Marjorie Farrell (18 page)

When he finally reached London, he sent a footman off with a note to Miranda telling her to expect him in the morning. Nora was the one who answered the door, and she handed the note wordlessly to her daughter, who opened it with trembling fingers.

“He will be here tomorrow.”

“Good. I know you are terrified, but it will be better to have this ordeal over as soon as possible. I cannot stand to watch you go through another week of waiting.” Miranda, who was easygoing and even-tempered in contrast to her mother’s more up-and-down temperament, had scared Nora this week with her frozen face and lack of energy.

She is strong enough to take his rejection. She won’t be devastated by it, Nora would try to convince herself, and then look at her daughter and want to cry all over again for the pain she had caused her.

Neither woman slept well that night, and the next morning found them at the breakfast table pale and heavy-eyed. Miranda pushed her food around and took only a few sips of tea and a bit of toast. Nora went out into the garden after breakfast, and so, when Jeremy arrived, she didn’t hear him. She was weeding as ruthlessly as though she were the Judgment Day Angel separating the wheat from the chaff.

Miranda called to her from the kitchen steps, and she went up the walk slowly, her heart beating as though she had just run across the Heath. What would her life be like if Jeremy rejected her daughter? How could Miranda
not
blame her in the long run?

Jeremy and Miranda were in the morning room, Jeremy on the couch and Miranda, at the window, her back to him, waiting for her mother.

Jeremy stood up as Nora entered, and she gave him her hand. “It is good to see you, Jeremy, and kind of you to answer Miranda’s note.”

“But of course I would. I would have been up soon anyway. Miranda should have known that.” He looked toward Miranda, who at last was facing him. The look on her face startled him, and he got up and stepped toward her. “Is anything wrong, my dear?”

Miranda put up her hands as though to push him away.

“No…yes. Please sit down, Jeremy. There is something I must tell you. It concerns our betrothal…”

“Well, that is just what I wanted to talk about! Although I did intend to speak with your mother first,” he added quickly. “Both Sam and my mother have agreed to an official engagement, and I want to put the announcement in this week, if I have your mother’s permission,” Jeremy said. “You have no objections, do you, Nora? Sam said he thought you might, but I don’t know where he would have gotten that idea.”

“No,” replied Nora slowly. “I have no objections. You are, in all ways but one, just the man I would have wished for Miranda.”

“Which one?” Jeremy quizzed. “Not spectacularly handsome, or not as rich as the ‘Golden Ball,’ ” he joked.

“You are the Earl of Alverstone,” replied Nora.

“I know you are rather republican in sentiment, Nora, but surely you forgive me an accident of birth,” Jeremy answered lightly. “After all, I had no choice in the matter.”

“It is really a matter of my birth,” interrupted Miranda. Her tone made Jeremy look up in alarm.

“What do you mean?”

“What Miranda wants to say is
—”

“Let me, Mother,” Miranda said firmly. She had never sounded quite so adult, and Nora knew some crucial shift had taken place. She was speaking not just as Nora’s daughter, or as Jeremy’s Miranda, but as herself, a grown woman.

“Jeremy, I can’t marry you.”

Nora, who was about to protest these words, to her own surprise was silenced by a flashing glance from her daughter.

“What do you mean? We are betrothed.”

“Yes, and I am thankful that it has not been announced. When I told you I would be your wife, I knew nothing of my own background.”

“I don’t understand,” Jeremy said, looking around questioningly, as though to see how her background had miraculously changed. “You are Miranda Dillon, daughter of Lieutenant and Mrs. Dillon. I know there is a difference in our status, but it means nothing to me, you know that.”

“Our positions are more alike and yet more different than we had thought. It seems I am not Miranda Dillon, but Miranda Breen. Or perhaps Miranda Ashton. I am not quite sure which would be correct, since my mother never married Mr. Breen.”

“Of course not, she married Lieutenant Dillon,” replied a thoroughly confused Jeremy, who wondered whether Miranda was suffering from a high fever.

