“At last,” he said when they came together again and the final waltz began. But the words sounded too fervent. “I danced the waltz after supper with Miss Ferguson and had to concentrate very hard on avoiding her feet with each step.”
She laughed. “Unkind!” she said.
“Yes. I admit it.” He laughed too. “But it is true, nevertheless.”
She laughed again. Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes shone. “I wish this night could go on forever and ever,” she said.
“Do you?” There was something about her eyes. His own locked on them and he was suddenly intensely aware of her. All else about them receded from sight and mind.
The fading of her smile brought him back to reality. “Until Sidney comes, at least,” she said, and her smile this time was brighter, less dreamy. “I shall tease him about all he has missed in the past two weeks and assure him that nothing he can tell me about Brighton will make me envious.”
The moment was gone. They danced in silence for most of the set, talking only occasionally. She was light on her feet and slender and warm to the touch. She smelled faintly of soap rather than any of the heavy perfumes he was more accustomed to with fashionable ladies. Her auburn curls were shining.
He wondered what might have happened if he had not tried to steal a kiss from her too early—when she was only fifteen years old—but had had the patience to wait for her to grow up. What might have happened if he had come home each summer to court her slowly? But nothing would be different, he knew. For always there had been Sid. The two of them had shared an extraordinary friendship ever since early childhood. It was inevitable that she fall in love with him eventually. He himself, on the other hand, had always been too old for her.
“Oh,” she said suddenly, looking up into his face with those large hazel eyes, which could always jolt him into heightened awareness. “The music is at an end? Already?” And then she flushed rosily and he smiled. At least she seemed to have lost her aversion to him.
“I am afraid so,” he said. “May I escort you down to your carriage? And does it take people as long to get into their carriages and drive away as it used to take?”
She laughed. “But of course,” she said.
Everyone always stayed to the very end of local assemblies, and so everyone’s carriage or gig was jostling for position at the same time outside the inn. But there was never the chaos and display of bad temper that one might expect of such a situation. Large numbers of people always remembered precious tidbits of gossip or important messages that they had found no time to confide in a whole evening of gossip and dancing.
And so the assembly rooms always became the domain of the ladies and the street outside of the men. The young people always crowded the stairway connecting the two. There was inevitably a lapse of at least half an hour between the ending of the last set and the drawing away of the carriages.
“Shall we join the crush on the stairs?” the viscount asked. “Or shall we push through to the street and take a stroll until everyone decides that it really is time to go home?” He was powerfully reminded of an occasion four years before when he had suggested that she stroll with him. He expected her to choose the crush on the stairs.
“A stroll sounds lovely,” she said. “Do you suppose it is cool outside?”
It was. And crowded and noisy. But he took Constance’s arm through his and they strolled away from the crowd of men filling the pavement between the inn wall and the carriages. They strolled past shops and houses all the way to the church at the end of the village street. But there was still no sign, the viscount saw when he glanced back, that the crowd was dispersing.
He drew her to sit beside him on the low churchyard wall, her arm still through his. They had not moved out of sight of the inn or the men on the pavement outside it. And yet, the sound of voices was muted. They seemed alone. He covered her hand with his own and caressed her fingers. And he wished he could think of something to talk about so that he would resist temptation.
And yet, was it temptation? Temptation to do something he ought not to do? Sid was not coming back. Soon she would know that—she would know it already if only he had more courage, or Sid more sense of decency. In reality, she was neither promised nor betrothed to any man. Was it not more fear of rejection than reluctance to give in to temptation that held him back?
He lifted her hand and held it to his lips for a long moment. She was looking down at her lap, he saw.
“I have enjoyed this evening more than any other event I can remember,” he said. “Especially the first and the last waltz.”
He did not think she was going to answer him. Or look at him. Or snatch her hand away from him.
“So have I,” she said at last, her voice little more than a whisper.
He returned her hand to his lips and turned it over and kissed her palm.
But the voices outside the inn had become louder and more boisterous, a sure sign that the young people and the ladies were coming outside and the carriages beginning to fill.
“We had better go back,” he said, “before your father calls out the militia.”
“Yes,” she said. He drew her to her feet, gave her his arm again, and walked with her back toward the inn.
They did not speak at all, though the silence between them was not an uncomfortable thing. And she did not once raise her eyes to his until he was handing her into her father’s carriage, where her mother was already seated.
“Good night, Jonathan,” she said softly, finally looking into his eyes, her own wide and unsmiling.
“Good night, Constance,” he said, and he turned away to bid farewell to Sir Howard and Lady Manning.
She was twenty years old, Constance thought, curled into the window seat of the parlor, her hands clasped tightly about her knees, and she felt like a child deprived of a treat, ready to howl with anguish and despair. Everything had gone wrong. Everything. And she was sorry in her heart that the whole of her party could not be canceled so that she could wallow in her misery for the rest of the day. How was she to gather herself together and appear cheerful for a houseful of guests within the next few hours?
