A Summer to Remember

Chapter 22

Summer had lingered on through the hot, lazy days of August and well into September. But it was finally giving place to autumn, it seemed. There was a distinct chill in the air and clouds were gathering overhead, low and heavy. It was going to rain.

She was in the very worst place she could be on such a day, Lauren thought. She was on the beach at Newbury Abbey. Not only on the beach, but perched on the very top of the great rock that appeared for all the world as if a giant must once have hurled it there from the cliffs above to land in the middle of the wide expanse of golden sand. She was sitting with a cloak wrapped warmly about her, her arms clasping her updrawn knees beneath its folds. But she was hatless—her bonnet lay at the foot of the rock, wedged into a narrow cranny with her gloves, where they would not blow away. The wind—no, it was more like a gale—whipped her hair back from her face and tasted of salt. The sea, on the ebb and halfway out along the sand, was slate gray and rough and flecked with angry white foam.

She was feeling almost happy. She allowed herself the qualifier of almost because she had accepted the fact that self-deception was also self-destructive. She would not deceive herself any more or hide behind any mask in an attempt to shield herself from the reality of her life.

Hence the beach, which she had never liked until recently, especially on a wild day. And hence her perch on top of the rock, which she had never climbed before today. Climbing it had been forbidden when she was a child, and so of course both Neville and Gwen had scaled it several times. Equally inevitably, she never had. Climbing it more recently had been unladylike. She could remember her shock at seeing Lily sitting up here one day, not long after her arrival at Newbury.

And hence too her bonnetless state. The wind and the sea air would do dreadful things to both her complexion and her hair. She tipped her face higher into the air and shook out her tangled hair with smiling defiance.

Hence also the fact that the likelihood of rain was not sending her scurrying back to the dower house for shelter. If she got wet, she would also feel cold and uncomfortable and might ruin her bonnet and her good shoes. She looked up at the clouds and challenged them to rain torrents on her head.

She was not with child. She had wept in the privacy of her own room when her courses had begun less than a week after her return from Alvesley. She had grieved for the child who had never been and the marriage that would never happen. At the same time she had been overwhelmingly relieved. She had written the next day to Kit, breaking off their engagement—the most difficult task she had ever undertaken in her life.

The thought of it—of the moment the letter had left her hands—could still make her chest tighten with an almost unbearable pain. She would not allow herself to think of it. At some time in the future—still rather far in the future, she believed—she would be able to look back on the brief summer at Alvesley and remember with pleasure what had surely been the happiest time of her life.

But not quite yet. At this precise moment in her life she was almost happy. She accepted with quiet patience that she was not entirely so.

Tomorrow she was going to Bath. Oh, not permanently yet, but the wheels were being set in motion. Gwen and Neville were going to accompany her. An agent had found four different houses he considered suitable residences for a single lady of modest fortune. She was going to view them all and make her choice. Against the advice of everyone except Elizabeth, but with the reluctant support of all, she was about to embark upon the rest of her life. Not a passive observer any longer, but an active participant.

The mist of spray from the sea—or perhaps it was the beginning of the rain—was dampening her face. Her hair was going to be impossibly curly when she got back home and her poor maid was called upon to do something with it. Lauren closed her eyes and felt enclosed by wind. Exhilarated by the wildness of it. Empowered by it.

She had read fifteen years’ worth of letters from the stranger who was her mother. Cheerful, careless, untidily scrawled letters from a woman who was clearly enjoying her life even though she complained freely about anything and everything—particularly about the men on whom she had heaped rapturous praises in an earlier letter, and consistently over the fact that her beloved Lauren never wrote back to her, never came to live with her. They were letters that would have shocked Lauren to the core even a few months earlier. But she had acquired a new tolerance, an acceptance of the myriad ways in which other people coped with the one life allotted them. She felt an aching love for the mother she remembered so dimly that none of the memories was concrete. She had written a long, long letter and sent it on its way to India. She could not expect any reply until sometime next year, but she felt a connection with the woman who had borne her.

She should climb down, she supposed, looking with some misgiving at the footholds and handholds that had appeared perfectly manageable when she had examined them from the beach. But she had been looking up then, not down. If she waited until the rain was falling in earnest, the rock might become slippery and she would be stranded.

