On the day after her twenty-fifth birthday, Diana Gresham followed a second coffin to the churchyard. Mrs. Samuels had been ill all that winter, and, late in February, she died, leaving Diana wholly alone. Diana had nursed the old housekeeper faithfully, and she tried to feel some sadness as she stood beside her grave and listened to the rector intone the ritual words, but she could not muster much emotion. She and Mrs. Samuels had never been true companions. The closeness that Diana had imagined might come from their shared adversity had never emerged. Indeed, the older woman had merely become more dour and reclusive as the years passed, and Diana had felt increasingly isolated.
When the rector and the few mourners were ready to depart after the brief service, Diana resisted their urgings to come away and wrapped her black cloak more closely around her shoulders as the sexton and his helpers began to fill in the grave. It was a dreary morning, with low gray clouds and a damp bitter chill. Warm weather earlier in the week had turned the winter earth to mud, but there was as yet no hint of green to reconcile one to the dirt. The moors rolling away beyond the stone church were bleak. Yet Diana did not move even when the wind made her cloak billow out around her, bringing the cold to her skin. She did not want to return to her family house, whose cramped rooms were unchanged since her father’s death.
For some time, Diana had been feeling restless and dissatisfied. The shocked immobility that had followed her disastrous rebellion seven years before had modulated through remorse and self-loathing into withdrawal, contemplation, and finally, understanding. She had forgiven her younger self a long while ago. Her faults had been great, but they sprang from warmth of feeling and lack of family love rather than weakness. Her mistakes had been almost inevitable, given her naïveté and susceptibility.
But with greater wisdom had also come a loss of the eager openness that younger Diana had possessed. The habit of solitude had become strong; Diana seldom exchanged more than a few sentences with her scattered neighbors. I am like Mrs. Samuels myself now, she thought, gazing over the moors. I have no friends.
Her restlessness reached a kind of irritated crescendo, and she felt she must do something dramatic, or else she would scream. But she did not know what to do. Some change was inevitable. Even had she not been inexpressibly weary of living alone, she could not remain completely solitary. Yet she had no family to take her in. Mr. Merton, the banker, had called yesterday to congratulate her and solemnly explain that she was now in full possession of her fortune. She was a wealthy woman. But she felt resourceless. Money was useless, she realized, if one did not know what to do with it.
Shivering as the wind whipped her cloak again, Diana felt she must come to some conclusion before she returned to the house. If she did not, some part of her suggested, she would slip back into her routine of isolation and never break free. She would indeed become a Mrs. Samuels, reluctant to venture beyond her own front door.
I must leave here, she thought, looking from the small churchyard to the narrow village street with its facing rows of stone cottages. All was brown and gray and black; there was no color anywhere. She had never learned to love the harsh landscapes of Yorkshire, a failing, no doubt. But where could she go?
Diana felt a sudden sharp longing for laughter and the sounds of a room full of people. Wistfully she remembered her short time at school. Her father had kept her there less than a year, concluding that she was being corrupted by association with fifty empty-headed girls. Diana recalled their chatter and jokes as part of the happiest time in her life. If only she could return to that time! But her new financial independence would not give her this, however pleasant it might be.
Briefly she was filled with bitterness. It seemed a cruel joke that she should get her fortune now, when events had rendered her incapable of enjoying it. She could buy a different house, hire a companion, enliven her wardrobe, but she could not regain her old lightheartedness or her girlhood friends. If only her father had been kinder, or Gerald… But with this thought, Diana shook her head. She could not honestly blame them for her present plight. Her father had been harsh and distant; Gerald had treated her shamefully. But she herself had repulsed the world in her first remorseful reaction, for no reason that the world could see. Naturally, those she rejected had withdrawn, and it seemed to her now that she had been foolish in this as well as in her rash elopement.
Gathering her cloak, Diana turned and walked through the churchyard gate and along the street toward home. Her father’s house, hers now, was beyond the edge of the village, surrounded by high stone walls. As she approached it, Diana walked more slowly, a horror of retreating behind those barriers again growing in her. Was she fated to spoil her life? Had some dark destiny hovered over her birth?
“Diana. Diana Gresham,” called a high, light voice behind her. “Wait, Diana!”
