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A moment later he was gone, and in very short order, thanks partly to her mother’s badgering and partly to shame and anger and various other emotional turbulence, Clara went to bed with an altogether real headache.
Wednesday afternoon
The Green Park
“You ran away,” Marcelline said.
She’d taken Lucie to the park, and Lucie was pushing a child-size baby carriage, one of the numerous presents Clevedon had filled the nursery with. Susannah, who was still the favored doll, sat in it, staring at her surroundings with her wide blue glass eyes.
Marcelline had taken pains to make him hate her forever. Yet in spite of all said, Clevedon had come back.
He’d gone to the shop, and not finding her there, and getting no information from her sisters, he’d insisted on speaking to Sarah. Since the nursemaid was still, officially, his employee, Sophy and Leonie had to let her talk to him, and Sarah had to tell him that Mrs. Noirot had taken Lucie to the Green Park.
He’d come to the park and hunted Marcelline down—to confide his romantic tribulations, of all things!
He was intelligent, caring, and sensitive. He was an artful and passionate lover.
He was obstinate and oblivious, too.
She reminded herself that dukes were not like other men. Getting their own way all their lives damaged their brains.
Her brain was damaged, too, probably from spending so much time with him. No, her heart was what was damaged. In a not-so-secret corner, she was glad that he and Lady Clara were not yet engaged.
But they soon will be, and you’ll simply have to live with it.
“You leapt at the first excuse not to propose,” Marcelline said. “If you had persevered, I promise you, her headache would have vanished. Your behavior is what pains her, you obtuse man.”
“I know I’ve made a muck of everything,” he said. “It was true what you said the other day. But the mess is so horrendous, I’m having the devil’s own time finding my way out.”
“You’re not helping matters, being here,” she said.
“You’re the expert on everything I do wrong,” he said. “You’re the autocratic female who knows exactly what everyone ought to do.”
“No, I know how everyone ought to dress,” she said.
“I’ll wager anything she knew why I was there,” he said. “I saw Lady Gorrell as I was leaving the jeweler, and she was bound to tell everybody. But I know Clara, and she didn’t seem very happy to see me—and when I offered to go, she looked relieved.”
“And you have no idea why she’d want you gone?” Marcelline said. “You’ve neglected her for weeks. You’ve made a spectacle of yourself with a lot of milliners.” Then you go out and buy a ring. And without any warning, you turn up, all braced for matrimony.”
“It was hardly like that,” he said.
“It was wrong, in any event,” she said. “You haven’t spent a minute wooing her.”
“I’ve known her since she was five years old!”
“Women like to be courted. You know that. What is wrong with you? Have you a blind spot when it comes to Lady Clara?”
He stopped in his tracks and looked at her while a comical look of horror overspread his beautiful face. “Are you telling me I have to chase her and make sheep’s eyes at her and hang on her every word the way her sodding idiot beaux do?”
“Don’t be thick,” Marcelline said. “You of all men know how to cast your lures at a woman. The trouble is, you treat her like a sister.”
He stiffened, but recovered immediately. In the blink of an eye, he was moving again, walking alongside her in his usual easy, arrogant way, expecting all the world to give way before him. Why shouldn’t he demand she solve his romantic difficulties? It was her purpose in life, as it was the purpose of all ordinary beings, to serve him. And wasn’t that her job, serving people like him? Not merely her job, but her ambition?
It wouldn’t occur to him that this was a thoroughly unreasonable way to behave with a woman he’d driven himself mad trying to make love him.
It wouldn’t occur to him how painful this was for such a woman.
She reminded herself the pain was nobody’s fault but hers for letting herself fall in love with him. She was a Noirot. She of all women ought to know better.
