But love ought not to cause dishonor. Or pain." "Can you have lived to the age of thirty and still be so naive?" he asked her.

Her eyes snapped open. "Let me fetch you some lemonade," he suggested.

The Earl of Sheringford was taking an empty plate from her hand and returning it to one of the tables before Margaret realized that she must have eaten something – she could not remember what. And her glass was empty. Lemonade? Yes, she could still taste it.

She was smiling. Lady Carling was coming toward her like a ship in full sail, both hands outstretched in front of her. "The Deans invited us to dinner ages ago," she said, kissing Margaret's cheek, "/long/ before Agatha set the date for her soiree. We have only now been able to get away and come here. And thus we have missed all the excitement. Margaret, my dear, you must be a saint to have borne it all and still be standing at Duncan's side. I understand Randolph Turner declined to challenge him to a duel, which is surprising really and even slightly shameful, though I am vastly glad he did. My nerves would never have recovered from the strain. Duncan, my love, you have no choice now but to eat a great deal of humble pie and apologize. You ought to have done it long ago." "He says he will not," Margaret told her. "He says he is not sorry." His mother clucked her tongue. "Laura Turner was a very fortunate woman, then," she said. "Duncan, you may fetch me some ratafia." Another half hour or so passed, most of it in company with Lady Carling and some of her friends, before Lord Sheringford suggested again that he escort Margaret home. She had never been more glad of anything in her life, though she would have died rather than ask to be taken. She felt exhausted.

Whatever had she got herself into? But whatever it was, she had no one to blame but herself.

Ought she to inform him when he took her back to Merton House that she had made a definite decision not to marry him, that she did not wish to see him again? He would still have time to find someone else. And really and realistically – how could she ever agree to marry a man who apparently had no conscience?

But who else would have him if she did not?

That was /definitely/ not her concern.

Stephen was in the drawing room, part of a large group of young people who seemed all to be talking and laughing at once. He detached himself from the group when he saw them come in from the music room. "You are leaving, Meg?" he said. "May I escort you?" "No, thank you, Stephen," she said. "Lord Sheringford will do that." "Let me at least call the carriage, then," he said. "No." She smiled at him. "It is a lovely evening – or was the last time I looked out a window." The earl did not own a carriage, and she had rejected his offer to hire one for the occasion. They had walked the short distance to the soiree.

They took their leave of Mrs. Henry, who shook her head at her nephew, kissed his cheek, and told him that he had made her so famous that simply everyone would clamor to attend her next entertainment. "Everyone who refused an invitation to this one will bitterly regret it," she said.

13

A FEW minutes later they were out on the pavement, Margaret shivering slightly beneath her shawl. The air seemed loud with the silence.

Lord Sheringford offered his arm and she took it. "What are your thoughts?" he asked her after they had walked for a little while without talking. "I scarcely know," she said. "I feel as if my whole life has been turned upside down." "Would you rather," he said, "that I ceased courting you? Your reputation would recover very quickly and leave you quite unscathed.

Gossip soon dies when there is nothing to feed it." "I think," she said, "that what I /would/ rather, Lord Sheringford, is an explanation of why you are not sorry, or why you refuse to apologize to that poor man. Is it just stubbornness? Or is it really love? Was Mrs. Turner the great passion of your life, worth everything you gave up, including your character and honor? And worth your refusal to do the right thing and admit that you caused irreparable suffering to her husband?" She shivered again. Her shawl had slipped off her shoulders and exposed them to the cool air of late evening.

