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Briefly she was filled with bitterness. It seemed a cruel joke that she should get her fortune now, when events had rendered her incapable of enjoying it. She could buy a different house, hire a companion, enliven her wardrobe, but she could not regain her old lightheartedness or her girlhood friends. If only her father had been kinder, or Gerald… But with this thought, Diana shook her head. She could not honestly blame them for her present plight. Her father had been harsh and distant; Gerald had treated her shamefully. But she herself had repulsed the world in her first remorseful reaction, for no reason that the world could see. Naturally, those she rejected had withdrawn, and it seemed to her now that she had been foolish in this as well as in her rash elopement.
Gathering her cloak, Diana turned and walked through the churchyard gate and along the street toward home. Her father’s house, hers now, was beyond the edge of the village, surrounded by high stone walls. As she approached it, Diana walked more slowly, a horror of retreating behind those barriers again growing in her. Was she fated to spoil her life? Had some dark destiny hovered over her birth?
“Diana. Diana Gresham,” called a high, light voice behind her. “Wait, Diana!”
She turned. A small slender woman in a gray cloak and a modish hat was waving from a carriage in the center of the village. Her face was in shadow, and Diana did not recognize her as she got out and hurried forward.
“Oh, lud,” the newcomer gasped as she came up. “This wind takes my breath away. And I had forgotten the dreadful cold here. But how fortunate to meet you, Diana! Cynthia Addison said you had left Yorkshire, and so I might not even have called! Are you back for a visit, as we are?”
When the woman spoke, Diana recognized Amanda Trent, a friend she had not seen for eight years. Amanda, two years older, had married young and followed her soldier husband to Spain. They had exchanged one or two letters at the beginning, but Amanda was an unreliable correspondent, and Diana had ceased to write after her elopement, as she had ceased to see acquaintances like Cynthia Addison, who could not be blamed for thinking her gone. “Hello, Amanda,” she answered, the commonplace words feeling odd on her tongue.
Amanda peered up into her face, sensing some strangeness. She looked just the same, Diana thought—tiny and brunette, with huge almost black eyes. Those eyes had been the downfall of a number of young men before Captain Trent won her hand. “Diana?” Amanda said, a question in her voice.
Making a great effort, Diana replied, “I am not visiting. I never left. After Papa died…” She didn’t finish her sentence because the story seemed far too complicated to review; none of the important things could be told. And she didn’t want pity.
Amanda held out both hands. “Yes, they told me about Mr. Gresham. I am sorry, of course, though…” She shrugged. Long ago, Diana had confided some of her trials.
Awkwardly Diana took her hands. Amanda squeezed her fingers and smiled. “Come back with me, and we shall have a cozy talk. I want to hear everything!”
Diana wondered what she would say if she did. Amanda seemed the same gay creature she had been at nineteen; she felt ancient beside her. Yet the chance to put off going home was irresistible, and shortly they were sitting side by side in Amanda’s carriage riding toward her parents’ house a few miles from the village.
“George is invalided out,” Amanda told her. “He never recovered properly from the fever he took after Toulouse, so we decided to come here for a good long visit. I am so happy to be in England again! You cannot imagine how inconvenient it sometimes was in Spain, Diana.”
Thinking that “inconvenient” was an odd characterization of the Peninsular Wars, Diana watched her old friend’s face. Now that they were closer, she could see small signs of age and strain there. Amanda was no less pretty, but it was obvious now that she was nearly a decade past nineteen. Her friend’s chatter seemed less carefree, more forced. Diana felt relieved; it had been daunting to think that only she was altered. “You have been in Spain all this time?”
“Oh, lud, no! That Icouldnot have borne. I spent two seasons in London, and I was here for the summer a year ago. I am sorry I did not call, Diana, but I was…ill.” She turned her head away. “Here we are. Mama will be so pleased to see you.”
Wondering uneasily if this was true, Diana followed Amanda into the house. Mrs. Durham was one of the acquaintances she had ceased to see years ago.
As it happened, none of the family was at home. George Trent was riding with Amanda’s father, and Mrs. Durham had gone to visit an ailing tenant rather than share Amanda’s drive. The two women settled in the drawing room with a pot of tea and a plate of the spice cakes Diana remembered from childhood visits.
“Are you still in mourning?” asked Amanda then, her expression adding what politeness made her suppress. Diana’s clothes and hair were even more unfashionable than before her father’s death.
Diana put a hand to the great knot of deep golden hair at the back of her neck as she explained about Mrs. Samuels. Amanda’s dark cropped ringlets and elegant blue morning gown brought back concerns she hadn’t felt for years. The black dress she wore was the last she had bought, for her father’s mourning.
Amanda looked puzzled. “But, Diana, what have you been doing all this time? Did you have a London season? Or at least go to York for the winter assemblies?” When Diana shook her head, she opened her eyes very wide. “Do you mean you have just stayed here? Butwhy?”
It must indeed seem eccentric, Diana thought, and she could not give her only plausible reason. Her neighbors had probably judged her mad.
Amanda was gazing at her with an unremembered shrewdness. “Is something wrong, Diana? You…you seem different. You were always the first to talk of getting away.”
Miserably Diana prepared to rise. She could not explain, and Amanda would no doubt take that inability for coldness. Their long-ago friendship was dead.
But Amanda had lapsed into meditative silence. “I suppose we are all changed,” she added. “It has been quite a time, after all. What else could we expect?”
Surprised, Diana said nothing, and in the next moment their tête-à-tête was interrupted by the entrance of Amanda’s family.
The Durhams were familiar, though Diana had not seen them recently, and their greetings were more cordial than she had expected. They did not mention her strange behavior or seem to see anything odd in her sudden visit to their house. But as they spoke, Diana gradually received the impression that they were too preoccupied with more personal concerns to think of her.
One cause, at least, was obvious. Diana had never seen a greater alteration in a person than in George Trent, Amanda’s husband. She remembered him as a smiling blond giant, looking fully able to toss his tiny bride high in the air and catch her again without the least strain. Now, after seven years in the Peninsula, he retained only his height. His once muscular frame was painfully thin; his bright hair and ruddy complexion were dulled, and he wore a black patch over one blue eye. Diana’s presence appeared to startle and displease him, though he said nothing, merely retreating to the other side of the room and pretending interest in an album that lay on a table. His family watched him anxiously but covertly.
“George,” said Amanda finally, when his conduct was becoming rude, “you remember Diana Gresham. She was at our wedding, and I have spoken to you of her.”
George was very still for a moment. Then he turned, squaring his shoulders as if to face an ordeal. “Miss Gresham,” he said, bowing his head slightly.
“Doesn’t George look dashing and romantic?” Amanda continued, her tone rather high and brittle. “I tell him he is positively piratical and he must take care not to set too many hearts aflutter, or I shall be dreadfully jealous. Don’t I, George?”
“Me and everyone else,” he replied, and strode abruptly out of the room.
