“ ’Twas Pearl,” he said. “She confessed when Paddy taxed her. She was jealous, crazy jealous, and when she knew that I’d be coming up to London and you’d be at Amberwood alone, she sent messages to that whoreson husband of yours and, to her credit, to your father, thinking that way to at least save you from being murdered on the spot. I near strangled her when she admitted what she’d done. Only Paddy stopped me, but he was wroth with her too. She said when I found you I should tell you she was sorry for what she did.”
“Oh, Alec,” she murmured foolishly against the solid warmth of his chest. She didn’t seem capable of saying anything else. Just his name, again and again. Like a litany. His words went completely over her head. She barely heard them. All she cared about was being back in his arms. She felt suddenly whole once more, as if half of her that had been missing had been found.
“Has the bloody bastard harmed you?”
“No. He had no more reason to, you see. My father has given him a fortune not to divorce me. For adultery. With you.” The absurdity of it struck her then, and she gave a hysterical little giggle.
As inured as she was to his language, the word he said then made the tips of her ears burn. Pushing a little away, she looked up at him. Her eyes touched every chiselled feature, caressed every well-loved plane and angle of that handsome face. His broad shoulders blocked her view of the rest of the garden, but she wouldn’t have cared if there had been a hundred spectators. She rose up on tiptoe and kissed him full on the mouth, softly and tenderly, with exquisite feeling. Then, as his arms tightened around her and his mouth took control of the kiss, the tenderness blazed into throbbing passion.
“Oh, Alec,” she said again when she could talk, her forehead bowed against him, resting just below the hollow in his neck. “I feared never to see you again.”
“No chance of that, my girl.” He was still holding her, but more loosely now, and his voice had recovered some of its normal aplomb. “ ’Twas France that threw me off, or I’d have come for you sooner. As it was, I had men scouring every nook and cranny of England. Finally a chap in Portsmouth remembered seeing a lady of your description boarding a ship. After that it was easy.”
“I’ve missed you so.”
“And I’ve missed you. It embarrasses me when I think how much. But enough of this. We’ll have time and more for this kind of foolishness once I have you safe away.”
He dropped a kiss on her hair, then another on her nose, then a third on her mouth. His arms dropped from around her waist. He caught her hand, and would have herded her from the garden. Beyond him, just outside the shoulder-high stone walls, Isabella caught a glimpse of a hulking giant and perhaps half a dozen others. Alec had brought a small army of his own, it seemed. With Paddy and the rest guarding the entrance to the garden, no wonder she and Alec found themselves completely alone.
“No, Alec,” she said gently. She knew that what she was doing was the only possible thing, but still she felt as though she were being stabbed clear through to the heart. For just a moment she allowed herself to imagine what it would be like to go with him, back to Amberwood or wherever he wished, to live with him and be his love as he had once asked her to. But then, in a blinding flash of reality, she knew that such an existence, while beautiful to imagine, would be impossible in real life. If she were to disappear again, after this time being so visible in Paris, there would be a scandal. Bernard and her father would inevitably turn up at Amberwood in a matter of days. Even if she and Alec were to go elsewhere, they would be found.
Alec, Bernard and her father would meet. There would be bloodshed. Alec would quite likely emerge the victor, but could she come to him with the blood of her legal husband or her father on his hands?
As long as Bernard lived, she had to remain his legal wife. Marriage was a sacrament, not to be put lightly aside. Alone, she could not hope to win a bill of divorcement. If Bernard divorced her—and she considered bloodshed far more likely than divorce, since an open scandal would touch his honor—the disgrace would haunt her family forever.
She shouldn’t care, but she did.
“I can’t come with you,” she said, lifting her chin in a proud gesture meant to stave off incipient tears.
“What?” He looked dumbfounded.
“I can’t come with you,” she repeated.
“You can’t come with me? Why the hell not?”
“Because I’m married, whether I like it or not. Because, although I love you, my place is with my husband.”
“What bloody tripe is this?” he all but roared. “Your bloody husband tried to have you killed!”
“I told you, I don’t think he’ll try again. He’s got money now.”
