In the Arms of a Marquess(80)

“Thank you, sister.” Tavy returned to the view of the bright autumn day through the windowpane. “The next time I wish praise for my appearance, I shall certainly come to you.”

“But you have been crying.”

Tavy rubbed at the moisture on her cheek. “Have I?”

Alethea moved across the chamber and smoothed her hand along Tavy’s arm.

“Lady Fitzwarren has come for luncheon as planned, but something is amiss and you have forgotten that, haven’t you? I will tell her you are indisposed.”

“No.” Tavy sniffed forcefully, blinked away tears, and headed for the door. “Company will be just the thing to wrest me from my blue devils.”

When Tavy entered the parlor, Lady Fitzwarren’s face opened in a look of perfect awareness, proving Tavy’s instinct horridly wrong. The dowager moved with rustling haste to grip her hands.

“What has he done?” she demanded.

“Oh, well.” The tears prickled again, and she gulped them back. “It seems he has taken a mistress—a mere child, but a remarkably beautiful one—and is being blackmailed by a very bad man through this girl. He is obviously quite in love with her, however, and she with him. So who is to fault either of them?” she finished with an airy wave of her hand.

“Not D—” The dowager’s fleshy lips snapped shut. “No, of course not.” She dropped Tavy’s hands and tilted back on her heels. “Then why are you crying, silly child?”

“Because I have just been thinking some tremendously uncomfortable thoughts and I am not quite certain how to proceed now.”

“First things first. Have you broken off the engagement?”

“Well, yes. Of course.”

“Oh, thank heavens,” Alethea said upon a sizable exhalation, and sank against a chair.

“Yes, let us all sit and talk this through,” the dowager said. “Your sister and I are consumed with relief and consequently somewhat shaken, so you must pour out the tea, Octavia.”

Tavy obeyed, and since the activity prevented her from chewing on her fingertips she was grateful for it. When she finished she could not be still. She went to the window, needing to look out. Always, outward.

“I think I accepted Marcus, or rather even considered accepting him, because I somehow knew he loved someone else.”

Neither of the other women spoke immediately. Then Alethea asked softly, “You do not wish for a love match, after all?”

“She does not believe she deserves one,” Lady Fitzwarren stated.

“Whyever not?” Alethea sounded affronted.

“Because your mother is a selfish, airheaded widgeon. And your father, a kind but weak man, never had any idea what to do with a daughter as spirited as Octavia. To have sent her away to live with that cold woman and stick-brained man in the very prime of her young womanhood was a thorough travesty, I always said.”

“You said that? To whom?”

“To them!”

Tavy turned away from the view. “You know, this is all very interesting, naturally, given that you are speaking of me, but I am still here in the room.”

“Have I said anything with which you disagree?” the dowager demanded.

“No. Mama and Papa did not sympathize with my character in the least. I was terribly awkward, not at all pretty, and too plainspoken. I hadn’t any of your feminine graces, Thea, and I loved all the wrong things, like sea travel and adventure and India. As girls on the verge of their introduction into society go, I was a complete disaster. But he saw something in me that he liked, nevertheless.”

“Not Marcus Crispin?”

“Octavia Pierce, for a young lady of impeccable honesty you have been wretchedly deceptive.”

“Well, I don’t know why I should have told anyone anything about it. I have always been traveling in some way or another, in my imagination even before I left England, dreaming of adventures, not content living within myself. Marcus seemed the perfect solution for continuing to live in that manner. He would not have asked anything of me that I would have found difficult to provide. And he never would have left me because he never would have given himself to me in the first place.”

“Left you?” Alethea whispered.

Tavy met Lady Fitzwarren’s gaze. Tears quivered on the rims of the dowager’s baggy orbs.

“I am deceptive, Aunt Mellicent, to myself most of all.”

The dowager nodded. “How do you feel now, child?” she said without a trace of sentimentality, despite the tears.

“Wretched.” Her stomach hurt, as well as her brain and heart, in a wholly new and desolate manner. “I think I must go now and write a note.” She crossed the chamber and returned to her bedchamber.

As she had requested, Abha was not to be found, and she still hadn’t the desire to see him. So she put the missive into a footman’s hands—a remarkably direct and open action that felt marvelously good—and waited.

After several hours, nerves strung, she asked the footman about his errand. He replied that he had given it to Lord Doreé’s first footman.

Tavy continued waiting. The day waned and Ben did not call or send a message. Perhaps she had been wrong about him. Perhaps she should have trusted her misgivings, as before.

But as dusk deepened into a purple-blue haze, her nerves twisted tighter, her stomach knotting in a continuous loop. She worried for herself. For Marcus and the girl who should not have to suffer even if they did not entirely deserve her help. And most of all for Ben. She could not make herself believe that he would not return her message if he were well. She simply could not have been that mistaken again.