by Mary Balogh
“You look extremely pretty, Abby,” she said. “No man could possibly look at you and dislike you.”
“He thinks I am quiet and sensible and good-natured,” Abigail said, her voice almost a wail.
“Well, on such short acquaintance,” Laura said, “he is fortunate to be accurate about one of the three. He will get used to the fact that you are almost never quiet and not always sensible.”
Abigail giggled nervously.
“But we agreed last night and again this morning that you would not think of such things,” Laura said. “Abby, we have kept him waiting for almost ten minutes already.”
“I don’t think I will be able to speak one word all day,” Abigail said. “How does one get one’s stomach to turn the right way up when it insists on standing on its head?”
Her friend clucked her tongue and took Abigail firmly by the hand. “It is time to go,” she said.
Abigail took a deep and ragged breath and allowed herself to be led from the room. Her new blue slippers must have been manufactured with lead weights in the soles, she was convinced.
The Earl of Severn was standing in the hallway at the foot of the stairs, talking with Mr. and Mrs. Gill. He had a stranger with him, a fair-haired young man of medium height and pleasing, amiable expression.
Abigail focused her attention on the stranger, though she was aware only of the earl, dressed quite gorgeously in pale blue knee breeches, a dark blue waistcoat embroidered with silver thread, and a lighter blue coat. His stockings, his elaborately tied neckcloth, and the lace that half-covered his hands were snowy white.
Prince Charming would have looked like a bulldog beside him, she thought as he took her hand and raised it to his lips and she was forced to meet his blue eyes.
The stranger was Sir Gerald Stapleton. Abigail smiled at him and curtsied and found herself wishing that he were the Earl of Severn. He looked very much less threatening than the man who was to be her husband. She presented Laura to both gentlemen, accepted Mrs. Gill’s kiss on the cheek and Mr. Gill’s bow, and before she had quite digested the fact that the moment of her doom had finally come, she was being led down the steps to the pavement with the earl’s hand at her elbow and helped into his carriage.
Laura sat beside her, the two gentlemen opposite them, their backs to the horses. And Abigail, trying to decide whether to stay quiet or to burst into animated conversation, found herself having to concentrate on not giving in to a quite inappropriate urge to giggle.
Except, she thought, thoroughly alarmed by the possibility that she might give in to that urge, that there was nothing even remotely funny about the situation. She was a bride on her way to church to be married. Her bridegroom—a total stranger—was sitting across from her, his silk-clad knees almost touching her own.
She turned her head from its awkward sideways position and looked full at him. He was looking steadily back at her and smiled as Sir Gerald was addressing a remark about the weather to Laura. It was a smile that began with his eyes and caused those creases that would be wrinkles when he was older, and ended with his mouth, dimpling his cheek on its way.
It was the same kind, gentle look he had given her the day before, as if she were a timid child who needed reassurance.
And indeed, Abigail thought, she felt timid and tongue-tied and breathless and weak at the knees—all completely unfamiliar sensations. She wondered when she would return to normal.
She tried to smile back and found that her mouth was trembling quite out of her control. She looked away in mortification.
“What a beautiful day it is,” she said brightly before raising her eyes to note the heavy dark clouds overhead.
All three of her companions appeared to find her words irresistibly witty. They all laughed.
“It must be your wedding day, ma’am,” Sir Gerald said. “Miss Seymour and I have just been agreeing that it is quite the most miserable day of the spring so far.”
“My vote has to go to the beauty of the day,” the Earl of Severn said. “But here we are, without any more time to argue the matter.”
HIS COUNTESS WAS NOT so very plain after all, the earl thought later in the evening. She was standing beside the fireplace bidding her friend good night, while he and Gerald had moved to the door already. Gerald was to escort Miss Seymour home in his carriage.
His bride had looked rather lovely—and very shy—that morning when he had first seen her descending the stairs at Mr. Gill’s house. It was amazing what a pretty, colorful dress and a more becoming coiffure had done for her appearance. And of course she had been bright-eyed and blushing.
But in the course of the day he had discovered a charm in her that he had not expected. She was talking to her friend now with a flushed and animated face. And she had conversed with Gerald with some ease all day. With him she had been shy, but that was understandable under the circumstances.
“I would have to say,” Sir Gerald said now, holding out a hand to him, “that either you are blind or your bride is a changeling, Miles. She is not at all as you described her. I pictured a drab and mute creature. I hope for your sake that she does not turn out to be quite, quite different from what you expect.”
“You hope no such thing, Ger,” Lord Severn said. “You can scarcely wait for the moment when you can crow ‘I told you so.’ I think you may have to wait a long, long time.”
No, she was not mute or uninteresting, the earl decided, turning his eyes on Abigail again. One event of the day more than any other had taken him by surprise and charmed him utterly.
When they had returned to Grosvenor Square after their wedding, his housekeeper had had all the servants lined up in the hall to meet his new countess. He had been vexed. He had expected her to be thoroughly frightened by the formality of the reception.
