Mary Balogh - Simply Magic

He turned then and took both her hands in his, squeezing them so tightly for a moment that she almost winced. He lifted them one at a time and set her gloved palms to his lips.

He raised his eyes to hers-and smiled.

“An already glorious November day has seemed warmer and brighter because of your presence in it,” he said, misquoting his very first words to her. “Thank you, Susanna.”

And so he drew a smile from her even though her heart was breaking.

“Foolish,” she said. “Ah, foolish.”

And somehow they both laughed.

“Good-bye, Peter,” she said.

And because she could not bear any more, she dashed with ungainly haste around the corner and up to the door of the school, and she lifted the knocker and let it fall with more force than was necessary.

She glanced toward the corner as Mr. Keeble opened the door, but there was no one there. She stepped inside, and the door closed behind her.

And now it seemed to her that there was nothing left to live for. Nothing at all. She was in too much distress to notice the melodrama of the thought.

I want you to know before I leave that I do care for you.

Mary Fisher, one of the middle school boarders, was on her way up the stairs. She turned back when she saw who had come through the door.

“Oh, Miss Osbourne,” she cried, all excitement, “we and Mr. Upton have made the changes you wanted to the sketches for the scenery and finished them. They are ever so gorgeous. Do come and see.”

“Of course. I can hardly wait. Lead the way, then, Mary,” Susanna said, smiling brightly as she pulled loose the ribbons of her bonnet. “Have you been working all afternoon? How splendid of you.”

I want you to know before I leave that I do care for you.

… before I leave…

And now he was gone.

Peter went straight from Bath to Sidley Park-to stay.

Will you do one thing for me? And this was it. She might never know he had done as she asked, and how his coming here could benefit her anyway he did not know. But here he was. He loved her, and so he had honored her final request.

He hoped that love would go away again as suddenly as it had come. He did not like the feeling at all. It was a dashed miserable thing, if the truth were known.

His mother was ecstatic to see him. She scarcely stopped talking about Christmas, which would be absolutely perfect now that he was home to enjoy all that she had planned for him. Four of his sisters-Barbara, Doris, Amy, and Belinda-were to come to Sidley Park for Christmas, all except Josephine, in fact, the middle one in age, who lived in Scotland with her husband and his family. And of course the presence of four sisters was going to mean too the presence of their spouses and children-nine of the latter among the four of them. And because it was Christmas, numbers of their in-laws of all ages had been invited too. None of his uncles-he had made himself clear to them five years ago, though in the intervening years since he had seen them occasionally in London and learned to be cordial with them.

And of course the Flynn-Posys were coming for Christmas.

Well, he would endure it. He would even enjoy it. He would establish himself as host.

His mother took him into the dining room the day after his arrival and explained to him all that she planned to have done in there for his comfort and delight.

“I’ll think about it, Mama,” he said. “I may have some ideas of my own.”

“But of course, my love,” she said, beaming happily at him. “Whatever you want provided it will not ruin the overall effect of what I have planned. How lovely it is to have you home again.”

He left it at that. It had never been easy to talk to his mother-it had always seemed something akin to dashing one’s brains against a rock.

Will you talk to your mother, Peter? Really talk?…Tell her who you are. Perhaps she has been so intent upon loving you all your life that really she does not know you at all. Perhaps-probably-she does not know your dreams.

He had never really talked to his mother, or she to him. He had confronted her once, of course-ghastly memory-but they had both been horribly upset at the time, and they had not used the opportunity to open their hearts to each other, to establish a new and equal relationship of adult mother and adult son.

That would change. He would talk to her. He would hold firm against her iron will. It just seemed somewhat absurd that the provocation was probably going to be a lavender dining room.

He spent a good deal of the time before Christmas away from the house. He liked to go and sit in the dower house, sometimes for hours on end, lighting a fire in the sitting room and enjoying the peace he found there. He had always loved the house, and it had always been well kept even though it had been inhabited during his lifetime only by the girls’ governesses and the tutors he had had before going away to school and sometimes during school holidays. It was a small manor in its own right and was set in the middle of a pretty garden in a secluded corner of the park.

It would, in fact, be the ideal home for his mother…

He visited his neighbors again. And he called on Theo.

“I must thank you, by the way,” Theo said as they sat in his library sipping brandy, “for taking Susanna Osbourne to call on my mother and Edith in Bath. They both wrote to tell me all about it the very next day. I suppose because I was away at school at the time of Osbourne’s death and Susanna’s disappearance, I did not realize quite how upsetting it all was for them. My mother has been thinking all these years that she must be dead.”

“Are the letters still in existence?” Peter asked.

“Yes, indeed,” Theo said, stretching out his booted feet to the blaze in the hearth. “They were at the back of the safe in Osbourne’s old office where I never look-it is stuffed with old papers that I must go through one of these days. I had never even read the letter Osbourne wrote my father until I found both letters after my mother wrote. Susanna’s is still sealed. I suppose I ought to send it on to her even though my mother seems to think she is not interested in seeing it. Queer, that.”

“I think it is more that she is afraid to read it,” Peter said.

“Eh?” Theo said, giving a log a shove farther onto the fire with the toe of one boot. “What would she be afraid of? Ghosts? I suppose it might put the wind up someone, though, to see a letter written more than a decade ago in the hand of a dead man.”

