Since Stuart hadn’t sent a cable ahead—he was half-afraid that if she knew he was coming, she might leave—he walked the mile from the village to his estate. As he approached the manor, he heard the piano that he’d given to his staff as a Christmas present.
For a few short months when he was five, or perhaps four, with his mother claiming to be a respectable widow, he’d lived in a lodging house for women. The place, kept by a pinched-face spinster, had been dark and glum, except during the evenings, when the parlor came alive with music and singing, around an ancient spinet that had first seen service in the reign of the Mad King.
His mother had bartered the stitching of new curtains for the entire house for music lessons from the spinster and soon she was playing for him and the other women who lived at the lodging house. She played ballads she’d known in her youth and the latest songs she’d learned from the other women at the mill.
The melodic evenings came to an abrupt end when his mother was discovered with her new beau in her room. They had to move to a frightful new place. The beau disappeared and she cried often. And whenever Stuart put his arms around her and asked her to tell him what was wrong, she’d say, her voice breaking, that she missed the spinet, she missed the music.
The front door of the manor was locked, but the service entrance in the rear wasn’t. He followed the music to the servants’ hall. Before its door he closed his eyes a moment.
Let her be there.
The servants’ hall was festive—there were garlands of evergreen and swags of holly and a Christmas tree full of candles—and crowded: Stuart had stumbled upon the Servants’ Ball.
The indoor servants were in their dress uniforms, the outdoor servants in their Sunday best. A footman played the piano. Mrs. Boyce and Mr. Prior, in the absence of the master of the house, had led off the Grand March—a procession around the hall in a pattern of straight and serpentine lines. The Robbinses were all there, Michael with a sprig of holly at his lapel, walking with a maid who looked as if she didn’t quite know what was going on. Two pairs of giggling maids—the women outnumbered the men—brought up the tail end of the procession.
But she was not among the servants.
Someone saw him. Soon everyone saw him. So he danced the quadrille with Mrs. Boyce—the highest-ranked female servant—while Mr. Prior partnered Mrs. Robbins, who, despite her marriage to the gamekeeper, was still considered a lady around these parts.
It was the longest dance of his life. All he could think was how stupid he had been, to not come for her sooner. He’d been a wiser man at twenty-seven: He’d known then that she was everything he ever wanted, that the two of them were meant to be each other’s comfort and refuge. But now, at thirty-seven, he was a fool. He’d pushed her away and she might never return again.
At the end of the quadrille, everyone clapped. Stuart pasted on a smile and did likewise. Then the door to the servants’ hall opened and in walked Verity Durant.
She was bareheaded, her dark golden hair pinned up in a simple top knot. Unlike the other servants, she wore neither her dress uniform nor her Sunday best, but an honest-to-goodness evening gown of cobalt blue velvet.
The gown was a decade out of fashion, its bodice and hems unadorned, its neckline so modest—baring only an inch of skin below her collarbone—that it could have garnered approval from the Puritans. But with the blue velvet choker at her throat and the long white gloves that reached past her elbow, the gown was nothing less than ravishing. She was nothing less than ravishing.
After all these years, Cinderella had arrived at the ball.
And suddenly Stuart could breathe again.
Conversation halted; mugs of beer raised toward lips went still in midair. Simmons, the head gardener, leaped up to intercept her. Prior, who outranked Simmons, cut into the latter’s path. When Stuart rose, however, all the other men backed down.
She’d been walking toward Michael. But when Michael glanced Stuart’s way, she did too, and stopped dead. Stuart did something he’d never done to a servant: He bowed. After a moment of unresponsiveness on her part, she curtsied to him.
“Let us have a waltz,” Stuart said to the footman at the piano. “Do you know one?”
The footman didn’t. But Mrs. Robbins did. As the first strains of a Strauss waltz wafted from the piano, Stuart held out his hand toward Verity. She didn’t move. He didn’t care. She was still here—it was the only thing that mattered. He would gladly keep his hand extended all night if that was what it took.
She stepped into his arms only when it would have caused a scene otherwise.
“What are you doing here?” she said in French, without the Provencal accent. Her voice was tight, her expression tight, her entire person taut as a pulled bow.
“I have come to apologize and ask for your forgiveness.”
“So you may go to your wedding with a clear conscience?”