“If you smile and incline your head,” he had murmured to her, “they will be quite satisfied. I will have you in the privacy of the drawing room in no time at all.”
But she had smiled almost absently at him, released her hold of his arm, and walked along the line of servants, Mrs. Williams at her side making the introductions, talking with each of the servants in turn, even laughing merrily with some of them. And she had stooped down to talk with Victor, the bastard son of a former maid, who had run away with a neighboring groom and a box of silver forks when the child was barely a year old. The earl had had the story from his valet shortly after his arrival in town.
But then, the earl had remembered, she had been a servant herself until a mere hour before. She must feel as comfortable with them as she did with her own class. Of course, many women in her position would be in some haste to put their past behind them and to assume the airs suitable to the newly acquired title of countess. Abigail appeared to be an exception.
He had directed Gerald to escort Miss Seymour to the drawing room while he had waited for his bride to finish listening to an account of the scullery maid’s brother’s new post as tiger to Mr. Walworth.
“They will all love you forever,” he had told his wife as they ascended the stairs to the drawing room.
“It is doubtful,” she had said, flashing him a smile. “I kept them standing for half an hour and have made them late in completing their day’s work. They doubtless wished me in Hades.”
He had laughed. “Your friend calls you Abby,” he had said. “May I have the same privilege?”
She had grimaced. “I think my parents must have had a grudge against me when they called me Abigail,” she had said. “It is a quite dreadful name, is it not?”
“I like Abby,” he had said.
“You are a skilled diplomat,” she had said, laughing and turning to look at him, and sobering again.
She had spoken to him since only when she could not avoid doing so.
“Good night, my lord,” Miss Seymour was saying now, curtsying low in front of him. “Thank you for inviting me to spend the day with Abby.”
“It has been my pleasure, ma’am,” he said, bowing and e
xtending a hand for hers. “And I know that you have made the day very pleasurable for my wife.”
My wife. He had scarcely had a chance to comprehend the reality of their new relationship. Just three days before, he had not known that Abigail existed. Now she was his wife.
And how was he to explain to his mother and the girls when they arrived within the next few days that he had met her two days before and married her today, knowing very well that they were to arrive within the week?
A violent case of love at first sight?
He would think of his explanation when the time came.
He took Abigail on his arm to accompany their friends to the top of the staircase, and they watched them descend, raising their hands in farewell when the pair turned at the bottom before leaving the house.
The landing suddenly seemed very quiet indeed.
“I have not told you,” he said, turning to her and taking both her hands in his, “how very lovely you look today, my dear. But I have thought it all day long.”
“Why, what a bouncer,” she said briskly. “Lovely I am not, my lord. But this dress you bought for me is very splendid.”
“My name is Miles,” he said. “You are not going to ‘my lord’ me for the next forty or fifty years, are you?”
“No,” she said, flushing. “I did not even know what your name was until we were at the church this morning. I kept waking up last night with possible names running through my head.”
“Did you?” he said. “I hope you approve. Unlike yours, my name cannot be shortened to a more attractive form, can it?”
She was trying to withdraw her hands from his without actually pulling at them, he could feel. Her eyes were on his neckcloth. She was clearly quite as aware as he that it was bedtime. The thought rather excited him.
“Mrs. Williams showed you your rooms earlier,” he said, “and introduced you to the maid she has chosen for you. Alice, is it? She is doubtless waiting for you. Did Mrs. Williams explain that my dressing room adjoins yours? Go on up. I shall come to you in a short while. Will half an hour be long enough?”
“Yes, my lord,” she told his neckcloth, and she turned and walked sedately halfway up the stairs to the upper floor before breaking into a run up the remainder of the flight.
The earl watched her go and wished there were some way to save a shy young bride from the terror of an approaching wedding night.
ABIGAIL EYED THE BED, which Alice had turned down for the night before leaving, and continued to stand at the foot, holding to one of the carved posts.
She could have been in bed and fast asleep long before—she was tired enough after two disturbed nights and a day of nervous emotion. And a great deal longer than half an hour must have passed. Though perhaps not. Time had a strange tendency to expand or contract at whim.
One thing she knew, at least. She would stand there all night rather than lie down on the bed to be caught there by him. There would be something quite demeaning and definitely terrifying about watching him come through that door from a supine position on her bed. Better to face him on her feet.
She felt rather like vomiting, if the truth were known. It was foolish, really, when she had never felt fear in her life, or never admitted to such a feeling, at least—even when Papa was at his worst. But then, she had had very little to do with men outside her own family.
Until her father’s death a little more than two years before, she had had the full care of him—he had been an invalid after years of uncontrolled drinking and rioting—and of the younger children. Boris was only two years her junior, but men were such little boys. Some of them—most of them—never really grew up at all. Bea and Clara were years younger, products of their father’s second marriage and left behind when his second wife ran off and left him.
