Someone to Wed

She was on the floor on the far side of the bed, huddled into the corner, her knees drawn up to her chest, her forehead on her knees, one arm wrapped about her legs, the other about her head. She was not making a sound. He felt his stomach lurch and his knees turn a bit weak.

“Wren?” He spoke her name softly.

There was no response.

“Wren?” He moved closer to her and went down on his haunches before her. “What is it? What has happened?”

The only response this time was a slight tightening of both arms.

“Will you let me help you up from there?” he asked her. “Will you talk to me?”

She said something, but the words were muffled against her knees.

“I beg your pardon?” he said.

“Go away.” They were clear enough this time.

“But why?” he asked her.

No response.

He squeezed into the space beside her, sitting with his back against the wall, his wrists draped over his raised knees. There was not much room. His left side was pressed against her.

“I have let you down,” he said softly. “I promised you the life of your choosing, yet at every turn I have encouraged you to do what you are uncomfortable doing. You will say that I forced nothing on you, but my very willingness to allow you to decide each time you are called upon to move further and further into the open has been a form of coercion. For perhaps you have felt you need to prove something to me and to yourself. You do not need to prove anything, Wren. Had I been more forceful on a few occasions and said a firm no myself instead of leaving the decision to you, I might have saved you from this sort of … collapse. I ought to have said no to Netherby’s invitation today without even mentioning it at home. I will do better in the future, I promise you. Shall we go home to Brambledean? Tomorrow? There you may live as you wish to live, and I will be happy to see you happy. I care, Wren. I really do care.”

And he did, he realized. If he could have taken every last penny of her fortune at that moment and dumped it in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, he would have done it without any hesitation at all. He cared. For her. He cared deeply.

Still she said nothing. He eased his arm up from between them and wrapped it about her. She was as rigid as a statue.

“Wren,” he said. “Wren, my love, speak to me.”

She mumbled something.

“I beg your pardon?”

The words were quite distinct this time. “She is my mother.”

What? He did not say it aloud. But whom could she possibly mean? He frowned in thought. What had happened? Was it just the stress of too much exposure to other people—to strangers? Had she just reached a natural breaking point halfway through this evening? Halfway. There had been a difference between the two halves. She had been a bit tense from the start, but she had remained in command of herself, and he believed she had watched the play even if she had not been relaxed enough to be totally absorbed in it. There had been something troubling her during the interval, though she had denied it, and afterward she had been almost silent and … absent. She had disappeared upstairs without a word as soon as they came home.

She is my mother.

What the devil had happened? Snippets of the evening came back to him. He remembered then the two women in white who had been staring at Wren so pointedly. He remembered words, a few of them spoken by him.

One does wonder how she does it.

With a wig and cosmetics and an army of experts. When you see her close to … she looks quite grotesque.

Even her daughter is older than I am, perhaps older than Lizzie.

You are attracting attention from over there. I hope it does not bother you. But really you ought to be feeling flattered, Wren. Lady Hodges usually notices no other lady but herself. By all accounts she has been the toast of the ton for at least the past thirty years, though her appearances in recent years are rarer and more carefully orchestrated.

Good God. Oh, good God!

“Lady Hodges?” he asked.

There was a low moan.

He turned as best he could in the confined space and wrapped his other arm about her too. It was not easy to do when she was curled up into a hard, unyielding ball. “Oh, good God,” he said aloud. “My poor darling. Let me hold you, Wren. Let me hold you properly. I am going to pick you up and carry you through to our room and hold you on the bed. Will you let me?”

She said nothing, but when he stood up and leaned down to scoop her into his arms, she released her tight hold on herself and let him get one arm beneath her knees and the other about her back beneath her shoulders. She let her head flop onto his shoulder, her eyes closed. He carried her through the two dressing rooms and set her on the bed, which had been turned down for the night. He eased off the light shoes she had worn to the theater and removed as many of her hairpins as he could find. And he lay down beside her and gathered her close. He did not try to talk to her. Sometimes, he thought, concern and love—yes, love—had to speak for themselves.

He did not know Lady Hodges, but he knew some things about her. Everyone did. She was a famous eccentric, if that was the right word to describe her. By all accounts she had been an extraordinarily beautiful girl, daughter of a gentleman of very moderate means. She had taken the ton by storm when her father had wangled an invitation from a distant relative to present her at a ton ball with his own daughter. Soon after, she married a wealthy baron. She had thereafter made her beauty the business of her life and had enslaved men by the dozens. It would not have been an entirely unusual story, had she not somehow contrived to hang on to her beauty—and her court—even after she had passed her youth and then her young womanhood and even her middle age. Young men were drawn by her wealth and strange fame, and she kept one of her daughters close so that—or so the accepted theory went—she might be flattered when told that they looked like sisters. Some particular flatterers even maintained that she looked like the younger sister. But Jessica had been right. Young and lovely as the woman appeared from a distance or in dim light, from close to she looked like a grotesque parody of youth. The woman’s vanity and self-absorption were commonly known to know no bounds.

And she was Wren’s mother.

Eighteen

Somehow Wren had held herself together through the second half of the performance at the theater, the farewells to the duke and duchess and Jessica, and the carriage ride home. But as she hurried upstairs and into her bedchamber without bothering to take a candle with her or to light any when she got there, she found herself plummeting backward twenty years and more. By the time she reached the corner of the room, hidden beyond the bed, and curled herself up on the floor into as tight a ball as she could manage, those twenty years no longer existed. She was back in her own little childhood room inside her own little childhood self, and the whole world of beauty and dazzle and glamour and laughter and friends and warmth and family and love was beyond her heavily netted window and beyond her door, which as often as not was locked from the other side.

The swiftness of her descent into the past would not have been so total, perhaps, if it had not been for that surreal image in the box across from theirs. For twenty years had passed since Aunt Megan had taken her from Roxingly Park forever. Yet her mother had not changed in all that time. She looked youthful and dainty and almost ethereally lovely. The other woman, the one who had looked so like her but had sat farther off to her side of the box, looking about with proud hauteur, had changed, if, indeed, she was Blanche. Her eldest sister had been sixteen when Wren last saw her and the favorite because she was blond and beautiful like her mother though without her allure. She had been someone to display but never allowed to overshadow.