Simply Love

going to the drawing room for tea, “I would have been happy.”

“Don’t be angry with David,” he said. “He merely wished to assert himself as a member of our group. Anyway, Anne, do you not think that on the whole it was for the best that the truth came out right at the start as it did?”

“What must they think of me?” she asked him, pulling off her bonnet and dropping it onto the bed. “First they were introduced to me and my son, then they were told that we married in haste without even informing them, then they were told that I am with child, and then they learned that I have never been married before.” She slapped the points off on her fingers. “But perhaps what they think is no more than the truth. I had no business marrying the son-”

“Anne!” he said sharply. “Please don’t. Whatever they think of you over this pregnancy they must think of me too. It took both of us to make the child.”

“Oh, no,” she said, “you really do not understand, do you? It is always the woman who is to blame-even when she has been raped.”

“Are you trying to say that I took you by force at Ty Gwyn?” he asked her, his hand clutching the bedpost, color flooding into the left side of his face.

“No, of course not,” she said. “Your family will see it quite otherwise, in fact. I will be the one who seduced you.”

“Nonsense!” he said. “They are going to love you as soon as they get to know you and as soon as they see how much you mean to me.”

He did not understand at all. He was at home with his family, secure in their love and the familiarity of his surroundings and their presence. He could not see her through their eyes-or the situation through hers.

“Show me where I can straighten my hair and wash my hands,” she said. “They will be expecting us.”

“The trouble with you, Anne,” he said when they were ready to leave the room, “is that you do not trust anyone else but yourself and your own small circle of friends.”

“The trouble with me,” she said tartly, “is that I did not believe disaster could strike me twice. I am a slow learner, it would seem.”

“Is our child a disaster, then?” he asked softly, though she could hear anger trembling in his voice. “Is David a disaster?”

“And the trouble with you,” she said, almost suffocated with anger herself, “is that you do not fight fair, Sydnam Butler. That is not what I meant. You know it is not what I meant.”

“You do not need to yell,” he said. “You do not need to signal to the whole house that we are having a disagreement. What did you mean?”

She was normally an even-tempered woman. As a teacher she had been renowned for it. She was usually sensible and reasonable too. She really did not know quite what had got into her. She did not even recognize the note of bitterness in her voice. The unaccustomed anger drained from her now, as it had the night before.

“I do not know what I meant,” she said. “I just want to go home.”

Except that she did not know where home was. It had not been the house in Gloucestershire for a long, long time. She no longer belonged at the school in Bath. She had been to Ty Gwyn on just one memorable occasion. There was no home-no safe home-to go to.

Sydnam was right, perhaps. She did not trust, she did not belong. But this time her predicament was entirely her own fault.

“I’ll take you there soon,” he said, his manner softening too. “But since we have come here, we might as well stay for a few days, would you not agree?”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, of course.”

She opened the door and preceded him from the room. He offered his arm as they descended the stairs and she took it. But the shadow of an unresolved quarrel and a marriage shakily begun lay dark between them. It was not helped by her awareness that she had been petulant and self-pitying. She did not know what his family thought of her, did she?

Everyone was remarkably polite during tea and again later at dinner. Conversation did not flag. But the warm delight with which Sydnam and she too had been greeted on their arrival was definitely gone. No one ignored Anne. Indeed, she was drawn firmly into the conversation.

The earl questioned her and discovered that her father was a gentleman, that she had a younger sister and an elder brother, that the expense of sending her brother first to Eton and then to Oxford had put such a severe strain on her father’s purse that she had offered to seek a governess’s position for a few years before marrying.

The countess questioned her and discovered that she had indeed been a governess before David was born and teacher to a few pupils in a Cornish village for a few years afterward until she had been fortunate enough to be recommended to the position of mathematics and geography teacher at Miss Martin’s School for Girls in Bath.

“Miss Martin?” Kit said, grinning-he had asked Anne to call him by his given name, as had his wife. “The famous Miss Martin who left her position at Lindsey Hall after trying to teach Freyja and refusing a letter of recommendation from Bewcastle?”

“Yes,” Anne said. “That Miss Martin.”

Kit asked more questions and discovered that she had been invited to Glandwr because the Marquess of Hallmere had befriended her in Cornwall and Lady Hallmere was the one who had recommended her to the school.

“It is to be hoped,” he said, chuckling, “that Miss Martin does not know that particular juicy fact.”

“She does,” Anne said. “But she did not when she hired me.”

The earl with a single question discovered that she had been estranged from her family for ten years. No one asked why. The reason, Anne supposed, was self-evident.

At dinner Lauren learned that Anne’s ivory lace-over-silk gown, which she had admired, was a wedding gift from Sydnam and that it was part of a whole wardrobe of ready-made clothes he had bought for her in Bath yesterday. And when the countess remarked upon her gold and diamond chain and earrings, she learned that they were a wedding gift too.

“Would you not agree that I have excellent taste, Mama?” Sydnam asked, smiling at Anne. “Not that my wife’s beauty needs embellishment.”

Anne wished that she had worn her old green silk and no jewelry at all.

For of course as the evening progressed she could see herself with stark clarity as she must appear through their eyes-as a fortune hunter. It was clear that she was no longer a very young woman-she had a son who was almost ten years old. She had never been wealthy. She had been forced to work for a living because her father was short of funds. Her son was illegitimate. Her future prospects were not bright-she could expect to live out her days as a spinster schoolteacher. Her only asset was her beauty. And so she had used that beauty this past summer when opportunity had presented itself to snare for herself a husband of rank and fortune whose own future prospects were equally bleak, though for a different reason-a man who was so badly maimed that he could expect only solitude and loneliness for the rest of his life. Her plan had succeeded extremely well. By the end of the summer she had been with child-by a gentleman to whom honor obviously meant more than life. His maimed body proved that.

That was how they must see her.

How could they not? The facts appeared to speak for themselves.

It was a very damning portrait.

They were polite to her because she was a guest in their home and she was Sydnam’s wife-and it was perfectly obvious to her that all of them adored him.

But how they must despise her!

By the time she retired for the night she was exhausted. She was thankful that Sydnam remained in the drawing room for a while to finish a conversation with his brother-they were talking about land and crops and livestock.

Although the suite of rooms included a sitting room and a large dressing room, there was only the one bedroom-and the one bed.

Anne undressed and washed, pulled on a nightgown, and brushed out her hair as quickly as she could, climbed into the big bed, moved over as far to the edge of it as she was able, pulled the covers up over her ears, and closed