Hope - Lesley Pearse [149]
‘Why do you mention my uncle?’ Bennett asked, facing her and taking hold of both her arms. He had that stern look he always wore when he was concerned. ‘And why do you call yourself a guttersnipe?’
‘That’s how he sees me, doesn’t he?’ she said. ‘He wouldn’t like it if he knew you had brought me here, would he?’
‘No, he wouldn’t,’ Bennett admitted. ‘But he is not my keeper. I am my own person, I don’t allow him to control me.’
‘But you live in his house, and therefore you must be beholden to him.’
‘To a certain extent, yes. But only as far as deferring to his greater experience in the practice he built up, and treating his home with respect. I do not allow him to choose my friends.’
‘But you have to hide ones like me away. You couldn’t invite me to Harley Place if he were there, could you?’
Bennett neither denied nor acknowledged that was true. He continued walking, saying nothing. Hope trotted after him, aware she’d already said too much, and not in a manner that would endear her to him.
When they got to the banks of the river, Bennett stopped, staring out at the water which was just a sluggish strip between vast swathes of greasy-looking mud. With the leaden sky above and the few trees growing along the riverside bare of leaves, looking skeletal and grim, the scene had none of the beauty it would have at high tide in sunshine.
‘I haven’t hidden you away,’ he suddenly burst out. ‘The epidemic was so bad there were no opportunities to do anything more than try to fight it. My first thought as the last cases either died or went home was about you, in particular your future and my feelings for you. That’s exactly why I asked you to come here with me.’
Hope didn’t know how to reply to that, so she said nothing.
‘Well?’ he said sharply. ‘No sarcastic comment?’
‘I’m sorry,’ she murmured. ‘I spoke out of turn.’
His chin was jutting out as if he was angry, and his eyes seemed to be boring right into her.
‘I am in a dilemma, Hope,’ he said. ‘It is the circumstances of how we met which make it so very difficult. If I’d met you at a party or a dinner, I’d know exactly how to behave with you. I’d come calling, I might give you a book of poetry, I could even ask my uncle to arrange some function so we could talk and be seen enjoying each other’s company. I would then invite you to the theatre or a concert, and provided you had a suitable chaperone, and you and your family didn’t take an immediate dislike to me, we could then embark on a courtship.
‘But I can’t do any of that with you, Hope. You don’t live with your family, you have no suitable person as a chaperone.’
‘I don’t have the right clothes or manners either,’ Hope said glumly.
He made a kind of exasperated growl in his throat. ‘That isn’t it, Hope! Not your manners, background or anything like that. Don’t you see it? I love you.’
Hope blinked in astonishment.
‘I fell for you almost the first minute I sawyour beautiful face,’ he went on. ‘Every moment with you since then has confirmed that you are the only girl in the whole world for me. All those social niceties mean absolutely nothing to me. But I am trapped in a situation where they are important to everyone else, and if I flout them, you would be the one who would suffer.’
Hope had been sure when he was talking about chaperones, concerts and families that he was just trying to show her why she could never fit into his world. But then he’d said he loved her, and that cancelled out everything else.
‘You love me?’ she whispered, bubbles of delight running down her spine. ‘Truly?’
He looked at her with the mournful eyes of a spaniel. ‘Yes, Hope. Truly! Madly and deeply. I spend all day thinking of you, I invent excuses to see you, I can’t sleep at night for imagining kissing you.’
‘Oh, Bennett.’ She flung herself into his arms impulsively. ‘I love you too, it’s just that way for me too.’
She stood on tiptoe to kiss him, and as