“Poor dear. It must have been embarrassing,” Poppy said softly.
“Oh, humiliating,” Constance agreed. For some reason, she could still not look at Apthorp, though the memory was so old you would think it would be stale by now. “I thought I might actually melt of shame. I went back to my room and wept for hours, and that evening I pretended to be ill so I wouldn’t have to face him at supper.”
Here, she did peek at Apthorp. He once again looked rather green, and didn’t meet her eye.
“The next morning I awoke in a very morose mood, determined to do something desperate and poetic like drown myself in the lake or cut off all my hair. But then I noticed there were flowers on my windowsill. A mess of crimson roses—all different lengths hacked off with a pocketknife and tied with twine. It was the ugliest bouquet I’d ever seen. But attached was a note and to this day, I can still recall every word. It said: Dear Lady Constance, please accept these flowers as an apology for my harsh words to you. And with them, my assurance that while you are far too young for suitors now, you will no doubt receive many more bouquets in due time from gentlemen who will admire your spirit, intelligence, and beauty. Until then, I hope you will take to heart the sentiment that strikes me when I look at you: that the best things are worth waiting for. With warm regard, Apthorp.”
To her shock, she found she could barely say the final line, because she had to wipe away a tear. Rather pathetic, given that the truth of her story had ended with Apthorp summarily dressing her down and forgetting the matter entirely.
“So you see,” she said, “from that day on, I loved him. Because he is sensitive and kind, even if he does sometimes deserve the name Lord Bore.”
She used a serviette to dab her eyes.
“Excuse me,” she said, rising from the table. “I really must freshen up.”
Apthorp glanced at the clock as Constance left the room. It was half past seven. He had five minutes.
The family was quiet. He was not the only one, it seemed, who was oddly shaken by the emotion of Constance’s story.
She was wrong to think he’d been unaware of her that summer. He’d been intrigued by the precocious young lady with the captivating air. But she was four years his junior, and not yet out, and not accustomed to English manners. It would have been appalling to think of her as anything other than a child, and one in need of his protection.
Besides, he was preoccupied. His father had died the year before and while he’d no doubt meant to get the estate in order long before it became his heir’s problem to sort out, the elder earl had not counted on his heart suddenly stopping at the age of eight and forty. With the title came a new reality: the estate was bleeding money and carrying heavy debts. His mother was frantic that no one should know their circumstances. To stanch the flow, something had to change.
Apthorp’s strolls in the garden had not been the idyllic pastime of a carefree young man. He’d gone outside so his family would not see him rifling through investment strategies, trying to parse silt from ash, and coal from granite, and the costs of borrowing against the estate’s future gains—concepts he had not been trained in and strained to understand. He’d been desperate to hide how desperate he was becoming. How inadequate he was to the task.
Such had been his state when a small presence had come barreling at him and nearly knocked him off his feet into a rosebush, gnashing at his ear. He’d been so alarmed he’d pushed her away before he’d realized what, much less who, she was.
Perhaps, in his surprise, he’d been less gentle than he ought.
He remembered that she’d cried and he’d felt bad. But soon enough, his thoughts had traveled back to his accounts, his diminishing coffers, the absurdity of a man so young propping up an estate nearly as old as the kingdom itself.
He’d not noticed how he’d hurt her.
So the end of her story—the kind note, the flowers, the respectful words of admiration—was a fiction.
He’d never apologized for wounding her.
And now that he recalled, she’d never looked at him the same way again.
If he’d reacted better in that startled moment, would it have changed the course of both their lives?
“Well,” the duchess said, turning to him and breaking the silence, “don’t leave us in suspense. Did you send her a bouquet expressing your admiration when she came of age?”
He cleared his throat, which had grown thick with regret. “After that day, I never stopped thinking about her. When she returned, three years later, she’d grown up. I couldn’t believe the transformation.”
“I remember,” Hilary said. “It was at that dreadful, rainy house party we had at my lodge in Devon. You spent the entire week gazing at her. You pulled me aside and asked me how many seasons young ladies waited before they married.”
He winced at the memory of that trip. “Well, by then things had gone so badly with the mines I couldn’t have proposed.”
That, and he had gathered her affections were trained elsewhere.
“Didn’t stop you this time,” Westmead muttered.
Apthorp glanced at the clock. It had been seven minutes. He was late.
“Excuse me,” he said, rising. “I want to see that Constance is all right. The past two days have been a trial for us both.”
Before anyone could object, he went down the corridor where she’d fled. There was no sign of her. He poked his head into the billiards room, but it was empty.
He tried the sitting room, but succeeded only in startling a maid who had been cleaning up the tea remains in silence.
“Constance?” he called out in a low voice. At the end of the hall there was only the closet used for powdering wigs. Surely she was not—
A small, ink-stained hand shot out of the door, grabbed him by the wrist, and pulled him inside.
Chapter 5
She knew him by his footsteps alone. That precise clipped pace, the moderate thump of a well-kept heel articulated under a (she imagined) slender but finely muscled calf. He never shuffled or stomped. He walked the way he did everything: elegantly.
She reached out from behind the closet door and grabbed him.
Perhaps with too much force, for he came careening toward her in a half stumble and nearly crushed her against the shelves.
“What are you doing?” he gasped, bracing against the shelf above her head to find his balance. The closet was small, just big enough for two adults to stand in. It was lined with wig stands and jars of powder and smelled heavy, like starch and milled soaps. And now, like the woody, balsam scent of whatever Apthorp used to oil his hair.
“Waiting impatiently to be discovered weeping in the wig closet by my future husband,” she said irritably. “Who is four minutes late.”
“May I ask why you are in the wig closet?”
“Because wig closets are just the improbable, tucked-away kinds of places that young lovers go when they wish to steal a moment of privacy to offer each other comfort outside of the prying eyes of their extended families.”
He glanced at her face in the shadows.
“You appear decidedly dry-eyed.”
“Can you please get on with it?”
“Pardon?”