Season for Temptation

Chapter 32. In Which Julia Receives a History Lesson

The family, the servants, and probably even the assorted livestock of Stonemeadows Hall were surprised to see Lady Irving’s crested carriage drive up without any notice late that afternoon. And they were even more surprised to see the carriage disgorge three very harriedlooking and travel-worn women who carried not a single bandbox between them.

Lord Oliver greeted his sister and children warmly, happy as always to see his relatives. He then drifted away, musing aloud to himself about some essential aspect of estate management or cow breeding.

Lady Oliver, however, did not simply take the arrival of the countess and her charges in stride and flutter on with her day. Only the least astute observer (which Lord Oliver decidedly was) could fail to notice that something had gone seriously and suddenly awry.

“What on earth happened?” she asked, plying Lady Irving, Louisa, and Julia with tea and biscuits as soon as they could settle themselves in the drawing room. “Are you all right, all of you?”

Lady Irving opened her mouth to speak, from sheer force of habit, but then seemed to think better of it. She looked at Louisa, Louisa looked at Julia, and Julia looked back blankly at the two of them.

“I don’t know how even to begin to tell her,” Julia admitted. The very thought was too daunting. All through the brief journey home, she had tried to keep her mind away from James, but it had taken all her willpower. Now that they had arrived, she wanted nothing but to sob onto her mother’s shoulder.

If her mother would let her, knowing the truth of what Julia had done.

“Everything is fine, Mama,” Louisa said, easing most of the apprehensive look from Lady Oliver’s face. “At least, we are all unharmed.”

Lady Irving snorted. “Physically, perhaps. But let me tell you, Elise, your girls have had a rough emotional time of it. That viscount doesn’t have the slightest idea how to behave toward persons of quality. He has used both of your daughters extremely ill. And probably he kicks puppies, too,” she added for good measure.

Lady Oliver was taken aback by this outburst. “Puppies?” she asked blankly. “I don’t understand. Did you keep a dog in London?”

Julia shook her head. “Aunt, you are only cluttering the issue with hyperbole.” A memory flashed into her head, of Sir Stephen Saville gravely informing her that she had been “hyperbolic.” Poor man. It seemed as if it had been years ago.

Well, for all the similarity her future life would bear to her life in London, it might as well have been years ago.

She took a deep breath, and looked at Louisa for permission to tell her mother everything. At her sister’s nod, Julia spoke as quickly as she could, trying not to consider her words too deeply for fear that she might choke on them.

“Louisa broke her engagement to James due to unhappiness. I love — loved — him, though, and he loved me in return. We were involved in a scandal and this morning he sent a note saying that he refused to marry me. So we left. And here we are.”

She looked anxiously at her mother, waiting for a reply. Lady Oliver shut her eyes for a few seconds, then opened them, and they were full of sympathy.

“Oh, my dear girls,” she said softly. “My dear sister.” She reached to gather them all in a hug at once, which involved a lot of uncomfortable bending and squishing together as three grown women tried to scoot within the grasp of one.

To Julia, however, this seemed not the smallest bit ridiculous. She felt intense relief that she’d been able to clear the first hurdle of telling her mother without, first of all, crying her head off, and second of all, provoking any type of enraged reaction (Lady Irving’s outburst about the puppy-kicking notwithstanding). True, she’d given only the vaguest outline of what had happened, but it was enough. Her mother wanted to hug her, not boot her out of the house.

So. She deserved to know the rest of it. And maybe. . maybe it would help Julia to say it all again. Maybe the whole sad ending of the affair would become a little more real, and maybe she could stop grasping at the faint hope that it would all work out in the end.

But it wouldn’t be easy to tell it all.

Julia spoke next to her aunt and sister. “Would you mind leaving us alone?”

Lady Irving began to protest, not wanting to miss the chance to add her considered opinion of the viscount and his moral flaws, but Louisa rose at once to leave the room. The countess looked after her reluctantly for a moment, then also stood.

