Lauren had stopped swinging, but she did not turn around.

"Lauren?" Neville said. "Lauren, my dear?" He still did not know what he could say to her.

Her voice was steady when she spoke, but it was without tone too. "It is quite all right," she said. "It is perfectly all right. It was just a convenient arrangement after all, was it not, our marrying? Because we grew up together and were fond of each other and it was what Uncle and Grandpapa had always wanted. And you did tell me not to wait when you went away. You were quite fair and honest with me. You were not betrothed to me or even promised to me. You were quite free to marry her. I do not blame you at all."

He was appalled. He would have far preferred to have her rush at him, teeth bared, fingers curled into claws.

"Lauren," he said, "let me explain, if I may."

"There is nothing to explain," Gwendoline said angrily, having mastered her tears. "Is she or is she not your wife, Neville? That is all that matters. But you would not have lied in church for all to hear. She is your wife."

"Yes," Neville said.

"I hate her!" Gwendoline cried. "Shabby, ugly, low creature."

But Lauren would not participate. "We do not know her, Gwen," she said. "Yes, Neville. Tell me. Tell us. There must be a perfectly good explanation, I am sure. Once I understand, I will be able to accept it. Everything will be perfectly all right."

She was in shock, of course. In denial. Trying to convince herself that what had happened was not so disastrous after all but merely something bewildering that would be perfectly acceptable once she understood. The exquisitely scalloped and embroidered train of her wedding gown, Neville noticed, was trailing in the dust.

It was so typical of Lauren to react rationally rather than emotionally, even when there was no rational way to act. She had always been thus, always the good one among the three of them, the one to think of consequences, the one to be concerned about upsetting the adults. Her story partly explained her, of course. She had come to Newbury Abbey at the age of three when her mother, the widowed Viscountess Whitleaf, married the late earl's younger brother. She had stayed at the abbey when the newlyweds left on a wedding trip—from which they had never returned. There had been letters and a few parcels from various parts of the world for a number of years and then nothing. Not even word of their deaths.

Lauren's paternal relatives had made no move to take her back. Indeed, when she had written to them on her eighteenth birthday, she had had a curt response from the viscount's secretary to the effect that her acquaintance was not something his lordship sought. Lauren, Neville suspected, had never quite trusted her lovableness. And now there were these circumstances to confirm her in her low opinion of herself.

"I do not want to understand," Gwendoline said crossly. "And how can you sit there, Lauren, sounding so calm and forbearing and forgiving? You should be scratching Neville's eyes out." She began to sob again.

"Neville?" Lauren said, motionless once more. "I need to understand. Tell me about—about L-Lily."

"Lily!" Gwendoline said scornfully. "I hate that name. It is despicable."

"She was a sergeant's daughter," Neville explained. "She grew up with the regiment, living with it, moving about with it. She always did her share of the work and she was everyone's friend. The toughest of the men and the roughest of the women loved her. But she was her own person. There was something dreamlike, fairylike about her—I do not know quite how to describe that quality in her. She had been untouched by the ugliness of the life by which she was surrounded. She was eighteen when I—when I married her." He went on to give brief details of the circumstances of their marriage.

"And you loved her too," Lauren added when he had finished.

For her sake he wished he could deny it. Not that it would make any difference to essentials. He said nothing.

"That is no excuse," Gwendoline said. "You were not eighteen, Neville. You were a man. You should have known better. You should have had more of a sense of duty to your family and position than to marry a sergeant's daughter for such a stupid reason. Marriage is for life."

"I will have to learn to love her too," Lauren said as if Gwendoline had not spoken. "I am sure it will be possible. If you love her, Neville, then I…" But her words trailed away. She set the swing in motion with one foot.

Neville wondered if it would help her if he strode all the way to the swing, hauled her off it by both shoulders, and shook her soundly. But he remembered his own shock of a few hours before. He had walked all the way from the church to the water's edge on the beach without knowing he had even moved from the altar. He could not take the alternative to shaking her of lifting her off the swing into the sheltering comfort of his arms.

"Lauren," he said, "I am so very sorry, my dear. I wish there were more to say, something to comfort you, something to make you feel less… abandoned. I could say all sorts of meaningless things to assure you that eventually this will be in the past and… But they would not comfort now and would be presumptuous in me. Know, though, that you are loved by this family, which is yours as much as it is mine or Gwen's." Pompous, empty words despite their truth. He did not believe he had ever felt more helpless in his life.

"But nothing is ever going to be the same" Gwendoline cried. "When Vernon died and I came home a widow and then Papa died, I thought the world was at an end. But then you came back and we three were together again and I could see that you would marry Lauren and… But now everything is ended, shattered beyond repair."

Neville ran a hand through his hair. Lauren swung gently.

Gwendoline had married for love while he was away in the Peninsula. He had never met Viscount Muir. But it had been a short, tragic marriage, over in two years. First Gwen had had a dreadful riding accident that had caused a miscarriage and left her with a permanent limp after her broken leg had healed, and then just a year later, Muir had died in a fall through a broken banister from the balcony of his own home to the marble hall below. Gwen had fled to the familiar comfort of home rather than remain at her husband's house.

