The Heiresses Page 32

  Just as Clio turned, ready to happily make her way back inside the town house, the door was wrenched open and an argument spilled onto the steps outside.

  “I’m going and you can’t stop me.” Thalia bounded down the steps. “No, Haggis McTavish, you stay here.” She pointed back inside the front door and a put-out Haggis McTavish immediately slunk back inside.

  Edwin followed close behind, while a bored-looking Venetia came as far as the front door, then stopped, watching the scene unfold before her rather dispassionately. Edwin, however, did not pause, even for breath. “I might not be able to stop you, but I can come with you.” He took the steps two at a time.

  Thalia raced by Clio, as if oblivious to her presence, her eyes intent on one thing only—her motorcar. Now, she hastened over to it and jumped inside, and it soon chugged to life.

  “Clio!” Edwin spotted her at the last moment, but didn’t pause to talk to her. “Just stay there. Wait for me.”

  Clio watched, confused, the whirl of the unnecessary commotion pulling her out of the blissful serenity she had felt this morning. As she viewed the motorcar pulling sharply away from the town house, taking any last vestige of peace with it, she sighed. She had her answer. Edwin, it seemed, was incapable of change, as was Thalia.

  “Thalia?” Ro joined the group, calling out from behind Venetia, as she pulled her coat on in the doorway.

  “She’s gone,” Venetia said with a shrug, as she leaned against the door frame and crossed her arms.

  “But where to?” Ro shook her head as Clio ascended the steps to find out more.

  “Oh, goodness knows,” Venetia replied. “All she would say was that she had to go somewhere near Covent Garden. And I told her I certainly wasn’t going there. How dire! Edwin and I had just arrived, too. A complete waste of a journey.”

  Ro’s mouth fell open. “You can’t be serious. After all Thalia has just been through, that’s all you have to say? You couldn’t go with her to find out what was going on? To see if she needed help?”

  “Not to that part of town. One must have some limits. Anyway, Edwin has gone with her, hasn’t he?”

  Clio remained silent before them both, too furious to speak. She wasn’t sure who she was more cross with—Edwin and Thalia for taking up yet again with their silly games, or Venetia for her inability to truly care about anything, or anyone.

  “Well, if Thalia is so terribly busy, I must be off.” Venetia waved a hand, unperturbed by Ro’s lecture. “I’m sure she’ll tell us all about her little trip later on.”

  “Oh, I do hope it will be an entertaining enough story for you,” Ro spat as Venetia passed them both by, skipped down the steps, and made her way along the pavement.

  When she was out of earshot, Clio spoke up. “Most likely Thalia and Edwin are on one of their idiotic missions once more.” She was not used to speaking such unkind words and they felt all wrong in her mouth after this morning’s visit to the cathedral, but she was tired of Edwin’s and Thalia’s childishness. This was the end for her.

  But Ro only frowned. “I don’t think so. The thing is, Thalia was here for only a moment, then gone once more. She seemed awfully … agitated. That’s why I ran for my jacket. I thought I’d go with her—to find out what the problem was.”

  Clio felt terrible for her harsh words then. She turned to face Ro properly. “What I said just now—it was wrong of me. It’s just that … well, you know I don’t care for their games. The thing is, I … well … Nicholas proposed to me. In that letter that came the other day…”

  It took Ro a moment or two to collect herself before she could reply. “Wait. Nicholas from Kenya? He proposed?”

  Silently, Clio nodded.

  “And have you responded to him?” Ro finally asked.

  “Not yet,” Clio replied. “But I’m beginning to think I might accept his offer. It would be excellent for my mother’s health. And Nicholas did mention that she might move over with us.”

  Ro was quiet for a moment or two. “And what of your health? Your sanity? Do you think you could—”

  Clio cut her sister off, quickly. “He is a good man. I’m beginning to think it’s much wiser to choose with your head, rather than your heart.” Her words were an obvious nod to what Ro had been through herself, with Vincent.

