One Night for Love

His arms were like iron bands about her. She was a little alarmed when she heard the first painful-sounding sob, but she closed her arms more tightly about him when he would have pulled away.

'No, no,' she said. 'It is all right. It is quite all right.'

He did not weep for long. Men did not. She knew that from experience. They saw it as a sign of horribly embarrassing weakness, even if they had just watched a close friend smashed to a thousand pieces by a cannonball or had just had a limb sawn off by the surgeons—or had just discovered a daughter after almost twenty-one years. He drew away from her after a couple of minutes and moved off to the window, where he stood with his back to the room, blowing his nose in a large handkerchief.

'I am so very sorry to have subjected you to that,' he said. 'It will not happen again. You will find me strong and dependable, I believe, Lily—a good provider and a good protector.'

'Yes, I know, Father,' she said, smiling at his back.

She heard him draw an inward breath and hold it for a few moments. 'I could, I suppose,' he said, 'have remarried any time during the past twenty years. I could have had a nurseryful of children and been called that a thousand times and more before now. I believe, Lily, it has been worth waiting to hear it first from your lips.'

'When will we leave for Rutland Park?' she asked. 'Is it a large house? Will I like it… Father?'

He turned to look at her. 'As soon as possible,' he said. 'It is larger than Newbury Abbey. You will love it. It has been waiting for you all these years. We had better see if Elizabeth will come with you. Today is Thursday. Shall we say Monday?'

Lily nodded.

He smiled at her and strode to the bell pull. He told the servant who answered the summons to ask Lady Elizabeth to return to the drawing room at her convenience. Then they both sat down again and gazed at each other.

It would be more accurate, Lily thought, to say that he was beaming at her. Despite the battered look of his face, he appeared very happy. She deliberately kept her own expression bright—not that it was all pretense. But a part of it was. She was stepping into the unknown again as she had done so many times, it seemed, during the past couple of years.

She remembered traveling down to Newbury Abbey from London and hoping that the long journey was almost ended. She remembered seeing Neville for the first time in almost a year and a half and experiencing, despite the difficulty of the circumstances, a feeling of final homecoming.

But she had not been home. And she still was not. She wondered if she ever would be. Would the time ever come when she would feel at last that she had arrived, that she could settle in peace to live out the rest of her life?

Or was life always a journey along an unknown path?

'Kilbourne,' the duke said to her just before Elizabeth came back into the room, 'asked me to inform you of his intention to call this afternoon, Lily—if you are willing to receive him.'

***

Killing another human being was not something one did with any relish, Neville thought during the night and the morning following the death of Calvin Dorsey. Certainly not in battle—one was too aware of the fact that the men one killed were no more evil or deserving of death than one was oneself. But not even when the man one killed was a murderer and had killed one's wife's mother and had tried on a number of occasions to kill her too. There had been a certain satisfaction, perhaps, in watching Dorsey take the bait of that carelessly abandoned pistol and in being given then little choice but to kill him—especially when Portfrey had won the argument about which of them was to punish Dorsey before he was turned over to the law. But certainly no relish.

Was there pleasure in having discovered the truth about Lily's birth? In having learned that she outranked him? That he had nothing to offer her that she did not now have in overabudance herself? And was that how he had hoped to win Lily—with his position and his wealth and the hope that her own near destitution would force her back to him? Surely not. He wanted her to be his equal, to feel his equal. The fact that she had felt herself to be by far his inferior had wrecked any chance they might have had for happiness when she had come to Newbury.

He should be rejoicing, then, in this turn of events. Why was he not? It was because of Lily herself, he concluded finally. Poor Lily had suffered so much turmoil in the past year and a half. How could she sustain the loss of her very roots? Would he find her all broken up when he called at Elizabeth's during the afternoon? Worse, would he find her still quite unlike her indomitable self, dazed and passive as she had been last evening?

He approached Elizabeth's with a great deal of trepidation. He even found himself half hoping as he entered the house and asked if Miss Doyle would receive him that she would send down a refusal. But she did not. The butler showed him up to the drawing room. Both Lily and Elizabeth were there.

'Neville,' Elizabeth said, coming across the room toward him after he had made his bow and exchanged greetings with them. She kissed his cheek. 'I will allow you a private word with Lily.' And she left the room without further ado.

Lily was not looking crushed—or dazed. Indeed, she looked remarkably vibrant in a fashionable sprigged muslin dress with her hair softly curling about her face.

'You killed Mr. Dorsey,' she said. 'My father told me this morning. I am not sorry that he is dead though I have never before wished for anyone's death. But I am sorry you were forced to do it. I know it is not easy to kill.'

Yes, Lily would know that, having grown up with an army whose business it was to kill.

But—my father?

'This one,' he said, 'was almost easy.'

'We will say no more of it,' she said firmly. She had risen from her chair and came across the room toward him. 'Neville, I am going to go to Rutland Park on Monday with my father and Elizabeth. There is to be a notice in the papers tomorrow. I am going to spend some time with him, learning to be his daughter, letting him learn to be my father. I am going to see my grandfather and my mother's grave. I am going to… go.'

'Yes.' His heart felt as if it somersaulted and then sank all the way to the soles of his boots—even as he told himself that he was glad for her.

She half smiled at him. 'I was Lily Doyle,' she said. 'Then I was Lily Wyatt—and then not. Now I am Lily