Alec stared at her. Those golden eyes bored into hers as if they could see into her very soul. “Either you’re crazed or I am. Of course you’re coming with me. I’ve moved heaven and earth to find you again, my girl.”
Arguments about bloodshed and scandal would not move him, she knew. He had no scruples about one, and cared nothing about the other. She had to fall back on the only weapon she had that she knew would infuriate him enough to drive him away.
“Listen to me, Alec,” she said in a low voice, obstinately resisting when he would have dragged her with him by main force. “Please, just listen. What we had together was a dream, a beautiful, beautiful dream. I’ll treasure the memory of it all the days of my life, but it’s time for me to wake up now, to return to reality. For both our sakes, the dream has to end.”
“Why?” He sounded stunned, and hurt, and angry. The golden eyes were beginning to shoot sparks. Looking at him, her heart aching, Isabella knew she had to deliver the killing blow. For his sake more than her own, being cruel now would be kinder in the end.
“Because of who you are … and who I am,” she said softly, and had the doubtful satisfaction of seeing all the fires of hell blaze to life in his eyes.
“Because I’m a bastard gutter rat and you’re a bloody countess,” he clarified, and dropped her hands. His expression was bitter, hating, furious. “Why not just call a spade a spade?”
“All right then, yes. That’s why.” The look in his eyes was killing her. If he was hurting half as much as she was, then he was in mortal agony. But it had to be done, and it was best done quickly.
“You snobbish little bitch,” he said then, his lip curling in a furious sneer. “I wish you joy of your bloody murderous blue-blooded husband, then, Countess. When he runs short of money again, I’ll be sure to come to your funeral.”
With that he turned on his heel and stalked from the garden. Watching him until he vanished from sight, Isabella’s heart bled.
LIX
Later that night, in a bustling little pensione off the Rue de la Paix, Alec sat bleary-eyed at a table in the taproom, systematically drinking himself into oblivion. Paddy, opposite him, eyed his friend sympathetically as he nursed his own drink, knowing that it would be up to him to steer the pair of them safely to their beds in due course. In the near quarter century that he had known Alec, he had never seen him in such a state as he had been since the little countess had so brutally spelled out the facts of life to him in the garden that afternoon. Paddy shook his head. He wasn’t much of a judge of women, he would be the first to admit that, but he wouldn’t have thought the lady had it in her to be so cold-hearted. Alec had been wild after, half-crazed with anger and a kind of … grief.
Women were the very devil, and that was the simple truth. Paddy took a long swig of his drink, and shook his head again, mournfully.
“Christ, can you believe it? She flat-out don’t want me, Paddy. She said so,” Alec muttered as he had all evening, speaking more to the golden liquid in his glass than to his friend. “Pearl was in the right of it after all. The bloody little bitch wanted me to warm ’er bed for ’er, but when it came right down to it, that’s all she wanted! She said she’s too good for me! A countess can bed a gutter rat, but she won’t run off with one!” He laughed bitterly.
“Don’t fash yourself so, Alec,” Paddy said, feeling helpless in the face of what he knew was Alec’s very real pain. “She’s not worth it. ’Ell, she’s not even a beauty; far from it, in fact! When we get ’ome again we’ll get you a real dazzler, and you’ll soon be wondering what you ever saw in such a scrawny, ’oity-toity little miss!”
“Aye,” Alec said, looking up to meet Paddy’s eyes at last. “God, I’d like to wrap my ’ands around her throat and choke the life out of ’er! When I think of ’ow bloody I was to Pearl, and ’ow I ran all over England looking for the ungrateful little bitch! ’Ell, I should send Pearl a bloody thank you note! She did me a bleedin’ favor, and I was too dumb to see it!”
“Pearl did wrong, and I admit it, but you were over-’arsh with ’er. She cried.”
“She’s cried before.” Alec was indifferent to Pearl’s heartburnings at the moment. His own heart was too sore to allow him to worry about anyone else.
“Aye, well, be that as it may, I don’t like to see it.”
Alec shifted his attention back to his glass, emptied it, and filled it again from the bottle on the table.
