“A place that I can never go back to. I’m still searching for my place, like you.”
He made no response for long seconds. Then he nodded slowly.
She rose. It was time for her to leave: Mrs. Robbins would be anxious to talk to him. “Come to the Servants’ Ball tonight. I’ll have a good cold supper buffet laid out. It will be a good time.”
“I don’t know. Some of the servants look at me funny.”
“Some of the servants have always looked at me funny, doesn’t stop me from going every year. Come and bring your mum. She’ll enjoy playing on a proper piano—Mr. Somerset gave one to the staff for Christmas, they uncrated it just this morning.”
“I’ll ask her if she wants to go.”
“And I’ll need someone to help me keep an eye on Marjorie, of course. I’m going to be too busy dancing and flirting.”
“Don’t talk like that. You are too old for it.”
She gave him a hard whack across the chest. “We’ll see how ancient you feel when you are thirty-three.”
He caught her hand and held it. She looked at him and her chest tightened. Such a hard life she had chosen for him, pushing him always to rise above his humble station, to find a place among people who’d rather not give him a place. And he’d never complained.
She embraced him. In her arms he was all skeleton, long, strong bones under worsted wool. “Come and see me sometime in the evenings, before I go.”
“I will,” he said. And hugged her back.
The panic was sudden and complete.
One minute Stuart was calmly discussing the proposed Customs and Inland Revenue Act with the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the next minute every last bit of his logic and rationality had deserted him.
Perhaps things would have come to a head sooner had he seen more of Lizzy. But Lizzy had become something of a hermit in the past two weeks. And Stuart, existing in a strange limbo, away from both the woman he loved and the woman to whom he was promised, postponed his final decision again and again—because he knew Verity wouldn’t leave without seeing Michael one more time and because he knew from his conversation with Michael that the boy wouldn’t return to Fairleigh Park until a week before Christmas.
A week before Christmas was yesterday.
What if she’d met Michael and left already? What if she did not want to be found? The false sense of security that came from knowing where she was evaporated in a second.
He was, all at once, frantic to leave London. But one did not quit the Chancellor of the Exchequer abruptly and without reason. Worse, on his way out of 9 Downing Street, where he maintained his Chief Whip’s office, he had to settle squabbles between MPs, adjust the legislative schedule, and reassure everyone and his son-in-law—who were all worried sick over what Mr. Gladstone was doing with the Irish Home Rule bill—that everything was under control.
By the time he flagged down a hansom he’d become hopelessly unnerved, convinced he was too late for everything, even though logic told him that she hadn’t left yet, that her resignation became effective only at the end of the month.
Outside the train station he bought a penny’s worth of treacle rock for luck. But it, like everything else he’d eaten in a fortnight, tasted like so much peat: When he’d cast Verity out, he’d lost his newly rediscovered sense of taste, too. And he missed it. God, he missed it.
He wanted to love food again. He wanted to be surprised, bewildered, or even assailed by his dinner. He wanted to be vulnerably, pleasurably, and dangerously alive.
He wanted her.
He’d tried to get on with his life, tried to pretend that everything would be all right if he simply carried on as before. But it was impossible when she was both Cinderella and Verity Durant; when he seemed destined to fall in love with her, no matter what little fraction of her he knew.
London raced by outside his first-class compartment. He lit a cigarette and stared, unseeing. He had no idea what he would do were he to see her this day. What if she wanted nothing to do with him? And, almost as terrifying, what if she did want something to do with him?
If he truly lost her again, he would lose the best part of himself. On the other hand, he’d spent decades building up his reputation and his career, neither of which would escape unscathed were he to take up with her.
He exhaled and watched the smoke obscure the air before him. It didn’t matter. He would cross that bridge when he came to it. Only let her be there. Let her still be there.