“Very well,” she agreed. “We’ll wait in the breakfast parlor or some such nonsense. But I’m taking the biscuits. I need fortification after what I’ve been through today.”

Julia rolled her eyes at this statement. She could have done with a biscuit herself, or perhaps a dozen. But she supposed she should just be glad to have her other relatives out of the room. She didn’t want to listen to her aunt rail against James, even though he had failed her. And she didn’t want to talk about the situation in front of Louisa’s bruised eyes. If there was a good side to this at all, it was that Louisa had been able to come home as she wished. Still, Julia couldn’t help feeling that she had added to Louisa’s misery, even though her sister had not only forgiven her but given her blessing for Julia to be with James.

Once she was alone with her mother, Julia again drew a deep breath for courage. She looked at her mother’s sympathetic blue eyes, so much like her own. It was hard to know where to begin. She had always told her mother everything, and her mother had always understood — but then again, nothing had ever really happened to Julia before. She’d lived her life in the country, seeing the same small circle of people over and over again. She’d certainly never been in love before, or publicly humiliated, for that matter.

“My girl,” Lady Oliver began with a soft smile. “It’s good to see you again, no matter what the cause for your return.” She put her arm around Julia’s shoulders and added, “You don’t have to tell me anything else if you don’t want to.”

This permission, this graciousness, freed Julia’s tongue at last, and she was able to tell her mother everything. She spoke for what seemed like hours, as Lady Oliver listened quietly and sympathetically.

She told her mother how she had fallen in love with James almost at once; how guilty she had felt, knowing he belonged to Louisa; how she finally realized she must try to forget him and seek a match with someone else. She described Sir Stephen, how he had pursued her and proposed to her. How Louisa had enlisted her help in delivering the news of the broken engagement. How Julia had gone to James’s home to talk to him.

The next part was more difficult to tell. “I spent time with him in his home, Mama. Of an intimate nature,” she admitted. “And then, as I was leaving, we were seen together.”

Lady Oliver read between the lines. “Oh, dear,” she replied. “That was quite a step to take.”

Julia looked nervously at her mother’s face. “Are you angry with me?”

Lady Oliver shrugged, her expression as untroubled as ever. “It’s not a good idea for a young woman, because of the risk of a baby. But in this case, he wants to marry you, so I think all shall be well, even if there is a baby.”

“A baby,” Julia repeated. She felt numb. She hadn’t even thought of the possibility of a baby.

Lady Oliver noticed her daughter’s thunderstruck expression. “Why are you so worried, my girl? What does it matter if the baby comes a week or two earlier than it might have if you waited for your marriage? Babies always come in their own time; no one will ever know the difference.”

“But, Mama,” Julia insisted, “he won’t marry me.” In a flat voice she assumed to hide her growing terror — dear God, if there would be a baby, how would she care for it, all alone in the world? — she told her mother about the scandal item in the morning paper; the messages sent and received; Sir Stephen’s rescinded proposal and the information about James’s whereabouts.

“So he must have felt that he had been disgraced, and he changed his mind about marrying me, which I thought he had only suggested in the first place because of what we had done, and I felt uneasy about it. And as it turns out, I was right to feel that way, because he never came for me, and I shall have a baby and be a disgrace to you and be cast out alone into the world,” Julia finished. She was wrung out at the end of her tale; she could do nothing but gasp for breath and stare at her mother with haunted eyes.

Lady Oliver stared back at her for a moment, absorbing this frantic stream of words. And then she laughed.

And she kept laughing, for what seemed to Julia like minutes on end, her loud peals of amusement finally simmering down into giggles, but breaking out again periodically into another hearty chuckle.

“Oh, my goodness,” Lady Oliver said, wiping at her eyes, as her daughter gaped at her in hurt shock. “Oh, I’m sorry to laugh at you. But you are just so funny.”

“Funny?” Julia was insulted. “What part of my tragic tale was funny to you?”

