No, they had not done that to her. She had still been free. The next morning she had been out at the falls, painting, looking like his little fawn. She had painted the life force, bursting passionately through every living thing and out into the universe itself. It was he who had now done it to her. He had tamed her spirit and caged it.

There was an ache in his chest and his throat. He felt like crying.

Viscount Burdett rose and bowed over her hand and took her walking along one of the lamp-lit paths after the ballet was over. Lady Sterne looked at Doris and raised her eyebrows, and she and Weims followed them to offer chaperonage. Ashley stayed where he was.

Soon, he saw, there were other gentlemen walking with Burdett and Emmy.

"Lud," Lady Sterne said, "but 'twas the best thing I ever did to bring Emily to town, Theo. She is enjoying herself immensely and has almost the largest court of any lady here this Season. I am in daily expectation of offers for her hand."

""Twould not surprise me, Marj," Lord Quinn said.

"She is the loveliest gel here, and she has those speaking eyes. Burdett has been marked in his attentions. A viscount too, egad. She could do worse."

Ashley clamped his teeth together and said nothing, though the conversation continued on the same subject for a while longer-- almost as if the newly betrothed couple had forgotten both his presence and the fact that if Emmy was ever to marry, he was the only possible candidate for her hand.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN.

She had been shopping all morning on Oxford Street and Bond Street with Lady Sterne. She had spent money quite unnecessarily on a cornflower-trimmed straw hat. She had enough hats already to wear for a month without wearing the same one twice, she was sure. She also had scarcely slept the night before-for the first time since she came to London. And there was a connection between the purchase of the hat and the sleepless night. Ashley was going to take her walking during the afternoon in the Mall.

He had not spoken a word to her at Vauxhall after his initial greeting, not until he took his leave, early, before the rest of them.

She had just returned from her stroll with Viscount Burdett, Doris, and Andrew. He had bowed over her hand after standing and speaking with the others first. She had thought he was going to leave without speaking to her at all. But he had.

"I have asked Lady Sterne if she will be at home tomorrow afternoon, Emmy," he had said. "I will call and take you walking in St. James's Park, if I may?"

She had smiled and nodded. In that moment there had been only Ashley and no consideration at all of the wisdom of being close to him. He had left before she saw the annoyance on Viscount Burdett's face. But he had no reason to be annoyed. She did not belong to him and did not intend to. Besides, she walked and drove with other gentlemen. She liked it that way.

"Lord Ashley Kendrick is a member of your family, Lady Emily?" he had asked her, leaning toward her so that, she guessed, no one else in the box would hear what he was saying. "A type of brother?"

She had smiled, opening her fan and cooling her face with it.

"Then I take it unkindly in a mere brother to monopolize your time for a whole afternoon, madam," he had said. "How will I live with the disappointment?"

She had laughed at his foolish gallantry and stretched out her arm to fan his face for a few moments.

But she had slept very little all night. Less than a month ago she had expected never to see him again. And then Aunt Marjorie and Lord Quinn had decided to marry, and she had known that Ashley would come for the wedding. She had been dismayed. She had not wanted him to come to London, just as a little more than a month ago she had not wanted him to come home to Bowden. Her life had to be lived without Ashley, and it was just too painful to see him.

Especially now. All last evening, after he had joined Viscount Burdett's party, although she had not once looked at him until he took his leave of her, she had felt him with every part of herself. Not just with her heart. Not even just with aching arms and yearning lips.

She had felt him with a throbbing in her womb and lower, where his body had known hers. It had been not so much desire she had felt as-knowledge.

He should not have asked her to walk with him. It was unfair. He wanted to resume the relationship with her that had always been comfortable for him. He wanted to be her brother, her friend. Did he not know now, as she had always known, that such a relationship was impossible? Would he be a friend and a brother during their walk? Or would he try again to persuade her to marry him? But surely not that.