“You’re in love, my friend. Be careful, it’s a ’orrid state.”
“Aye.” Paddy drank to that, and refilled his own glass. Swirling the contents thoughtfully, he cast a considering look at Alec. “Mayhap you should go talk to ’er again on the morrow. Females are subject to queer starts, you know. Mayhap she didn’t mean it.”
“Oh, she meant it, all right.” Alec gave that humorless laugh again, downed the contents of his glass in a single long gulp, and refilled it for what must have been the dozenth time that night. “She meant it. No, I’m for ’ome at first light. I’ve business to see to. I’ve neglected things shamefully over the last few months. Things ’ave gone to ’ell in a ’and-basket, and it’s time I set them to rights.”
Paddy said nothing, and Alec nodded with determination.
“Aye, I’ll go ’ome, that’s what I’ll do, and the little bitch can rot in ’ell along with ’er whole blue-blooded family for all I care!”
Alec fell silent after that, drank until he passed out, and was finally carried off to bed by the slightly less inebriated Paddy.
In the morning, still obdurate, Alec climbed into a hired carriage with Paddy shortly after noon. Though his head was splitting, Alec insisted that the journey had to be begun that day. Long-suffering as ever, though his head pounded nearly as badly as Alec’s, Paddy grumbled but agreed. The men they had brought with them lined up behind the carriage, looking uncomfortable on a motley collection of post horses.
“To Le Havre,” Alec instructed the driver, while Paddy settled back against the seat for the duration. But the carriage had scarcely reached the outskirts of Paris before Alec sat bolt upright, cursing, and banged sharply on the roof to get the driver’s attention.
“What the bloody ’ell …?” Paddy began, startled, but Alec ignored him.
“Pull up,” Alec bellowed out the window, then searched for the words in French. Paddy said nothing more, just looked at him narrow-eyed as the carriage rocked to a halt. At the expression on his friend’s face, Alec smiled wryly. Paddy looked as if he knew perfectly well what Alec was about before Alec even said a word of explanation.
“Well?” Paddy cocked his head, crossing his arms over his chest, and waited.
“Fool that I am, I find that I can’t just leave the troublesome little bitch to St. Just’s less than tender mercies after all.”
Paddy sighed. “I thought as much. Well, tell the man to turn around.”
Alec shook his head. “No, you go on home and make things right with Pearl, and take care of business for me. ’Twould be nothing short of idiotic if we both stayed in Paris on account of one snot-nosed little chit. Though I’ll keep what men are already here with me. I may have need of them.”
“You sure you don’t want me to stay? You won’t do something bloody stupid, will you?” Paddy asked, frowning.
“Have I ever? Go on, now.” Alec opened the door and stepped down into the road, then, with a final wave at Paddy, told the driver to move. As the carriage rolled away he strode back to the men who had pulled up behind the carriage, commandeered a horse, and with his little band riding in silent confusion behind him, made his way back to the heart of Paris.
LX
One month passed, then another, and a third. Finally, it was December. The gray, bleak weather exactly matched Isabella’s mood. Since she had sent Alec away, the number of times she had laughed could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Give it time, she told herself each and every day. Surely she would not always suffer such excruciating emotional pain. She would adjust to the way things had to be, and look back on her too brief interlude with Alec with no more than gentle nostalgia. Of course she would. No heart could ache like hers did forever.
Outwardly, she had little trouble adapting to the far more social role she was expected to play in Paris as Bernard’s countess. At Blakely Park, there had been no one to please but herself, and Bernard on the few occasions when he had put in an appearance. But in Paris there was a continuous round of afternoon calls, soirees, and balls. Plainly dressed, quiet and unassuming, she would never be one of Society’s leading lights, but she was accepted without question everywhere, and the scandal her father had so feared never materialized. No one seemed much interested in her whereabouts before arriving in Paris, and if her relationship with her husband was cool, why, then, so were the relationships of most fashionable married couples—when they weren’t actively warring.