For a moment her mind touched upon the memory of Kit helping her descend the tree at Alvesley, his body and arms cradling her protectively from behind, though she had forbidden him to touch her or carry her down. She pushed the memory aside. She was not ready for it yet. It was still too painful.

Something caught at the edge of her vision, and she turned her head to look. There was a steep path down from the cliff top to the valley where the waterfall and pool and cottage were, just out of her range of vision from where she sat. But she could see the bridge that crossed the river as it flowed the last few yards to the beach and the sea. He was just stepping onto the bridge, his long drab riding coat billowing out to one side, his tall hat pulled low over his brow.

A mirage, she thought foolishly, whipping her head downward to rest on her knees. Her heart thumped uncomfortably, as if she had been running too fast. It was just Neville, sent by Aunt Clara to discover what kept her so long on the beach. But it was not Neville. The Duke of Portfrey, then, sent by Elizabeth and Lily on the same errand. No. No, it was not he. Besides, none of them would have come looking for her. She had told them she wanted to be alone.

She lifted her head again and turned it casually, so as not to disappoint herself when she saw empty beach and bridge and path.

He was on the beach, striding toward her.

Lauren clasped her knees more tightly.

All the guests had left Alvesley within two weeks of the birthday party. Sydnam had left a week after that, bound for one of the Duke of Bewcastle’s larger estates in Wales. He had been very cheerful about it. Doing a good job as someone else’s steward was a challenge he needed to take on, Kit had realized. Syd certainly had no need of the extra income.

Life at home would have been tranquil and happy except for one thing. His relationship with his father was better than it had ever been. They could communicate man to man. They could relate as father and son. His father was eager to teach; he was eager to learn. And he brought with him skills acquired during years of commanding men and shouldering life-and-death responsibilities, and a young man’s energy to complement his father’s slower, more deliberate wisdom. His mother was cheerful and affectionate. He was once again his grandmother’s favorite, though he had little competition, of course. He had come face-to-face with Rannulf when both were out riding alone one day. They had talked for a few hours, Ralf turning his horse to ride alongside his erstwhile friend since neither of them had had any particular destination in mind. They had fallen back into the easy camaraderie they had enjoyed throughout their boyhood years. They had met several times since then. Their friendship had resumed.

There was only one thing to mar the tranquillity, though to call it one made it sound small, insignificant, unimportant. It was the consuming fact of Kit’s life. Lauren had written a formal little note from Newbury, breaking their engagement, citing incompatibility and personal fickleness. Right to the end she had kept her part of the bargain, careful to assume all the blame for the breakup. And the letter was designed for other eyes in addition to his own. There was not a whisper of a mention of pregnancy. He had to assume from the nature of the letter that she was not with child. He had opened it not knowing which of two quite opposite fates he was going to be facing.

After reading it he had stridden down to the lake, torn off all his clothes—even though it had been daytime and total privacy had been by no means guaranteed—and swum the whole length of the lake, using every last ounce of his energy so that by the time he reached the far side of the island he had had to half stagger, half drag himself up the sloping bank to fall in a panting stupor facedown on the grass among the wildflowers. He did not even know for how many hours he had lain there.

The foolish part—the really stupid part—was that after he had returned to the house he had not immediately told anyone. He could not face the questions, the explanations, the emotion, the recriminations, the sympathy, the whatever it was he would have been called upon to face if he had told. He had postponed the telling until the evening, and then until the next morning, and then . . .

He had not told at all.

One morning when they were riding home from an inspection of the ripening crops on the home farm, his father admitted to him that he had arranged the marriage with Freyja only because he had thought it would please Kit. Left to himself, he had added, Kit had chosen far more wisely and well than anyone else could have done for him. He had matured into a sensible, dependable man despite the wild oats he had been sowing in London even as late as this spring. Miss Edgeworth would be a fine viscountess and a worthy countess when the day came.

The day Syd left, their mother linked an arm through Kit’s after drying her tears and strolled with him in the parterre gardens. She had had misgivings at the prospect of sharing a home with Freyja, she admitted, though she was very fond of her and of all the Bedwyns, who had suffered only from not having had a mother through their most formative years to curb their wildness and teach them some restraint. But she simply loved Lauren. She had done almost from the first, though she confessed that she had been predisposed to dislike her intensely. Lauren already felt like the daughter she had never had but had always longed for.

