Simply Magic

13

Susanna returned to Bath in the Earl of Edgecombe’s well-sprung traveling carriage. By the time it rocked to a halt outside the school on Daniel Street, she had tucked away all her raw, bruised emotions deep inside herself and was able to smile as the door opened and Mr. Keeble peered out. Almost immediately Claudia and then Anne came hurrying past him out onto the pavement, both beaming happily as they waited to hug her.

All her emotions were generally happy ones for the next little while as she assured her friends and then the girls, whom she joined in the middle of their tea, that she was very delighted to be back even though she had had an absolutely marvelous time in Somerset. And they all looked delighted to see her. She felt enveloped in familiarity and love.

She was home.

And from this moment on she would have plenty with which to occupy her mind. There was a whole busy school term to plan for and look forward to.

The journey, comfortable as the earl’s carriage undoubtedly was, had been dreadful. With only herself for company, she had been unable to stop the memories of the past two weeks from churning around and around in her head-particularly, of course, the memory of that last afternoon. She could still scarcely believe that it had actually happened-that she had allowed it to happen. But it had-and she had. She had been aware with every turn of the carriage wheels that she was moving farther and farther from him -which was a foolish thought indeed when they had always been universes apart.

Even when they were children his sister had been horrified to see them playing together and had dragged him away.

She had had her great adventure, her grand romance of a lifetime, Susanna decided with great good sense once she was back home, and now it was time to get back to reality.

And yet her determination to be cheerful was tested the very evening of her return. Claudia had gone out to dine with the parents of one of the new pupils, and Anne had invited Susanna to come and sit in her room for a while after all the girls had gone to their dormitory.

Susanna sat on the bed, always her favorite perch, her arms clasped about her raised knees, while Anne sat on the chair beside her desk. They talked about Frances for a while until Anne broke a short, not uncomfortable silence with a question.

“And what of you?” she asked. “Did you really have a lovely time? Did you meet anyone interesting?”

For one moment Susanna considered pouring out the whole sorry story to her friend. But it was just too intensely personal-especially its ending. Maybe later, when the memories were not quite so raw, she would confide in Anne, but not now. Not yet.

“Like a duke to sweep me off my feet and bear me off to his castle as his bride?” She laughed at the old joke. “No, not quite, alas. But Frances and Lord Edgecombe were very obliging, Anne, and made sure that there was some entertainment for me to attend almost every day, even though I am sure they would have been just as happy to relax and be quiet together after being away for so long. I met some amiable and interesting people, most of whom I knew from before, of course.”

“But no one special?” Anne asked.

Susanna’s heart felt like a leaden weight in her chest.

“No,” she said. “Not really.”

Anne raised her eyebrows.

“Only one gentleman,” Susanna said reluctantly, “who made his intentions very clear, and they were not honorable ones. It was the old story, Anne. Yet he was very handsome and very amiable. Never mind. And you? You told us a great deal about your Welsh holiday the evening before I left, but nothing that was very personal. Did you meet anyone interesting?”

Anne and her son, David, had gone to Wales to spend a month with the Bedwyn family on the Duke of Bewcastle’s estate.

“The Bedwyns,” Anne said, smiling, “are all quite fascinating, Susanna-and that is actually an understatement. The Duke of Bewcastle is every bit as formidable as he is reputed to be. He has cold silver eyes and long fingers that are forever curling about the handle of his quizzing glass. He is quite terrifying. And yet he was unfailingly courteous to me. The duchess is a delight and not at all high in the instep, and it is quite clear that he adores her though he is never ever demonstrative in public. He also adores their son, who is a cross, demanding little baby-except when his father is holding him. And he holds him rather often. He is a strange, mysterious, fascinating man.”

Susanna rested her chin on her knees. She was thinking of how words could be true and yet a massive lie at the same time. It was the old story, Anne. Yet he was very handsome and very amiable. Never mind. Just as if the whole relationship with Viscount Whitleaf had been that trivial, that unimportant.

“All this talk of married dukes is depressing me,” she said, smiling as if her heart were not breaking. “Was there no one who was unmarried?”

“No dukes.” Anne smiled too.

Something in her tone alerted Susanna.

“Oh, Anne,” she said. “Who?”

“No one really,” Anne said quickly, shifting position on the chair. “Oh, what a dreadful thing to say of another human being. He very definitely is someone. He is the duke’s steward at Glandwr. He was alone and I was alone, and so it was natural enough that occasionally we walk out together or sit together on evenings when he was invited to dine. That is all.”

