“It is very good,” he had assured her. “I called upon Viscount Harding and his wife. Chloe came with me. And I wrote to Sir Marvin Courtney and to Lord and Lady Janes.”
“You were not responsible for what happened to their sons, Ralph,” she had said. “Your father and I told you that again and again.”
“It seems their parents agree with you,” he had told her. “I am so sorry, Mama. I must have given you years of heartache—and Papa too. I wish I could make it up to him. I wish—”
But she had surged to her feet.
“Ralph,” she had said with the severity he could remember from his childhood when he had been up to some mischief. “You must not do this. Yes, your father was unhappy because you were unhappy and there was nothing he could do or say to comfort you. But you had nothing whatsoever to do with his brief illness and passing. He loved you always, and he always understood, even when he felt at his most helpless. I will not have you feel guilty over your father or over me. You will have children of your own one day, soon, I hope, and then you will understand how parents ache to see their children happy and would never, ever want to see their children unhappy over them.”
Her words, and the passion with which she had spoken them, had startled Ralph. How little he had known his parents, he had realized a little sadly. It was sad in his father’s case because he could do nothing now to cultivate a closer relationship with him. It was not too late with his mother, though. And it was time he looked at her, not through the selfish eyes of a boy, but through the more mature eyes of a man so that he could see her as a person with all her imperfections—and his own.
He had hugged her warmly before she left. He had not been able to remember the last time he had done so.
He looked across the ballroom now and smiled when he saw the partially opened French windows leading out onto the balcony. They would have to be closed soon, pleasant as the cool outside air felt. For the king might come. Chloe had reacted with near hysteria when he had told her, but she had soon recovered and squared her shoulders and lifted her chin.
“Well, then,” she had said, a martial gleam in her eye.
That was all. She had not needed to say more. Chloe, he believed, would always confront her fears and march straight through the middle of them. Whether he had had something to do with making her that way, he did not know, but certainly she had not been like it last year when she had fled London at the first whisper of gossip. Perhaps he had had a positive influence on her, as she had had on him. He doubted he would ever have approached Harding if it had not been for his wife.
His wife!
It was time he went up to see if she was ready for the ball. The first of their guests would be arriving in the next half hour or so. And there would be many of them. Of all the invitations they had sent out, they had received only four refusals, and each of those had come with a personal note of regret. They could expect almost everyone, then, as well as a few people who would inevitably slip in without having been invited. This ball was going to be one of the grandest squeezes of the Season, a prospect that would have horrified him just a couple of months ago.
His mother had been quite right, he thought as he made his way upstairs. He was back. He felt as though he had shed a great burden and was physically lighter. He felt years younger. He felt his age, in fact—he was only twenty-six.
The strange thing was, of course, that his grief—for his friends, for all the men of his regiment who had died while he was in the Peninsula, for his father, for his grandfather—had sharpened to a painful degree during the past few weeks even as his sense of guilt had ebbed away. But then all his feelings had sharpened.
He was in love with Chloe.
Yes, he was—madly, passionately in love, though he had tried hard not to make an idiot of himself by showing it. But his feelings went deeper than the merely romantic or sexual—though neither of those two felt like a mere anything.
He loved her.
There was no language for that particular state, however. It merely was. He loved her. He supposed he had shown it or at least a glimmering of it during the past weeks. He certainly had not tried to hide it. But one day soon he was going to have to say something, even if only the inadequate cliché I love you. Words, he understood, especially words that expressed emotion, were important to women. He wished it were not so, but it was.
One day soon he would tell her.
* * *
Despite all the stress of hosting a ball for the ton during the London Season and even the expectation that the king might make one of his rare appearances there, and despite the fact that some of the guests and combination of guests made her feel a little as though her head were spinning on her shoulders, and despite the fact that the evening was less than half over and disaster might still strike before it ended—despite it all, Chloe was feeling happy.
Quite consciously happy.
She had confronted her worst fear a few weeks ago, and really it had not been so dreadful after all. Her papa had looked apprehensive and had even shed a tear when she told him about her visit to the Marquess of Hitching. But when she had hugged him tightly and told him that he would always, always be her beloved papa, he had shed a few more tears and hugged her back and told her she was a good girl and had done the right thing. And he was here at the ball tonight with Graham and Lucy and Mr. Nelson even though she had warned him that the marquess had been invited and had accepted.
The marquess had arrived fairly early with his family. He had squeezed Chloe’s hand as they passed along the receiving line and smiled at her. The marchioness had inclined her head, setting her hair plumes to nodding, and murmured something cool and gracious. Lady Angela had looked slightly disdainful but had bidden Chloe a polite good evening. Viscount Gilly had taken her hand in his, raised it to his lips, and called her sister, a mocking though not noticeably malicious gleam in his eye.