Simply Unforgettable

“If I had been there then,” he said fiercely, his eyes blazing into hers, “and if you had known me then, if I had asked you then what I have asked you now, would you have made the same choice, Frances?”

“Hypothetical questions are like the future you spoke of earlier,” she said. “They are a meaningless figment of the imagination. They have no reality. I did not meet you then.”

“No is your final answer, then,” he said. It was not really a question.

“Yes,” she said, “it is.”

“Good God!” He released her hands. “One of us must be mad, Frances, and I fear it may be me. Can you look me in the eye, then, and swear to me that you have no feelings for me?”

“Nothing is ever as simple as that,” she said. “But I will not swear either way. I do not have to. I have said no. That is all that needs saying.”

“By Jove, you are right.” It was he who got to his feet this time. “I beg your pardon, ma’am, for causing you such distress.”

His voice was tight with hostility.

She suddenly realized that they were surrounded by silence again except for the sounds of water dripping off the roof onto the soaked ground. The rain had stopped as suddenly as it had begun.

“But there is still a part of me, Frances,” he added, “that could cheerfully throttle you.”

She closed her eyes and set a hand over her mouth as if to stop the outpouring of words she would regret. She was assailed with such a yearning to hurl herself into his arms and throw good sense to the winds that she felt physically sick again.

Thoughts whirled through her head in a chaotic jumble.

Perhaps she should be more like him and simply act instead of always thinking.

But she would not do it. She could not.

She got to her feet, stepped past him, and looked up at the sky. It still looked full of rain, and indeed there was still a fine drizzle falling.

“The hour is at an end, Lord Sinclair,” she said. “I am going back to the school now. You need not accompany me.”

“Damn you, Frances,” he said softly.

They were the last words he said to her—the last words of his she would ever hear, she thought as she hurried down the path, heedless of the fact that it was very wet and muddy and even slippery in places.

He had wanted her to marry him.

And she had said no.

Because, for a whole host of reasons, a marriage between them simply could not work.

And because love was simply not enough.

She was mad, she thought. She was mad, mad, mad.

He had asked her to marry him.

No, it was not madness. It was sanity—cold, comfortless, merciless sanity.

She was half running by the time she came to the gates and emerged from the gardens onto

Sydney Place

. And she was half sobbing too, though she tried to tell herself that it was only because she was out of breath from hurrying to get back to school before the rain came down heavily once more.

Lucius had wanted to marry her, and she had been forced to say no.

Actually participating in all the busy rituals of the spring Season—attending balls and routs and Venetian breakfasts and concerts and theater performances, riding in Hyde Park during the morning and tooling a curricle about it during the fashionable hour of the afternoon, being drawn into a thousand and one other frivolous activities—actually participating in it all did help to distract one’s thoughts from past humiliations and one’s spirits from taking up permanent residence in the soles of one’s boots, Lucius found over the coming month, especially when one also spent a large portion of one’s nights at White’s or one of the other gentlemen’s clubs and one’s mornings at Jackson’s boxing saloon or Tattersall’s horse auction or one of the other places where gentlemen tended to congregate in significant numbers and one could forget about being on one’s best social behavior.

Of course, it was all very different from the life he was accustomed to, and he was forced to endure the wincing sympathies and rowdy teasing of a number of his acquaintances, who could not fail to notice that he was living at Marshall House instead of in his usual bachelor rooms and that he was participating in the activities of the marriage mart and who, if the truth were told, were only too glad that it was not their turn to be thus occupied.

He danced with Emily at her come-out ball and with Caroline at her betrothal ball two weeks later. He took both sisters—and even Amy once or twice—shopping and walking and driving. He took his mother visiting and shopping and browsing at the library. He escorted them all to the theater and the opera. He even, for the love of God, escorted them to Almack’s one evening, that insipid bastion of upper-class exclusivity, where there was nothing to do but dance and eat stale bread and butter and drink weak lemonade and make himself agreeable to a veritable host of young female hopefuls and their mamas.

But their hopes, raised no doubt by the sight of someone so eligible in unaccustomed attendance at ton revelries, were entirely misplaced and no doubt they soon realized it. For even before he arrived back in London from Bath a dinner at the Marquess of Godsworthy’s town house on Berkeley Square, at which his family members were the guests of honor—and indeed the only guests, he was soon to discover—had already been arranged, as had a similar dinner and small soiree at Marshall House a few evenings later. And soon after his return—the very day after, in fact, when he paid a courtesy call on the