The Gilded Web

by Mary Balogh

  She turned toward him reluctantly. “I would like to see the other place,” she said. “Is it close by? Is it as lovely as this?” She shrugged and half-smiled at her choice of word.

  “Yes, it is close,” he said. “It is rather different from this.”

  It was a stone hut built into the side of the hill at some undetermined time in the past for some undetermined reason.

  “I used to think it was once a gamekeeper’s hut,” he said. “But why would it have been built so high up? Was it a hermitage perhaps when the old house was first built or when the old monastery still stood at the other side of the valley? I like to think so, but no one now living seems to know for sure. Indeed, no one seemed even to know it existed when I first discovered it as a boy. And everyone else seems to have forgotten about its existence since. Perhaps it would seem absurd to everyone but me that it is almost the most important spot on this earth to me.”

  It was very different from the clearing they had just left. The treetops around them were just too high to allow a view into the valley. All that was visible around were the tops of trees behind them and stretching below and climbing the hillside opposite, and the sky above them. But Alexandra knew immediately what he meant. There was total seclusion, total peace, here.

  She stopped herself from saying that it was lovely.

  “Come,” he said, pulling open the heavy wooden door of the stone hut and stepping inside. He had lit a candle by the time she reached the doorway.

  There was a roughly carved table and bench inside and a bed of straw with a folded blanket against one wall. Against the other was another bench piled with books and papers, quill pens and an inkwell.

  “It is my hermitage,” he said, looking at her with an expression that was not quite a smile. He looked uncertain. “Sometimes I escape here for an hour or two. Sometimes I even spend a night here. At such times I usually invent some story about business taking me from home.”

  “Does anyone know?” she asked. “Anyone else?”

  “No,” he said. “I have never told anyone but you.”

  Alexandra turned away and stepped back out into the sunlit clearing. Why had he told her? Why had he brought her here and shown her? Was it so important to him that he befriend her? And yet he did not wish to marry her. His sister had told her that the day before, but she would have known anyway. He had not answered her question about whether he would ever have married or not. And he had spoken with warm affection about the mistress he had been forced to give up because of her. He had just admitted to great frustration at her terrible reticence.

  He was making such a great effort for her sake. Did she not owe him something in return? She owed him something, some vulnerability.

  “You must be ready for tea,” he said from behind her. His voice sounded weary.

  She spun around to face him. “Thank you,” she said curtly. “Thank you, Edmund.” But the words sounded angry, as if she resented the web of obligation he was weaving around her. And she did not want to sound angry.

  Perhaps he understood. He smiled, his blue eyes kindly again. “You are to be my wife, Alex,” he said. “I do not believe a husband and wife should have secrets from each other.”

  “I will not come back here,” she said hurriedly. “This is your place. It will remain so. I will never intrude.”

  He continued to smile. “Don’t make a promise,” he said. “Promises are so very binding on honorable people. Everything I have will be yours, dear, including this if you ever need it.”

  She felt her breath quickening as she looked at him—at his thick dark hair, his smiling blue eyes, the broadness of his shoulders and chest so very obvious beneath the linen of his shirt. She thought she would faint. But she owed him something.

  “Kiss me again!” she said impulsively. Her eyes widened as she heard the words come from her mouth, and her heart began to thump in her throat.

  He set his hands on her shoulders and lowered his head. His blue eyes searched hers. She closed her eyes.

  His mouth touched hers lightly, his lips slightly parted as they had been the day before. She held hers steady, waiting tensely for the moment when he would release her and she would be free again.

  But when she found herself a few moments later gazing into his eyes a mere few inches from her own, noting their questioning expression, she knew that it was not enough after all. She had allowed something, but had given nothing. And she wanted to give something. She could not resist the need to give.

  She lifted her hands to his sides and grasped the warm linen of his shirt. She raised her mouth to his and moved toward him as he bent his head to her again. She touched the strong muscles of his chest with her breasts, those of his thighs with her own. And she deliberately abandoned the aloofness that always kept her apart from others, private and contained within herself.

