Simply Magic

“Of course I do.” Anne stepped back from Susanna’s arms and smiled with ghastly cheerfulness at both of them. “I want to marry Mr. Butler. I am fond of him. I am not marrying him just because I am with child. I am with child, Susanna.”

“We are all going to have a nice cup of tea,” Claudia said with iron calm. “And we are all going to sit down. Not necessarily in that order.”

Susanna was glad of the chair. She could guess exactly the way it was. Anne was more than fond of Mr. Butler, but Mr. Butler was the son of an earl. He had allowed Anne to return to Bath without offering her marriage. Yet now he was doing the honorable thing and marrying her after all-but only because he must.

Poor Anne! What a dreadful thing it was for her to be facing a marriage in which her feelings were engaged when she would always know that his were not.

And it could so easily have happened to her too, Susanna thought, a chill about her heart even while the fire warmed her toes and her face.

Except that she would never have let Viscount Whitleaf know if she had shared Anne’s fate. And she doubted he would have offered marriage even if she had.

Oh, but she did not know, did she, what she would have done if it really had happened. Or what he might have done if he had found out. Her knees turned weak at the thought of how close she had come to disaster.

Anne had not had her fortunate escape.

Susanna did not meet Mr. Butler until the day, two weeks later, when the wedding took place by special license in Claudia’s private sitting room. He had been badly maimed as a soldier during the Peninsular Wars-he had lost an arm and an eye and was badly burned all down the right side of his face. He was also, as Anne had told Susanna on the evening after her return from Somerset, tall, dark, and handsome. Susanna told him so with a twinkle in her eye after the brief service, when Anne was already his wife-but she said it only because it seemed to her that he was a good-humored man and she thought it altogether possible that he did care for Anne.

She hoped so. Oh, she hoped so.

And she tried very hard not to be envious-but how very foolish to even think of being envious when she had been pitying Anne so deeply for the past fortnight. Sometimes human emotions made no sense at all.

She did dare to hope, though, that Anne had found her happily-ever-after despite everything. It appeared that Mr. Butler was even going to be kind to David, though it was not equally obvious that David was going to take kindly to the existence in his life of a new stepfather.

Susanna and Claudia stood on the pavement outside the school after the small reception they had given for the newlyweds, waving the three of them on their way back to Wales.

“Susanna,” Claudia said as the carriage turned the corner onto Sutton Street and moved out of sight, “I expected that my heart would break today. But maybe it does not have to after all. What do you think?”

“I believe,” Susanna said, “there is fondness on one side and honor on the other- and even that would offer promise for the future. But I think there is also a little bit of love on both sides.”

“Ah,” Claudia said with a sigh, “it is my thought too. Let us hope we are right and not just a couple of hopeless romantics. Ah, Anne! I suppose we will not see her again for a long time. I do object to losing my friends, not to mention my teachers. I will have to look about for her replacement, though Lila is coming along quite nicely, would you not agree?”

Lila Walton was a junior teacher, promoted at the end of the summer term from the ranks of the senior girls. Like Susanna before her, she had been a charity girl.

“She shows great promise, as I knew she would,” Susanna agreed as Claudia linked an arm through hers and they stepped back inside the school.

But they were to see Anne again far sooner than Claudia had expected. She and Mr. Butler did not go directly home to Wales, as it turned out, but instead went first to Alvesley Park in Wiltshire, family home of Mr. Butler, and then to Gloucestershire to visit Anne’s estranged family. The day after a letter arrived at the school from Anne at her father’s home, another letter came from Viscountess Ravensberg at Alvesley Park. Claudia held it open in one hand when Susanna answered a summons to her study at the end of a composition class-a subject she had taken over from Frances two years before.

“There is to be a surprise wedding breakfast for Anne and Mr. Butler at the Upper Assembly Rooms next week,” Claudia said. “The Viscountess Ravensberg and the Duchess of Bewcastle have arranged it and have devised some sort of devious plot for luring the couple back here. We are invited, as well as Mr. Huckerby and Mr. Upton.”

They stared at each other. The strange coincidence of Mr. Butler’s being a brother-in-law of Viscountess Ravensberg, cousin to Viscount Whitleaf, had not escaped Susanna’s notice at the time of Anne’s wedding. Now she would have an unexpected opportunity to meet the lady-the very cousin, she believed, who had the same color eyes as he.

Certain wounds, healed over nicely but still tender to the touch, were going to be in danger of being ripped open again, she thought. She would just have to make very certain they were not.

Claudia was tight-lipped.

“You know what this means, Susanna, do you not?” she said, folding the letter and tapping it against her leg. “If the Duchess of Bewcastle has had a hand in organizing this breakfast, then undoubtedly the duke will be in attendance. And since Lady Potford on Great Pulteney Street is a friend of Anne’s and grandmother to the Marquess of Hallmere, it is altogether possible that the marquess and that woman will come to Bath and be there too. I would rather have every fingernail on both my hands pulled out than be in company with those two people. But some things cannot be avoided. This is for Anne. I will go. You will come too?”

She stood ramrod straight and spoke as if she were inviting Susanna to accompany her to a funeral.

“I will come and hold your hand,” Susanna promised.

Claudia snorted and then laughed.

“I do not suppose,” she said, “that either one of them will even recognize me or care if they do. Though Lady Hallmere did come here a few years ago to look down her nose at me and my school and ask if there was anything I needed. The nerve of the woman! But, Susanna, we will see our beloved Anne again after all-and our dear David. I miss them both very much indeed.”

“Yes.” Susanna smiled. “We will see them again.”

And Viscountess Ravensberg.

How absurd to think that seeing her would somehow bring Viscount Whitleaf closer. Or that it would be a desirable thing even if it did.

Yes, that healed wound was very tender to the touch.

14

The Duchess of Bewcastle had reserved the ballroom as well as the tearoom at the Upper Assembly Rooms in Bath in order to give the children somewhere to run and be noisy while the adults conversed in civilized fashion over tea and listened to a few speeches. But she had engaged the services of an orchestra too, Peter discovered when he arrived early on the appointed afternoon with