He must have seen at Vauxhall how happy she was, how much she was enjoying the Season and the company of other gentlemen. He should not have asked her. And so she tossed and turned more than she slept during the night. And so too she went shopping during the morning and bought a new straw hat.

Before going to Lady Sterne's, Ashley had a call to make on South Audley Street. It was one he had told himself all the way to London and again all morning that he need not make and should not make.

Even though Lady Verney had given him her son's address when she knew he was going to London and had urged him to leave his card there- Henry and Barbara would be honored by such a marked courtesy, she had told him-there was really no compulsion on him to call on complete strangers.

But curiosity got the better of him. He wanted-no, it was almost as if he neededto see the man Alice had loved and lain with before she went to India. Perhaps if he could understand that relationship, he thought foolishly, he would somehow be able to put to rest the terrible memories.

He would see if Sir Henry and Miss Verney were at home, the butler told him after he knocked on the door at South Audley Street and deposited his card on a silver tray. Ashley almost hoped that they were not, or that they would choose not to be. Verney might well wish to avoid him, after all. But the butler returned within a couple of minutes, bowed, and asked if his lordship would follow him up to the drawing room.

A man and a woman were rising to their feet as Ashley followed the butler's announcement into the room. The man came striding toward him, right hand extended. He was a powerful-looking man of about his own age, Ashley guessed. He was not as tall as Ashley, but he was broad-shouldered and wide-chested and gave the impression of size though he was not in any way portly. He was fashionably, though not foppishly, dressed. He wore his own fair hair, tied neatly at the neck.

His face was good-humored and smiling.

"Lord Ashley Kendrick,'' he said. "What an honor this is. I had heard from my mother that you had returned from India and taken up residence at Penshurst. I was sorry to be from home and unable to call on you to pay my respects. And so you have called upon me instead. May I present my sister, Barbara?"

Ashley shook the offered hand and bowed to the lady, who curtsied and smiled at him. She was somewhat darker than her brother in coloring, but she shared his quiet elegance and air of good humor.

She was not pretty, but then she was not quite plain either.

"Madam," he said. "Verney. You will be pleased to hear that I left Lady Verney in good health. She sends her affectionate regards."

"How kind of you to bring them. Do have a seat, my lord," Barbara Verney said. "I have given directions for the tea tray to be sent up."

Ashley sat. The suffocating hatred he had begun to feel had taken him completely by surprise. He had expected a dark, brooding, morose-looking man, the sort of man one could easily imagine to have seduced and abandoned a woman who was besotted with him.

He had not expected this smiling, genial man, who would perhaps be attractive to women more for his personality than for his looks. He could almost have forgiven wariness and surliness. He could only hate the warm hospitality.

"It must be admitted," Sir Henry said, seating himself after his sister had settled into a chair across from Ashley's, "that we have been curious to meet the man Alice married. Have we not, Barbara? We were devastated, by the way, when news reached us a few months ago of the tragedy that befell her and your son. We wrote to you immediately, not realizing that you were on your way to England.

May we express our heartfelt condolences now?"

"Yes, indeed," Miss Verney said.

If he could have throttled the man and remained civilized, Ashley thought, he would have done so. There was not a flicker of shame or guilt on his face. "Thank you," he said. But he was curious. He addressed himself to the sister. "You knew my wife well?"

"We grew up together," she said, "Alice, Gregory-her brother, you know-Henry, and I."

"And Katherine Binchley," Sir Henry added. "Daughter of Kersey's steward. You may have met her, though she is Katherine Smith now."

"Yes, and Katherine too," Miss Verney said. "We were all close as children. But we grew up and grew apart. 'Twas inevitable, I suppose.

Though Henry and Gregory remained close friends. But Gregory died and Alice went to India and Katherine went away to marry Mr.

Smith-all within a few months. Everything was changed."

"But you wanted to hear about your wife as she was before you met her," Sir Henry said. "She was always beautiful, was she not, Barbara, even as a child? Small and dainty and exquisite. By the time she was sixteen she had the whole of the county on its knees to her. The fact never went to her head. She favored no man. She was very discriminating." He smiled.

