One Night for Love

One Night for Love

By

Mary Balogh

Contents

PART I - The Return

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

PART II - Memory: One Night for Love

Chapter 3

PARTV III - An Impossible Dream

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

PART IV - The Education of a Lady

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

PARTV V - The Education of a Lady

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

"LILY, I WANT TO MAKE LOVE TO YOU.

Do you want it too?" he asked her.

"Yes."

"You must not be frightened," he told her. "Not at any moment. However far advanced in passion I might become, I will stop the instant you tell me to stop. Will you believe that?"

"Yes," she said. "But I will not tell you to stop."

She knew that she would want to. Before he made love to her, she would want to stop him. Because once they were together, she would know. She would know if her dreams of love must die forever. And she would know if after all, he found himself repulsed by the knowledge that another man had known her since their wedding day. But she would not stop him. This—tonight, all of it—was meant to be, and she would let it be, however it turned out.

Published by Dell Publishing a division of Random House, Inc.

Copyright © 1999 by Mary Balogh

ISBN: 0-440-22600-7

To Gayle Knutson,

a former student and present friend, who designed and created

my Web site in time for the promotion of this book.

With thanks.

www.marybalogh.com

PART I

The Return

Chapter 1

Despite the early hour and the chilly weather, the yard of the White Horse Inn in

Fetter Lane, London

, was crowded and noisy. The stagecoach for the West Country was preparing to make its daily run. Few passengers had yet boarded; most were milling about anxiously to see that their luggage had been properly stowed. Hawkers attempted to sell their wares to passengers for whom the day would be long and tedious. Grooms bustled about their business. Ragged children, when they were not being shooed back into the street, darted about, feeding on the excitement.

The guard blew his horn, a deafening warning that the coach would be departing within a few minutes and anyone with a ticket would be well advised to climb aboard.

Captain Gordon Harris, looking smart in the green regimentals of the Ninety-fifth Rifles, and his young wife, who was warmly and modishly dressed, looked somewhat out of place in such inelegant surroundings. But they were not themselves passengers. They had accompanied a woman to the White Horse in order to see her on her way.

Her appearance was in marked contrast to theirs. While she was clean and tidy, she was undeniably shabby. She wore a simple high-waisted cotton dress with a shawl for warmth. Both garments looked well worn and well washed. Her bonnet, which had perhaps once been pretty even if never quite modish, had clearly shielded its wearer from one too many rainstorms. Its wide brim was limp and misshapen. She was a young woman—indeed, she was so small and so slight of frame that she might at first glance have been mistaken for a mere girl. But there was something about her that drew second, more lingering glances from several of the men who were busy about their various tasks. There were beauty and grace and some indefinable air of femininity about her to proclaim that she was indeed a woman.

"I must be getting into the coach," she said with a smile for the captain and his wife. "You need not stay here any longer. It is too cold to be standing about." She held out both her slim hands to Mrs. Harris, though she looked alternately at both of them. "How will I ever be able to thank you sufficiently for all you have done for me?"

Tears sprang to Mrs. Harris's eyes, and she enfolded the young woman tightly in her arms. "We have done nothing of any great significance," she said. "And now we are abandoning you to travel on the stage, the very cheapest form of transportation, when you might have gone more respectably by post chaise or at the very worst by the mailcoach."

"I have borrowed enough from you," the young woman said, "without indulging in needless extravagances."

"Borrowed." Mrs. Harris removed a lace-edged handkerchief from her reticule and dabbed at her eyes with it.

"It is still not too late to alter your plans, you know." Captain Harris took one of the young woman's hands in both of his own. "Come back to our hotel with us for breakfast and I shall write that letter even before I eat, and send it on its way. I daresay there will be an answer within the week."

"No, sir," she told him quite firmly, though she smiled. "I cannot wait. I must go."

He did not argue further but sighed, patted her hand, and then impulsively pulled her into a hug as his wife had done. By that time she was in danger of losing the inside seat he had quite adamantly insisted upon. He had even slipped the coachman a tip to ensure her a window seat for the long journey to the village of Upper Newbury in Dorsetshire.

But a large woman, who looked as if she might be ready to take on any coachman or any army captain who dared cross her, or indeed both at once, was already settling herself into the only window seat still available.

The young woman had to squeeze herself into a middle seat. But she did not appear to share the captain's wrath. She smiled and lifted a hand in farewell. As she did so, the guard's horn blew again as a warning to everyone nearby that the stage was about to begin its journey.

Mrs. Harris's gloved hand was still raised in an answering farewell wave after the stagecoach had rumbled out of the yard, turned onto the street, and disappeared from sight.

"I have never in my life known anyone so stubborn," she said, using her handkerchief again. "Or anyone so dear. What will become of her, Gordon?"

The captain sighed once more. "I fear she is doing the wrong thing," he said. "Almost a year and a half has passed, and what seemed like madness even at the time will doubtless be a total impossibility now. But she does not understand."

"Her sudden appearance is going to come as a dreadful shock," Mrs. Harris said. "Oh, foolish girl to have refused to delay even a few days while you wrote a letter. How will she manage, Gordon? She is so small and so frail and so—so innocent. I fear for her."

"For as long as I have known Lily," Captain Harris replied, "she has looked much the same, though admittedly she is thinner than she used to be. The appearance of fragility and innocence are largely illusory, though. We know that she has been through a great deal that would severely test the roughest and toughest of my men. But she must have experienced worse things that we can only imagine."

"I prefer not even to try," his wife said fervently.

"She has survived, Maisie," he reminded her, "with her pride and her courage intact. And her sweetness too—she seems not to have been embittered. Despite everything there still appears to be more than a touch of innocence about her."

"What will he do when she arrives?" she asked as they began to walk back to their hotel for breakfast. "Oh dear, he really ought to have been warned."

***

Newbury Abbey, the country seat and principal estate of the Earl of Kilbourne in Dorsetshire, was an imposing mansion in a large, carefully tended park that included a secluded, fern-laden valley and a private golden beach. Beyond the gates of the park, Upper Newbury was a picturesque village of thatched, whitewashed houses clustered about a green with the tall-spired Church of All Souls and an inn with its taproom belowstairs and its assembly room and guest rooms abovestairs. The village of Lower Newbury, a fishing community built about the sheltered cove on which fishing boats bobbed at rest when not in use, was connected to the upper village by a steep lane, lined with houses and a few shops.

The inhabitants of both villages and the surrounding countryside were, on the whole, content with the quiet obscurity of their lives. But, when all was said and done, they were only human. They liked a spot of excitement as well as the next man or woman. Newbury Abbey supplied it on occasion.

The last grand spectacle had been the funeral of the old earl more than a year before. The new earl, his son, had been in Portugal at the time with Lord Wellington's armies and had been unable to return in time for the somber event.

He had sold his commission and come home later to take up his responsibilities.

And now—in early May of 1813—the people of the Newburys were about to experience something far more joyful, far more splendid than a funeral. Neville Wyatt, the new Earl of Kilbourne, a young man of seven-and-twenty years, was to be married to his cousin by marriage, who had been brought up at the abbey with him and his sister, Lady Gwendoline. His father, the late earl, and Baron Galton, the bride's maternal grandfather, had planned the match many years before.

It was a popular match. There could be no more handsome couple, the villagers were generally agreed, than the Earl of Kilbourne and Miss Lauren Edgeworth. His lordship had gone away to the ware—much against his father's wishes, it had been rumored—as a tall, slender, blond, and handsome boy. He had returned six years later improved almost beyond recognition. He was broad where a man should be broad, slim where a man should be slim, and fit and strong and rugged. Even the scar of an old saber wound that slashed his face from right temple to chin, only narrowly missing both his eye and the corner of his mouth, seemed somehow to enhance rather than mar his good looks. As for Miss Edgeworth, she was tall and slim and elegant and as pretty as any picture with her dark shiny curls and eyes that some described as smoky and others as violet, though all were agreed that they were uncommonly lovely. And she had waited patiently for her earl to an almost dangerously advanced age—she was all of four-and-twenty.

It was all very proper and very romantic, everyone agreed.

For two days a steady stream of grand carriages had passed through the village and been duly gawked at by the more vulgar and peered at from behind parlor curtains by the more genteel. Half the quality of England was coming for the occasion, it was said, and more titled persons than some of them had known existed in all of England, Scotland, and Wales combined. Rumor had it—though it was surely more fact than rumor since it had come directly from the first cousin of the brother-in-law of the aunt of one of the kitchen maids at Newbury—that there was not a bedchamber at the abbey that was not to be filled with guests. And that was a prodigious number of rooms.

A number of local families had received invitations—to the wedding itself and the breakfast that would follow it at the abbey, and to the grand ball that was to take place on the evening prior to the wedding. Indeed, no one could remember more elaborate plans. Even the humbler folk were not doomed to being mere spectators. While the wedding guests were partaking of their breakfast, the villagers would be enjoying a sumptuous repast of their own, to be served inside the inn at the earl's behest and expense. There was to be dancing afterward about the maypole on the green.

The wedding eve was a time of heightened activity in the village. Tantalizing aromas of cooking wafted from the inn all day long in promise of the next day's feast. Some of the women set the tables in the assembly room while their men hung colored streamers from the maypole and children tried them out and were scolded for tangling them and getting under everyone's feet. Miss Taylor, spinster daughter of a former vicar, and her younger sister, Miss Amelia, helped the vicar's wife decorate the church with white bows and spring flowers while the vicar set new candles in the holders and dreamed of the glory the morrow would bring him.

The next morning would see the convergence of all the illustrious guests and their carriages on the upper village. And there would be the earl to admire in his wedding finery, and the bride in hers. And—bliss of all blisses—there would be the newly married couple to cheer as they emerged from the church doors with the church bells pealing out the glad tidings that there was a new young countess for the abbey. And then the feasting and frolicking would begin.

Everyone kept a wary eye on the western horizon, from which direction most weather approached. But there was nothing ominous to see. Today was a clear, sunny, really quite warm day. There was no sign of clouds building in the west. Tomorrow looked to be a fair day—as was only right and proper. Nothing was to be allowed to spoil the day.

No one thought to look east.

***

The stagecoach from London set Lily down outside the inn in the village of Upper Newbury. It was certainly a pretty place, she thought, breathing in the cool, slightly salty evening air and feeling somewhat restored despite her weariness and the stiffness of her limbs. It all looked very English to her—very pretty and very peaceful and rather alien.

But the dusk of evening was falling already and she still might have a way to go on foot. She had neither the time nor the energy to explore. Besides, her heart had begun thumping in her chest, making her slightly breathless. She had realized that she was very close now—at last. But the closer she came, the more uncertain she was of her welcome and of the wisdom of having made this journey at all—except that there had seemed to be no real alternative.

Lily turned and walked into the inn.

"Is Newbury Abbey far?" she asked the innkeeper, ignoring the near silence that fell over the taproom as she entered it. The room was full to overflowing with men, who all appeared to be in a festive mood, but Lily was not unaccustomed to such situations. Large numbers of men did not embarrass or frighten her.

"Two miles if it is anything to you," the innkeeper said, leaning massive elbows on the counter and looking her up and down with open curiosity.

"In which direction?" she asked.

"Past the church and through the gates," he said, pointing, "and follow the driveway."

"Thank you," Lily said politely, and turned away.

"If I was you, my pretty wench," a man seated at one of the tables called to her, not unkindly, "I would knock on the vicarage door. Next to the church this side. They will give you a crust and a mug of water."

"If you cares to sit down between me and Mitch 'ere," someone else called with rough jocularity, "I'll see that you ' as your crust and a mug of cider to go with it, my lovely."

A hearty guffaw of laughter greeted his words as well as a few whistles and the sound of tables being pounded with the flat of the hand.

Lily smiled, unoffended. She was accustomed to rough men and rough ways. They rarely meant any harm or even any great disrespect.

"Thank you," she said, "but not tonight."

She stepped outside. Two miles. And it was very nearly dark. But she could not wait until morning. Where would she stay? She had enough money to buy herself a glass of lemonade and perhaps a small loaf of bread, but not enough to buy lodging for the night. Besides, she was very close.

Only two miles.

***

The ballroom at Newbury Abbey, magnificent even when empty, was laden with yellow, orange, and white flowers from the gardens and hothouses and decked with white satin ribbons and bows. It was ablaze with the lights of hundreds of candles set into the crystal chandeliers over-head and by their myriad reflections in the long mirrors that covered two facing walls. It was crowded with the cream of the ton as well as with members of the local gentry, all dressed in their finest for the wedding eve ball. Satins and silks shimmered and lace and white linen glowed. Costly gems glittered. The most expensive of perfumes vied with the scents of a thousand flowers. Voices were raised in an effort to be heard above others and above the strains of the music, provided by an entire orchestra.

Beyond the ballroom, guests strolled on the wide landing and ascended or descended the twin curved staircases to the domed and pillared great hall below. They strolled outdoors—on the balcony beyond the ballroom, on the terrace before the house, about the stone fountain below the terrace, along the graveled walks of the rock and flower garden to the east of the house. Colored lanterns had been strung about the fountain and hung from trees though the moonlight would have offered illumination even without them.

It was a perfect May evening. One could only hope, as several of the guests did aloud to Lauren and Neville as they passed along the receiving line, that tomorrow would be half as lovely a day.

"Tomorrow will be twice as lovely," Neville replied each time, smiling warmly at his betrothed, "even if the wind howls and the rain pours and the thunder rolls."

Lauren's smile was unmistakably radiant. It seemed strange to Neville as he led her eventually into the first set of country dances that he had ever hesitated about making her his bride, that he had kept her waiting for six years while he worked off the restless rebellion of youth as an officer with the Ninety-fifth Rifles. He had advised her not to wait, of course—he had been far too fond of her to keep her dangling when he had been quite uncertain of his intentions toward her. But she had waited. He was glad of it now, humbled by her patience and fidelity. There was a rightness about their impending marriage. And his affection for her had not dimmed. It had grown along with his admiration for her character and his appreciation of her beauty.

"And so it begins," he murmured to her as the orchestra began to play. "Our nuptials, Lauren. Are you happy?"

"Yes."

But even the single word was unnecessary. She glowed with happiness. She looked like the quintessential bride. She was his bride. It felt right.

Neville danced first with Lauren, then with his sister. Then he danced with a series of young ladies who looked as if they expected to be wallflowers while Lauren danced with a succession of different partners.

After taking a turn upon the balcony with one of his partners, Neville entered the ballroom through the French doors and joined a group of young gentlemen who, as always at balls, seemed to need one another's collective company in order to summon the courage to ask a young lady to dance. He had the misfortune to remark on the fact that none of them appeared to be dancing.

"Well, you have done the pretty every set, Nev," his cousin Ralph Milne, Viscount Sterne, said, "though only once with your betrothed. Hard luck, old chap, but I suppose you are not allowed to dance with her more than once, are you?"

"Alas, no," Neville agreed, gazing across the ballroom to where Lauren was standing with his mother, his paternal aunt, Lady Elizabeth Wyatt, and his maternal uncle and aunt, the Duke and Duchess of Anburey.

Sir Paul Longford, a childhood neighbor and friend, could not resist such a perfect opportunity for bawdiness. "Well, you know, Sterne," he said with his best drawl, "it is only for tonight, old chap. Nev is to dance alone with his bride all night tomorrow, though not necessarily on a dance floor. I have it on the best authority."

The whole group exploded with raucous male laughter, drawing considerable attention their way.

"A hit, Nev, you must confess," said his cousin and tomorrow's best man, the Marquess of Attingsborough.

Neville grinned after pursing his lips and handling the ribbon of his quizzing glass. "Let those words fall on any female ears, Paul," he said, "and I might feel obliged to call you out. Enjoy yourselves, gentlemen, but do not neglect the ladies, if you please."

He strolled off in the direction of his betrothed. She was wearing a high-waisted gown of blond net over daffodil-yellow sarcenet and looked as fresh and lovely as the springtime. It really was too bad that he was not to dance with her again for the rest of the evening. But then it would be strange indeed if he could not maneuver matters more to his liking.

It was not i mmediately possible. There was the necessity of conversing politely with Mr. Calvin Dorsey, a middle-aged, mild-mannered acquaintance of Lauren's grandfather, who had come to solicit Lauren's hand for the dance after supper and who stayed for a few minutes to make himself agreeable. And then the Duke of Portfrey arrived on Dorsey's heels to lead Elizabeth away for the next set. He was her longtime friend and beau. But finally Neville saw his chance.

"It is more like summer than spring outside," he remarked to no one in particular. "The rock garden must look quite enchanting in the lantern light." He smiled with deliberate wistfulness at Lauren.

"Mmm," she said. "And the fountain too."

"I suppose," he said, "you have reserved the next set with Lauren, Uncle Webster?"

"Indeed I have," the Duke of Anburey replied, but he winked at his nephew over Lauren's head. He had not missed his cue. "But all this talk of lanterns and summer evenings has given me a hankering to see the gardens with Sadie on my arm." He looked at his wife and waggled his eyebrows. "Now if someone could just be persuaded to take young Lauren off my hands…"

"If you were to twist my arm hard enough," Neville said, while his mother smiled in enjoyment of the conspiracy, "I might be persuaded to take on the task myself."

And so one minute later he was on his way downstairs, his betrothed on his arm. It was true that they were stopped at least half a dozen times by guests desiring to compliment them on the ball and wish them well during the coming day and the years ahead, but finally they were outside and descending the wide marble steps to feast their eyes on the rainbows created by lantern light on the spraying water of the fountain. They strolled onward toward the rock garden.

"You are a quite shameless maneuverer, Neville," Lauren told him.

"Are you glad of it?" He moved his head closer to hers.

She thought for a moment, her head tipped to one side, the telltale dimple denting her left cheek. "Yes," she said quite decisively. "Very."

"We are going to remember this night," he said, "as one of the happiest of our lives." He breathed in the freshness of the air with its faint tang of saltiness from the sea. He squinted his eyes so that the lights of individual lanterns in the rock garden ahead all blurred into one kaleidoscope of color.

"Oh, Neville," she said, her hand tightening on his arm. "Does anyone have a right to so much happiness?"

"Yes," he told her, his voice low against her ear. "You do."

"Just look at the garden," she said. "The lanterns make it seem like a fairyland."

He set himself to enjoying the unexpected half hour with her.

Chapter 2

Lily found the driveway beyond the massive gates to the park—a wide and winding road so darkened by huge trees that grew on either side and whose branches met overhead that only the occasional gleam of moonlight kept her from wandering off the path and becoming hopelessly lost. It was a driveway that seemed more like four miles long than two. Crickets chirped off to either side and a bird that might have been an owl hooted close by. Once there was the crackling of movement off in the forest to her right—some wild animal that she had disturbed, perhaps. But the sounds only succeeded in intensifying the pervading silence and darkness. Night had fallen with almost indecent haste.

