Simply Magic

9

Peter found them two seats wedged between the teapot and the window before going to the food table. One thing a person could always count upon at a country assembly, he thought appreciatively as he filled plates for them both, was plenty of good food.

“Where will you go when you leave here?” Miss Osbourne asked him after he had set down their plates and fetched some tea and seated himself opposite her at their small table. “Will you go home?”

“To Sidley Park?” he said. “Not immediately. I do not wish to intrude upon the end of my mother’s latest house party there.”

“There is a house party at your own home, yet you are not there to host it?” She raised her eyebrows as she selected a small cucumber sandwich and bit into it.

“The thing is,” he said, “that my mother is desperately trying to marry me off. There is someone there whom she wishes me to court-and all the other guests would have been well aware of the fact if I had gone there.”

“You do not wish to marry?” she asked him.

“I most certainly do not,” he assured her. “Or at least, I do not wish to be trapped into a marriage not entirely of my own choosing.”

Her eyes laughed into his.

“I absolutely do not want my mother choosing my bride,” he said.

“I daresay,” she said, “she loves you.”

“She does,” he agreed. “But love can sometimes be a burden, you know. She first tried to marry me off when I was twenty-one years old and still wet behind the ears.”

“You did not love the girl?” she asked.

“I did.” He grimaced. “I was head-over-ears in love with her-because I was expected to be, of course. I was a cocky boy, Miss Osbourne, and was thoroughly convinced that I was my own man. But in reality I did everything I was expected to do. I thought I loved her.”

“But you did not really?” She set one elbow on the table against all the rules of etiquette and rested her chin in her hand. She gazed steadily at him. “What happened?”

Oh, good Lord, he was not prepared to go there with her. He smiled, though the expression felt somewhat crooked.

“One could say that I had an awakening,” he said. “It was really quite spectacular. I woke up one morning an innocent, cheerful babe, my head in the clouds, stars in my eyes, and I went to bed that same night a cynical old man, with my eyes opened to all the ugly realities of life. My almost-engagement was the biggest casualty. The woman I had loved so devotedly but no longer loved at all left the next morning with her family and I never saw any of them again. Fortunately, they live far to the north of England and seem never to come near London. Though I did hear that she married less than six months later.”

The loss of Bertha was not the biggest casualty, though, was it? His relationship with his mother was that. He had never been what can only be described as a mother’s boy, but he had loved her totally. She had been perfect in his eyes. When all was said and done, though, all he had really discovered about her on that day was that she was human.

And dash it all, had he actually been talking about that event, no matter how vaguely, to Susanna Osbourne? He never spoke about that episode. He rarely even thought about it. He grinned sheepishly at her.

“I was left with a rather rakish reputation as a breaker of female hearts,” he said. “Entirely undeserved. She did not have a heart.”

She continued to gaze at him.

“And so my mother’s ongoing…concern over my marital state-or my un marital state-is a continual burden,” he said, “though she means well.”

“One’s family can be a burden,” she said softly, “even if one’s mother died at one’s birth and one’s father died when one was twelve.”

His eyes sharpened on hers, but she was gazing through him rather than at him, he thought.

“Was there no other family for you,” he asked her, “on either side?”

It had seemed strange to him, when he thought about it after the picnic, that the Markhams had not found anyone of her own to take her in-or, failing that, that they had not done something themselves to make provision for her. She had been only twelve years old, for the love of God. And he had never thought of the Markhams as heartless people. What the devil had she been doing alone in London, looking for employment at the age of twelve?

“I do not really know,” she said, her eyes focusing on him again. “My father had… quarreled with his family and would never even talk about them whenever I asked. He would never talk about my mother or her family either. Perhaps, like me, he did not enjoy memories of the past.”

Who did when those memories were painful? And yet it seemed odd, even cruel, that Osbourne had not told his daughter anything about her heritage. Perhaps he had not expected to die young. No one did really, did they? Perhaps he had had no warning of his impending heart seizure. And so Susanna Osbourne had no one. Her mother had died at her birth, and Osbourne had told her nothing that would in any way have brought her mother alive for her. In her childhood dreams she had never been able to put a face on her mother-even an imaginary one.

He must remember Susanna Osbourne the next time he thought to complain about the number of sisters’ and nieces’ and nephews’ birthdays he was expected to remember.

“Will you go home after the house party is over, then?” she asked.

“I planned to go home the very day after I met you,” he said. “Finally, after five years of being away from it as much as I could, I was going back. But a couple of hours before you and I met I had my mother’s letter telling me of the house party she had planned in my honor-complete with eligible marriage prospect.”

“And so you are not going after all?” she asked.

He shrugged. Was he going to go? He was no longer sure. Sidley was his mother’s home as well as his, as it had been since her marriage to his father. And she ruled it with firm efficiency as she always had done. He was not sure they could both live there now-he was no longer her biddable little boy. He was even less sure, though, that he was prepared to ask her to leave or even insist that she make her home in the dower house at Sidley.

She was his mother. And cruelty had never come easily to him.

“Your finest asset and your greatest problem,” Susanna Osbourne said, “is that you are very kind.”

He realized, startled, that he had spoken his thoughts out loud.

“That sounds very like weakness,” he said, embarrassed, as he tackled the food on his plate.

“Kindness is not weakness,” she said firmly.

“It was kind to stay away from her party?” he asked.

She gazed at him, her chin in her hand again. The food on her plate had hardly been touched, he noticed. She sighed.

“What you need,” she said, “is a dragon to slay.”

He chuckled. “And a helpless maiden to rescue?”

“Tell me your dreams,” she said.

“Those bizarre wisps of things that flit through my head when I am asleep?” he asked, grinning at her.