She turned. A small slender woman in a gray cloak and a modish hat was waving from a carriage in the center of the village. Her face was in shadow, and Diana did not recognize her as she got out and hurried forward.
“Oh, lud,” the newcomer gasped as she came up. “This wind takes my breath away. And I had forgotten the dreadful cold here. But how fortunate to meet you, Diana! Cynthia Addison said you had left Yorkshire, and so I might not even have called! Are you back for a visit, as we are?”
When the woman spoke, Diana recognized Amanda Trent, a friend she had not seen for eight years. Amanda, two years older, had married young and followed her soldier husband to Spain. They had exchanged one or two letters at the beginning, but Amanda was an unreliable correspondent, and Diana had ceased to write after her elopement, as she had ceased to see acquaintances like Cynthia Addison, who could not be blamed for thinking her gone. “Hello, Amanda,” she answered, the commonplace words feeling odd on her tongue.
Amanda peered up into her face, sensing some strangeness. She looked just the same, Diana thought—tiny and brunette, with huge, almost black, eyes. Those eyes had been the downfall of a number of young men before Captain Trent won her hand. “Diana?” Amanda said, a question in her voice.
Making a great effort, Diana replied, “I am not visiting. I never left. After Papa died…” She didn’t finish her sentence because the story seemed far too complicated to review; none of the important things could be told. And she didn’t want pity.
Amanda held out both hands. “Yes, they told me about Mr. Gresham. I am sorry, of course, though…” She shrugged. Long ago, Diana had confided some of her trials.
Awkwardly Diana took her hands. Amanda squeezed her fingers and smiled. “Come back with me, and we shall have a cozy talk. I want to hear everything!”
Diana wondered what she would say if she did. Amanda seemed the same gay creature she had been at nineteen; Diana felt ancient beside her. Yet the chance to put off going home was irresistible, and shortly they were sitting side by side in Amanda’s carriage riding toward her parents’ house a few miles from the village.
“George is invalided out,” Amanda told her. “He never recovered properly from the fever he took after Toulouse, so we decided to come here for a good long visit. I am so happy to be in England again! You cannot imagine how inconvenient it sometimes was in Spain, Diana.”
Thinking that “inconvenient” was an odd characterization of the Peninsular War, Diana watched her old friend’s face. Now that they were closer, she could see small signs of age and strain there. Amanda was no less pretty, but it was obvious now that she was nearly a decade past nineteen. Her friend’s chatter seemed less carefree, more forced. Diana felt relieved; it had been daunting to think that only she was altered. “You have been in Spain all this time?”
“Oh, lud, no! That I could not have borne. I spent two seasons in London, and I was here for the summer a year ago. I am sorry I did not call, Diana, but I was…ill.” She turned her head away. “Here we are. Mama will be so pleased to see you.”
Wondering uneasily if this was true, Diana followed Amanda into the house. Mrs. Durham was one of the acquaintances she had ceased to see years ago.
As it happened, none of the family was at home. George Trent was riding with Amanda’s father, and Mrs. Durham had gone to visit an ailing tenant rather than share Amanda’s drive. The two women settled in the drawing room with a pot of tea and a plate of the spice cakes Diana remembered from childhood visits.
“Are you still in mourning?” asked Amanda then, her expression adding what politeness made her suppress. Diana’s clothes and hair were even more unfashionable than before her father’s death.
Diana put a hand to the great knot of deep golden hair at the back of her neck as she explained about Mrs. Samuels. Amanda’s dark cropped ringlets and elegant blue morning gown brought back concerns she hadn’t felt for years. The black dress she wore was the last she had bought, for her father’s mourning.
Amanda looked puzzled. “But, Diana, what have you been doing all this time? Did you have a London season? Or at least go to York for the winter assemblies?” When Diana shook her head, she opened her eyes very wide. “Do you mean you have just stayed here? But why?”
It must indeed seem eccentric, Diana thought, and she could not give her only plausible reason. Her neighbors had probably judged her mad.
Amanda was gazing at her with an unremembered shrewdness. “Is something wrong, Diana? You…you seem different. You were always the first to talk of getting away.”
Miserably Diana prepared to rise. She could not explain, and Amanda would no doubt take that inability for coldness. Their long-ago friendship was dead.
But Amanda had lapsed into meditative silence. “I suppose we are all changed,” she added. “It has been quite a time, after all. What else could we expect?”
