Her country village was no longer enough for her.
The contours of her soul had changed in a short time, and she no longer fit it, like a dress she had outgrown.
What had Lord Kirke said in the sitting room that night:We may not find precisely what we’re looking for as we seek answers, but the search may reveal to us other useful or beautiful things about ourselves and our world.
It was like wildflowers, she supposed: one never knew which ones might burst forth in the spring, having waited beneath the earth for just the right rain and warmth. London, and a certain beautiful, difficult, flawed man, had caused her soul to riotously bloom. She hadn’t known passion or wildness or complexity or jealousy or daring were part of her. She hadn’t known it was possible to be more fully, soaringlyherselfuntil she’d met him. She hadn’t truly known the depths of her capacity for tenderness, or her need to express and receive it.
He was the cause of her suffering, but the notion that she might never have met him left her desolate. The idea that he could easily find a temporary lover to comfort and distract him scorched the breath from her if she dared entertain it for a moment. She’d grown up with such a fine, peaceful example of love. How had she managed to fall in love with a man who seemed unable to love her in return?
And at night, even the skim of her night rail over skin was a sensual torment. Because her skin remembered, and preferred, the skim of his fingertips.
She was more conscious than she’d ever been of how quiet it was in their house at night. She waswistful for the merry sitting room of The Grand Palace on the Thames, and the sound of cheerful debate, and the clicking of knitting needles, and the rustle of pages turning. For the littlepoksound of someone laying a chess piece decisively down on a chessboard.
“I wonder if I could read a story aloud to you?” she offered one night to her father.
He studied her, surprised.
“We haven’t yet done that, have we? It sounds lovely. Have you one in mind?”
It was one way to fill the room with other people: by way of characters and stories.
How had brave Scheherazade managed to mine her imagination for so many stories? As Lord Kirke said, women were resourceful when the circumstances demanded it. And she knew she, too, would find ways to survive.
Hotel rooms were always scarce during the London season. Kirke finally found an unimpressive one near the King’s Theatre, where the poor madman shouted Hamlet soliloquies to an indifferent audience.
He felt like his town house after the fire: still upright. Still looking more or less whole and normal on the outside.
Inside, scorched to charcoal.
It seemed to him a blackly comic farce of Shakespearean grandeur that every time he truly loved someone, he apparently destroyed them and shattered his own life.
He tried, as one does, to trace it back to the beginning, back to the moment he’d taken her handkerchief from her, to see where he could have donesomething differently. He did not see how he would have made different choices. He could rue them all now, but a different choice would mean he would never have held her in his arms, and this he knew he would never forego.
He was able, for a time, to function within a blessed shocked numbness. For a fortnight, he managed to allow in no feeling at all by working until he dropped into a black sleep at night. He was damned if his own stupidity and suffering would lead to more suffering for any of the people he’d been trying to help or the people he’d been elected to serve.
It was useful to have a sense of duty for a spine. To fill his days with meetings and appointments he would be required to attend. He reported to Parliament, and voted when needed.
But as one week became two weeks became three, his inner condition became outwardly apparent.
Because he scarcely ate.
He gave no speeches.
And he attended no balls.
He’d tried to attend one, and by his calm insouciance demonstrated that the rumors about him and an innocent girl who had merely visited London from the country for a few weeks were nonsense, as so many rumors were.
He knew—he heard—Lady Wisterberg had vigorously done her part to slap them down, too. She was convincingly scornful and indignant. Then again, if she had been just as forceful about protecting Keating’s reputation from the first, Dominic would never have spent a moment alone with her.
So be it.
The ton gossips eventually gave up the outlandish notion of him taking the angelic young Miss Kas a mistress, and stopped talking about her altogether, mainly because it was not as much fun to shun someone who wasn’t present for the shunning. And because no oxygen was given to the flames.
But at the ball he’d attended, he found himself experiencing a nearly grotesque lurch of hope when he glanced at a collection of ferns in a corner of a ballroom.
After that, he found he simply couldn’t go to another. That was it for him for the season.
And possibly for every season thereafter.