She sat in a wicker chair on the back terrace, overlooking this land, the light shawl across her shoulders donned for a chill that the morning sun had long since burned away. So take it off, she thought. But she did not move.
She had moved very little in the last two days. It was as if making her way out of London had exhausted all her strength and now she could do nothing but sit very still, and look, and try not to think.
She looked, then, and tried to nourish herself on beauty. Heaton Dale sat on a slight rise—a hillock, really—to which her parents had added. Layer upon layer of sediment had been pressed into the earth, lifting the house farther toward the sky than nature had intended. From this lofty vantage point, the countryside rolled out in all directions, the grass walks that bordered the cornfields drawing a geometrical grid to guide the eye. The hedges bristled with shepherd’s roses and blossoms of white hawthorne, and closer by, interspersing the remaining pagodas (she’d had two chopped up and carted away this morning, and the rest would fall to the axe tomorrow), limes and honeysuckle dotted the lawn. Nightingales and larks flitted from limb to limb, serenading the sky, the season, the sun.
Such a lovely view. Too lovely to be viewed and admired by nobody but her. Behind her, from inside, came a great racket amongst the staff. There were eighteen bedrooms to be aired—eighteen; she could not imagine what her parents had been thinking—and half as many drawing rooms. Also: two dining rooms, a billiards room, a smoking room, a morning room, two conservatories, a music room, quarters to house over sixty servants, and, of course, the nurseries. Very large nurseries, with great, glorious windows that let in light both in the morning and afternoon. Her parents had nursed grand plans for their children, of which marriage had only been the beginning.
Well, they had sent her away, and then they had died.
And then Richard had died.
Anger flickered, and with it stirred a horrifying urge to cry, still not quite vanquished. She took a sharp breath against it. She did not care what her parents’ plans had been. If, somewhere above, they were upset with her for failing to honor their dreams, they must look to themselves for the reason. They had died. Everyone who loved her had died, but she had survived and done her best. She was done with being left and abandoned.
I love you, he said, and I will prove it, as if, by doing so, it would become his right to demand another chance from her. Oh, he was worse than Pennington and Trent by far. At least they had only wanted her money. He wanted far more than that. He was the last man any sane woman would trust; leaving was his art form. Yet he wanted to take her trust in his hands, to lure her into loving him, with her only reassurance his single, slim promise not to break faith and abandon her. And what did this promise come down to? Merely two words, two syllables, scripted by somebody else, and spoken countless times by a million cads or more: I do. How many men had said those two words while already plotting their peccadilloes and betrayals? Her parents had loved her truly, by blood as well as by heart, and Richard had, too; but that had not stopped them from leaving. How dare he think a simple promise more powerful than what had bound her family to her? How dare he ask her to imagine that he could deliver to her what her own family had failed to do? Nobody could promise to stay.
“Mistress,” came a voice from behind her. One of her new footmen. It had taken under two days to assemble a staff; money did have its advantages. “Lady Anne rather wishes to see you. Are you at home?”
She turned in her seat. How curious that of all the people she might have imagined would call on her here—although Elma was fuming at her, and the Ramsey twins were maintaining their distance, per her wishes—the first should be Lady Anne. Gwen could not imagine what might have prompted it. Heaton Dale was two hours outside the city by rail, no small effort for a girl whose social schedule was—so Anne assured her in regular notes—remarkably full.
She breathed deeply of the warm air. “Show her out here,” she said, and turned back around.
So much land. She had no idea what she would do with all of this. She had worked and reworked it to please others, to suit the tastes of men who had never bothered to learn her own tastes, or even to come and view what she had wrought for them. In the end, the only transformation she had undertaken that would last was the transformation she had wrought on herself. Alex was wrong. She could change. She would no longer seek to please. She could be alone and content. Romantic love was not so thick as blood. This sense of mourning, in turns as vivid-bright as the lash of a razor, or as numbing and crushing as a boulder on the chest—it would dull. He would forget her. She would forget him. They were not family and nothing permanent bound them. People could change.