CHAPTER EIGHT: A PLACE I CAN NEITHER SPELL NOR PRONOUNCE

CHAPTER EIGHT

A PLACE I CAN NEITHER SPELL NOR PRONOUNCE

Alasdair rapped on the door of Miss Trent’s apartment and waited. He was aware of the silently closed doors of the other four apartments on this floor, aware of the potential for any one of those doors to open and an enquiring face to appear and questions to follow. But the doors remained silently closed. The questions he feared were not asked.

Yet some person was abroad for, as he stood there waiting, the newly installed lift jerked into life and rattled wheezily upwards, passing him and going on to the top floor. Its doors clanged open then shut again, and the lift wheezed and rattled its laborious way down once more. The lift clattered to a halt on the ground floor and at the same moment the door before which he stood opened.

Verity was not expecting him.

This was clear to him the moment she opened the door and stood in the doorway in her pastel green skirt and her little matching jacket, her hat already pinned into place on her head, her hair neatly arranged. Behind her on the console table lay her gloves and her reticule. And even if her apparel had not told him this, her face did. A look part confusion, part consternation crossed her face, her lips parted then at once closed again. The confusion, the consternation was quickly gone. She met his eyes and then she looked away. She was quite pale.

Despite this, his senses intensified at sight of her, his being soared, and the fear that lived permanently in his soul that other men would see in her what he saw flared agonisingly. He had a curious feeling that many lives had been lived by him and by her until their fates had, finally, in this life, collided. It was curious because he did not, in any way, believe in such things, yet still he felt it.

‘You were expecting me? You received my note?’

She shook her head. ‘I received no note. If you recall,’ she went on, ‘I told you I have an appointment this morning.’

Indeed, she had told him this and he had quite forgotten, or had chosen to forget. But he had sent her a note three days ago. It unsettled him that she had not received it. That his plans had been spoiled.

He nodded and said, ‘Yes, of course,’ because no man wishes to look foolish.

She had given him no explanation of the appointment and seemed disinclined to provide one now, and Alasdair would not demand one of her, though he rather thought he deserved one, that it was his due.

He was a gentleman, even if she was not, quite, a lady.