by Karen Ranney
Michael felt as if a brick had struck him. “Did she tell you that?”
“No,” she said, “but she didn’t have to. I’ve had four children of my own, Michael. I know the signs well enough. She has that look, for one. And the smell of chocolate made her ill. I was the same with Charlotte.”
She glided across the foyer as if she didn’t see him standing there, dumbstruck. Smytheton opened the door for her, bowed. She turned and glanced at Michael. “But do not take my word for it,” she said sharply. “Ask her yourself.”
Michael took the stairs two at a time. Whatever he expected to find, it was not Margaret seated at the end of the bed, wearing her faded green cotton dress. Her hands were linked together on her lap, her feet crossed at the ankles. Beside her on the bed was the blue dress she’d worn earlier, topped with the shawl he’d given her.
He entered the room, closed the door behind him. She didn’t look up as he approached her, only fixed her attention on her linked hands.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he said, his voice too loud. He stood before her and attempted to calm himself.
Her head jerked up and she stared at him wide-eyed. If anything, she grew more pale.
“Tell you what?” she asked. A paltry attempt at brazening it out, he thought.
“About the child. My child.” His look dared her to deny it.
It seemed to him as if the moments thudded past with their own sound. A drumbeat, heavy and ponderous.
“How do you know?” she asked finally, her voice faint.
A confession couched in a question.
“My mother informed me. Evidently, having four children has given her some insight into life,” he said dryly. “Perhaps I should be grateful for her timely interference. Were you bloody well going to tell me, Margaret?” He continued to gaze at her, hoping that he appeared more calm than he felt. “Or were you just going to fade away into nothingness? Never letting me know? Never telling me that I sired a child?”
“Why?” she asked, standing. “So that you could label him your bastard?”
He was taken aback by her anger.
“I never wanted you to know,” she said, and the truth of that statement rang out in her words. Idiotic to feel a spurt of pain at her comment.
“Why not?” There, a rational enough question.
She gripped one of the posts, studied the carving intently. “Because you would never stop trying to convince me to stay with you.”
“You’re right,” he said. “I won’t.”
She frowned at him.
“At least he would be provided for,” he said. “Or do you intend to raise him in your cottage? Educate him as well? I do not doubt that you are a good teacher, Margaret, but I could provide him with better schools.”
“You probably could, Michael,” she said, turning aside. “But then he would be forever known as the Earl of Montraine’s bastard.”
Another startling blow. How adept she was becoming at delivering verbal wounds.
“Better than being poor, Margaret,” he said, in an effort to ward off the effect of her words.
She narrowed her eyes and stared at him. “Is it? My grandmother earned money by tatting lace and taking in washing. Her knuckles were so red and swollen that sometimes she wept in her sleep. I was called Margaret Long Toes because my shoes never fit. I’d cut out the toes so that I could keep wearing them. There were days, Michael, when there was not enough to eat and I went to sleep early in order to dream of food. Do not try to teach me about being poor.”
A formidable woman. She had lost what stability she’d had with her husband’s death, yet had transformed herself. A teacher, a woman of the country. Now a mother, dedicated and protective even before her child was born.
“The poor have pride, too, Michael. Perhaps more than the rich because it means more to us.”
Anger gave her some color. At least now she was not so pale.
“You can’t leave me, Margaret,” he said stubbornly. Reasonably. He was waging a war of wills and words, one he’d never expected to have. But then, he’d not thought that she would come to mean so much to him. Or that she would be carrying his child. Nor had he ever considered that the realization would create yet another emotion inside him—an ebullient pride.
“Do you remember Covent Garden, Michael? The women who strutted about the theater district with their skirts pulled up, the better for the world to see what they were? Is that what you wish to make of me?” Her eyes flashed at him.
“Bloody hell, Margaret.” He strode to the fireplace in order to put some distance between them. He needed time to think, to marshal his arguments. She had effectively punctured his logic and shown him the weakness of his reasoning.
“My husband was a duke’s bastard. The nobility of his sire did not make his illegitimacy easier to bear. Is that what you want for your child, to be mocked at school? To be called bastard?”
“Do you really think that now is the time to bring up your damnably sainted husband?” he asked caustically.
“Stop swearing at me,” she said testily.
“I want to do more than that, Margaret,” he admitted. “I want to strip you naked, tie you to this bed and force you to remain there until you start making some bloody, damnable sense!”
Her eyes widened. Good. She should be a little wary of him at the moment. Rage had a cleansing effect, Michael noted. He felt as if it burned from the inside out, the fuel being all the petty exasperations of his days, the irritants he’d buried for years.
“Why are you so angry?” she asked him, courageous enough to look at him again. He wanted to warn her that he was changing as the moments passed, becoming someone not quite himself.
Why was he so angry? Because she was slipping away from him and there was not one damn thing he could do about it. Because she was right, and he saw that just as he saw his own actions in a kind of magnifying glass. The shame he felt warred with other, more dominant emotions. Need, desire, a possessiveness that shocked him.