“Julia, my girl”—her mother smiled fondly, cupping her chin—“I think the world of Louisa, but she has obviously encouraged you to read far too many Gothic novels. You are allowing your imagination to run away with you.”

She looked her daughter full in the face as she ticked points off one by one on her fingers, still smiling. “First of all, you are loved; that can never be a tragedy. Second, if there should be a baby and no marriage, you will always have a home here with us. Third, that will never come to pass, because there will be a marriage, because the viscount is head over ears in love with you.”

Julia stared at her, a faint, eager optimism beginning to grow inside of her. “Why do you say that? Are you just repeating what I told you he said in the past, or. .”

“Please,” Lady Oliver scoffed gently, “allow that your own mother has eyes in her head to see what’s going on in her house, even if your father tends to be, er, a bit too distracted to notice. I was very eager for Louisa’s match to take place, but when I saw how reserved they were with each other and how comfortable James was with you and you with him, I thought there might be a change of bride at some point.”

Julia was stunned. She had had no inkling that anyone else had ever observed her feelings for James. “You thought that all along?”

Lady Oliver smiled again. “It would hardly have been tactful to say anything while Louisa was still engaged to him, would it? I only hoped that, if it should not work out, it would not be a disappointment to Louisa. But she’s stronger than even she knows, and she’s seen to her own happiness in this case.”

“She’s been wonderful,” Julia blurted. “She forgave me in an instant. Once she had given James up, she was more than happy that I should. . well, be happy.”

“So?” Lady Oliver looked at her daughter expectantly. “Are you going to be?”

Julia shrugged. “I don’t know. My aunt says it is for James to make things right at this point.”

“Bosh,” the elder woman replied, and looked startled at her own response. “My goodness, I must be taking on your aunt’s personality.”

She blinked in surprise, then explained, “If you want something, you must go and get it. It may not be precisely the conventional thing to do, but it’s the only way to be sure you’ll have no regrets. If you love him, you must pursue him, and if he loves you in return, then all will work out for the best. And if by some impossibility, he does not — I know, dear; no need to shudder, for it won’t happen — then you will have tried your utmost, and you need never wonder about what might have happened.”

Julia considered her mother’s words. She had been so hurt by the note James had sent — well, it couldn’t really have been James who’d sent it, but still, perhaps it had come on his behalf — that she hadn’t thought about anything beyond escaping from London. She had been devastated. Crushed. Mortified.

She had no desire to experience any of that again. Her mother’s encouraging words had cheered her at first. But now she was being told to take a risk, a very bold and unladylike risk, and take the chance of experiencing another, worse pain than before.

She felt grouchy. What did her mother know about it, anyway? Her mother had a perfect marriage and a husband who loved her even more than he loved mucking about with his animals, which was truly saying something. All right, perhaps she had been a little melodramatic talking about her “tragic tale”—but still, it was too much to ask that Julia risk humiliation again.

“Who would actually pursue a man in that way?” she grumbled. “Women aren’t allowed to do anything. We just have to wait for the men to ask, and then we simply have the choice of yes or no.”

Lady Oliver raised her eyebrows in surprise. “But my dear, that’s not true at all.” She brought a considering forefinger to her cheek. “Did you never wonder why you were named Julia, rather than being named Elise for me?”

Julia hadn’t been expecting that response. “Um. . no. No, I never thought about it, I suppose.”

“Well.” Lady Oliver sat back and folded her hands over her knee, as if settling in for a long tale. “It was, of course, expected that I would name you for myself, as my oldest daughter. But you are named instead for your father.”

Despite the passage of time, the baroness’s eyes grew misty with remembered fondness. “I was only eighteen, even younger than yourself, when I met Julian Herington. I was the daughter of a country squire, and he was the curate.”

Her voice turned confiding. “He was the handsomest man I’d ever seen, positively golden, and so kind and intelligent. I would stay after services every week just to talk to him. My father was delighted with my devotion to the church.”