And then finally she turned a bend and was startled by light in the near distance. She found herself staring at a brightly lighted mansion with another large building to one side of it also lighted up. There was light outside too—colored lanterns that must be hanging from tree branches.

Lily paused and gazed in amazement and awe. She had not expected anything of near this magnitude. The house appeared to be built of gray granite, but there was nothing heavy about its design. It was all pillars and pointed pediments and tall windows and perfect symmetry. She did not have the knowledge of architecture with which to recognize the Palladian design that had been superimposed upon the original medieval abbey with remarkably pleasing effect, but she felt the grandeur of the building and was overwhelmed by it. If she had imagined anything at all, it was a large cottage with a well-sized garden. But the name itself might have alerted her if she had ever really considered it. This was Newbury Abbey? Frankly it terrified her. And what was going on inside? Surely it did not look like this every night.

She would have turned back, but where would she go? She could only go forward. At least the lights—and the sounds of music that reached her ears as she drew closer—assured her that he must be at home.

Somehow she didn't find that a particularly comforting thought.

The great double doors at the front of Newbury Abbey stood open. There was light spilling out onto marble steps leading up to them, and the sounds of voices and laughter and music echoed behind them. There was the sound of voices outside too, though Lily saw only distant shadows in the darkness and no one noticed her approach.

She climbed the marble steps—she counted eight of them—and stepped into a hall so brightly lighted and so vast that she felt suddenly dwarfed and quite robbed of breath and coherent thought. There were people everywhere, milling about in the hall, moving up and down the great staircases. They were all dressed in rich fabrics and sparkled with jewels and gems. Lily had foolishly expected to walk up to a closed door and knock on it, and he would answer it.

She wished suddenly that she had allowed Captain Harris to write his letter and had awaited a reply. What she had done instead no longer seemed a wise course at all.

Several liveried, white-wigged servants stood about on duty. One of them was hurrying toward her, she saw in some relief. She had been feeling invisible and conspicuous all at the same time.

"Out of here immediately!" he commanded, keeping his voice low, attempting to move her back toward the doors without actually pushing her. He was clearly trying not to draw attention to himself or to her. "If you have business here, I will direct you to the servants' entrance. But I doubt you do, especially at this time of night."

"I wish to speak with the Earl of Kilbourne," Lily said. She never thought of him by that name. She felt as if she were asking for a stranger.

"Oh, do you now?" The servant looked at her with withering scorn. "If you have come here to beg, be off with you before I summon a constable."

"I wish to speak with the Earl of Kilbourne," she said again, standing her ground.

The servant set his white-gloved hands on her shoulders, obviously intending to move her backward by force after all. But another man had glided into place beside him, a man dressed all in black and white, though he did not have the same sort of splendor as other gentlemen who were in the hall and on the stairs. He must be a servant too, Lily guessed, though superior to the first one.

"What is it, Jones?" he asked coldly. "Is she refusing to leave quietly?"

"I wish to speak to the Earl of Kilbourne," Lily told him.

"You may leave of your own volition now," the man in black told her with quiet emphasis, "or be taken up for vagrancy five minutes from now and thrown in jail. The choice is yours, woman. It makes no difference to me. Which is it to be?"

Lily opened her mouth again and drew breath. She had come at the wrong time, of course. Some grand sort of entertainment was in progress. He would not thank her for appearing now. Indeed, he might not thank her for coming at all. Now that she had seen all this, she began to understand the impossibility of it all. But what else could she do? Where else could she go? She closed her mouth.

"Well?" the superior servant asked.

"Trouble, Forbes?" another, far more cultured voice asked, and Lily turned her head to see an older gentleman with silver hair and a lady in purple satin with matching plumed turban on his arm. The lady had a ring on each finger, worn over her glove.

"Not at all, your grace," the servant called Forbes answered with a deferential bow. "She is just a beggar woman who has had the impudence to wander in here. She will be gone in a moment."

"Well, give her sixpence," the gentleman said, looking with a measure of kindness at Lily. "You will be able to buy bread for a couple of days with it, girl."

With a sinking heart Lily decided it was the wrong moment in which to stand her ground. She was so close to the end of her journey and yet seemingly as far away as ever. The servant in black was fishing in a pocket, probably for a sixpenny piece.

"Thank you," she said with quiet dignity, "but I did not come here for charity."

She turned even as the superior servant and the gentleman with the cultured voice spoke simultaneously and hurried from the hall, down the steps, along the terrace, and across a downward sloping lawn. She could not face that dark driveway again.

The light of the moon led her onward to a narrow path that sloped downward at a sharper angle through more trees though these did not completely hide the light. She would go down far enough, Lily decided, that she was out of sight of the house.

The path steepened still more and the trees thinned out until the pathway was flanked only by the dense and luxuriant growth of ferns. She could hear water now—the faint elemental surging of the sea and the rush of running water closer at hand. It was a waterfall, she guessed, and then she could see it gleaming in the moonlight away to her right—a steep ribbon of water falling almost sheer down a cliff face to the valley below and the stream that flowed toward the sea. And at the foot of the waterfall, what appeared to be a small cottage.

Lily did not turn up the valley toward it. There was no light inside and she would not have approached it even if there had been. To her left she could see a wide, sandy beach and the moonlight in a sparkling band across the sea.

She would spend the night just above the beach, she decided. And tomorrow she would return to Newbury Abbey.

***

When Lily awoke early the following morning, she washed her face and hands in the cold water of the stream and tidied herself as best she could before climbing the path back up over the fern-draped slope and through the trees to the bottom of the cultivated lawn.

She stood looking up at what appeared to be stables with the house beyond. Both looked even more massive and forbidding in the morning light than they had appeared last night. And there was a great deal of activity going on. There were numerous carriages on the driveway close to the stables, and grooms and coachmen bustled about everywhere. Last night's party guests must have stayed overnight and were preparing to leave, Lily guessed. It was clearly still not the right time to make her call. She must wait until later.

She was hungry, she discovered after she had returned to the beach, and decided to fill in some time by walking into the village, where perhaps she could buy a small loaf of bread. But when she arrived there, she found that it was by no means the quiet, deserted place it had been the evening before. The square was almost surrounded by grand carriages—perhaps some of the very ones she had seen earlier by the stables of the abbey. The green itself was crowded with people. The doors of the inn were wide open, and a great bustling in and out discouraged Lily from approaching. She could see that the gateway to the church was tightly packed with an even denser throng than the green held.

"What is happening?" she asked a couple of women who stood on the edge of the green close to the inn, both staring in the direction of the church, one of them on tiptoe.

They turned their heads to stare at her. One looked her up and down, recognized her as a stranger, and frowned. The other was more friendly.

"A wedding," she said. "Half the quality of England is here for the wedding of Miss Edgeworth to the Earl of Kilbourne. I don't know how they squeezed them all inside the church."

The Earl of Kilbourne! Again the name sounded like that of a stranger. But he was not a stranger. And the meaning of what the woman had just said struck home. He was getting married? Now? Inside that church? The Earl of Kilbourne was getting married?

"The bride just arrived," the second woman added, having thawed to the idea of having a stranger for an audience. "You missed her, more's the pity. All in white satin, she is, with a scalloped train and a bonnet and netting that covers her face. But if you stand here a spell, you will see them coming out as soon as the church bells start to ring. The carriage will come around this way before going back around and through the gates, I daresay, so that we can all wave and get a good look at them. Leastways that is what Mr. Wesley says—the innkeeper, you know."

But Lily did not wait for further explanations. She was hurrying across the green, threading her way among the people standing there. She was half running by the time she reached the church gateway.

***

Neville could tell by the flurry of movement at the back of the church that Lauren had arrived with Baron Galton, her grandfather. There was a stirring of heightened expectation from the pews, which held all the flower of the ton as well as a number of the more prominent local families. Several heads turned to look back, though there was nothing to see yet.

Neville felt as if someone had tightened his cravat at the neck and dropped a handful of frisky butterflies into his stomach, both of which afflictions had been with him to varying degrees since before the early breakfast he had been unable to consume, but he turned eagerly enough for his first sight of his bride. He caught a glimpse of Gwen, who was stooping apparently to straighten the train of Lauren's gown. The bride herself stood tantalizingly just out of sight.

The vicar, splendidly robed for the occasion, stood just behind Neville's shoulder. Joseph Fawcitt, Marquess of Attingsborough, the male cousin closest to him in age and always a close friend, cleared his throat from his other side. Every head, Neville was aware, had turned now to look toward the back entrance in expectation of the appearance of the bride. Of what importance was a mere bridegroom, after all, when the bride was about to appear? Lauren was exactly on time, he guessed with a private half smile. It would be unlike her to be late by even a single minute.

He shifted his feet as the movements at the back of the church became more pronounced and there was even the sound of voices inappropriately loud for the interior of a church. Someone was telling someone else with sharp urgency that he or she could not go in there.

And then she stepped through the doorway into the view of those gathered inside the church. Except that she was alone. And not dressed as a bride but as beggar woman. And she was not Lauren. She took a few hurried steps forward along the nave before stopping.

It was a hallucination brought on by the occasion, some remote part of his mind told Neville. She looked startlingly, achingly familiar. But she was not Lauren. His vision darkened about the edges and sharpened down the center. He looked along the nave of the church as down a long tunnel—or as through the eyepiece of a telescope—at the illusion standing there. His mind refused to function normally.

Someone—two men actually, he observed almost dispassionately—grabbed her arms and would have dragged her back out of sight. But the sudden terror that she would disappear, never to be seen again, released him from the paralysis that had held him in its grip. He held up one staying arm. He did not hear himself speak, but everyone turned sharply to look at him and he was aware of the echo of someone's voice saying something.

He took two steps forward.

"Lily?" he whispered. He tried to restore reality and passed a hand swiftly over his eyes, but she was still there, a man holding to each of her arms and looking his way as if for instructions. There was a coldness in his head, in his nostrils.

"Lily? " he said again, louder this time.

"Yes," she said in the soft, melodic voice that had haunted his dreams and his conscience for many months after her—

"Lily," he said, and he felt curiously detached from the scene. He heard his words over the buzzing in his ears as if someone else were speaking them. "Lily, you are dead!"

"No," she said, "I did not die."

He was still seeing her down the tunnel of his hallucination. Only her. Only Lily. He was unaware of the church, unaware of the people stirring uneasily in the pews, of the vicar clearing his throat, of Joseph setting a hand on his sleeve, of Lauren standing in the doorway behind Lily, her eyes wide with the dawning premonition of disaster. He clung to the vision. He would not let it go. Not again. He would not let her go again. He took another step forward.

The vicar cleared his throat once more and Neville finally comprehended that he was in All Souls Church, Upper Newbury, on his wedding day. With Lily standing in the aisle between him and his bride.

"My lord," the vicar said, addressing him, "do you know this woman? Is it your wish that she be removed so that we may proceed with the wedding service?"

Did he know her?

Did he know her?

"Yes, I know her," he said, his voice quiet, though he was fully aware now that every single wedding guest hung upon his words and heard him clearly. "She is my wife."

***

The silence, though total, lasted only a very few seconds.

"My lord?" The vicar was the first to break it.

There was a swell of sound as half the people present, it seemed, tried to talk at once while the other half tried just as loudly to shush them so that they would not miss anything of significance. The Countess of Kilbourne was on her feet in the front pew. Her brother, the Duke of Anburey, rose too and set a hand on her arm.

"Neville?" the countess said in a shaking voice, which nevertheless was distinctly audible above the general buzz of sound. "What is this? Who is this woman?"

"I should have had her taken up for vagrancy last night," the duke said in his usual authoritative voice, trying to take charge of the situation. "Calm yourself, Clara. Gentlemen, remove the woman, if you please. Neville, return to your place so that this wedding may proceed."

But no one paid his grace any heed, except the vicar. Everyone had heard what Neville had said. There had been no ambiguity in his words.

"With all due respect, your grace," the Reverend Beckford said, "this wedding may not proceed when his lordship has just acknowledged this woman as his wife."

"I married Lily Doyle in Portugal," Neville said, never taking his eyes from the beggar woman. The shushing voices became more insistent and a hush so total that it was almost loud fell again on the congregation. "I watched her die less than twenty-four hours later. I reached her side no more than a few minutes after that. I stood over her dead body—you were dead, Lily. And then I was shot in the head."

Everyone knew that for over a month before his return to England Neville had lain in a hospital in Lisbon, suffering from a head wound sustained during an ambush among the hills of central Portugal when he had been leading a winter scouting party. Amnesia and persistent dizziness and headaches had prevented his return to his regiment even after the wound itself had healed. And then news of his father's death had reached him and brought him home.

But no one had heard of any marriage.

Until now.

And clearly the woman he had married was not dead.

Someone in the church had already realized the full implications of the fact. There was a strangled cry from the back of the church, and those who looked back saw Lauren standing there, her face as pale now as the veil that covered it, her hands clawing at the sides of her gown and sweeping up the train behind it before she turned and fled, followed closely by Gwendoline. The church doors opened and then closed again rather noisily.

"I am sorry," Lily said. "I am so very sorry. I was not dead."

"Neville!" Lady Kilbourne was clinging with both gloved hands to the back of the pew.

Sound swelled again.

But Neville held up both hands, palm out.

"I beg your pardon, all of you," he said, "but clearly this is not a matter for public airing. Not yet at least. I hope to offer a full explanation before the day is out. In the meantime, it is obvious that there is to be no wedding here this morning. I invite you all to return to the abbey for breakfast."

He lowered his arms and strode down the aisle, his right hand reaching out toward Lily. His eyes were on hers.

"Lily?" he said. "Come."

His hand closed on hers and clamped hard about it. He scarcely broke stride, but continued on his way toward the outer door, Lily at his side.

***

Neville threw the doors wide, and they stepped out into blinding sunshine and were met by a sea of faces and a chorus of excited, curious voices.

He ignored them. Indeed, he did not even see or hear them. He strode down the churchyard path, through the gateway, between crowds of people who opened a way for him by hastily stepping back upon one another, and around to the gates into the park of Newbury Abbey.

He said nothing to the woman at his side. He could not yet trust the reality of what had happened, of what was happening, even though he held tightly to the apparition and could feel her small hand in his own.

He was remembering…

PART II

Memory: One Night for Love

Chapter 3

Lily Doyle is sitting alone on a small rocky promontory jutting out over a deep valley high in the barren hills of central Portugal. It is December and chilly.

She is wrapped in a shabby old army cloak that she has cut down to size. But it cannot hide the fact that she has been transformed over the past year or so from a lithe, coltish girl into a heart-stoppingly beautiful woman. Her dark-blond hair waves loose down her back to below her waist. The wind is blowing it out behind her and hopelessly tangling it. Her slender arms, covered by the sleeves of her faded blue cotton dress, clasp her updrawn knees. Her feet, despite the cold, are bare. How can she feel the earth, how can she feel life, she once explained, if she is always shod?

Neville Wyatt, Major Lord Newbury, is reclining at his ease on the ground some distance behind her, a tin mug of hot tea cupped in both hands. He is watching her. He cannot see her face, but he can imagine its expression as she gazes down over the valley below, up at the cloud-dotted sky and the lone bird wheeling there. It will be dreamy, serene. No, those descriptions are too passive. There will be a glow in her face, a light in her eyes.

Lily sees beauty wherever she goes. While the men of the Ninety-fifth and the women who follow in its train curse the Iberian landscape, the weather, the endless marches, the dreary camps, the food, one another, Lily can always find something of beauty. But she is not resented for her eternal cheerfulness. She is a favorite with all who know her.

Until recently she has been a girl. She is a girl no longer.

Neville tosses the dregs of his tea onto the grass beside him and gets to his feet. He looks about, first at the company of men he has brought with him on a winter scouting expedition to make sure that the French are observing the unwritten truce of the season and are keeping behind their lines in Spain or else inside the border fortress of Ciudad Rodrigo, which the British forces will besiege as soon as spring comes.

He squints across to the hills opposite and down into the valley. All is quiet. He has not expected otherwise. If there had been any real danger, he would never have allowed Corporal Geary to bring his wife or Sergeant Doyle to bring his daughter. It is a routine mission and has been unexpectedly pleasant—this is normally the rainy season. Tomorrow they will return to base camp. But tonight they will camp where they are.

He can no longer resist. He strolls toward the promontory on which Lily sits and makes a show when he is standing beside her of shielding his eyes and sweeping his gaze over the valley again. She looks up and smiles. He is not quite sure when her looks and smiles started to make his heart skip a beat. He has tried to continue seeing her as the young daughter—the too-young daughter—of his sergeant. But he has been failing miserably of late. She is eighteen, after all.

"You have observed no French regiment tiptoeing stealthily along the valley floor, Lily?" he asks without looking down at her.

She laughs. "Two of them actually, sir," she says. "One cavalry and one infantry. Was I supposed to have said something?"

"No, no." He grins down at her, and there—it happens again. His heart turns over when he sees the eager delight in her face. "It is not important. Not unless old Boney was with them."

She laughs again. He wonders as he seats himself beside her, one leg stretched out, one arm draped over the raised knee of the other, if she knows the effect she has on men—on him. He is not by any means the only one who has noticed that she has become a woman.

"I suppose, Lily," Neville says, "you can see some beauty in this godforsaken place?"

"Oh, not godforsaken," she says earnestly, as he knew she would. "Even bare rocks have a certain majesty that inspires awe. But see?" She lifts one slender arm and points. "There is grass. There are even a few trees. Nature cannot be repressed. It will burst through."

"They are sorry apologies for trees." He looks to where she is pointing. "And the gardener at Newbury Abbey would consign that grass to the rubbish heap without a second thought."

When she turns toward him and her eyes focus on his, he finds himself drawing a slow breath, half of him wanting to edge farther back away from her, the other half wanting to close the distance until…

"What is the garden like there?" she asks him, an unmistakable wistfulness in her voice. "Papa says there is nothing so lovely as an English garden."

"Green," he says. "A lush, vibrant green that cannot be adequately described in words, Lily. Grass and trees and flowers of every color and description. Masses of them. Especially roses. The air is heavy with their perfume in summer."

He rarely feels nostalgia for home. Sometimes the realization makes him feel guilty. It is not that he does not love his mother and father. He does. But he was brought up to take over his father's role as earl one day, and he was brought up to marry Lauren, his stepcousin, who was raised at Newbury Abbey with him and was as dear to him as his sister Gwen was. The time came when he was stifled by his father's loving plans for him, desperate for a life of his own, for action, adventure, freedom…

He has hurt his parents by becoming a military man. He suspects he has done more than hurt Lauren, having informed her as tactfully as he could when he left that he would not promise to be back soon, that he would not expect her to wait for him.

"How I would love to see them and smell them." Lily has closed her eyes and is inhaling slowly as if she actually can smell the roses at Newbury.

