If I Fall (3 page)

It was the hardest thing she had ever done.

It was the only thing she could do.

Her chest tightened over her heart. It became unbearable to breathe. She clutched her hand over her mouth so as to not make a sound.

If only…

But no—there was no use in “if only.” Because as the tears began to fall, ugly drops running down her face, across the ring on her hand, Sarah knew one thing with absolute certainty.

Everything was broken, and nothing would be right again.

April 1823

I
T
was over.

Everything was all right again.

Sarah closed the door to her bedroom, sinking back against it with an audible sigh of relief. Finally, the horrendous night had ended, and she was safe again.

It wasn’t meant to be a particularly taxing evening. After all, it had only been a card party, with supper and some light amusements thereafter, Bridget on the pianoforte. Just close friends, her mother had said. No one there would dare mention…

The Event.

And to their credit, no one did. No one would think to do so in the Forresters’ own home. But that didn’t stop them from staring. And whispering.

Sarah pushed herself off of the door, giving herself the smallest of shakes. “Close friends.” What a laughable conceit. When your father is consumed by antiquities, and your mother has one daughter entering her third Season and another daughter her first, the term “close friend” becomes muddied. What Lady Forrester considered a close friend was, apparently, the
wife of the man whose personal collection of Roman statuary Lord Forrester was trying to acquire. And said Lady’s sons—who happened to have been among the men who danced with Sarah more than once last Season.

Although, that had been before.

She pulled her weary body over to her silly little scrolled dressing table and sat on the small velvet stool that had always reminded Sarah of nothing so much as a tuffet. Which, of course, was why Sarah had picked it out when she was twelve.

No one should be held accountable for his or her adolescent tastes.

The dressing table was fluffy, if a wooden object could be described as such. There were cherubs, and clouds, and other white-painted rococo touches that made the twenty-one-year-old Sarah certain she had been a slightly ridiculous child.

She took off the pearl drop earrings, the pearl pendant at her throat, placed them aside.

She glanced at her left hand. Now naked. She quickly looked up, moved her gaze back to the fat woodwork of the silly dressing table.

Somehow, today, the silliness was a comfort. Because she could recognize it. It reminded her of herself … before. Though as she turned her face to the dressing table’s mirror, she could not recognize the face that stared back at her.

It was not twelve.

It was not one-and-twenty.

It was ancient.

The face did not smile. The eyes were hollows of exposure in the moonlight. If she went so far as to light a candle in the dark room, she would see herself, true. She would see the pearl pins in her golden hair; she would see the light green eyes that bespoke her Anglo-Saxon ancestry, and her pale unlined skin that attested to her youth. But the old woman with hollow eyes would still be underneath. Because…

Because that’s who she truly was now.

A swift knock at the door, and the curt entry of Molly, her maid, snapped Sarah to attention.

“Ah, miss, quite the party tonight!” Molly said, efficiently straightening her cuffs before she approached Sarah and struck a flint to light the candles at the mirror.

“Yes,” Sarah said, again painting her face with the serene smile she had tried to adopt all night. She was certain it had only fallen a few times over the course of the evening, and that she had quickly recovered. “My mother does love to have her
friends
over.”

Molly, whose professionalism belied her youth—she couldn’t have more than a few years on Sarah herself—hummed a noncommittal reply, as she began pulling the pins from Sarah’s hair.

But the sweet relief of having her thick straight hair give in to gravity’s pull was negated by the truth Sarah knew, and Molly was too smart to say.

“Be honest, Molly.” Sarah finally broke the silence that had been filled only by the brush being pulled through her hair. “Tonight was a disaster.”

“It was no such thing, miss!” Molly declared, the brush never stopping. “The courses were all served on time. None of the china was cracked. And we could all hear her Ladyship’s laughter all the way in the kitchens.”

It was true. Her mother’s laugh did carry—especially when it was forced.

“I suppose your definition of success differs from mine.” Sarah sighed.

“It might at that”—Molly shrugged—“but don’t think we didn’t see you standing up to dance with that Lord Seton. He seemed a jolly sort.”

He seemed the sort to report back the answers to any and all of his probing questions to the nearest gossip columnist, Sarah thought wearily, recalling his pointed queries and his short breath, due to too-tight stays. Worse still, he was the only one to have asked her to dance. Maybe she no longer looked the type to wish for a dance.

Maybe that was one of the times the ancient woman who lived beneath her skin had slipped through the surface.

“Now, would you like to dress for bed, miss?” Molly asked, taking the pearl-headed pins and placing them precisely in the case, next to the matching jewelry. “Your parents are still in the drawing room, having a bit of cold cheese before retiring. Perhaps you’d wish to join them first?”

Sarah saw herself blanche in the mirror. But while the
thought of rehashing the evening with her parents was bad, the idea of lying in bed with nothing to do but rehash the evening to herself was even worse. She needed a distraction.

A warm glass of milk. A lurid novel. Anything that could remove her from herself.

From what they called her in whispers.

“Thank you, Molly, I can see to my dress. The kitchens must need an extra hand this evening.”

“You have the right of it, miss.” Molly smiled kindly as she curtsied. “Good evening, miss.”

“Good night, Molly,” Sarah replied distractedly.

A novel. From the library. She could slip down the servants’ staircase, and avoid the possibility of her parents hearing her on the main stairs. On the way back up, she could retrieve a glass of warm milk from the kitchens while enjoying the distracting comfort of their bustle and hum.

A novel. That should do the trick.

Unfortunately, while one could in theory avoid the drawing room doors if one were, say, leaving the house, it was impossible to cross to the library without passing said doors.

