It would be more accurate, Lily thought, to say that he was beaming at her. Despite the battered look of his face, he appeared very happy. She deliberately kept her own expression bright—not that it was all pretense. But a part of it was. She was stepping into the unknown again as she had done so many times, it seemed, during the past couple of years.

She remembered traveling down to Newbury Abbey from London and hoping that the long journey was almost ended. She remembered seeing Neville for the first time in almost a year and a half and experiencing, despite the difficulty of the circumstances, a feeling of final homecoming.

But she had not been home. And she still was not. She wondered if she ever would be. Would the time ever come when she would feel at last that she had arrived, that she could settle in peace to live out the rest of her life?

Or was life always a journey along an unknown path?

"Kilbourne," the duke said to her just before Elizabeth came back into the room, "asked me to inform you of his intention to call this afternoon, Lily—if you are willing to receive him."

***

Killing another human being was not something one did with any relish, Neville thought during the night and the morning following the death of Calvin Dorsey. Certainly not in battle—one was too aware of the fact that the men one killed were no more evil or deserving of death than one was oneself. But not even when the man one killed was a murderer and had killed one's wife's mother and had tried on a number of occasions to kill her too. There had been a certain satisfaction, perhaps, in watching Dorsey take the bait of that carelessly abandoned pistol and in being given then little choice but to kill him—especially when Portfrey had won the argument about which of them was to punish Dorsey before he was turned over to the law. But certainly no relish.

Was there pleasure in having discovered the truth about Lily's birth? In having learned that she outranked him? That he had nothing to offer her that she did not now have in overabudance herself? And was that how he had hoped to win Lily—with his position and his wealth and the hope that her own near destitution would force her back to him? Surely not. He wanted her to be his equal, to feel his equal. The fact that she had felt herself to be by far his inferior had wrecked any chance they might have had for happiness when she had come to Newbury.

He should be rejoicing, then, in this turn of events. Why was he not? It was because of Lily herself, he concluded finally. Poor Lily had suffered so much turmoil in the past year and a half. How could she sustain the loss of her very roots? Would he find her all broken up when he called at Elizabeth's during the afternoon? Worse, would he find her still quite unlike her indomitable self, dazed and passive as she had been last evening?

He approached Elizabeth's with a great deal of trepidation. He even found himself half hoping as he entered the house and asked if Miss Doyle would receive him that she would send down a refusal. But she did not. The butler showed him up to the drawing room. Both Lily and Elizabeth were there.

"Neville," Elizabeth said, coming across the room toward him after he had made his bow and exchanged greetings with them. She kissed his cheek. "I will allow you a private word with Lily." And she left the room without further ado.

Lily was not looking crushed—or dazed. Indeed, she looked remarkably vibrant in a fashionable sprigged muslin dress with her hair softly curling about her face.

"You killed Mr. Dorsey," she said. "My father told me this morning. I am not sorry that he is dead though I have never before wished for anyone's death. But I am sorry you were forced to do it. I know it is not easy to kill."

Yes, Lily would know that, having grown up with an army whose business it was to kill.

But—my father?

"This one," he said, "was almost easy."

"We will say no more of it," she said firmly. She had risen from her chair and came across the room toward him. "Neville, I am going to go to Rutland Park on Monday with my father and Elizabeth. There is to be a notice in the papers tomorrow. I am going to spend some time with him, learning to be his daughter, letting him learn to be my father. I am going to see my grandfather and my mother's grave. I am going to… go."

"Yes." His heart felt as if it somersaulted and then sank all the way to the soles of his boots—even as he told himself that he was glad for her.

She half smiled at him. "I was Lily Doyle," she said. "Then I was Lily Wyatt—and then not. Now I am Lily Montague. I have to discover who I really am. I thought I was discovering the answer after I came here to London, but today it feels as far away as ever."

"You are Lily." He tried to smile back at her.

She nodded and her eyes brightened with tears.

