Disclaimer: Disney's
Retreat and Regroup
The carriage trundled down the hill, the music fading away on the night air, air that was sea-fresh now, rather than laden with the scents of glowing candles, and brilliant flowers, rich foods, and perfumed bodies. The sibilant tumult of voices was left behind, too. And all those eyes: admiring debutants and their calculating mothers, the guarded friendliness of his junior officers, the amusement of the Governor, and Sparrow's studied innocence. And Harry, gleeful expectation and curiosity quite overriding the prim expression on her pretty countenance.
Damn the little wretch. She should have been sitting before a fire, knitting or…or whatever women did when awaiting the birth of a child, rather than orchestrating elaborate entertainments – a ball, for Heaven's sake! Exhausting in plan and execution, even with a pack of underlings at one's beck and call. Sparrow was most irresponsible to have allowed it, and so he would tell him on the morrow.
It would, perhaps, serve to mask the true cause of his irritation.
He did not feel he was indulging in vanity. No. There was little doubt that the entire affair had been planned with him in mind. To throw Maggie in his path.
Lady Margaret Holliday.
Who must have known, herself, and yet had said nothing to dissuade her meddling friend from staging this ill-advised and all-too-obvious attempt at matchmaking.
Why had she not? What did it signify?
Was he now supposed to hope?
Widowed, was she? And older. He gave a slight snort of unamused laughter. They were both of them older, God knew. She had been, for too long now, only a dream of youth, perfect, yet bittersweet, and uttterly lost to him. Or so he'd thought.
She was astonishingly lovely. She always had been, but was even more so now. Over the years, his mind's eye had lost the ability to conjure up her image —or perhaps he had tried to forget. Only component parts had lingered in memory. A wide brow, usually edged with a few wisps of curling, pale gold: her silken hair ever refusing to be quite confined to a smoothly elegant coiffure. The nose, straight, with delicately molded nostrils. A rather decided chin. Cheeks touched with the delicate color of new roses: made for kissing! As was that mouth, tender and tragic, and supposedly a little too wide for classic beauty: he could not now remember who had made that remark, in former days. Good God, what an absurdity!
She was tall, for a woman, and still slender as a girl, after…how many children? They had told him, he thought, but his attention had been arrested, as usual, by her eyes. Smiling eyes, they'd been, and blue as the sea they were still. But now a womanly gravity lingered within them, something that spoke of pain suffered, endured, and set behind. Eyes open to the present, and looking to the future.
Lady Margaret Holliday. Maggie. His Maggie.
He frowned, and shifted uncomfortably on the seat of the coach. Studied as objectively as he could his feelings on the matter. And found that he could not do so, for the strange feeling in his chest. Nerves? The rites of courtship had never come easily to him. He'd learned that first with Maggie, and then more recently, with Elizabeth.
Elizabeth! He'd barely thought of her tonight. How odd. And only a year ago…
But things had changed so much since then. And things had changed even more since the sun had set this evening.
Maggie. His Maggie.
And all at once, breath catching at his own temerity, he finally recognized the strange feeling that had taken hold of him tonight: the hope…no, the promise of happiness. -.-