Kit’s grandmother spoke of Lauren when she got up in the mornings and Lauren was not there to accompany her on her walk, when she sat by the fire in the evenings and Lauren was not there to listen to her or to entertain her with conversation or massage her bad hand, and whenever she fancied that Kit was looking restless, which was almost every time she set eyes on him.

He had been able to find neither the courage nor the heart to tell them that the engagement was over, that they would never see Lauren again, that he would not either.

By the middle of September, with his mother asking almost daily when the wedding date was to be set and his grandmother urging that it be before Christmas so that they would have Lauren with them for the holiday—and so that they could start airing out the family christening robes—he knew that he was going to have to do something decisive. He was going to have to tell them.

It was during a lapse in the conversation at dinner one evening that he finally steeled himself and drew breath to speak.

“I’ll be going down to Newbury Abbey,” he said abruptly. “Tomorrow, I think. I need to . . . see Lauren.”

His words surprised him as much as they did his family. More so, in fact. They were all delighted. They had been expecting it, in fact. They thought it was high time. Lauren would be thinking he was having second thoughts.

It was only when the unexpected, unplanned words were spoken that he understood why he had not broken the news to his family, why he had been unable to let go of the charade. He had learned something of infinite value during the summer—he and Lauren had both learned it, he believed. He had learned the importance of openness, of talking to the people he loved, even when habit urged him to keep everything locked up inside himself. He had a good relationship with his father and with Syd today because Lauren had coaxed him into talking with them after a three-year estrangement.

Yet he had never spoken the full truth to Lauren herself. He had withheld it for her sake, because it was something she did not want to hear, because she might find the knowledge a burden, because it might influence her into sacrificing what was of greatest importance to her—her freedom.

But perhaps she had a right to the truth. Freedom surely involved the right to choose.

Or perhaps he was simply deluding himself into self-indulgence.

But if it was self-indulgence, he thought as he rode into the village of Upper Newbury two days later on a blustery day and took a room at the inn on the green, it felt remarkably uncomfortable. The village was picturesque, and there was another part of it—Lower Newbury?—at the bottom of a steep hill, he could see from his room, its small houses clustered about a sheltered harbor, which nevertheless could not disguise the roughness of the sea.

He was undecided about whether he should call first at the dower house or at Newbury Abbey itself. But the dower house, he found, was just a short distance inside the gates of the park. He went there first. The ladies were at the abbey, a servant informed him, and so he rode the rest of the way along a lengthy, winding driveway and presented his card at Newbury Abbey with the request that the Countess of Kilbourne receive him.

He was kept waiting for only a couple of minutes before being ushered up to the drawing room, where several people were awaiting his appearance, all on their feet. Lauren was not among them.

She had not been as reticent as he, he could see immediately. These people all knew. Lady Muir was looking pale, the Dowager Lady Kilbourne grave, Portfrey poker-faced. But the small, blond-haired, exquisitely pretty young lady who hurried toward him, her hand extended, was smiling.

“Lord Ravensberg?” she said. “What a pleasure this is.”

“Ma’am?” He bowed over her hand.

“Ravensberg?” A tall, blond man, about Kit’s own age, came up beside her and bowed without offering his hand.

“Kilbourne?”

He was in the presence, Kit realized, of the man who had meant so much to Lauren all her life, whom she had been within a few minutes of marrying, whom she had loved and probably still did. And of the infamous Lily, who had blighted all Lauren’s hopes and dreams.

“What a pleasant surprise,” the countess said. “Do come and have a seat. It is rather chilly outside today, is it not? You know everyone else, I believe?”

The ladies curtsied. Portfrey inclined his head. He was holding a small child against one shoulder, Kit noticed for the first time. The duchess smiled warmly.

“You have come, Lord Ravensberg,” she said. “I am so glad as I have predicted it.”

“And I,” the countess added, taking Kit’s arm and leading him toward a chair. “Lauren wrote to you before telling any of us—even Gwen—that she was going to end her betrothal. We have all been mystified and very sad because Gwen and my mama-in-law were both firmly of the opinion that it was a love match and very much approved of by your family. Lauren insisted that the breakup was all her idea, that none of the blame must be laid at your door, but of course we have been doing just that. We love Lauren very dearly, you see, and it is always easier to blame strangers. But now you have come, and you may defend yourself in person.”