"How long?" he asked her.

She shook her head.

He could not press her on the point, he realized. She did not need one more burden to carry. And he knew the question to be unanswerable.

He had begun to believe that there was a future for them after all. He had been on the brink of putting the matter to the test at Vauxhall. He hated to remember that night, which had started with such magical promise. Now he would have to wait an indefinite length of time again with no certainties to make the wait easy.

He reached out both hands for hers, and she set her own in them.

"You will like him, Lily," he said. "You will even love him, I daresay. He is a good man and he is your father. Go then and find yourself. And be happy. Promise me?"

She was biting on her upper lip, he could see.

He squeezed her hands and raised them one at a time to his lips. "I am not overfond of London," he said. "I shall be glad to return to Newbury for the summer. I daresay I will go tomorrow or the next day. Perhaps, if you think it appropriate, you will write me a letter there?"

"I cannot… write well enough," she said.

"But you will." He smiled at her. "And you will be able to read my reply too."

"Will I?" she asked him. "Sometimes I wish—oh, how I wish I were Lily Doyle again and you were Major Lord Newbury and Papa…"

"But we are not," he said sadly. "I want you to know something, though, Lily. Not so that you will have one more burden to shoulder, but so that you will know that some things are unchanged and unchangeable. I loved you when I married you. I love you today. I will love you with my dying breath. I have loved you and will love you during every moment between those time spans."

"Oh. But it is not the right moment," she said, her eyes clouding with some emotion he was unable to enter into. Poor Lily. So much had happened to her recently and she had borne it all with dignity and integrity.

"I will not prolong this visit," he told her. "I will take my leave, Lily. Make my excuses to Elizabeth?"

She nodded.

They clung to each other's hands for a few moments longer. But she was correct. It was not the right time. If she came back to him—when she came back to him—there must be no other need in her except to be with him for the rest of their lives.

He withdrew his hands gently, keeping the smile in his eyes, and left her without another word.

He was halfway back to Kilbourne House, striding unseeing along the streets, before he remembered that he had driven his curricle to Elizabeth's.

 

PART V

A Wedding

 

Chapter 25

"Oh, may the carriage be stopped?" she asked.

The Duke of Portfrey, from his seat opposite, rapped on the front panel, and the carriage drew to an abrupt halt. Lily had the window down in a trice despite the coolness of the day and leaned her head through it.

"Mrs. Fundy," she called. "How are you? And how are the children? Oh, the baby has grown."

While the duke and Elizabeth exchanged glances of silent amusement, Mrs. Fundy, who had been gawking at the grand carriage with its ducal crest, smiled broadly, looked suddenly flustered, and bobbed a curtsy.

"We are all very well, thank you, my lady," she said. "It is good to see you back again."

"Oh, and it is good to be back again," Lily said. "I shall call on you one day if I may."

She beamed at Mrs. Fundy while the carriage lurched into motion again. She was not coming home, she reminded herself. Newbury Abbey was not home. Oh, but she felt as if it were. She had come to love Rutland Park, as her father had predicted she would. She had come to love him too, as she had been determined to do, though it had not proved difficult at all. She had even enjoyed their extended visit to Nuttall Grange, where she had won the affection of her bedridden grandpapa and of her two aunts who were not really aunts at all—Bessie Doyle and her mama's sister. She had even come to feel happy and settled and at peace with herself and the world. She had not once, since leaving London, dreamed the nightmare.

But Newbury Abbey, though she had not seen either the park or the house yet, felt like home.

"Oh, look!" she exclaimed in awe after the carriage had turned through the gates and was proceeding along the driveway through the forest. The trees were all glorious shades of reds and yellows and browns. A few of the leaves had fallen already and lay in a colorful carpet along the drive. "Have you ever seen anything more splendid than England in autumn, Father? Have you, Elizabeth?"

"No," her father said.

"Only England in the springtime," Elizabeth said. "And that is not more splendid, I declare, only as splendid."