“Jeremy,” interrupted Nora, “I have been living a lie for many years. Miranda knew nothing of this until last week, when I had to tell her, for your sake and for hers. I had hoped none of it would need to come out, that you were both in the throes of calf love…”

“You did not approve either? You were as much opposed as Sam and my mother? Why?”

“Because I am not Nora Dillon. I am Lady Honora Margaret Ashton. I ran away with one Dillon Breen when I was only a little younger than Miranda. I had her when I was eighteen and I never married her father. Miranda is illegitimate.”

Jeremy turned to Miranda as though waiting for her to deny all of this. She merely nodded and said softly: “So you see, knowing this now, I could never become the Countess of Alverstone.”

“Because your mother forbids it?”

“No. Because it would not be right to ask you to bear the disgrace.”

Jeremy’s head was too full of conflicting facts. He had not yet assimilated the change from Miranda Dillon to Miranda Breen or whomever. He had not even registered the information that Nora was of the nobility. His heart, however, needed to assimilate none of it. He heard himself say what he knew to be the truth for him, beyond any careful reasoning:

“Why would anyone else have to know?” he asked.

God bless you, Jeremy, thought Nora.

He turned to her. “Is this Breen really dead, or is that another lie?”

His tone was cool, and Nora flushed as she answered. “No, he is truly dead.”

“Then there is no way for the truth to come out,” he said with relief in his voice.

“Jeremy,” protested Miranda, “the Earl of Alverstone cannot marry a…bastard.”

Jeremy was next to her in one moment. He took her by the shoulders and shook her gently and said, “I never want to have you use that word again.”

“But that is what I am,” she answered.

“You are an intelligent, lovely woman, and the circumstances of your birth have nothing to do with you. Do you think so little of me that you believe my love could be extinguished by just one word?”

“Oh, no.” Miranda lifted her eyes to his. “It is only that I love you too much to hold you to a marriage that would be abhorrent to you. That would be beneath you.”

“Then you would have sent me away, and all for your lack of trust?”

“No, you don’t understand,” protested Miranda, the tears she had been holding back for a week beginning to fall.

“I
do
understand,” said Jeremy softly. He kissed her gently on the forehead and folded her into his arms. “But what you don’t seem to understand is I loved you the first time I saw you, and could never stop loving you.”

Nora did not stay. She slipped out the door, leaving Miranda and Jeremy their private moments, and walked blindly down the path toward the Heath. She should be happy for Miranda; she
was
happy for her. She had prayed Jeremy was who she thought he was, and he had not disappointed her. For, once she had revealed the basis of her objections, she had found herself wanting for them the ending she had never had to her own romance. She had had no true consummation, no growth of love, but only a slow realization that she had thrown herself away for a fantasy. She had been surprised by her daughter this week. Miranda had made a decision in silence, a decision to release Jeremy. A decision that reflected her maturity. And as Miranda came to her decision, Nora had hoped, against all her own reasons, that Jeremy would prove worthy of her daughter. And he had, in a way that erased all of Miranda’s doubts. Had he thought about it, had he taken any time over it, she knew Miranda would always have been insecure in the marriage. This way, she knew he had no hesitation; that he loved her for herself.

Then why was her relief not unalloyed? Why was she seized by an almost palpable unhappiness? For herself. It had nothing to do with Miranda. Or maybe it did, after all. She kept walking faster and faster, as though to outrun her jealousy. For that was, after all, the feeling that tore at her. Her daughter was loved in a way that she herself had never been loved. Her daughter had found a man, grown-up. Breen had never grown up. And perhaps I never have, thought Nora. Oh, I have in some ways; I have taken on responsibility and raised a child. But there is still a part of me who is that seventeen-year-old looking for a knight in shining armor, she thought. And that young girl has just seen someone else who has been granted the reality, not the fantasy. And she is dying from it.

Miranda had grown up. And she would marry Jeremy, and would drive away, leaving her mother behind, the young girl in her awake at last, finally facing what she had lost and knowing what she had never had, an adult passion. She had thrown it away for blue eyes and bright hair. And now the fulcrum of her existence was being removed. She sat down suddenly, as though all her energy had drained out in one moment, and opened her mouth in a long silent cry.

