The Gilded Web (46 page)

“I have been searching everywhere for you,” he said. “I thought I was going to have to leave without speaking to you.”

“To leave?” she asked, staring at him blankly. “Where are you going?”

“I am leaving,” he said. “I can't stay any longer, Alex. Not even for another night. I have to go. It is not a dark night. I will be able to see where I am going.”

“But it is past midnight,” she said, “and in the middle of a ball. What has happened, James? Is it Papa? Has he said something?”

He shook his head and grasped both her hands in his. “I cannot explain,” he said. “Don't ask it of me, Alex. I have to go, that is all. I have left a letter for Mama and Papa. But I wanted to see you. You will be all right? You still feel as you have felt for the past week? You do not need me?”

She gazed at him in silence for a moment, biting her lip. “No,” she said finally. “I want you to do what you must. But where will you go, James? This is so sudden, though I have known it is coming. I cannot think.”

“Out of the country,” he said. “I have to get right away. Canada, I think. There is room there, and opportunity. There is work there, and challenge, and it does not matter there who one is or what one possesses. I think Canada.”

She clung to his hands and rested her forehead against his chest. “Go, then,” she said. “Write to me.”

“Yes,” he said. “But I will not know where to write, Alex.”

She frowned suddenly and looked up at him. “Write here,” she said in some agitation. “Write here, James. I will let them know where I am going to be. Lady Amberley, maybe. Or Madeline.”

They looked at each other with the desperation of an imminent parting.

“Live again, James,” she pleaded. “Give life another chance. I love you.”

“Yes,” he said, taking her into his arms and hugging her so hard that she could not draw air into her lungs. “Yes. Alex.”

And he was gone from her, striding in the direction of the stables without looking back. Alexandra stared wildly after him until he disappeared from sight. Then she hurried up the steps and into the house. She could not wait until he rode into sight again.

M
ANY OF THE GUESTS
had left or were leaving when Alexandra returned to the ballroom. Lord Amberley stood just inside the doorway with Lord Eden, Madeline, and his mother, saying good night to an almost continuous stream of neighbors. She had no choice but to join them.

“A terrible ball, Edmund,” his Uncle William was saying. “Terrible. Next year you will have to hire an orchestra that plays at half the speed. This one is like to kill us all from heart failure after torturing us with blisters. Terrible ball.” He chuckled.

“Oh, William!” his wife said. “You know you have been saying all evening what a splendid time you have been having. Take no notice of him, Edmund. He is just a tease. Miss Purnell will be taking you seriously, William. She does not know you yet.”

Lord Amberley smiled. “I did not notice you suffering, Uncle William,” he said. “Every time I have spotted you this evening, you have been dancing.”

“Merely practicing,” his uncle said cheerfully. “Next year we will have to bring Anna. She almost drowned in her own tears this year because Viola said no—and I dare not defy Viola, you know. Next year, my boy, I will have to dance with Anna. And you had better reserve the opening set with her soon, Dominic, or she will break her heart.”

Mr. and Mrs. Courtney were the next to leave. Their boys were close behind them, Susan hovering in the background, Lieutenant Jennings beside her.

“Well, your lordship,” Mr. Courtney boomed, extending a large hand to his host, “a thoroughly grand evening, as always. My little one here will remember it for as long as she lives, I'll wager.”

Lord Amberley smiled at Susan. “You have been a great success, Susan,” he said. “I am still chagrined over the fact that when I asked you, you had not one free set to offer me.”

She blushed and hung her head.

“It is supposed to be a secret,” Mr. Courtney whispered so loudly that no one in the group had any difficulty hearing. “I am not supposed to say anything until the lieutenant has had a chance to communicate the news to his family. But they will not mind present company knowing. Lieutenant Jennings here offered for Susan this afternoon, and Mrs. Courtney and I gave our blessing, and she has accepted him this evening.” He beamed around at everyone who stood and listened to him.

“Papa!” Susan said in an agony of embarrassment, allowing the lieutenant to lift her hand and lay it on his sleeve.

“Well, then,” Lord Amberley said, “my ball has been a memorable occasion indeed. My congratulations to you both.”

Lieutenant Jennings bowed. Susan would not lift her head.

“My little girl the wife of an officer!” Mr. Courtney said. “Can you imagine it, my lord? My lady?”

“I am sure Susan will do very well,” Lady Amberley said. “I believe she has a great deal more backbone than anyone gives her credit for. And is it true that the regiment may be going to Spain, Lieutenant?”

Madeline, who had not looked at or spoken to her brother all evening, moved quietly to his side and slid a hand through his arm. She laid a cheek lightly against his shoulder for a moment. He hugged her arm to his side, his own as taut as iron.

“We will be taking ourselves off to bed,” Lord Beckworth said, approaching the door with his wife on his arm. He nodded stiffly and unsmilingly to his host. “We will talk to you in the morning, Amberley. And Alexandra.” He gave her a direct and cold look. “Where is James?”

Alexandra hesitated. “He has left,” she said. She looked up at Lord Amberley. “Did he tell you?”

“Yes,” he said briefly. “I am glad he found you, Alex. He was looking for you.”

“Left?” Lord Beckworth said. “What in thunder do you mean by that?”

“He has gone away, Papa,” Alexandra said quietly. “I think permanently.”

