Major Trent and Captain Wilton departed with their friends the following morning, high-spirited as boys going adventuring. Amanda was quite cast down when they had gone. She remained by the window for some time after they had disappeared toward the London road, chin in hand, close to tears. And Diana was, at first, too preoccupied to cheer her. She could not decide if she was more glad or sorry that Wilton had gone. Diana knew she would miss him, but his absence conveniently postponed difficult decisions, for which she still had no resolution. She welcomed the chance to push the questions aside. This was cowardly, she felt, but better than forcing confrontation. She would have a little more of the enjoyment and frivolity, which had been so rare in her life thus far, before she had to withdraw once again.
For this now seemed the most likely outcome to Diana. She would go back to Yorkshire. No one had bought her father’s gloomy house; it awaited her there, its contents as yet intact. After her brief taste of gaiety, it would receive her again as if nothing had happened. In her more despondent moments Diana felt that, perhaps, Yorkshire was where she belonged. Each time she had ventured out, she had botched things. Probably her father’s teaching had made her unfit for society and the sort of loving home Amanda had established.
Part of her recoiled in horror from this prospect, and urged her to dare all to grasp happiness. But it had to combat a fatalistic voice that had been nourished by years of solitude and contemplation of her mistakes. It was far easier for Diana to convince herself that she had made a mull of things again than to rouse the energy to fight.
It was scarcely a question of battle, in any case, she reasoned. If she, like Wilton, had been riding off to face an enemy with saber and pistol, she might have managed. The prospect was daunting, but conceivable. But Diana had no weapon with which to fight the disgrace that would engulf her should Wilton learn of her past. Rather than a snarling adversary, she would confront a lover and watch him turn, not into an enemy, but something distant and disapproving. The thought made her shudder.
And so she made a great effort not to think of it. She turned her attention resolutely to Amanda and exerted herself to keep her friend amused and comfortable. Since Amanda’s physical condition was as delicate as her emotional state—she was still often ill in the morning and tired during the rest of the day—the task was engrossing, and Diana found she could forget her own troubles for hours at a time.
“We should go out today,” Diana insisted on the third morning after George’s departure. “You cannot mope about the house this way. You always took a drive before, remember? You need fresh air.”
“With George,” was the melancholy reply.
“Yes, well, you will have to make do with me now. And he will be back before you know it. Indeed, he is to return in two days’ time, if all goes well. You do not want to greet him all pale and languid, do you?”
This had some effect. But Amanda was not easily rallied. “He will be going away again almost at once.”
“Perhaps. However, there is one thing we have not considered, Amanda.”
“What?”
“The army may refuse to take him back. He did fight long and hard, and he has lost an eye.”
Amanda, who had been reclining laxly on the sofa, sat up. “Oh, do you think there is a chance?”
“I do, though never tell George I said so.”
“He would be furious,” she agreed, sitting straighter still. “I suppose I am a horrid selfish cat, but I hope you are right. Particularly if the fighting is not to last long this time. It seems so silly for him to go.”
Diana nodded, thinking that it really was very likely the major would be refused. Captain Wilton was another matter. “Why don’t we go to the concert tonight?” she suggested then. “You enjoy the music, and it would not be strenuous. You can keep to your chair the whole time, if you like.”
Amanda considered. “All right,” she answered slowly, as if unable to find a suitable excuse for refusing.
“Good. And this afternoon, we will go for a short drive. You really are looking wan, Amanda.”
This also was allowed, and, after dinner that evening, the two women set off to the concert rooms—if not exuberantly, then at least with a calm contentment. Amanda wore a gown of primrose muslin and really looked much better for her drive. Diana had chosen an amber sarcenet that was nearly the same hue as her hair, worn with some amber beads that were her mother’s only legacy. They arrived just as the musicians were striking up and slipped into seats near the back.
Diana was pleased to see the tight lines in Amanda’s face relax a little as the music began. Her friend was fonder of music than she, a fact that had influenced Diana’s choice of activity for tonight. Gradually Amanda leaned back in her chair, bowed her head, and half-closed her eyes.
