“Just my body,” she said, drawing back from his silencing finger.
“That,” he said softly, refolding his arms, “was uncalled for.”
“Was it?” she asked.
“I suppose that now we are embarked upon a thoroughly satisfactory affair you want more?” he said.
“Like most women?” She smiled, but the expression did not reach her eyes. “That is what your question implied. No, Marcel, I do not want to own your soul. I certainly do not want to own your name. But is an affair only about—” She stopped and frowned.
“Sex?” he said. “But sex is very pleasurable when it is good, Viola. As I believe you would agree.”
“Yes,” she said, and laid her head back against the cushions and closed her eyes. Shutting him out. Leaving him feeling somehow shallow for wanting nothing but sex from this brief escape from responsibility. She was the ice queen of memory, lips in a thin, straight line. He wanted her.
“None of them will miss us,” he said after a few minutes of irritated silence—irritated from his point of view, anyway. She looked perfectly serene, apart from her lips. He might almost have thought she had dozed off except that her head had not flopped to the side. “Do you realize that, Viola? None of your numerous family members will even notice you are gone. They think you have returned to whatever-the-devil house you live in—”
“Hinsford Manor,” she said without opening her eyes.
“Hinsford Manor,” he said. “They will continue to enjoy themselves in Bath and not spare you another thought.”
She had no comment on that. No protest to make. She knew he was right.
“And no one will miss me,” he said. “When André arrives with word that I have fallen by the wayside but will put in an appearance when I put in an appearance, they will breathe a collective sigh of relief and carry on with their lives. Their tedious, sometimes fractious lives. And they will all write me another letter of complaint, and then complain to one another when they realize there is nowhere to send it.”
Her lips softened and curled at the corners in the suggestion of a smile. “You are out of sorts,” she said.
He pursed his lips and glared at her, but she would not give him the satisfaction of opening her eyes. And he would not give her the satisfaction of speaking another word, even to deny her charge.
He was not out of sorts.
After a few minutes her head tipped to the left. He unfolded his arms, slid away from his corner, and lifted her head to rest on his shoulder.
They had had their first quarrel.
But he was right. No one would miss them. And he was not going to start feeling self-pitying about that. Though he did permit himself some small indignation on her part. They had let her go—in a hired carriage, no less—when the raw wound of what she had suffered a few years ago had not even begun to heal. They had let her go, and they would not even miss her.
He would miss her when she left him, he thought. Which was, of course, utter nonsense.
Eight
Viola’s family began to miss her after just a few days, when no letter came from Hampshire to inform them that she had arrived home safely. It was unlike her not to let at least her daughters know, especially when she must realize they would be more anxious than usual. They had tried everything they could to dissuade her from leaving in a hired carriage with no servant for protection or company, not to mention respectability.
Camille and Abigail had each since written to her. So had their maternal grandmother and Viola’s sister-in-law on the Kingsley side and two of her erstwhile sisters-in-law on the Westcott side, they discovered when they mentioned the matter during a family dinner at their grandmother’s home on the Royal Crescent. And so had Wren, the Countess of Riverdale, and Elizabeth, Lady Overfield, Wren’s sister- in-law, Alexander’s sister. One of a lady’s daily duties, after all, was to write letters, and they had all been concerned about Viola and her abrupt decision to return home so soon after the christening of her grandson.
A little more than a week after her departure a letter finally did arrive from Hinsford, addressed to both Camille and Abigail. It was beside Camille’s plate in the breakfast parlor when they arrived there together, having come directly from the nursery. It was not from their mother, however, but from Mrs. Sullivan, the housekeeper, who explained that she had got in a whole pile of provisions in expectation of her ladyship’s return home—she had flatly refused to stop addressing Viola thus even after the title was no longer hers. She had given most of the food away after a couple of days before it could go bad, as she was sure her ladyship would have wished her to do. It was unusual for her ladyship not to let her know she had changed her mind about coming, but Mrs. Sullivan had not been too concerned until a number of letters started arriving for her, all from Bath. Her question for Mrs. Cunningham and Miss Westcott, then, if she might make so bold, was this: If her ladyship was not either in Bath or at Hinsford, where was she?
The realization that their mother had neither arrived home nor written to explain why was alarming indeed to the sisters. Joel Cunningham found them severely agitated when he strolled into the breakfast parlor five minutes after them with a cheerful smile on his face and good morning greetings on his lips.
“Mama has disappeared,” Camille told him without preamble, the letter open in her hand, her face ashen. “She has not arrived home yet, and she has not written either to us or to Mrs. Sullivan.”
“I knew I ought to have gone with her,” Abigail wailed. “She was behaving very strangely—we all noticed it. How could we not? She was abrupt and even rude with a few of us, and she is never either of those things. It was selfish of me to remain here and let her go alone.”
“It was no such thing,” Joel assured her. “I think she actually wanted to be alone for a while, Abby. Now where would she have gone if not home? To stay with some relative?”
Both ladies gazed at him in incomprehension. “But everyone is here in Bath,” Camille said.
“Right.” He rubbed his hands together. “Some particular friend, then?”
“There is no one who does not live within a couple of miles of Hinsford,” Abigail said. “There is nowhere she could have gone.”
“Well clearly,” he said, “there is somewhere. She cannot just have disappeared off the face of the globe.”
“But she has not even written.” Abigail covered her mouth with one hand while tears welled in her eyes and threatened to spill over.
“Perhaps she has arrived by now,” Camille said, handing the letter to her husband and making a visible effort to pull herself together. “Perhaps there was carriage trouble and she was delayed. I daresay she is home by now.”
“But for a whole week? And if it was that, why did she not write?” Abigail asked.
No one could think of an explanation. Camille set an arm about her sister’s shoulders while Joel read the letter, a frown on his face. There was no further enlightenment to be found from that single page, however.
“I tell you what I will do,” he said, folding it as he spoke. “I will go down into Bath and see if the hired carriage that took her has returned. If it has, I will talk to the man who drove it. He is bound to know where she went.”
“Oh yes,” Camille said with visible relief while Abigail gazed hopefully at her brother-in-law. “Of course he will. Let us go and find him.”