Mary Balogh: Secrets of the Heart

She had agonized over whether to tell Lady Murdoch the whole truth or not. She should have done so at the start. But finally she had decided to take the risk. She had heard that Bath was not quite as fashionable as it had used to be. Most of the late-summer visitors were reputed to be older people. Going to Bath, then, would not be quite like going to London. She would not have dared go there.

But for the first few days she had been terrified. She had expected everyone she passed to turn and point an accusing finger at her, and she had cringed from introductions to acquaintances of Lady Murdoch or to new acquaintances presented by the master of ceremonies of one of the assembly rooms. And miraculously no one seemed to realize that she was different from everyone else. No one had come to order her to leave Bath and all respectable society.

She-had been timid, almost ashamed at first, about meeting new people, knowing that she had no right to be in their company. But soon enough she had discovered some exhilaration in being accepted as any normal human being and in being admired. She knew she was beautiful; she knew that her generous figure and masses of red hair were unusually attractive. She had never been proud of these attributes. In fact, they had been directly responsible for her downfall. But suddenly she found it a heady experience to be sought out by the few young and attractive people who were in the city, and to be smiled at indulgently by the older friends her cousin was making.

It was all wrong, of course; she knew that. But she was not intending to make any permanent connections. After a few weeks she would leave behind all these people and never see them again. Surely it could not be wrong to enjoy those few weeks. There had been so little of joy in her life. Her youth had been cut very short. She had been barely nineteen…

Thus Sarah looked around the Pump Room with interest.

"Yoo-hoo!" Lady Murdoch called suddenly, making Sarah start with surprise. She winced as she watched her cousin wave her handkerchief in the direction of a gentleman who had just entered the Pump Room.

Several eyes turned in the direction of the two ladies, including those of the gentleman who had been hailed. He smiled, crossed the room, and bowed elegantly before them. He took Lady Murdoch's hand, handkerchief and all, into his own kid-gloved one, and raised it to his lips.

"My dear Lady Murdoch," he said, "you are becoming hardly recognizable. The waters are reputed only to heal infirmities, not to rejuvenate. But I swear you look years younger than when I saw you two days ago."

Lady Murdoch threw back her head and barked with laughter. She appeared quite oblivious of the eyes and quizzing glasses that again turned in her direction.

"Famous!" she said. "You should have been on the stage, Mr. Phelps. I have been telling you so these twenty years, since my dear departed husband first bought those horses from you in London. Both lame! And if I really had lost all the years you always claim, I should be an infant in my mother's arms again."

Mr. Phelps smiled and twirled in his hands the top hat that he had removed from his head. He looked at Sarah. "Ah, the divine Miss Fifield," he said, bowing again. "Still breaking hearts by the score, I do not doubt. Or am I the only one whose invitations to walk and drive you consistently refuse, cruel one?"

Sarah made him a half-curtsy. "Milsom Street is strewn with them, sir," she said. "With broken hearts, I mean. I am afraid there is little I can do about it. My time and attention are all devoted to the care of Lady Murdoch."

The lady in question crowed with laughter again. "A hit!" she said. "Come, you must admit it, sir. Now, do tell me, is it true that Lord Barton lost three thousand at cards last night? That is what Mrs. Watkins told us as we came in, is it not, cousin? But one never knows with that woman. Three days ago she told us that the Regent himself was planning to come here for a week, and it turned out that there was not a word of truth in the rumor."

"Well, of course, ma'am," Mr. Phelps began, bending his head close to that of his questioner, "I do not gamble myself, you know, but it is said…"

Sarah's attention wandered. She found Mr. Phelps amusing. He was a fashionable dandy in his forties, a man who delighted in gossip and in light flirtation. His attentions to her would stop very fast, she guessed, if she once began to take them seriously. She had found that answering his flattery in a flippant manner kept him hovering in her vicinity, pretending to languish after her.

She smiled at the approach of Colonel and Mrs. Smythe, a couple also in early middle age, with whom she and Lady Murdoch had sat at a concert in Sydney Gardens a few days before. With them were the Misses Seymour, two sisters who lived permanently in Bath with their mother, widow of a clergyman. They all stopped and talked with her for a few minutes, but she declined joining them in a stroll about the room, choosing rather to stay with Lady Murdoch. She similarly refused Mr. Gregory Evans, a young and earnest landowner who had been presented to her the day after her arrival and who had singled her out each day since.

Lady Murdoch and Mr. Phelps were still deep in conversation. Sarah looked around her again. It was becoming almost a rarity to see new faces in the Pump Room. The group of people who had just entered looked unfamiliar, though she could not see their faces to be sure. They stood with their backs to the room, looking at the baths below. One of them was an elderly lady, though very different from Lady Murdoch and many of the others of her generation in the room. She was slim and held herself ramrod straight and moved without assistance of cane or human arm. She was fashionably dressed in lavender walking dress and dove-gray bonnet. She was in company with a gentleman and two young ladies, one of whom had an arm resting in the crook of his, though she stood as far from him as her arm would allow. Both girls looked very young, judging from the back view Sarah had of.them. The man was of medium height, slender, graceful, and elegant in green coat, biscuit-colored pantaloons, and black Hessians. Obviously they were people of fashion.

"Bertha!" Lady Murdoch released the name into the middle of a confidence that Mr. Phelps was sharing with her. "Bertha Lane. Yoo-hoo! Bertha!"

Sarah cringed and wished for one moment that she were anywhere but where she was. The handkerchief was again waving in the air, and Lady Murdoch was looking directly at the new arrivals who had been attracting her own attention.

The next moment Sarah was beyond even wishing she were elsewhere. She was paralyzed, mesmerized, lifted totally beyond time and place. The whole group had turned, as indeed had many other promenaders. But Sarah saw none of them except the man. No one except George Montagu, Duke of Cranwell. The man whom, of all others, she had dreaded to see again this side of the grave.

The Duke of Cranwell had agreed with some reluctance to travel to Bath. His idea of pleasure did not include the assemblies in the Upper and Lower Rooms, gatherings in the Pump Room, concerts in the park, and shopping and gossip expeditions in the crowded streets. In the summertime, particularly, the prospect was far from appealing.

His idea of comfortable living was to reside at Montagu Hall, his Wiltshire home. The large park offered everything in the way of quiet exercise: lawns and hills and woods stretching in every direction far out of sight of the house. His farms gave ample challenge to his mind and his physical energies. And the house was his pride and joy, the possession that gave his life its chief purpose. In the ten years since he had inherited the title and the estate from his father, he had filled it with art treasures and elegant furnishings. He had remodeled parts of it for more comfortable living. He, would have been well content to rusticate there for the rest of his life.