Very discriminating. Because she had ignored the attentions of all the young men in the county except those of Verney himself?

Barbara Verney was pouring the tea. She smiled as she handed Ashley a cup. "I do believe Mama had hopes at one time that Alice and Henry would make a match of it," she said. "Happily for you, it did not happen."

"But then," Sir Henry said with a laugh, "neither did you make a match with Gregory, Barbara. Sometimes, Kendrick, as you may know from personal experience, mothers have tidy visions of their children's lives that in no way match what their children want for themselves. I was pleased when I heard that Alice had married you, a man with impressive connections and a respected colleague of her father's. She was a very unhappy young lady when she left Penshurst."

He had no feelings of regret or guilt at all, Ashley decided. He had been gladto hear of her marriage to someone else. Would hefeel glad to hear of Emmy's marriage to another man? Would he be able to look the other man in the eye some years in the future and tell him he had been pleased to hear of her marriage? When he himself had had carnal knowledge of her? And did Verney wonder if he knew? Did his smile hide a certain contempt for the man who had taken his leavings? But he did not wish to think of Alice like that. He had not loved her; indeed, he had in many ways hated her. But she had been a person, and a desperately unhappy person.

"Yes," Ashley said. "She had recently lost her only brother. I gather they were close, though she rarely talked about him. I understood it was too painful for her to do so."

Brother and sister exchanged glances. "Yes," Sir Henry said. "They were close. His death was a dreadful shock to her, as it was to all of us."

Gregory Kersey had been shot in a hunting accident. That much Ashley had learned from Sir Alexander Kersey, long before he met Alice. She herself had almost never mentioned her brother.

"How did it happen?" Ashley asked.

For the first time Verney looked uncomfortable. He scratched his head and looked at his sister.

" 'Twas early in the morning," she said. "He was out shooting with several other gentlemen from the neighborhood."

"Myself among them," Sir Henry added.

"Yes," she said. "They had decided to finish for the day, and were all beginning to make their separate ways home when there was a shot."

"None of us paid it any heed," Sir Henry offered. "Someone had seen a bird and had been unable to resist one more shot, we all thought. 'Twould not have been unusual. Binchley found the body at noon. Alice had sent him to discover why Gregory had not come home from hunting."

"No one remembered having fired that late shot," Barbara Verney said.

"Or no one would admit it," her brother added. "Doubtless it was an accidental shooting. Greg had no enemies. But 'twould be difficult to face the fact-and to admit publiclyto it-that one had shot and killed a fellow human."

"Where?" Ashley asked. "Where was he shot?"

"In the hills north of Penshurst," Sir Henry said. "Inside the park."

"Through the head," Miss Verney added quietly. " 'Twas what his lordship meant, Henry. 'Twas dreadful. Suspicion attached to almost every man in the neighborhood. Henry included. Henry was his closest friend."

Had Gregory Kersey found out about his closest friend and his sister?

Ashley wondered unwillingly. He pushed the thought aside. He had not intended to wade into waters as deep as this.

"Hearing about Alice and her son-your son-was like a nightmare," Sir Henry said. "It seemed almost as if that family had been doomed. But we become morbid. I am sure you have done enough grieving in the past year and more to last you a lifetime. You have come to town to take in part of the Season?" He smiled.

"For that reason," Ashley said, "and to attend the marriage of my uncle."

The conversation proceeded into comfortable, impersonal topics.

They talked about weddings and fashions and entertainments and even the weather.

Sir Henry Verney was a man who had taken pleasure but felt no guilt, Ashley thought as he left South Audley Street a half hour after arriving there. An essentially shallow man. It was difficult to understand why Alice had been so fanatically attached to him. But then love was difficult to understand. It was not always a rational thing.

It seemed almost as if that family had been doomed.

The remembered words were chilling. And yet, Ashley thought, there could not possibly have been any connection between the tragic accident that had taken Gregory Kersey's life and the one that had taken Alice's four years later. It was merely a disturbing coincidence.

