Some of the older girls had gone out for a walk. One of the younger ones was playing quietly and ploddingly on the spinet in the schoolroom at Lindsey Hall. Another read silently to herself, curled up on the window seat. A third was embroidering a large daisy across the corner of a cotton handkerchief. Molly was reading aloud from Robinson Crusoe, and Becky, Lady Aidan’s elder daughter, was listening with rapt attention. Claudia was teaching Lizzie to knit, having cast on twenty stitches and knitted up a few rows to get her started. The collie lay at their feet, his head on his paws, his eyes turned upward. Claudia looked up when the door opened. It was Eleanor, who had been enjoying a prolonged breakfast with the duchess. “Miss Martin,” she said, “the Duke of McLeith has ridden over from Alvesley again and wishes to see you. I will stay with the girls while you are gone. Oh, Lizzie is learning to knit, is she? Let me see if I can help. And I do apologize, Molly. I have interrupted your reading. Please continue.” Her eyes twinkled at Claudia. They had had a long talk after Charlie’s last visit. Eleanor was convinced that his interest was more than just fraternal. Claudia found him in the morning room downstairs, in conversation with the Duke of Bewcastle and Lord Aidan. Both withdrew soon after her arrival. She sat. Charlie did not. He crossed the room to the window instead and stood looking out. His clasped hands tapped against his back. “Ever since you forced me to remember,” he said, “the flood-gates of memory have opened, Claudia. Not just remembered events, which are relatively easy to forget, but remembered feelings, which never can be. They can only be suppressed. In the last week I have done nothing but remember how wretchedly unhappy I was after I left you, and how totally unable I was to come back to face you when I felt obliged to marry someone else. I really had no choice, you know. I had to marry—” “Someone from your own world,” she said, interrupting him. “Someone who would not shame or embarrass you with the inferiority of her birth and manners.” He turned his head to look at her. “That was not it,” he said. “I never thought those things about you, Claudia.” “Did you not?” she said. “Was it someone impersonating your handwriting who wrote that final letter to me, then?” “I did not write those things,” he protested. “You were sorry to be so plain with me,” she said, “but really you ought not to have been taken to live with Papa and me in the first place since there was always the possibility that you would inherit a dukedom one day. You ought to have been given a home and upbringing more suited to your station. The fact that you had lived with us all those years had put you in an awkward position with your peers. I must understand why you felt it necessary to break off all connection with me. You were a duke now. You must not be seen to associate too closely with people who were beneath your notice. You were to marry Lady Mona Chesterton, who was everything a duchess and your wife ought to be.” “Claudia!” He looked pale and aghast. “I did not write those things.” “Then I wonder who did,” she said. “Losing someone one loves is one of the worst things that can happen to anyone, Charlie. But to be rejected because one is inferior, because one is despised, because one simply is not good enough…It took me years to gain back my self-respect, my self-confidence. And to put the pieces of my heart back together. Do you wonder that I was less than delighted to see you again in London a few weeks ago?” “Claudia!” He passed a hand through his thinning hair. “My God! I must have been so upset that I was out of my mind.” She did not believe it for a moment. Becoming a duke had gone to his head. It had made him conceited and arrogant and any number of other nasty things she would never have suspected him capable of. He sat down on a chair close to the window and stared at her. “Forgive me,” he said. “Lord, Claudia, forgive me. I was even more of an ass than I remember. But you did recover. You did magnificently well, in fact.” “Did I?” she said. “You proved,” he said, “that you were the strong person I always knew you were. And I have paid my dues to whatever power decreed that I be snatched from my familiar life—twice, once when I was five and once when I was eighteen—and plunged into a completely alien one. There is no longer any reason, though, why either of us cannot return to where we were when I was eighteen and you were seventeen. Is there?” What exactly did he mean? Return to what? “I have a life,” she said, “that involves responsibility to others. I have my school. And you have duties to others that only you can perform. You have your son.” “There is no obstacle,” he said, “that cannot be overcome. We have been apart for eighteen years, Claudia—half my life. Are we going to remain apart for the rest of our lives too just because you have a school and I have a son—who, by the way, is almost grown up? Or will you marry me at last?” She very much feared afterward that her jaw had dropped. If only she had seen this coming, she thought—if only she had believed Eleanor—she might have prepared herself. Instead she stared stupidly and mutely at him. He came across the room to her and bent over her to take both her hands in his. “Remember how we were together, Claudia,” he said. “Remember how we loved each other with the sort of all-consuming passion the very young are not afraid of. Remember how we made love up on that hill—surely the only time in my life I have really made love. It has been a long, weary time, but it is not too late for us. Marry me, my love, and I will make up for that letter and for the eighteen years of emptiness in your life.” “My life has not been