'Why have you ended the affair?' she asked him. 'Because I am married.' She smiled fleetingly. 'Not because you are married to /me/?' she asked him. 'Just because you are married? Well, that is something, I suppose. It is admirable, perhaps. But how soon will it be before this noble sense of morality wears thin and you take another mistress?' 'Never,' he said. 'Not as long as we both live.' 'I suppose,' she said, looking down at her hands, 'you had other mistresses before her.' 'Yes,' he said. 'All beautiful, I suppose.' 'Yes.' 'How can I - ' she began.
He cut her off, speaking rather harshly. 'Enough of this, Vanessa,' he said. '/Enough! /I have told you that you are beautiful and I have not lied. Even if you cannot trust my words, surely you cannot disbelieve my actions. Does my lovemaking not tell you that I find you both beautiful and irresistible?' Her eyes filled with tears and she turned sharply away again.
Her insecurities about her looks ran very deep, he realized. Probably she did not even realize it herself. She had cultivated cheerfulness as an antidote. But when she was robbed of good cheer, she was defenseless against hurt. 'I /wish /she had not been your mistress,' she said. 'I do not like her.
I cannot /bear /the thought of you - ' 'And I cannot bear the thought of you with young Dew,' he said, 'different as the circumstances are, Vanessa. I suppose we would all like to believe that our life's partner comes to us as fresh and new as a babe, that there has been no one else but only us. But that is impossible. You had done almost twenty-four years of living before you met me. I had done almost thirty before I met you. Yet if neither of us had done that living, we would not be as we are now. And I like you as you are now. I thought you were starting to like me.' She sighed and dropped her head. 'Whose idea was it to approach us at the theater and to come to the ball last night?' she asked him. 'Hers? Or Constantine's?' 'I do not know,' he said. 'Both, probably. I ought to have robbed them of power by immediately telling you all: /Oh, by the way, that lady sitting next to Con is my ex-mistress, who perhaps does not even know that she is an ex. I am sorry, but I promise to be a good boy for the rest of my life. /It would have solved a lot of headaches, would it not?' She turned her head over her shoulder and half smiled at him though her face was wan. 'It would have ruined the play for me,' she said. 'Would it?' She nodded. 'And has the knowledge now ruined your marriage for you?' he asked her. 'Has it ruined the rest of your life?' 'Elliott,' she said, 'you /are /telling me the full truth?' 'I am.' He looked steadily back at her.
She sighed and turned to face him fully again. 'I have never believed in or even wanted a happily-ever- after,' she said. 'How foolish of me to have believed yesterday and this morning that I had found it after all. I had not. But no, nothing has been irrevocably ruined. I will live on. /We /will. Do you really find me irres - Do you really find me a little bit attractive?' 'I do,' he said. He could have stridden around the bed at that point and caught her up in an embrace, but it might have been the wrong thing to do. She might have doubted his sincerity. 'But I did not use the word /attractive, /accurate though it would be. It is also tame. I used the word /irresistible/.' 'Oh,' she said. 'I really do not know why. I look a fright.' She looked down at herself. 'At this precise moment you do,' he agreed. 'If there were mice in the house, they would surely be frightened away after one glimpse of you.
Outdoor clothes were not meant to be worn in bed, you know. And hair was meant to be brushed every few hours.' 'Oh,' she said, and laughed - a rather thin, tremulous sound. 'Let me ring for your maid,' he said. 'I'll go down and tell Mama and Cecily that they do not have to starve tonight after all, that you will be down within half an hour.' 'It will be a Herculean task,' she said as he came around the bed and made for her dressing room, 'to make me presentable in just half an hour.' 'Not really,' he said, pulling on the bell rope and turning his head to look at her. 'All you really have to do is smile, Vanessa. Your smile is pure magic.' 'I ought to call your bluff, foolish man, and come downstairs with you now, then, smiling,' she said. 'Your mother would have a fit of the vapors.' 'I will return in twenty-five minutes,' he said as he stepped inside his own dressing room and closed the door.
He stood against it for quite some time, his eyes closed.
He had much atoning to do. He had hurt too many people recently. He had been hurt himself during the past couple of years by people he had trusted so he had turned to stern duty and turned his back on love - and on laughter and joy.
He had hurt people anyway. /Love and laughter and joy./ All of them embodied in the wife he had married so unwillingly and so cynically.
He had married a treasure he did not at all deserve.
What had she said a few minutes ago? He frowned in thought. /I have never believed in or even wanted a happily-ever-after. How foolish of me to have believed yesterday and this morning that I had found it after all./ She had been happy yesterday and this morning. Happily-ever-after happy.
Dear God!
She had been happy. But /of course /she had.
So had he.
21
VANESSA had expected her task of introducing her sisters to the /ton /to be an onerous one. She was as new to society as they were, after all, even if she /was /married to a viscount, heir to a dukedom. She knew practically nothing and no one.
But it turned out not to be very difficult after all. All that had been needed was her respectable position as a lady married to a gentleman of the /ton/. Elliott more than qualified in that role.
They were something of a curiosity, the three sisters. Vanessa because she had recently married one of England's most eligible bachelors.
Margaret and Katherine because they were the sisters of the new Earl of Merton, who had turned out to be very youthful and very handsome and very attractive despite - or perhaps because of - a certain lack of town bronze. And Margaret and Katherine had the added attraction of being rare beauties.
The /ton, /Vanessa soon learned, was always avidly interested in seeing new faces, hearing new stories, getting wind of new scandals. The story of the new earl and his sisters having been found in a remote country village, living in a cottage smaller than most people's garden shed - the /ton /also had a strong tendency to hyperbole - captured the collective imagination and fed drawing-room conversations for a week or more. As did the fact that one of those sisters had captured the hand, if not the heart, of no less a personage than Viscount Lyngate. She was /not /a beauty, and therefore one must not suppose that it was a love match - though if it was not, it was strange that he had not married the /eldest /sister. And there was a positive swell of interest when word spread that Mrs. Bromley-Hayes had been dropped like a hot brick as Viscount Lyngate's mistress after she was seen in company with the viscountess one afternoon in Hyde Park.
The viscountess's prestige rose significantly.
The Huxtables were invited everywhere fashionable people were invited - to balls, soirees, concerts, picnics, Venetian breakfasts, dinners, theater parties… The list was endless. They could, in fact, have been busy merrymaking every day from morning to night. Well, perhaps not morning as they defined it. Most people slept until past noon, having danced or played cards or conversed or otherwise diverted themselves almost all night long.
It amused Vanessa to discover that an invitation to breakfast actually was an invitation to a meal beginning in the middle of the afternoon. It amazed her that most people seemed perfectly content to begin their day in the afternoon and end it early in the morning.
What a sad waste of daylight and sunshine!
She accompanied her sisters to numerous entertainments, but she did not have to make any great effort to introduce them to people whose names she often could not recall herself or to find conversational groups for them to join or partners for them to dance with. As Elliott had predicted, they met the same people almost wherever they went, and names, faces, and titles soon became more familiar.
Margaret and Katherine soon acquired friends and acquaintances, and each very quickly had a court of admirers - as did Vanessa herself, to her great amazement. Young gentlemen whose names she scarcely remembered asked her to dance or offered to fetch her refreshments or to escort her on a stroll about a garden or dance floor. One or two even offered to drive her in the park or to ride on Rotten Row with her.
It was not an uncommon occurrence, of course, for married ladies to have their cicisbei. And she remembered Elliott telling her at the theater that it was quite unexceptionable for a married lady to be escorted in