“I think she is afraid of what she will find there,” Peter said. “Sometimes it seems better not to know what one thought forever lost in the past. But I do wonder if the not knowing will fester in her now that she knows about the letter. Does she know it still exists?”

“Not unless my mother has told her,” Theo said. “Sometimes I wish I had a secretary of my own. Writing letters is not my favorite occupation. I suppose I must write one, though. I can hardly just bundle up her father’s and send it off to her without comment, can I?”

“Is there likely to be something in your father’s letter that would not be in in hers?” Peter asked. “Remember that hers was written to a twelve-year-old.”

Theo raised his eyebrows and considered the question as he gazed into the fire and took two more sips from his glass. Then he looked at Peter.

“I say, Whitleaf,” he said, “what the devil is your interest in all this?”

“Just that,” Peter said. “Interest.”

“You told me you had met Susanna during the summer,” Theo said. “And then you were with her in Bath of all places, at a concert in Bath Abbey, and then in Sydney Gardens, and then at Edith’s. She isn’t your mistress by any chance, is she? Morley won’t like it if you took your mistress to call on him and Edith.”

But he chose to find the mental picture amusing, and first chuckled and then threw back his head and laughed outright.

“He would probably have a fit of the vapors,” he said. “Lord knows what Edith sees in him, but it was a love match.”

“Susanna is not my mistress,” Peter said, without joining in the laughter. “And I would thank you, Theo, for not making that suggestion ever again. I offered her marriage, and she refused me.”

“Eh?” Theo frowned. “Why the devil? She is a schoolteacher, isn’t she? And last time I looked you were a viscount. It would be a brilliant match for her, wouldn’t it? And that’s a colossal understatement.”

Peter did not answer the question.

“I think she needs to know the full truth,” he said. “Everything you know and everything your mother knows and everything both letters can tell her. It may be upsetting for her, but I don’t think she will be able to put the past fully behind her until she knows all there is to know. He was all she had, Theo, and he deliberately put a bullet through his brain.”

“Well, yes,” Theo said. “Poor devil. I say, I wonder if she would like to come here for Christmas. I’ll wager Edith would be ecstatic, and I think my mother would be pleased too-she is coming home the day after tomorrow, by the way. I’ll see what she says. Come to think of it, though, I have a hankering to see Susanna again myself. I used to be rather fond of her. I can remember teaching her to row a boat one summer. She was damned good at it too for all she was just a little bit of a thing with sticks for arms and a shock of red hair. Does she still have the hair?”

“It is auburn,” Peter said.

He had not been trying to lead Theo in the direction of inviting her to Fincham. He had been thinking more of Theo’s going down to Bath, taking Lady Markham with him and both letters so that the two of them could spend some time with her and help her deal with the past.

“You will invite her?” he asked.

Theo looked at him and chuckled before getting to his feet to fetch the brandy decanter.

“I will indeed,” he said, “and you can decide whether to give Fincham a wide berth over Christmas or haunt it every day. How firmly did she mean no when she said it? And how disappointed were you? They are rhetorical questions, Whitleaf-another fellow’s love life is not my concern. But I’ll fetch Susanna here if she will come. She may not, of course. It sounds to me as if she is a lady with a mind of her own-something that showed up when she was twelve years old, I suppose. More brandy?”

He held the decanter suspended over Peter’s glass.

“It’s dashed good,” Peter said, holding his glass up. “Smuggled, I suppose?”

“Is there any other kind?” Theo asked.

She would say no, Peter thought. Of course she would say no.

There was not even any point in wondering how he would behave if she did come. Would he stay away from Fincham? Or would he haunt it every day?

But he would never know, would he? She would not come.

Eleanor Thompson did indeed join the staff of Miss Martin’s school as geography and mathematics teacher. At first Claudia expected that she would come after Christmas, but she was very eager to start immediately and so moved into the school directly from her hotel and began her duties as soon as Claudia had adjusted the timetable and teaching loads.

She proved an instant favorite with the girls and her fellow teachers alike. She was a strict enough disciplinarian, but she also conducted her classes with humor and good sense. She was too late to do anything spectacular-her own word-for the Christmas concert, like directing a play or a choir or organizing maypole dancing. She would busy herself instead with the less glorious work behind the scenes, she announced the day after her arrival, and she worked during almost every spare moment after that, guiding a group of volunteer girls as they brought alive Mr. Upton’s sketches for the various sets, and as often as not wielding a brush herself.

“And to think,” she said with a weary sigh late one evening in Claudia’s sitting room as she rubbed at a stubborn spot of paint on her right forefinger, “that until Christine married Bewcastle and turned all our lives on their collective head I considered that the perfect life was sitting quietly at home in our cottage with an open book in my hand.”

“And do you still think the same thing?” Susanna asked with a twinkle in her eye.

Eleanor laughed. “Just occasionally,” she admitted. “Like this morning, for example, when Agnes Ryde uttered a Cockney curse when she could not solve a problem in mathematics and I had to resist the temptation to pretend I did not understand. It does help, I suppose, that Agnes is a favorite of mine, even though I am sure you would tell me, Claudia, that teachers ought not to have favorites. Agnes has character.”