“You know of Philip?” For a moment the two worlds collided; with an effort of will he pushed the other one away.
She laughed, gaily. “Of course I know of him—from the letters you’ve sent Grace, silly. We all know Philip or, rather, Lieutenant Drummond now, isn’t it?”
He managed only half a smile this time and tipped up the glass of champagne. “Drummond is a capital fellow. A great friend.”
“Where is he now?”
The champagne rushed down Colin’s throat in an angry rush of bubbles. “With his family in Devon.”
“Oh, of course!” Lily put a hand on his sleeve. “Colin, it’s time to go home.”
He frowned down at her.
Her eyes were sympathetic. Everything you’d want a wife’s eyes to be. “You’ve had too much champagne,” she told him. And then she came up on her toes and, to his utter horror, wiped a tear from his cheek. “Come on, old thing,” she said, tucking her arm under his and towing him off toward the door. “I expect the navy doesn’t give you much champagne, do they? We must have Father send you a case in the diplomatic bag…”
He stumbled along with her, letting a stream of words carry him to the door, whereupon his father appeared from somewhere, and then he fell into the darkness of the carriage.
“I don’t sleep much,” he told his father, blinking because Sir Griffin was a little hazy in the dark carriage. “But I think it will be all right tonight.”
“I’m so glad,” his father said, but he sounded sad.
So Colin added, “Because of the dancing. Because of Lily.”
“Lily?”
His father sounded a little dubious, so Colin made the statement even more positive. “When she’s there, and I’m dancing with her, and she’s smelling of roses in late summer, I don’t think so much. She’s my tonic.” He swept his hand in the air and accidentally hit the wall of the carriage.
His father’s hand landed on his knee, warm and steady. “I love you, Colin. We all love you.”
What was the point of saying that? He would have asked, but all the champagne swept up into his head and he collapsed into the corner of the carriage.
In the end, the memories invaded his sleep, anyway.
But when he woke up, he remembered that it was Lily who had chased them away.
The next morning, her eyes shining, Lily told Grace that Colin had come to the ball. Apparently he had asked for Grace, but no one could find her, and finally their mother had told him that she had a headache, and he had said he was sorry to hear that.
And to tell her how much he appreciated her letters.
Grace decided at that moment that there would be no more letters.
Colin paid a call that morning, but Grace refused to leave her chamber. Lily popped her head in, and said that Colin was taking her for a drive in the park, and did Grace wish to come?
Grace was so consumed with love and anger and anguish that she shook her head. “I’m painting,” she said. “You know I paint every morning.”
“After all those letters, don’t you wish to see Colin?” Lily asked, looking surprised. “I’d think you’d be dying to say hello to him. He’s even more handsome now, Grace, I promise you that. And it was so sweet when he became a little tipsy on champagne last night. I shall tease him about it.”
Much later that evening, after supper had come and gone (Grace ate in her room), her mother looked in, gave her a hug, and said, “Darling, are you certain that you don’t wish to say hello to Colin? I expect he finds it confusing, given that you have written all those letters. He’s coming tomorrow morning as well.”
She swallowed and said, “He’s fallen for Lily, hasn’t he?”
The duchess opened her mouth… and shut it again.
“Hasn’t he?” Grace asked in a hard little voice. She had seen it happen. She knew.
“I believe Colin has discovered Lily’s charm,” her mother said, finally. “But that doesn’t mean that he won’t discover yours as well.”
Grace rolled her eyes. “I might as well be invisible when Lily is near, Mother. You know that.”
“I disagree.” But mothers are mothers, and Grace knew better than to trust her mother’s opinion.
The duchess caught her up in another hug. “You are my dear, darling Grace, and any man who doesn’t see what a wonderful woman you are doesn’t deserve to kiss the hem of your gown.”
Mothers say things like that.
Grace managed to avoid Colin for the three short days of his leave, and when the following Wednesday came, and her father bellowed for her letter so that he could forward it to the Admiralty, she said, very simply, that she would write no more letters.
Her father always maintained that he was nothing more than a battered old pirate, with a great scar across his throat and a tattoo under his eye. But Grace never saw him that way, and when he opened his arms, she flew into them and nestled against his heart.
“Perhaps that’s best, sweet pea,” he said, encircling her in a hug so tight that she could hardly breathe. “You can’t write to the man forever, after all.”
She shook her head, feeling her hair rumple against his chest. “It’s getting embarrassing.”
“Someone else should take up the torch,” he said.
Tears prickled Grace’s eyes. “Lily hates writing. She’ll never do it.”
“He’s an old man of twenty-five. We should have stopped it when you became a young lady.”
“He’s not old,” Grace said, sniffing a little.
“But he’s not a lonely boy any longer. No more letters, Lady Grace, and that’s an order from your father.”
She nodded and let a tear or two darken his silk neck cloth before she pulled away and stood up straight.
“I saw you talking to McIngle a few nights ago.” Her father very kindly ignored her tears as Grace dug a handkerchief from her pocket.
“I like him,” she said, managing a wobbly smile. “He has such an interesting face.”