Surprised, Diana said nothing, and in the next moment their tête-à-tête was interrupted by the entrance of Amanda’s family.
The Durhams were familiar, though Diana had not seen them recently, and their greetings were more cordial than she had expected. They did not mention her strange behavior or seem to see anything odd in her sudden visit to their house. But as they spoke, Diana gradually received the impression that they were too preoccupied with more personal concerns to think of her.
One cause, at least, was obvious. Diana had never seen a greater alteration in a person than in George Trent, Amanda’s husband. She remembered him as a smiling blond giant, looking fully able to toss his tiny bride high in the air and catch her again without the least strain. Now, after seven years in the Peninsula, he retained only his height. His once-muscular frame was painfully thin; his bright hair and ruddy complexion were dulled, and he wore a black patch over one blue eye. Diana’s presence appeared to startle and displease him, though he said nothing, merely retreating to the other side of the room and pretending interest in an album that lay on a table. His family watched him anxiously but covertly.
“George,” said Amanda finally, when his conduct was becoming rude, “you remember Diana Gresham. She was at our wedding, and I have spoken to you of her.”
George was very still for a moment. Then he turned, squaring his shoulders as if to face an ordeal. “Miss Gresham,” he said, bowing his head slightly.
“Doesn’t George look dashing and romantic?” Amanda continued, her tone rather high and brittle. “I tell him he is positively piratical and he must take care not to set too many hearts aflutter, or I shall be dreadfully jealous. Don’t I, George?”
“Me and everyone else,” he replied, and strode abruptly out of the room.
Amanda made a small sound, and when Diana turned she saw that her old friend’s eyes were filled with tears. She felt sharp pity and feared that she intruded.
“It was only a tiny wound,” said Amanda shakily. “But they could not save his eye. And then he took the fever as well. I had hoped that being home again would be good for George, but he doesn’t seem to want to recover.”
“You’ve been here only a week, Amanda,” answered Mr. Durham. “Give him time.”
“Yes, darling.” Amanda’s mother looked as if she might cry too. “I’m sure it is very hard for him, but he will come round.”
Diana rose. “Perhaps I should take my leave.”
The Durhams exchanged a glance.
“Please don’t,” cried Amanda. Then, realizing that she had spoken too fervently, added, “I beg your pardon. Why should you wish to stay, after all? It is just that I have been so…” She broke off and dropped her head in her hands.
Diana moved without thinking to sit beside her friend and put an arm around her shoulders. “Of course I will stay if you wish it. I feared I was prying into private matters.”
“George does not allow it to be private.” Amanda’s voice was muffled. “I am selfish to keep you, Diana. It was just so splendid to see someone from the old days.” She raised her head. “The things we remember of each other are so…simple.”
It was true, Diana thought, and the idea appealed to her as much as it did Amanda. Whatever worries each might have, between them there was nothing but pleasant recollections. Here was an opportunity to end her loneliness without explanations or the great effort of finding and cultivating new acquaintances. At long last, fate seemed to be coming to her aid. “I should like to stay,” she said. “I should like it very much.”
Amanda met her eyes, and for a moment they gazed at each another as two women, a little buffeted by the world and sadder and wiser than the girls they had been when they last met. A flash of wordless communication passed between them. Then Amanda smiled and clasped her hands. “I’m so glad. We will have another cup of tea and talk of all our old friends. Do you know what has become of Sophie Jenkins?”
Returning her smile, Diana shook her head.
“She married an earl!”
“But she wished to become a missionary!”
“So she always said,” replied Amanda. “But when she got to London, she threw that idea to the winds and pursued a title until she snared one. They say her husband is a complete dunce.”
Diana couldn’t help but laugh, and Amanda’s mischievous grin soon turned to trilling laughter as well. They both went on a bit longer than the joke warranted, savoring the sensation.
“I hope you will stay to dinner, Diana,” said Mrs. Durham then. “I know you are alone now.”
Diana had nearly forgotten the older couple. Turning quickly, she saw encouraging smiles on both their faces. “I should like that. Thank you.” Did they really want her?
“That’s right!” Amanda’s dark eyes widened as she thought of something. “Diana! You must come and stay here. You cannot live alone, and I should adore having you. Wouldn’t we, Mama?”
“Of course.”
