They all laughed merrily.
“I can see that your guests are fortunate indeed. My goodness, you’ve made the place so charming.” She turned her head this way and that in wondering delight.
If they had put their heads together to invent the ideal guest, they would not have come up with one quite so perfect as Mrs. Locksley.
“We’re so glad you think so. We want everyone who stays with us, no matter how long, to feel as though it’s a real home,” Angelique told her.
“I think I shall be fortunate if I am able to make my new home half this charming. I hope you will advise me on the choice of colors for the little sitting room off my bedroom. The rose color just glows in the light, doesn’t it?”
“We decided it was best to use colors that please us rather than allow fashion to dictate our choices.”
Limited funds had, in fact, dictated their choices, but Angelique and Delilah were pleased to be able to frame it in this new light.
“Howbold,” Mrs. Locksley exclaimed with pleasure.
“Will your husband be joining us, too, Mrs. Locksley?” Delilah asked delicately.
She paused. “I’m afraid my husband died nearly two years ago.”
“Oh. We are so sorry for your loss,” Delilah said, after a second or so worth of appropriately somber silence.
“Thank you,” Mrs. Locksley said with great dignity. “I miss him greatly, but I have decided that I shall get on with things and try to live a happy life as he would have wished me to do. My aunt has invited me to live with her in London. She is quite lively and we shall go about and enjoy what it has to offer in the way of diversions and...”
She paused.
And then, astonishingly, a rosy blush traveled from Mrs. Locksley’s collar to her hairline.
Angelique stared at it, fascinated. She couldn’t recall the last time she’d blushed.
Flushed, of a certainty. Every time Lucien so much as looked at her.
He hadn’t looked at her at all over the past several days. When he couldn’t avoid it, he had on occasion aimed a vague, polite smile more or less in her direction over the top of her head in the sitting room. But they had not exchanged a single word.
And during that time he had sat dutifully in the sitting room with the others. He beat Delacorte in chess. He had gone out and come back in by curfew three nights out of the week, by all accounts sober, because if he hadn’t been, the maids who lit the fires and brought up morning tea would certainly gossip. Many recalled working for drunk lords who mistook their shoes for chamber pots or snarled oaths when the curtains were drawn back to let the sun shine on their drink-soaked morning-after faces.
“...men?” Angelique suggested, delicately. Completing Mrs. Locksley’s dangling sentence.
Mrs. Locksley laughed. “Well, it’s just... I should not object to being wed again. And one does enjoy a little romance, isn’t that so? Even when we’re married?” she said earnestly, her eyes dancing between Delilah’s and Angelique’s faces and back again. “Flowers, a poem, a stroll in a country lane? My husband did excel at that. Do you know, when he proposed, he got down on bended knee before my family at a gathering and asked for my hand,” she said dreamily.
“Soromantic,” Delilah agreed. Who had been proposed to on a dock.
“Mmm,” Angelique agreed. Who had never once been proposed to.
Angelique sardonically wondered whether Lucien would think of Mrs. Locksley as hardtack or roast goose.
And at once there flashed before her an image of Lucien’s white, taut face the day she’d left him in the hallway. Not for the first time today.
And her heart felt like a lead fist.
He was hurt. And angry. She could scarcely breathe knowing she was the cause. She thought she understood why but she didn’t dare to look at the reasons too closely, because they frightened her, too.
No one knew better than she did the lengths required to accommodate pain so that one could just get through the day. So that no one,no one, ever saw it. She didn’t wish any more pain on him.
And if only she could make him understand the lengths that she would go to in order to avoid hurting again. But perhaps he already knew and had made his peace with that.
Lucien would leave, eventually.
She supposed she would exhale then.