"You will one day." Without thinking, he reaches out to draw free with one finger a strand of her hair that has blown into the corner of her mouth. Her skin is smooth—and warm. The hair is wet. He feels raw desire stab into his groin and withdraws the finger hastily.

She smiles at him. But then she does something Lily rarely does. She blushes and her eyes waver and then look away rather jerkily to the valley again.

She knows.

He is saddened by the thought. Lily has always been his friend, ever since Doyle became his sergeant four years ago. She has a lively mind and a delightful sense of humor and a natural refinement of manner despite the fact that she is illiterate. She has talked to him about her life, especially her years in India, where her mother died, and about people and experiences they have in common. She once argued with him when he found her on a battlefield after the fighting was over and scolded her for tending a wounded and dying French soldier. A man is simply a man, & person, she told him. She has always been uncowed by his rank even though, like her father and all the men, she calls him "sir." He knelt beside her and gave the Frenchman a drink from his own canteen.

But things have changed. Lily has grown up. And he desires her. She knows it. He will have to withdraw from the friendship because Lily is off limits to him as anything more than a friend. She is Sergeant Doyle's daughter, and he respects Doyle even though they are from different social classes. But besides that, Lily is an innocent, and it is his duty to protect her honor, not take it. And she too, of course, is of a different class from his own. Such things do matter in the real world, unfortunately. Rebel as he still is, he has nevertheless not broken with his own world and never will. He has too much of a sense of duty for that. He is a gentleman, an officer, a viscount, a future earl.

He can never be Lily's lover.

"Lily," he asks, trying to cling to the friendship, to suppress the other, unwelcome feelings, "what do you look forward to? What will you do with your life? What are your dreams?"

She cannot stay with her father forever. What does the future hold for her? Marriage to a soldier chosen carefully for her by her father? No. He wishes he has not thought it.

She does not immediately answer. But when he turns his head to look at her again, he sees that she is gazing upward and that her wonderful dreamy smile is lighting her face again.

"Do you see that bird, sir?" He turns his head and glances at it. "I want to be like that. Soaring high. Strong. Free. Borne by the wind and friend of the sky. I do not know what will become of me. One day you will be gone, and one day…"

But her words trail off and her smile fades and what she has just said hangs in the air before them like a tangible thing.

Then the silence is broken by the crack of a single gunshot.

***

One of the pickets has caught sight of a rabbit out of the corner of his eye and has imagined a ravenous French host. That is Neville's first thought. But he cannot take a chance. His years as an officer have trained him to act from instinct as much as from reason. It works faster, and sometimes it saves lives.

He jumps to his feet and hauls Lily to hers. They are running back to the company, Neville protectively hunched over her from behind, even as Sergeant Doyle bellows to her and everyone else is grabbing rifles and ammunition. Neville checks for his sword at his side even as he runs. He yells orders to his men, Lily forgotten as soon as he has her back in the relative safety of the makeshift camp.

He has misjudged the picket. It is not a rabbit that has caught his attention; it is a French scouting party. But the warning shot was a mistake. Without it, the French probably would have gone peacefully on their way even if they had spotted the British soldiers. Nothing can be gained for either side by engaging in a fight. But the shot has been fired.

The ensuing skirmish is short and sharp but relatively harmless. It would have been entirely so if a new recruit in Neville's company had not frozen with terror on the bare hillside, a motionless, open target for the French. Sergeant Doyle, cursing foully, goes to his assistance and takes the bullet intended for the boy through his own chest.

The fighting is all over five minutes after it has started. With a derisive cheer the French go on their way.

"Leave him where he is!" Neville shouts, racing across the slope of the hill toward his felled sergeant. "Fetch the first-aid box."

But it will be useless. He sees that as soon as he is close. There is only a small spot of blood on the dark-green fabric of his sergeant's coat, but there is death in his face. Neville has seen it in too many faces to be mistaken. And Doyle knows it too.

"I am done for, sir," he says faintly.

"Fetch the damned first-aid box!" Neville goes down on one knee beside the dying man. "We will have you patched up in no time at all, Sergeant."

"No, sir." Doyle clutches at his hand with fingers that are already cold and feeble. "Lily."

"She is safe. She is unhurt," Neville assures him.

"I should not have brought her out here." The man's eyes are losing focus. His breath is coming in rasping gasps. "If they attack again…"

"They will not." Neville's fingers close about those of his sergeant. He gives up the pretense. "I will see Lily safely back to camp tomorrow."

"If she is taken prisoner…"

It is highly unlikely even on the remote chance that there will be another encounter, another skirmish. The French will surely be as little eager for a confrontation at this time of year as the British. But if she is, of course, her fate will be dreadful indeed. Rape…

"I will see that she is safe." Neville leans over the man who has been his respected comrade, even his friend, despite the differences in their rank. His heart is involved in this death more than his head. "She will not be harmed even if she is taken prisoner. You have my word as a gentleman on it. I will marry her today."

As the wife of an officer and a gentleman, Lily will be treated with honor and courtesy even by the French. And the Reverend Parker-Rowe, the regimental chaplain, who finds life in camp as tedious as the most restless soldier, has come with the scouting party.

"She will be my wife, Sergeant. She will be safe." He is not quite sure the dying man understands. The cold fingers still pluck weakly at his own.

"My pack back at the base," Sergeant Doyle says. "Inside my pack…"

"It will be given to Lily," Neville promises. "Tomorrow, when we arrive safely back at camp."

"I should have told her long ago." The voice is becoming fainter, less distinct. Neville leans over him. "I should have told him. My wife… God forgive me. She loved her. We both did. We loved her too much to…"

"God forgives you, Sergeant." Where the devil is the chaplain? "And no one could ever have doubted your devotion to Lily."

Parker-Rowe and Lily arrive at the same moment, the latter hurtling down the hill at reckless speed. Neville gets to his feet and stands to one side as Lily takes his place beside her father, gathering his hand into both her own, bending low over him, her hair a curtain about his face and her own.

"Papa," she says. She whispers his name over and over again and remains as she is for several minutes while the chaplain murmurs prayers and the company stands about, helpless in the presence of death and grief.

***

After they have buried Sergeant Doyle on the hillside where he died, Neville orders the camp moved two or three miles farther on. He walks on one side of a silent, frozen-faced Lily while Parker-Rowe walks on the other side. He has already spoken with the chaplain.

Lily has not wept. She has not spoken a word since Neville took her by the shoulders and raised her to her feet and told her gently what she already knew—that her father was gone. She is accustomed to death, of course. But one is never prepared for the death of a loved one.

"Lily," Neville says in the same gentle voice he used earlier, "I want you to know that your father's last thoughts were of you and your safety and your future."

She does not answer him.

"I made him a promise," he tells her. "A gentleman's promise. Because he was my friend, Lily, and because it was something that I wanted to do anyway. I promised him that I would marry you today so that you will have the protection of my name and rank for the rest of this journey and for the rest of your life."

There is still no response. Has he really made such a promise? A gentleman's promise? Because it was what he wanted? Has he wanted to be forced into doing something impossible so that it can be made possible after all? It is impossible for him, an officer, an aristocrat, a future earl, to marry an enlisted man's humble and illiterate daughter. But doing so has now become an obligation, a gentleman's obligation. He feels a strange welling of exultation.

"Lily," he asks her, bending his head to look into her pale, expressionless face—so unlike her usual self, "do you understand what I am saying to you?"

"Yes, sir." Her voice is flat, toneless.

"You will marry me, then? You will be my wife?" The moment seems unreal, as do all the events of the past two hours. But there is a sense of breathless panic. Because she might refuse? Because she might accept?

"Yes," she says.

"We will do it as soon as we have made camp again then," he says.

It is unlike Lily to be so passive, so meek. Is it fair to her…

But what is the alternative? A return to England, to relatives he knows she has never met? Marriage to an enlisted soldier of her own social rank? No, that is an unbearable thought. But it is Lily's life.

"Look at me, Lily," he commands, no longer gently, using the voice that she, as well as all the men under his command, obeys instinctively. She looks. "You will be my wife within the hour. Is it what you want?"

"Yes, sir." Her eyes stare dully back into his before he looks over her head and locks eyes with the chaplain.

It will be so, then. Within the hour. The great impossibility. The obligation.

Again the panic.

Again the exultation.

***

The marriage service is conducted before the whole company and is officially witnessed by Lieutenant Harris and the newly promoted Sergeant Rieder. The gathered men seem not to know whether to cheer or to maintain the subdued solemnity they have carried from Sergeant Doyle's funeral three hours ago. Led by the lieutenant, they applaud politely and give three cheers for their newly married major and for the new Viscountess Newbury.

The new viscountess herself appears totally detached from the proceedings. She goes quietly off to help Mrs. Geary prepare the evening meal. Neville does not stop her or mention the fact that a viscountess must expect to be waited upon. He has duties of his own to attend to.

***

It is dark. Neville has checked on the pickets and the schedule for the night watch.

He will remain in the army, he has decided. He will make a permanent career of it. In the army he and Lily can be equals. They can share a world with which they are both familiar and comfortable. He will no longer feel pulled in two directions as he has since he left Newbury.

They would not want him back there now anyway. Not with Lily. She is beautiful. She is everything that is grace and light and joy. He is in love with her. More than that, he loves her. But she can never be the Countess of Kilbourne, except perhaps in name. Cinderellas are fine in the pages of a fairy tale and might expect to live happily ever after with their princes. In real life things do not work that way.

He is glad he has married Lily. He feels as if a load has been lifted from his soul. She will be his world, his future, his happiness. His all.

His tent, he notices, has been set up a tactful distance away from the rest of the camp. She is standing alone outside it, looking off into the moonlit valley.

"Lily," he says softly as he approaches.

She turns her head to look at him. She says nothing, but even in the dim moonlight he can see that the glazed look of shock has gone from her eyes. She looks at him with awareness and understanding.

"Lily." Everything they say now is in whispers so that they will not be overheard. "I am so sorry. About your father."

He lifts one hand and touches the tips of his fingers lightly to one of her cheeks. He has thought about this. He will not force himself on her tonight. She must be allowed time to grieve for her father, to adjust to the new conditions of her life. She still says nothing, but she raises one hand and sets it against the back of his, drawing his palm fully against her cheek.

"I ought to have said no," she says. "I did know what you were asking of me. I pretended even to myself that I did not so that I would not have to refuse you and face an empty future. I am sorry."

"Lily," he says, "I did it because I wanted to."

She turns her head and sets her lips against his palm. She closes her eyes and says nothing.

Lily. Ah, Lily, is it possible…

"You take the tent," he tells her. "I will sleep on the ground here. You must not worry. I will keep you quite safe."

But she opens her eyes and gazes at him in the moonlight. "Did you really want to?" she asks him. "Did you really want to marry me?"

"Yes." He wishes he could retrieve his hand. He is not made of stone.

"You asked me what my dream was," she tells him. "How could I tell you then? But I can tell you now. It was this. Just this. My dream."

He touches his mouth to hers and wonders while he still can if they have an audience.

"Lily," he says against her mouth. "Lily."

"Yes, sir."

"Neville," he tells her. "Say it. Say my name. I want to hear you saying it."

"Neville," she says, and it sounds like the most tender, the most erotic of endearments. "Neville. Neville."

"Will I share the tent with you, then?" he asks her.

"Yes." There can be no mistaking that she means it, that she wants him. "Neville. My beloved."

Surely only Lily could utter such a word without sounding theatrical.

It seems strange to him that they are about to consummate a marriage when they buried his comrade, her father, a mere few hours ago. But he has had enough experience with death to know that life must reaffirm itself immediately after in the survivors, that living on is an integral part of the grieving process.

"Come then," he says, stooping to open the flap of the small tent. "Come, Lily. Come, my love."

***

They make love in near silence since there undoubtedly are listeners enough eager to hear grunts of pleasure, cries of pain. And they make love slowly so as not to cause any undue shaking of the tent's flimsy structure. And they make love fully clothed except in essential places, and covered by their two cloaks so that they will not be chilled by the December night.

She is innocent and ignorant.

He is eager and experienced and desperate to give her pleasure, terrified of giving her pain.

He kisses her, touches her with gentle, exploring, worshipful hands, first through her clothing, then beneath it, feathering touches over her warm, silken flesh, cupping her small, firm breasts, teasing his thumb across their stiffening crests, sliding gentle, caressing fingers down into the moist heat between her thighs, touching, parting, arousing.

She holds him. She does no caressing of her own. She makes no sound except for quickened breathing. But he knows that she is one with his desire. He knows that even in this she is finding beauty.

"Lily…"

She opens to him at the prodding of his knees and wraps herself about him at the bidding of her own instincts. She croons soft endearments to him—mostly his own name—as he mounts her, surprising himself with his own sobs as he does so. She is small and tight and very virgin. The barrier seems unbreakable and he knows he is hurting her. And then it is gone and he eases inward to his full length. Into soft, wet heat and the involuntary contraction of her muscles.

She speaks to him in a soft whisper against his ear.

"I always knew," she tells him, "that this would be the most beautiful moment of my life. This. With you. But I never expected it to happen."

Ah, Lily. I never knew.

"My sweet life," he tells her. "Ah, my dear love."

But he can no longer think only of not hurting his bride. His desire, his need, pulses like a drumbeat through every blood vessel in his body and focuses as exquisite pain in his groin and the part of himself that is sheathed in her. He withdraws to the brink of her and presses deep again, hears her gasp of surprise and surely of pleasure too, and withdraws and presses deep.

He holds the rhythm steady for as long as he is able both for her sake and his own, resisting the urge to release into pleasure too soon, before she can learn that intimacy consists of more than simple penetration.

She lies relaxed beneath him. Not out of distaste or shock or passive submission. He would know. Even if she were not making quiet sounds of satisfaction to the rhythm, he would know. She is enjoying what is happening. He finds her mouth with his own and it is warm, open, responsive.

"My love," he tells her. "This is what happens. Ah, you are beautiful, Lily. So very beautiful."

He can hold back no longer. He slows the rhythm, pressing deeper, pausing longer. He is enclosed by her, engulfed by her, part of her. Lily. My love. My wife. Flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone, heart of my heart.

He withdraws and delves deep again. Deeper. Beyond barriers. Beyond time or place. He releases deep into the eternity that is himself and Lily united.

He hears her whisper his name.

They have only a few miles to go before reaching the base camp. But there is a narrow pass to be negotiated before they get there. There can be no real danger of any French force being this far in front of its winter lines, but Neville is cautious. He sends men ahead to scout the hills. He arranges the line of his company so that he has the most dangerous position in front while Lieutenant Harris is at the rear and the rawest of his men as well as the chaplain and the two women are in the middle.

Lily is quiet today though no longer dazed. The reality of her father's death has begun to sink in. She has begun to grieve. But she made love with him for a second time in the early-morning darkness before he got up, and she twined her arms about his neck and told him that she loved him, that she had always loved him from the first moment she saw him, perhaps even before that, before her birth, before time and creation. He had laughed softly and told her that he adored her.

She is wearing a package on a cord about her neck. In the package is a copy of their marriage papers—the other copy will be duly registered by Parker-Rowe when they return to camp. Lily's package is a final precaution. Anyone opening it will see that she is the wife of a British officer and will treat her with the appropriate chivalry.

The French are clever. At least this particular company is. They have evaded detection by the advance British party. They allow the front of the British line to march through the pass and emerge on the other side before they attack the weak center.

Neville whips around at the sound of the first volley of shots from the hills. It seems to him that the world slows and his vision becomes a dark tunnel through which he observes Lily in the middle of the pass, throwing up her hands and tipping backward out of sight amid the smoke and the milling bodies of his trapped men.

She has been hit.

He calls her name.

"L-i-l-y!L-I-L-Y!"

Instinctively he acts like the officer he is, drawing his sword, bellowing out orders, fighting his way back into the killing field of the pass. Back to Lily.

Lieutenant Harris meanwhile has led his men from the rear up onto the hill. Within minutes the French are put at least to temporary flight. But during those minutes Neville has reached the middle of the pass and found Lily, who has blood on her chest. More blood than was on her father's yesterday.

She is dead.

He looks down at her slain body and falls to his knees beside her, his duty forgotten. His arms reach for her.

Lily. My love. My life. So briefly my life. For one night.

Only one night for love.

Lily!

He feels no pain from the bullet that grazes his head. The world blacks out for him as he falls senseless across Lily's dead body.

PART III

An Impossible Dream

Chapter 4

They did not proceed up the driveway as Lily had expected. They turned just inside the gates and were soon walking along an unpaved, wooded path. Neville neither spoke to her nor looked at her. His grip on her hand was painful. She had to half run to keep up with his long strides.

He was dazed, she knew, not quite conscious of where he was going or with whom. She did not try to break the silence.

In truth she was hardly less in shock herself. He had been about to get married. He had thought her dead—she knew that from Captain Harris. But it had been less than two years ago. He had been about to marry again. So soon after.

Lily had caught sight of his bride when she had burst into the church in a panic. She was tall and elegant and beautiful in white satin and lace. His bride. Someone from his own world. Someone whom perhaps he loved.

And then Lily had hurried past his bride and into the nave of the church. It had been like last night, like stepping into a different universe. But worse than last night. The church had been filled with splendidly, richly clad ladies and gentlemen, and they had all been looking back at her. She had felt their eyes on her even as her own had focused on the man who stood at the front of the church like a prince of fairy tales.

He was clothed in pale blue and silver and white. Lily had scarcely recognized him. The height, the breadth of shoulder, the strong, muscular physique were the same.

But this man was the Earl of Kilbourne, a remote English aristocrat. The man she remembered was Major Lord Newbury, a rugged officer with the Ninety-fifth Rifles.

Her husband.

The Major Newbury she remembered—Neville, as he had become to her on that last day—had always been careless of his appearance and impossibly attractive in his green and black regimentals, which were often shabby, often dusty or mud-spattered. His blond hair had always been close cropped. Today he was all immaculate elegance.

And he had been about to marry that beautiful woman from his own world.

He had thought Lily dead. He had forgotten about her. He had never spoken of her—that had been clear from everyone's reaction in the church. He had perhaps been ashamed to do so. Or she had meant so little to him that he had not thought to do so. His marriage to her had been contracted in haste because he had felt he owed it to her father. It had been dismissed as an incident not worth talking about.

Today was his wedding day—to someone else.

And she had come to put a stop to it.

"Lily." He spoke suddenly and his hand tightened even more painfully about hers. "It really is you. You really are alive." He was still looking straight ahead. His pace had not slackened.

