Page 35 of Twice Upon a Midnight

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

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wo days later,Ella paced the length of the front drawing room, chewing on her bottom lip and wringing her hands. She paused only to glance out the tall windows at the busy road beyond the stone and wrought iron fence. Nothing. No sign of anything out of the ordinary.

No sign of Spenser.

She should have been practicing the pianoforte in the music room, she supposed, or studying her watercolors and floral arrangements. To be honest, none of those pursuits that marked an aristocratic woman as accomplished were anything she normally enjoyed anyway, but today she could have used the distraction. Yet nothing appealed to her. Not even the library with its floor-to-ceiling bookshelves could keep her mind off Spenser. Rather, off how he’d not tried to contact her.

So now she lingered in the drawing room at the front of the house where she could glance down into the street for any sign of his arrival.

Ifhe arrived.

“If you keep pacing like that,” her mother called out from the royal blue brocade sofa where she sat attempting needlework but only seemed to be producing a series of misshapen knots, “you’ll wear a trench through the carpet, and then the Duke of Arlington won’t renew our lease. We’ll be cast out, homeless, into the square.”

“Homeless?” Ella laughed grimly at the absurdity of that. “Papa owns over half a dozen properties across London.”

“Yes, but they’re all let. Would you rather we make others homeless in our stead?”

Ella halted mid step and rolled her eyes toward the ceiling, letting her arms sink to her sides. It was impossible to argue with logic like that.

“Come sit by me.” Mama patted the cushion next to her. “Your tea is growing cold.”

Ella didn’t want tea, but she did as Mama wanted and joined her on the settee. Once there, though, she couldn’t stop fidgeting, plucking at pieces of invisible lint on her day dress, and tapping her foot.

“Oh, very well,” Mama conceded with a long-suffering sigh. “Go on and pace, then.”

Ella gratefully jumped to her feet and raced back to the window, afraid she might have missed something—or someone—important on the street. She held her breath as she swept her gaze down one end of St James Place to the other.

“But at least tell me why you’re so restless.”

Oh, Ella could never tell her that!

“Did something happen this morning?”

“No, not this morning.”Something happened two nights ago. Something absolutely wonderful.

But since then, she hadn’t seen or heard from Spenser.

The first day, she’d thought he hadn’t wanted to frighten her by pressing his suit, so she hadn’t worried. She’d spent the day in her room, napping to catch up on missed sleep from the night before and remembering the precious hours she’d spent with him. She’d filled her time by rereading all his letters, even the sad one in which he had tried to break off with her but couldn’t bring himself to, and committing to memory the lines of poetry he’d marked for her in the books. When midnight finally came, she could barely contain herself and slipped out into the park, her feet barely touching the ground as she hurried back to the same place where she’d shared her heart.

But he wasn’t there. No picnic, no blankets…no Spenser. She’d been upset and on the verge of tears, only to convince herself that perhaps there had been a miscommunication, and he’d simply confused which day—or midnight—he would return. After all, she had done the same when she’d asked him to call on her. Somehow she’d managed to keep from breaking down in tears, even if the rest of the night had been spent in fitful tossing and turning.

But he also wasn’t there the following night, and this time, she couldn’t blame it on a miscommunication. Instead of being in his arms, she’d spent the hours until dawn crying herself to sleep.

Now, the following afternoon, he had yet to send a single note of explanation—no letter, no book, no lines of poetry…not even to say goodbye.Thatwasn’t at all like him. Neither was the complete lack of response to the note she’d had the footman deliver to the print shop this morning.

Now she was past the point of worry. If she didn’t hear from him soon—

“I should like to visit that print shop we stopped at the other day,” she announced to her mother with a decisive nod as she turned away from the window. “I need stationery and sealing wax.”

Her mother glanced at the little writing desk beneath the window. A stack of linen note cards and a new stick of wax sat on the desktop. “Oh?”

“Yes.” And while she was there, she planned on demanding answers. Lots and lots of answers. She wouldn’t leave until she had them.

A commotion went up from the courtyard, and Ella hurried back to the window, her heart thumping with desperate hope. She braced her hands on the sill and watched a man on horseback trot through the wrought iron gate and up to the front portico. From a distance, he looked like Spenser…Washe Spenser? The same broad shoulders and easy posture, the same thick brown hair she could just see beneath the brim of a beaver hat that hid his face.

Thathadto be him! She could feel it in her bones. Relief swelled inside her, and her shoulders sagged as she let out a long breath, unaware until that moment that she’d even been holding it.