think I just met your mother, Miss Parker,’ Miss Layton said. She wafted her fan towards Rose’s mother, who was still chatting with Emma and Charles St George. ‘She says you live in a cottage nearby. How absolutely charming that sounds. Like Wordsworth, with roses round the door and sheep on the hills.’
Rose laughed, thinking of their smoking chimney and the vegetables she tried to grow in the kitchen garden mud, her chickens pecking around them. ‘Something of the sort, I suppose, Miss Layton.’
‘We must find something just the same when you get back from this silliness in Sicily,’ Miss Layton said, her fingers curling around his sleeve.
He only gave her a tight smile and Rose could feel her cheeks turning warm as she longed even more to flee the whole uncomfortable scene.
‘Rose! Rose!’ she suddenly heard Lily cry and Rose had never been so relieved to see her sister. Rose spun around, away from the sight of the handsome Captain St George and the lovely Miss Layton, away from the foolish feelings that had come over her only moments ago.
Lily was running towards her, her face shining with happiness, utterly unconcerned with the impropriety of calling out and running at a ball. Mr Hewlitt followed her, just as glowing. Together they hurried towards Rose’s mother, who was watching them avidly.
‘Mrs Parker,’ he said, trying so very hard to be solemn that it almost made Rose laugh. ‘May I have the privilege of speaking to you for a moment? I know such things are not usually done at a dance...’
‘Please, just follow me,’ Emma said. ‘You can use the library. It will surely be quiet there for a moment.’
As they hurried away, Lily held out her hand to Rose to display a small pearl ring. ‘Oh, Rose! Isn’t it the loveliest?’
Rose smiled, but she was afraid she might also start crying as well. The happiness of that moment, of her sister’s dreams coming true just as her own fledgling, girlish ideas were nipped in the bud, was almost overwhelming. But she did the only thing she knew how to do. She laughed and hugged her sister tight.
‘The loveliest, Lily. I know you will be so very happy.’
Over her sister’s shoulder as Lily hugged her back, Rose glimpsed Captain St George, withdrawing to a quiet corner with his brother and Miss Layton. He gave her a small smile and it was so sad, so full of commiseration and understanding, that Rose nearly burst into tears. How perfect that one dance had been! Rose liked her life, her independence, but just for that moment she seemed to glimpse, far in the distance, the glimmer of something—more. A real home.
Miss Layton whispered something in the Captain’s ear and the two of them turned away together, beautiful and perfect, leaving Rose in her ordinary world once more.
Oh, well, she thought, laughing at herself just a bit. Ordinary life was not so very bad after all.
‘You will be a lovely bride, Lily dearest,’ she said, squeezing her sister a little tighter before she let her go.
‘And then it will be your turn, Rose, I vow it,’ Lily said. ‘I will find you someone just as handsome and sweet as my own Hewlitt.’
Rose closed her eyes, and saw, in the darkness of her mind, far away from the colour and noise of the party, Captain St George’s all too brief smile. ‘Oh, Lily. I don’t think that would even be possible.’
* * *
The carriage was blessedly shadowed and silent as it jolted away from the lights of Barton Park and slid into the night. Harry leaned his head back against the leather cushions and closed his eyes, letting all the wondrous quiet wash over him.
Silence had become a precious commodity to him in the last few years. In Spain, and then at Waterloo, noise had been ever-present. The cacophony of military camps, drumbeats and shouted orders, and drunken laughter at night as men tried to forget their fears and loneliness around campfires. The explosion of shot and shell, the screams of people and horses as they fell, the sobbing afterward. No—quiet had no place in war.
Nor, it seemed, in a world after the war. Harry had returned to England thinking he was coming home to a world of green and rain and peace, the world he dreamed of in canvas tents at night. It had taken him years to return, but he had always been determined he would.
But it was not like that at all once he returned to London. There were parties all the time, dinners and teas and dances, with everyone clamouring for tales of the glorious heroics of war. He could hardly tell them the truth of it all, of the mud and blood and dying, so he said little at all. Charming social conversation had always been Charles’s forte, not his.
Yet his silence only seemed to make him more sought out. Made more invitations arrive at his lodgings, more ladies want to sit beside him in drawing rooms or ride in the park. ‘Like a corsair warrior in a poem,’ he had once heard a lady whisper to her friend as they watched him at a musicale.
The memory made him laugh all over again. Him—a poetic corsair. If only they knew. He was just a rough army man, riding behind the drum, ever since he was a lad with his first commission. An army man with dreams of being a country farmer one day, of sitting by his own hearth after a day of watching his fields ripen and his sheep grow fat. A house where there was quiet all the time, except perhaps for a toddler’s giggle or the sound of a lady playing at her pianoforte.
It was a dream that would have to be postponed again, at least for a time. His regiment had called on him once more, to go to sun-baked Sicily this time to put down a rebellion. There was only time for this one visit home, to his father’s house at Hilltop Grange near Barton Park.
He hadn’t wanted to go to the party at Barton. Yet more noise, more clamour, more stares. But Jane and Emma Bancroft were old neighbours, kind people, and he let Charles persuade him to attend. Now he was rather glad he had.
He closed his eyes and there he saw something most unexpected—the face of Miss Rose Parker. She had the sweetest smile he could remember ever seeing and even dancing, which he normally loathed, was a pleasure when he talked to her. She seemed almost like no lady, no person, he had ever met before. So calm, so serene—she made the very air seem to sigh with relief around her.
After so long in the rough world of war, he had almost given up ever glimpsing pure sweetness in anything again. Yet there it was, in Rose Parker’s smile.
Until Helen appeared. Helen—one of his oldest friends, the daughter of his late mother’s best friend, a lady of such beauty she was called in London The Incomparable. The lady everyone had always expected he would marry.
‘How changeable you are tonight, Harry,’ Charles said. ‘Laughing, then scowling—one hardly knows what to expect next.’
Harry opened his eyes to study his brother, who lolled on the opposite seat. His golden hair gleamed in the moonlight from the open window, the perfect aquiline features that had always made him their late mother’s copy, her darling, were outlined like a classical cameo. Charles was the perfect Apollo wherever he went to Harry’s Hephaestus, always laughing and easy-tempered, making everyone around him feel easy as well. But now that the party was behind him, even Charles looked almost—sad, as he had rather often since Harry returned to England. Harry couldn’t help but wonder what was plaguing his brother.
Perhaps it was because Charles had been left all those years to deal with Hilltop and their father while Harry was at war. And their father was not a kind man at the best of times. The house that had been their mother’s pride, the glowing name she had loved, had been tarnished by him.
‘I laugh because the party went better than I could have expected,’ he said.
‘Ha!’ Charles answered. ‘So you see I was right to make you attend. The Bancroft girls are always kindness itself.’
‘They are hardly girls now, are they? Jane a countess, Emma a widow.’
‘Poor Emma. Remember when Mother made us go to the children’s tea parties at Barton and we all ended up climbing trees instead?’ Charles