"Yes." She stopped herself only just in time from apologizing, as she had done in the church. It would be so much better for him if she had died. Not that he was an unkind man. Never that. But—

"You were dead," he said, and she realized suddenly that the path was a short route to the beach where she had spent the night. They had left the trees behind them and were descending the hillside, brushing through the ferns at reckless speed. "I saw you die, Lily. I saw you dead with a bullet through your heart. Harris reported to me afterward that you had died. You and eleven others."

"The bullet missed my heart," she told him. "I recovered."

He stopped when they reached the valley floor and looked toward the waterfall, which knifed downward in a spectacular ribbon of bright foam over a fern-clad cliff to the pool below and the stream that flowed to the sea. The tiny thatched cottage that Lily had noticed the night before overlooked the pool. There was a pathway leading to its door, though there was no sign that the house was inhabited.

He turned in the opposite direction and strode toward the beach, taking her with him. Lily, who was feeling overwarm at the length and speed of their walk, pulled loose the ribbons of her bonnet with her free hand and let it fall to the sand behind her. She had lost hairpins during the night. The few that remained were not sufficient to the task of keeping her mane of curly, unruly hair confined on her head. It fell about her shoulders and down her back. She shook her head and allowed the breeze to blow it back from her face.

"Lily," he said, looking down at her for the first time since they had left the church. "Lily. Lily."

They were walking, not along the hard level sand of the beach, but down it. They stopped at the water's edge. If only they were still separated by the ocean's expanse, Lily thought. If only she had stayed in Portugal. It would have been better for both their sakes.

He would have married the other woman.

She would not have known that he had forgotten her so soon, that she had meant so little to him.

"You are alive." He had dropped her hand at last, but he turned to her now, gazed into her face with searching eyes, and lifted one hand. He hesitated before touching his fingertips to her cheek. "Lily. Oh, my dear, you are alive!"

"Yes." She had reached her journey's end. Or perhaps merely the beginning of another. He stood there in all the splendor of the Earl of Kilbourne.

***

Neville realized suddenly that he was standing on the beach, at the water's edge. He had no idea why he had come here of all places. Except that the house would soon be filled with guests again. And this was where he always came to be alone. To think.

But he was not alone now. Lily was with him. He was touching her. She was warm and alive. She was small and thin and pretty and shabby, her long hair blowing wildly in the wind.

She was—oh, God, she was Lily.

"Lily," he asked, and he squinted out to sea, though he did not really see either the water or the infinity beyond it, "what happened?"

He had been carried off unconscious from that pass. Lieutenant Harris had told him in the hospital that Lily and eleven of the men, including the chaplain, the Reverend Parker-Rowe, had died. But the company had been forced to make their escape carrying only their packs and their wounded with them. They had had to leave the dead and their belongings for the returning French to plunder and bury.

Guilt had gnawed at Neville in the year and a half since then. He had failed to protect his men from harm. He had failed Sergeant Doyle. He had failed Lily—his wife.

"They took me to Ciudad Rodrigo," she said, "and a surgeon dug the bullet out of me. It missed my heart by a whisker, he told me—it was the word he used. He spoke English. A few of them did. They were kind to me."

"Were they?" He turned his head and looked sharply down at her. "They found your papers, Lily? They treated you well? With respect?"

"Oh, yes," she said, looking up at him. He remembered then the large, guileless eyes as blue as a summer sky. They had not changed. "They were very kind. They called me 'my lady.' " She smiled fleetingly.

Relief made him feel slightly weak at the knees. The shock was beginning to wear off, he realized. He should be married now and on his way back to the abbey for breakfast—with Lauren, his wife. Instead he was standing on the beach in his wedding finery with—his wife. He felt a renewed wave of dizziness.

"They kept you in captivity and treated you well?" he said. "When and where did they release you, Lily? Why was I not informed? Or did you escape?"

Her gaze lowered to his chin. "They were attacked soon after we left Ciudad Rodrigo," she said. "By Spanish partisans. I was taken captive."

He felt further relief. He even smiled. "Then you were safe," he said. "The partisans are our allies. They escorted you back to the regiment? But that must have been months ago, Lily. Why did no one notify me?"

She was turning, he noticed, to look back up the beach toward the valley. Her hair blew forward over her shoulders, hiding her face from his gaze.

"They knew I was English," she said. "But they would not believe I was a prisoner. I was not confined, you see. And they would not believe that I was an officer's wife. I was not dressed like one. They thought I was with the French as a—as a concubine."

He felt as if his heart had performed a complete somersault in his chest. He opened his mouth to speak, but he could scarcely get the words out.

"But your papers, Lily…"

"The French had taken them and not returned them to me," she said.

He closed his eyes tightly and kept them closed. The Spanish partisans were notorious for the savagery with which they treated their French captives. How would they have treated a French concubine, even if she was English? How had she escaped horrible torture and execution?

He knew how.

He gasped air into his lungs. "You were with them… for a long time?" he asked. He did not wait for her answer. "Lily, did they…"

Had all of Doyle's worst fears been realized? And his own? But he did not need to hear the answer. It was pitifully obvious. There was no other possible answer.

"Yes," she said softly.

Silence stretched before she continued speaking. Somewhere a seagull was crying, and it was easy to imagine that the sound was mournful.

"After many months—seven—an English agent joined them for a few days and convinced them to let me go. I walked back to Lisbon. Nobody there would believe my story until by chance Captain Harris came to Lisbon on some business. He and Mrs. Harris were returning to London. They brought me with them. The captain wanted to write to you, but I would not wait. I came. I had to come. I needed to tell you that I was still alive. I tried last night when there was a p-party at the house, but they thought I was a beggar and wanted to give me sixpence. I am sorry it had to be this morning. I—I will not stay now that I have told you. If you will… pay my way on the stage, I will go… somewhere else. I think there is a way of ending a marriage for what I have done. If you have money and influence, that is, and I daresay you do. You must do it and then you can… continue with your plans."

To marry someone else. Lauren. She suddenly seemed like someone from another lifetime.

Lily was referring to divorce. For adultery. Because she had allowed herself to be raped as an alternative to torture and execution—if she had even been given the choice. Because she had set her face toward survival. And had survived.

Lily raped.

Lily an adulteress.

His sweet, lovely innocent.

"Lily." It was not his imagination that she was thinner. Her slender frame had used to have a lithe grace. Now it looked gaunt. "When did you last eat?"

It took her awhile to answer. "Yesterday," she said. "At noon. I have a little money. Perhaps I can buy a loaf of bread in the village."

"Come." He took her hand in his again. Hers was cold now and limp. "You need a warm bath and a change of clothes and a good meal and a long sleep. Do you have no belongings with you?"

"My bag," she said, looking down as if she expected it to appear suddenly in her empty hand. "I think I must have dropped it somewhere. I had it when I went into the village this morning. I was going to buy breakfast. And then they told me about—about your wedding."

"It will be found," he assured her. "It does not matter. I am going to take you home."

Into complications his mind could not even begin to contemplate.

***

"It is not that I think of you as a servant, Lily," Neville explained—the first words either of them had spoken since they left the beach, "but this way we may avoid the worst of the crowds."

The door through which they entered Newbury Abbey was not at the front. It was, Lily gathered, a servants' entrance. And the bare stone steps they ascended inside must be servants' stairs. They were deserted. The rest of the house certainly was not, if all the carriages that were before the stables and coach house and on the terrace were any indication. And there were people on the terrace too, standing together in small groups—some of those richly clad wedding guests who had been in the church.

Neville opened a door onto a wide corridor. It was carpeted and lined with paintings and sculptures and doors. They were in the main part of the house now, then. And there were three people there in conversation with one another, who stopped talking and gazed curiously at her and looked embarrassed and greeted Neville uncertainly. He nodded curtly to them but said not a word. Neither did Lily, whose hand was still in his firm clasp.

And then he opened one of the doors and released her hand in order to set his at the back of her waist to move her into the room beyond the door. It was a large, square, high-ceilinged room. There were gilded moldings all about the edges of the ceiling, she saw in one glance upward, and a painting on the ceiling that included fat, naked little babies with wings. Two long windows showed her that the room faced over the front of the house. It was a bedchamber, richly carpeted and sumptuously furnished. The bed was canopied and draped in heavy silk. The dusky pink and moss-green colors of the room's furnishings and draperies blended pleasingly together.

Lily had never seen anything half so grand in her life—except perhaps the great hall she had glimpsed the evening before.

"I shall have food and drink brought up immediately."

Neville said, striding across the room to pull on a tasseled strip of silk beside the bed, "and then I shall have hot water carried up to the dressing room for a bath. It should be possible to retrieve your bag, but for now I am sure a nightgown and a dressing gown can be found for you. You must sleep then, Lily. You look weary."

Yes, she was tired, she supposed. But weariness had been a condition of her life for so long that she hardly recognized it for what it was. She knew she was hungry, though she was not at all sure she would be able to eat. His tone was brisk and formal. It was not at all the joyful homecoming she had imagined—or the horrified rejection she had feared. He knew what had happened to her, yet he had brought her to the house, to this grand apartment.

"Is this your room?" she asked him. She did not know what to call him. "Neville" seemed too familiar, even though she was his wife. She would have felt comfortable calling him "sir," but he was no longer an officer and she was no longer a part of his regiment. She could not bring herself to call him "my lord." And so she called him nothing.

"It is the countess's room," he said. He nodded toward a door in the room she had not yet seen beyond. "You will find the dressing room through there."

The countess? The countess would be his wife or his mother. He would hardly have put her in his mother's room. That tall lady at the church was to have been his wife, his countess. But he had been unable to marry her because he was already married to herself, to Lily. That made her… the countess. Did it? She really had not thought of it before. She had been startled when her French captors had called her "my lady" and she had realized that she was Viscountess Newbury. But that had been a long, long time ago.

"It is to be my room?" she asked. "I am to stay, then?" She had never really thought beyond the end of the journey.

She had known deep down that an earl would surely rid himself of a sergeant's daughter at the slightest excuse—and the Earl of Kilbourne would have an excuse that was hardly slight. But she had tried to focus on the fact that the Earl of Kilbourne was also Major Lord Newbury. Her Major Newbury, the man she had always admired, trusted, adored. Neville. Her husband. Her lover. Her love. But she knew, standing in the countess's room, that she had never really expected a happily ever after. Only some sort of completion.

"Lily." He stepped toward her, and she could see that he was as uncertain and bewildered as she. More so, perhaps. He had had no warning of what was to happen to him this morning. "Let us not look beyond the moment. You are alive. You are here. And you are in the countess's room. To eat and to rest. Do both before we speak further."

"Yes. All right." Yes, she wanted oblivion more than anything else in this world. She did not know how to stay on her feet any longer, how to keep her eyes open, how to focus her mind on anything more than its need for sleep.

The door opened behind Lily and she turned to see a young girl in crisp black dress and white apron and mob cap, saucer-eyed and curtsying. Neville gave her instructions while Lily walked over to the window and gazed out with heavy-lidded eyes. He was ordering enough food to feed an army. And a hot bath—what an unbelievable luxury!

He came to stand behind her after the maid had left. "I will stay until the tray arrives," he said. "I shall leave you alone then while you eat. There will be water and night clothes awaiting you in the dressing room by the time you have finished. Then you must lie down and sleep. I shall come back for you later. We will talk then."

"Thank you, sir," she said, and immediately felt foolish.

She wondered suddenly if she had merely imagined that once upon a time, for one brief night, there had been a glorious flowering of love—strangely mingled with deep grief for her father. Both emotions had been shared with this man, this stranger who was her husband. Love—or what sometimes went by the name of love—had been so very ugly since that night that it was hard to believe it ever could be beautiful. But it had been. Once. Once in her life. With him—with Major Lord Newbury. With Neville.

It had been the most beautiful experience of her life. All the love she had stored secretly in her heart since she first knew him had culminated in that night of carnal passion. And she had believed—she had felt—that it was a shared love, though she had learned since that men were capable of passion without feeling one iota of love. They could even murmur endearments.

Had she imagined that Neville had felt both that night? In her naivete had she imagined it—or in the need she had felt during the months following that night to believe that once, for one short night, she had loved a man who had loved her in return?

The tray arrived while she was lost in memory and was set down on an elegant little table. Neville drew back a chair, and when Lily went toward it, he seated her and pushed the chair closer. There really was enough food for an army. She looked hungrily at a couple of boiled eggs while he poured her a cup of tea.

"I will leave you in privacy now," he said then, taking her right hand in both of his. "I can't express to you how glad I am that you did not die, Lily. I am glad you survived everything else." He raised her hand to his lips and kissed the backs of her fingers before turning and leaving the room and closing the door quietly behind him.

Was he glad? she wondered, staring after him. Apart from the fact that he was not a cruel man and would not wish for her death, was he glad! That she had survived, yes, perhaps. But that she had come back into his life to complicate it? Was he glad that it had happened through some ghastly coincidence on his wedding day to another woman?

How could he possibly be glad? Especially knowing the truth of what had happened to her.

Who was his intended bride? Lily wondered. She was beautiful. Lily had not had a good look at her, and her face had been covered by the veil of her bonnet, but she had given an impression of grace and elegance and beauty. Did he love her? Did she love him? Were they perfect for each other? Had they been minutes away from a happily ever after?

But such thoughts were pointless. And it was impossible to think when every thought was like a leaden weight pressing down on her eyelids. Lily picked up the cup of tea and sipped the warm liquid. She closed her eyes in sheer bliss.

If only, she thought, she had been able to recover her father's pack after she had returned to Lisbon. But far too much time had elapsed. It had probably been sent back to England, she was told eventually, to some surviving relative, unless it had been simply lost or destroyed. Papa had had a father and brother living somewhere—was it in Leicestershire? Lily did not know for sure, and she had never met them. Her father had been estranged from them. But he had told her over and over again as she grew up that if he were to die suddenly she must take his pack to a senior officer and have him look at the package inside. It was her key to a secure future, he had always said, just as the gold locket she had always worn was her talisman.

She supposed her father had been saving some of his wages for her all his life. She had no idea how much money there might have been in the packet. It probably would not have been enough to last long, but it might at least have got her back to England and into some decent employment. If she had been able to find it, she need not have come here to Newbury Abbey. Though she would have done so anyway. The only thought that had sustained her through her two captivities had been the thought of him and the hope of seeing him again. She had not really thought of the impossibility of it all until recently, after her arrival in England. And especially last evening, when she had seen and then entered his home and his world.

She was his wife—but she was also by strict definition an adulteress.

If she had found the pack and the money, she would have had an alternative now…

But just as she had finished eating one of the eggs and was biting into her second piece of toast, Lily closed her eyes tightly and fought a wave of panic. Her locket! It was in her missing bag. She had not worn it for a long time, as the chain had broken when Manuel ripped it from her neck. But by some miracle he had returned it to her when he released her. She had not let it out of her possession since—until this morning.

Would Neville find her bag? She would have rushed out herself in search of it, but she did not know that she would be able to find her way out of the house. And she might meet people on her way. No, she would have to trust him to find it for her.

But the thought of losing the last link with her father brought on a wave of nausea, and she could eat no more.

She got to her feet and crossed to the dressing room door, swaying with exhaustion as she did so. She turned the ornate handle gingerly.

Chapter 5

The Countess of Kilbourne had taken charge of a very embarrassing situation, having recovered somewhat from her shock at the church. The house guests would be coming for breakfast. She had given directions that it was to be served in the ballroom, as planned. As many obvious signs as possible that it had been intended as a wedding breakfast were to be removed—the white bows and the wedding cake, for example.

The ballroom was by no means full, but it was full enough for all that. Several of the guests, the countess included, had changed out of their wedding finery and wore clothes more suited to early afternoon. Despite what they might have talked about in and outside the church and during their return to the abbey, good manners prevailed at breakfast. Polite conversation was the order of the day. Any stranger wandering into the ballroom would scarcely have guessed that the meal in progress was to have been a wedding breakfast but the wedding itself had met with catastrophic disaster—or that both family members and guests were close to bursting with curiosity to know more.

The countess was composed and gracious. She set herself to conversing with her neighbors at table on a variety of topics and showed no outer sign of the acute distress she was feeling. Private and personal concerns must wait. She was not the Countess of Kilbourne for nothing.

This was the scene that greeted Neville's eyes when he entered the ballroom. But the artificiality of it all became apparent when an immediate hush fell on the gathering and all eyes turned his way. He became horribly aware of the fact that he had not changed his clothes—he had not thought of doing so. He was a bridegroom without a bride. He stood where he was just inside the ballroom doors and clasped his hands at his back.

"I am delighted to see that the meal is proceeding," he said. He looked about him, meeting the eyes of friends and relatives, and noting without surprise that there was no sign of either Lauren or Gwen. "I shall not disturb you for long. But naturally I owe you all a little more explanation than I was able to give at the church this morning. Indeed, I cannot recall what I said there."

The Marquess of Attingsborough, who had risen from his seat, perhaps to indicate to Neville the empty chair at his side, sat down again without saying anything.

Neville had not planned the speech. He did not know quite how much or how little to tell. But there was really no point in withholding anything. His mother was staring at him with blank-faced dignity. His uncle at her side was frowning. There were several servants present, including Forbes, the butler. But the servants had a right to know too, Neville supposed. He would not wait to dismiss them before speaking.

"I married Lily Doyle a few hours after her father, my sergeant, was killed," he said. "I married her to fulfill a dying promise to him to give her the protection of my name and rank in the event that she was captured by the French. The following day the company I led was indeed ambushed. My… wife was killed, or so both I and the lieutenant who reported to me afterward believed. I was carried back behind British lines with a severe head wound. But Lily survived as a French captive." Her captivity by the Spanish partisans he had no intention of sharing with anyone. "She was treated honorably as my wife and finally released. She returned to England with Captain and Mrs. Harris and came on alone to Newbury Abbey to be reunited with me."

No one, it seemed to Neville, had moved a muscle since he had begun to speak. He wondered if any of those gathered here had seen Lily last night or knew that she had been turned away from the abbey with the offer of sixpence because she had been mistaken for a beggar. He wondered how many were telling themselves that she was in reality the Countess of Kilbourne. It needed to be said.

"I will be honored to present my wife, my countess, to you all later," he said. "But understandably this would be somewhat overwhelming to her at present. Many of you know… Lauren as a friend and relative. Most of you—all of you—will be imagining her pain today. It is my hope that you will lay none of the blame for her suffering at—at my wife's door. She is innocent of any intention to cause either disruption or pain. I—Well." There was really no more to say.

"Of course she is, Nev," the Marquess of Attingsborough said briskly, but he was the only one to break the silence.

"I beg that you will excuse me now," Neville said. "Enjoy the meal, please. Does anyone know where Lauren is?" He closed his eyes briefly.

"She is at the dower house with Gwendoline, Neville," Lady Elizabeth told him. The dower house was where they had lived with the countess ever since the betrothal last Christmas. "Neither of them would admit me when I stopped there on my way back from church. Perhaps—"

But Neville merely bowed to her and left the room. This was not the time for thought or consultation or common sense. He had to go with the momentum of the moment or collapse altogether.

