Simply Unforgettable

that I am not and have never wanted to be. Perfection is an infernal thing. You are far from perfect.”

She laughed despite herself and would have turned away then to join her great-aunts, but two more people were approaching, and she turned to them, still smiling.

Ah!

The gentleman, who was ahead of the lady, still looked boyishly handsome with his baby-blond hair and blue eyes and rather round face. He also looked somewhat pale, his eyes slightly wounded.

“Francoise,” he said with eyes only for her. “Francoise Halard.”

She had known before she entered the music room on Lord Sinclair’s arm that something like this might happen. She even remembered thinking that it would be a minor miracle if it did not. But from the moment she had started singing until now she had forgotten her fears—and her knowledge that she ought not to be here.

But here was the very person she had most wished to avoid seeing—unless that honor fell to the woman behind him.

“Charles,” she said and extended one hand to him. He took it and bowed over it, but he did not carry it to his lips or retain it in his own.

“You know the Earl of Fontbridge, then?” Lord Sinclair asked as Frances felt that she was looking down a long, dark tunnel at the man she had once loved and come close to marrying over three years ago. “And the countess, his mother?”

She turned her eyes on the woman standing behind him. The Countess of Fontbridge was as large and as formidable as ever, almost dwarfing her son, though more by her girth and the force of her presence than by her height.

“Lady Fontbridge,” she said.

“Mademoiselle Halard.” The countess did not even try to hide the hostility from her face or the harshness from her voice. “I see you have returned to London. When you decide to give a concert in future, Sinclair, you may wish to divulge the identity of those persons who are to perform for your guests so that they may make an informed decision about whether it is worth attending or not. Though on this occasion it is altogether possible that my son and I would not have understood that Miss Frances Allard was the same person as the Mademoiselle Francoise Halard with whom we once had an unfortunate acquaintance.”

“Francoise,” the earl said, gazing at her as if he had not even heard what his mother had just said, “where have you been? Did your disappearance have something to do with—”

But his mother had laid a firm hand on his arm. “Come, Charles,” she said. “We are expected elsewhere. Good evening to you, Sinclair.”

She pointedly ignored Frances.

Charles bent one lingering, wounded look upon Frances before submitting to being led away by the countess, whose hair plumes nodded indignantly above her head as she swept from the room without looking to left or right.

“Your own excruciating little moment sprung to life from nightmare, Frances?” Viscount Sinclair asked. “Or should I say Francoise? I take it Fontbridge is a discarded lover from your past?”

“I had better leave,” she said. “I daresay my aunts are ready to go. It has been a busy evening for them.”

“Ah, yes, run away,” he said. “It is what you do best, Frances. But first perhaps I can cheer you up a little. Let me take you to Lady Lyle.”

“She is here?” Frances actually found herself laughing. All she needed to complete the disaster of the evening now was to find that George Ralston was here too.

“I thought that she would like to hear you,” he said. “And that you would like to see her once more. I invited her to come.”

“Did you?” She smiled up at him. “Did you really? Do you not suppose I would have called upon Lady Lyle before now if I had wished for a tender reunion with her?”

He sighed out loud.

“I remember,” he said, “that on a certain snowy road several months ago I informed you that you were going to have to ride up with me in my carriage and you gave me a flat refusal. At that moment, Frances, I made the greatest mistake of my life. I gave in to a chivalrous impulse, albeit grudgingly, and stayed to argue. I ought to have driven away and left you to your fate.”

“Yes,” she said, “you ought. And I ought to have stuck with my first decision.”

“We have been the plague of each other’s lives ever since,” he said.

“You have been the plague of mine,” she said.

“And you have been nothing but sweetness and light to me, I suppose,” he said.

“I have never wanted to be anything at all to you,” she told him. “I have always been firm on that.”

“Except on one memorable night,” he said, “when you joined your body with mine three separate times, Frances. I do not believe it was ravishment.”

Oh, goodness, she thought, they were quarreling in full sight of a whole ballroomful of people. And she had just spotted Lady Lyle, sitting slightly apart from everyone else just inside the ballroom. She was looking as elegant as ever, her distinctive silver hair piled high and decorated with plumes. She was also looking slightly amused, her eyes fixed upon Frances.

“I have no wish to speak with Lady Lyle,” Frances said. “And I have no wish to remain here any longer. I am going to join my great-aunts now. Thank you for what you tried to do for me this evening, Lord Sinclair. I realize that you thought it would please me, and for a while it really did. But I am going to go back to Bath within the next few days. This is good-bye.”