Julia smiled back at her mother, encouraging her to go on, but she was puzzled. She’d never heard any of this before. She supposed she’d never even thought to ask, since as far back as she could remember, there had been no father — and then, when she was still a young child, there had been Lord Oliver. She’d never thought about the man who had been in her mother’s life before.

Lady Oliver spoke on, telling her daughter about how she managed to provoke the curate into admitting that he loved her, but he felt he did not have the right to marry her because she was so far above him.

“So far above him.” The baroness shook her head. “As if there could ever be such a thing, when such warmth and wit were involved. However, my parents agreed with his view of the matter, and hoped to match me to a baronet, or a knight at the very least. I was quite the heiress, you see.” She smiled mischievously. “So I simply took matters into my own hands.”

Julia’s eyes were round with amazed interest. She’d never known any of this. It wasn’t hard to think of her lighthearted mother as young — but this willful woman, in love and determined, was a revelation. “What did you do?” she breathed.

Lady Oliver turned pink, and hesitated before speaking. “While I was talking with him alone, I pulled the bodice of my dress down just before I knew some women would be coming in to decorate the church.”

She coughed, remembering the old scheme with slight embarrassment. “Naturally, they were horrified by his scandalous conduct, and he was forced to marry me at once. I hadn’t foreseen that he might also be removed from his position as curate, but so it was. I did regret that part.”

Her smile grew warm and her eyes distant. “But the marriage — ah, that was wonderful. My father used his influence and my dowry to buy Julian a living in Leicestershire, and we went to live there following our marriage.”

She looked her daughter straight in the eye. “It was the most wonderful time of my life, and it would never have happened if it weren’t for my own determination. When we discovered you were on the way, it made our happiness complete.”

Julia hardly dared ask what had happened next, knowing that the idyll must have soon ended.

“Yes, it was very soon over,” Lady Oliver replied, her eyes downcast. “Your father was killed in a carriage accident three months before your birth. He never even saw you.”

She choked on her next words. “Despite my grief, I thanked God for you every day, for you were a little piece of him. I longed to hold you, to keep any connection with him that I could. So of course I had to name you for him.”

She reached out to stroke Julia’s hair with a hand that trembled. “You look like me, but you have his smile. His smile could warm you in winter, just of itself.”

Her wistful expression brightened. “So there you have it, my darling girl. You are here on earth because I was a rather bold and improper young lady. We women may not have the right to ask, but we can still get what we want, even if for just a little while.”

Her smile broadened. “Actually, I must correct myself. I’ve been very fortunate to have what I wanted for years. My early loss was terrible, but some years later I met Lord Oliver.”

Her expression turned considering. “We met at Tattersalls, you know. I believe I was the only woman there looking at horseflesh. Naturally, I drew his eye at once. I wasn’t thinking of marrying again, though I did like him very much. But when I learned he had a daughter also—well. Then I wanted to know him better, and in time I came to love him. Just as much as I loved your father, though not in the same way, of course. Lord Oliver is a very unique person, you know.”

“Yes, I’m well aware of that,” Julia replied with an understanding quirk of the mouth.

“And when you and Louisa met — you just fit. You were meant to be sisters. You healed each other, and I hadn’t even known that you needed healing.”

She gave a pensive sigh. “Oh, Julia. How fortunate you are. You, who could have all the approval and congratulations of the world for joining yourself with a titled gentleman, have nothing to risk but your own heart. And that, as I have told you, is already his, as his is yours.”

Lady Oliver stopped speaking, and she fell into a reverie, her mind dancing back nineteen years to her first love. Julia saw her mother’s face turn preoccupied, and she considered her own situation anew.

She felt heavy and sorrowful, thinking of her young mother’s terrible loss, with an unborn baby on the way. If that had happened to her — if she had lost James so swiftly and irrevocably — it would be unbearable. But never to see him again, while he lived, would be even worse. It would be a waste. A loss that need never be.

