also resumed working together in his study. The weather was becoming less wet and they were often up in the middle of the night to carry out observation. The household was accustomed to such shifts in the master’s schedule; breakfast was laid out at ten, instead of eight, and everything else carried on as before.

On this particular morning, he arrived in the breakfast room looking gloriously hale, approached her chair, and whispered
in her ear, “I always think I cannot love you more if I tried, but I always do.”

Oddly enough, these late breakfasts became his preferred place for telling her that he loved her. It didn’t happen daily or semiweekly or on any other kind of regular basis, but only as the mood struck him. In this way, he was still unpredictable: Before this day, more than a week had passed since his last avowal of love.

I feel exactly the same
, she almost answered, but caught herself just in time.

It was as if she were waiting for something, a sign from above, a final reassurance, before she was ready to admit the nature of her sentiments.

Hundreds of snowdrops had sprung up, seemingly overnight, on the still-dormant lawn. They were admiring those messengers of spring when Sturgess came into the breakfast room and presented a silver salver to Felix.

The latter glanced at the calling card. “I take it the gentleman is not anyone you recognize?”

“No, sir,” said Sturgess.

Felix broke the seal on the note and began reading. His expression changed almost instantly. Dropping the note, he picked up the card and gave it a hard perusal.

“What is it?” she asked, alarmed by his unusual reaction.

“A Mr. Aubrey Lucas, applying to visit the grave of the late marchioness,” he said flatly, handing her everything.

The note was simple. Mr. Lucas identified himself as an old friend of the late Lady Wrenworth. He stated that he had been in the civil service in India for many years and had only now returned to England to retire. He would very much like to pay his last respects to the late marchioness in honor of their friendship. Would the present marquess be so generous as to give permission and have a manservant conduct him to the grave site, where he might lay a wreath?

“Show Mr. Lucas to the green drawing room,” Felix instructed Sturgess. “Look after his comfort, and tell him that Lady Wrenworth and I will be glad to receive him and conduct him to the late marchioness’s final resting place.”

Sturgess bowed and left. Louisa looked up from the note. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

“Probably. Certainly she didn’t form many friendships after her marriage, male or female. A life of vengeance doesn’t leave much room for finer things.”

“What are you going to do?” She was both curious and worried.

“Meet him, of course.” He took up the card again, and turned it over a few times in his fingers while he finished his coffee.

When he looked up, he said, “I take it you are not hungry anymore, my love?”

Indeed she wasn’t.

L
ouisa half expected a dashing young man of Felix’s age. Failing that, she thought she’d see a commanding figure, tall, handsome, and ramrod straight.

Mr. Lucas was of medium height, round, and stooped. His hair might have been golden once, but was now an indistinct shade of grey, his eyes a faded blue. His clothes were a decade behind fashion. He moved somewhat jerkily and spoke a little too fast, giving the impression of someone always on the edge of nervousness.

Traces of boyish good looks were still detectable when he occasionally broke into a self-conscious smile. But Louisa could not imagine that he was anywhere near as beautiful as the late Lady Wrenworth, even if one took away thirty years of aging in the harsh climate of the subcontinent.

Could he really be the one for whose loss two generations of Wrenworth men had paid so dearly?

She glanced at her husband. He was being the perfect host.

“When did you leave for India, sir?” he asked amiably.

“Oh, must have been December of fifty-nine.”

Six months before Felix was born. Six months after Mary Hamilton married Gilbert Rivendale.

“Was it a difficult decision to leave?” She took it upon herself to ask that potentially significant question. It wouldn’t do for it to look as if Felix were grilling him.

“I was the fourth son of a baronet, Lady Wrenworth. It was largely a foregone conclusion that I’d have to venture abroad to seek my fortune.” He smiled ruefully. “I’d have gone sooner, but I was a young man madly in love and couldn’t bear to tear myself away.”

Louisa stirred her tea. “And Mrs. Lucas, did she not accompany you today?”

“There is no Mrs. Lucas—I never married.” Mr. Lucas raised his teacup to his lips and gazed wistfully at Felix. “Forgive me, sir, but you are the very image of your late mother. How beautiful she was, how devastatingly lovely.”

“Did you know her well, by any chance?” Felix’s voice was slick as marble, but behind his urbane smile, Louisa detected ripples of tension.

“I hardly know how to answer that question, sir.” Mr. Lucas shook his head. “We exchanged correspondence—I still keep every one of her letters—but we rarely had the opportunity of speaking to each other. She was well guarded and I didn’t see her as much as I would have liked to.”

“I see,” Felix murmured.

“That does not mean that I didn’t gain any insight into her character,” Mr. Lucas said staunchly. “As I’m certain you can attest, sir, she was the sweetest, kindest angel God ever put on earth.”

For an instant Felix froze. That moment passed, however, before it even registered on Mr. Lucas. “Yes, indeed. Now,
sir, if you are finished with your tea, I would be happy to show you the way.”

L
ouisa, for all that she was the mistress of Huntington, had never been to the private cemetery. It was small and without ostentation, the marble grave markers laid out in neat, well-tended rows.

From a package he carried, Mr. Lucas carefully extracted a dried and faded wreath and placed it on Mary Hamilton Rivendale’s tombstone.

“Amaranth. Her favorite flower,” Felix said in a low voice.

Mr. Lucas looked up, his eyes misty. “Yes. I had the wreath made shortly after she passed away—and I always hoped that one day it would find its way to her even if I couldn’t.”

A silence fell. Mr. Lucas’s gaze returned to the tombstone, as if he could penetrate the layers of marble and earth to the bones below of the woman he loved. Felix watched him. Louisa watched her husband.

A few moments later, he asked, “Would you like to see some of her favorite places around Huntington, sir?”