“Lily!” Kilbourne said. “Ravensberg owes us no explanation at all. We do not even know why he has come.”

“I came,” Kit said, “to speak with Lauren. Where is she?”

“What is it you wish to say?” Kilbourne asked. “She has ended the betrothal. None of us knows why exactly, but we can safely guess that she has no further wish to see or speak with you.”

“She is best left alone, Lord Ravensberg,” the dowager added. “She was quite adamant in her insistence that she had not acted out of impulse when she wrote to you. I do not know what happened at Alvesley, but she is quite determined not to have you despite the social stigma of a broken engagement. If this is a courtesy call, I thank you on behalf of my niece. If it is not, you see a formidable array of her concerned relatives before you ready to protect her from you.”

“Poor Lord Ravensberg,” the duchess said with a sympathetic laugh. “You will be thinking you have stepped onto an Arctic continent. We are being unfair to you. Lauren really has insisted that none of the blame for what has happened is yours.”

“She is down on the beach,” Lady Muir said quietly from some distance away.

Kit looked at her and inclined his head. He still had not sat down.

“Thank you, ma’am,” he said.

“She said she wanted to be alone,” Kilbourne said. “She said she did not want to be disturbed.”

“And so, Lord Ravensberg,” the countess added, smiling, “you will have all the privacy in the world to say to her what you have come to say.”

“I’ll not have her upset,” Kilbourne said.

The countess relinquished Kit’s arm in order to take her husband’s. She smiled up at him. “Lauren is twenty-six years old, Neville,” she said. “She is very sensible and has just spent weeks convincing us that she is in control of her own life and can make her own decisions. If she does not want to speak to Lord Ravensberg, she will tell him so.”

When Kilbourne looked down into his wife’s eyes, Kit realized two things. Lauren was very much loved here at Newbury Abbey, especially perhaps by the two who had caused her the most pain. And Kilbourne was consumed by guilt for what he had made her suffer. Consequently he was doing all in his power to see to it that she did not suffer again.

“I will walk down to the beach if someone will show me the way,” Kit said.

“It is going to rain,” Kilbourne said, glancing toward the window. “Tell her to come home without delay.”

The countess smiled dazzlingly at her husband though she spoke to Kit. “Tell her to take shelter in the cottage, Lord Ravensberg. It is closer.”

“Walk down over the lawn,” Lady Muir instructed him, “bearing right as you go until you reach the cliff path.”

Kit bowed to them all and made his exit.

It was not really raining when he reached the steep path down the side of the cliff. It was not even quite drizzling. But his face felt damp and his ungloved hands clammy. It was certainly going to be raining soon.

He realized where he was when he was halfway down. Lauren had described it once—the short valley with a waterfall and pool at the inner end and a picturesque cottage beside the pool. It was where she had once seen Kilbourne and his countess frolicking and had concluded that she was incapable of that kind of passion herself. There was no sign of Lauren. He turned his gaze to the beach and shaded his eyes as he looked along the wide stretch of golden sand.

And then he spotted her. And smiled. And knew beyond all doubt that the summer had not been in vain for her. Wearing a cloak but no bonnet on a blustery, damp day, she was in the middle of the beach, facing a wild, tumultuous sea, and perched at the very pinnacle of a great tall rock, which from this angle appeared to have almost sheer sides.

At the same time the scene chilled him. This she had done alone. She had not needed help or support—not from him or anyone else. Seeing her thus, he knew that she had achieved self-knowledge and peace. That she was capable of living her life her way. That she needed no one.

That she did not need him.

Foolishly, he was tempted to turn back before she saw him. But he had something that needed to be said. Something he must say.

He thought the wind might blow him over when he stepped out of the relative shelter of the path onto the bridge over the shallow river. He lowered his head so that he would not lose his hat. He was on the beach, plodding over the sand, when he finally looked up again. She had seen him. She was watching him approach, sitting quietly at the top of the rock, clasping her knees. It seemed to take forever to walk the rest of the way.

He looked up at her and grinned. “Stuck?” he asked. “Do you need rescuing?”

“No,” she said with all her characteristic quiet dignity, “thank you.”

And she moved from her place to descend the other side of the rock. It was far more scalable than the side by which he had approached, he saw when he walked around it. Even so, she descended at a pace that would have put a tortoise to sleep. He would have climbed up to be close enough to catch her if she slipped, but something told him that it would be entirely the wrong thing to do. Finally first one foot and then the other was on firm ground—or on shifting sand, at least. She turned and looked at him.

