Everything I Ever Wanted (31 page)

"But you had already served with distinction. You were honored, weren't you, for your escape and rescue?"

"Yes. Though that is neither here nor there. I remained until we had cleared the way for Wellington's entry into Spain." South saw that small vertical crease appear between India's brows. "It is like seeing a play through to the final act," he said. "Even when you have a wish to slip quietly into the wings before it is done."

"And did you have such a wish?"

"On occasion. As is often true, it was never the same after the rescue. It set me apart from the others, though I would not have had it so. I could not put it in the past, because I was not allowed."

"You were regarded as a hero," India said softly. South's brief, darting glance revealed again how discomfited he was by the thought of it. She imagined he must have abhorred the public expression of praise for his deeds. "And you only meant to do your duty."

"Yes."

She nodded. "I know it is not the same thing at all, but there are times I would rather be Ursula again, the gentlewoman attending on Hero, than Hero."

He chuckled at her wordplay. "If it is not the same thing," South said, "then it is not so very different."

"Perhaps." India finished her tea and set her cup down. "Is it why you choose to work for the colonel?"

South lifted an eyebrow in question.

"I mean, there is little chance of you being acknowledged for what you do at his urging."

He smiled. Trust India to come so pointedly to the heart of it. "That is as good a reason as any. Though I must tell you, the colonel has never urged me to do anything. No matter how it is couched, there can be no mistaking what he says for anything but a command."

"Does your family know?"

"No." He paused. "Does yours?"

India had been spooning her porridge. His carefully timed question made her head snapped up. "You must know that I have no family," she said.

"Why must I know that?" he asked. "I know only that I could not find any."

She merely shrugged.

South reached across the table and laid his hand lightly over her wrist. He held her glance. "Are we at another impasse?" he asked. "Did you think I would not return to the matters that brought us here? I have answered your questions, India. Not because I needed to. Certainly not because I found any pleasure in it. I answered them for no other reason than because you asked."

India swallowed. Her appetite had fled. She slipped her hand free of South's and pushed her half-eaten bowl of porridge aside. "What do you want to know?" she asked.

"Your name," he said. He saw that he had surprised her. "I reasoned some time ago that the difficulty in discovering much about you lay in the fact you were no longer using your name. You selected India Parr for the stage, did you not?"

India stood and cleared her things from the table. She expected South to raise some objection, but he did not. He let her go, let her busy her hands with the mundane tasks of scraping and washing. "I was called Diana," she said finally. "You will allow that it is not terribly different from India. A letter moved here and there, another changed."

He nodded and continued to wait.

India unpinned the apron protecting her gown and began to fold it neatly. "Hawthorne," she said. "Diana Hawthorne."

"Hawthorne is nothing at all like Parr."

"No," she agreed. "It is not."

"Was Cotswold your home?"

"Cotswold?" At first she did not understand. "Oh, because of my position there as governess. No, I was sent there from Devon. That is where I grew up."

South came to his feet and skirted the table. He took the apron India was creasing with her fingertips out of her hands and laid it across the back of a chair. Placing his hands gently on her shoulders, he turned her around and nudged her toward the adjoining room. He pointed to the settee. "Sit. I will get your shawl."

He was gone no longer than a minute and India was sitting exactly as he had left her. South produced a dark-green Paisley shawl and placed it around her shoulders.

"Did you think I meant to faint, my lord?" she asked when he placed a bench directly in front of her and sat. "I assure you, I would not have."

He was in a better position to judge her pale features than she had been. "Let us call it a precaution," he said.

She nodded and looped the tails of the soft woolen shawl under her breasts. A strand of hair had fallen across her cheek, and she brushed it back. It was then she noticed how cold her hands were. She settled them on her lap, threading her fingers together to keep them still. "Are you familiar with Devon?" she asked.

"I can admit to little more than having ridden through that countryside on my way to Land's End."

"It is rich farmland for as far as the eye can see. Each little plot is carefully tended. Neat hedgerows stitch the fields together as if the landscape were a verdant quilt. The scale of everything is diminutive. Where London sprawls, Devon nestles. The hollows are filled with tiny cottages, and villages stay confined to boundaries of the woods and meadows. The people are plain and steady, hardworking and proud. So much in Devon is small, my lord, except the heart of its inhabitants. The people in the West Country have enormous hearts."

"That is good to know."

India smiled faintly at South's carefully polite tone. "I mention it because it is part of my story. I lived in one of those little cottages. My father had been in the king's regiments years before, and now he had a piece of England that was his own. You might not imagine that farming would suit him, but it did. My mother was a midwife. It was a skill she had occasion to learn following the drum. That had been her life for many years."

"Before you were born," South said.

"Yes. My parents were settled in Devon when I was born."

South nodded. "They are older?"

India changed the tense of his question. "Were," she said. "They were older. They are both gone now."

"How long ago?"

"A dozen years. I was eleven."

A faint frown changed the line of his mouth as South considered not what she had told him, but what she hadn't. "Together?" he asked. "You lost both your parents at the same time?"

"In a fire."

South realized he had not fully prepared himself to hear what she might have to say. "I am sorry." He held her gaze because to look away would have been cowardly. "Was it your home that burned?"