It was luck that had them closed.

It was bad luck that they were thin enough to hear through.

“It could have gone worse.” Sarah heard her father’s gruff voice as she tiptoed across the foyer. His usual booming jubilance was countered by a certain reserve. As if he were asking a question instead of knowing his own opinion.

“Not much worse,” Sarah heard in a feminine grumble of reply. She would have continued on past the drawing room doors; she would have nodded and smiled curtly to the servants bent over pails to clean as she headed briskly to the library, shutting the door behind her.

She would have done so—except for one thing. The voice that responded to her father had not belonged to her mother. It instead belonged to her sister, Bridget.

“Come now, my dear,” Lady Forrester replied this time, the weariness apparent in her voice. “I thought the evening went … as smoothly as we could expect.”

“Smoothly?” her sister scoffed. Sarah, via some previously
unknown gift for subterfuge, silently went to the door and knelt at the jamb, half concealing herself behind a potted plant. She briefly locked eyes with a footman, who was busy dusting footprints from the marble tiles in the foyer. He looked back down again and quickly resumed his work.

“
Smoothly
would have been if Sarah hadn’t looked like she was about to faint the entire time,” her sister replied in that lecturing tone she took on when she thought she knew better than everyone else. “
Smoothly
would have been if Rayne’s wedding announcement hadn’t been printed just yesterday.”

Sarah could feel the blood rising to her face. It was silent beyond the doors, Bridget’s pronouncement simply hanging in midair for the barest, longest of seconds.

The announcement. God, what horrific timing.

It had been almost four months since that terrible night, when Jason Cummings, the Duke of Rayne, had dashed everyone’s hopes and called off their engagement. Shortly thereafter, Lord and Lady Forrester had retired with their daughters for the spare remainder of the Little Season to Primrose Manor, the family seat near Portsmouth. Four months should have been plenty of time for people to forget. For Sarah to forget.

It had been peaceful at Primrose. Comfortable. There, Sarah had room to breathe.

But it was also quiet. And the quiet only let the memories slip in.

As such, she had been determined to return to London for the Season proper. New gowns, new plays, new people. It would be, in her estimation, a fresh start.

She had expected some questions. Some whispers.

But not like this.

It hadn’t helped that Jason had been so bloody
good
about the matter! Once the engagement was called off, he told everyone who would listen that absolutely no fault lay at Sarah’s door, that she was nothing if not a kind and deserving young lady. And then, blessedly, he left town for an extended stay on the Continent.

But when Jason left London, he left the gossipmongers behind.

The day after they first arrived back, the gossip columns
noted their arrival. Strange, as no one really noted the comings and goings of the Forresters before. They were proper young ladies of good family, of course, but not high ranking enough or scandalous enough to pique a newspaperman’s interest. For heaven’s sake, her father was president of the boring, stuffy, academic Historical Society. The Forresters could not have been less salacious if they tried.

But there it was. In bold print.

“The Girl Who Lost a Duke Returns to Town.”

After that, Sarah avoided the papers.

So she hadn’t known about the announcement. Until yesterday, when one of her mother’s “friends” told her.

“Oh, my dear,” Lady Whitford said, coming over to clasp Sarah’s hands in a show of sympathy early in the morning. Too early, really, to be paying calls. And far too early to be wearing such a ridiculous silk costume of patriotic ribbons across her bodice. But there she was, her round face shining with predatory concern, the feathers from her striped turban flopping into her earnest eyes. “How can you stand it? How can you go on?”

And then she told her. The Duke of Rayne had been married last week in Provence, to noted historian Winnifred Crane. Sarah tried to feel something. Anything. Other than a wistful sort of dread.

Because, while Sarah had been certain that she would be quite able to go on, contrary to Lady Whitford’s opinion, it seemed more and more people were just as certain that she wouldn’t. She couldn’t, they’d said. Enough people repeated the same thing to her with wide, sad eyes, and thus she began to question herself.

Will I be able to go on? … Should I even try?

She held out a small hope that something, anything would happen to distract the population. A global catastrophe, a declaration of war, anything. But sadly, the only bit of gossip involved some gentleman who got caught in, and then managed to escape from, Burma—and since most people could not locate Burma on a map, it was not nearly of enough interest to waylay the ogling of the “Girl Who Lost a Duke.”

Therefore, the dinner party that Lady Forrester had planned for weeks, as a casual reintroduction of herself as a hostess, while also easing her daughters into society again, had been a clamorous game of expectations. People had been expecting her to break. To make some sort of comment about the situation.

And the whispers and stares had made her want to do nothing more than oblige them.

To give in to gravity’s pull.

Bridget’s imperious voice broke the silence from within the drawing room, and broke through Sarah’s racing thoughts. “And
smoothly
would have been if anyone had bothered to remember that they were there to meet me, too.”

“Bridget!” her mother admonished, shocked.

“It’s true, Mother!” Bridget replied, adamant. “Any woman that spoke to me made sure to ask, ‘Oh, and how is your sister?’” Bridget’s voice took on a quality of mock concern, her pitch eerily like that of Lady Whitford. “And any man who thought to talk to me could barely put two words together, as if they were afraid that I was tainted with the same man-repelling stain!”

“For heaven’s sake, Bridget—” her mother tried, but Bridget would not be stopped.

“This was to be
my
Season. How am
I
supposed to catch a husband when Sarah looks like she’s going to break into pieces at the idea of a dance? She should have just married the Duke—even if he did not love her. Everything would have been better!”