Chapter Twenty-Five
Anticipation was the order of the night. James took his carriage to Lady Sarah’s town house, gray stone and symmetric sash windows and steps leading up to a black door. It looked like every other house in the row, except for the carriages milling about and the people entering.
If all went according to plan, Lady Sarah would be his wife before dawn broke.
He’d thought this fact would fill him with joy. All he felt as he sprung down from the carriage was a strange sort of bitter satisfaction. If she agreed to elope, he would be married to the daughter of an earl, the most sought-after woman in Edinburgh. He would possess the wealth of a lord.
Thomas Clark’s arrival would not matter. James’s dwindling savings, the money he’d spent to pursue Lady Sarah, would not matter, even if his students were gone, even if his source of income was lost.
None of it would matter, once she married him.
If Sarah married him, his father could look at him like he was nothing all he wanted, but they would both know it wasn’t the truth.
He would know it.
Instead of reveling in this, he kept remembering how soft and sweet Eleanor’s mouth tasted.
He hadn’t been planning on kissing her—nothing about Eleanor had gone according to plan—but he had anyway, as a sort of good-bye.
Good-bye kisses were not supposed to make his chest feel like it was going to crack open. Good-bye kisses were not supposed to linger on his lips, as though they were a permanent fixture. Good-bye kisses were not supposed to make him yearn for more kisses.
And by God, they were certainly not supposed to make him feel like he’d ended something good, something wonderful, before it had even begun. Like he might have said good-bye to the best thing he would ever have.
They weren’t supposed to ruin him utterly.
With his heart in his throat, he practically ran up the steps to Lady Sarah’s front door.
The ball was a crush. The heavy perfumes made his head ache and the press of bodies annoyed him. He felt like pushing people out of the way, but with his strength, he’d probably send them careening into walls, and that wasn’t a very good impression to make on one’s future wife.
He scanned the drawing room for Sarah, but couldn’t find her. He did, however, see Georgina Townsend chatting amiably with some other guests.
He frowned, scanning the room again. There was Lady Sarah, entering from another part of the house, probably the retiring room. She looked as beautiful and untouchable as a diamond in a pale-blue silk dress. When she turned her head, jewels glinted in her hair.
That bitter satisfaction rose in him again, even more potent than before, like the taste of copper in his mouth.
The Duke of Sheffield was there, too. He was tall, and fairly easy to spot among the crowd. He walked like a man who owned the world. He did own the world, at least one corner of it. Soon, James would be one step higher, one step closer to him. Someday, perhaps, they would be equal.
He started to make his way toward Lady Sarah, but he glanced at the chairs along the wall, hesitating when he noted that Eleanor wasn’t in them.
It wasn’t that he wanted to see her, exactly. It was just unusual that her sister would be here and she wouldn’t be.
He paused, resisting the magnetic attraction that Lady Sarah had on him in her icy-blue dress, with that easy smile that had been bred from wealth and time and class.
He would just see. He would just make sure that Eleanor was all right, and then he would go back to his plan. He would go back to all of the things that had made sense for so long.
When he finally reached Georgina through the crowd, she smiled brightly up at him. “Mr. MacGregor.”
“Why isn’t your sister here?”
Georgina glanced around with a twist to her lips and tapped her head, as though she hadn’t realized Eleanor wasn’t there. The little devil was playing with him. James was torn between wanting to throttle her and wanting to laugh. He wondered if that was what it felt like to have sisters.
“Eleanor is not feeling quite herself. It all started with the meeting, I think, but your little visit certainly didn’t help.”
He ignored the reproach in her clear eyes, and the idle thought that he wouldn’t want Georgina Townsend as an enemy. “Meeting?”
“The Natural History Society meeting.” She blinked at him.
“She went to another one?”
“Mmm,” Georgina uttered, noncommittally.
“Damn that woman! Is she trying to get caught?” he asked, annoyed. He wasn’t one to tell people how to live their lives, but it seemed like Eleanor was playing with fire. She couldn’t keep up such a ruse indefinitely.
“Don’t worry so. She wasn’t trying to get caught. She went to tell them the truth.”
James froze. “The truth?”
“Of Cecil’s identity.”
“You…I…what?” He sounded crazed. He was feeling a bit crazed, come to think of it.
Georgina spoke slowly and simply, as though he were a child. “She went to the meeting to tell them that she is Cecil Townsend.”
His heart plummeted. “Is she mad? Are you mad? What in God’s name is wrong with your family?”
“I’ve always been quite fond of my family. People think we’re a little eccentric, I know, but I’ve always enjoyed eccentric people.”
“Why didn’t you try to stop her?”
“She had made up her mind, and I admired her decision.”
They were mad, the lot of them. It figured he’d get mixed up with a family like the Townsends. “What happened?”
Georgina peered up at him. “They were…upset. They dismissed her from the society for good. From what Eleanor said, they wouldn’t even listen to her, once they knew.”
That would have devastated Eleanor.
“When was this?”
“The day you last visited. Not long before your visit, actually.”
“But she didn’t tell me. She didn’t say anything about it!”
“Should she have?”
“Yes!” James exclaimed, his chest tight. He hated the thought of Eleanor in pain. Hated, even more than that, the thought that she might have hidden it from him.
“Why? You’re courting another woman, are you not?” she said, before glancing behind him. “Lady Sarah is looking at you.”
James turned. Lady Sarah was, indeed, watching him from several feet away. He couldn’t interpret the expression on her face.
He started toward her. All he had were his plans. What was he without them?
Nothing. No one. The voice in his head was his father’s, but it sounded like James, too.
Without his plans, he was just a man who’d grown up in the slums and made his living with his fists and wanted to be something he wasn’t.
He stopped a foot away from Lady Sarah. For a moment, they didn’t speak.
He thought of Eleanor, so stubborn and so brave, facing a roomful of men who dared to pretend they were better than her, and smarter than her. He thought of how scared she must have been, and how hopeful.
She had gone to them and they had turned her away.
This Society—it took extraordinary things and it turned them ordinary. It took an intelligent, independent woman and it tried to break her down until she felt like nothing. For the first time, James didn’t want to be a part of it. For the first time, he very nearly loathed it.
He drew in a breath to speak.
Sometimes, in a boxing match, skill would only take you so far. Sometimes, instinct took you further. A gut reaction. A feeling you couldn’t ignore.
That was the only explanation he had for what happened next, because it certainly wasn’t what he’d thought he wanted. In that moment, his gut took over. Or his heart. Maybe they were the same thing.
He just knew that the dreams he’d held onto for so long were tilting, falling, crashing, and he didn’t lift a hand to save them. He just stood there and watched them burn.
Maybe the foundation of that other life he’d envisioned had been shaken the very first time he’d met Eleanor Townsend. Maybe every moment after that had only weakened it further, until this—an entire collapse—was inevitable, and he was just the idiot who hadn’t seen it coming.
Who hadn’t realized that this aching tenderness in his chest had a name, and it wasn’t something he could fight.
It wasn’t something he wanted to fight.
“I’m sorry,” he told Lady Sarah. “I’m sorry,” he repeated, backing away. “For everything.”
And then he was pushing people out of his way so he could get to the door.