  Ro saw this immediately, her face hardening. “Maybe so,” she told Clio. “But I would be careful, Clio, for something that is so seemingly perfect, rarely is.” She turned then and ran back inside the house.

  Left alone once more, Clio gave a long sigh before slowly following Ro. She had not meant to upset her. And as for Edwin, despite his asking her, she had made a decision—she would wait for him no longer.

  * * *

  “I simply don’t think it’s wise, Thalia,” Edwin yelled as Thalia took yet another corner way too fast, her driving becoming more and more erratic as the pair sped toward Seven Dials. “You should speak to your aunt about it first.”

  “No,” Thalia said firmly, breaking sharply and narrowly missing the taxi directly in front of her. “She wasn’t home and I can’t spend the time locating her. I need to go now, while it’s all still fresh in my mind.”

  “At least let me drive.” Edwin tried to persuade her. “You’re obviously upset.”

  “I am not upset!” Thalia glanced over at him.

  “Thalia, watch where you’re going!”

  “All right! All right! As I was saying, I’m not upset. I just need to get to the bottom of this, that’s all.” Thalia’s trip to see Charles had certainly been a fruitful one. He had told her close to nothing, of course, denying all of her suggestions. She had almost been about to leave when it happened. Charles had been standing across the room from her; she had looked at his face and had had an amazing moment of clarity, where she had seen what she had missed before, what had been right in front of her, waiting to be realized. Suddenly, she had seen the truth. She had blurted out her thoughts, which Charles had, again, denied. But his expression had told her all she needed to know. Mrs. Blount, she knew for certain, would tell her the rest.

  Concentrating on the happenings of the morning, rather than on the road, Thalia returned to the present—and her driving—with a start, as the motorcar barreled along quickly toward a sharp bend in the road. Shocked back to attention, she turned the wheel too fast and Esmerelda shuddered and lurched beneath her.

  “Thalia!” Edwin cried out too late, leaning over and making a grab for the wheel, as they hurtled in an arc toward the opposite side of the road.

  The last thing she heard was a sickening crunch.

  * * *

  “Is this for me?” Clio called out from the hall later that afternoon.

  “Is what for you?” Ro replied, from where she was curled up in the drawing room, reading some medical textbook or another that made Clio flinch whenever she saw the inside illustrations by accident.

  “This note,” Clio said, turning it over in her fingers. It was folded up along with her portrait—the one Edwin had drawn of her that day in the park. She traced one of the pencil strokes that formed her hair with her index finger, feeling, somehow, as if she had lost him forever to that other world of his she would never be able to understand. “The note with my name on it.”

  “Oh!” Ro ran out to the hallway now. “Yes, sorry. I forgot all about it. Edwin left it for you.”

  Clio glanced at her sister, to see if she had “forgotten” on purpose, after Clio’s words concerning Vincent.

  “I’m sorry, Clio,” Ro said, with a shrug. “I really did forget.”

  “It’s all right,” Clio replied, with a sigh. She opened up the note and began reading it.

  “What is it?” Ro stepped forward on seeing Clio’s expression change as her eyes scanned Edwin’s words.

  Clio refolded the note before glancing up, every fiber of her ashamed of her previous thoughts regarding Edwin. “Edwin wasn’t being silly at all in racing off. He was looking after Thalia. He was worried about her.�
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  Ro frowned. “But where did they go? Thalia was looking for Hestia, but she wasn’t here before. She did seem in an awful rush.”

  Clio clutched the note in her hand. “He doesn’t say. But they still haven’t come back. And that was over five hours ago. I hope they’re all right. Thalia didn’t give any clue as to what was going on?”

  “No, none.” Ro shook her head. “Though I expect she’ll turn up soon, with or without Edwin. Not to mention Haggis McTavish has been extremely cross that she left him behind.”

  In front of Ro, Clio began to feel a distinct sense of uneasiness creep across her body, from her head to her toes. Haggis McTavish, she began to think, was the least of their worries. “The thing is, that’s exactly what you said last time,” she told her. “And look what happened to Thalia then.”

