The Elopement (5 page)

“I don’t know. We’ll stop for the night and have a preacher in the morning and then we’ll decide.”

“In the morning? But . . . a full night together with no chaperone—what will people think?”

He laughed again. “How funny you are. We’ve been without chaperones a hundred times. You’ve never cared before.”

“Yes, but then it was . . . Well, no one
knew
.”

He looked at her in surprise. “Of course they knew. You can’t believe no one’s ever seen you in the hotel lobby? There’s been gossip about it for months.”

She was stunned. “I’ve never heard it.”

“It’s been quietly suppressed,” he said. “By your father, for one. He’s very respected, you know. People like him. And of course, the wedding plans did what they were meant to do. Everyone’s ready to forgive it with the marriage. But you’re a bit notorious, you know. We both are. What does it matter? Parties and dinners are boring. I’ll be glad to have them off the menu for a bit.”

Her surprise grew. Her father had never said a word of it. But now she began to recall things she’d seen but never thought about. Her father’s grim looks sometimes when they were in a carriage riding to some entertainment or another. The way he sometimes seemed ready to say something he thought better of. The sidelong glances she’d caught as she entered a parlor. People whispering among themselves.

“They don’t like that we do what we want without caring what they think,” her lover went on. “That’s all it is. When we’re good and legal, they’ll forget it all.”

She knew he was right. No one liked to be thought of as unimportant or to be disregarded. She did not like it herself. She wondered how long the taint would stick to them. How long people would say:
They ran off together before the wedding. All the plans in place, and they eloped. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a rather early addition to the family.

She thought of Amanda Brown’s shining face. The way the girl had gripped her hand, the way she’d said, “I so admire you. You cannot know how much.”

She thought of Michael Bayley and the hurt in his eyes.
We are all so prepared to be cruel to each other. But we all have feet of clay.

The wedding plans . . . It was lobster—that was what she had chosen. How odd that she had forgotten it, as much trouble as she had taken with it. Salmon and lobster brought in from Maine for the occasion. A great deal of wine sitting in crates in the cellar. Such minute preparations. They had absorbed her for months. A dream of walking down the aisle in lace. The smell of roses.

All of it gone now.

She said quickly, desperately, “We must turn around.”

He frowned. “What?”

She turned to him, gripping his hands hard. “I was wrong. I don’t want this at all. I want the wedding. I want the pianist and the gown. I want the roses.”

He looked stunned. “You can’t. How can you want it?”

“If we hurry, we can make it back before they find us missing. We can pretend we were walking in the garden.”

“I think it’s too late for that, my love.” His voice was grim.

“It’s not. I know it cannot be. Please. Please tell the driver to turn around. Please. I want the wedding.”

“Why? You aren’t like them. You don’t care for their petty rules. You aren’t their kind of woman.”

“I wonder sometimes if even I know what kind of woman I am. Please. Tell the driver. Tell him to turn and to hurry.”

He set his jaw, but he did as she asked, and her heart was in her throat until the driver turned the carriage and they started back, and then her relief made her almost light-headed. A pianist and a church. All of society watching. Consecrated and accepted. Not this hurried elopement, which would leave them pariahs for months, if not years. Not people talking behind their hands. She felt a quickening inside her, a certainty she had never thought to feel, her will settling, strengthening. She knew suddenly what she wanted, who she was meant to be. To be good. To be admired. To be the kind of woman who could offer assistance to a debutante and be thanked with breathless, grateful surprise.

“Hurry,” she murmured beneath her breath. “Oh, please hurry.”

He sat silently beside her. She felt his disappointment. They were racing through the leaves again, raising them in little tornadoes, when he said, “You don’t love me as you say you do.”

“I don’t know how to explain, but . . . but this is what I want. This is what I am.”

“So you’re for Venice and the Coliseum,” he said bitterly. “And helping foolish little debutantes become more and more foolish. I had not thought you cared for such things.”

“I do,” she said. “And I think perhaps you care too, more than you say. We are all more like each other than you suppose.”

A laugh burst from his lips. “My God, I hope not!”

She was filled with impatience. “Tell the driver to hurry.”

“Are you certain? Be certain, my love. Would you not rather I ask him to go slow, and we make love the way we did before? Do you remember it? It was in this very carriage. You were moaning beneath my hands—”

“Of course I remember it!” she burst out. “Oh, why can’t we go faster?”

