He pulled a handful of change from his pocket, selected the required sixpence fare, and held it up through the opening. The driver took the coin from his fingers, shoved the lever to open the doors, and Jonathan emerged onto the sidewalk, replacing his remaining change back in his pocket.
“Wait here,” he ordered, then turned around to face the house where he’d grown up, moving forward to stand on the very same square of pavement where he’d stood with a suitcase a decade ago.
He felt suddenly as if he’d spent the past ten years wandering in a desert, walking and walking, and yet only going in circles. How fitting, then, that he should be back in the place he’d started.
The house had been sold upon his father’s death five years before, but despite the change in ownership, it looked the same now as it had when he was eighteen.
Well, he amended at once, not precisely the same. It was night this time around, and lit lamps shone in some of the windows. Rain wasn’t dripping off the eaves, Clara and Irene were not standing in the bay window of the dining room watching him go with shocked, disbelieving faces, and his father was not scowling down at him from between the curtains in the window above. Most important, he wasn’t looking at it from the point of view of a rebellious eighteen-year-old youth, but as a man nearing thirty. It was an entirely different perspective.
He’d left here filled to the brim with anger, pain, and resentment toward his father, his grandfather, and the girl who’d broken his heart, but all of that was gone now, disappearing into the ether during his years in America, fading away so gradually that he hadn’t even noticed the departure.
When he’d stood here ten years ago, he’d had a fire in his belly and things to prove. He’d succeeded. He was wealthy, and by most people’s definition, he was successful, but to him, it was a shallow success. He no longer had the fire of anger to fuel his ambition, and he should have felt at peace, but he didn’t. Instead, he felt empty. His dreams were gone, his best friend was dead, and even though a big piece of what he’d lost all those years ago had just been offered to him on a plate, he’d turned it down.
What do you want from life?
It haunted him, that question—had been haunting him ever since Marjorie had first asked it of him aboard theNeptune. Or perhaps it had been haunting him ever since he’d last stood here, and he’d spent the past ten years running from it.
He moved, he wandered, but it wasn’t out of some zest for adventure, and it wasn’t even in a search to replace what he’d lost, not really. The truth was much less romantic. His restlessness came from fear: if he stood still, he feared he’d stop moving altogether, sink into the life of apathy, privilege, and ennui so common in the British upper classes, a life where things like which fork to use and which invitations to accept took on crucial significance and one had nothing more important on one’s calendar than visits to the tailor, whist at the club, and chasing down hapless foxes at the country house.
He had the money for that life, certainly, but unlike Marjorie, he didn’t want it. He wanted something else—something more, and though it seemed as elusive as a rainbow’s end or a mirage on a desert horizon, he knew he wouldn’t find it standing here.
Turning around, he walked back to the cab. “Where can a man obtain an underdone porterhouse, a plate of chips, and a pint of good ale in London these days?” he asked the driver.
“Black Swan’s just up around the corner, guv’nor. On the High Street. Best beefsteak in Holborn.”
Jonathan pulled another sixpence out of his pocket, handed it up, and ignoring the driver’s profuse thanks, he started toward High Holborn. Behind him, he heard the snap of reins, the clatter of wheels, and a moment later, the hansom rolled past him up the street.
As he followed in its wake, Jonathan had the curious, nagging sensation that he’d left something undone. He stopped, realizing what it was, and why he’d really come here.
Slowly, he turned to look back over his shoulder to the lace-curtained upstairs window.
“Good-bye, Papa,” he said. “Godspeed.”
With that, he once again turned his back on his father’s house, his grandfather’s unfulfilled ambitions, and his own lost dreams. He did it not with rancor or resentment, but with relief, and he knew at last that the past was truly behind him.
The question he had to face now was what to do with his future, and he suspected finding an answer to that was going to be much harder than letting go of the past.
Chapter 17
Marjorie’s reunion with Dulci and Jenna had been delightful, reliving days at Forsyte and laughing about their escapades there, but in the days that followed tea at Claridge’s, she rarely saw either of her old friends. Their social calendars for the remainder of the season were already filled, and their circle of acquaintances was an entirely different one from Irene and Clara.
In addition, Marjorie’s mourning period prevented her from attending any significant social events, so as the days of June went by, her path crossed very little with that of her friends, but both of them promised to attend the house party for her birthday in August.
She was able to participate in some of the season’s activities, however, thanks to Irene, Clara, and Rex’s cousin, Hetty. Due to their efforts, Marjorie attended teas, paid calls, shopped, and went to picnics, Afternoons-At-Home, several small dinner parties, the theater, and the opera. Marjorie enjoyed her new life, although after a lifetime of no society at all, she found the pace a bit overwhelming. Had she fully participated in the social whirl as the debutantes did, she’d have been exhausted by it.
As for Jonathan, she saw him every day. They made small talk across the breakfast table every morning and over sherry nearly every evening. She listened with the members of his family to his stories of life on the American frontier. He was cordial and attentive and scrupulously polite, and yet, she felt as if there was a wall between them. They never sparred, they never disagreed. When she asked his opinion, he gave it, but he never tried to tell her what to do, what to wear, or who to see. Their conversations were amiable, as those between friends should be, and yet, they always had the curious result of leaving Marjorie unaccountably depressed.
Not once did she see in his face what she’d seen at Claridge’s. Not once did she catch him watching her in the way that made her lips tingle and her heart race, and as the days passed, she began to wonder if what she’d seen at Claridge’s had been nothing but her imagination. Even their passionate kiss aboard theNeptuneseemed now like nothing more than a wild, fevered dream.
By the day of Irene’s water party, Marjorie was tempted to do something wildly outrageous just to see if she could get a rise out of him, but she refrained, for she didn’t wish to embarrass her hosts or hurt her newfound social position. And what would be the point? It wouldn’t change anything.
To prepare for the water party, the duke and his brother left before breakfast, wanting to look over theMary Louisaand make certain the crew had the vessel ready for the day’s excursion, and Jonathan chose to accompany them. Irene did the same, having preparations of her own to make as hostess, so when it was time for Marjorie and Carlotta to depart for Queen’s Wharf, it was Rex and Clara’s landau that rolled up in front of the house to fetch them.
The landau’s top was rolled back to the fine July morning, but one glance at the couple in it told Marjorie not everyone was in a sunny mood.
“I still think you should talk to him again,” Clara was saying to Rex in an insistent tone as Marjorie and Carlotta approached the vehicle. “We both know—”
She broke off to give Marjorie and her sister-in-law a nod of greeting as Torquil’s footman assisted them into the carriage, then she returned her attention to her husband and their conversation. “We both know how persuasive you can be when you choose. If you presented the offer another way—”