  * * *

  At the dinner table, Hestia, Ro, and Clio barely touched their food. “And you both honestly have no idea what she wanted from me, or where she was going?” Hestia glanced at both of her nieces in turn, asking her question for what felt like the hundredth time.

  “Honestly,” Clio answered. “I only arrived home as they ran out and Ro said Thalia was only here for a minute or two. As soon as she found out you weren’t here, she took off again, with Edwin in tow, leaving Haggis McTavish behind. She was quite insistent about that.”

  “But what was Edwin doing here?” Hestia turned to Ro.

  “He wasn’t here,” Ro told her. “He came in with Thalia. Though I got the impression he had just met her outside, by chance, and that he was really here to see Clio.”

  Hestia’s eyebrows shot up with this. “Perhaps he was here to ask for your hand again, Clio?” she said to her niece.

  “What?” Ro burst out. “He proposed to you as well? Both Edwin and this Nicholas in Kenya?”

  “Who is Nicholas in Kenya?” Hestia interjected, but the doorbell disturbed the three.

  “I’ll see who it is,” Clio said as she rose quickly, glad of the interruption. She ran down the hallway and across the marble flooring toward the front of the house and pulled the thick, heavy wooden door open.

  A police constable stood on the doorstep. “I’m afraid there’s been a motorcar accident, miss,” he told her, glancing behind her, down the hallway. “Is her Ladyship at home?”

  * * *

  Hestia, Ro, and Clio raced over to the London Hospital in Whitechapel as fast as they could. The police constable had few details to give them. All he knew were the addresses and persons he needed to inform and that both the male and the female involved were alive and not in any immediate danger.

  When their taxi dropped them off, they wasted no time with formalities and began asking anybody and everybody for directions. Finally, a nurse who recognized Hestia directed them personally through several of the hospital’s mazelike corridors right to Edwin and Thalia’s bedside. “They should still be in here, your Ladyship,” the nurse told Hestia, who thanked her profusely for her help.

  And the nurse was right, for there was Edwin, sitting up in bed, eating a plate of sandwiches and drinking a cup of tea with his left hand. His right arm, however, lay rigidly beside him, splinted and bandaged. “Oh!” Clio cried. “So it is true! You’re all right after all! And Thalia?”

  “Yes, it’s all right. It seems we’ll both live. She’s over there, behind the screen.” Edwin pointed. “Just having a rest. Before you go over there, though, I must warn you—she’s taken a nasty knock to the head. They’ve given her something to help her get some sleep.”

  Hestia, Clio, and Ro crept over to look behind the calico screen that stood around the bed offering some privacy. Behind it lay Thalia. Not the golden-haired, quick-witted, darting-eyed Thalia that Clio had come to know so well, but an ashen-faced version of the same. Clio held her hand to her mouth as she surveyed the damage to her sister. There was obviously an injury to her head. A large plaster had been placed on her forehead, above her right eye. Bruising crept out from either side of the raised mound and some blood stained her wide, lace-edged collar.

  “My goodness,” Hestia said as she exhaled, sitting down on the edge of Thalia’s bed. Both Ro and Clio reached over to her and each took one of her hands. “Oh, thank heavens she is all right.”

  “They gave her something because she was working herself into a state trying to remember what happened,” Edwin told them, from across the room.

  “What do you mean?” Clio released Hestia’s hand and walked across to Edwin’s bedside.

  “Well, after that bump to her head, she couldn’t remember who she was, or where she was going.”

  Clio gasped. “She’s lost her memory?”

  “No, no. They’ve said it’s going to be fine. It took her only a few minutes to remember her name and the year and so on. She was even asking for all of you by the time we got to the hospital. It was where she was driving to that she couldn’t remember. I’m sure she will recall later on, though. Everything else seemed to come back easily enough.”

  Clio breathed a sigh of relief. “And that’s all that’s wrong with her? Nothing else?”

