Simply Unforgettable

back. “I do not believe you take life very seriously at all.”

“Sometimes it is more amusing not to,” he said. “But there are certain things I take very seriously, Frances. I am serious at the moment. I have a hankering to know exactly what it is that I have lost since you will not have me.”

That silenced her. She looked up at him with uncomprehending eyes and then dipped her head sharply as two people approached them and then passed with murmured greetings.

“I know a number of facts about you,” he said. “I know that your mother was Italian and your father some sort of French nobleman. I know that you are related to Baron Clifton. I know you grew up in London and left it two years after your father’s death in order to teach music and French and writing at Miss Martin’s school in Bath. I know that you are a very good cook. I know you have one of the loveliest soprano voices—perhaps even the loveliest—of our generation. I know other things about your character. I know that you are devoted to duty and can be stubborn and sometimes downright belligerent and also amiable and affectionate to those you love. I know you are sexually passionate. I even know you biblically. But I do not really know you at all, do I?”

“You do not need to,” she said firmly as they reached a side gate into Hyde Park and entered it and turned onto a narrow, shaded path that ran parallel to the street outside though thick trees hid it from view. “No one can be a totally open book to another person even if there is the intimacy of a close relationship between them.”

“And there is no such intimacy between us?” he asked.

“No. Absolutely not.”

He wondered how much of a fool he was making of himself. He tried to imagine their roles reversed. What if she had pursued him and twice he had told her quite clearly that he did not want her? How would he feel if she came after him again anyway, maneuvered matters so that she could get him alone, and then demanded to know who he was?

It was an uncomfortable picture.

But what if the signs he had given her were mixed? What if, while his lips had said no, his whole being had said yes?

“Tell me about your childhood,” he said.

Good Lord, had he taken leave of his senses? He had never been interested in anyone’s childhood!

She sighed aloud and for a few moments he thought she was going to keep silent.

“Why not?” she said eventually, as if to herself. “We are taking a very long way home and might as well have something to talk about.”

He looked down at her. She was dressed in cream-colored muslin, with a plain straw bonnet. She looked quite unfashionable. Yet she looked neat and pretty and adorable. Bars of sunlight and shade danced over her as they walked.

“That is the spirit,” he said.

For the first time a smile played about her lips as she glanced up at him.

“It would serve you right,” she said, “if I talked for the next several hours without pausing for breath about every single detail I can remember of my childhood.”

“It would,” he agreed. “But the thing is, Frances, that I doubt I would be bored.”

She shook her head.

“It was a happy, secure childhood,” she said. “I never knew my mother and so did not miss her. My father was all in all to me, though I was surrounded with nurses and governesses and other servants. I had everything money could buy. But unlike many privileged children, I was not emotionally neglected. My father played with me, read to me, took me about with him, spent hours of every day with me. He encouraged me to read and learn and make music and do and be all I was capable of doing and being. He taught me to reach for the stars and settle for nothing less.”

He could have asked her why she had forgotten that particular lesson, but he did not want to argue with her again or cause her to turn silent again.

“You lived in London?” he asked her.

“Most of the time,” she said. “I loved it here. There was always somewhere new to go, some other church to admire or museum or art gallery to wander about or market to explore. There was so much history to absorb and so many people to observe. And there were always shops and libraries and tearooms and parks to be taken to. And the river to sail on.”

And yet now she shunned London. After Christmas he had been unable to lure her back here even though he had offered her an abundance of luxuries to replace those she seemed to have lost since childhood.

What a comedown it must have been for her to have to remove to Bath to teach—and to wear clothes that were either several years old, like the two evening gowns he had seen her wear, or else inexpensively made like today’s muslin.

“But I did go into the country too,” she said. “My great-aunts sometimes had me to stay with them. They would have taken me to live when I arrived in England—Great-Aunt Martha was already widowed then. I suppose they thought that a gentleman could not raise a daughter alone, especially in a country that was foreign to him. But though I love them dearly and have always been grateful for the affection they have lavished on me, I am glad my father would not give me up.”

“He had ambitions for you as a singer?” he asked, noting again that she dipped her head sharply downward when an elderly couple he did not know strolled past them on the same deserted path as the one he had chosen.

“Dreams more than ambitions,” she said. “He would not even hire a singing master for me until I was thirteen, and he would not allow me to sing at any auditions or public concerts even when my singing master said I was ready. It was to wait until I was eighteen, my father said, when my voice would have matured, and even then only if it was what I really wanted for myself. He was very adamant in his belief that a child ought not to be exploited