A Secret Affair

She stopped and flushed again.

“Romantic love?” Hannah said, completing the sentence for her. “It hurts anyway, Babs. Losing him, I mean. It hurts here.” She set her hand over her ribs beneath her bosom. “And romantic love did not serve me well before I met him, did it?”

“You were little more than a child,” Barbara said. “And what happened was not your fault. Love will come in time.”

“Perhaps so.” Hannah shrugged. “But I do not intend waiting around for it to show its face. And I have no intention of going in desperate search of it and perhaps persuading myself that I have found it when I have not and so trapping myself in another marriage so soon after the last. I am free, and I intend to remain so until I choose to give up my freedom, which may be a long, long time in the future. Perhaps I will never give it up. There are advantages to widowhood, you know.”

“Oh, Hannah,” Barbara said reproachfully. “Do be serious.”

“A lover is what I am going to have,” Hannah told her. “I have quite decided, Babs, and I am perfectly serious. It will be an arrangement purely for enjoyment with no strings attached. He is going to be someone sinfully handsome. And devilishly attractive. And wickedly skillful and experienced as a lover. Someone with neither a heart to break nor any aspirations whatsoever toward matrimony. Is there such a paragon, do you suppose?”

Barbara was smiling again—with what looked like genuine amusement.

“England is said to abound with dashing rakes,” she said. “And it is quite obligatory, I have heard, that they also be outrageously handsome. I do believe, in fact, that it is against the law for them not to be. And of course almost all women fall for them—and the eternal conviction that they can reform them.”

“Why ever,” Hannah asked, “would anyone wish to believe that? Why would any woman wish to reduce a perfectly wicked rake and rogue to the dullness of a mere worthy gentleman?”

They both doubled over with mirth for a few moments.

“Mr. Newcombe is not a rake, I suppose?” Hannah asked.

“Simon?” Barbara was still laughing. “He is a clergyman, Hannah, and very worthy indeed. But he is not—he is definitely not a dull man. I absolutely reject your implication that all men must be either rakes or dullards.”

“I did not intend to imply any such thing,” Hannah said. “I am quite sure your vicar is a perfectly splendid specimen of romantic gentlemanhood.”

Barbara’s laugh had become almost a giggle.

“Oh,” she said, “I can just picture his face if I were to tell him you had said that, Hannah.”

“All I want of a lover,” Hannah said, “apart from the aforementioned qualities, of course— they are obligatory—is that he will have eyes for no one but me for as long as I choose to allow him to continue looking.”

“A lapdog, in other words,” her friend said.

“You would put remarkably strange words into my mouth, Babs,” Hannah said, getting to her feet to pull on the bell rope and have the tea tray removed. “I want—indeed, I demand—just the opposite. I will have a masterful, very masculine man. Someone I will find it a constant challenge to control.”

Barbara shook her head, still smiling.

“Handsome, attractive, besotted, devoted,” she said, counting the points off on her fingers. “Masterful, very masculine. Have I missed anything?”

“Skilled,” Hannah said.

“Experienced,” Barbara amended, flushing again. “Goodness, it ought to be quite easy to find a dozen such men, Hannah. Do you have anyone in mind?”

“I do,” Hannah said and waited while a maid took the tray away and closed the door behind her. “Though I do not know if he is in town this year. He usually is. It will be inconvenient if he is not, but I have a few others in mind should I need them. I should have no difficulty at all. Is it conceited of me to say that I turn male heads wherever I go?”

“Conceited, perhaps,” Barbara said, smiling. “But also true. You always did, even as a girl—male and female heads, the former with longing, the latter with envy. No one was at all surprised when the Duke of Dunbarton saw you and had to have you as his duchess even though he had been a confirmed bachelor all his life. And even though it was not really like that at all.”

Barbara had come dangerously close to talking of a topic that had been strictly off-limits for eleven years. She had broached it a few times in her letters over the years, but Hannah had never responded.

“Of course it was like that,” she said now. “Do you think he would have afforded me a second glance if I had not been beautiful, Babs? But he was kind. I adored him. Shall we go out? Are you too tired after your travels? Or will you welcome some fresh air and the chance to stretch your legs? At this time of day Hyde Park—the fashionable part of it, at least—will be teeming with people, and one must go along to see and be seen, you know. It is obligatory when one is in town.”

“I can recall from a previous occasion,” Barbara said, “that there are always more people in the park at the fashionable hour of the afternoon than there are in our whole village on May Day. I will not know a soul, and I will feel like your country cousin, but no matter. Let us go by all means. I am desperate for some exercise.”

Chapter 2

THEY WENT TO FETCH their bonnets and walked to the park. It was a fine day considering the fact that it was not even officially summer yet. It was partly sunny, partly cloudy, with a light breeze.

Hannah raised a white parasol above her head even though there were actually more cloudy periods than sunny. Why have such a pretty confection, after all, if one was not going to display it to full advantage?

“Hannah,” Barbara said almost hesitantly as they passed between the park gates, “you were not serious over tea, were you? About what you plan to do, I mean.”

“But of course I am serious,” Hannah said. “I am no longer either an unmarried girl or a married lady. I am that thoroughly enviable female creature—a widow of wealth and superior social standing. I am even still quite young. And widows of good ton are almost expected to take a lover, you know—provided he is also of good ton, of course. And preferably unmarried.”

Barbara sighed.

“I hoped you were joking with me,” she said, “though I feared you were not. You have grown into the manners and morals of this fast world you married into, I see. I disapprove of what you intend. I disapprove of the morality of it, Hannah. But more important, I disapprove of your rashness. You are not as heartless or as—oh, what is the word?—as jaded, as blasé as you believe yourself to be. You are capable of enormous affection and love. An affair can bring you nothing but dissatisfaction at best, heartbreak at worst.”

Hannah chuckled. “Do you see the crowds of people up ahead?” she said. “Any one of them would tell you, Babs, that the Duchess of Dunbarton does not have a heart to be broken.”

“They do not know you,” Barbara said. “I do. Nothing I say will deter you, of course. And so I will say only this. I will love you anyway, Hannah. I will always love you. Nothing you can do will make me stop.”

“I do wish you would stop, though,” Hannah said, “or the ton will be treated to the interesting spectacle of the Duchess of Dunbarton in tears and wrapped in the arms of her companion.”

Barbara snorted inelegantly, and they both laughed yet again.

“I will save my breath, then,” Barbara said, “and simply gaze about at this extraordinary scene. Does your masterful man, who may or may not be in London, have a name, by the way?”