She blinked her eyes wide open, understanding at last. Her mother’s sorrow had all been worth it, despite the short duration of her first love. That’s what her mother was trying to tell her. It was worth the risk of grief to pursue that bold delight. For if you caught it. .

Lady Oliver had been fortunate enough to find a second happiness, but she, Julia, would never even have existed if her mother had not pursued her first.

Well. She could do the same, could she not? She felt she owed it to her mother to pursue her own heart’s desire — but also, of course, she owed it to herself. And to James. Good heavens, hadn’t she already done something similar, forcing the next step by going to his house alone? She had always known within herself, or hoped, what would happen if she did.

So now that she was home and away from London’s prying eyes, what did she really want? Despite the long, momentous day and her physical exhaustion from worry and travel, the answers were clear.

She wanted James. She loved him, and she wanted to marry him.

She did not want to go back to London for some time.

She did not want to see Sir Stephen Saville again for quite a while, either.

And she didn’t want to listen to her aunt. She didn’t want to wait and see if James would come after her. She wanted, as her mother had said, to do all she could to find him, clear the air, and make him hers.

“All right,” she said with determination. “I’ll do it. I’m going to get James.”

Lady Oliver blinked back to the present, and took in Julia’s words slowly. Then she beamed a bright, delighted smile at her daughter. “That’s wonderful! I’m so happy for you. And for him.”

Julia smiled back, allowing a sense of relief and glee to fill her. She knew what to do. She didn’t have to wait for anyone to decide her life for her. She would take the next step herself, and handle the consequences that came.

Then a sudden doubt seized her. “Mama, what should I do to find him? I don’t know if he knows where I am, and I don’t know if he plans to stay in London either.”

“Hmm.” Lady Oliver pondered this. “We’re a day behind in getting the London papers here. Tomorrow we’ll receive the one with your, ah, news.”

Julia shuddered. “Could we dispose of that one, please?”

Her mother nodded. “I’ll just tell your father that Manderly scorched it with the iron when preparing it to be read. Your father won’t think twice about it.”

“Poor Manderly,” Julia said, thinking of how the starchy butler might react to having his skills impugned. Oh, well. She couldn’t bear to have her father, or her siblings, or the servants thinking ill of her after reading that scandal item. It was only a matter of time before word got around from the neighboring estates anyway.

Unless she married James, of course. Just another reason to make that happen; she could add that to the hundreds she had already thought of. First of which was, of course, that she desperately wanted to.

“Anyway,” Lady Oliver went on, “by the following day, there may be an item if he has decided to leave for the country. Then you’ll know if you should write him in town, or visit him at Nicholls.”

“That makes sense,” Julia said, nodding. More waiting; it seemed endless. “But I want to leave at once.” Never mind that she didn’t even know where she ought to go.

“I understand,” her mother soothed. “But — and you must forgive me for once again sounding like your aunt — you’ll appear to much better advantage if you rest and bathe before embarking on another journey.”

“Oh.” This sensible remark put a sudden stop to Julia’s feeling of desperate longing. She ran a tentative hand over her hair, and could feel the snarls and prickling pins of an untidy coiffure. She looked down at her dress, and admitted the creases in it as well. And now that she thought of it, she wasn’t sure she was exactly at her cleanest after a long and traumatic day that involved a close and frantic carriage ride.

“Very well,” she sighed. “I’ll wait until I appear to be a decent human being again. Simone will be here sometime soon with the trunks, I hope before nightfall. So I’ll take your advice and wait another day — but not a bit longer than that,” she said, a warning light in her eyes.

“I think that sounds delightful,” Lady Oliver said cheerfully. “Now, what’s this I heard about you getting some Oiseau gowns? I would love to see them.”

Despite the uncertainties pressing on her mind, this comment provoked Julia into a laugh. “Yes, Mama, I do have the most beautiful dresses. And they look absolutely nothing like Aunt Estella’s!”