He opened his mouth to speak and discovered that he had no idea what he would say.

She made no move to help him.

They stared at each other.

And because his mind really was quite terrifyingly blank, he leaned forward and kissed her instead of talking. Her lips softened and pressed back lightly against his.

“Lauren,” he said.

“Kit.” After a few moments she rescued him. “Why are you here? Why have you come?”

The dampness in the air had turned to drizzle.

“To instruct you to hurry back to the house,” he said, “if you wish to listen to Kilbourne. To suggest the cottage as a closer destination if you prefer the advice of the countess.” He grinned again.

“Kit.” She frowned. “I did not want to see you again. I really did not.”

He swallowed and set a hand against the rock beyond her shoulder. He lowered his head and noticed idly that the sand was destroying the shine on his riding boots—and he had come without his valet.

“You are still here,” he said. “Still at Newbury.” He had braced himself for the possibility that she would already be gone.

“Only until tomorrow,” she said. “Tomorrow I will be going to Bath to choose a house. I am going to live there.”

“Is that what you really want?” he asked.

“You know it is,” she said. “Kit, why have you come? Where is Lady Freyja?”

“Freyja?” He looked up at her with a frown. “At Lindsey Hall, I suppose. Why?” But he understood before she could answer. “There is nothing between Freyja and me, Lauren. There was once very briefly, but it was a long time ago. Now there is nothing. Nothing whatsoever and never will be.”

“Yet you suit,” she said.

“Do we?” He considered the matter. “Yes, I suppose there is a similarity. That does not mean we would suit. We would not. Did this misconception have anything to do with your breaking off our betrothal?”

“Of course not.” She sighed and leaned back against the rock. “It was all arranged even before I met Lady Freyja, remember? Kit, why are you here?”

“There is something I need to tell you,” he said. “Something I should have told you before you left Alvesley. Something you ought to know whatever you decide to do with the knowledge. Once I have told you, you have only to say the word, Lauren, and I will walk back along this beach and up to the cliff top and into the village and I will never trouble you again, never try to see you again. It is a promise.”

“Kit—”

He set one finger across her lips and looked into her eyes.

“I want to marry you,” he said. “I want it more than I have ever wanted anything else in my life. For many reasons. But only one of them really matters to me. It is the one I did not tell you of because it seemed somehow dishonorable after you had carried out your side of the bargain so sweetly and so well. I love you. That is it, you see, the part I omitted. Just that. I love you. I do not believe it can really hurt you to know. It lays no obligation on you. I just needed to say it. I’ll leave now if you wish.”

She said nothing, just pressed her head back harder against the rock and gazed at him with her lovely violet eyes. The drizzle was turning to light rain. It was running in droplets down her face. But it was not raindrops that were welling in her eyes.

“Tell me to go,” he whispered.

She started to say something and then swallowed. She tried again. “I do not need you, you know,” she said.

“I know.” His heart was down in his boots somewhere.

“I do not need anyone,” she said. “I can do this alone, this living business. All my life I have shaped myself into being what others expect me to be so that I will belong somewhere, be accepted somewhere, be loved by someone. When I knew I could not belong to Neville, I felt as if I had been cut adrift in the universe. I anchored myself by retreating into an even more rigid gentility. I don’t need to do any of that any longer. And I do have you to thank. But I don’t need you any longer, Kit. I am strong enough on my own.”

“Yes.” He bowed his head and closed his eyes again. “Yes, I know.”

“I am free, you see,” she said, “to love or to withhold love. Love and dependence need no longer be the same thing to me. I am free to love. That is why I love you, and it is the way I love you. If you have come here, Kit, because you think you owe me something, because you believe I might crumble without your protection, then go away again with my blessing and find happiness with someone else.”

“I love you,” he said again.

She gazed at him for a long time, her eyes still swimming in tears, and then she smiled, very slowly, and very, very radiantly.

He wrapped his arms about her waist, lifted her off her feet, and twirled her about in circles, while she braced her hands on his shoulders, flung her head back to expose her face to the rain, and laughed.

Kit whooped, and because the echo from the cliffs was so impressive, he threw back his head too and howled like a wolf.