Regardless of Lady Birks’s uncomfortable tendency to effusive emotion, Edmund respected the dedication and support that she was giving to her cousins in the Arnold family. She was evidently a strong woman. Having been through grief and widowhood herself, it was good that Esther had a friend like her to lean on.
They ate in silence for some minutes, and then, Lady Birks put down her cutlery and sighed herself into a smile of sorts.
“But life goes on, children, however hard we may find it. I do have one piece of good news for all of you to look forward to, though. I received a letter from Andrew, who has already arrived back in London. He’ll be traveling up to Hayward House tomorrow, and I’d like to invite all of you for dinner with us on Thursday.”
The glow that had been on Diana’s face since her encounter with Edmund in the woods—and had somehow survived the anxiety of the latest doctor’s visit—abruptly vanished at her aunt’s announcement. Edmund looked at her with both compassion and tenderness, wishing that there were something more he could do to help but was stymied by her apparent cooperation with this unwelcome marriage arrangement.
“Yes, Aunt Henrietta,” Diana said blankly.
“Your mother will naturally remain here with your father. Your Grace, Lord Wycliff, you are also invited. I’m sure Andrew would be very pleased to meet the friends who have been so good to his cousins and his future wife.”
Edmund took a long sip of red wine from his glass.
“You are too kind, Lady Birks,” he said, not really wishing to meet this man and considering how best to politely decline her invitation. He couldn’t imagine that it would be much fun for Jacob either.
But then, he looked again at Diana, who was visibly miserable despite the forced smile she had given her aunt and thought of her facing her unwanted fiancé alone.
“Of course, we would be pleased to join you for dinner on Thursday,” he added, ignoring Jacob’s raised eyebrow across the table, and noticing the way Diana’s face had relaxed at his acceptance.
Perhaps his presence at this dinner would be the last service he could offer Diana. It was clear that she would soon be another man’s wife and there was no way for their flirtation, or whatever this was between them, to continue under those circumstances.
He would find it humiliating and dishonourable to be entangled with a married woman, and he suspected that Diana would feel the same once she had taken her wedding vows.
With Viscount Birks back in the country, at last, it became clear to Edmund that he and Diana must start keeping some distance from one another. However hard this might prove.
ChapterEight
Diana felt guilty again as she looked down at the drying daisy crown inside one of the drawers of her dressing table.
Her father was probably dying, her mother was distraught, and she herself was soon to be married to Andrew and become Viscountess Birks. Despite such life-altering developments, she had spent much of the past few weeks having fun with her brother and his friends. And kissing Edmund, the Duke of Colborne.
Kissing him was scandalous enough if anyone had known. But it had been something more than kissing, hadn’t it?
Do you want me to show you how it begins?
Diana shivered deliciously as she remembered Edmund saying those words to her in the library before he kissed her for the first time. The kisses, the strokes, his hands caressing her breasts in the woods… they were all the start of something wonderful. Where would it end?
It was like a trail she desperately wanted to follow to the end while knowing that it was utterly forbidden and might lead to ruin.
Closing the drawer, she tried to concentrate on brushing her long, blonde curls and pinning them back into a neat twist, finishing with an emerald studded golden hair comb and pins. She had never liked anyone else dressing her hair. Even as a child, the thickness and curls required patience and a gentleness of touch that she doubted most maids would possess.
After fastening her grandmother’s pearls around her neck, she stood and pulled on the long satin gloves that Elsie, the chambermaid, had left hanging over the mirror after she had helped Diana into her high-waisted dress of shimmering cream muslin embroidered with tiny golden flowers.
The flowers made her smile. They were an echo of the daisies in her drawer.
“I don’t regret any of it!” she said fiercely to her reflection in the mirror. For a moment, she felt brave again, but it faded with the knowledge that she must now go downstairs to the coach and travel to finally meet Andrew again, the man who was destined to be her husband. Whether she wanted him or not.
* * *
“She’s rather small, isn’t she?” Diana heard an unfamiliar man’s voice say as Percy helped her down from the coach in front of Hayward House.
Standing at the top of the steps outside the front door, she saw Henrietta, who had traveled back there earlier in the day to oversee preparations for the dinner, together with a tall and ruddy-faced young man of solid build, not yet fat but tending towards it. Fluffles sat beside them, and Jacob groaned quietly under his breath as he took in the dog’s presence.
An attractive, dark-haired young woman stood slightly behind Lady Birks with a welcoming smile. Diana easily recognized Lady Katherine, known as Kitty, who must now be three and twenty.
In contrast, the young man who must be her cousin looked entirely unfamiliar. But as Diana reflected on his rather bored and petulant expression, she could see how the spoiled and disagreeable boy she had once known could easily have developed into such a man.
“Oh, she’ll do, of course,” the man added, as his sister frowned and his mother whispered something to him.