Mary Balogh - A Secret Affair

“I am so, so happy that you came, Babs,” she said. She laughed. “Just in case you did not understand that when you arrived.”

“Well, I did think you might have shown just a little enthusiasm,” Barbara said, and they both laughed again.

Hannah suddenly tried to remember when she had last laughed, and could not recall an occasion. No matter. One was not meant to laugh while one was in mourning. Someone might call one heartless.

They talked without ceasing for all of an hour, this time both listening and talking, before Barbara asked the question that had been uppermost in her mind since the Duke of Dunbarton’s death, though she had not broached it in any of her letters.

“What are you going to do now, Hannah?” she asked, leaning forward in her chair. “You must be dreadfully lonely without the duke. You adored each other.”

Barbara was probably one of the few people in London, or in all of England for that matter, who truly believed such a startling notion. Perhaps the only one, in fact.

“We did,” Hannah said with a sigh. She spread one hand on her lap and regarded the rings she wore on three of her well-manicured fingers. She smoothed her hand over the fine white muslin of her dress. “I do miss him. I keep thinking of all sorts of absurdities I simply must rush home to share with him, only to remember that he is not here any longer waiting to hear them.”

“But I know,” Barbara said, her voice earnest in its sympathy, “that he suffered dreadfully with his gout and that his heart was giving him much pain and trouble in his last years. I daresay it was a blessing that he went quickly in the end.”

Hannah felt inappropriately amused. Barbara would make an excellent vicar’s wife if her head was full of platitudes like that one.

“We should all be so fortunate when the time comes,” she said. “But I daresay his heart seizure was helped along by a too hearty indulgence in beefsteak and claret the night before he died. He had been warned off such extravagances ten years or more before I even met him and every year after that—oh, at least once a year. He was forever saying that his headstone ought to have been already gathering moss in the graveyard when I was rocking my dolls to sleep in the nursery. He used to apologize to me once in a while for living so long.”

“Oh, Hannah,” Barbara said, half distressed, half reproachful. And clearly unable to think of anything else to say in response.

“I finally put a stop to it,” Hannah said, “when I composed a very bad ode entitled ‘To the Duke Who Ought to Have Died’ and read it aloud to him. He laughed so hard that he brought on a coughing fit and very nearly did die. I would have written a companion piece, ‘To the Duchess Who Should Be a Widow,’ but I could think of nothing to rhyme with widow, except perhaps his toe, referring to his gout. But it seemed rather lame.”

She half smiled as Barbara recognized the pun and exploded into laughter.

“Oh, Hannah,” she said, “you are bad.”

“Yes, aren’t I?” Hannah agreed.

And they both laughed.

“But what are you going to do?” Barbara came back to the question and looked very directly at Hannah for an answer.

“I am going to do what the ton expects me to do, of course,” Hannah said, spreading her other hand across the arm of her chair and admiring the rings she wore on her third and little fingers. She tipped her hand slightly forward so that they caught the light from the window and sparkled in a thoroughly satisfying way. “I am going to take a lover, Babs.”

It sounded a little … wicked spoken aloud. It was not wicked. She was free. She owed nothing to anyone any longer. It was quite unexceptionable for a widow to take a lover provided it was a secret affair and she was discreet about it. Well, perhaps not unexceptionable. But certainly quite acceptable.

Barbara was, of course, of a different world than her own.

“Hannah!” she exclaimed, color rushing up her neck and over her cheeks and on up across her forehead to disappear beneath her hair. “Oh, you horrid creature. You said it to shock me and succeeded admirably. I almost had a fit of the vapors. Do be serious.”

Hannah raised her eyebrows. “But I am perfectly serious,” she said. “I have had a husband and he is gone. I can never replace him. I have had escorts. They are always good company, but I find them less than completely satisfactory. They feel depressingly like my brothers. I need someone new, someone to add some … oh, some vividness to my life. I need a lover.”

“What you need,” Barbara said, her voice far firmer, “is someone to love. Romantically, I mean. Someone with whom to fall in love. Someone to marry and have children with. I know you loved the duke, Hannah, but it was not—”

She stopped and flushed again.

“Romantic love?” Hannah said, completing the sentence for her. “It hurts anyway, Babs. Losing him, I mean. It hurts here.” She set her hand over her ribs beneath her bosom. “And romantic love did not serve me well before I met him, did it?”

“You were little more than a child,” Barbara said. “And what happened was not your fault. Love will come in time.”

“Perhaps so.” Hannah shrugged. “But I do not intend waiting around for it to show its face. And I have no intention of going in desperate search of it and perhaps persuading myself that I have found it when I have not and so trapping myself in another marriage so soon after the last. I am free, and I intend to remain so until I choose to give up my freedom, which may be a long, long time in the future. Perhaps I will never give it up. There are advantages to widowhood, you know.”

“Oh, Hannah,” Barbara said reproachfully. “Do be serious.”

“A lover is what I am going to have,” Hannah told her. “I have quite decided, Babs, and I am perfectly serious. It will be an arrangement purely for enjoyment with no strings attached. He is going to be someone sinfully handsome. And devilishly attractive. And wickedly skillful and experienced as a lover. Someone with neither a heart to break nor any aspirations whatsoever toward matrimony. Is there such a paragon, do you suppose?”

