that the sound was mournful.
'After many months—seven—an English agent joined them for a few days and convinced them to let me go. I walked back to Lisbon. Nobody there would believe my story until by chance Captain Harris came to Lisbon on some business. He and Mrs. Harris were returning to London. They brought me with them. The captain wanted to write to you, but I would not wait. I came. I had to come. I needed to tell you that I was still alive. I tried last night when there was a p-party at the house, but they thought I was a beggar and wanted to give me sixpence. I am sorry it had to be this morning. I—I will not stay now that I have told you. If you will… pay my way on the stage, I will go… somewhere else. I think there is a way of ending a marriage for what I have done. If you have money and influence, that is, and I daresay you do. You must do it and then you can… continue with your plans.'
To marry someone else. Lauren. She suddenly seemed like someone from another lifetime.
Lily was referring to divorce. For adultery. Because she had allowed herself to be raped as an alternative to torture and execution—if she had even been given the choice. Because she had set her face toward survival. And had survived.
Lily raped.
Lily an adulteress.
His sweet, lovely innocent.
'Lily.' It was not his imagination that she was thinner. Her slender frame had used to have a lithe grace. Now it looked gaunt. 'When did you last eat?'
It took her awhile to answer. 'Yesterday,' she said. 'At noon. I have a little money. Perhaps I can buy a loaf of bread in the village.'
'Come.' He took her hand in his again. Hers was cold now and limp. 'You need a warm bath and a change of clothes and a good meal and a long sleep. Do you have no belongings with you?'
'My bag,' she said, looking down as if she expected it to appear suddenly in her empty hand. 'I think I must have dropped it somewhere. I had it when I went into the village this morning. I was going to buy breakfast. And then they told me about—about your wedding.'
'It will be found,' he assured her. 'It does not matter. I am going to take you home.'
Into complications his mind could not even begin to contemplate.
***
'It is not that I think of you as a servant, Lily,' Neville explained—the first words either of them had spoken since they left the beach, 'but this way we may avoid the worst of the crowds.'
The door through which they entered Newbury Abbey was not at the front. It was, Lily gathered, a servants' entrance. And the bare stone steps they ascended inside must be servants' stairs. They were deserted. The rest of the house certainly was not, if all the carriages that were before the stables and coach house and on the terrace were any indication. And there were people on the terrace too, standing together in small groups—some of those richly clad wedding guests who had been in the church.
Neville opened a door onto a wide corridor. It was carpeted and lined with paintings and sculptures and doors. They were in the main part of the house now, then. And there were three people there in conversation with one another, who stopped talking and gazed curiously at her and looked embarrassed and greeted Neville uncertainly. He nodded curtly to them but said not a word. Neither did Lily, whose hand was still in his firm clasp.
And then he opened one of the doors and released her hand in order to set his at the back of her waist to move her into the room beyond the door. It was a large, square, high-ceilinged room. There were gilded moldings all about the edges of the ceiling, she saw in one glance upward, and a painting on the ceiling that included fat, naked little babies with wings. Two long windows showed her that the room faced over the front of the house. It was a bedchamber, richly carpeted and sumptuously furnished. The bed was canopied and draped in heavy silk. The dusky pink and moss-green colors of the room's furnishings and draperies blended pleasingly together.
Lily had never seen anything half so grand in her life—except perhaps the great hall she had glimpsed the evening before.
'I shall have food and drink brought up immediately.'
Neville said, striding across the room to pull on a tasseled strip of silk beside the bed, 'and then I shall have hot water carried up to the dressing room for a bath. It should be possible to retrieve your bag, but for now I am sure a nightgown and a dressing gown can be found for you. You must sleep then, Lily. You look weary.'
Yes, she was tired, she supposed. But weariness had been a condition of her life for so long that she hardly recognized it for what it was. She knew she was hungry, though she was not at all sure she would be able to eat. His tone was brisk and formal. It was not at all the joyful homecoming she had imagined—or the horrified rejection she had feared. He knew what had happened to her, yet he had brought her to the house, to this grand apartment.
'Is this your room?' she asked him. She did not know what to call him. 'Neville' seemed too familiar, even though she was his wife. She would have felt comfortable calling him 'sir,' but he was no longer an officer and she was no longer a part of his regiment. She could not bring herself to call him 'my lord.' And so she called him nothing.
'It is the countess's room,' he said. He nodded toward a door in the room she had not yet seen beyond. 'You will find the dressing room through there.'
The countess? The countess would be his wife or his mother. He would hardly have put her in his mother's room. That tall lady at the church was to have been his wife, his countess. But he had been unable to marry her because he was already married to herself, to Lily. That made her… the countess. Did it? She really had not thought of it before. She had been startled when her French captors had called her 'my lady' and she had realized that she was Viscountess Newbury. But that had been a long, long time ago.
'It is to be my room?' she asked. 'I am to stay, then?' She had never really thought beyond the end of the journey.
She had known deep down that an earl would surely rid himself of a sergeant's daughter at the slightest excuse—and the Earl of Kilbourne would have an excuse that was hardly slight. But she had tried to focus on the fact that the Earl of Kilbourne was also Major Lord Newbury.