He stopped walking and lifted her shawl, wrapping it more closely about her and keeping one arm about her shoulders to hold it in place. He was looking very directly into her eyes, though she could scarcely see him in the darkness. She could smell the wine he had been drinking. "The great passion of my life?" he said. "It would be a terrible insult to you if I were to continue to woo you and allow you to believe that to be a possibility. I did not love Laura at all, Maggie – not in any romantic sense, anyway." She gazed at him, baffled. They were beneath a straight row of trees that had been planted along the edge of the pavement, she realized suddenly. That was why it was so dark despite the fact that the sky was bright with moon and stars. The street was deserted. There was not even a night watchman in sight. "Then it is only stubbornness?" she said. "An un willingness to admit that a fleeting passion ruined lives, including your own? And you think other people, including me, will respect you for your steadfast stubbornness? You believe it to be unmanly to admit that you did something so dreadfully wrong, its effects quite irreversible? Admitting you were wrong, asking pardon, is the only decent, manly course of action remaining to you – surely?" He sighed. "I ought to have apologized profusely to you when we collided in Lady Tindell's ballroom," he said, "and allowed you to hurry on your way to wherever it was you were going. I ought to have chosen someone with far less firm opinions to save me from penury. Maggie, there are many kinds of decency. Snatching a married lady from her husband and running off with her is sometimes the most decent thing a man can think of to do.

Even when he is forced to leave behind a bride of his own, almost literally waiting at the altar for him – though Caroline Turner was not treated quite as shabbily as that." "Then tell me what." She turned to face him fully and was forced to spread her hands across his chest when he did not take a step back. His one arm was still about her shoulders. "How can such a sin be /decent/?" She gazed up into his face, barely visible even at this distance.

And then she had a sudden inkling of the truth and wondered that it had not occurred to her before. "Randolph Turner is a coward," he said. "You may have noticed it a short while ago. Any other man in his position would have felt that he had no option but to slap a glove in my face, even if only a figurative one. He found a way of wriggling out of doing so and appearing rather heroic into the bargain – to the ladies, at least." "Perhaps," she said, "he abhors violence and understands that it is no solution to any problem." "And perhaps," he said, "any normal husband whose wife had run off with another man would scour heaven and earth to find her and punish her abductor – or else would publicly spurn and divorce her. He would at the very least take firm exception to her abductor's returning to society after her death and attending the same social functions as he, just as if he had every right to the forgiveness and respect of society." "Perhaps," she said again very distinctly, "he abhors violence and understands that it is no solution to any problem." He sighed. "And perhaps," he said, "he possesses that quality that so often goes hand in hand with cowardice." She searched his eyes in the darkness. She did not wait for him to explain. Her inkling had been right, then. "He was a bully?" She was whispering.

He released his hold on her and took a few steps away to lean back against a tree trunk. He folded his arms over his chest, and Margaret grasped the ends of her shawl and drew it more closely about her. "I promised her that I would never tell a soul," he said, "and indeed the necessity for secrecy was dire. Her main reason, though, was that she felt guilty. She felt that she had failed as a wife, that she had drawn every bit of censure and violence upon herself. She thought people would blame her if they knew the truth and seemed to prefer being known simply as a faithless wife." "He beat her?" Margaret was gripping the ends of her shawl as if her life depended upon her hanging on. "Among other things," he said. "She really was in the wrong for running away from him, of course. A man has a right to beat his wife or to administer any form of correction he deems necessary to make her obedient and submissive. She is, after all, his possession. A man has a right to beat his dog too." "Oh, poor Mrs. Turner," Margaret said, looking quickly about. But there was still no one in sight. She had always thought that violence within a family was one of the worst afflictions that could be visited upon any person. One's family ought to be one's safest haven. "How did you come to know?" "Quite by accident, I suppose," he said. "I was newly betrothed to Caroline and so was a part of the family. I cannot for the life of me remember why Laura and I were so far separated from the rest of the company one evening that we were able to talk privately with each other for a few minutes. Turner kept her on a very short leash – especially after a beating. Which meant that she was almost always on a short leash. It looked like marital devotion to anyone who did not know differently. /I/ thought it was marital devotion at first – until that evening, in fact." Margaret stared at him in the near darkness. She forgot about the chilliness of the air, though she shivered anyway. Hooves clopped along the street to her left, but the horse and its rider must have turned into another street. The sound grew fainter and then disappeared altogether. "However it happened, we /were/ separated from the group," he said, "and she let her guard down sufficiently to afford me a glimpse of a dark bruise on her upper arm. The sleeves of her gown were somewhat longer than was fashionable, I remember. She appeared frightened when I mentioned it and then turned her head in such a way that her silk shawl fell away from her neck for a moment before she yanked it back in place.