  At some time over the next minutes—how many?—she took fire. At some time she allowed his tongue to part her lips, and opened her mouth to its more intimate penetration. At some time she allowed his hands to pull loose her hairpins so that her hair cascaded all around them. At some time she allowed those same hands to pull her blouse free from the band of her skirt and move beneath it and up along the thin silk of her shift.

  And at some time she felt the thickness of his hair and the firmness of his shoulders, and pulled loose his own shirt so that her hands could caress the rippling muscles of his back.

  When he raised his head again, she knew from the body pressed to her own, with a knowledge that had never been taught her, that she was desired. And she saw it in his face, in the heavy-lidded dreamy blue eyes that looked into her, far beyond her eyes.

  There was a moment of choice, a moment during which she knew she was on the brink of an experience that would forever change her, forever decide the course of her life. A moment during which she wanted and wanted to pass beyond that brink, to give herself, to lose herself, to end the newly conceived struggle to assert herself. A moment only.

  And then she panicked.

  When she came to herself, she was almost at the bottom of the hill, the trees thinning before her, the river already in sight. The sobbing sounds that had finally penetrated her hearing were coming from her own throat. Lord Amberley was coming down behind her, she knew, though he had called her name only once, when she had first broken away from him and begun to run blindly downhill.

  She slowed her pace when she reached the bottom, and began to walk in the direction of the horses, which she could see quite a distance downstream. She pushed her blouse back inside her skirt with frenzied hands.

  “Alex,” Lord Amberley said, coming up beside her and looking searchingly at her. He did not say anything more.

  Alexandra averted her face. “It was all my fault, not yours,” she said. “This will not work at all. You do not wish to marry me, and I do not wish to marry you. We have both somehow been trapped into this, and I think we both resent it. If I marry you, I will be forever stranded in a world in which I can never be comfortable. And if you marry me, you will be forever miserable. I cannot give you the love and affection and spontaneity that you want of me. I am incapable of changing. And I don’t want to change. I must go away from here. I cannot marry you.”

  “Alex,” he said, touching her arm briefly, but not leaving his hand there, “you are quite overwrought. I don’t know if I owe you an apology or not. We were both involved in that embrace, but I should not have allowed it to get out of hand as it did. I have more experience than you. I should have known that you would take fright. I did not intend to allow matters to progress quite so far.”

  She was trying to confine her hair on top of her head again without any hairpins with which to do it.

  “Here,” he said, holding out a few in the palm of his hand. “I retrieved these. Alex, please don’t do anything hasty. Allow yourself to calm down. Completely. Give yourself a day or two. Breaking off our betrothal would have terrible repercussions for you, I believe. And you know, wha
t has just happened is not so terrible really. You are upset because this has never happened to you before. But passion between a man and a woman is not an ugly thing. Between two who are to be husband and wife it is even desirable, is it not?”

  “I suppose it has happened to you a thousand times,” she said, jabbing at her head with the one remaining hairpin and reaching for her hat, “and I am just one more victim to be seduced.”

  “That is not fair,” he said quietly. “You know there was no seduction, Alex. And no, I am not familiar with passion. It is not an element of all relationships, you know.”

  “No, I do not know,” she said, rounding on him, her face flushed, her hair untidy. “And I do not wish to know. I want nothing to do with you, my lord. Nothing at all. I want to be myself. I cannot marry you.”

  “And you cannot be yourself and my wife at the same time, you think?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “No, I can’t. I must leave. I will talk to Mama and James.”

  “Alex,” he said, standing in front of the horses so that she had no choice but to look at him, “please don’t be rash. Please don’t. I am sorry for what happened. I should have known better. But you need me. I know that at the moment you think that any life would be preferable to being with me. But give yourself time to be sure that that is right. Weigh the alternatives. I know I am not the man you would have chosen for yourself. But you need my protection. And I will give it willingly, Alex. And I will try to give you room so that you may grow accustomed to this life, which is so strange to you. Please do not act on impulse today or even tomorrow. Promise me you will wait for a few days at least.”