He stood at the fireplace, fists clenched, fascinated to discover that rage was bringing forth a new man. This man wanted to throw the new gowns his mother had purchased on dubious credit out in the street, trample on the bonnets his sisters nonchalantly ordered, flail his arms like a madman and rail at every damn woman on the face of the earth. But more, he wanted to keep her with him no matter the cost. No matter what he had to do to ensure it.
“Is it pride, Montraine? Is that all this is?”
He glanced over his shoulder at her.
She walked toward him. He stiffened, looked away from her, furious. Instead of anger, there were tears in her eyes. “Let me go, Michael,” she softly said. “This will not aid us at all. It will only ruin the memories of these past days.” When she reached him, she reached up and pressed four fingers gently against his lips.
“There is nothing you can say to me that will convince me,” she said softly. “It is perhaps not a shocking thing for a man to have a mistress. Quite another to be one. I find that I do not like being called whore. And I could not bear it if our child was labeled a bastard as he surely will be if I stay.”
It felt almost as if a door was swinging shut, slowly. An odd reaction to repudiation. The pain of it surprised him.
“I don’t want to be your whore, Michael. I don’t want you.”
That was new. Something altogether innovative. He forced a smile to his face to mask his sudden surprised hurt.
“I’m supposed to simply accept your decision, Margaret? Walk away and forget?”
“You have no choice,” she said simply. “I was only a challenge to you, Michael,” she said. “And you told me yourself you don’t like being bested.”
Let her go. Settle an amount of money on her. Ask her to inform him when the child is born. Marry your heiress and send more money on an annual basis. Arrange to do so through his solicitor. Arrange for the child’s schooling. His conscience had a hundred suggestions. If he wished to handle the sit
uation in a pragmatic fashion, there were options available to him.
How strange that they were all unacceptable.
He didn’t know how to say all he wished to say to her. The words should have come easier than they did. Instead, they crouched, cowardly, in his throat.
I admire your strength, Margaret, your wit and the way you look at the world. I glory in your mind and cherish your thoughts. Even your anger fascinates me.
When had this enchantment with her happened? When they’d laughed together on the river? Or in the theater when she’d sat so still and proud while everyone gossiped about her? Or on a terrace when she’d almost kissed him? Did it matter when it had happened? It had. Simply put, it had.
“Can you so easily forget me, Margaret?”
“I will have to,” she said softly. But he noted that she did not quite look him in the eye.
“What are you going to do, Margaret? Will your villagers not think it a little strange that a woman two years widowed is bearing a child? It will be a little difficult to convince the villagers that the child is the sainted Jerome’s.” At the look on her face he bit back an oath. “That’s exactly what you’re going to do, isn’t it?” The words she’d said to him a week ago resounded in his mind. She’d hinted at it then. Even where I live will not be a concern of yours.
“Perhaps,” she said.
He turned and fingered one of a pair of Staffordshire dogs resting on the mantel. “So, you are going to have to go away. Create a new existence for yourself. Pretend yourself newly widowed and claim the child Jerome’s.” He turned and glanced at her. “Is that it, Margaret?”
Her silence was assent enough.
“I should be happy you wish to leave me. I would be well suited with Jane Hestly as a wife.” She would not be easily coaxed to amusement, his bride. She would be solemn and serious and exceedingly proper. Nor would she have a way of tapping her fingernails on the cover of the book as she read, a habit that had made him smile. She would not have the ability to make him doubt himself. And she would not, he realized, possess the capacity to wound him.
Margaret stood silent behind him. Waiting for his assent, his agreement. Patient while he brushed aside this surprising pain so that he could speak.
He had avoided sentiment all his life. Because it was his nature. Because, too, he’d been surfeited with it. Yet now he felt buffeted by the force of it. Strangely animated in a way he’d never been. Rage and euphoria, a curious combination.
He had thought of words such as enchanted or captivated to describe his reaction to her, but they did not measure exactly what he felt. The emotion Margaret sparked in him seemed difficult, almost impossible, to place in a net of words. If it was a number, he would call it infinity. And the very poetry of that thought shook him to the core.
The realization slid into his mind with the ease of a breath.
Surely a logical man would have understood long before now? A man whose life revolved around puzzles and ciphers and codes would have comprehended what had happened to him? It shouldn’t have taken him this long to understand.
He loved her. Not simply, not easily. It wasn’t a friendly, passive emotion. It changed him, this feeling, made him a different man. One who wasn’t certain or sure. One not at all reasonable as much as alive.
There was only one thing to do.
“I want to go home,” she said again from behind him.
He turned and looked at her, almost bemused with the realization of what he was about to do. He couldn’t hold it within, couldn’t restrain himself one second longer. Without his conscious thought, his arm reached out and grabbed the china dog and hurled it against the window. It shattered in an explosion of sound, an odd counterpart to the buoyancy of his own emotions.
Her gaze flew to his, her mouth open in shock.
He smiled at her, feeling an exuberance that was unlike him. “I will be delighted to take you home, Margaret. Pleased beyond all measure. Happy to do it. This afternoon, in fact. Will that be soon enough?”