***

Neville was on his way downstairs when his uncle's voice called to him from the landing above. He looked up to see not only the duke, but his mother too, and Elizabeth.

"A private word with you, Kilbourne," his uncle said with stiff formality. "You owe it to your mother."

Yes, he did, Neville thought wearily. Perhaps he ought to have spoken with her first, before making a public appearance and a public statement in the ballroom. He just did not know the proper etiquette for a situation like this. He was not amused by the grim humor of the thought. He turned with a curt nod and led the way down to the library. He crossed the room and stood looking down at the unlit coals in the fireplace until he heard the door close and turned to face them.

"I suppose it did not occur to you, Neville," his mother said, some of the usual gracious dignity gone from her manner to be replaced by bitterness, "to inform your own mother of a previous marriage? Or to inform Lauren? This morning's intense humiliation might have been avoided."

"Calm yourself, Clara," the Duke of Anburey said, patting her shoulder. "I doubt it could have been, though the whole thing might have been somewhat less of a shock to you if Neville had been more honest about the past."

"The marriage was very sudden and very brief," Neville said. "I thought her dead and… well, I decided to keep that brief interlude in my life to myself."

Because he had been ashamed to admit that he had married the unlettered daughter of a sergeant even if she was already dead? It was a nasty possibility and one he hoped was not true. But how could he have explained the impulse that had made him do it? How could he have described Lily to them? How could he have explained that sometimes a woman could be so very special that it simply did not matter who she was or—more important—who she was not? He would have given the bare facts and they would have been secretly glad, relieved,

that she had died before she could become an embarrassment to them.

"I have been able to think only of somehow handling the dreadful disaster of this morning," the countess said, sinking down into the nearest chair and raising a lace-edged handkerchief to her lips, "and of what is to become of poor Lauren. I have not been able to think beyond. Neville, tell me she is not as dreadful a creature as she appeared to be this morning. Tell me it is only the clothes…"

"You heard the boy say she is a sergeant's daughter, Clara," the duke reminded her, taking up his stand at the window, his back to the room. "I daresay that fact speaks for itself. Who was her mother, Neville?"

"I did not know Mrs. Doyle," Neville replied. "She died in India when Lily was very young. There is no blue blood there, though, Uncle, if that is what you are asking. Lily is a commoner. But she is also my wife. She has my name and my protection."

"Yes, yes, that is all very well, Neville." His mother spoke impatiently. "But… Oh dear, I cannot think straight. How could you do this to us? How could you do it to yourself'? Surely your upbringing and education meant more to you than to—to marry a woman who looks for all the world like a vulgar beggar and is indeed a product of the lower classes." She stood up abruptly and swayed noticeably on her feet. "I have guests I am neglecting."

"Poor Lily," Elizabeth said, speaking for the first time. She was Neville's aunt, his father's sister, but she was only nine years his senior and he had never called her aunt. She was unmarried, not because she had never had offers, but because she had declared long ago that she would never marry unless she could find the gentleman who could convince her that the loss of her independence was preferable to keeping it—and she did not expect that ever to happen. She was beautiful, intelligent, and accomplished—and no one quite knew whether the Duke of Portfrey was more friend or beau to her. "We are forgetting her distress in a selfish concern for our own. Where is she, Neville?"

"Yes, where is she?" his mother repeated, her voice unusually petulant. "Not here, I suppose. There is not a single spare room at the abbey."

"There is one unoccupied room, Mama," Neville said stiffly. "She is in the countess's room—where she belongs. I left her there to have a meal and a bath and a sleep. I have given instructions that she is to be left undisturbed until I go up for her."

His mother closed her eyes and pressed the handkerchief to her lips again. The countess's room, formerly hers, was part of the suite of rooms that included the earl's bedchamber—Neville's own. He could almost see her coming to grips with the reality of the fact that Lily belonged there.

"Yes," Elizabeth said. "I am sure it is best for her to rest for a while. I look forward to making her acquaintance, Neville."

It was like Elizabeth, he thought, to be gracious, to take a situation as it was and somehow make something bearable of it.

"Thank you," he said.

His mother had pulled herself together again. "You will bring her down to tea later this afternoon, Neville," she told him. "There is no point in keeping her hidden, is there? I will meet her at the same time as the rest of the family. We will all behave as we ought toward your—your wife, you may rest assured."

Neville bowed to his mother. "I would expect no less of you, Mama," he said. "But excuse me now. I must go and see Lauren."

"You will be fortunate if she does not throw things at your head, Neville," Elizabeth warned him.

He nodded. "Nevertheless," he told her.

He left the house a couple of minutes later and set out on foot in the direction of the dower house, which was close to the gates into the park, set back from the driveway in the seclusion of the trees and its own private garden. He was well on his way before he realized that he was still wearing his wedding finery. But he would not go back to change. Perhaps he would never regain his courage if he did that.

He was about to face, he realized, one of the most difficult encounters of his life.

Lauren was not inside the dower house. She was out behind it, sitting on the tree swing, idly propelling herself back and forth with one foot. She was staring unseeingly at the ground ahead of her. Gwendoline was seated on the grass to one side of the swing. Both of them were still dressed for the wedding.

He would rather be anywhere else on earth, Neville thought just before his sister spotted him. They were two of the dearest people on earth to him, and he had done this to them. And there was no comfort to bring. Only a totally inadequate explanation.

Gwendoline jumped to her feet at sight of him and glared. "I hate you, Neville," she cried. "If you have come here to make her unhappier still, you may go away again—now! What do you mean by it? That is what you can explain to me. What did you mean by saying that dreadful woman is your wife?" She burst into noisy, undignified tears and turned her face sharply away.

Lauren had stopped swinging, but she did not turn around.

"Lauren?" Neville said. "Lauren, my dear?" He still did not know what he could say to her.

Her voice was steady when she spoke, but it was without tone too. "It is quite all right," she said. "It is perfectly all right. It was just a convenient arrangement after all, was it not, our marrying? Because we grew up together and were fond of each other and it was what Uncle and Grandpapa had always wanted. And you did tell me not to wait when you went away. You were quite fair and honest with me. You were not betrothed to me or even promised to me. You were quite free to marry her. I do not blame you at all."

He was appalled. He would have far preferred to have her rush at him, teeth bared, fingers curled into claws.

"Lauren," he said, "let me explain, if I may."

"There is nothing to explain," Gwendoline said angrily, having mastered her tears. "Is she or is she not your wife, Neville? That is all that matters. But you would not have lied in church for all to hear. She is your wife."

"Yes," Neville said.

"I hate her!" Gwendoline cried. "Shabby, ugly, low creature."

But Lauren would not participate. "We do not know her, Gwen," she said. "Yes, Neville. Tell me. Tell us. There must be a perfectly good explanation, I am sure. Once I understand, I will be able to accept it. Everything will be perfectly all right."

She was in shock, of course. In denial. Trying to convince herself that what had happened was not so disastrous after all but merely something bewildering that would be perfectly acceptable once she understood. The exquisitely scalloped and embroidered train of her wedding gown, Neville noticed, was trailing in the dust.

It was so typical of Lauren to react rationally rather than emotionally, even when there was no rational way to act. She had always been thus, always the good one among the three of them, the one to think of consequences, the one to be concerned about upsetting the adults. Her story partly explained her, of course. She had come to Newbury Abbey at the age of three when her mother, the widowed Viscountess Whitleaf, married the late earl's younger brother. She had stayed at the abbey when the newlyweds left on a wedding trip—from which they had never returned. There had been letters and a few parcels from various parts of the world for a number of years and then nothing. Not even word of their deaths.

Lauren's paternal relatives had made no move to take her back. Indeed, when she had written to them on her eighteenth birthday, she had had a curt response from the viscount's secretary to the effect that her acquaintance was not something his lordship sought. Lauren, Neville suspected, had never quite trusted her lovableness. And now there were these circumstances to confirm her in her low opinion of herself.

"I do not want to understand," Gwendoline said crossly. "And how can you sit there, Lauren, sounding so calm and forbearing and forgiving? You should be scratching Neville's eyes out." She began to sob again.

"Neville?" Lauren said, motionless once more. "I need to understand. Tell me about—about L-Lily."

"Lily!" Gwendoline said scornfully. "I hate that name. It is despicable."

"She was a sergeant's daughter," Neville explained. "She grew up with the regiment, living with it, moving about with it. She always did her share of the work and she was everyone's friend. The toughest of the men and the roughest of the women loved her. But she was her own person. There was something dreamlike, fairylike about her—I do not know quite how to describe that quality in her. She had been untouched by the ugliness of the life by which she was surrounded. She was eighteen when I—when I married her." He went on to give brief details of the circumstances of their marriage.

"And you loved her too," Lauren added when he had finished.

For her sake he wished he could deny it. Not that it would make any difference to essentials. He said nothing.

"That is no excuse," Gwendoline said. "You were not eighteen, Neville. You were a man. You should have known better. You should have had more of a sense of duty to your family and position than to marry a sergeant's daughter for such a stupid reason. Marriage is for life."

"I will have to learn to love her too," Lauren said as if Gwendoline had not spoken. "I am sure it will be possible. If you love her, Neville, then I…" But her words trailed away. She set the swing in motion with one foot.

Neville wondered if it would help her if he strode all the way to the swing, hauled her off it by both shoulders, and shook her soundly. But he remembered his own shock of a few hours before. He had walked all the way from the church to the water's edge on the beach without knowing he had even moved from the altar. He could not take the alternative to shaking her of lifting her off the swing into the sheltering comfort of his arms.

"Lauren," he said, "I am so very sorry, my dear. I wish there were more to say, something to comfort you, something to make you feel less… abandoned. I could say all sorts of meaningless things to assure you that eventually this will be in the past and… But they would not comfort now and would be presumptuous in me. Know, though, that you are loved by this family, which is yours as much as it is mine or Gwen's." Pompous, empty words despite their truth. He did not believe he had ever felt more helpless in his life.

"But nothing is ever going to be the same" Gwendoline cried. "When Vernon died and I came home a widow and then Papa died, I thought the world was at an end. But then you came back and we three were together again and I could see that you would marry Lauren and… But now everything is ended, shattered beyond repair."

Neville ran a hand through his hair. Lauren swung gently.

Gwendoline had married for love while he was away in the Peninsula. He had never met Viscount Muir. But it had been a short, tragic marriage, over in two years. First Gwen had had a dreadful riding accident that had caused a miscarriage and left her with a permanent limp after her broken leg had healed, and then just a year later, Muir had died in a fall through a broken banister from the balcony of his own home to the marble hall below. Gwen had fled to the familiar comfort of home rather than remain at her husband's house.

"And how I despise my own selfishness," Gwendoline said when no one responded to her words. "I am thinking of my own unhappiness when it is nothing to poor Lauren's. Oh, what a brute I am." She gathered up her skirts and dashed toward the house, avoiding Neville's outstretched arm as she passed him.

"Poor Gwen," Lauren said. "She wanted so very much to go back in time after Lord Muir's death, Neville. She wanted life to be as it was when we were children, and it seemed to her that her dream was coming true. But we can never go back. Only forward. We cannot go back to yesterday or early this morning. There is Lily now."

"Yes."

"I have been selfish too," she told him. "I have been preoccupied by my own disappointment. But you must be so very happy, Neville, even though in your kindness you are sad for me and have taken time to come and talk with me. Lily is alive and she has come to you. How wonderful for you."

"Lauren," he said softly. "My dear, don't do this. Please don't."

"You want me to tell you how much I hate her, then?" she said. "How much I wish she had died and stayed dead? How much I wish even now that she would die? You want me to tell you how much I resent your going away after telling me not to wait and then marrying a sergeant's daughter on mere impulse? You want me to tell you how much I hate you for not telling me? For caring so little for me that you did not mention the fact that this would be your second marriage? For causing me such humiliation this morning?"

He drew a slow breath. "Yes," he said. "This is what I want to hear, Lauren. Let it out. Yell at me. Throw things at me. Hit me. Don't just sit there." He ran his fingers through his hair again. "Oh, dear God, Lauren. I am so wretchedly sorry. If I could only—"

"But you cannot," she said quietly, though there was an edge to her voice at last. "You cannot, Neville. And hatred is pointless. As are violent emotions. Will you go now, please? I wish to be alone."

"Of course," he said. It was the only thing he could do for her. To take himself out of her sight.

She was still pushing the swing with one foot when he turned to leave. Nursing her shock. Her conviction that if she just stayed calm and rational, everything would be all right. Her intense hatred for the sergeant's daughter who had destroyed her hopes and her dreams, her very life, in one stroke. And for the man she had loved all her life.

It did not help Neville to know beyond all doubt that she had always loved him with a far deeper intensity than he had ever loved her.

He thought suddenly, as he made his way back up the drive, of Lauren as she had been the night before—radiant, glowing with happiness, asking him if anyone could possible deserve to be so happy.

She could, as he had told her then. But life did not always give what one deserved.

What had he done to deserve Lily's return? His footsteps quickened as he thought of her even then asleep, alive, in the countess's bed.

Chapter 6

The food and the tea had satisfied Lily; the deep, hot bath with perfumed soap and large, fluffy towel had soothed and lulled her; she had slept long and deep and had woken refreshed but bewildered. For several moments she was unable to remember where she was or how she had got there. She could not recall when she had last slept so well.

It did not take long for everything to come back to her, of course. She had arrived. She had reached the end of a journey that had begun she did not know how long ago when Manuel had come to her and told her she could go. Just like that—after seven months of captivity and enslavement. She had been somewhere in Spain. All she had known to do was set her face for the west, where Portugal lay, to search for him—for Neville, Major Lord Newbury, her husband. She had not even known if he was still alive. He might have died in the ambush that had wounded and made a prisoner of her. But she had begun the journey anyway. There had been nothing else to do. Her father was dead.

She had arrived, she thought, flinging back the bedcovers and stepping out onto the soft pile of the pink and green carpet. She had to hold up the hem of her nightgown in order not to trip over it. It was at least six inches too long, or she was six inches too short—probably the latter. She had arrived in spectacularly embarrassing circumstances, and distressing ones too. But she had not yet been turned away even though she had admitted the essential truth that might have caused him to dismiss her without further ado.

He might still do it, of course. But he had treated her kindly despite the fact that she had ruined his future plans. Surely he would at least give, or lend, her enough money to get her back to London. Perhaps Mrs. Harris would be good enough to help her find some employment, though she did not know what she was capable of doing.

She turned the handle of the dressing room door as gingerly as she had done earlier. But this time she was not so fortunate. There was someone else in there.

"Oh, I am sorry," she said, closing the door quickly.

But it opened again almost immediately and the startled face of a young girl about Lily's own age looked in at her. The girl was wearing one of those pretty mob caps the servant who had brought the food had worn.

"I beg your pardon, I am sure, my lady," the girl said. "I just come up with your clothes, and Mrs. Ailsham told me to stay to help you dress and do your hair. She said his lordship is to come for you in half an hour, my lady, to take you to tea."

"Oh." Lily smiled and held out her right hand. "You are a maid. What a relief to learn that. How do you do? I am Lily."

The maid eyed her outstretched hand askance. She did not take it but curtsied instead. "I am pleased to make your acquaintance, my lady," she said. "I am Dolly. My mum and dad had me christened Dorothy, but everyone has always called me just Dolly. I am to be your personal maid, Mrs. Ailsham says, until your own arrives."

"Mrs. Ailsham?" Lily stepped into the dressing room and looked about her. The bathtub had been removed, she saw.

"The housekeeper, my lady," Dolly explained.

And then Lily saw her bag lying on the stool before the dressing table. She rushed toward it and searched anxiously inside. But all was well. Her hand closed about her locket at the bottom of the bag. She drew it out and clasped it comfortingly in her hand. She would have felt she had lost part of herself if she had lost the locket. Some other things were missing, though. She looked about the room.

"I took the liberty of taking a dress and shift out of your bag, my lady," Dolly said. "I ironed them. They was creased bad."

There they were laid carefully over the back of a chair, her cotton shift and the precious, pretty pale-green muslin dress Mrs. Harris had insisted on buying for her in Lisbon.

"You ironed them?" she said, smiling warmly at the maid. "How very kind of you, Dolly. I could have done it myself. But I am glad not to have to do so. However would I find my way to the kitchen?" She laughed.

Dolly laughed too, a little uncertainly. "You are funny, my lady," she said. "How everyone would look if you was to walk into the kitchen with your dress over your arm, asking for the iron." The idea seemed to tickle her enormously.

"Especially dressed as I am now," Lily said, grasping her nightgown at the sides and raising it until her bare toes showed. "Tripping all over my hem."

They laughed together like a pair of children.

"I'll help you dress, my lady," Dolly told her.

"Help me? Whatever for?" Lily asked her.

Dolly did not answer. She pointed to Lily's rather battered shoes, the only pair she owned. Mrs. Harris had bought those for her too, but she had told Lily that the army was paying for them. The army, in Mrs. Harris's opinion, owed Lily something. The army had bought her bag too and her passage on the ship that had brought them to England.

"I had them polished, my lady," Dolly said. "But you need new ones, if you was to ask me."

"I do not believe I need to ask," Lily said as she dressed quickly. She was feeling curiously lighthearted. "One day soon I am going to take a step forward and my shoes are going to decide to remain where they are, and that will be the end of them."

Lily could not remember laughing with such merriment for a long, long time—until now as she did so yet again with Dolly.

"You have a pretty figure, my lady," Dolly said, looking critically at her when she was dressed. "Small and dainty, not all arms and legs and elbows like me. You will dress up nice when all your trunks have arrived."

"But I wish I had some of your height," Lily said with a sigh. "Is there a ribbon anywhere, Dolly, with which to tie back my hair? I do believe I have lost all my hairpins."

"Oh, a ribbon will not be enough, my lady." Dolly sounded shocked. "Not to go down to tea. You sit down on the stool now—here, I will move the bag to this chair—and I will dress your hair for you. You need not worry that I will make a mess of it. I dressed Lady Gwendoline's hair sometimes before she moved to the dower house, and I even patched up Lady Elizabeth's hair last night when some of it fell down during the ball and her own maid was nowhere to be found. She said I done a nice job. I want to be a lady's maid all the time instead of just a chambermaid. That's what my big ambition is, my lady. You got lovely hair."

Lily sat. "I do not know what you can do with it, though, Dolly," she said dubiously. "It curls hopelessly and is like a bush. It is more than usually unruly today because I washed it. Oh, how novel—I have never had anyone do my hair for me."

Dolly laughed. "What funny jokes you make, my lady," she said. "There are some I know as would kill for the curl in your hair. Look how it piles nice and stays high without falling like a loaf of bread when the oven door is opened too soon. And ooh, look, my lady, how it twists into ringlets without any rags or curling tongs, I would kill for this hair."

