She said nothing to that, just sat there, her lamb untouched on her plate, her head averted, stiff as a pike. He said, more harshly than he intended, “Good God, Kate, I don’t understand you. Harry is a grown man, or very nearly grown. You’re behaving as though he is still in short coats and you’re his doting mother or great aunt. Let him have his freedom, let him get away from Sir Oliver, who wants to make a scholar of a boy with no more taste for Ovid than Sophocles, who hated his guts, had.”
“It’s not that,” she said, and she was actually wringing her hands. “It’s just happened so quickly. Everything’s happened so quickly. Everything is different. The changes . . . there have been so many changes.”
The world she’d known had crumbled about her. Harry had been everything to her after her mother died. Of course she’d known that someday he would leave her, that he would even marry and another girl would take her place in his heart, but it had always been in a misty, vague future. A very distant future. Dear God, he was only twenty-two, and he’d left her without telling her, without a single damned word, without giving her time to reconcile herself to it.
Quite suddenly, her look of unhappiness was replaced again by thin-lipped anger. She was now dwelling on Harry’s other words. Julien waited patiently for her outburst, but it didn’t come. Perplexed, he saw the angry look vanish, and to his consternation, she gazed at him steadily and said in a voice that was surely desperate, “So, my lord, I am to be your obedient wife and conduct myself as a countess should. Just how does a countess behave? Does she stick her nose in the air when addressed by those who are beneath her? And who are beneath her? Pray tell me, for these are uncharted seas for me.”
23
He stretched out his hand and let his long fingers close over hers. “You are no longer Sir Oliver’s daughter. He has no more say about anything regarding you. You’re now mine. You’re also now a countess, and that means that however you choose to behave is quite the correct way.” He spoke easily, smiling, hoping to make light of Harry’s ill-chosen words.
To his surprise and dismay, a large tear gathered and rolled unheeded down her cheek. She didn’t sniff or blink, merely let the tear and those following it gather and fall, leaving a light streak to mark their path.
“My dear—”
She calmly picked up her napkin, daubed the corners of her eyes, and wiped her cheeks. She said dully, “It seems that I didn’t know my brother. He is exactly like the rest of you men. He cares for naught but his own pleasures, his own pursuits, no matter that they may kill him, and expects women to keep to their place, safe and quiet and subservient. An obedient and, yes, undoubtedly, inferior creature, that’s what he expects. Of course, it is what you wish also. The rest is all nonsense. Pray don’t insult my intelligence or patronize me.”
She slipped out of her chair and without another word walked stiffly to the door. She didn’t turn when he called out to her, just let herself quietly out of the room, picked up her skirts, and fled up the stairs to her bedchamber. Ah yes, such a lovely room, a room fit for a countess, which she now was, but what was that, indeed? Surely not she, for she was miserable and unfit and quite stupid.
She looked blindly about her for a moment and then flung herself face down on the bed. She was lost in her own private misery and was roused only when the fire in the grate burned low and she began to shiver. She stood up, automatically smoothing the folds of her beautiful new gown. It was hopelessly crumpled, but she didn’t care, for after all, it was Julien’s. If he didn’t like the wrinkles, let him smooth them.
She walked to the windows, found the cord, and pulled back the heavy curtains. The night was black save for a few errant stars appearing through the heavy veil of darkness. She pulled the latch and leaned out, the cold night air pressing against her face. A picture of Harry in his yellow-striped waistcoat, proudly pluming himself in front of her, came into her mind. Harry, flinging his arms heavenward, groaning loudly, falling flat on his back when it had last been his turn to be killed in a duel. Harry, now gone from her, now gone to Spain. Harry, no longer a part of her life. Harry, a man like all the rest of them, now gone from her irrevocably. Deep inside she knew that nothing could ever again be the same. For so long as Harry had remained near to her, a semblance of their years together, the happy moments of her childhood, was preserved. But now they had both crossed unalterably into a different life, their past forever lost to them.
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