She nodded silently, her gaze fixed cautiously on him.
The fissured glass sent faceted shafts of sunlight into the room, illuminating the shards of porcelain littering the floor. Kicking away the larger pieces in his path, he strode to the door.
He turned and surveyed her, thinking that she still looked shocked. Well she might be. And later, what would her reaction be? He began to smile, then chuckle. Gradually, his laughter overcame him, giving life to the jubilance he felt.
Margaret only stared at him as if he were a madman.
Indeed he might be.
Chapter 25
Pleasure can be as soft as the breeze of a
butterfly’s wing or as shattering as a
mountain crumbling.
The Journals of Augustin X
A brief burst of rain had freshened the air earlier leaving the sky a brilliant blue without a hint of clouds. The leaves of the trees in the square were a glossy emerald. Even the cobbles seemed a different color, now a bright and glaring orange.
Michael stepped into the carriage, settling opposite Margaret. Her hands lay folded in her lap, her shoulders squared.
They had not spoken since he’d left the chamber a few hours earlier. But his strange mood seemed to have dissipated. Now Michael seemed intent upon the passing scenery or else captured by his thoughts.
Mayfair offered an illusion of calm. As they traveled further into London, the noise level increased. The clatter of carriage wheels across the cobbles, the whinny of thousands of horses. The street peddlers, barrow girls, shouts, cries, laughter—they were all part of the cacophony of the city.
The buildings began to change as they traveled further west. Here they were built closer together, blocking out the brightness of the day. Even the air seemed thicker, almost sulphurous. As early as it was, shadows puddled in the streets. Soot covered the bricks and rendered the world monochromatic.
Gray was the color of poverty.
Finally, they were quit of London completely, the landscape appearing as if by magic, unmarred by buildings and the noise of thousands of people.
Michael clenched the gold head of his walking stick so hard his hand must hurt. A muscle flexed in his jaw as he stared out at the view.
She might have been wary of him after the scene in the bedchamber, if other memories had not intruded. Not a man of rage, but one who laughed with her on the floor of the morning room. A diligent man who worked beneath a dawn-painted sky, showed her the echo of a pantheon with the delight of pride. A man who had carried her upstairs after she’d fallen asleep in the bath.
It was true he was obstinate, supremely logical. He sought patterns in numbers and meaning in codes. Yet he had abducted her from her home for a week of passion, laughed with her and been boyish. An inconsistency. A fascination.
I expect a certain order in my life.
She recalled his words only too well. Yet, he’d not acted rationally, especially this morning. He’d been furious.
The afternoon advanced as they traveled west, but other than a few questions posed and answered, they barely spoke.
“Would you like to stop at an inn?” he asked at one point.
“No,” she answered as politely. “I’d rather travel straight through.”
An hour later—“Are you comfortable?”
“Yes, very.”
She blinked her eyes against the spike of tears, lifted the leather shade with a fingertip, and pretended an interest in the countryside. They were growing closer to Silbury.
In a few moments he would say good-bye to her. Forever.
What happens when something occurs in your well-planned life that you simply do not expect? What do you do then?
She’d asked him that question the day on the river. The answer to it had been remarkably simple, but not particularly easy. He had spent hours in his library, writing to his solicitor, giving him instructions that would set into motion the destruction of his heritage.
&nb
sp; Torrent had not been producing well for the last decade, but the land was scenic and the hunting was good. Haversham was less well situated, but the property had potential. Surely both estates could be sold easily.
Although Setton was entailed, the furnishings were not. There were some Chinese bowls and Delft pottery that hadn’t been shattered in his parents’ marriage, along with works of art and some fine pieces of statuary collected by his grandfather. Also, there were a few pieces of jewelry neither wished to wear nor pass on to his sisters. Rubies were unlucky, she’d always said. Perhaps, in this case, they might bring him some good fortune.
But he was adamant about retaining the London houses. He would not live with his mother and sisters, and he could not banish them to Setton. At least not until his sisters had a chance at a season. The expenses for that would be paid by the sale of a bibelot or two—a silk screen his grandmother had fancied, or a gold snuffbox dating back a few decades.
Nor would he have to touch their dowries if he was careful. They would then all be able to make advantageous marriages even if word of his financial reversals got out.
He tallied up his possessions like a man standing before the judge at debtor’s gaol. The complete sum was not an enormous amount, even considering that he might receive a fair price for Torrent and Haversham. But it would be enough to live quietly, if economically, for the rest of his life. A subdued existence, one that pleased him to contemplate.
The greatest change would be to send word to his creditors that he would no longer pay for any of his mother’s extravagant shopping sprees. In addition, he was going to cut down on her staff, and establish a great many other economies not previously instituted. The days of profligacy while waiting for an heiress to be wed was over.
His mind whirred with possibilities.
The one true regret he had was being forced to sell the few parcels of land in Scotland left to him by his maternal grandmother. He’d always thought it would be a legacy he, himself, could pass down to his child independent of the entail.
In a way, he thought, glancing at Margaret, perhaps it was.