“It’s not all about faces. He’s a good one. I would have taken him on my crew in a moment.” That was her father’s highest praise.
“But Colin… I…”
Her father drew her back into his arms. “He asked for her hand before he left, dearest.”
For a moment Grace didn’t even hear what he said over the ringing in her ears. Then her heart started beating again, a sort of death march. She’d known it. She’d known it the moment she saw Colin’s eyes meet Lily’s. She saw the joy in his face.
“What did you say to him?”
“The same thing I say to anyone who asks. No daughter of mine will marry before she is twenty, no matter how dear a family friend her suitor may be. And frankly, that goes double for Lily. I want her to be a bit steadier before she contemplates a match. Your mother and I are firmly against youthful marriages; you know that.”
“It worked for the two of you,” Grace managed. But her voice wobbled.
“Not at first,” her father said. “Not at first.”
At that moment, Lily herself drifted into the room, looking as fresh as if she hadn’t danced away the night. “The world seems so dark,” she said, pausing. “Colin has left to rejoin his ship.”
Grace took a deep breath. “You’ll see him on his next leave.”
“But it won’t be the same, will it?” Lily said. “Colin dances so beautifully. I feel as if I’m flying when we waltz.”
“I thought the two of you looked lovely together.”
Lily narrowed her eyes. “I thought you left the ball before he arrived. He should have asked you to dance before me!”
“I didn’t give him the chance,” Grace said hastily. Hell had no fury like Lily if she thought her older sister had been spurned.
“He should have found you,” Lily said indignantly. “You’ve been writing him for half your life. That was remarkably impolite of him. Perhaps I’ll write him and say so!”
The duke wrapped an arm around each of them. “I’ll write t
he lad and let him know that you won’t be writing any longer, Grace.”
She nodded.
“I shall write him instead,” Lily said. “I promised. And he is a family friend, Papa.”
Grace’s heart warped at the idea of not taking up her pen to write Colin. What would she do with her life? Sometimes she felt as if she lived merely to find the funniest moments and put them onto paper, to capture a face so amusing that it would make Colin laugh in the midst of battle.
But she didn’t touch her pen. She cried a great deal that week, but she didn’t write a word. By Sunday, she had pulled herself together. She couldn’t live merely to write letters to a person who rarely bothered to answer her.
She had obviously created a romance in her head and heart that didn’t exist. She was always imagining what he was thinking in response to her letters, but she must have been wrong. Perhaps he didn’t even keep her letters.
That saddened her, but it also made her angry. If someone had written her, written her every month for years, she would have searched him out immediately on her return to England. She would have danced with him all night, if she could. She would have thanked him herself, not just sent a message through her sister.
She wouldn’t have proposed to someone else. Not ever.
The crate came the next morning. Inside was a simple wooden box, marked with her name. She opened it cautiously, finding rumpled pink silk with a slip of paper on top. Her name was written on the paper, with a simple Thank You.
For a moment she felt sick, physically ill, as if the ground was pitching under her feet.
“Oh, look!” Lily crowed, looking over her shoulder. “I knew Colin couldn’t be so impolite as to not thank you for all those letters. He should have asked you to dance, but this is even better.” She plucked up the silk cloth that lay on top before Grace could stop her. Below was a neat line of small round bladders. “What on earth are those?”
“Please let me do that,” Grace said. But she was too late; Lily had already grabbed one of the bottles. “It’s a pig’s bladder filled with paint.”
“A bladder? Ugh!” Lily cried, dropping it. “It’s all wired shut, Grace. How on earth will you get the paint out?’
Grace took it back. “You pierce the bladder with a tack and then replace the tack to keep the paint from drying out.”
In all, there were eleven different colors. One was cadmium red, but there were others that she hadn’t seen before: a beautiful deep green, the color of a cedar tree. A blue that was so clear that it looked like a summer sky. Another blue that shaded into violet, the color of twilight over the sea.
She scooped up the box and trotted up the stairs, heading for her bedchamber.
The duke stepped out of the library, and she heard Lily explaining the gift. She froze at the top of the stairs when her father called her name, looked down, and saw him standing with his arm around Lily. They looked uncannily similar.
“No letters,” he stated.
“I do have to thank him.”
“A brief note that will advise Colin it is your last letter.”
She nodded.
“I’ll write him for you,” Lily said cheerfully. “But only once, unless he replies. I would never write the way you did, Grace, without getting responses. You were far too kind to him.”
Grace made it into her bedchamber and closed the door before she started crying, which was quite an achievement.
In all her years of correspondence, she had received at most one letter every few months. Of course, some of Colin’s letters might have gone astray. But she had stopped pretending that he was writing her as often as she would wish.
Yet, if he was in love with her sister, he might well write Lily. The pain hit her so hard that she actually sank to her knees on the carpet, clutching the wooden box, wondering how one lived with a broken heart, especially when one’s beloved is married to a sister.
It was humiliating to think about how she wrote him long, boring letters, as if she were his maiden aunt. Worse, each one had been a love letter, though he hadn’t known that.