Mrs. Durham did not sound as enthusiastic as her daughter. But neither did she seem insincere. Suddenly the idea was very attractive. Diana would not have to go back to that dreary house for a while; she could put off the decision about what to do. Yet the habit of years was strong. “I don’t know…” she began.
“You must come,” urged Amanda. “We shall have such fun.” Tension was in her voice, and Diana could not resist her plea. She nodded, and Amanda embraced her exuberantly.
“For a few days,” murmured Diana, her eyes on the Durhams.
But the older couple was watching their daughter with pleased relief.
And so it was that Diana closed up her father’s house on the day after Mrs. Samuels’ funeral and settled into a pleasant rose-papered bedchamber at the Durhams’. The room was much more comfortable than her own, attended to by a large staff of servants. Diana had dismissed all the servants but Mrs. Samuels after her father’s death, taking on household chores herself as a kind of penance. She had never learned to enjoy the work, however, and she decided now that there was no further need to punish herself.
As the days passed, it became more and more obvious that Diana’s presence was good for Amanda, and Diana took this as reason enough for the Durhams’ kindness. That the opposite was also true, she did not consider for some time. Yet at the end of the first week, Diana realized that she was happier than she had been for months, perhaps years. Amanda’s companionship filled a great void in her life, and a more luxurious style of living suited her completely.
At the beginning of the second week, as she and Amanda walked together on a balmy March afternoon, Amanda said, “We are the only two of our friends who have stayed the same, or nearly the same, anyway. I have seen Sophie and Jane and Caroline in town, and they are all vastly changed. They talk of people I don’t know, and they seem wrapped up in town life. I suppose it is because you and I were cut off from society.”
“Did you see no one in Spain?” Diana was curious about her friend’s experiences abroad, though she did not wish to call up any painful memories.
“Some other officers’ wives, but they were often posted away just as we became friendly. And I never got on with the Spanish and Portuguese ladies.” She sighed. “George was most often with the army, of course. I spent a great deal of time alone.”
“You came back for visits.” Diana wondered why she had not stayed in England, as most army wives did.
“Yes. But then I missed George so dreadfully.” Amanda’s smile was wry. “We were…are so fond of one another. It is very unfashionable.”
“I remember when you met him. One day you were perfectly normal, then you went to an assembly in York and came back transformed. We could hardly force a sentence from you. It took days to discover what was the matter.”
Amanda laughed. “We were both bowled over. We married six weeks later.”
“And the rest of us nearly died of jealousy.”
They laughed. But Amanda’s expression soon sobered again. “And now we are all scattered—Sophie in Kent, Jane in Dorset, and Caroline flitting from London to Brighton to house parties. It all seems so long ago.” She paused. “Of course, they all have children, too. It makes them seem older.”
Diana sensed constraint. “When you and George are settled…” she began.
Amanda shook her head as if goaded. “I have lost three. I…I don’t hope…that is…” She bit her lower lip and struggled for composure. “But what am I about, discussing such things with you? An unmarried girl! Mama would be scandalized.” She paused again, taking a deep breath. “You know what we must do, Diana? We must find you a husband. You are…what? Five-and-twenty now? Nearly on the shelf. How careless of you!” Abruptly her eyes widened. “I did not mean… Oh, I haven’t offended you, have I? My tongue runs away with me sometimes.”
“Of course you have not.” But Diana did feel uneasy. “I have never had the opportunity to marry. I don’t suppose I shall.” Even if she did have the chance, it was impossible. No man would wish to marry her once he learned of her past. Diana knew she could never keep such a secret from a husband.
“Nonsense.” Amanda examined her friend with a more critical eye than she had used so far. Diana had been very pretty at seventeen. Now, her color was not so good, admittedly, but her deep golden hair had lost none of its vibrancy, and the unfashionable way she dressed it was somehow very attractive. Her face was thinner, but her brown eyes with those striking gold flecks remained entrancing. Her form was slender and pleasing, even in the poorly cut black gown. Amanda’s own dark eyes began to sparkle. It was unthinkable that Diana should not marry, and this was just the sort of problem that appealed to her. A keen interest that Amanda had not felt for some time rose in her, temporarily banishing worry. How could her plan be best accomplished? Slowly an idea started to form, which, she reasoned, might work for George as well.