She had gone to London earlier in the year to attend the wedding of the new Earl of Riverdale. He had not heard of her being in town. She had gone at the specific invitation of the earl himself—the very one who had usurped her son’s title, though that had not been his fault—and of his mother and sister. The bride had also written to urge her to go, though the woman was about to assume the title that had been Viola’s for more than twenty years.
Had she been taunting Viola? He had not met the new countess, but he was instantly biased against her. Why had Viola gone? Duty? Dignity? Pride? Good God.
“That must have been painful for you,” he said.
“Sometimes,” she said, “doing what is most painful is the only thing to do.”
“Is it?” he asked, looking at her in some astonishment. “I have always thought it is the very last thing to do. Surely pain is to be avoided at all costs.”
“I tried that for a while,” she said. “I fled. I fled London and then Hinsford Manor, which was no longer either mine or Harry’s. I even fled my daughters, with the explanation that it was for their own good that they live with my mother in Bath rather than with me. I fled to Dorset to stay with my brother. He is a clergyman and was still a widower at the time. But fleeing was not enough, for I took myself and my pain with me. Finally I had to go back and face at least some of it. I still sometimes find it difficult to look into the eyes of my daughters—and my son. He was home for a few months this year recovering from serious injuries.”
“I suppose,” he said, “you felt guilty. Correction: I suppose you feel guilty.”
“I suppose I do occasionally,” she admitted. “As though I ought to have known. But mainly I felt . . . mainly I feel helpless. I would die for them if by doing so I could ensure their happiness. But even that would not be enough. There is really nothing I can do for them.”
“Except love them,” he said. Now where had that come from?
“Love never seems to be enough either,” she said. “It is said to be everything, but I am not sure I believe that.”
He felt a bit chilled. This was not the first time she had run away, then. She had carried all her bewilderment and pain and guilt with her the first time. And this time? The very fact that she was talking about it suggested that she had not come unencumbered, as he had. Did he really want to be doing this? Yet he made no effort to stop the flow of her words. He lifted their clasped hands and set his lips to the back of hers. He kept his eyes on her face.
She was telling him that she had gone to London and made friends with the new Countess of Riverdale.
What the devil? Did she delight in punishing herself?
“It was possible?” he asked.
“They are a lovely family,” she told him. “Alexander is good and kind and has a strong sense of duty and responsibility. Wren is warm and earnest and truly generous. She is also strong and independent. She is a wealthy businesswoman in her own right and continues to be, with Alexander’s blessing. They epitomize for me what a true marriage ought to be but very few marriages are.”
Ah, yes. He remembered now reading about it. Riverdale had married the Heyden china heiress, said to be fabulously wealthy.
“You find both of them impossible to hate, then,” he said. “That must be a severe annoyance.”
She darted a look of amazed incomprehension at him and then . . . smiled. “Well,” she said. “I suppose it would be a comfort if I could dislike them. But I cannot. None of what happened was their fault. Alexander was genuinely dismayed when he was told the title was his. I know. I was there. I cannot dislike any of the Westcotts. None of it was their fault either, and they have gone out of their way to draw us back into the family. They have even all traveled to Bath several times in the last two years for our sakes. They are there now to spend a couple of weeks together following the christening of Camille and Joel’s son.”
“But you do not use the Westcott name,” he said.
“No.” She shrugged.
“And when I met you, you were running again from all this kindness and generosity and love,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “Again. I had not thought of it that way. And now—yet again. Perhaps I have just turned into a runner. A shirker of reality.”
“Reality can be much overestimated,” he said.
She sighed, and they were silent for a while. Tall trees lining the road on both sides obscured the view of fields and meadows beyond and shut out much of the sunlight.
“And you, Marcel,” she said. “What are you fleeing from?”
He had listened with unexpected interest to the tangle of love and hope and drama and fear and tedium that was her life. But listening was a passive thing. Her life was her own. It did not directly concern him. He had no real interest in her children, her mother, her brother, or the Westcotts—except as they affected her. Not that he was interested in shouldering her burdens and making them his own. Indeed, it was a little alarming to realize that she had brought them with her on this journey of supposedly mindless pleasure. But it was only because she had lived through such experiences and been involved in those relationships that she was the person she was now, he realized in a moment of strange insight. And somehow he was interested in the person who was Viola Kingsley. His interest in her should be entirely about sex if this affair was to proceed true to type. It did not feel quite like any type, however. It had not from the start.
What was he fleeing from?
“Merely the tedium of a visit home,” he said. “There are too many feuding women there. And men who want to take charge in my absence, and a steward who is complaining about them. And a housekeeper who is grumbling about being forced to pray. It is a place to be avoided whenever possible, though just occasionally one feels obliged to put in an appearance to assert one’s authority.”
“And does that work?” she asked.
“Oh, assuredly.” He looked at her, eyebrows raised. “I do not suffer fools gladly. Or at all, in fact.”
“Your family and servants are fools?” she asked him.
He gave the matter some thought. “I can see,” he said, “that I am going to have to choose my words carefully with you, Viola. No, they are not fools. At least, not all of them are. They are merely . . . tedious. Is that a more acceptable word?”
“I do not know the people concerned,” she said. “Are they all your family? Do you not have children? Surely your own children are not tedious.”
He sighed and settled his shoulders across the corner of the carriage seat, putting a little distance between them. He folded his arms over his chest. “They are not,” he said. “But those who have the charge of them would make them tedious if they could.”
“But can they?” she asked. “Do you not have the charge of them yourself?”
“Perhaps,” he said, “I am tedious, Viola.”
“How old are they?” She was not to be deterred, it seemed.
“Seventeen, almost eighteen,” he said.
“All of them?” It was the turn of her eyebrows to shoot up.
“Two,” he said. “Twins. Male and female.”
“And are they not—” She got no further. He had set one finger across her lips. Enough was enough.
“I am running away,” he said. “With you. I have the necessary baggage with me in the form of a few changes of clothes and my shaving gear. It is all I need. And your company. But not your probing questions.”