His keys lifted, jingle and clatter. They’d come to the end of the conversation. He would see himself into the house now.
But she couldn’t bear to let him go yet. Their encounter had shaken her, but it had also unchained an appalling need to be closer to him—she’d missed him so. And no matter how much she reminded herself that he was engaged to marry another, there was a part of her that insisted that, no, he was hers. All hers, always.
“Sir, Wallace didn’t come back with you?” she asked.
The keys stilled. “I had him put himself and the carriage up some place closer to Inner Temple. It was too dangerous to drive.”
“Then how did you come back?”
“By tram. And on foot.”
“And that, that was not dangerous?”
“It was.” His walking stick tapped. Once, twice. “But if I were to take a hotel room, I would be deprived of your food.”
He’d come more than three miles in this weather, facing very real risks of getting lost and getting injured, for her food? “I didn’t know you liked my cooking this much.”
“You didn’t?” He chuckled softly. “Well, now you do.”
“But the first time I cooked for you, you sent the food back to the kitchen without touching it.”
Silence. The fog twisted and slithered. Then the sound of a match being struck, a small burst of orange flame—he’d lit a cigarette. The reddish light at the end of the cigarette glowed with his inhalation.
“Do you know, Madame, what happens to a man who spends decades in the dark, then steps suddenly into full sunlight?”
“No, sir.”
She heard him expel a breath. She smelled the smoke, a warm pungency that swirled about them both.
“He is blinded by the light,” said Stuart Somerset. “And I didn’t want to be blinded. Good night, Madame.”
Chapter Thirteen
Michael’s letter came on the afternoon post, a short missive, not even quite one page. He acknowledged the two letters Verity had sent, but made no apologies for not replying sooner. He’d been busy: He’d taken over as the editor of a student journal and his team had just defeated the Cotton House team at rugby. Verity sighed, in pride and frustration. He let her in on so little of his life these days; she hardly knew him anymore. Had she been wrong to send him to an elite school? Was it the snobbery of his classmates that had made him chill and distant?
But she didn’t think the snobbery of the middle-class boys at a more ordinary public school would have been preferable. And the thought of sending him to a mere state school had never occurred to her. No, she’d always been determined that it would be Rugby and Cambridge, as it had been for the men in her family for generations.
Well, perhaps not always. And certainly not before that chilling letter from her aunt ten years ago. Until then she’d have been happy to see him grow to manhood, be he a farmer, a clerk, or a gamekeeper, like his adoptive father. After that she’d pushed him as hard as she pushed herself—she’d never managed to impress her aunt in all her years at Lyndhurst Hall, but now that her aunt’s eyes were on her again, she couldn’t stop herself from trying.
She instructed Michael in elocution, eradicating from his speech every last trace of Mr. Robbins’s broad Yorkshire vernacular. She taught him all the foreign languages with which her governesses had tortured her. She initiated him into the myriad and mysterious rules of etiquette that governed the deportment of the upper echelon. By the time he was ten he spoke English like a royal duke, acquitted himself in French, Italian, and German, and knew that a gentleman removed his glove before shaking a lady’s hand and that should he be present for a luncheon, the last thing he should do was offer a lady his arm—that was how one spotted parvenus and pretenders from a furlong away.
But all the courtly manners in the world weren’t enough for the adopted son of a gamekeeper. So she’d drummed into him that he did not want a life like hers, that he owed it to himself—to her—to be the best at everything he did, because it was the only way he’d ever be treated as an equal of those to the manor born.
She opened the locket she wore around her neck and gazed at the picture inside—Michael and herself, her hand draped possessively over his shoulder. It had been close to the start of term his first year at Rugby. She’d taken him to Manchester and bought him all new clothes of the best material and workmanship, from hats to linens and stockings.