At last she got to her feet, walked over to her writing desk, and wrote a short note, thanking Colin for the paintbox and explaining that her father felt it was no longer appropriate for them to correspond. Then she sat down and made the best painting of her life.
It was a miniature, no bigger than her palm. But she painted it on a small square of canvas, so that, if wrapped in silk and carried in his breast pocket, it wouldn’t fade or chip, like the watercolors she’d sent him before.
It was a portrait of Lily, laughing.
Grace worked all night, surrounded by candles that kept burning out, so she had to replace them, rubbing her eyes. She had to finish. She had to put Colin out of her mind, give him this last gift.
Then it was finished. Lily gazed out of the picture, with all her laughing exuberance, her innocent seductiveness, the sweetness that stopped her from becoming vain.
It was very tiresome to love one’s rival, she thought before falling, exhausted, in bed.
When she woke up, late in the afternoon, the painting was dry enough to be sent off. She wrapped it in silk and then a soft piece of vellum, and went downstairs to give the packet to her father to be dispatched to the Admiralty.
When she unwrapped the vellum to show him, he held the miniature very delicately in his huge hand and stared at it in silence for a moment.
“You have a great talent, Grace.”
She knew he was right. She had captured Lily. It was the only thing she had to give Colin, since he didn’t want her.
The duke reached out with his other hand and caught her against his side. “All this love you have inside you, sweet pea… it will make some fellow very happy.”
She nodded. She was exhausted, but she also felt clean and emptied out. Her love wasn’t gone, but she was ready to let it go.
She had built an imaginary thing between herself and her childhood friend. But adult relationships didn’t spring from letters. They came from the sort of happiness that Colin had felt when he saw Lily across the ballroom, and when he kissed Lily’s hand.
That was an adult relationship. Someday, someone would feel that for her. But it wouldn’t be Colin.
“Thank you, Papa,” she said, resting her head against his shoulder.
“I won’t allow him to marry Lily,” he said, touching the painting with a finger. “He couldn’t see what lay before him. I won’t give him another of my girls to overlook.”
Grace shrugged. “It’s all right, Papa. I’ve put him behind me.”
The duke wrapped up the painting again. “Colin has to be the stupidest man I know.” He paused. “Actually, I have a lot in common with him.”
Grace sat down on the sofa and drew up her feet under her. “Do you mean because you went away to sea and left Mama behind?”
“Exactly,” her father said, going back to making a neat package of the painting. “I was worse than Colin, actually, because I was already married to your mother, and I knew I loved her.”
“But she told you to leave,” Grace said, repeating the story that they all loved. “She told you to leave and never come back, and you didn’t return for seven years.”
“That’s right,” the duke said. “Given my profound stupidity in obeying her, I can hardly say anything about Captain Barry’s idiocy.” He looked up, and suddenly he looked like a pirate again. “Of course, if he comes around here and tries to woo either of my daughters, I’ll disembowel him.”
Grace laughed. “Sir Griffin wouldn’t like that.”
“He wouldn’t, would he?” The duke’s laugh welcomed a fight with his closest friend.
“I think I’ll go take a bath,” she said, tired to the bone.
“I’ll send this out,” he said. “And I’ll put in a note from myself as well.”
Grace continued up the stairs. She didn’t really care what her father wrote in that note.
Eight
Lily’
s letter arrived six weeks after Colin left London. At first he thought, happily, that it was a letter from Grace, and then felt ashamed on opening it. He had fallen in love with Lily; of course, he should welcome her letter above anyone else’s.
Even now the memory of that ball—the pretty girls, the delicious food, the intoxicating champagne—made him grin. That was the England he longed for, and by marrying Lily he would be a part of it. She had always been such a sweet, laughing presence, even as a child.
Lily’s letter was written in round, rather childlike script.
Dear Captain Barry,
I went to three balls last week and danced until well past midnight at each of them, but they weren’t as much fun without a bosky captain at my side. Papa says that it is improper for me to write you, but I thought I would anyway. I like breaking his rules. I tell him that it keeps him young. This week we are looking forward to two balls, a masquerade, and a musical breakfast. London is quite a whirl of gaiety. When I think how tedious you must find your life, it quite breaks my heart. If you found your way to Paris, I’m sure you would be happy. I think that the French court must be like heaven on earth. How I wish Papa would take us there! I do hope this letter finds you well. I’ll probably stop here, as I’m not much of a writer—I prefer dancing.
Colin read the letter four times. It was manifestly the letter of a charming young lady. Of course her life was a whirl of gaiety. Of course it was.
That night he lay in his berth staring up at the wood planks above his head. A small spider had found its way on board, and it was building a web, hoping to catch flies. There were no flies on board ship that Colin had seen.
He watched as the spider carefully, carefully dropped a slender, elegant line of silk from the ceiling to the wooden wall against which his berth was fixed. It was very busy, quickly running back to its origin point, adding more radial lines, then, beginning at the center, a spiral of connecting threads.
After a while, he read the letter once again, squinting in the candlelight. Lily’s gaiety shone from every word. She would make some man, a man with dancing feet and a dancing soul to match, a beautiful wife.