Isabella had even made a few friends, the closest of whom was Miss Brantley, who had become engaged to Colonel Tynling and whom she now called Ellen. Even such a high stickler as Sarah had termed Miss Brantley (the niece of the Duke of Richmond) unexceptionable, and Isabella was allowed to go about pretty much as she pleased in Ellen’s company. Of course, the ubiquitous Lambert was always in discreet attendance, as was Ellen’s maid, but that was no more escort than was proper for ladies jaunting about Paris on their own, and aroused no curiosity.
Her relationship with Sarah had improved to the point where the two women could spend several hours in each other’s company and emerge still on civil terms. Isabella got the impression more than once that, however horrified Sarah might profess to be by her stepdaughter’s indiscretion, she was also secretly envious that Isabella had dared to so flout convention as to actually take a lover.
For the first time it occurred to Isabella that Sarah, who was only a few years older than herself, should be pitied rather than despised. Sarah was less than thirty, and Isabella’s father was nearing sixty. It could not be easy being married to a man so much older than oneself, and one who was, besides, more than a little corpulent, bluff-mannered and overfond of port to the extent that he was frequently victim of the gout. To share the intimacies of the bedroom with such a husband … Well, like Isabella, Sarah doubtless had been raised to believe that to submit herself to her husband was a woman’s lot. Isabella shivered to realize that she would still be ignorantly enduring Bernard’s invasions of her body, knowing nothing of the rapture that could occur between a man and a woman who truly loved, were it not for Alec.
Alec. She could not think of him without pain. Closing her eyes, she willed the all too vivid image of him to go away. But even as the image obligingly faded, the question haunted her: If she were to find herself back in that garden with Alec, would she again send him away?
Or would she flee with him back to their wonderful, shining dream world, and love him and be loved in return for as long as the fates permitted?
She had made the right choice, the only sensible one. But knowing that didn’t even begin to make the pain of living without Alec go away.
On that particular windy December afternoon, Isabella was rambling along the granite cliffs that rose in towering majesty above the sea near Boulogne. From where she walked on a flat plateau covered with brown tufts of grass, it was a sheer drop to t
he water far below. The rocky shore had dug in under the cliff so that the ground on which she wandered formed a kind of overhang. Foaming waves rolled in from far out at sea to crash against the shore. Like the sea, the sky was gray. The line at the horizon where the two met was so similar in color as to be blurred. Overhead, a lone seagull wheeled and cried.
Isabella followed its flight with her eyes, shivered, and tugged the velvet-lined hood of her dark blue cloak closer about her head as she walked on.
She and Bernard had been invited, along with her father and Sarah and perhaps two dozen other guests, to make up a Christmas house party at the centuries-old chateau of the Marquise de la Ros. Heloise, as the marquise insisted Isabella call her, was a well-preserved, very wealthy widow in perhaps her mid-thirties. While she was too sharp-featured to have ever been a beauty, with her raven hair and slender figure she was elegant as few Englishwomen ever were. She and Bernard were quite friendly in a discreet, one-following-the-other-from-the-room-ten-minutes-later type of way. Isabella suspected, without caring one way or another, that Bernard had set the marquise up as his latest mistress. Or perhaps, given the marquise’s autocratic ways, it had been the other way around. In any case, the chateau and its grounds were beautiful, and as Isabella had had absolutely no desire to spend Christmas alone with her husband, she had not been sorry to come.
Although the evenings were crammed with entertainments designed to amuse the guests, the afternoons were free to spend as each individual preferred. The rest of the party variously napped, read or played quietly at cards, but Isabella had found that she was too restless for any of those pursuits. Instead she had spent nearly every afternoon since their arrival just as she was now doing, walking alone along the cliffs. The solitude soothed her bruised spirit while the fresh, cold air cleared her head.
Isabella had been walking for some time when she got the feeling, as she had more than once in the last few weeks, that she was no longer alone. Glancing uneasily around, she saw that the chateau looked quite small in the distance, silhouetted as it was against the lowering sky. To her left, perhaps a hundred feet away, was a dense woods of small pines. To her right was the sea. Behind her was the chateau, and before her was more flat, grassy ground.
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