  She looked at him, her eyes stormy. “Oh, yes,” she said, “I will promise. We both know that I cannot break this engagement. And we both know that I am being thoroughly unfair to you right now. And we both know that I need you, that I cannot function as a member of our society without you. You have my promise, Edmund.”

  He closed his eyes briefly, and she could see him draw a deep breath. “I am sorry for your bitterness, Alex,” he said, “and sorry that you are so upset. Let me help you into the saddle again. We will go home in search of tea.”

  She rode the distance back to the house, her chin high, and blanked her mind. She must be calm before they got back. And she must hope that no one would see her disheveled state. She tried to forget that Lord Amberley was riding silently just half a length behind her.

  DA-DUM-DUM, DA-DUM-DUM,” MADELINE SANG, grabbing her twin around the waist and attempting to twirl him into a dance. “We are going to waltz again tonight, Dom, and skip and hop and reel. Is not life wonderful?”

  “Are you trying to tip me down the stairs?” her brother asked, shaking off her hands and resuming the absorbing task of straightening out his lace cuffs over the backs of his hands. “This is not the time or place to trip the light fantastic, Mad. Wouldn’t I make an elegant descent to the hall if I went tumbling head over ears down the whole marble flight?”

  “Especially since I would rush shrieking behind you,” she said, giggling. “Come then, Dom, since you and I have emerged from our dressing rooms at identical moments, let me take your arm and we shall descend with all sedate dignity.”

  But as they began to do so, she struck up with “Da-dumdum, da-dum-dum” again, descending the stairs to the hall below in time to the waltz tune she hummed none too musically.

  “What has put you in such high spirits?” Lord Eden asked, hauling back ungraciously on her arm. “The prospect of dancing in Courtney’s crowded parlor? The anticipation of dancing with Howard Courtney?”

  She laughed gaily. “Howard is so very earnest and so very faithful,” she said. “It just is not kind to make fun. I shall dance with him once, you will see. But those officers, Dom! I know we saw them only from a distance this afternoon, but how very splendid they looked. Why is a gentleman in a uniform so totally irresistible?”

  “Imagine them out of a uniform in twenty years’ time when the wars are long over,” her brother said unsympathetically. “You have to live with a man, not a uniform, if you marry him, Mad.”

  “You are so unromantic,” she said with a mock sigh.

  “Besides,” he said, “if you love a military uniform so much, why do you almost collapse in a fit of the vapors every time I mention donning one myself?”

  “Oh, don’t start that now,” she said. “I positively refuse to talk about anything even remotely serious for the next twelve hours at the very least. And I am not planning to marry any of these officers, silly. Just dance with them. And perhaps flirt with them ever so little.” She giggled.

  “And probably be head over ears in love with at least one of them by tomorrow morning,” he said. “You see, we are not the first down after all, Mad.”

  Sir Cedric, James Purnell, and Lord Amberley were in conversation together. Alexandra was talking with Lady Amberley. Only Lady Beckworth was still not downstairs.

  “The carriages are ready,” Lord Amberley said. “Perhaps you would like to start on your way, Dominic, with Madeline and Alex and Mr. Purnell? The rest of us will follow immediately.”

  Madeline smiled and took Alexandra’s arm. “You and I will exercise a lady’s right and sit facing the horses, Alexandra,” she said. “It is not quite fair, is it? But men have so many privileges that are not available to us, that we must take what we can.” She felt embarrassed about her attempt of the day before to further her twin’s schemes to save his older brother from the fate of having to marry Alexandra. She had told Dominic earlier that she would have no more part in his plans. She was going to do her best to make a friend of Alexandra, whichever brother she ended up marrying.

