A Secret Affair

just for me. It pierces right through to my heart.”

Her needle was suspended above her work. Her cheeks were slightly flushed, her eyes shining as they gazed at her embroidery and saw a man who was physically far away.

Hannah felt a twinge of envy.

“I am very happy for you, Babs,” she said. “I know you thought you were doomed to spinsterhood even though you had several quite eligible offers over the years. But you waited and found love.”

“Hannah,” her friend asked, her needle still in the air above her work, “do you ever wish you had waited?”

The flush deepened in her cheeks, and she lowered her needle again.

“No,” Hannah said softly. “No, never for a single moment.”

“But—” Barbara set the cloth down on her knee before she had worked even one more stitch. “But you were in no fit state to make such a momentous decision at that particular time. You were so terribly upset. Justifiably so.”

“I had a guardian angel,” Hannah said, “and his name was the Duke of Dunbarton. I told him that once. I thought he would choke on his port.”

“But Hannah,” Barbara said, “he was so old. Oh, I do beg your pardon.”

“He was only fifty-four years older than I was,” Hannah said with a half-smile. “Only old enough to be my grandfather. Indeed, he once presented me with numbers that proved I could quite reasonably have been his great-granddaughter. You might as well give up, Babs. I will never admit that I married him in haste and regretted it ever after. I married in extreme haste and never regretted it for a moment. Why should I have? I was pampered and rich, and I was elevated into this world.” She gestured at the room around them with one arm. “And now I am free.”

She turned her head rather sharply to look out through the window.

Tears? Tears?

“Hannah,” Barbara said, “you ought to come back home. You ought—”

“I am home,” Hannah said, interrupting.

Her friend gazed at her with unhappy eyes.

“Come for my wedding,” she said. “You can stay with Mama and Papa. The cottage will be nowhere near up to your usual standards, but I know they would love to have you. And it would make my wedding day complete if my dearest friend was there. I know that Simon wishes to meet you. Oh, please come.”

“He will not wish it when he knows what I have become,” Hannah said. “And I would be dealing deceitfully with the Reverend and Mrs. Leavensworth if I were to stay beneath their roof as I am. Theirs is a different world from the one I inhabit, Babs. Yours is a different world. A more innocent, more moral world.”

“Come anyway,” Barbara said. “They will love you for yourself, as I do. I am straitlaced and puritanical, Hannah. I am still a spinster who has grown up very close to the church. If you were to shake me, I daresay I would become invisible within a cloud of old dust. I hate what you have done to yourself in the past week or so because I do not believe you are happy. And I believe you will only grow unhappier as your liaison with Mr. Huxtable progresses. You think you want pleasure, when what you really want is love. But I digress, and I promised myself that I would never scold you or reproach you. Come to my wedding anyway. Is it not time to come back? It has been more than ten years.”

“That is entirely the point,” Hannah said. “I am living in a different lifetime now, Babs, and in a different universe. The old ones no longer exist for me. I do not want them to exist.”

“What does that make me?” her friend asked. “A ghost?”

“Oh, Babs,” Hannah said, and she had to turn her head away again to hide the tears welling in her eyes, “don’t ever abandon me.”

She heard a rustling behind her, and then she was being enfolded in a tight hug. They clung wordlessly to each other for a while, Hannah feeling very foolish indeed. And, strangely, almost as griefstricken as she had felt on the day the duke died.

“Silly goose,” Barbara said in a voice that was not quite steady. “Why would I drop your friendship when you are so rich? And when you take me to ton balls and insist upon buying me a perfectly frivolous bonnet every time I wangle an invitation to London from you?”

Hannah swung her legs over the side of the window seat and brushed her hands over the muslin skirt of her dress.

“It was a particularly splendid bonnet, was it not?” she said. “If you had not allowed me to buy it for you yesterday, Babs, I would have bought it for myself, and where would I have put it? I already have a whole dressing room and the guest room adjoining it positively bursting at the seams with clothes—or so rumor has it, and everyone knows how reliable rumor is.”

“I have the guest room adjoining your dressing room,” Barbara said, straightening up and turning to fold her embroidery.

“You are greatly to be pitied,” Hannah said. “It must be extremely difficult, Babs, to get through the door, even if you walk sideways.”

Barbara laughed.

“Will you come to my wedding?” she asked softly.

Hannah sighed inaudibly. She had hoped that matter had been dropped.

“I cannot, Babs,” she said. “I will not go back. But perhaps you and your vicar would like to come and spend at least a part of your honeymoon with me in Kent.”

A maid came into the room at that point, bringing their tea, and the conversation moved on to other topics.

She was not unhappy, Hannah thought. Barbara was quite, quite wrong about that. And she was not going to become unhappier. How could she when she was not unhappy to start with?

She could hardly wait for tonight, after the ball was over. The need she felt might be a superficial one, but it was very powerful nonetheless.

She did not believe she would ever tire of Constantine’s lovemaking. She would have to, of course, by the time the Season ended. But that was long in the future. She did not have to even start thinking about it yet.

She got up to pour the tea.

***

A NOTE WAS DELIVERED to Constantine’s house early in the afternoon from Cassandra, Countess of Merton, Stephen’s wife, inviting him to dine at Merton House before the Kitteridge ball. He had no other engagement and was pleased to send back an acceptance.

He had tried a number of times over the years to resent, even to hate, Stephen, who had inherited Jon’s title and had turned up at Warren Hall at the age of seventeen as the new owner, bringing his sisters with him. They had all been strangers to Constantine, who had not even known of their existence until Elliott and his solicitors had searched the family tree and found a distant heir. Even then it had not been easy to track him down to some remote village in Shropshire.

Constantine had been sick with hatred before he met them. They were coming to invade his home, to trample upon his memories, to take over what ought by rights to have been his. More important than all that, Jon was buried on land that now belonged to a stranger.

Even afterward he had hated them for a while.

But how could one hate Stephen once one got to know him? It would be like hating angels. And his sisters were equally hard to dislike. They had been so very pleased, all of them, to discover him. They had embraced him as a long-lost member of their family. They had been sensitive to how he must feel about the whole succession.

Margaret and Duncan, Earl of Sheringford, had also been invited to dinner, Constantine discovered when he arrived at Merton House. Margaret was the eldest of the three sisters, the one who had held the family together after the early death of their parents. She had remained stubbornly single until they were all grown up. Only then