“She has a new baby?” Chloe said.
“Thomas,” Gwen said. “The first Survivor baby. I think mine will be the second.” Her cheeks turned suddenly rosy as both Chloe and Sarah looked involuntarily in the direction of her stomach and Agnes smiled at her.
“How lovely for you!” Sarah said.
“Hugo did not want me to come here with him,” Gwen said. “I have only just stopped feeling horribly bilious in the mornings. But I hate being apart from him, even for a few days, and I know he hates being away from me. I lost a child to a miscarriage once, a long time ago, during my first marriage. I am . . . ecstatic to be given another chance. And terrified. But not as frightened as Hugo is, poor thing.”
“I am very happy for you, Gwen.” Chloe smiled at her. “You do not resent them? The Survivors?”
“Resent them?” Gwen tipped her head to one side and looked rather curiously at her. “I met them all at once. I had trespassed unknowingly upon Penderris property. I was walking on the beach below the house and tried to climb to the top over a steep fall of loose stones. I slipped and sprained my bad ankle and Hugo found me and carried me up to the house. Meeting them all was a bit daunting, I must confess, especially as local gossip would have it that the Duke of Stanbrook had pushed his wife over a cliff, when in reality she jumped to her death. But they were all very kind to me and very courteous. I had to stay there for a few days until my brother came to fetch me. No, I do not resent them.”
“They share an extraordinary bond with one another,” Agnes added. “But they live their own separate lives too. And love is not a finite thing. They love one another, but they have plenty of love left over for their wives and families—or for a husband in Imogen’s case, if she ever remarries. Did you know that one of the Survivors is a woman?”
Chloe nodded and then remembered that she must keep her head still.
“My mother and sisters,” Sarah said, “have always been of the opinion that the three years Ralph spent in Cornwall did him more harm than good.”
“The Duke of Worthingham,” Gwen said, “was very badly hurt physically, but his wounds went far deeper than the worst of the saber cuts. And sometimes, Hugo has told me, the invisible wounds of war are far more deadly than the visible ones. Indeed, Hugo was not physically wounded at all. There is not a scratch upon his person. Yet he was brought home from the Peninsula in a straitjacket and spent three years in Cornwall with the others. He still suffers occasionally.”
“I remember Ralph as he used to be,” Sarah said with a sigh. “Perhaps he will be himself again now that he has married you, Chloe. Though that is an absurd thing to say. He will never be the same. None of us can be the same as we once were. Our lives and our very selves constantly change. But perhaps he will be happy again. Oh, yes!”
That final exclamation was for Chloe’s hair. Gwen’s maid had finished cutting and crimping it and had stood back so that everyone could view the finished effect. She handed Chloe a round mirror with a handle so that she could see too.
“Brilliant!” Sarah exclaimed, and she came hurrying across the room to hug her sister-in-law. “It looks lovely. It looks . . . dashing. You look lovely and dashing. Oh, you will be all the rage, Chloe. Wait and see.”
Chloe looked critically at her image. Her hair had been cut in short layers. It hugged her head in shiny, bouncy waves and made her face look heart shaped and her eyes look bigger. She scarcely recognized herself.
“It is very often assumed,” Gwen said, “that all women look best with long hair. It is not so. I had mine cut many years ago and have never regretted it. You look more striking with short hair, Chloe. I would not have believed it, however, if I had not seen you both ways. And now you will surely have the courage to venture beyond your own room.”
Chloe laughed and turned to thank the maid and commend her on her skill. She found her purse and pressed a generous vail into her hand.
“It is breakfast time,” Sarah said. “Indeed, it is well past time, and I am ravenous even if no one else is.”
“You do look pretty, Chloe,” Agnes assured her, and she linked her arm through Chloe’s as they all left the room.
* * *
“A minor crisis,” Ralph explained to his mother and two of his sisters at breakfast. “Chloe decided to cut her hair last night and did not like the results. The matter has been taken to committee and will be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction, I have no doubt.”
He found himself having to repress a grin. It was not amusing for poor Chloe, especially when one considered why she had done it. But the memory of the rather large female delegation outside his bedchamber door and of Chloe inside it, her chopped hair standing out from the sides of her face and the back of her head, the cross look on her face turned to one of dismay, was worthy of any farce. He could not remember a time when he had been better entertained.
It was doubtless an inappropriate response.
And he had been happy enough to make his escape.
“Chloe has never liked her hair,” Sir Kevin Muirhead said. “She has always been annoyed with the ancestor of mine who passed the bright color on to her. And the more it has been admired, the more she has hated it.”
“Red hair does suggest a certain . . . flamboyance of character,” Ralph’s eldest sister, Amelia, observed.
“Then one can understand why the duchess is uncomfortable with it,” Flavian said. “She is reserved and dignified and quite the opposite of f-flamboyant.”