“All,” Susanna repeated. “And was he tall, dark, and handsome, Anne?”

“Yes,” Anne said. “All three.”

Susanna continued to gaze at her.

“We were merely friends,” Anne said.

“Were you?” Susanna spoke softly.

“We were. We were…very dear friends,” Anne said.

But Susanna knew something as clearly as if they had both poured out their hearts to each other. They had both met someone very special indeed during their holidays. And they had both returned with bruised, perhaps even broken, hearts.

“But he did not make an offer,” she said. “Anne, I am so sorry.”

There was a lengthy silence, during which Anne did not contradict her.

“Do you think,” Susanna asked at last, “life would be easier, Anne, if one had parents and family to take one about, to make sure one met suitable people, to arrange for one to meet eligible suitors? Would it be easier than living at a girls’ school as one of the teachers?”

It seemed absurd, she thought, to miss her mother so very much even now when she was twenty-three-her mother, whom she had never known.

“I am not sure,” Anne said, closing the curtains again, “that life is ever easy. Very often girls and women make disastrous marriages even while surrounded by family to help guide their choice or make it for them. I think given the choice between a bad marriage and life here, I would choose being here every time. In fact, I am certain I would.”

“It was so ungrateful of me,” Susanna said, “even to ask that question. Good fortune was smiling on me when I was sent here to school, and I was blessed beyond belief when Claudia offered me a position on the staff. And I have such very good friends here. What more could I ask of life?”

“Ah, but we are women as well as teachers, Susanna,” Anne said as she resumed her seat. “We have needs that nature has given us for the very preservation of our species.”

Ah, and that was the trouble. That was the whole trouble. Without those needs, Susanna thought, she might have escaped unscathed from her summer holiday. She might have gone through the rest of her life convincing herself that Viscount Whitleaf had been just a temporary though dear friend whom she missed.

“And sometimes,” she said, “they are very hard to ignore. I was very tempted this summer, Anne. To be a man’s mistress. Part of me is still not convinced that I made the right choice. And will I be able to make the same choice next time? And the next?”

As if there ever would or could be a next time.

And she had been tempted in more than one way, hadn’t she? And had certainly not resisted one of those temptations.

“I don’t know,” Anne said.

“What poor, sad spinsters we are,” Susanna said, laughing and getting up from her perch on the bed. “I am for my lonely bed. The journey has tired me out. Good night, Anne.”

Three days later all the boarders returned to school and with them several new girls, including two charity pupils who needed a great deal of care and attention. And the day after that the day girls returned and classes started.

It was a relief to be busy again.

It was even more of a relief-and that was a massive understatement-to discover two weeks later that she was not with child, that her great indiscretion had had no lasting consequences. None that would be observable to anyone else, anyway.

And yet, perversely, the discovery left her feeling freshly bereft.

Now it was all definitely and finally over.

Her heart, her very life, had never felt more frighteningly empty.

It was not finally over for Anne.

One Saturday morning late in September a sudden deluge of rain sent Susanna and a class of girls under her supervision dashing back inside the school from the open meadows beyond Daniel Street, where they always went for their games lessons. Susanna sent the girls up to their dormitories to dry off and would have taken her own wet cloak and bonnet up to her room before meeting them in the grand hall for indoor games, but Mr. Keeble informed her that she was wanted in the office, that he had already asked Miss Walton to supervise the hall.

She found Claudia and Anne waiting for her and smiled when she saw a nice warm fire crackling in the grate. It was a chilly day outside.

“We are to lose Anne, Susanna,” Claudia said sternly and without preamble. “She is to marry Mr. Sydnam Butler, son of the Earl of Redfield and steward at the Welsh estate of the Duke of Bewcastle.”

Poor Claudia could never utter that last name without some venom in her voice. Her final position as a governess, which had been with Lady Freyja Bedwyn as her pupil and the Duke of Bewcastle as her employer, had left her with a lasting antipathy toward both. She heartily despised them though she did concede that without that more-than-unpleasant experience she might never have summoned the courage to open her own school.

But Susanna did not spare much thought for Claudia. She had looked into Anne’s ashen face, and she instantly knew.

“Oh, Anne,” she said, closing the distance between them and hugging her friend tightly.

“I have told her that she need not do it,” Claudia said. “I have told her we will find some alternative. But she insists.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anne had not had her fortunate escape.

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

She hoped so. Oh, she hoped so.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Claudia was tight-lipped.

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

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

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

Claudia snorted and then laughed.

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

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

And Viscountess Ravensberg.

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

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