empty, Charlie,” she told him. Though it had been—in some ways at least. He looked into her eyes. “Tell me you did not love me,” he said. “Tell me you do not love me.” “I did,” she said, closing her eyes. “You know I did.” “And you do.” She felt dreadfully upset, remembering that long-ago love, its physical consummation, and the anguish of the yearlong separation and then its cruel, abrupt ending. It was not possible to go back, to forget that even as boy he had been capable of destroying the one person he had professed to love more than life. Besides, it was too late for him. He was the wrong man. “Charlie,” she said, “we have both changed in eighteen years. We are different people.” “Yes,” he agreed. “I have less hair and you are a woman rather than a girl. But at heart, Claudia? Are we not the same as we ever were, the same as we always will be? You have never married even though you had plenty of would-be suitors even before I left home. That tells me something. And I have admitted to you that I was never happy with Mona, though I was rarely unfaithful to her.” Rarely? Oh, Charlie! “I cannot marry you,” she said, leaning a little toward him. “If we had married then, Charlie, we would have grown together and I daresay I would have loved you all my life. But we did not marry then.” “And love dies?” he asked her. “Did you ever love me truly, then?” She felt a spurt of anger. Had he truly loved her? “Some forms of love die,” she said. “If they are not fed, they die. I have gradually been coming to like you again since we met in London—as the friend you were through our childhood.” His jaw was hard-set as she remembered its being whenever he was angry or upset. “I have spoken too soon,” he said. “I must confess that the violence of my feelings has surprised even me. I will give you time to catch up with me. Don’t say an outright no today. You already have, but let us agree to forget that you spoke the words. Give me time to woo you—and to make you forget what I once wrote to you.” He released her hands after squeezing them. “Goodness, Charlie,” she said, “look at me. I am a thirty-five-year-old spinster schoolteacher.” He smiled slowly. “You are Claudia Martin,” he said, “that bold, vital girl I loved, now masquerading as a spinster schoolteacher. What a lark, you would have said then if you could have looked ahead.” If she could have looked ahead, she would have been consumed with horror. “It is no masquerade,” she said. “I beg to disagree,” he told her. “I had better go now—I am expected back at Alvesley for luncheon. But I will come again if I may.” But after he had gone she stared at her hands in her lap. How very strange life could be. For years and years now her school had been her whole world, all thoughts of love and romance and marriage long suppressed. Yet she had made the seemingly harmless decision to accompany Flora and Edna to London so that she could talk to Mr. Hatchard in person and her whole world—her whole universe—had changed. She wondered in some trepidation how she was going to be able to recapture the relative contentment and tranquillity of her life when she returned to Bath. There was a tap on the door and it opened to reveal Eleanor. “Ah, you are still here,” she said, coming inside. “I have just seen the duke riding away. Louise is still playing the spinet, but the others have gone outside—except Molly and Lizzie. Becky has taken them to the nursery to meet her little sister, Hannah, and her new governess as well as numerous cousins, all of whom are very young. Lizzie is doing very well, Claudia, even if you did find her crying to herself in her bed this morning.” “This is all very bewildering but very exciting for her,” Claudia said. “Poor girl,” Eleanor said. “One wonders what her life has been like until now. Did Mr. Hatchard say?” “No,” Claudia said. “The Duke of McLeith did not stay long this morning,” Eleanor said. “He asked me to marry him,” Claudia told her. “No!” Eleanor looked at her, arrested. “And…?” “I said no, of course,” Claudia said. “Of course?” Eleanor sat down in the nearest chair. “Are you quite sure, Claudia? Is it because of the school? I have never mentioned this to you because it seemed inappropriate, but I have often thought how I would not mind if it were mine. And I do believe I would be able to run it in a manner worthy of you. I mentioned it to Christine at one time and she thought it a wonderful idea and even said she would sponsor me with a loan or an outright gift if I would accept one—and if the time ever came. And Wulfric, who was reading a book at the time, looked up and said it would certainly be a gift. So if your refusal had anything to do with misgivings about—” “Oh, Eleanor,” Claudia said, laughing, “it did not, though I suppose it might have if I had wanted to say yes.” “But you did not?” Eleanor asked. “He is so very amiable, and he seems inordinately fond of you. And he must have pots of money, if one wants to be mercenary about such matters. Of course he is a duke, which puts him at a horrid disadvantage, poor man.” “I loved him once,” Claudia admitted, “but no longer. And I am comfortable and really quite happy with my life as it is. The time when I might have thought of marriage is long past. I prefer to keep my independence even if my fortune is minuscule.” “As I do,” Eleanor said. “I loved once too—quite passionately. But he was killed in Spain during the wars and I have never been tempted to find someone to replace him in my affections. I would rather be alone. If you should ever change your mind, though, know that concerns for the school need not stand in your way.” She laughed, and Claudia smiled. “I will remember that,” she said, “if I should ever fall violently in love with someone else. Thank you, Eleanor.”