She Fled Her Wedding — Then Found the Duke Escaping on the Same Train
Chapter 17
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Piers stood a little apart until the porter had finished loading. Annora went to him."You have brought no valise," she observed."I am practicing remaining where I said I would. Will you write?""Yes.""Even if nothing has happened?""Especially then. You may regret asking."She wanted him to kiss her. She also wanted her father, the porter, three elderly ladies, and a man eating a pear to vanish temporarily. Neither wish seemed likely to be fulfilled without assistance. So, she stepped forward and kissed him herself.Mr. Bramwell developed an urgent interest in the timetable.On the train, Rowena offered Annora a corner of the food parcel. "Are you crying?""No."Her sister waited."Yes, a little. It is possible to wish to go and still dislike leaving. I had hoped to be simpler than that."Rowena handed her a sandwich. "Then you chose the wrong family."The first fortnight abroad was sufficiently busy to make missing Piers an occasional inconvenience. By the third week, it had become a companion with particular habits: it appeared beside an ugly ornament in a shop, at the end of a good dinner, halfway through a story Annora could imagine him telling better.She wrote to him about all of it. At first, she described the admirable things she had seen; then she began to describe the things she had actually noticed: Lucius losing his temper with a trunk, Rowena's disastrous attempt to bargain over a piece of lace, the embarrassment of finding that she preferred an unremarkable church to the famous one everyone had told her to admire.Piers replied that a committee meeting had lasted so long he had begun to envy the furniture, which at least was not expected to speak. His oldest horse had acquired a dislike of a particular gate. His mother had invited a friend to stay and had told the housekeeper to remove the room's most uncomfortable chair before the friend arrived; he wondered how many previous guests had suffered in it out of respect.He did not turn every letter into a declaration. Once, he wrote only two pages, most of them about rain. Annora read those pages in bed and missed him so fiercely that she had to put them down.In October, they quarreled by post. He suggested visiting in November and named dates without asking which would suit. She had just been invited elsewhere with Rowena and Lucius. Instead of telling him that, she wrote that his arrangements sounded agreeable, then grew cross when his next letter assumed they were settled.