Elizabeth tipped her head to one side and looked curiously at him. “But—?” she said.
“But I have the strange feeling,” he said, “that I may be completely wrong. I have known Netherby since we were both boys at school. Yet I discovered aspects of him . . . recently that I did not even begin to suspect.” He glanced at their mother. “It is possible, even probable, that I have never known him at all. And yes, I still resent him for that, Lizzie, and could never, I think, call him friend. How can one be a friend to someone who has chosen to make himself unknowable? Yet if I ever needed . . . help, I believe I would not hesitate to turn to him. Beyond my fear for Anastasia lies a certain suspicion that she will be happy after all and that perhaps he will be too. Though one cannot quite imagine Netherby happy, can one?”
“Oh, I can,” their mother said. “His eyes sometimes give him away, Alex, if one looks closely enough. He has a certain way of looking at Anastasia . . . Well, I do believe he is in love with her. And she is in love with him, of course. What woman would not be if he turned his attention on her and informed her in that strange way of his that she could be his duchess if she chose and then whisked her off the very next day with a special license and two witnesses to marry her? Lizzie, was it a very romantic wedding?”
“I believe it was, Mama,” Elizabeth said, her eyes twinkling. “I think it was perhaps the most romantic wedding I have ever attended. Cousin Louise would have had an apoplexy, not to mention Cousin Matilda—Anna wore her plain straw bonnet and forgot her gloves.”
She laughed, and her mother clasped her hands to her bosom and beamed with delight. Alexander leaned back in his chair and smiled fondly from one to the other of them.
*
Anna had thought she was traveling in great comfort when she came to London in the chaise Mr. Brumford had hired, with her small bag containing most of her worldly possessions and Miss Knox for companionship. What a difference a few weeks had made. She traveled back west in a carriage so opulent that even the lamentable state of English roads could not seriously disconcert the springs or make the seats seem less than plushly comfortable. This time there was so much baggage that a separate conveyance was coming along behind, together with a valet and a maid.
For companionship she had Avery, who asked her about her education and told her about his own, who conversed with her about books and art and music and politics and the war. He told her about Morland Abbey, his home in the country, hers too now, a house with character surrounded by a vast landscaped park complete with follies, a wilderness walk, a lake, shaded alleys, and rolling lawns dotted with ancient trees. He was sometimes serious, sometimes outrageously funny in his own peculiar way. He talked a great deal, and he listened just as much, his head usually turned toward her, his eyes regarding her in their characteristic lazy but attentive way.
Often they did not talk at all but watched the landscape passing by beyond the windows. Occasionally they nodded off to sleep, his head wedged into the corner beside him, hers burrowed between his shoulder and the back of the seat. Sometimes he held her hand and laced their fingers. If they had been silent too long, he would tickle her palm with his thumbnail and smile lazily when she turned her head.
They traveled at a far more leisurely pace than she had on that other journey. Whenever they stopped to change the horses, he always stayed out in the yard to look over the replacements, often with a pained expression because this journey had been planned in too much of a hurry to allow time to send his own horses forward to the various staging points. Then he would join Anna for refreshments or a full meal, always in a private parlor, even when it seemed the inn at which they stopped was full to overflowing. They were treated with a deference often bordering upon obsequiousness that amazed Anna, though she realized that Avery was so accustomed to it he did not even notice. His coat of arms was, of course, emblazoned on both doors of their carriage, and his coachman and footman and two outriders were dressed in a distinctive livery. There could be no missing their passage west. Even if he had been alone, though, and without all the trappings, Anna suspected that everyone would still have known at a single glance that he was no ordinary gentleman but a distinguished member of the Quality.