  Madeline chattered determinedly throughout the journey. Dominic could be trusted to do his part, of course, and she found Alexandra surprisingly easy to talk with when they were alone together. But Mr. Purnell made her thoroughly uncomfortable. It seemed to be inevitable that she be thrown into his company quite frequently at the house. But she felt his disapproval. He seemed so often to be looking at her from those intense and hostile dark eyes. Her high spirits over the evening to come were partly relief at the prospect of having other young men to look at and talk to and dance with. Other young men who would perhaps admire her. Madeline was used to being made much of, though she would admit that at the age of twenty-two she must expect admiration to begin to wane. One of these days she was going to meet the man she could really love and then she was going to get contentedly married.

  “Farmhouse” was rather a misnomer for the solid red brick house that Mr. Courtney had built twenty years before. It was no mansion. It would have been lost if set beside Amberley Court. Nevertheless, it was an imposing building, quite comfortably large for a family of seven. Mr. Courtney was a tenant farmer, but one who was very comfortably well-off, more so than many a landowner. The greatest delight of his heart and of his wife’s was to have guests. If they could entertain anyone from the Hall, their cup of joy was full. On this occasion, when eight people from the Hall sat down with them for a dinner of five full courses, their cup almost literally ran over. Certainly the quantities of food would scarce fit on the sideboard or on the plates of the guests.

  The parlor had never been dignified with the name of drawing room. It might have been, being large enough to serve as a quite respectably sized ballroom on this occasion, as it had on others. But Mr. Courtney had a strong sense of his own place on the social scale. His wealth he would enjoy, but he had no pretensions to gentility. In his own mind and vocabulary, he was still a farmer, his house a farmhouse, and his main room of entertainment a parlor. If he did have an ambition to reach beyond his status, it was to see his daughter well married. He had no wish to see such beauty and refinement wasted on another farmer such as he.

  Miss Courtney was seated beside Mr. Purnell during dinner and blushed and chattered her way through the meal even though she drew only polite response from him. By the end of dinner she had somehow got him to reserve the opening
dance with her. Since the second dance was to be a waltz and Lord Eden had solicited her hand for that the day before, she was entirely happy.

  Madeline continued gay, despite the fact that she had Mr. Howard Courtney seated beside her at dinner. She really did not dislike Howard. She would be quite happy to sit beside him and talk to him, and dance with him too, if he did not persist in looking at her with worshipful eyes and making stilted, worshipful speeches. She had told him four years before and several times since that she could think of him only as a childhood playmate and not as anything else. But nothing seemed to have changed. She might have been able to feel anger against him if he were not such a thoroughly likable person. He looked a great deal like his father. Indeed he seemed to be getting more portly every time she saw him. He had his father’s geniality too, without his blustering joviality.

  But Madeline refused to have her spirits lowered. All the other near neighbors were to come for the dancing too, including Sir Peregrine Lampman, who had always paid her such lavish compliments until he had married a woman ten years older than he two years before. Since then his manner had been distant. She suspected that Lady Grace Lampman was a tyrant. And there was Mr. Watson, the handsome poet farmer, whom Susan considered too old for herself. And of course her uncle and aunt and Walter. And there were the officers from the regiment stationed outside Abbotsford. Surely one or both of them would be handsome. One could not be an officer and not be handsome. It was strictly forbidden.

  The younger Miss Stanhope was to play the pianoforte for the dancing, and the third Courtney son the violin. Not very impressive when one was used to London balls during the Season, as Mrs. Courtney had pointed out to her guests at dinner with apologetic voice and flapping hands. But a dance is a dance, Madeline reflected, brightening considerably when two officers in full regimentals entered the parlor and Mr. Courtney proceeded to present them to all the company already assembled. The one in front, the tall one, was extremely handsome, and the other was quite passably good-looking. Captain Forbes immediately solicited her hand for the first waltz, Lieutenant Jennings for the second. Captain Forbes was the very handsome one.