One Night for Love

She touched a hand to her throat as if it were still there. 'No,' she said. 'It was empty.'

He did not ask where the locket was. It had probably been taken from her during her captivity, and reminding her further of its loss would be painful to her.

He was disappointed the following morning to find that she had not gone out again to watch the sun rise. It had rained during the night and was still rather cloudy and blustery, but he did not believe it was the weather that had deterred her. He found her, when he peeped into her room, sitting at the window, gazing quietly out. She smiled at him and told him that one of her new dresses was to be delivered early and that she was waiting to wear it. His mother was to introduce her to the housekeeper and include her in the discussion of the day's menu.

It was important, he supposed—certainly his mother believed it was—that she learn about the running of a great house. But he did not want her new life to sap all the light and joy from her. He wanted her to be Lily, the person he remembered from the Peninsula.

As it turned out, Neville discovered later, Lily had misunderstood and had not realized that the housekeeper was to come to her, not the other way around. She went alone down to the kitchen, expecting to meet her mother- in-law there. By the time, much later, Mrs. Ailsham informed her ladyship, the dowager, that the Countess of Kilbourne was belowstairs and a startled mother-in-law followed her down there, Lily was seated at the large kitchen table, an oversized apron protecting her new dress, peeling potatoes with a kitchen maid and regaling a flustered but delighted kitchen staff with tales of cooking for a regiment on rations that arrived all too irregularly and when they did arrive were often quite inadequate to the men's needs.

After Neville had been told the story and had chuckled over it, though his mother was not amused, he went to find Lily. But by that time she had been safely restored to the respectability of the morning room and the company of his aunts and female cousins. She was looking cheerful and mute and listless all at the same time—and very pretty in her new blue morning gown.

***

Word had been sent up from the dower house that Lauren and Gwendoline would call during the afternoon.

There was a general air of tension as the family gathered in the drawing room. No one behaved naturally. Everyone smiled a great deal and talked a great deal and laughed more than was necessary. Lily was very quiet.

Neville awaited their arrival with the deepest dread.

But when they came, the moment was almost anticlimactic. They had chosen not to be announced, but entered the room together as soon as a footman had opened the doors, just as they would have done on any other occasion before Lily's arrival. They were both looking their most elegant. Gwen was not smiling. Lauren was—brightly and graciously. And she looked about her, meeting everyone's eyes, apparently perfectly at her ease.

The moment must have cost her enormous effort, Neville guessed as he jumped to his feet and hurried toward them.

'Lauren,' he said, resisting the impulse to take both her hands in his. He bowed to her instead. 'How are you? Gwen?'

'Hello, Neville.' Lauren smiled at him and held out her hands to him. 'We came to pay our formal respects to your wife, did we not, Gwen? But not to be presented to her. We met her yesterday morning when we were all out for a walk and our paths crossed. Oh, there you are, Lily.' She turned away from Neville with a warm smile and held out her hands again. 'Looking—tamed.' She laughed. 'What a very pretty dress. Primrose suits your coloring.' She took Lily's hands in hers and leaned forward to kiss her cheek.

It was a stellar performance. But surely it was a performance? She went on to greet everyone else with ease and affection before seating herself beside Lily on a love seat.

The contrast between the two of them—between his wife and the woman who had so nearly become his wife two mornings before—could scarcely be more marked. Lily, small, pretty, quiet, slightly flustered when anyone addressed a remark her way, reclining back on the seat, drinking all her tea down without once setting her cup back in its saucer before it was empty, quite without the 'presence' his mother considered so important in a countess. Lauren, tall and beautiful and elegant, perfectly at her ease, sitting with erect but graceful posture, her back not touching the love seat, sipping from her cup and setting it down again in its saucer with all the appreciation of a true lady for fine possessions.

It was almost, Neville thought, as if she had seated herself deliberately beside Lily, knowing how the contrasts would be observed and interpreted. But it was an unkind thought. Lauren had never been an unkind woman. But then, of course, she had never found herself in such a situation before.

Gwen was behaving far more as he would have expected the rejected bride to behave. Although she was perfectly well bred, she pointedly ignored both Lily and himself after the first stiff acknowledgment. She confined her conversation to a group of cousins.

Neville had half expected—and more than half hoped—that Lauren would leave Newbury during the morning with her grandfather and Mr. Calvin Dorsey, who had offered the elderly gentleman quiet comfort since the day of the aborted wedding and had been kind enough to offer his company for the first day of the baron's journey home to Yorkshire. But Lauren had not gone with them. Newbury, after all, had been her home for most of her life. And perhaps, Neville thought, it was important to her not to run away but to stay and face the new conditions of her life.

She was doing magnificently well. Perhaps he should feel relieved—he was relieved. But he could not help remembering how Lauren as a child used to prattle happily about what she would do when her mama came home—until she stopped completely one day, never to mention her mother again. And how when she was older she had talked eagerly of writing to her father's family and becoming reacquainted with them and perhaps going to spend a few months with them—until she had stopped talking about them altogether after she had had a reply to her letter. Just the silence on both topics. No loss of cheerfulness. Just total silence.

No stranger appearing in the drawing room now would guess that Lauren had been a bride two mornings before—his bride—or that her hopes had been abruptly and cruelly dashed.

Lauren, he thought uneasily, reminded him somewhat of a keg of gunpowder, quite harmless in appearance but awaiting the spark that would ignite it.

Perhaps he was wrong. Perhaps there was just not that much passion in Lauren.

But part of him wished she had raged at him when he had called on her two mornings before. And part of him wished she had stormed into the drawing room this afternoon and made a noisy and scandalous scene.

Pauline Bray, James's sister, finally made a suggestion that broke up the strangely tense normality of the gathering in the drawing room.