Amanda’s enjoyment ensured, Diana was free to look about her. The room was fairly full, as there was no assembly this evening, and she saw a number of Trents’ acquaintances dotted about it. She also glimpsed Ronald Boynton and his aunt near the front, evidently part of a large party. As she watched, Boynton leaned across his massive relative and spoke, quite loudly, to a brown-haired man. A dowager in purple just behind him glared through her lorgnette. With a slight smile, Diana composed herself to listen.
At the interval, Amanda was almost cheerful. “This was a splendid idea, Diana,” she said. “You were very right to insist.”
“Would you like something? Tea? I’ll go and get it.”
“I’ll come with you,” said Amanda, half-rising.
“No, no. There will be a great crush in the refreshment room. You wait here.”
“But you should not go alone.”
Diana was amused. “What could happen to me here? I’ll just be a moment.” And she moved off before Amanda could protest again.
It was indeed very crowded, and Diana was subjected to several quizzical glances as she made her way through the press. It was customary for the gentlemen of a party to fetch refreshment for the ladies. She ignored the stares, however, and slowly moved closer to the viands. When at last she had procured tea and cakes and was picking her way back with a small tray, she heard her name called. But, as she recognized the voice as Ronald Boynton’s, she did not even pause. Let him think she hadn’t heard.
Mr. Boynton was not easily discouraged. He repeated his call and, in the next moment, had hurried forward to confront Diana. “Miss Gresham!”
“Oh, how do you do? You must excuse me, I am just taking this tray back to Mrs. Trent.”
“My friends have arrived from London,” he replied, oblivious of her excuse and not offering to take the tray. “Nearly the whole group. Is it not splendid?”
Nodding without enthusiasm, Diana tried to make her way around him.
“You must come and meet them. They are prodigious fashionable, you know.”
His pleased excitement might have amused Diana under other circumstances, but just now she was simply annoyed. “I cannot. I must deliver this tea. If you wouldn’t mind stepping out of the way?”
“What?” He became aware of Diana’s burden for the first time, and this awareness brought with it the knowledge that he should come to her aid, though he clearly did not wish to.
The succession of emotions visible in his face made Diana smile, but she was weary of waiting. “Let me pass, please.”
“Er, certainly. I, er, I must…”
She didn’t linger to hear his excuses. Slipping between two chatting groups, Diana left the refreshment room.
“I’ll bring them round to meet you when the concert is done,” she heard Boynton call after her, but she paid no heed.
The interval was nearly over by the time she reached Amanda, and they drank their tepid tea in silence. Amanda seemed to enjoy the second part of the concert as much as the first. She was smiling and humming softly when they rose to go. Diana, on the other hand, was preoccupied by the thought that she must get someone to fetch their carriage, though all available servitors were besieged by others with similar desires. It was much more comfortable, she realized, to go out with a gentleman who took responsibility for such details.
“I am afraid we may have to wait a little,” she told Amanda. “Everyone is trying to leave at once.”
Amanda nodded, and they withdrew a little from the crowd at the doors.
“There you are, Miss Gresham,” exclaimed Ronald Boynton, bearing down upon them from the concert rooms. “Did you forget that I promised to present my friends to you?”
In fact, she had, and she found herself wishing that he had been equally forgetful.
“Some of the most elegant folk now in Bath,” he was telling her confidingly. “You won’t wish to miss the chance. Nor will Mrs. Trent, I vow.” He nodded to Amanda, who looked amused. “Lord Faring is among them,” finished Boynton, as if offering them a great prize.
This did pique Diana’s curiosity a little. She would not object to meeting Robert Wilton’s older brother, she thought. She would be interested to see what he was like, though she already knew that he did not much resemble the captain.
Boynton took her hesitation for eagerness. “Just come along this way,” he instructed. “We’re waitin’ within until the crush eases.”
Diana glanced at Amanda, who shrugged, and they allowed Boynton to usher them through an archway and back into the concert rooms. “He reminds me of a cat we once had,” whispered Amanda very softly. “She was forever bringing me the mice she caught, and dropping them at my feet.”
Diana stifled a laugh. The comparison was perfect, and the treat Boynton promised seemed nearly as distasteful.