Barbara was smiling again—with what looked like genuine amusement.

“England is said to abound with dashing rakes,” she said. “And it is quite obligatory, I have heard, that they also be outrageously handsome. I do believe, in fact, that it is against the law for them not to be. And of course almost all women fall for them—and the eternal conviction that they can reform them.”

“Why ever,” Hannah asked, “would anyone wish to believe that? Why would any woman wish to reduce a perfectly wicked rake and rogue to the dullness of a mere worthy gentleman?”

They both doubled over with mirth for a few moments.

“Mr. Newcombe is not a rake, I suppose?” Hannah asked.

“Simon?” Barbara was still laughing. “He is a clergyman, Hannah, and very worthy indeed. But he is not—he is definitely not a dull man. I absolutely reject your implication that all men must be either rakes or dullards.”

“I did not intend to imply any such thing,” Hannah said. “I am quite sure your vicar is a perfectly splendid specimen of romantic gentlemanhood.”

Barbara’s laugh had become almost a giggle.

“Oh,” she said, “I can just picture his face if I were to tell him you had said that, Hannah.”

“All I want of a lover,” Hannah said, “apart from the aforementioned qualities, of course—they are obligatory—is that he will have eyes for no one but me for as long as I choose to allow him to continue looking.”

“A lapdog, in other words,” her friend said.

“You would put remarkably strange words into my mouth, Babs,” Hannah said, getting to her feet to pull on the bell rope and have the tea tray removed. “I want—indeed, I demand—just the opposite. I will have a masterful, very masculine man. Someone I will find it a constant challenge to control.”

Barbara shook her head, still smiling.

“Handsome, attractive, besotted, devoted,” she said, counting the points off on her fingers. “Masterful, very masculine. Have I missed anything?”

“Skilled,” Hannah said.

“Experienced,” Barbara amended, flushing again. “Goodness, it ought to be quite easy to find a dozen such men, Hannah. Do you have anyone in mind?”

“I do,” Hannah said and waited while a maid took the tray away and closed the door behind her. “Though I do not know if he is in town this year. He usually is. It will be inconvenient if he is not, but I have a few others in mind should I need them. I should have no difficulty at all. Is it conceited of me to say that I turn male heads wherever I go?”

“Conceited, perhaps,” Barbara said, smiling. “But also true. You always did, even as a girl—male and female heads, the former with longing, the latter with envy. No one was at all surprised when the Duke of Dunbarton saw you and had to have you as his duchess even though he had been a confirmed bachelor all his life. And even though it was not really like that at all.”

Barbara had come dangerously close to talking of a topic that had been strictly off-limits for eleven years. She had broached it a few times in her letters over the years, but Hannah had never responded.

“Of course it was like that,” she said now. “Do you think he would have afforded me a second glance if I had not been beautiful, Babs? But he was kind. I adored him. Shall we go out? Are you too tired after your travels? Or will you welcome some fresh air and the chance to stretch your legs? At this time of day Hyde Park—the fashionable part of it, at least—will be teeming with people, and one must go along to see and be seen, you know. It is obligatory when one is in town.”

“I can recall from a previous occasion,” Barbara said, “that there are always more people in the park at the fashionable hour of the afternoon than there are in our whole village on May Day. I will not know a soul, and I will feel like your country cousin, but no matter. Let us go by all means. I am desperate for some exercise.”

THEY WENT TO FETCH their bonnets and walked to the park. It was a fine day considering the fact that it was not even officially summer yet. It was partly sunny, partly cloudy, with a light breeze.

Hannah raised a white parasol above her head even though there were actually more cloudy periods than sunny. Why have such a pretty confection, after all, if one was not going to display it to full advantage?

“Hannah,” Barbara said almost hesitantly as they passed between the park gates, “you were not serious over tea, were you? About what you plan to do, I mean.”

“But of course I am serious,” Hannah said. “I am no longer either an unmarried girl or a married lady. I am that thoroughly enviable female creature—a widow of wealth and superior social standing. I am even still quite young. And widows of good ton are almost expected to take a lover, you know—provided he is also of good ton, of course. And preferably unmarried.”

Barbara sighed.

“I hoped you were joking with me,” she said, “though I feared you were not. You have grown into the manners and morals of this fast world you married into, I see. I disapprove of what you intend. I disapprove of the morality of it, Hannah. But more important, I disapprove of your rashness. You are not as heartless or as—oh, what is the word?—as jaded, as blasé as you believe yourself to be. You are capable of enormous affection and love. An affair can bring you nothing but dissatisfaction at best, heartbreak at worst.”

Hannah chuckled. “Do you see the crowds of people up ahead?” she said. “Any one of them would tell you, Babs, that the Duchess of Dunbarton does not have a heart to be broken.”

“They do not know you,” Barbara said. “I do. Nothing I say will deter you, of course. And so I will say only this. I will love you anyway, Hannah. I will always love you. Nothing you can do will make me stop.”

“I do wish you would stop, though,” Hannah said, “or the ton will be treated to the interesting spectacle of the Duchess of Dunbarton in tears and wrapped in the arms of her companion.”

Barbara snorted inelegantly, and they both laughed yet again.