from jumbled, bumpy dreams as the chaise began the descent towards the centre of Sandbay. It was dark and the lights from the Assembly Rooms made a constellation of stars on the surface of the sea.
Home. And yet it would not be for much longer. Home would be somewhere unknown, somewhere with Lucian. Lucian’s homes would be the shells around an entirely new life, the kind of life she had run from when she had married Michael.
‘Sara?’
‘Sorry... I must have been wool-gathering. Oh, the men have stopped for directions.’ She let down the window and called instructions to the postilions, then sat back in the gloom of the chaise’s interior and stared blankly out at the dark, familiar streets.
Run from... Is that what I was doing? Running away from an alien, difficult world, not running to the man I loved? But I did love him. I did. He was my friend and he was so safe and he gave me the entrée to a whole intellectual world that fascinated me.
He was my friend... She had loved Michael, she realised, but not as she loved Lucian. She had loved him as friend who was also a lover and that, she realised, was a very different thing from what she felt now for Lucian. For Lucian she was prepared to take risks, take a step into a frightening unknown. With Michael she had taken what she wanted and needed. If she had felt this for him then she would never have—No, she would not think about Francis, about that foolishness that had had such a terrible result. Foolishness on her part, on Francis’s part—and, fatally, on Michael’s.
It had not been her fault, she had told herself over and over again. But it had. Michael had loved her in a way that she had never been able to return and that was why he had challenged Francis. That was why he was dead.
‘Sara? Are you well? We have arrived at your house and you seem to be in a dream.’
Lucian, here and now. ‘Yes, I am well, just not properly awake, that is all.’
‘There is light down in the area. Wait here and I will go and knock.’
He did so and the door opened after perhaps half a minute, sending light spilling out down the steps and across the façade of the house as Walter held up a lantern. On the very edge of the light a shadow moved, a swift movement back into the darkness. A footpad waiting for an unwary passer-by or a beggar, perhaps, looking for an unlocked gate to slip inside and find warm shelter for the night. And yet there had been something familiar and unsettling about the way the figure moved.
Sara gave herself a shake. She was imagining things, seeing ghosts. It was because she was tired and had let herself dwell on the past, on Cambridge.
Lucian helped her down while Walter and one of the postilions sorted out her baggage from his. They made a very decorous goodnight, out in the open on the street. She did not ask him in, he lifted her hand and kissed her fingers lightly. The shadows stayed shadows, unmoving.
‘I will call in the morning.’
‘I must go to the shop. Could you meet me there?’
‘For Mrs Farwell’s cake? Certainly.’ A bow and he was back inside the chaise and driving off.
‘Is all well?’ she asked as she followed Walter inside. He locked and bolted the door as Maude came running down and moved the valises to the foot of the stair.
‘Yes, my lady,’ Maude said. ‘Mrs Farwell came round and left some money and I locked it away with your jewel case as the safest place. She said to tell you that everything was quite as it should be. Your post is on your desk and I opened the ones that looked like invitations and sent messages that you were away this week.’
‘No callers?’
My imagination or a footpad, that was all it was. Who would be waiting for me out there in the dark?
‘No, my lady, very quiet it has been.’
‘Excellent, although I hope you were not too bored. I think I will go up and wash and change into my nightgown and just have a cup of tea before I go to sleep. It was a long journey from near St Albans in Hertfordshire.’
* * *
She waited until Maude was brushing out her hair to tell her the news.
‘Oh, my lady! You will be a marchioness, just like your mama. Oh, how grand.’
‘And I hope you will stay on with me, Maude. It will mean moving to London for much of the time and wherever Lord Cannock’s various country houses are.’
How little I know about him. I must check the Peerage.
‘Oh, yes, please, my lady. Oh, just think—London for weeks at a time and grand balls and dinners. The gowns—’
‘You will be busy indeed, Maude. You will be my dresser and have a maid of your own and be the highest-ranking female member of staff in the household after the housekeeper.’
At least someone had stars in their eyes about the future and no worries or doubts, Sara thought as she settled down in bed with a cup of tea and the hope that sleep would come soon.
* * *
In some distant corner of her mind she knew she was dreaming, knew that she should make an effort to drag her eyes open and wake up and yet she was powerless. Michael’s voice was speaking the words that she had only ever seen written on the letter he had left that morning when he had gone out to meet Francis in the dewy early light. Michael’s face showed vague and misty as though seen through a shifting fog bank, his mouth speaking the words.
Francis said things that I could not let go unchallenged—implied that when I was at the college in the evenings, at night, he would not be keeping you company having dinner, as I believed he would, but making love to you. He would not deny it, would not confirm it.
Of course I know it is all lies, that you would not so much as flirt with my friend, but he said such things... My friend no longer.
Duels have always seemed to me to be archaic, violent. Now I see that sometimes there are slurs too great, betrayals too vile, to leave unpunished. I will defend your honour and mine and if I do not come back then remember that I love you and do not believe his lies for one moment.
Your husband
Michael
And the fog swirled around her, choking her, muddling the words in her ears as she sank, drowning into the whiteness.
It was only flirtation, she tried to say to him. I was bored. I was lonely. All those long evenings you were in college at those interminable meetings and dinners. Francis was there—he was fun, amusing, a friend. I never loved him, Michael, only you. Only you.
Then there were three voices in that fog, like some devilish part-song. Michael’s, hers, and one she had not heard for two years. Francis Walton’s.
‘Just a kiss goodnight, Sara dearest. Where’s the harm? Just a kiss for an old friend...’
Sara woke sweating and crying, the sheets tangled around her legs, her hair in her face, clinging like the tendrils of the dream fog.
‘But I can’t have loved you, Michael,’ she said out loud. ‘Not enough, not as I should, or I would never
