A Secret Affair

“Oh, Ha

“Yes, aren’t I?” Ha

And they both laughed.

“But what are you going to do?” Barbara came back to the question and looked very directly at Ha

“I am going to do what the ton expects me to do, of course,” Ha

It sounded a little … wicked spoken aloud. It was not wicked. She was free. She owed nothing to anyone any longer. It was quite unexceptionable for a widow to take a lover provided it was a secret affair and she was discreet about it. Well, perhaps not unexceptionable. But certainly quite acceptable.

Barbara was, of course, of a different world than her own.

“Ha

Ha

“What you need,” Barbara said, her voice far firmer, “is someone to love. Romantically, I mean. Someone with whom to fall in love. Someone to marry and have children with. I know you loved the duke, Ha

She stopped and flushed again.

“Romantic love?” Ha

“You were little more than a child,” Barbara said. “And what happened was not your fault. Love will come in time.”

“Perhaps so.” Ha

“Oh, Ha

“A lover is what I am going to have,” Ha

Barbara was smiling again—with what looked like genuine amusement.

“England is said to abound with dashing rakes,” she said. “And it is quite obligatory, I have heard, that they also be outrageously handsome. I do believe, in fact, that it is against the law for them not to be. And of course almost all women fall for them—and the eternal conviction that they can reform them.”

“Why ever,” Ha

They both doubled over with mirth for a few moments.

“Mr. Newcombe is not a rake, I suppose?” Ha

“Simon?” Barbara was still laughing. “He is a clergyman, Ha

“I did not intend to imply any such thing,” Ha

Barbara’s laugh had become almost a giggle.

“Oh,” she said, “I can just picture his face if I were to tell him you had said that, Ha

“All I want of a lover,” Ha

“A lapdog, in other words,” her friend said.

“You would put remarkably strange words into my mouth, Babs,” Ha

Barbara shook her head, still smiling.

“Handsome, attractive, besotted, devoted,” she said, counting the points off on her fingers. “Masterful, very masculine. Have I missed anything?”

“Skilled,” Ha

“Experienced,” Barbara amended, flushing again. “Goodness, it ought to be quite easy to find a dozen such men, Ha

“I do,” Ha

“Conceited, perhaps,” Barbara said, smiling. “But also true. You always did, even as a girl—male and female heads, the former with longing, the latter with envy. No one was at all surprised when the Duke of Dunbarton saw you and had to have you as his duchess even though he had been a confirmed bachelor all his life. And even though it was not really like that at all.”

Barbara had come dangerously close to talking of a topic that had been strictly off-limits for eleven years. She had broached it a few times in her letters over the years, but Ha

“Of course it was like that,” she said now. “Do you think he would have afforded me a second glance if I had not been beautiful, Babs? But he was kind. I adored him. Shall we go out? Are you too tired after your travels? Or will you welcome some fresh air and the chance to stretch your legs? At this time of day Hyde Park—the fashionable part of it, at least—will be teeming with people, and one must go along to see and be seen, you know. It is obligatory when one is in town.”

“I can recall from a previous occasion,” Barbara said, “that there are always more people in the park at the fashionable hour of the afternoon than there are in our whole village on May Day. I will not know a soul, and I will feel like your country cousin, but no matter. Let us go by all means. I am desperate for some exercise.”