Fitz stood outside Isabelle’s house.
He thought he’d learned to be levelheaded, but every emotion that tumbled through him was unrestrained, heart-stopping. Second chances—not many received such graces, and even fewer were in a position to seize them with both hands.
Dread and hope pulsed in his blood with equal intensity. So many years had passed. He’d changed. She, too, must have changed. Would they even have anything to say to each other when they came face-to-face?
He rang the bell. A maid in a large white cap and a long white bib opened the door, took his card, and asked him to follow her into the house. He stopped, however, in the vestibule, empty except for a rectangular mirror and a narrow console table underneath. A silver tray for calling cards sat on the table. Beside it, an instantly recognizable photograph.
He had a copy of the same photograph somewhere in the depths of his dressing room. It had been taken near the end of his first stay at the Pelham house, the ladies in their Sunday finery seated in the front row, the gentlemen, a solemn-looking lot, standing behind them. He himself looked impossibly young; Isabelle was uncharacteristically demure, her hands folded chastely in her lap.
But those hands concealed a secret. Directly after the photographer pronounced himself satisfied, she’d pulled Fitz aside and given him what she’d been stowing in her pocket: a tiny dormouse she’d named Alice. Alice had been the perfect pet for a busy student: She hibernated for much of Michaelmas Half and all of Lent Half, emerging only in April to live in his pocket on a delicate diet of berries, nuts, and an occasional caterpillar.
“I always keep that photograph close to me,” said a familiar voice. “It’s the only one I have of you.”
He set down the photograph and carefully, slowly, turned toward her.
Isabelle.
She was both taller and leaner than he remembered—and not eighteen anymore. Her face had settled into a somewhat harsher shape. There was tension to the contour of her jaw. Her skin seemed to require a greater effort to stretch over her features.
But those features were as chiseled and proud as ever. Her hair was the same blue black. The fire in her eyes remained undiminished. And in the intensity of her gaze he recognized the Isabelle Pelham of yesteryear.
And at the sight of her, long-lost memories, recollections that had become as faded as pages in an ancient manuscript, suddenly reacquired color, brightness, and focus. Isabelle in spring, holding an armful of hyacinths. Isabelle in her white tennis dress, waving her racquet at him, her smile brighter than the sun shining on the deep green lawn. Isabelle crunching fallen leaves underfoot, turning occasionally to say something to her governess, who trailed several steps behind them, and whom he barely noticed, because he had eyes only for his girl.
“Mrs. Englewood,” he said. “How do you do?”
“Fitz, my goodness,” she murmured. “You are exactly as I remember you. Exactly.”
He smiled. “I still look nineteen?”
“No, of course not. You are a man full grown. But the essence of you has not changed at all.” She shook her head slightly, as if in wonder. “Come, we can’t hold a conversation in a passage. Let’s sit down.”
The tea things had already been laid out in readiness. Isabelle poured for them both.
“Tell me everything,” she said.
“Tell me about India,” he said at the same time.
They both smiled. He insisted that she regale him first with her stories, so she did. Delhi was unbearably hot in the month of April. Kashmir was very likely the most beautiful place on earth, especially Srinagar on the shores of Dal Lake. And she enjoyed the food of Hyderabad the best. He, in turn, gave her the latest on their mutual friends and acquaintances: courtships, marriages, children, and scandals minor and major.
An hour flew by.
Eventually she lifted her teacup and looked at him. “You haven’t said a thing about yourself, Fitz. How have you been?”
How had he been? “I can’t complain,” he said.
Isabelle’s gaze was fluid and just slight mocking. A smile played at the corners of her lips. How well he recalled this particular expression on her—she was about to say something naughty. “I hear you have been very successful with the ladies.”
He lowered his gaze. Between the two of them, he’d always been the shyer one. “It’s a way to pass time.”
A way to cope—and to forget.
“Lady Fitzhugh is very understanding, then.”
“She’s always been very sensible.”
“When I was still in India I’d heard it said that the two of you got on very well. I hadn’t quite believed it—but I guess it’s true.”
At last they came to it, the subject of his marriage. Her face turned somber, her gaze that of one regarding a friend’s tombstone.
“For someone who had no say in the matter,” he said, “I’ve been fortunate in the wife I’ve been allotted.”