Sherry Thomas: Ravishing the Heiress

If only they could. “Neither of us is of age. Our marriage wouldn’t be valid without the consent of your father and my guardian. I don’t know about your father, but Colonel Clements is dead set on my doing my duty. He’d rather see you ruined than allow our marriage to stand.”

Overhead thunder rolled. “Isabelle, Lord Fitzhugh,” cried her mother’s voice from inside the house, “better come back. It’s going to rain soon!”

Neither of them moved.

Drops of rain fell on his head, each as heavy as a pebble.

Isabelle gazed at him. “Do you remember the first time you came to visit?”

“Of course.”

He’d been sixteen, she fifteen. It had been at the end of Michaelmas Half. And he’d arrived with Pelham, Hastings, and two other mates from Eton. She’d sprinted down the stairs to hug Pelham. Fitz had met her before, when she’d come to see Pelham at Eton. But on that day, suddenly, she was no longer the little girl she’d been, but a lovely young lady, full of life and verve. The afternoon sun, slanting into the hall, had lit her like a flame. And when she’d turned around and said, “Ah, Mr. Fitzhugh, I remember you,” he was already in love.

“Do you remember the fight scene from Romeo and Juliet ?” she asked softly.

He nodded. Would that time flowed backward, so he could leave the present behind and head toward those older, more joyous days instead.

“I remember everything so clearly: Gerry was Tybalt and you Mercutio. You had one of my father’s walking sticks in one hand and a tea sandwich in the other. You took a bite of the sandwich, and sneered, ‘Tybalt, you rat-catcher, will you walk?’” She smiled through her tears. “Then you laughed. My heart caught and I knew then and there that I wanted to spend my life with you.”

His face was wet. “You’ll find someone better,” he forced himself to say.

“I don’t want anyone else. I want only you.”

And he wanted only her. But it was not to be. They were not to be.

Rain came down in sheets. It had been a miserable spring. Already he despaired of ever again walking under an unclouded sky.

“Isabelle, Lord Fitzhugh, you must come inside now,” repeated Mrs. Pelham.

They ran. But as they reached the side of the house, she gripped his arm and pulled him toward her. “Kiss me.”

“I mustn’t. Even if I don’t marry Miss Graves, I’m to marry someone else.”

“Have you ever kissed anyone?”

“No.” He’d been waiting for her.

“All the more reason you must kiss me now. So that no matter what happens, we will always be each other’s first.”

Lightning split the sky. He stared at the beautiful girl who would never be his. Was it so wrong?

It must not be, because the next moment he was kissing her, lost to everything else but this one last moment of freedom and joy.

And when they could no longer delay their return to the house, he held her tight and whispered what he’d promised himself he would not say.

“No matter what happens, I will always, always love you.”

Eight years later, 1896

I hear Mrs. Englewood has arrived in London,” said Millicent, Lady Fitzhugh, at breakfast.

Fitz looked up from his paper. The strangest thing: His wife never gossiped, yet she seemed to know everything the moment it happened.

She wore a morning gown of cornflower blue. The morning gown, worn strictly indoors among intimates, was looser of form and construction than its more tightly corseted cousins the promenade gown and the visiting gown. But there was something about his wife that was highly—almost excessively—neat, so that even the slouchier morning gown looked prim and precise on her.

Her light brown hair was pulled back into a tight bun, not a strand loose—never a strand loose, except when she’d smashed a brick fireplace wielding a sledgehammer. Her eyes, a similar shade to her hair, busily scanned one invitation after another. Sweet eyes—she never looked upon anyone in anger, seldom even in displeasure.

Sometimes it surprised him how young she still looked. How young she still was . They’d been married almost eight years and she was not even twenty-five.

“Yes,” he answered, “your information is correct, as usual.”

She reached for the salt cellar. “When did you learn?”

“Yesterday evening,” he said, his heart skipping a beat with anticipation.

Isabelle. Seven years it had been since his last glimpse of her on her wedding day. Eight, since they last spoke.

And now she was coming back into his life, a free woman.

Lady Fitz sliced open another envelope and glanced at its content. “She will be eager to see you, I’m sure.”

He had known, since he first met the former Millicent Graves, that she was unusually self-possessed. Still, sometimes her even-keeledness surprised him. He knew of no other wife who combined this sincere interest in a husband’s welfare with such a lack of possessiveness—at least none who didn’t have a lover of her own.

“One hopes,” he said.

“Would you like me to rearrange your schedule in any way?” she asked without looking at him. “If I’m not mistaken, we are expected tomorrow at the bottling plant to taste the champagne cider and the new lemon-flavor soda water. And the day after tomorrow, the biscuit factory for cream wafers and chocolate croquette.”

Isabelle’s return had coincided with the semiannual taste test of new product ideas at Cresswell & Graves.

“Thank you, but it won’t be necessary: I am invited to call on her today itself.”

“Oh,” said his wife.

Her countenance often reminded him of blancmange, smooth, mild, and perfectly set. But this moment, an unnamed emotion flickered across her features. And suddenly she resembled not so much a bland dish of pudding as the surface of a well-known, yet never explored lake, and he, standing on the banks, had just seen a movement underwater, an enigmatic shadow that disappeared so quickly he wasn’t sure he hadn’t imagined the whole thing.

“Then you must convey my regards,” she said, reaching again for the salt cellar.

“I shall.”

She inspected the rest of the post in her pile, finished her tea, and rose—she always arrived to and left from breakfast before he did. “Don’t forget we are expected to dinner at the Queensberrys’.”

“I won’t.”

“Good day, then, sir.”

“Good day, Lady Fitz.”

Her gait was as neat as her person, her blue skirts barely swishing as she turned down the corridor. By habit he listened as her footsteps receded, the cadence and lightness of her footfalls almost as familiar to him as the rhythm of his own breaths.

When he could hear her no more, he pulled Isabelle’s note out of the inside pocket of his day coat and read it again.

My Dearest Fitz,

(Am I too forward in the salutation itself? No matter, I have never been the least reticent and I certainly won’t change now.)

Thank you for the lovely house you have arranged for myself and the children. They adore the garden, tucked away from sight. I am particularly fond of the bright, cheerful parlor, which overlooks the green square just across the street.

Such a long time it has been since I last saw you, a few more days ought not to matter very much. Yet I find myself extraordinarily impatient to meet again, even though the house is clearly not yet ready to receive callers. Will you come tomorrow?

Yours,

Isabelle

The letter was most cordial, and her signature the warmest element of all. He had thought of her as Isabelle for many years, but had only ever addressed her as Miss Pelham or—in his recent correspondence—Mrs. Englewood. For her to close her letter with her given name was an unmistakable invitation to further intimacy.