“Faring,” Mr. Boynton cried, and a slender brown-haired man ahead of them turned. “Like you to meet some of my Bath acquaintances.” He gestured.
“You are wrong, Amanda,” murmured Diana. “We are the mice.” And indeed Boynton seemed pleased to be presenting such a pretty girl to his noble crony. He performed the introductions with a complacent smirk.
“Enchanted,” said Lord Faring, bowing over Diana’s hand. She would never have known him for Wilton’s brother, she thought. Their coloring was the same, and an informed observer could trace certain similarities in the lines of Faring’s face. But, in every other respect, the brothers were clearly opposites. Faring’s dress was the height of dandyism, and his countenance showed evidence of years of excess in its pouchy eyes, premature lines, and lack of color. He surveyed Diana with an appreciative insolence that made her wish to turn her back.
“Miss Gresham is a friend of your brother’s,” added Boynton.
“Indeed?” Faring seemed to find this amusing. He spoke in the same drawl as Boynton, but more languidly. “You must not judge our whole family by the gauche Robert. His years abroad have left him ignorant of everything except shooting, I believe.”
“On the contrary,” answered Diana coldly. “I found him remarkably well-informed. And he is a valued friend of Mrs. Trent’s husband, Major Trent.”
“Ah.” Again Lord Faring seemed amused.
Boynton was not yet done with introductions, however. He reeled off the names of several other gentlemen and, finally, hailing another who came up just then, said, “And last of all, but by no means least amusin’, Miss Gresham, my friend Gerald Carshin.”
Diana had already begun to turn, and Amanda was facing the newcomer. The latter was a fortunate circumstance, for Amanda’s polite response covered Diana’s frozen immobility and allowed her the necessary instant to force herself to resume movement. She did not, however, recover her composure, and she faced Gerald Carshin in wide-eyed silence.
He, too, was patently startled. But his self-possession, or perhaps effrontery, was greater. “Miss Gresham and I have met before,” he murmured and bent to kiss her limp hand.
“I might have known,” joked Boynton. “You always know the pretty girls, Carshin. Where did you meet?”
Carshin did not answer, but this was evidently not unusual. “How are you?” he asked Diana.
She tried to speak, and failed, the implications of this encounter boiling up in her mind.
Amanda sensed some strangeness in her friend. She looked sidelong at Diana, then at Carshin, and said, “We must be going, I’m afraid. We were waiting for our carriage.”
“We will escort you,” offered the newcomer. “Boynton here can send for your vehicle.” Adroitly he slipped Diana’s hand into his arm and started off, leaving the group a bit nonplussed.
“If he is not the most complete hand,” Boynton was heard to murmur.
“Do you call it that?” responded Faring, who was obviously used to more deference.
One of the other men, recalling his manners, offered his arm to Amanda, and the rest of the party followed toward the exit.
“You are as lovely as ever,” said Gerald Carshin to Diana. He could feel her trembling on his arm, and he rather enjoyed the sensation.
Diana was silent. She was gradually recovering from the shock, but she was not yet up to conversation.
“You seem unchanged, in fact, though it has been…what, seven years?” Carshin had not thought of her in nearly that long, but now details were coming back to him. Had it not been seven years until Diana came into her fortune? “I see no ring on your finger?” he ventured. “You have not married?”
“No,” she managed.
“Ah.” Carshin’s brain began to work. His financial position was no better now than it had been seven years ago. If anything, it was worse. The charity of men such as Lord Faring, who was by no means a leader of fashion, kept him afloat. And he had had no luck in attaching another heiress whom he could imagine as his wife. The reappearance of Diana Gresham, obviously not in disgrace with society, seemed providential. And I objected to coming to Bath, he thought with a shake of his head. “Nor I,” he said in a melancholy tone that sought to imply he had never gotten over her.
