Blossom had been brought to the dower house in a housemaid’s basket. She had expressed no particular objection, having never quite recovered from having had her chair by the drawing room fire taken away and replaced with one she did not find nearly as comfortable, and one she was moreover expected to relinquish every time a certain man was in the room to claim it for himself. She prowled about the new environment, upstairs and down, before selecting a chair on one side of the fireplace in the sitting room. No one ordered her to get down. She was fed tasty victuals in the kitchen and assigned a comfortable bed for the nights in one corner beside the oven. She promptly forgot the old home and adopted the new.
The sound of hammers from the direction of the roof was close to being deafening all day, but Imogen did not mind. At least the noise gave indication that the job was being done. And living in a noisy, chilly, slightly damp, very dusty house—at least for the first hour or two—was certainly preferable to the alternative.
She did not set foot outside the house for the entire first day, even to check her garden to see if an early snowdrop had made its appearance yet. She had hardly left the sitting room since it had been cleaned and all was bustle and activity elsewhere. She even ate there, as Mrs. Primrose declared the dining room still unfit for her ladyship.
Imogen felt she was in heaven. She sat during the evening, as she had all afternoon, with her workbag beside her and a book open on her lap. Mostly, though, she enjoyed the silence and solitude. Her housekeeper and the roof workers were gone for the day, and all the extra servants had returned to the hall.
He read Alexander Pope, she thought as she turned a page of her own book. At least, that was the volume that had been on the table beside his chair in the library when she had looked one morning. Perhaps he had taken one glance inside it and closed it and neglected to return it to the shelf. Perhaps he had not even taken a glance.
And perhaps he had read it.
Why did she always want to believe the worst of him?
She set a hand flat on her book to hold it open, closed her eyes, and rested her head against the back of her chair. If only last night could be erased from memory. No, not just from memory—from fact. If only none of it had happened. If only she had returned home with Aunt Lavinia and Cousin Adelaide.
But if onlys were pointless. She had spent three years learning that lesson.
Could she not simply have enjoyed that waltz without . . . Well, she could not even complete the thought. She did not know what else she had felt but enjoyment. Enchantment, perhaps?
He had asked the question on the way home. Very few people ever had, even her own family, though she suspected many had wondered. Only her fellow Survivors and the physician at Penderris knew the truth—the full truth, and she had volunteered the information to them.
How had he dared to ask? He was a near stranger. I suppose you were raped. But she guessed he was the sort of man who dared ask anything, who believed it was his God-given right to pry into other people’s secrets.
She hated him with a passion.
She wondered if he had believed her answer.
She had hated him for asking. Yet she had kissed him immediately after. Oh, yes, she had. There was no denying it this time. He had kissed her for a few seconds, it was true. But after that she had kissed with as much passionate abandon as he had kissed her. Probably more, for she doubted his passion had been anything more than lust, while hers . . . She did not know what hers had been. And if it had been pure lust on his part, why had he put such an abrupt end to their embrace? Why had he not taken more liberties while he could? It must have been obvious that she was not resisting him, and there had been several minutes left of the journey and its enforced closeness and privacy.
She did not understand him or know him. She liked to believe she did both. She disliked him and wanted to despise him. And he made it easy for her to believe that he was empty of everything but arrogance and conceit—and charm.
She liked to believe she disliked him. Yet down on the beach she had said he was almost likable. Oh, this was all very confusing and very upsetting.
He was the one who had sent the army of servants after her to the dower house this morning. One of them had admitted it when she was still hoping it had been Aunt Lavinia. He might have done it, of course, out of sheer delight to be rid of her and determination to give her no possible excuse to return. But it would be spiteful to believe that.
She really did not know him at all. And sometimes, she thought, extraordinary beauty, even male beauty, must be a disadvantage to the person who possessed it, for it was easy to look only at the outer package and assume that there was nothing of any corresponding worth within.
When confronted, he had assured her that there was nothing inside him but charm. Despite herself, Imogen smiled at the memory. He had a gift for absurdity—a fact that suggested a certain wit, a certain intelligence, even a certain attractive willingness to laugh at himself. She did not want to believe it of him.
She went to bed early after an exhausting day of doing nothing and lay awake until sometime after four o’clock.
* * *
The first thing Percy did when he got out of bed the morning following the assembly was tear down the offending curtains at his window, rods and all. They had made his room so dark through the night that when he awoke at some unknown hour he had been unable to see so much as his hand before his face. If he had got out of his bed and taken a few steps away from it, it might have taken him an hour to find it again. Had Lady Barclay told him that one of her Survivor friends was blind? It did not bear thinking of. Neither did she. Last night . . . Well, that did not bear thinking of either.