She laughed.
He realized he’d lately taken to saying things to get her to laugh, the way he might reflexively open a window to allow in fresh air.
There were little gold flecks in her green eyes, and when she laughed, they lit up. More of these faint gold flecks were scattered across her nose. It was as if her maker had finished her off by flinging a handful of fairy dust at her, and then, whimsically, pressed a little dimple into her chin with a forefinger before calling it a day.
“I almost married her off to a cobbler,” she said. “My father wanted me to marry a cobbler. I might have done, if he’d lived.”
He coughed a shocked laugh. “I cannot imagine that.”
Her silence and stillness were so sudden that he looked up from the foolscap sharply, surprised.
To his astonishment, she looked stricken.
“Why not?” she said finally. Her voice was quiet, thin, and wary, as if she knew he was a doctor bound to deliver bad news.
It seldom happened that he was surprised unto speechlessness.
But he was.
“It would have been a perfectly nice life, Your Grace,” she said indignantly into his silence. “I’d have a family. Maybe we’d have some rooms over a shop, with a little parlor a bit like the one here at The Grand Palace on the Thames, and a pianoforte if we’d been able to get one at a bargain, and we’d stand about it singing some nights . . . I would know how my days would look. I’d have . . . people to care for.”
It almost sounded like an enviable life. Truthfully, a lot like the one they’d managed to create here at The Grand Palace on the Thames.
Moreover, one would never be urged to write their damned memoirs if one lived that life.
“It sounds like a fine life,” he said finally, somewhat gently. “It’s a far cry from the King’s Theater and . . .”
She tipped her head. “Lovers and duels?”
“Exactly,” he said, rather ruthlessly.
There was a pause. “I had no extraordinary ambition at first. I sang for pleasure. But after my father died, I sang for money in the hopes that my mother and I could keep our rooms over the shop. I was able to get better and better singing roles, but I never did earn enough money to keep it. My mother was compelled to go to Scotland to live with a cousin, who had more room for her. It’s safer and more comfortable for her there than in my tiny room on Haywood Street. I send money to her when I can.”
She wasn’t complaining about any of it. But through her words ran a current of almost bewildered wistfulness, as though the life she’d imagined was something she could see receding inexorably into the distance. Borne away by the damned caprices of fate, like a boat that had slipped its moorings while she stood on the shore.
I would know how my days would look.
He’d never even thought about that. A military life meant he’d known, for the most part, how all of his days would look, often to the minute. Not precisely what occurred during a campaign, of course, but he knew that there would be one. It had been a fact of his methodical, rung-by-rung climb to the rank of general. And then, as a commander, he’d been able to determine how his day and the days of thousands of others looked now.
How difficult would it be to find and keep one’s bearings in life when the road wasn’t at all defined? When life came at you as though you were a moving target?
When one was falling, the reflex was to flail out for any steadying handhold, he supposed. He conceded to himself that what she had managed to accomplish—from the cobbler’s shop to Covent Garden and the King’s Theater—was actually rather astonishing. When viewed in this light, it was rather a miracle that she’d been made visible at all by the gossip columns.
He sat with this realization quietly. He considered what to say.
“I spoke hastily, Miss Wylde. A habit of barking orders, and I apologize. I instinctively could not picture it, because . . . I think extraordinary circumstances are, for better or worse, the lot of extraordinary people. Not everyone is equal to the caprices of fate. Most would lose their heads, literally or figuratively, when confronted with some of the challenges you’ve faced. It just seems to me that you are destined for a more remarkable life.”
As he said it, he was bemused to realize he did, indeed, believe this.
Before his eyes, gradually, slowly, a glow gorgeously suffused her. As though his words had reached every corner of her. It was as elemental as a sunrise.
He had somehow forgotten the simple, piercing joy of making someone happy.
He hadn’t thought her anyone’s notion of a siren, with the pale gold dust on her cheeks and the dark gold tips of her lashes and the rose gold hair that seemed to want to burst from its pins.
For that fleeting instant, he couldn’t imagine preferring to look at anything or anyone else in the world. Those idiots who’d shot at each other had gotten one thing right: she was unequivocally beautiful.
Her bodice lifted and slowly fell as she seemed to take a steadying breath.
“‘Caprices’ . . . ?” she ventured quietly.
He’d been staring.
More accurately: staring and frowning.
“Whims,” he said shortly. “‘Vicissitudes’ is another word you might like. It means very nearly the same thing.”
He wrote the words down for her.
There was a little silence.
“So you’ve not yet wed at all, Miss Wylde, unlike Primrose and Phillip?”
It hadn’t occurred to him to ask this yet. It was possible her husband had died.
Or abandoned her.
Men being what they were.
For a moment he thought she wouldn’t answer; she was under no obligation to do it. Uncertainty flickered across her face. Then she quirked the corner of her mouth. “Opera singers don’t precisely fit into anyone’s notion of a good or proper wife. And then, once you get that first scandalous duel under your belt, well . . .”
She shrugged one shoulder.
She wasn’t wrong. She now occupied a singular place in their very stratified society. People liked their labels; they wed to climb rungs, to cement a place in the world. Marriage was a strategic initiative, not a whim.
But Miss Wylde, he suspected, still possessed more than a drop or two of romanticism.
It was difficult to fully kill, romanticism was. Worse than a weed.
War killed it neatly, though.
So, for that matter, did marriage.
“I should think there are some compensations in the theater. I imagine it is all drama and passionate declarations and so forth all day long.”
“Oh, those,” she said so offhandedly he bit back a smile. “That’s not love, is it? Possessiveness. Posturing. A whim of mood. It’s all, ‘Oh, your hair looks wonderful by candlelight, now I’m in love.’ Of course, should the day come when I rise to the top of my profession . . . I shall have anyone I choose.” She paused. “Or no one at all, if I choose.”
This bit sounded like bravado. The thing she told herself to dull any lingering wistfulness.
But then, she’d had the presence of mind to cast off a lover who wasn’t right for her.
“No doubt,” he said shortly.
He dropped his eyes to the foolscap. “Have we looked at all of your sentences?”
“Yes,” she said hurriedly, just as he said, “I see there’s one left.”