She noted his sudden pained silence and thought with sorrow that she’d hurt him, and when he said acerbically, “Don’t worry. We’ll make it in time. Your precious reputation will be untarnished,” she knew it for certain, and she wanted to cry. To hurt him was not what she wanted to do, but every decision she’d made since she’d met him had been wrong. All but one.

The carriage jerked, hard enough that they were both thrown out of their seats. She heard a shout, a terrible crack, and a sharp cry of terror from the horses, and then the floor tilted and he was falling into her and they were both flailing about, unable to gain purchase, tumbling like stones in a current, helpless. She was aware of pain and confusion, and then the carriage settled, suddenly still. They were tangled together, and she still didn’t understand what had happened. Pain lashed through her shoulder; she let out a little cry, and then she heard the jangle of harness and the scrabbling of boots, and he was saying to her in a frightened tone, “Are you all right? Tell me you’re all right!”

The door above them opened—it was only then that she realized that the door was not where it was supposed to be, but above her head, and the window was now the floor, and she was knotted together with him, his elbow jammed painfully into her shoulder.

The driver peered down at them. “Miss? Sir? Are you hurt?”

“No,” she said, struggling to free herself.

Her lover helped her regain herself, a gentle hand, a concern in his eyes that surprised her—why, she wondered, should she be so surprised at that?

“What the devil happened?” he asked the driver.

“The wheel cracked,” the man told them, reaching down to help her to her feet. “Flew clean off and splintered into bits. There’s no repairing it.”

“No repairing it?” she asked in dismay.

The driver shook his head sorrowfully. “I’ll have to find someone to help. There was a house a few miles back. Should only take an hour or so for me to walk there.” He cocked his head to look over his shoulder, back out the door at the falling sunlight. “Won’t be back before dark, though.”

Her heart sank. She felt it all slipping away, falling from her grasp. “That will be too late.”

She did not look at her lover. Not when he and the driver helped her climb clumsily from the carriage and then he climbed out himself. Not until the driver set off down the road, and the two of them were sitting on the axle while the horses grazed nearby. Not until he said, “Well, it’s done then.”

His hands were clasped between his knees. His dark hair came forward to hide his face. She felt something in him she had never felt before. Dismay, she thought, and then he looked up, and she saw it wasn’t dismay at all. It was despair.

A despair that matched her own. She said, “Michael will never forgive this.”

“Nor should he,” her lover said. He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “Once the wheel is fixed, we’ll go on. We’ll be married as soon as we can. They’ll forgive us. Eventually.”

She said nothing. How could she tell him that their judgment wasn’t what frightened her? That it had never been what frightened her?

A flock of starlings rushed overhead in a cloud of fluttering wings, descending into a nearby tree with the setting sun. They were loud, twittering. She thought of the canary that Michael had given her. How he’d said it reminded him of her, and she felt that woman—the very barest inception of that woman, who had barely emerged from her cocoon—shrivel. The certainty that had only just risen within her gave way—she felt it go and was helpless to draw it back. She was only a vessel on a potter’s wheel, waiting for the right hand to turn her, to mold her into something fine or coarse, and she wondered where the fault was, who to blame, and if this moment was truly as fated as she’d felt it to be that night she’d stepped out onto a balcony and seen his shadow amidst a crescent moon and spangling of stars, or if it was simply that she’d found the easiest place to perch.

She reached over, taking his hand. He grasped hers tightly, his thumb grazing the moonstone, the one Michael Bayley had put on her finger as he’d said, “I saw the way you looked at this in the shop. You do like it, don’t you? I would do anything to please you,” and she remembered how she had so wanted to be worthy of pleasing.

Her lover said carefully, slowly, “You
will
marry me now? There’s no reason we can’t carry on with it.”

“What choice is there?” she asked. “I’ll be ruined otherwise.”

His smile was wry. “We could go to darkest Africa instead. Or take a boat up the Amazon. We would never have to return.”

“There’s my father,” she said quietly. “I’m his only child. And there will be . . . we’ll have children of our own, you know. They can’t live in darkest Africa.”

He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “Tell me you love me.”

“I love you,” she said.

“Do you mean it?”

She felt near tears. She looked down at their clasped hands. “Yes. Yes, I mean it.”

“Then why?” he asked softly. “I’ve always wondered it. Why, if you love me, did you choose him?”

And she said the truth, because it might be the only time she ever said it, because her will was already bending to his, slipping into his hands, being molded on his potter’s wheel, and she wanted to remember it had once been otherwise, that she had tried once to save herself.

“Because,” she said, “he wasn’t you.”