Lily looked at the developing style in the looking glass, her eyes wide with astonishment. "How extraordinarily clever you are," she said. "You have amazing skill, Dolly. I would not have thought it possible for my hair to look tame."

Dolly flushed with pleasure and pushed the final pin into place. She picked up a small hand mirror from the dressing table and held it up at various angles behind Lily so that she could see the back of her head and the sides.

"That will do for tea, my lady," she said. "For this evening we will need something more special. I will think of what to do. I hope your own maid does not arrive too soon, though I ought not to say so, ought I?" She was fluffing the short puffed sleeves of Lily's dress as she talked, watching the effect in the looking glass. "There you are, my lady. You are ready whenever his lordship comes."

It was not a comforting prospect. He was going to take her to tea. What did that mean exactly? But there was no time for reflection. Almost immediately there was a tap on one of the three doors of the dressing room and Dolly went to answer it—she seemed to know unerringly which one to open. Lily got to her feet.

He had changed out of his pale wedding clothes. He looked more familiar wearing a dark-green coat, though it was far more carefully tailored and form-fitting than his Rifleman's jacket had been. He looked her over quickly from head to toe and bowed to her.

"You are looking better," he said. "I trust you slept well?"

"Yes, thank you, sir," she said, and grimaced. She must remember not to call him that.

"You were fast asleep when I looked in on you earlier," he told her. "You are looking very pretty."

"Thanks to Dolly," she said, smiling at the maid. "She ironed my dress and tamed my hair. Was that not kind of her?"

"Indeed." He raised his eyebrows. "You may leave us… Dolly."

"Yes, my lord." The maid curtsied deeply without raising her eyes to him and scurried from the room.

Well, Lily could understand that reaction. She had seen soldiers leave his presence in similar fashion—though they had not curtsied, of course—after he had turned his eyes on them. His men had always worshiped him—and been terrified of his displeasure. Lily had never felt the terror.

"My name is Neville, Lily," he said. "You may use it, if you please. I am going to take you to the drawing room for tea. You must not mind. Several of my guests have already left so the numbers will not be quite overwhelming. They are mostly members of my family. I will stay close to you. Just be yourself."

But some of those grand people she had seen last night and this morning would be there, gathered in the drawing room? And he was going to take her there to join them? How could she possibly meet them? What would she say? Or do? And what would they think of her? Not very much, she guessed. She had lived most of her life with the army and was well aware of the huge gap that had separated the men—her father included—from the officers. And here she was, an earl's wife, making her first appearance at his home on the very day he was to have married someone else—a lady from his own class, she did not doubt. It would be difficult to imagine a less desirable situation.

But all her life Lily had been led into difficult situations, none of them of her own choosing. She had grown up with an army at war. She had adjusted to all sorts of places and situations and people. She had even lived through seven months of what many women would have considered a fate worse than death.

And so she stepped forward and took Neville's offered arm without showing any of her inward qualms, and they stepped out into the wide corridor she remembered from earlier. They descended one of the grand curved staircases. She looked down over the banister to the marble, tiled hall below and up to the gilded, windowed dome above. She had that feeling again of being dwarfed, overwhelmed.

"I expected a large cottage," she said.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Your home," she said. "I expected a large cottage in a large garden."

"Did you, Lily?" He looked gravely down at her. "And you found this instead? I am sorry."

"I thought only kings lived in houses like this," she said, and felt very foolish indeed, especially when his eyes crinkled at the corners and she realized she had said something to amuse him.

Then they were approaching two huge double doors and one of those liveried footmen waited to open them. He was the footman she'd encountered last evening, Lily saw. She could even remember what the superior servant had called him. Her life with the army had made her skilled in remembering faces and the names that went with them. She smiled warmly.

"How do you do, Mr. Jones?" she asked.

The footman looked startled, blushed noticeably beneath his white wig, bobbed his head, and opened the doors. Lily glanced upward to see that Neville's eyes were crinkled at the corners again. He was also pursing his lips to keep from laughing.

But she had no chance to consider the matter further because as soon as they stepped inside the drawing room, she was assaulted by so many impressions at once that she was struck quite dumb and breathless. There was the hugeness and magnificence of the room itself—four of her imagined cottages would surely have fit inside it with ease. But more daunting than the room was the number of people who occupied it. Was it possible that any of the wedding guests had already left for home? Everyone was dressed with somewhat less magnificence than either last evening or this morning, but even so Lily suddenly realized that her own prized muslin dress was quite ordinary and her wonderful coiffure very plain. Not to mention her shoes!

Neville took her, in the hush that followed their entrance, toward an older lady of regal bearing and attractively graying dark hair. She was seated, a delicate saucer in one hand, a cup in the other. She looked as if she had frozen in position. Her eyebrows were arched finely upward.

"Mama," Neville said, bowing to her, "may I present Lily, my wife? This is my mother, Lily, the Countess of Kilbourne." He drew breath audibly and spoke more quietly. "Pardon me—the dowager Countess of Kilbourne."

She was the lady who had stood up at the front of the church during the morning and spoken his name, Lily realized. She was his mother—she set down her cup and saucer and got to her feet. She was tall.

"Lily," she said, smiling, "welcome to Newbury Abbey, my dear, and to our family." And she took one of Lily's hands from her side and leaned forward to kiss her on the cheek.

Lily smelled a whiff of some expensive and exquisite perfume. "I am pleased to meet you," she said, not at all sure that either of them spoke with any degree of sincerity.

"Let me present you to everyone else, Lily," Neville said. The room was remarkably silent. "Or perhaps not. It might prove too overwhelming for you. Perhaps a general introduction for now?" He turned and smiled about him.

But the dowager countess had other ideas and told him so. "Of course Lily must be presented to everyone, Neville," she said, drawing Lily's arm through her own. "She is your countess. Come, Lily, and meet our family and friends."

There followed a bewildering spell that felt hours long to Lily though it was doubtful it exceeded a quarter of an hour. She was presented to the silver-haired gentleman and the lady with all the rings she had seen downstairs last evening and understood that they were the Duke and Duchess of Anburey, the dowager countess's brother and sister-in-law. She was presented to their son, the Marquess of something impossibly long. And then she was aware only of faces, all of which belonged to persons with first names and last names and—all too often—titles too. Some were aunts or uncles. Some were cousins—either first or second or at some remove. Some were family friends or her husband's particular friends or someone else's friends. Some of them inclined their heads to her. Several of the younger people bowed or curtsied to her. Most smiled; some did not. All too many of them spoke to her; she could think of nothing to say in reply except that she was pleased to meet them all.

"Poor Lily. You look thoroughly bewildered," the lady behind the tea tray said when Lily and the dowager countess finally reached her. "Enough for now, Clara. Come and sit on this empty chair, Lily, and have a cup of tea and a sandwich. I am Elizabeth. I daresay you did not hear it the first time, and really it does not matter if you forget it the next time you see me. We have only one name to remember while you have a whole host. Eventually you will sort us all out. Here, my dear."

She had been pouring a cup of tea as she spoke and handed it to Lily now with a plate of tiny sandwiches with the crusts cut off. Lily was not hungry, but she did not want to refuse. She took a sandwich and then discovered that if she was to drink, as she dearly wished to do, she must eat the sandwich first so that she might have a hand free with which to lift the cup. The china was so very delicate and pretty that she felt a sudden terror of dropping some of it and smashing it.

Neville's hand came to rest on her shoulder.

The room was no longer silent, Lily noticed in some relief, and all attention was no longer focused on her. Everyone was being polite, she gathered. She listened to the conversation that flowed around her as she ate her sandwich and succeeded in sipping her tea without mishap. But she was not being ignored either. People whose names she could not remember—what a time for her usual skill of memory to have deserted her!—kept trying to draw her into the conversation. A few of the ladies had been having a spirited discussion on the relative merits of two types of bonnet.

"What do you think, Lily?" one of them, a dashingly dressed red-haired lady, asked graciously. Was she one of the cousins?

"I do not know," said Lily, to whom a bonnet was simply something to keep off the sun.

Then they talked about a certain theater in London and had differing opinions on whether its audiences preferred comedies or tragedies. Lily found herself remembering with pleased nostalgia the farces the soldiers had sometimes put on for the merriment of the regiment.

"What do you think, Lily?" one gentleman asked, a pleasant-faced youngish man with receding fair hair. Was he a relative or one of the friends?

"I do not know," Lily replied.

They talked about a concert several of them had attended in London a few weeks before. The Duchess of Anburey thought Mozart the greatest musical genius ever to have lived. A portly, florid-faced gentleman disagreed and put forward the claims of Beethoven. There were firm supporters of both sides.

"What do you think, Lily?" the duchess asked.

"I do not know," Lily said, not having heard of either gentleman.

She began to wonder if they asked her opinion deliberately, knowing that she knew nothing, that she was almost as ignorant now as she had been on the day she was born. But perhaps not. They did not appear to be looking at her with malicious intent.

They were discussing books, the gentlemen speaking in favor of political and philosophical treatises, some of the ladies defending the novel as a legitimate art form.

"Which novels have you read, Lily?" an extremely elegantly dressed and coiffed young lady asked.

"I cannot read," Lily admitted.

Everyone looked suddenly embarrassed on her behalf. There was an awkward little silence that no one seemed in a hurry to fill. Lily had always wanted to read. Her parents had told her stories when she was a child, and she had always thought it would be wonderful to be able to pick up a book and escape into those magical worlds of the imagination whenever she wished—or acquire knowledge of matters on which she was ignorant. She was so very ignorant. But there had never been the chance to go to school, and her father, who had been able to read a very little and to write his name, had always declared himself incompetent to teach her himself.

Neville half bent over her from behind her chair. He was going to rescue her and take her from the room, she thought in some relief. But before he could do so, the lady behind the tea tray spoke up—Elizabeth. She was very beautiful, Lily had noticed earlier, though she was not young. She had a grace and elegance that Lily envied and a face full of character and hair as blond as Neville's. She was his aunt.

"I daresay Lily is a living book," she said, smiling kindly. "I have never been able to travel beyond these shores, Lily, because the wretched wars have been raging for almost the whole of my adult life. I would dearly love to travel and see all the countries and cultures I have only been able to read about. You must have seen several. Where have you been?"

"To India," Lily said. "To Spain and Portugal. And now England."

"India!" Elizabeth exclaimed, gazing admiringly at Lily. "Men come home from such places, you know, and tell us about this battle and that skirmish. How fortunate we are to have a woman who can tell us more interesting and important things. Do talk about India. No, that is too broad a question and will doubtless tie your tongue in knots. What about the people, Lily? Are they very different from us in any essential ways? Tell us about the women. How do they dress? What do they do? What are they like?"

"I loved India," Lily said, memory bringing an instant glow to her face and a light to her eyes. "And the people were so very sensible. Far more so than our own people."

"How so?" one of the young gentlemen asked her.

"They dressed so sensibly," Lily said. "Both men and women wore light, loose clothes for the heat. The men did not have to wear tight coats buttoned to the throat all day long and leather stocks to choke their windpipes and tight breeches and high leather boots to burn their legs and feet off. Not that it was the fault of our poor soldiers—they were merely following orders. But so often they looked like boiled beets."

There was a burst of laughter—mainly from the gentlemen. Most of the ladies looked rather shocked, though a few of the younger ones tittered. Elizabeth smiled.

"And the women were not foolish enough to wear stays," Lily added. "I daresay our women would not have had the vapors so frequently if they had followed the example of the Indian women. Women can be very silly—and all in the name of fashion."

One of the older ladies—Lily had no memory of her name or relationship to the rest of the family—had clapped a hand to her mouth and muffled a sound of distress at the public mention of stays.

"Very silly indeed," Elizabeth agreed.

"Oh, but the women's dresses." Lily closed her eyes for a moment and felt herself almost back in the land she had loved—she could almost smell the heat and the spices. "Their saris. They did not need jewels to brighten those garments. But they wore glass bangles that jingled on their wrists and rings in their noses and red dots here"—she pressed a middle finger to her forehead above the bridge of her nose and drew a circle with it—"to show that they were married. Their men do not have to steal sly glances at their fingers, I daresay, as our men do, to see if they may freely pay court to them. All they have to do is look into their eyes."

"They have no excuse, then, to pretend that they did not know?" the young gentleman with the long name—the marquess—asked, his eyes twinkling. "It does not seem sporting somehow."

Several of the younger people laughed.

"Did you know," Lily asked, leaning forward slightly in her chair and looking eagerly about her, "that saris are really just very long strips of cloth that are draped to look like the most exquisite of dresses? There is no stitching, no tapes, no pins, no buttons. One of the women who was a friend of my mama taught me how to do it. I was so proud of myself the first time I tried donning one without help. I thought I looked like a princess. But when I had taken no more than three steps forward, it fell off and I was left standing there in my shift. I felt very foolish, I do assure you." She laughed merrily, as did the bulk of her audience.

"Goodness, child." That was the countess, who had laughed but who also looked somewhat embarrassed.

Lily smiled at her. "I believe I was six or seven years old at the time," she said. "And everyone thought it was very funny—everyone except me. I seem to recall that I burst into tears. Later I learned how to wear a sari properly. I believe I still remember how. There is no lovelier form of dress, I do assure you. And no lovelier country than India. Always when my mother and father told me stories, I pictured them happening there, in India, beyond the British camp. There, where life was brighter and more colorful and mysterious and romantic than life with the regiment ever was."

"If you had gone to school, Lily," the gentleman with the receding fair hair told her, "you would have been taught that every other country and every other people are inferior to Britain and the British." But his eyes laughed as he spoke.

"Perhaps it is as well that I did not go to school, then," Lily replied.

He winked at her.

"Indeed, Lily," Elizabeth said, "there is a school of experience in which those with intelligence and open, questioning minds and acute powers of observation may learn valuable lessons. It seems to me that you have been a diligent pupil."

Lily beamed at her. For a few minutes she had forgotten her ignorance and her inferiority to all these grand people. She had forgotten that she was frightened.

"But we have kept you talking too long and have caused your tea to grow cold," Elizabeth said. "Come. Let me empty out what remains and pour you a fresh cup."

One of the young ladies—the one with the red hair—was asked then to play the pianoforte in the adjoining music room, and several people followed her in there, leaving the double doors open. Neville took the seat beside Lily that had just been vacated.

"Bravo!" he said softly. "You have done very well."

But Lily was listening to the music. It enthralled her. How could so much rich and harmonious sound come from one instrument and be produced with just ten human fingers? How wonderful it must feel to be able to do that. She would give almost anything in the world, she thought suddenly, to be able to play the pianoforte—and to be able to read and to discuss bonnets and tragedy and to know the difference between Mozart and Beethoven.

She was so terribly, dreadfully ignorant.

Chapter 7

Neville stood on the marble steps outside the house watching Lily stroll in the direction of the rock garden with Elizabeth and the Duke of Portfrey. He made no attempt to join them. Somehow, he realized, if Lily was to function as his countess, she was going to have to do so without his hovering over her at every moment, ready to rescue her whenever she seemed in distress—as he had been about to do at tea when she had admitted to being illiterate. He had felt everyone's shock and her embarrassment and had been instantly intent on taking her out of the way of more humiliation. But Elizabeth had come magnificently to her rescue with her questions about India, and Lily had been suddenly transformed into a warm and relaxed and knowledgeable student of the world. She had shocked a few of his aunts and cousins with her candid references to breeches and stays and such, it was true. But more than one or two of his relatives had seemed charmed by her.

Unfortunately his mother was not one of them. She had waited for Lily to leave and for all but an intimate few of the family to withdraw after tea.

"Neville," she had said, "I cannot imagine what you were thinking of. She is quite impossible. She has no conversation, no education, no accomplishments, no—no presence. And does she have nothing more suitable to wear for afternoon tea than that sad muslin garment?" But his mother was not one to wallow in a sense of defeat. She straightened her shoulders and changed her tone. "But there is little to be gained by lamenting the impossibility, is there? She must simply be made possible."

"I think her deuced pretty, Nev," Hal Wollston, his cousin, had said.

"You would, Hal." Lady Wilma Fawcitt, the Duke of Anburey's red-haired daughter, had sounded scornful. "As if pretty looks have anything to say to anything. I agree with Aunt Clara. She is impossible!"

"Perhaps," Neville had said with quiet emphasis, "you would care to remember, Wilma, that you are speaking of my wife."

She had tutted, but she had said no more.

His mother had got to her feet to leave the room. "I must return to the dower house and see what is to be done for poor Lauren," she had said. "But tomorrow I shall move back into the abbey, Neville. It is going to need a mistress, and clearly Lily will be quite unable to assume that role for some time to come. I shall undertake her training."

"We will discuss the matter some other time, Mama," he had said, "though I agree it would be best if you moved back here. I will not have Lily made unhappy, however. This is all very difficult for her. Far more difficult than for any of us."

He had left the room before anyone could say anything more and had come to stand on the steps. There were some days, he reflected, that were so unremarkable that a week afterward one could not recall a single thing that had happened in them. And then there were days that seemed packed full of a lifetime of experiences. This was definitely one such day.

He had written several letters after returning from the dower house and then checking on Lily, who had been fast asleep. He had sent the letters on their way. It would not be easy to be patient in awaiting the replies.

The fact was that for all his solicitude, for all his apparent calm, he simply was not sure Lily really was his wife.

They had married without a license and without the customary banns. The regimental chaplain had assured him that the wedding was quite legal, and he had drawn up the proper papers to which Neville had put his signature and Lily her mark and which had been witnessed by Harris and Rieder. But Parker-Rowe had been killed in that ambush the following day. Harris had reported that the belongings of the dead had been left with them in the pass.

That would seem to mean that the marriage had never been registered. Was it therefore not a marriage at all? Was it void? Neville supposed that his mind must have touched upon the possibility before today. But he had never pursued the question. It had been unimportant. Lily had been dead.

But now she was alive and at Newbury Abbey. He had acknowledged her as his wife and his countess. Lauren had been made to suffer. All their lives had been turned upside down. But perhaps there was no legality to the marriage. He had written to Harris—now Captain Harris, it seemed—and to several civil and ecclesiastical authorities to try to find out.

What if he and Lily were not legally married after all?

Should he mention his doubts to her now before he knew the answer? Should he mention them to anyone else? The question had been weighing on his mind ever since it had struck him as he stood on the beach with her, gazing out across the sea. But he had decided to keep his doubts to himself until he had the answer. He was not sure it would make a great deal of difference anyway. He had married Lily in good faith. He had made vows to her that he had had every intention of keeping. He had consummated the marriage with her.

And he had loved her.

But he could not rid his mind of the image of Lauren, swinging gently back and forth on the tree swing in her wedding gown, listless and quietly accepting of her disappointment—and surely about to explode with the anger she had told him was pointless. A bride rejected and humiliated.