She nodded. "There was nothing left. Nothing. I was gone from the cottage that evening. I had been invited by the vicar and his wife to spend the night because I was to attend the fair with them the following day. My father could not take me, and my mother was anticipating there would be need for her services as Mrs. Doddridge's time was nearing." India hands unfolded, and she absently fingered the fringe on her shawl. Her smile was rueful. "I have not thought of Mrs. Doddridge in years," she said. "My mother confided that she was set to deliver twins. I cannot say whether she did or not. I only know that my mother was not there to assist with the birthing."

South watched India shake her head slightly, rousing herself from her reverie. He waited patiently to see where her thoughts would take her next.

"I sometimes wonder, if I had not been away, if I might have saved them," India said. "I slept more lightly, I think. I might have been able to do something. I asked the vicar about it, but he told me I should not dwell on what might have been. I needed to accept what was."

"There is not much in the way of comfort there for a young girl."

"No," India agreed. "It is not."

"There were no brothers?" South asked. It seemed unusual that she would grow up as an only child in a farming family. He had always imagined that the sturdy stock of the West Countrythe spirited descendants of the Saxons and Vikingswould have a brood. Though no particular number defined that term, he knew it was greater than one. "No sisters?"

"No. None. There was only me. Diana Hawthorne. Daughter of Thomas and Marianne."

South thought he might have been able to touch her loneliness. It seemed that tangible to him. He caught her eye. "If there were some other way," he said. "If I could spare"

India's short laugh was without humor. "Never say that you wish you could spare me this. You brought me here to open these wounds. If I must feel the pain, then you can look on it."

"I will look at whatever you want me to see, India. And yes, if I could spare you, or better still, take it upon myself, I would. But you know it is not true that I brought you here to open wounds when I had no knowledge of any."

"Didn't you?"

"You have secrets," he told her."They are not necessarily one and the same."

India drew in a breath and released it slowly. "Perhaps you are right," she said wearily. "It is only that it has been so long since I spoke of it."

"Why is that?"

She stared at her hands for a long moment before she raised her palms in a helpless gesture. The same helplessness was reflected in her dark, lonely eyes. "I suppose," she said slowly, "because there has been no one to listen."

India had to hear herself say it aloud before she could comprehend what it meant. Had she truly allowed herself to become so isolated? Why hadn't she fought more? she wondered. Offered a struggle? When had she lost hope and embraced acceptance?

A small shudder slipped down the length of her spine. A sound, something between a hiccup and sob, escaped her lips. She covered her mouth with her fingertips, and her eyes darted away from South's implacable study. There was the press of tears at the back of her eyes and an ache in her throat.

"India?"

She shook her head quickly. If she spoke now, even if she only tried to speak, there would be tears, and they were something she did not want him to see. As weak as she had been, she had not often cried. To give in to tears seemed an act not of grief but of surrender.

South's fingers plowed through his hair and came to rest at the back of his neck. He massaged the tension that was like a thick cord under his skin. The action kept him from reaching for India and making an offer of comfort that she was certain to reject. He was on the point of getting up, solely for the purpose of moving about the room, when India turned to him again, her face pale, her expression oddly defiant.

"Let me say the rest," she said. There was a slight quaver in her voice, which India fought to control. "I would be done with this."

"Of course."

She nodded once. "After my parents died, there rose the question of what was to become of me. There were neighbors who would have seen to my care, been glad of it for the help I might have given them. The vicar and his wife, though they had three children of their own, would have also accepted me."

"As you say, the people of Devon are goodhearted."

"Yes. They were everything kind to me. It seemed as if the choice of where I should live would be mine, for no one had an opinion that one place was more suited than another." India smoothed the muslin fabric of her day dress over her lap as a way to dry her damp palms. "That changed when Lady Margrave expressed an interest in having me come to live with her. You were perhaps not aware that she has an estate near Devon. Not Marlhaventhat lies northwest of London. I am speaking of Merrimont. The property has been in her family for centuries and was never encumbered by entailment. She visited often, even after her marriage to the earl of Margrave."

India took a shallow breath, steadied herself, and continued. "You will no doubt wonder how I came to her attention. It is because of her son. She has but one child, and she would deny him very little. When she came to Merrimont, he often accompanied her unless he was at school. Lady Margrave permitted him to make the acquaintance of the village's children, though she made the initial selections. Some of us would be invited to the estate for tea and cakes, and those who comported themselves well were allowed to return."

"You were one of those?" asked South, though he knew the answer. He had no difficulty imagining her as she had been then, perched on the edge of a chair, politely accepting her cup of tea and a sweet Her gold-and-platinum hair had likely been paler then. It would have framed her thin, solemn face like a halo. She would have been careful not to swing her legs or speak out of turn. She would not have given in to her curiosity by letting her eyes stray or asking impertinent questions.

India nodded. "My mother was firm that Lady Margrave would find no fault with my manners, because she knew my failure would reflect poorly on her. I suppose I understood that, too. I practiced sitting and standing and speaking and serving. I could make a curtsy without wobbling and eat a cake without dropping a crumb."

It was as if she were being prepared for the stage even then, South thought. "Did you go often to Merrimont?"

"Yes. Sometimes there would be three or four of us invited for an afternoon. On occasion I was the only one." India saw one of South's dark brows lift slightly in question. "Lady Margrave's son," she said. "He liked he liked to play with me."

The pause was almost infinitesimal. So was the pressure India placed on the tips of her laced fingers. South missed neither. "He is older than you?"