Simply Unforgettable

And so here she was, in London again and sick with anxiety. Great-Aunt Gertrude had never enjoyed robust health, and she tended to coddle herself by staying too far away from fresh air and too close to the nearest fire. But Frances had never thought of actually losing her.

When the carriage finally rocked to a halt outside a respectable-looking house on Portman Street, she waited impatiently for Thomas to open the door and set down the steps and then hurried up to the house door, which opened even before she reached it, and into a tiled hall, where she fell into Great-Aunt Martha’s open arms.

“Frances, my love,” her aunt cried, beaming with happiness, “you did come! I hardly dared hope you would be able to get away. And how lovely you look, as usual!”

“Aunt Martha!” Frances hugged her back. “How is Aunt Gertrude?” She was almost afraid to ask. But the first thing she had noticed—with enormous relief—was that her great-aunt was not wearing black.

“A little better today despite the damp weather,” Aunt Martha said. “She has even got up from her bed and come down to the sitting room. What a delightful surprise this is going to be for her. I have not breathed a word about your coming. And indeed, I can scarcely believe that you have come only because I asked. I do hope Miss Martin has not dismissed you permanently?”

“She has granted me a leave of absence,” Frances said. “Aunt Gertrude is actually getting better, then? She is not—”

“Oh, my poor love,” Aunt Martha said, taking her arm and leading her in the direction of the staircase. “You did not imagine the worst, did you? She never was dangerously ill, but she has been dragged down by a chill she has been unable to shake off, and she has been in dreadfully low spirits as a result. We both have. It seemed to me— very selfishly, my love—that seeing you would be just the tonic we both needed.”

Great-Aunt Gertrude was not on her deathbed, then? It was the best of good news. At the same time Frances thought ruefully of all the trouble she had put Claudia to by leaving the school so abruptly for a few weeks in the middle of a term—and of all the disruption to her classes and choirs and music pupils.

It was enormously touching, though, to know that her presence meant so much to her aunts. She would never take them for granted again, she vowed. And it really was lovely to see Great-Aunt Martha again. Frances felt a rush of tears to her eyes and blinked them away.

There was great jubilation when she appeared in the sitting room, which was hot and stuffy with a fire roaring in the hearth. Great-Aunt Gertrude sat huddled close to it, a heavy woolen shawl about her shoulders and a lap robe over her knees, but both were cast aside the moment she set eyes upon her great-niece, and she got to her feet with surprising alacrity and came hurrying toward her. They met and hugged tightly in the middle of the room while Great-Aunt Martha fluttered about them, telling excitedly of the secret she had kept to herself for all of four days lest dear Frances not be able to come and Gertrude be plunged into even deeper gloom with disappointment.

Later, as she sat with a cup of tea in her hand and a plate of cakes—Aunt Martha had put three on it though she had asked for only one—on her knee, Frances felt warm and happy and pleasantly tired. It was obvious that Aunt Gertrude was not in the best of health, but neither was she dangerously ill. Frances even felt a twinge of guilt about having come here, but she had not come under false pretenses, and it seemed that she really had been a tonic for her aunts’ spirits. They were chattering merrily and seemed not even to have noticed that the fire had died down considerably.

She would spend a week or so with them and enjoy herself without guilt, Frances thought rather sleepily, and then she would go back to school and work doubly hard until the end of the term. There would be all the extra work of preparing for the year-end prize-giving and concert.

Perhaps she would try to visit her aunts in the country for another week during the summer. They needed her, she had just realized—and really she needed them too.

“Some friends of yours came calling on me a few days ago, Frances,” Great-Aunt Martha said, beaming at her. “Poor Gertrude was still in bed that day and did not meet them, but we will certainly invite them back.”

“Oh?” Frances looked inquiringly at her, a little flutter of alarm in the pit of her stomach. Someone who knew her was already aware that she was returning to London?

“The Earl of Edgecombe called on me,” Aunt Martha said. “His late wife and I used to be bosom bows when we were girls, you know, and I always did like him exceedingly. It was most obliging of him to call.”

Frances felt as if her stomach performed a complete somersault. Ah, yes, of course. She remembered then that he had said he once knew Great-Aunt Martha. She had not even thought of the possibility . . .

But her aunt had spoken of friends calling on her.

Plural.

“And he brought his grandson and one of his granddaughters with him,” Aunt Martha continued. “Viscount Sinclair and Miss Amy Marshall. They are delightful young people. And they were all full of praises for your singing, Frances, after hearing you in Bath. I do not wonder at it, of course.”

“I only wonder that you have not done more of it and become famous,” Great-Aunt Gertrude said.

Frances’s heart had plunged and lodged somewhere in the soles of her shoes. This was the stuff of her worst nightmares. She must somehow dissuade her aunts from inviting them all back here. She could not bear to see them again.

She could not bear to see him.

Gracious heaven, why had he come here? Just because his grandfather had wished to?

“And you accompanied them to an assembly at the Upper Rooms,” Aunt Martha continued, looking at her niece with a beaming smile. “It did my heart good, my love, to hear that you have started enjoying yourself again. We have always thought that you are too young and lovely to bury yourself inside a school and have no chance to meet suitable beaux.”

“Oh,” Frances said with a forced smile, finishing off her tea and setting the cup and saucer down on a table beside her, “I am really quite happy as I am, Aunt Martha. And I am not entirely without beaux.”

She had been to the theater with Mr. Blake and his sister and brother-in-law one evening during the past month and to dine with them on another. She had been to two services at Bath Abbey with Mr. Blake alone, and both times they had strolled back to the school by a long, circuitous route. What was between them could not exactly be