This was the devil of a coil, he thought. He felt weighed down by guilt even though common sense told him that he could not possibly have foreseen the day's events.

***

Lily was thankful to be out of doors again—away from that great daunting mansion and the bewildering crowds of people.

Elizabeth had suggested a stroll to the rock garden, which was strangely named as it had far more flowers and ornamental trees than rocks. Graveled walkways meandered through it and a few well-placed wrought-iron seats allowed the stroller to sit and appreciate the cultivated beauty. Lily was more accustomed to wild beauty, but a garden lovingly created and tended by gardeners had its charm, she decided.

Elizabeth walked with her arm drawn through the Duke of Portfrey's. Lily had to be told his name again, but she had noticed him in the drawing room, partly because he was a very distinguished-looking gentleman. She guessed his age to be about forty, but he was still handsome. He was not very tall, but his slim, proud bearing made him appear taller than he was. He had prominent, aristocratic features and dark hair, which had turned silver at the temples. Mainly, though, she had noticed him because he had watched her more intently than anyone else had. He had scarcely taken his eyes off her, in fact. There had been a strange expression on his face—almost of puzzlement.

He asked some pointed questions as they walked.

"Who was your father, Lily?" he asked.

"Sergeant Thomas Doyle of the Ninety-fifth, sir," she told him.

"And where did he live before he took the king's shilling?" he asked.

"I think Leicestershire, sir."

"Ah," he said. "And where exactly in Leicestershire?"

"I do not know, sir." Papa had never talked a great deal about his past. Something he had once said, though, had led Lily to believe that he had left home and joined the army because he had been unhappy.

"And his family?" the duke asked. "What do you know of them?"

"Very little, sir," she replied. "Papa had a father and a brother, I believe."

"But you never visited them?"

"No, sir." She shook her head.

"And your mother," he asked her. "Who was she?"

"Her name was Beatrice, sir," she said. "She died in India when I was seven years old. She had a fever."

"And her maiden name, Lily?"

Elizabeth laughed. "Are you planning to write a biography, Lyndon?" she asked. "Pray do not feel obliged to answer, Lily. We are all curious about you because you have suddenly been presented to us as Neville's wife and your life has been so fascinatingly different from our own. You must forgive us if we seem almost ill-bred in our inquisitiveness."

The duke asked no more questions, Lily was relieved to discover. She found his blue eyes rather disconcerting. He gave the impression of being able to see right into another person's mind.

"Do you know the names of all these flowers?" she asked Elizabeth. "They are very lovely. But they are different from flowers I know."

They sat on one of the seats while Elizabeth named every flower and tree and Lily set herself to memorizing their names—lupins, hollyhocks, wallflowers, lilies, irises, sweet briar, lilacs, cherry trees, pear trees. Would she ever remember them all? The Duke of Portfrey strolled along the paths while they talked, though he did pause for a while at the lower end of the rock garden to gaze back at Lily.

***

Lady Elizabeth stood beside the fountain watching Lily return to the house. She looked small and rather lost, but she had declined Elizabeth's offer to accompany her to her room. She thought she could remember the way, she had said.

"She has courage," Elizabeth said more to herself than to the Duke of Portfrey, who was standing behind her.

"I must thank you, Elizabeth," he said stiffly. "for pointing out how ill-bred and excessively inquisitive my questions were."

She swung around to face him. "Oh, dear," she said, smiling ruefully, "I have offended you."

"Not at all." He made her a slight bow. "I am sure you were quite right."

"Poor child," she said. "One feels she is a child, though if Neville married her well over a year ago she cannot be so very young, can she? She is so small and looks so fragile, yet she has lived in India and Portugal and Spain with the armies. That cannot have been easy. And she was a captive of the French for almost a year. What is your particular interest in her?"

The duke lifted his brows. "Have you not just stated it?" he asked her. "She is a curiosity. And she has appeared at a moment that could not have been better chosen if it had been done for deliberate effect."

"But you surely do not believe that it was?" she said, laughing.

"Not at all." He was gazing broodingly at the door through which Lily had disappeared. "She is very beautiful. Even now. When Kilbourne has spent money on clothes and jewels for her and has brought her into fashion…" He did not complete the thought—he did not need to do so.

Elizabeth said nothing. She was never able to explain even to herself the nature of her relationship with the Duke of Portfrey. They had been friends for several years. There was an ease and a closeness between them that was rare for a single man and a single woman. And yet there was a distance too. Perhaps it was a distance that was inevitable when they were of different genders but were not also lovers.

Elizabeth had sometimes asked herself whether she would become his lover if he ever suggested it. But he never had. Neither had he asked her to be his wife. She was glad of that fact. Although she had lived through her youth and her twenties in the hope that she would meet a man for whom she could care enough to marry him, she was no longer sure she was willing to give up the independence she prized.

But sometimes she thought she would like the experience of being loved—physically loved—by the handsome Duke of Portfrey.

He had been married as a very young man—briefly and tragically. He had been a military officer at the time and a younger son who had not expected ever to succeed to his father's ducal title. He had married secretly before going off with his regiment, first to the Netherlands and then to the West Indies, leaving his bride behind and his marriage undisclosed. She had died before his return. Although it had been years and years ago, Elizabeth often felt that he had never quite recovered from the experience—never forgiven himself, perhaps, for leaving her, for not being with her when she died in a carriage accident, for not being there for her funeral.

It was almost, Elizabeth felt, as if he had never quite accepted her death or let her go—though he never spoke of her. He was a moody man whom she never felt she fully understood. Perhaps, she admitted, that was his fascination.

And now he seemed fascinated with Lily, a young woman whom he had just described—quite accurately—as beautiful. And Elizabeth herself was six-and-thirty. Well. She smiled ruefully.

"Shall we go indoors too?" she suggested. "The breeze is becoming chilly."

He offered her his arm.

***

Lily tried to re-create in her mind the dream she had held there for longer than a year. How very foolish it seemed now in retrospect. She had pictured herself arriving at that large cottage set in its pretty English garden—her father had always said that English gardens were prettier than any other gardens on earth—and seeing the delight in Neville's face as he opened the door and found her standing on his doorsill. He would enfold her in his arms and squeeze all the breath out of her, and then she would tell him her story and he would forgive her the part that needed forgiveness and they would live happily ever after. She would have a home, a permanent place where she belonged and that she could make her own. In her dream there had been no other people—just Neville and herself. Lily sighed as she opened one of the long windows of her bedchamber and breathed in the cool night air. Had she ever really believed in the dream? Probably not. She was not so naive as to imagine that life could ever be that simple. All her life she had been aware of the insurmountable social gap between the officers and the men—and their women. And her marriage to Neville had been so very sudden and so very brief. But the dream had sustained her through many hardships. And it was better sometimes to have an unrealistic dream, she thought, than to have only the cold truth of reality.

She was the Countess of Kilbourne, mistress of all this—unless he decided after all to divorce her, though she did not think he would. The whole situation was absurd. It was impossible. Teatime had been a nightmare. Dinner had been worse. She had not known what food or drink to accept from the footmen, which knives and forks and spoons to use with which courses. If Neville had not touched her hand almost at the start and murmured to her that she should copy what he did, and if Elizabeth had not caught her eye from across the table, winked, and picked up the utensils that would be needed for the course then being served, she would have disgraced herself utterly.

And in the drawing room afterward there had been all that conversation again. It might have been wonderful indeed to have listened to it if she could have been been invisible, if other people for one reason or another had not tried to draw her in. She had revealed more and more of her ignorance every time she opened her mouth.

She had worn her green muslin again though Dolly had done new things to her hair. Everyone else had changed and made her feel plainer and dowdier than ever. She hated being made aware of such things. What she wore had never particularly mattered before. Clothes had simply been for warmth or coolness or basic decency. But here clothes said something about status.

This was to be her life, she thought, moving from the window toward the bed. She reached down to pull up the sides of her nightgown so that she would not trip over the hem. But she stopped and smiled at her bare toes. Dolly had sat in her dressing room for much of the evening, removing the frill from the bottom, shortening the gown, and sewing the frill back on. How very kind she was when Lily was perfectly capable of doing it for herself. But when she had said so, Dolly had laughed and called her funny again and they had both laughed for no reason at all. The maid had unpacked her bag, she had explained, and noticed that there was no nightgown within. She could not have her ladyship tripping over the frill and breaking her neck.

There was a knock on the dressing room door. Was Dolly still up? Did that girl take no time for herself?

"Come in," Lily called.

But it was not Dolly. It was Neville, looking very handsome in a long brocaded blue dressing gown. Lily remembered him saying that he had looked in on her earlier in the day while she was sleeping. She caught her lower lip between her teeth, remembering her wedding night. But almost simultaneously she recalled with a stabbing of pain that this was to have been his wedding night with someone else.

"Lily," he asked her, "do you have everything you need?"

She nodded.

"Are you… all right?" He looked searchingly at her.

She nodded again.

"It has been a difficult day for you," he said. "Perhaps tomorrow will be easier."

"Do you love her?" she couldn't help but blurt out. She stared at him, wishing she could recall the words, wishing she could stop herself from feeling hurt that the answer might be yes. All the time she had been with Manuel and the partisans, clinging to the hope of one day returning to the man who had married her, he had been courting another woman, perhaps falling in love with her. All the time she had been making her difficult journey, with only the thought of reaching him sustaining her, he had been planning a marriage with someone else.

He clasped his hands at his back and regarded her gravely. "We grew up together," he said. "She lived here at the abbey with us. Her mother is married to my uncle, my father's brother, but Lauren was the child of a previous marriage. We were intended for each other from infancy. I have always been very fond of her. After my return from the Peninsula a marriage between us seemed the logical step to take."

"You were promised to someone else when you married me?" she asked him.

"No," he said. "Not really. I was rebelling against my lot in life. Even we privileged aristocrats do that, Lily. I had advised her not to wait for me."

"Was I part of your rebellion, then?" she asked him, realizing that there could surely not be a more magnificent snub to his former life, to his parents, than marrying a sergeant's daughter.

"No, Lily." He was frowning at her. "No, you were not. I married you because there was a need to do so, because I had made a promise to your father. And because I wanted to."

Yes. It was true. She must not start to believe that there had been any cynicism in his choice of her. He had married her because he was a kind and honorable man. And because he had wanted to. What did that mean?

"But all the time you remained fond of her," she said.

"Yes, Lily."

It had not escaped her notice that he had not really answered her original question. Did he love the woman called Lauren? Did he realize now what a dreadful mistake he had made in marrying her even though he had wanted to in a moment of impulse?

"And today you would have married her," she said.

"Yes." He had not looked away from her. "I have known her all my life, Lily. She waited for me. My father died and I returned to my responsibilities here. One of my duties was to marry so that the abbey would have a countess. And to beget children, in particular an heir. My life of rebellion was over. And you were dead."

"You told no one about me." It was not a question. She turned and touched the silky brocade of the bed hangings. So heavy and so rich. So alien to anything she had ever known in her life. She wished she had remained in Portugal. She did not know what she would have done there, but she wished she had not come back. Perhaps she could have clung to part of the dream…

"Lily," he said as if he was reading her thoughts, "I mourned you deep in the privacy of my own heart. I am not sorry you survived. I am not, my dear. How could I be?"

No, he was a kind man. He had always treated her with gentleness and courtesy, even when she had been a girl and must sometimes have seemed an irrelevance at best, a nuisance at worst. Of course he would never wish her dead even though her survival had set an obstacle in the smooth path of his future.

"It was not because I did not care that I never mentioned you here," he said. "It was not because I did not care about you that I was to marry Lauren this morning, only a year and a half after your—your death. Please believe me."

She did. Yes, he had cared. Enough to marry her. Enough to murmur those endearments to her on their wedding night. Enough to mourn her. But if he had died, she thought, she would have mourned him for the rest of her life. She would never, could never… But how could she know for sure? Who was she to judge? Meanwhile there was an obstacle even more insuperable than the fact that he was the Earl of Kilbourne while she was the former Lily Doyle.

"I—" She swallowed. "You know what happened to me in Spain, do you not? You did understand this morning?"

She could feel him staring at her for a long time as her hands played with the braided fringe of the curtain. "Was it one man, Lily?" he asked. "Or many?"

"One." Manuel, the leader. Small, wiry, darkly handsome Manuel, who ruled his band of partisans through daring and charisma and occasional intimidation. "I have not been true to you."

"It was rape," he said harshly.

"I—I never fought," she told him. "I said no a number of times and was quite determined to—to die rather than submit, but when it came to the point I did not fight." It was a burden on her conscience that she had not fought her captor more strenuously.

"Look at me, Lily," he said in the quiet, authoritative voice of the major she had known. She looked unwillingly into his eyes. "Why did you not fight?"

"There were the French prisoners," she began. Her breath was coming in short gasps as she tried not to remember what had happened to them. "Because I was afraid. So afraid. Because I was a coward."

"Lily." He was still using the same voice. His eyes were looking very directly into hers, making it impossible for her to look away. He was her commanding officer again suddenly, not her husband. "It was rape. You were not a coward. It is a soldier's duty to survive any way he can in captivity—and you were a soldier's daughter and a soldier's wife. There is no question of cowardice. It was rape. It was not adultery. Adultery demands consent."

Neville sounded so certain, so sure of what he was saying. Could it possibly be true? She was not a coward? Not an adulteress?

"Let me hold you," he said softly. He was using a different voice now. "You look so very lonely, Lily."

A woman come home to a world that was alien to her and to a husband who had been about to marry someone else. How abject was it possible to feel? Would she never have herself back again, the serene, confident, happy self she remembered, the self who had somehow got lost after her one night of love?

She hunched her shoulders and looked down at her hands. When he came to stand in front of her and took her upper arms in his hands and drew her against him, she relaxed for a while, turning her head to rest against his shoulder, feeling the warmth and the strength of him all along her body. She allowed herself the luxury of feeling safe, of feeling cherished, of feeling that she had come home. He smelled good—of musk and soap and pure masculinity.

Yet she felt like someone who has arrived at the end of the rainbow only to find that there is nothing there after all—no pot of gold, not even the shreds of the rainbow itself. Just… nothing. And no more faith in rainbows. Only the core of herself with which to build a new identity, a new life.

She drew back from him before she could get lost in a dependency that would just not do.

"It would have been better for us both," she said, "if I had died."

"No, Lily." He spoke sharply.

"Can you tell me," she asked him, "that it has not once crossed your mind in the past year and a half that it was better so?"

She paused only briefly, but it did not escape her notice that he did not rush in with any denial.

"I think," she said, "if I had lived—if you had known I lived—you would not have brought me here. You would have found some excuse to keep me far away. You would have been kind about it. You would have explained that it was for my own good, and you would have been right. But you would not have brought me here."

"Lily." He had walked to one of the windows and was standing staring out into the darkness. "You cannot know that. I cannot know it. I do not know what would have happened. You were my wife. You were—dear to me."

Ah, she was dear to him. Not the love of his heart he had called her that night? Lily smiled bleakly and sat on the side of the bed, her arms hugging herself against the chill of the evening.

"I believe," she said, "this is an impossibility. To say I am out of place here is so obvious that it is laughable. She is not out of place, is she? Lauren? She has been brought up to all this and to being your wife and your countess. Instead she has been made miserable, your future is in ruins, and I… Well."

"Lily." He had come back to her, stooped down on his haunches before her, and taken both her hands in his. "Nothing is impossible. Listen to yourself. Is this Lily Doyle speaking? Lily Doyle, who marched the length and breadth of the Peninsula, undaunted by the heat of summer, the bitter cold of winter, the dangers of battle and ambush, the discomforts and diseases of camp? Lily Doyle, who always had a smile and a cheerful word for everyone? Who saw beauty in the dreariest surroundings? There is nothing impossible that you of all people cannot make possible. And I will help you. We freely joined our lives together on that hillside in Portugal. We must soldier on, Lily. We have no alternative. I am not sure I would even wish for one."

She did not know if she could resurrect that old Lily. But she warmed to his faith in her.

"Perhaps," she said, smiling wanly, "I am just tired and dispirited. Perhaps everything will look brighter in the morning. It has been a difficult day for both of us. Thank you for your kindness. You really have been kind."

"You would rather be alone?" he asked her. "I will stay and hold you through the night if you need the comfort, Lily. I will not press other attentions on you."

It was tempting. It would be so very easy to relax permanently into his kindness and his strength and become as abject in a way as she had been with Manuel. But somehow if she was going to find a way to cope with this new, frightening, impossible life, she must not give in to a need for the comfort of his arms—especially when she did not want more than that from him.

"I would rather be alone," she said.

He squeezed her hands before releasing them and getting to his feet. "Good night, then," he said. "If you should need me, tonight or any other night, my dressing room adjoins yours and my bedchamber is beyond that. If you need anything else, the bell pull is beside your bed. Your maid will answer it."

"Thank you," she said. "Good night."

She wondered suddenly how his intended bride—Lauren—was feeling tonight. Did she love him? Lily felt genuinely sorry for her, caught in a situation in which she was entirely innocent and totally helpless. This was to have been her wedding night, but Lily was in the countess's room instead of her.

Everything was so very wrong.

Chapter 8

Lily had slept too much during the daytime. She dozed fitfully through the night, and two separate times she was awakened by the same dream—the old nightmare. It was always exactly the same in every detail.

Manuel was on top of her while she lay beneath him, and then she opened her eyes to see him—Major Newbury, Neville—standing in the doorway of the hut, watching. There was that look on his face that she had seen there sometimes immediately after battle, a hard, cold, battle-mad, almost inhuman look, and his white-knuckled hand was on the hilt of his sword. He was about to kill Manuel and rescue her. Hope soared painfully as she tried to lie still so as not to alert Manuel.

The dream always proceeded the same way. After standing there, white-faced and immobile for endless moments, he turned away and disappeared, and precious minutes were lost to her while Manuel took his pleasure of her.

In the dream she was free to run after Neville as soon as Manuel was finished with her, but her legs were always too weak to carry her at any speed and the air was too thick to move through. She had no voice with which to call to him, and she could never see where he had gone, which direction he had taken. There was always mist swirling about and panic immobilizing her. And then—the crudest part of the dream—the mist suddenly cleared and there he was, only a few steps away, standing still, his back to her.

In the dream she always stopped too at that moment, afraid to proceed, afraid to reach out to him, afraid of what would be in his eyes if he turned. It was the most dreaded moment of the dream and almost its final moment, when she touched the terrifying depths of despair. For during that second of indecision, the mist swirled again and he disappeared, not to be seen again.

She dreamed the nightmare twice during the first night at Newbury Abbey.