"And how I despise my own selfishness," Gwendoline said when no one responded to her words. "I am thinking of my own unhappiness when it is nothing to poor Lauren's. Oh, what a brute I am." She gathered up her skirts and dashed toward the house, avoiding Neville's outstretched arm as she passed him.

"Poor Gwen," Lauren said. "She wanted so very much to go back in time after Lord Muir's death, Neville. She wanted life to be as it was when we were children, and it seemed to her that her dream was coming true. But we can never go back. Only forward. We cannot go back to yesterday or early this morning. There is Lily now."

"Yes."

"I have been selfish too," she told him. "I have been preoccupied by my own disappointment. But you must be so very happy, Neville, even though in your kindness you are sad for me and have taken time to come and talk with me. Lily is alive and she has come to you. How wonderful for you."

"Lauren," he said softly. "My dear, don't do this. Please don't."

"You want me to tell you how much I hate her, then?" she said. "How much I wish she had died and stayed dead? How much I wish even now that she would die? You want me to tell you how much I resent your going away after telling me not to wait and then marrying a sergeant's daughter on mere impulse? You want me to tell you how much I hate you for not telling me? For caring so little for me that you did not mention the fact that this would be your second marriage? For causing me such humiliation this morning?"

He drew a slow breath. "Yes," he said. "This is what I want to hear, Lauren. Let it out. Yell at me. Throw things at me. Hit me. Don't just sit there." He ran his fingers through his hair again. "Oh, dear God, Lauren. I am so wretchedly sorry. If I could only—"

"But you cannot," she said quietly, though there was an edge to her voice at last. "You cannot, Neville. And hatred is pointless. As are violent emotions. Will you go now, please? I wish to be alone."

"Of course," he said. It was the only thing he could do for her. To take himself out of her sight.

She was still pushing the swing with one foot when he turned to leave. Nursing her shock. Her conviction that if she just stayed calm and rational, everything would be all right. Her intense hatred for the sergeant's daughter who had destroyed her hopes and her dreams, her very life, in one stroke. And for the man she had loved all her life.

It did not help Neville to know beyond all doubt that she had always loved him with a far deeper intensity than he had ever loved her.

He thought suddenly, as he made his way back up the drive, of Lauren as she had been the night before—radiant, glowing with happiness, asking him if anyone could possible deserve to be so happy.

She could, as he had told her then. But life did not always give what one deserved.

What had he done to deserve Lily's return? His footsteps quickened as he thought of her even then asleep, alive, in the countess's bed.

Chapter 6

It did not take long for everything to come back to her, of course. She had arrived. She had reached the end of a journey that had begun she did not know how long ago when Manuel had come to her and told her she could go. Just like that—after seven months of captivity and enslavement. She had been somewhere in Spain. All she had known to do was set her face for the west, where Portugal lay, to search for him—for Neville, Major Lord Newbury, her husband. She had not even known if he was still alive. He might have died in the ambush that had wounded and made a prisoner of her. But she had begun the journey anyway. There had been nothing else to do. Her father was dead.

She had arrived, she thought, flinging back the bedcovers and stepping out onto the soft pile of the pink and green carpet. She had to hold up the hem of her nightgown in order not to trip over it. It was at least six inches too long, or she was six inches too short—probably the latter. She had arrived in spectacularly embarrassing circumstances, and distressing ones too. But she had not yet been turned away even though she had admitted the essential truth that might have caused him to dismiss her without further ado.

He might still do it, of course. But he had treated her kindly despite the fact that she had ruined his future plans. Surely he would at least give, or lend, her enough money to get her back to London. Perhaps Mrs. Harris would be good enough to help her find some employment, though she did not know what she was capable of doing.

She turned the handle of the dressing room door as gingerly as she had done earlier. But this time she was not so fortunate. There was someone else in there.

"Oh, I am sorry," she said, closing the door quickly.

But it opened again almost immediately and the startled face of a young girl about Lily's own age looked in at her. The girl was wearing one of those pretty mob caps the servant who had brought the food had worn.

"I beg your pardon, I am sure, my lady," the girl said. "I just come up with your clothes, and Mrs. Ailsham told me to stay to help you dress and do your hair. She said his lordship is to come for you in half an hour, my lady, to take you to tea."

"Oh." Lily smiled and held out her right hand. "You are a maid. What a relief to learn that. How do you do? I am Lily."

The maid eyed her outstretched hand askance. She did not take it but curtsied instead. "I am pleased to make your acquaintance, my lady," she said. "I am Dolly. My mum and dad had me christened Dorothy, but everyone has always called me just Dolly. I am to be your personal maid, Mrs. Ailsham says, until your own arrives."

"Mrs. Ailsham?" Lily stepped into the dressing room and looked about her. The bathtub had been removed, she saw.

"The housekeeper, my lady," Dolly explained.

And then Lily saw her bag lying on the stool before the dressing table. She rushed toward it and searched anxiously inside. But all was well. Her hand closed about her locket at the bottom of the bag. She drew it out and clasped it comfortingly in her hand. She would have felt she had lost part of herself if she had lost the locket. Some other things were missing, though. She looked about the room.