  Edwin shook his head. “No, not a scratch on her other than that bump to the head.”

  “And yet you’ve broken your wrist?” Clio turned her concerned gaze to Edwin’s bound arm.

  “No, luckily. Thumb only. Where I grabbed the wheel.”

  “What exactly happened?” Ro walked over to stand at the end of Edwin’s bed.

  “To tell you the truth,” Edwin said as he frowned, “I don’t entirely know. Thalia kept going on and on about having to go somewhere and see someone, but she wouldn’t tell me where, or who, or what it was all about. She was desperate to see Lady Hestia, though. She was almost beside herself—sort of triumphant and fearful all at the same time. She was acting so strangely I thought I’d better go with her to make sure she was all right.”

  “So, you got in the motorcar…” Ro prompted Edwin to go on with his tale.

  “Yes, we set off and it didn’t take long at all before she began to drive more and more erratically. I tried to get her to pull over and let me drive, but before I knew what was happening, she’d taken a corner too fast. I tried to grab the wheel, but it was too late.”

  Clio felt her shame rise once more as she realized what she had thought about Edwin while he was actually busy protecting her sister. “Thank you so much, Edwin,” she said. “For looking after her.”

  “It was nothing,” Edwin said modestly. “Anyone would have—”

  But Clio cut in here. “No, they wouldn’t have. It really was very good of you.”

  Ro saw here that other, more private, words were about to be said, and turned at once and beat a hasty retreat back to Thalia’s bedside.

  Clio gestured toward the side of Edwin’s bed. “May I?”

  “Of course! Sorry, do sit down.”

  Clio perched beside Edwin, already feeling her heart start to beat faster in her chest at what she was contemplating. “Ro said you only met up with Thalia outside the town house. Was there another reason you were coming to visit this afternoon?”

  Edwin gulped quite visibly. “Well, yes. It was your portrait, actually. I meant to give it to you the other day, then I forgot because we all became terribly busy with that impression of the woman. Anyway, I thought … well, that I should give it to you. I thought that when I hadn’t heard from you in all that time … since that day in the garden of the nursing home … I mean, well, I thought you didn’t care to see me again. And then I figured you might think it strange that I still had the portrait and that you might not want me to have it and … oh, I don’t know…” The usually confident Edwin lost his steam at this point.

  Clio bit her lip for a moment and glanced over at Hestia and Ro, who were, thankfully, chatting quietly on the other side of the room. As she turned back to Edwin once more, she smiled slightly, suddenly knowing with all of her being that she had been sent a test, which she was about to pass. In that brief moment she felt el
ated—with a clear head and an even clearer heart. It was Edwin she loved and it was Edwin she was meant for. No one on this earth was perfect: neither man nor woman (Clio herself knew she was far from it). Not Nicholas, not even her father. Nicholas might have seemed to be without risk, but she now knew God was asking her to take a simple leap of faith and this was it. Edwin had proved to her time and time again that he cared for her and for the people who surrounded her in this new life she was living. Now, she was being called to make that leap of faith. She needed to believe that Edwin would be waiting to catch her on the other side. With shining eyes, she edged her body up the bed, closer to his. “That question,” she said, leaning in, her voice a whisper. “The one you asked me that day in the garden at Thalia’s nursing home…”

  Edwin looked confused for a moment. “You mean…?” He let the words go unsaid.

  Clio nodded, blushing furiously. “Yes. Do you think you could ask me that question again? That is, if you don’t mind.”

  “Of course I don’t mind!” Edwin sat bolt upright now, almost knocking over his unfinished tea. He began to swing his legs off the bed before Clio realized he actually meant to get down on one knee once more.

  “Oh!” she started, with a laugh. “Don’t get up! As if I would ask you to get up at a time like this!” She laughed harder now, seeing the ridiculousness of their situation.

  On hearing this, Edwin wasted no more time. “Clio Silsby, will you do me the very great honor of marrying me?” he asked her, his eyes never once leaving hers.