Louisa tried to conceal her astonishment.

Mr. Lucas’s face lit. “Would it not be too much trouble?” He almost squeaked in his excitement.

Felix was solemn. “No. Not at all.”

They went on a grand tour. There was the small stone bridge that spanned Huntington’s trout stream, where the late Lady Wrenworth had set up her watercolor easel on many a sunny spring day. There was the pier at the far end of the lake, where she liked to read on summer afternoons under a large canopy. There was the cloistered ornamental garden she had designed herself, and greenhouses filled to the brim with exotic flowers of all descriptions, her true legacy to Huntington.

What stunned Louisa was not so much the tour in itself, but how her husband conducted it. He spoke at length of his mother, fluently, easily, as if that woman had never caused him a shred of pain in his entire life. He described her daily habits, her improvements to Huntington, and her many charitable works. He painted a picture of a grand lady who lived a life above any mortal reproach.

Mr. Lucas listened with the rapture of an aspiring young soldier before a celebrated war hero, holding fast to Lord Wrenworth’s words as if they were so many gleaming pearls. He devoured the locales they visited, looking about them as if he could transport himself back in time, to the side of his beloved, if only he stared fiercely enough.

They ended the tour back in the house, the formal, majestic portion of it, where Mr. Lucas was shown an elegant parlor where every stitch of needlework had been done by the late marchioness’s own hand. Gingerly, he touched his fingers to the meticulous embroidery, to the fastidiously and beautifully rendered irises, roses, and tulips.

The very last place he was taken to was the gallery, so he could see the three large portraits of her on the wall and the dozen or so photographs in a glass-topped display case.

Once again, they watched in silence as Mr. Lucas stood lost before the images.

“She never changed,” he said at last. “Still as beautiful as the day I first saw her.”

For Louisa, however, the hardening of the late marchioness’s eyes was plainly visible as the years went on. A grim, humorless countenance stared back at them from the last photographs taken of her, in her midthirties.

“Was . . . was her passing difficult?” Mr. Lucas asked diffidently.

“No. She caught a chill and developed acute pneumonia. It was swift.”

“She must be lovingly remembered,” Mr. Lucas said softly, his eyes never leaving the portraits.

“The entire county turned out for her funeral,” said her son.

Unlike Louisa, Mr. Lucas did not notice the deft sidestepping. He took out a large handkerchief and dabbed surreptitiously at the corners of his eyes.

An invitation was issued for luncheon, but Mr. Lucas declined with much effusive gratitude for their time and trouble. Louisa suspected that the emotional man was in great need of solitude. They let him go, and watched on the steps before the house as he drove his rented dogcart out of sight.

Her husband headed straight into the house. “I could do with some whiskey.”

She did not follow him immediately, except with her eyes, her heart swelling with a ferocious tenderness for this man. His mother had to be one of the most difficult and unhappy subjects of his life. But he had burnished Mr. Lucas’s angelic image of the late Lady Wrenworth, because he recognized that the illusion was what sustained Mr. Lucas, because the belief that he had had the love of a wonderful woman was all Mr. Lucas had to comfort himself in an existence that found neither fortune, fame, nor a family of his own.

She might attribute Felix’s sweetness to her to the fact that he wanted something from her. But this . . . this was pure kindness, without anything to be gained on his part.

The sign she had been waiting for, it had come.

She ran into the house, found him in his study, leaped on him, knocking over the whiskey he was pouring, and kissed him with all her might.

“I love you. I love you. I love you.” Her words emerged breathless, almost hiccupy.

He pulled back and gazed at her in astonishment. Then he kissed her hard. “Say that again.”

“I love you. I love you. I love you.”

Her words were largely muffled by his lips.

He broke off the kiss. “I hope you aren’t saying it out of some misplaced sense of my nobility. You saw the man. I could hardly send him home with a broken heart.”

“No. I haven’t any misplaced sense of your nobility, Felix. I know exactly who you are and I love exactly who you are.”

He stared at her for a second before pulling her into his arms again. “That’s good enough for me. Now tell me some more; count all the ways you love me.”

L
ouisa finally visited the Roman folly in person the following August.

Her jaw dropped the moment she stepped onto the belvedere. “You said this location was remote. There is a village right there. I can see into the windows of the cottages.”

“I realized that only when I came to place the dress dummies here before our wedding,” her husband answered, grinning. “It wasn’t as if I visited frequently—silly place.”

“How come you never said anything to me?”

“You were willing to make love in the Greek folly in the middle of an outdoor party. You don’t lack for courage—or perversity.”

She hit him on the arm. “That was at night. I am much more respectable during the day.”

“We don’t have to do anything naughty. We can just enjoy the view.”

She linked her fingers with his. The view was quite ordinary,
but the day was warm and lovely and she was inexpressibly happy.

“Still over the moon about your comet?” he asked, smiling at her.

“It will always be my first.”

It had been an accidental discovery, as she compared photographs taken of the same patch of sky on successive nights. Together they did the work afterward, comparing the timing and trajectory of the comet to those that had been observed before, eliminating the possibility that it was one of those on a returning trip—and that was when she first learned that Felix had discovered other comets before.

But now it was confirmed: a previously unknown astronomical body. She hadn’t stopped smiling since the letter from the Royal Astronomical Society arrived.

And she couldn’t help wrapping her arms around him. “Oh, all right, why not? We came all the way here. Let’s give the villagers an eyeful.”

He guided her to a corner of the belvedere where it would be difficult for anyone below to see anything. “I know I love you for a reason. I will love you even more when they come for you with pitchforks.”

She laughed, cupped his face, and looked into his eyes. “And I could never be this happy with anyone else.”