“In the middle of the night?” Lady Beckworth said. “And in the middle of a ball? What can have possessed him? There must be some mistake. Where is he going?”

“To Canada, he said.” Alexandra looked around her. “He left you a letter. Perhaps I can accompany you upstairs, Mama.”

She said a hurried good night to everyone else, linked her arm through her mother's, and left the ballroom.

Lord Eden's free hand had come across to grip his sister's. Looking down at their clasped hands, Madeline wondered idly whose knuckles were the whiter with tension, his or hers. She concentrated on their hands, giving them the whole of her attention. Only so could she save herself from falling down the long, dark tunnel that was waiting to receive her.

M
ORE THAN AN HOUR
later Alexandra was standing at the window of her room, staring sightlessly out. She was brushing idly at her hair, though there was really no need to do so. Nanny Rey had already given it its obligatory two hundred strokes for the night. And her touch had been none too gentle either. She had been told about the broken engagement and their imminent departure from Amberley.

“You don't know your own mind,” she had said, pulling out the last hairpin and spreading Alexandra's hair over her shoulders in preparation for brushing it. “All these years you have not been given a chance to live, and now, when you are being offered all that life has to give by way of happiness, you are not satisfied.”

“I know I am being foolish,” Alexandra had said meekly.

“Foolish?” The first vicious stroke of the brush had dragged Alexandra's whole head backward. “Lunatic, I would call it. Such a lovely lord that I can scarce believe he is real. And not good enough for you.”

“Ah, I did not say that, Nanny,” Alexandra had protested. “He is too good for me, perhaps. Goodness had nothing to do with it. I have to be free, that is all. For once in my life I have to be free.”

“That is the silliest word I ever heard tell of,” Nanny Rey had said, making no effort whatsoever to tease the brush through a tangled curl, but pulling at it unrelentingly. “I can see it being in the French language or the Italian language, but not in the English language. The English are supposed to be sensible people. Free! There is no such thing as freedom, I am here to tell you.”

“If I were a man I could be free,” Alexandra said. “Ouch, Nanny. Can you not be a little more gentle?”

“Do you want to go to bed with tangles?” Nanny Rey had asked severely. “Hold still now, lovey. Men are no more free than we are, I do assure you. We are all born to a certain way of life, and we have to make the best of it. The person does not live who can do just whatsoever he pleases. Oh, some of those Eastern princes, perhaps, with their harems and other heathen trappings, poor lost souls. But I'll wager even they have to do what is expected of them. What if one of them wants only one wife? Everyone will laugh at him and think he is less than a man. So he is forced to fill his harem with fifty wives.”

“Ouch! Nanny!” Alexandra had complained.

“Hold still, lovey” had been the only sympathy she had received. “If you spend your life running around in search of freedom, you will be running to your dying day and still no nearer than when you started.”

“Perhaps,” Alexandra had said. She never had been able to argue with Nanny, whose homespun wisdom always sounded incontestable.

“If I were you, I would run to his lordship in the morning and beg his pardon,” Nanny had said. “He will forgive you, lovey, and still marry you, I would wager. I have never known a kinder gentleman.”

“Nor I,” Alexandra had said. “But the deed is done anyway. I will want you to pack my bags tomorrow morning, Nanny, if you please.”

And finally she had been left alone, unhappy, her victory feeling very hollow indeed. And James gone. Perhaps she would never see him again. Perhaps she would never even hear from him. There had been no time to think of a place where he could send a letter and she be sure to receive it. Lady Amberley or Madeline might be very reluctant to forward a letter to her under the circumstances. Lord Amberley would, her mind told her unbidden. But she shook off the thought.

And then she saw him. He was standing outside the house, his hands clasped behind him, his legs apart. He was looking up to the sky. She held her breath and watched him, the brush suspended in her hair. He stood there for a long time, not moving. The urge began to grow on her to go down to him, to stand beside him, to talk to him. She wanted to ask him what his thoughts were, what his feelings. Too late she had remembered that there were two people involved in any relationship. She had not been the only person involved in their betrothal. He had been too.

She would have to get dressed, she thought. She would not have to pause to do her hair. He would not mind if she merely tied it back at the nape of her neck. She removed the brush slowly from her hair and stared down at him, undecided.

But before she could put her half-formed plan into action, Lord Amberley moved. He strode away from the house in the direction of the stone bridge. He was no longer wearing his ball dress, she could see, but riding clothes. He did not go for a horse, though. He crossed the bridge, turned up the valley, and disappeared from view behind the trees.

Alexandra stood at her window for another half-hour, her forehead against the pane, waiting for him to return, knowing that he would not do so. She knew where he had gone. And as the minutes passed, she ached to follow him there. He wanted to be alone. That was why he had gone. She would be the last person he would want to see. She had told him once that it would be his private place. She would never go there again.

It was a losing battle. She lost it at the end of the half-hour, when she hurried across her bedchamber and into the dressing room, changed quickly into her green velvet riding skirt and green silk blouse, rejected the jacket, and reached for a woolen shawl. She did not possess a hair ribbon and could not at the moment think of anything else that would serve the same purpose of tying back her hair. She tossed it back over her shoulders, drew the shawl around her, and let herself quietly out of her room.