“My son,” she said, “was the greatest disappointment of my life, Lord Dorchester. And that was while he lived. Afterward he was the greatest shame of my life. Because of his misdeeds one of my granddaughters grew up in an orphanage, without the comfort of any family at all. Two other granddaughters and a grandson grew up with a false idea of who they were and suffered the overturning of the world they had known when the truth came out. Because of his misdeeds my daughter-in-law endured unspeakable humiliation and was cut asunder from a whole family of people she had considered her own for almost a quarter of a century. In her own mind she was cut asunder. Not in ours. She is a Westcott as surely as any of the rest of us are, even though she took back her maiden name and has clung to it ever since.”
She stopped and glared at him as though to say—unnecessarily—that she did not find him in any way intimidating.
“Miss Kingsley is fortunate to have such a loving and loyal family, ma’am,” he said. His words sounded lame and fell quite flat.
“I want you to give me one good reason, Lord Dorchester,” she said, “why we should entrust one of our own into your keeping. One good reason why we should welcome you into the family, as we welcomed Joel Cunningham last year and Wren Heyden earlier this year.”
He looked steadily back at her. “I cannot, ma’am,” he said.
That certainly had its effect. She leaned farther back into the cushions, rather as though he had reached out a hand and shoved her.
“I do not doubt you are aware of my reputation,” he said. “I do not doubt all of you are. It has been hard-won, and I apologize for none of it. If I regret anything in my life, the regrets are mine. They are not the property of a disapproving ton or even of the disapproving family of the woman to whom I am betrothed. That I have the birth and rank and fortune to support your daughter-in-law for the rest of her life is beyond question. But that is not the question, I know. You want her to be happy at last because you love her.”
“And do you love her, Lord Dorchester?” she asked.
It was the inevitable question. He had been hoping even so to avoid it. He could not even answer it for himself. He knew he had been in love with her fourteen years ago, but fourteen years was a long time. He was not the same person now he had been then. Anyway, what did being in love mean? Anything at all? He knew that he had wanted her when he took the madcap risk of sending André away with his carriage, that he had enjoyed her more than he could remember enjoying any woman before her, that he had not been nearly done with her when she was done with him, that he was still not over her. But love? Love was a forever-after thing, was it not? An in-sickness-and-in-death thing—or was that in sickness and in health? It was a steadfast all-or-nothing thing, or rather an all-in-all thing. It was an amputation of everything he had been for almost twenty years and . . . But his mind would not take him further. It did not matter anyway. He was not going to marry her.
“Yes,” he said softly.
There was a lengthy silence.
“I have no control over what any member of my family does,” she said at last. “Least of all with Viola. And you know that, Lord Dorchester. You might have invited me to go to the devil rather than agree to bring me here. Instead, you have listened to me and answered my questions with what seems to me to be blunt honesty. I thank you for that. Whether you can bring Viola happiness remains to be seen, but no couple can ever know that for certain when they marry. I am going to trust you not to break an old lady’s heart as well as hers.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” he said, getting to his feet.
But he was not free even after returning her to the morning room, where a number of other people were gathered to stay out of the way of the servants who were dashing about to prepare the house for the celebrations later. Before he could excuse himself, Mrs. Kingsley discovered an urgent desire to view his library, and her son, the Reverend Michael Kingsley, thought he would rather like to see it too since he had not brought more than one book with him from home.
It was much the same sort of interview as the last one. Mrs. Kingsley told him how delighted her late husband had been when the Earl of Riverdale, a slight acquaintance of his, had broached the possibility of a marriage between his son and Viola. The earl had made no secret of the fact that his son was sowing some wild oats and was impecunious to a fault, but both fathers had agreed that marriage—with a great infusion of money from the deep Kingsley coffers, of course—would be a steadying influence upon the young man. And the young man, she added rather bitterly, had doubtless been pressured into agreeing with the threat that there was no other way to settle his astronomical debts. He had agreed despite the fact that, unknown to his father or anyone else, he was already married to a woman who was dying of consumption and they had a daughter.
“I acquiesced, Lord Dorchester,” Mrs. Kingsley said, “even though Viola fancied herself in love with the son of a friend of mine and he with her. It is easy for parents to brush aside very young love when they can convince themselves that they have the greater good of their child at heart. I have never forgiven myself. My weakness has haunted me even more during the past couple of years.”
“Unfortunately, Mama,” the Reverend Michael Kingsley said, “we can never look ahead to see the consequences of the decisions we make.” And never were truer words spoken, Marcel thought. “We can only make them with the best intentions in mind and with love in our hearts.”
He was a bit of a pompous man, Viola’s brother. But he had come all the way from Dorsetshire, abandoning his flock there, because his sister was of great immediate concern to him. There was a story somewhere in the Bible, Marcel seemed to remember, about a shepherd who left his whole flock to fend for themselves while he went in search of the one lost sheep. A rash thing to do, that, though the story illustrated a point. Good God, was he about to start quoting Scripture? The mind boggled.
“I understand,” Marcel said, “that you are afraid Viola is about to step into another marriage that will bring her as little happiness as the first one did. That perhaps it will bring her actual misery.”
One thing to be said in Kingsley’s favor was that he did not beat about any bushes. “We are mortally afraid, Dorchester,” he said. “I was a moral coward during my sister’s first marriage. I did not like or approve of Riverdale, and so I avoided him. In doing so, of course, I avoided her too. I am ashamed of that neglect. It will not happen again. If you do any harm to my sister, I will find you and call you to account.”
He ought to have sounded ridiculous. Marcel had a mental image of pacing out the steps of a duel and turning, pistol cocked, to face this man, who had possibly never held a gun in his life. But try as he would, he could not make the clergyman in that mental image into a figure of fun.
“I will not hurt her,” he said.
“Tell me, Lord Dorchester,” Mrs. Kinglsey said before asking the inevitable question, “do you love her?”
He did not even have to think about it this time, though he knew the answer no better than he had an hour ago.
“Yes,” he said curtly.
* * *
• • •
Viola kept out of the way of the busy preparations for the party as much as she could all day. It was not difficult. She spent an hour after breakfast in the nursery with the children. Winifred was in her element playing mother to Annemarie’s two children, who were both younger than she and were quite happy to be organized by someone they looked upon with evident admiration. Sarah was happy to play a clapping game with her grandmother, while Camille and Anna rocked the babies and talked with each other. It was good to see those two grow ever more accepting of the fact that they were half sisters. It had been difficult at first, especially for Camille. And Viola herself was beginning to love Anna, partly because she was determined to do so and partly because she could not help herself.