But he could not shake those words from his mind.

It seemed almost as if that family had been doomed.

She was wearing her new blue and white striped silk open gown.

Beneath it, in the newest fashion, she wore not hoops but a white silk quilted petticoat. Her hair was braided and coiled at the back of her head. The coils were covered with a lace cap. Over all she wore her new straw hat, tipped forward to shade her eyes, secured with a ribbon bow at the back of her neck.

She wondered if he would like her appearance. It did not matter except that she wanted him to see how she had changed, how very happy she was. If he had come with any sense of guilt still remaining, with any lingering conviction that he owed her marriage, she wished to reassure him. He had done her a favor, she thought. If he had not come home, she would have married Lord Powell and spent the rest of her life in the country fighting to assert herself over his mother- probably an impossibility. She would not have discovered, at the very elderly age of two-and-twenty, how much life had to offer even a deaf woman.

Emily leaned forward and looked closely at herself in the glass of her dressing room. She would smile at him and he would know that she did not need him at all. Yet when she caught her eye in the glass, she looked away quickly, concentrating on every part of her appearance except her eyes.

He was waiting in the hallway with Aunt Marjorie when she went downstairs. He was early. He wore a dark green skirted coat, fashionably pleated at the back with a matching waistcoat beneath, and buff breeches. His hair, as usual, was unpowdered. He held his three-cornered hat beneath one arm. His blue eyes smiled at her. She was becoming accustomed to his thin face. It made him look quite impossibly handsome.

"Emmy." He made her a formal bow. "You look quite lovely."

She gave him the full force of her dazzling smile.

"Lud," Aunt Marjorie said, "you will quite turn her head, Lord Ashley. I have heard nothing but compliments for Emily since I brought her to town. You will be fortunate indeed if you find time for any private conversation in the park with her."

He smiled at Emily while Aunt Marjorie spoke, but she had looked to see what was being said about her. She blushed. Not that her head had been turned, she thought. All those silly compliments-those that she bothered to watch being spoken-meant nothing to her.

Except that they amused her and kept her mind firmly off-no, on.

They kept her mind on her newfound happiness.

She looked about her during the drive to the park, watching the people they passed, the elegant pedestrians, the hawkers, who were clearly yelling out news of their wares, the darting children, two dogs on leashes. It struck her suddenly that it could be very frightening indeed to be alone in such a setting-very different from the countryside, where she was rarely if ever afraid. But she had never been alone here. She was not alone now. She smiled and felt Ashley's eyes on her. She would not look to see if he had anything to say.

Ashley. There was a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach, but she fought it with every ounce of her being.

He offered his arm when they had descended from the open carriage and begun to walk. She loved the straight, tree-lined Mall, with its crowds of strollers and groups of people in conversation together.

Sometimes she liked to look up to see the branches and the leaves against the sky. But more often she preferred to watch the people and to feel at one with them. Today she could seem to feel only the muscles in Ashley's arm and the warmth of him. Finally she looked up at him from beneath the brim of her hat. He was looking at her, that smile in his eyes. A smile that did not touch his lips.

"You are happy, Emmy?" he asked her.

She told him with sparkling eyes how happy she was. She gestured about her. How could she not be happy?

"Penshurst is rather lovely," he told her. " 'Tis in a valley with a broad park stretching from the house to the road. Between the house and the village to one side of it there is a broad river with a river walk inside the park, which was constructed for maximum beauty and seclusion. And behind the house are wooded hills, mostly quiet and shady but with the occasional and unexpected prospect over miles of quiet countryside. There is a summer house up there. 'Tis even furnished, though it has not been touched in years, I believe."

Penshurst. It was where he lived. Where he belonged. Where Alice had lived. Where he would have lived with her and their son if they had not died.

"You would like it, Emmy." He had bent his head closer to her and touched his hand to hers. "I wish you could see it."

For a moment she felt dizzy with yearning. But for only a moment.