She rose when it was still dark, made up her bed, washed in cold water in the dressing room, and clothed herself in her old blue cotton dress. She had to get outside where she could breathe. She did not stop to pick up a bonnet or to pull on her old shoes. She had to feel the good earth beneath her feet. She had to feel the air against her face and in her hair. She met no one on her way downstairs or while she did battle with the heavy bolts on the front doors.

Eventually she was outside, where there was the merest suggestion of dawn in the eastern sky. She breathed in deep lungfuls of chilly air. She felt it raise goosebumps on her bare arms and begin to numb her feet. She was immediately calmed and set out for the beach.

She did not stop until she was at the water's edge. At the edge of the land, the edge of place and time. On the brink of infinity and eternity. The wind, blowing off the vast expanses of the unknown, was strong and salt and chill. It flattened her dress against her and sent her hair billowing out behind her. Her feet sank a little into spongy sand. Above her gulls wheeled and cried, like spirits already free of time and space. For a moment she envied them.

But only for a moment. She felt no real desire this morning to escape the bonds of her mortality. Her years with the army had taught her something about the infinite preciousness of the present moment. Life was such an uncertain, such a fleeting thing, so filled with troubles and horrors and miseries—and with wonder and beauty and mystery. Like all persons, she had known her share of troubles. An almost overwhelming abundance of them had begun for her just the day following both the unhappiest and happiest day of her life, when her father had died and Major Newbury had married her. But she had survived.

She had survived!

And now—now at this most precious of moments—she was free and surrounded by such elemental beauty that her chest and her throat ached with the pain of it all. And it seemed to her that the wind blew through her rather than around her, filling her with all the mysterious spirit of life itself.

How could she fail to reach out and accept such a gift?

How could she fail to let go of the suffocating shreds of her dream and of all the misgivings about her new life that had oppressed her yesterday?

At least it was life.

And at least it was new. Ever and always new. Every day.

Lily stretched her arms out to the sides, tipped her face up to the rising sun, and twirled twice about on the sand, overwhelmed by her fleeting glimpse into the very heart of the mystery.

She was alive.

She was!

Filled with new hope, new courage, new exuberance, she set off exploring, picking her way carefully with her bare feet over the rocks at the end of the beach, reveling in the increased seclusion offered by the high cliffs to her left and the ocean to her right. Though the seclusion did not last for long. As soon as she had rounded a bend in the headland, she could see little boats bobbing on the water ahead of her and small houses and other buildings huddled at the base of the cliffs. It must be the lower village, Lower Newbury, she realized, at the bottom of that steep hill she had seen beside the inn.

Lily smiled brightly and continued on her way. She could see people up and about in the village, early as the hour must still be. Ordinary folk, like herself.

***

Lily was feeling happy by the time her bare feet finally took her through the gates of Newbury Abbey and onto the long driveway. She had walked up the steep hill to Upper Newbury and across the green, raising a hand in greeting to the few people she had seen. All of them, after some hesitation, had returned her gesture.

It was amazing how a new day could restore one's spirits and one's courage.

But as she was walking past the smaller lane to her left, along which she and Neville had turned the day before on their way from the church, she could see that the path was not deserted. There were two ladies walking toward her along it, not far distant. Lily stopped and smiled. They were very smartly dressed young ladies, probably guests from the house, though she did not recognize either of them.

One of them was tall and slim and dark-haired. The other was smaller and fairer and limped slightly. Both were lovely. The sight of their immaculate elegance reminded Lily of how she must look in her shabby dress and bare feet, her hair loose and curly and tangled by the wind, her complexion doubtless rosy from the air and exercise. She hesitated, about to move on. These ladies were strangers, after all.

But then, with a lurching of her stomach, she recognized the taller of the two, though her face had been veiled the day before.

And they both recognized her. That was very clear. Both stopped walking. Both looked at her with widened eyes and identical expressions of dismay. Then the taller lady came closer.

"You are Lily," she said. Ah, she was very beautiful despite the paleness of her face and the dark shadows beneath her violet eyes.

"Yes." The other lady, Lily noticed, had stiffened with obvious hostility. "And you are Lauren. Major Newbury's bride."

"Major—?" Lauren nodded with understanding. "Ah, yes—Neville. I am pleased to make your acquaintance, Lily. This is Lady Gwendoline, Lady Muir, Neville's sister."

His sister. Her own sister-in-law. Lady Gwendoline glared at her with undisguised dislike and said nothing. She stayed where she was.

Lauren's face held no such expression. Or any other either. It was a pale mask.

"I am so very sorry for what happened yesterday," Lily said—oh, the inadequacy of words. "I truly am."

"Well." Lauren's eyes, she noticed, were not quite meeting her own. "Let us look on the bright side. Better yesterday than today or tomorrow. But are you out without a companion or maid, Lily? You ought not to be. Does Neville know?"

Lily felt an overwhelming need to push past the terrible awkwardness of the meeting and to say something that would lift the blank look from the other woman's face. What a shock she must have suffered. "Oh, I have had such a wonderful morning," she told Lauren. "I went down onto the beach to watch the sun rise and then crossed the rocks out of curiosity and came to the village below. Some of the fishermen were getting ready to take their boats out, and their wives were out helping them, and their children were running about, playing. I talked with several of the people and they were so kind to me. I had breakfast with Mrs. Fundy—do you know her?—and amused her children while she fed the baby. I do not know how she manages to look after four such young children and keep her house neat all at the same time, but she does. I have made friends with them all and have promised to go back as often as I may." She laughed. "They were all funny at first and wanted to curtsy and bow to me and call me 'my lady,' Can you imagine?"

Lady Gwendoline's silence became almost loud.

Lauren's face stretched for a moment into what might have been a smile.

"But I am keeping you," Lily said, her animation fading. "I really am sorry. You are very gracious. He—Major Newbury—told me last night that he was very fond of you. I do not wonder at it. I—Well, I am sorry." She was saying all the wrong things, of course. But were there right things to say? "Do you live at Newbury Abbey?"

"At the dower house," Lauren said, nodding in the direction of the trees opposite, through which Lily could see a house just visible when she turned her head to look. "With Gwen and the countess, her mother. Perhaps I will call upon you some time. Tomorrow maybe?"

"Yes." Lily smiled, vastly relived. "I should like that, please. I should like it very much. Will you come too… Gwendoline?" She looked uncertainly at her sister-in-law, who did not answer, but whose nostrils flared with what was clearly barely controlled anger.

Gwendoline loved her cousin, Lily thought. Her anger was understandable. She smiled fleetingly at them both before continuing on her way to the abbey. She felt considerably discomposed. Lauren was beautiful and dignified and far more gracious than she might have been expected to be. How could Neville not love her?

Some of the oppressive feeling of the day before weighed down on Lily again.

***

Lauren and Gwendoline stood gazing after her.

"Well!" Gwendoline expelled her breath audibly and came to stand beside her cousin as Lily moved out of earshot. "I have never been so affronted in my life. How dared she stop and talk to us—to you in particular."

"How dared she, Gwen?" Lauren gazed after the disappearing figure. "She is Neville's wife. She is your sister-in-law. She is the Countess of Kilbourne. Besides, I was the first to speak." She laughed, though there was no amusement in the sound. "She is very lovely."

"Lovely?" Gwendoline spoke with the utmost scorn. "She would put even a beggar to the blush. Is she deliberately trying to disgrace Neville, or does she simply not know any better? She has appeared in both villages for all to see, looking like that—no bonnet, no shoes, no—" She made a sound of exasperation. "Does she know nothing about how to behave?"

"But oh, Gwen," Lauren said so quietly that her cousin almost did not hear the words, "did you not see that she is vivid and original? Something quite out of the ordinary? The sort of woman who would draw a man's eyes and desires? Neville's, for example?"

Gwendoline looked incredulously at her cousin. "Are you mad?" she asked rhetorically. "She is disgusting. She is impossible. And you of all people should hate her, Lauren. You are not defending her, are you?"

Lauren laughed quietly again as she crossed the driveway and strode in the direction of the dower house. "I am merely trying to see her through Neville's eyes," she said. "I am trying to understand why he left me and told me not to wait and then met her and married her. Oh, Gwen, of course I hate her." For the first time her voice became impassioned though she did not raise it. "I feel the most intense hatred for her. I wish she were dead. I know I ought not to feel that way. I am horrified by my own feelings. I wish she were dead. And so I must try, you see—yes, I really must try to understand. It is not her fault after all, is it? I daresay Neville did not tell her about me any more than he told me about her. And what was there to tell anyway? He had told me not to wait. He was under no obligation to me. We were not betrothed. I must try to like her. I will try to like her."

Gwendoline limped along beside her, finding it difficult to keep up. "Well, I do not intend even to try," she said. "I will hate her enough for both of us. She has ruined your life and Neville's—though it is entirely his own fault—and you are the two people I love above all others. And do not tell me that Lily is not to blame. Of course she is not to blame and of course I am being unfair to her. But she is a loathsome creature for all that, and how can I not hate her when I see you so dreadfully unhappy?"

They had arrived at the house. But Lauren stopped before entering it. "We are going to have to teach her things," she said, her voice flat again as it had been the day before. "How to dress, how to behave, how to be a lady. I will call on her tomorrow, Gwen. I will try—to be kind to her."

"And we are going to try learning to play the harp and to balance halos on our heads too," Gwendoline said crossly, "so that we will be ready to become saints or angels when we die."

They both laughed.

"Please, Gwen," Lauren said, taking her cousin's arm in a tight grip, "help me not to hate her. Help me… Oh, how could Neville have married such a—such a wild fairy creature? What is the matter with me?"

Gwendoline did not answer. There was no reasonable answer to give.

Chapter 9

Lily felt suddenly almost as if she were returning to a prison. Her footsteps lagged as the house came into sight. But then they quickened again. She could see that Neville was outside on the terrace, three other gentlemen with him. For so long she had held him steadfastly in her memory and her dreams. But now he was real again. And he was watching her approach, his lips pursed, his eyes crinkled at the corners. They were all watching her approach. She had been right earlier, she thought. Things did look brighter this morning after all.

Neville bowed to her when she was close and reached out a hand for hers—and then kissed it.

"Good morning, Lily," he said.

"I have been down on the beach," she told him. "I wanted to watch the sun come up. And then I explored the rocks and found myself in the village." Her purpose and destination would explain her appearance.

"I know." He smiled at her. "I watched you go from my window."

The marquess with the long name bowed to her then. "I am awed into incoherence," he said, but he went on talking anyway. "None of the ladies of my acquaintance ever rise early enough to know that the sun even does anything as peculiar as rise in the morning."

"Then they miss one of the greatest joys of life," Lily assured him. "Please will you tell me your name again, sir? I only remember that it is long."

"Joseph," he said, and laughed, revealing himself to be a very good-looking gentleman indeed. "You are a cousin now, Lily, and do not need to get your tongue around Attingsborough."

"Joseph," she repeated. "I believe I can remember that."

"And James too," one of the other gentlemen said, bowing to her. "Another cousin, Lily. I have a wife, who is Sylvia, and a young son, Patrick. My mother is Nev's Aunt Julia, his father's sister. My father—"

"Devil take it, James." The fourth gentleman tossed his glance at the sky. "Lily's eyes are crossing and her head is spinning on her shoulders. Why do you not add for her edification that Nev's other paternal aunts are Mary and Elizabeth and that his uncle is the famous black sheep, the lost sheep, who embarked on a wedding journey more than twenty years ago and never returned? I am Ralph, Lily. Yes, another cousin. If you cannot recall my name the next time we meet, you are welcome to call me 'you.' "

"Thank you," she said, laughing. It was definitely easier this morning. Maybe everything would be easier. But then she had always been comfortable in the company of men, perhaps because she had grown up surrounded by so many of them.

"The exercise has whipped the most lovely roses into your cheeks, Lily," the marquess said. "But however have you managed to walk so far in bare feet?" He was observing them through his quizzing glass.

"Oh." She glanced down at them. "It is so much more comfortable than walking in shoes. If you were to take off your boots and walk in the grass, Joseph, you would discover that I am right."

"Dear me," he commented.

"But you will not do it," she said, smiling sunnily at him. "I know. There were some men in the Peninsula who never removed their boots—ever. I swear they went to bed with them on. Sometimes I wondered if they had feet at all, or if their legs ended just below the knee. They would not wish to admit to such a deformity, of course. Just imagine how short they would have been—and men set great store by their height. They hate to have to look up to other men and feel perfectly shamed to have to look up to a woman."

The gentlemen were all laughing. Lily joined them.

"Good Lord," Joseph said, using his quizzing glass now to look down at his own boots, "my secret is out. When I stopped growing at four foot ten, Lily, I had Hoby make me boots—tall boots. So that I could look down on the world from a lofty height."

"He even dances in them, Lily," Ralph said. "You would not wish to risk your toes by tripping a measure with Joe."

"If you knock on them," James added, "they ring hollow."

"This conversation," Lily declared gleefully, "has become absurd. But despite your teasing, I have felt the grass and the dew beneath my feet this morning and the sand between my toes. And I have seen the sun rise over the sea. England is a lovely country, as my papa always said it was."

Neville smiled at her. "You are right, Lily," he said. He offered her his arm. "Let me escort you to your room and summon Dolly to help you tidy up. My mother has come up from the dower house and is awaiting you in the morning room with several of the other ladies."

He did not sound in any way annoyed. He did not utter one word of reproach either then or after they had left the company of his cousins. And yet Lily had not missed the detail about several of the ladies.

"Are the others out enjoying the morning?" she asked.

"They are still in bed or in their boudoirs. Ladies generally do not, ah, enjoy the morning until their maids have dressed and coiffed them and they have breakfasted, Lily." He smiled down at her as they climbed the grand staircase.

"Oh," she said. Maids—she had not thought of ringing for Dolly when she got up. Besides, she would not have wished to wake the girl so early. And she had no dress suitable for Newbury Abbey except her green muslin, and she had doubts even about that. She might at least, she supposed, have tied back her hair and worn her shoes. "I did not think. I ought not to have gone out as I am, ought I? How embarrassed you must have been when I came back and all your cousins were out there to see me. I am so sorry."

"No, no." He covered her hand on his arm with his free one. "That was not my meaning. I was not scolding, for heaven's sake. This is your home, Lily. You must do here whatever you wish."

Lily fell silent, remembering how very elegantly Lauren had been dressed. She had been wearing a bonnet and even gloves. She would not have gone dancing off in bare feet and with her hair down her back to watch the sun rise over the sea. She would not have embarrassed him out on the terrace.

***

Neville took Lily down to the morning room after she had washed and put on stockings and her old shoes and Dolly had dressed her hair in a simple knot at the back of her head with two neat braids wound about it. Dolly had advised against wearing the green muslin as her ladyship would need something into which to change for the afternoon, and so the old cotton would have to do.

Neville stayed with her in the morning room for a short while though there was no other gentleman present, but then he was summoned away to speak with his steward.

The ladies all greeted her pleasantly. The dowager countess even got to her feet to kiss Lily's cheek and seated her beside herself on a love seat. But there was nothing comfortable about the conversation, as there had been out on the terrace. They talked about London and Almack's and lending libraries and rose gardens and the management of servants, none of which topics were within Lily's experience. And when the war was mentioned and the French spoken of as monsters of evil and depravity and Lily spoke up with the opinion that they were people just like the British and shared their capacity for tenderness and loyalty and love and all the finer feelings, the red-haired lady, who Lily remembered was Wilma—Joseph's sister?—declared herself very close to fainting, and someone else scolded young Miranda for introducing such an ungenteel subject into the conversation of ladies.

Lily smiled sympathetically at the young girl, whose numerous ringlets made her appear slightly top heavy, but she was blushing and biting a wobbling lip and gazing downward.

Aunt Sadie tried to turn the awkward moment by asking Lily if she would like some embroidery to work on. Lily had noticed that almost all the ladies were busy with needlework. She was forced to admit that she had never been taught to embroider though she was quite skilled at patching and darning. There was an awkward little silence again before her mother-in-law suggested that Miranda go into the music room and leave the door open while she played for them on the pianoforte.

Lily was finally rescued by the appearance of the butler, who announced that Mrs. and Miss Holyoake had arrived to wait upon the Countess of Kilbourne.

Lily looked at the dowager countess as did all the other ladies present, and that lady raised her eyebrows.

"Whatever can Mrs. Holyoake want with me today?" she asked. "I certainly did not summon her."

"I beg your pardon, my lady," Mr. Forbes said with a discreet clearing of his throat, "but I understand his lordship did—for his wife. I have put them in the blue salon."

Lily felt dreadfully embarrassed at the quickly suppressed look of chagrin on the face of her mother-in-law, who had clearly forgotten that she, Lily, was now the Countess of Kilbourne. This was all going to be quite impossible, Lily thought for the umpteenth time—except that it could not be allowed to be. Somehow she was going to have to live with this situation. They were all going to have to live with it.

Lady Elizabeth came hurrying toward her, both hands extended, as she left the morning room.

"Lily," she said, taking her hands and kissing her cheek. "Good morning, my dear. It is quite all right, Forbes. I shall conduct her ladyship to the Holyoake ladies. They are the village dressmakers, Lily. Neville spoke to me about them earlier and asked if I would see to it that they measure you for as many pretty clothes as they have time to undertake."

It was an enticing prospect, Lily had to admit. The two dresses she possessed were certainly not adequate to the needs of her new life. But more bewilderment was awaiting her in the blue salon. After she had been presented to Mrs. Holyoake and her daughter, black-haired, black-eyed ladies, who looked remarkably alike, and after they had curtsied deeply to her and called her "my lady," she could see that they had brought with them so many bolts of fabric and so many patterns and other tools of their trade that it must have taken several servants to carry everything inside.

"Would it not have been more convenient for me to come to you?" she asked.

Both ladies looked shocked, and Elizabeth laughed.

"Not when you are the Countess of Kilbourne from Newbury Abbey, Lily," she said.

It seemed that she was not to have just two or three new dresses, which would have seemed an impossible luxury to Lily, but a dozen or more. When she protested, she discovered that she was going to need morning dresses and tea dresses and evening dresses—some for family evenings, some for dinner parties, some for balls—and walking dresses and carriage dresses. And a riding habit too, when it was discovered that she could ride—though perhaps she ought not to have said she could since she had certainly never ridden a great deal.

Different functions of dress called for different fabrics and different designs, she discovered. There were many colors to choose among, but one might not simply choose just what one thought pretty. Apparently there were colors that suited certain people but not others. There were colors that looked good in daylight and others that looked better in candlelight. And there were all sorts of trimmings—suited to different fabrics and functions and occasions. There were trimmings identical in color to the fabrics they were to adorn. There were others that complemented the fabrics—or did not. There were styles that were fashionable and others that were too avant garde or too passe. There were styles suited to a young girl and others better suited to a young matron or to an older lady. There were measurements to be taken. There were…