After a while Nora composed herself and walked slowly back to the house. Miranda and Jeremy were sitting hand in hand on the old bench in the garden. Nora approached them slowly. Jeremy had sounded so cold when he had heard the truth, and she wondered if she had lost his respect. In Miranda, he had nothing to forgive, for she was an innocent. But my story must have shocked him, thought Nora. And I am not an innocent; I am responsible for all of this.

The lovers looked up at her approach, and Miranda got up, and taking her hand, brought her over to sit down on the bench.

“We were worried about you, Mother.”

“I just went for a walk, my dear. It seemed to me that you did not need a third person. Am I to wish you happy?”

Jeremy, who had as yet given no sign of welcome, smiled at her question and nodded. “Yes, and we are glad you are the first. The notice will go in in a few days, and we are planning an August wedding.”

“So soon? Why, that is little more than a month away,” protested Nora.

“I want to introduce Miranda as my countess in the fall,” replied Jeremy. “That way she will have the support of her position, and any gossip about her background will have died down by the holidays.”

“I see,” Nora said slowly, dazed by the events of the morning.

Jeremy looked at her and saw more clearly the tracing of wrinkles around her eyes. He had enjoyed Nora as a welcome contrast to his own mother. He had idealized her as an independent woman who had survived widowhood without falling into the vaporish states that Lavinia did. She had almost seemed like an older sister, Miranda’s and his.

When he heard the truth from her, he had initially been shocked and disillusioned. But after he and Miranda talked, he had begun to try to imagine what it must have been like for Nora. Miranda could not tell him anything about Scotland, but she did remember some of the early years in Hampstead, and Jeremy wondered at Nora’s courage. She was the daughter of a marquess, yet she had worked as a barmaid to support herself and her daughter, and then managed to establish herself as a writer. He knew he might not have been capable of that. He had been raised in luxury, and though he worked hard on his estates, he did so because he chose to. Like Miranda, he was seeing Nora for the first time, and wondering about that seventeen-year-old. Who had she been? Not this capable woman, but a romantic girl.

Jeremy turned to Nora and said, “I have always admired you, Nora, but never so much as this morning.”

Nora blushed.

“Thank you, Jeremy,” she said, looking straight at him. He looked back at her and she knew he was accepting her past and did not despise her for it.

“And, Jeremy,” she continued, “I would not wish for any other son-in-law, even though you
are
an earl.”

Their laughter eased the tension as she had hoped it would. Suddenly they were all chattering about details: how would Miranda put a wardrobe together, who would pay for it (Nora insisted on the responsibility for the wedding dress), who would be invited? As they talked, Nora felt herself to be two people: one, the excited mother, the other, a woman who was beginning to realize how alone she would be in just a few weeks. Her whole life was about to change overnight.

During the next few weeks Nora felt the split even more. She accompanied Miranda to Madame Didier’s to choose the material for her dress. They found an ivory silk, and decided upon a pattern that was a bit old-fashioned but which suited the material better than the wider skirts that were coming in vogue. The silk hung gracefully, and needed little embellishment. Madame produced a cache of freshwater pearls, with which she embroidered the sleeves and neckline, and Nora, unbeknownst to Miranda, visited a jeweler’s in London to have the rest of them strung into a delicate choker. The pink-tinged jewels emphasized Miranda’s pale rose complexion. Nora was convinced by Madame to wear a certain shade of blue-green that complemented her darker coloring to perfection.

Once the announcement went in the
Post
,
there were gifts to be opened, cousins and aunts to visit, and, of course, Lavinia to be included and entertained. The city was fairly empty, but since one of Lavinia’s sister’s lived near Richmond, there was some socializing that could be done.

Sam did not return to the city until a week after the announcement. He had been detained by problems with one tenant, and a long-promised visit to Sutton. Simon and Judith had been happy to hear of the betrothal, as was the viscount himself. Whatever Mrs. Dillon’s objections had been, he said to the duke and duchess, they must have been overcome by the obvious rightness of the match. The duke agreed, but wondered to himself just what had transpired. He assumed Nora had left the decision up to Miranda and Jeremy, as he had advised. Perhaps he would find out at the wedding.