Her mother also would not understand that she had loved him all that time without wavering—even during the past two weeks when she had been surrounded by handsome and charming and eligible young gentlemen who might easily have turned her head.
She could not tell her mother any of these things.
Whatever was she to do? Whatever was she to say?
There was nothing, of course. Absolutely nothing.
“When must we leave?” she asked.
Perhaps it was an invitation for the summer.
Her mother beamed at her again.
“Within the week,” she said. “Oh, my love, I am so happy for you. And Middlebury Park is not even so very far from Bath. We will be able to come and visit you there after your marriage. I do not think Mrs. Pearl would have described the viscount as handsome and personable unless he were really so, for we will know for ourselves as soon as we get there, will we not? I daresay he will love you, for you are very sweet and he is very much confined to his own home. And you will grow fond of him. I know you will. It is easy to love people who are dependent upon us, you know. We love our children for that very reason, as you will no doubt discover for yourself within the next year or two.”
She leaned down and hugged her daughter, who hugged her back—and was filled from the top of her head to the tips of her toes with misery and utter despair.
This was suddenly the very worst day of her life.
The Honorable Julian Crabbe broke his journey from Cornwall in Bath, where he planned to spend a few days with his uncle and aunt. There he intercepted a letter whose sender had feared he would not receive at all. She had sent it enclosed in a short note to his cousin Barbara in the faint hope that it would reach him in Cornwall before he set out on his journey. The letter was not a long one, but its brief contents were devastating to the hopes that had buoyed him for so long.
Philippa was being taken, within a week of writing, to Middlebury Park in Gloucestershire, where she was to be presented as a prospective bride to the blind Viscount Darleigh. She would be there by now.
His caution had been his undoing—their undoing. He was too late. He had spent two years turning his life about, living down the deserved notoriety the sowing of his youthful wild oats had earned him before he removed from London to rusticate in Bath. He had spent two years making himself into someone the Deans would consider worthy of their daughter when she was old enough to be married. It had not been an easy thing to do, for they would not be meeting him as a stranger when he presented himself to them, but as the wild jackanapes whom Mr. Dean had caught in Sydney Gardens in the nick of time before Julian debauched his young daughter. Or so the man had thought, anyway, and who could blame him? Philippa had been sixteen, and he had been six years older than she and the owner of a tarnished reputation.
Julian had been holding her hand. He had had no intention even of kissing her. He was well aware that she was still just a schoolgirl. But … Well, there had been his reputation, and he had been fully responsible for earning that.
He had been a wild and reckless young cub who had dabbled in every imaginable vice—except that he had never been a womanizer. He had expected a dull time in Bath, especially when his cousin Barbara showed a tendency to hang about him as if his arrival was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to her. But he had liked her despite himself, and he had liked her friend even more. Philippa Dean had been sweet and modest and bright and cheerful and remarkably pretty. He had enjoyed her company for a number of weeks until it had suddenly occurred to him that he was falling in love with her.
It had been an alarming as well as an astonishing realization. She was far too young for courtship, and so was he. And even if they had not been, he was in no position to court her. He had scarcely a penny to his name.
But love, he had found, did not follow the laws of logic.
And so, when sober good sense replaced astonishment, he had decided to leave Bath and return home to Cornwall. He had taken her aside after the concert at that grand and crowded gala in Sydney Gardens in order to say good-bye to her—only to discover that her feelings were engaged as deeply as his. But it would not do, he had decided. He had taken her gloved hand in his to say his farewells.
And, irony of ironies, that had been the very moment when her father had found them and drawn his very understandable conclusions.
That might have been the end of it. But he had felt horribly guilty at getting her into trouble, as he did not doubt he had done, and wrote a letter of apology, which he smuggled to her through Barbara.
She had written back.
And so had started their secret correspondence.
He had never stopped loving her. Would he have without the letters? He supposed it was possible, even probable. But there had been the letters, and so there was their love, two years old now and in no way dimmed. Quite the contrary.
He had tried to make allowances for her youth, though, to allow her to meet other eligible gentlemen before she saw him again. Hence his decision not to arrive too soon in London when she was finally eighteen and about to make her come-out. She must be allowed some little time, he had decided, to discover if her heart was indeed as set upon him as she believed it to be.
There was no longer any question of his eligibility, thank God. The circumstances of his life had changed and helped him to change. His father had died six months after the Bath incident, and Julian had been able to set to work on the difficult task of bringing the Cornwall property and estate back to something resembling the splendor and prosperity they had enjoyed before the Duke of Stanbrook, Julian’s grandfather, had willed them to his younger son. Lord Charles Crabbe, Julian’s father, had lived a life of expense and dissipation and had neglected his inheritance, except to draw every penny from the rents he squeezed out of tenants whose genuine complaints had gone unheeded for years.