Diana understood it, and the audacity of the man made her stare up at him in amazement. He tried to look soulful, and succeeded merely in impressing her with the change in him since they had parted. Diana remembered Carshin as a blond Adonis. He had, indeed, been handsome. Moreover, such a memory partially explained her foolishness in her own eyes. She had been dazzled. But the man she saw now was scarcely dazzling. His pale hair was thin, and an incipient paunch strained his waistcoat. The weight of years of hard living stamped his features. A hint of jowl marred his clean jaw, and his blue eyes gazed out from a network of tiny wrinkles.
“Perhaps it was fated thus,” he went on, throwing her another intense look.
“Fated?” Diana was nearly herself again.
“That neither of us should be attached, and that we should meet again after all this time.”
“I can’t believe the fates so stupid,” she replied tartly, not really believing him serious.
“To keep us apart so long?” Carshin realized that she still resented the past. Only to be expected, he supposed, though she seemed to have retained her position in society. But he had his work cut out for him. It was fortunate that he enjoyed a challenge and that the prize was so worth the effort.
“To bring us together at all.”
He bent a little toward her, not enough to cause comment, but so that he could whisper in her ear. “Too hard! You cannot have forgotten those golden days when we first met. The tulips I brought you? Our walks over the moors?”
A luminous haze did lie over those recollections, Diana realized. Though she had bitterly deplored her own stupidity at seventeen, she had concentrated on the elopement itself. The preceding time retained some of its magical aura.
“I was a fool,” murmured Carshin. “Worse! But I have been sorry for it ever since. If you knew how I regretted—”
“So much that you could not even write,” she interrupted.
“Exactly. I was afraid to write to you. I knew how you must despise me. A thousand times I began a letter, only to tear it up in despair.”
For a fleeting moment Diana almost believed him. Her active imagination pictured the scene he described. She had known enough despair herself to be reluctant to judge others. But then she met Carshin’s eyes, and the illusion dissolved. At seventeen she had been blind to the calculation and self-love mirrored there. At five-and-twenty, she was not. There had been no letters, and no regrets. Gerald Carshin had probably not thought of her from that day to this unless—Diana’s heart froze with her next thought—he had told their story to his cronies, to amuse them. Briefly, she couldn’t breathe. Then she realized that none of the other men had seemed to recognize her name.
“But now I have been given the opportunity to make amends,” Carshin was saying. “I can scarcely believe my good fortune. I will show you how—”
“No.” She looked at him, coolly appraising. “I don’t wish to see you again. Please do not speak to me.”
He paused, weighing various replies. “Surely you would not be so unforgiving as to—”
“It has nothing to do with forgiveness. I simply don’t like you, and I don’t wish to associate with you.” This bluntness felt amazingly good. Diana drew in a breath, pleased.
“Do you not?”
“No.” She withdrew her arm. “If you will excuse me, I must see about the carriage and join Mrs. Trent.”
“I wonder what your friend Mrs. Trent would think if she knew the story of our…association? Apparently you kept it secret somehow, but that need not go on.”
Diana stared at him, appalled.
“Ah, that catches you up, does it? Perhaps there are others who would be interested in the story.” Seeing her expression, he added, “Perhaps some whose good opinion you value even more highly, eh?”
“You—”
“Now, now, don’t say anything you’ll be sorry for later.” He stepped close again. “You will see me, and speak to me, and do as I tell you. For, if you don’t, all of Bath will hear our romantic history.” He grinned unpleasantly. “And your friends shall hear all the most intimate details.” He looked her up and down in a way that brought back that night they had spent at the inn. Diana flushed crimson.
“You horrible—”
He held up a warning finger. “What did I tell you about name-calling?”
She turned away, moving toward Amanda, and Carshin added, “So good to see you again, Miss Gresham. I shall certainly call tomorrow,” in a voice that all could hear.
Once Diana and Amanda were safely in their carriage, Amanda, though weary, turned to her friend and asked, “Wherever did you meet that man Carshin, Diana?”
Diana looked away so that her friend couldn’t see her expression. “He visited Yorkshire several years ago.”
“Indeed? That must have been one occasion when you were grateful for your father’s reclusiveness. The man’s manner is quite unpleasantly insinuating. I hope he does not actually call.”
Gazing out the carriage window, Diana thought despairingly that Amanda would never understand her ill-fated elopement of years ago.