Abigail had had no time for courting and no patience with the few local gentlemen who had been foolish enough to stammer out the beginnings of an admiration for her. How could she have contemplated marriage when she had lived with such a poor example of the institution? And how could she have married and left the children helpless?
And yet her father had left them all helpless ultimately. His debts, they had discovered after his death, were appallingly huge, his creditors panting like wolves at the door. By the time they had sold the house and all its furnishings and paid off the more pressing of the debts, there had been nothing left for Boris. And nothing for the girls either, of course.
Boris had taken himself off in search of his fortune. Abigail had written a bold letter with trembling hand to the girls’ Great-Aunt Edwina—aunt of the second wife, no relation to her at all. And she had mentally held her breath for all of two weeks until the reply came that the girls could go and live with their great-aunt in Bath until they were old enough to seek employment.
Abigail had packed them off on their way after hugging them hard enough to break every bone in their bodies and crying over them enough salt water to drown them. And then she had gone begging to Vicar Grimes, who had found her a position with the Gills.
Mrs. Gill had frowned at the prospect of “gentlemen callers,” as she had termed possible suitors. Not that there had ever been any gentleman to make those calls. None at all. There had never been the chance to meet any.
She was twenty-four years old, Abigail thought, eyeing the bed again with a lurching of the stomach and licking dry lips, and knew nothing at all about gentlemen except that their bodies and minds could disintegrate with alarming totality under the prolonged influence of liquor and other dissipations. And she knew what those bodies looked like—in their disintegrated state, anyway. She had done everything for her father for the final year of his life.
She straightened up hastily when she heard a door open nearby. She should be doing something. Reading a book? But there were none in the room. Brushing her hair? But it was in a braid.
There was a tap at the other side of her dressing room door and it opened before she could call to him to come in. She found herself stranded five feet from the foot of the bed with empty hands and a blank mind.
“Have I kept you up?” he asked, his eyes passing over her long white cotton nightgown.
He was wearing a dark blue brocaded dressing gown. She had not thought to put one on. She felt suddenly naked and had to resist the urge to lift her hands to cover her breasts.
“No,”she said. “It is quite all right, my lord. I have been busy.”
If she had spent the past half-hour dreaming up the most stupid reply she could make to such a question, she thought, mortified, she could hardly have done better. Busy!
“Oh, Abby,” he said, coming toward her, taking her by the shoulders and turning her, “I thought so. Your hair must be very long, is it? Your braid reaches almost to your waist.”
“I mean to have it cut,” she said. “Mrs. Gill’s maid told me just this morning that there is no way of dressing my hair fashionably when it is so long.”
“Then dress it unfashionably,” he said. “It looked very becoming as it was today. May I?”
He did not wait for an answer, but unwrapped the ribbon from the end of the braid and began to unravel the hair. Abigail stood meekly and swallowed awkwardly. She was going to feel even more naked with her hair all down about her.
“Ah,” he said, his hands passing through the ripples that the braiding had created, “it is quite breathtakingly lovely.” He turned her to face him again, and his eyes were laughing down into hers. “You did promise this morning that you would obey me, did you not? Here is my first command, then. You must never cut your hair. Promise me?”
“I have never wished to,” she said. “What if I did not like it shorter? I could not stick it back on, could I? And it would take years to grow it back again. But I thought you would wish me to be fashionable, my lord.”
“Miles,” he said.
“Miles.”
“And don’t ever braid it at bedtime,” he said. “I want to see it loose, like this.”
He thread
ed his fingers through her hair to rest them against the back of her head. And he lowered his head and kissed the side of her neck.
“Oh, goodness,” she said, her voice sounding quite unnaturally loud. “I really don’t know what to do.”
“You don’t need to,” he said, raising his head and looking down at her so that she had the sensation of swimming helplessly in the blue depths of his eyes, a mere few inches from her own. “I shall do the doing, Abby. Are you frightened?”
“No, not at all,” she said, her voice blurting out the lie a moment before his mouth came down to cover hers.
It touched hers lightly, warmly. His lips were not closed, but slightly parted. She recoiled, startled, making an audible smacking sound, as if she were kissing the girls for bed. But one hand stayed behind her head while the other circled her waist, and he kissed her again, lingering on her lips, moving his own, holding her head steady as he brought her loosely against him.
Oh, dear good Lord in heaven!
He was all hard-muscled maleness.
Abigail became aware of her arms hanging loosely at her sides, one of them awkward over his. She did not know quite what she should do with them. Let them dangle? Put them about his shoulders as seemed the sensible thing to do?
“Come,” he was saying, his mouth still brushing hers. “Let us lie down. I shall extinguish the candles. You will be more comfortable in the darkness.”
“Yes,” she said. Actually, she thought, she would be more comfortable behind six locked doors, but she did not say the words aloud. A jest seemed to be inappropriate to the moment. Besides, she doubted that she would be able to get so many words past her teeth without their rattling loudly enough to drown out the sound.
She climbed into bed and moved to the far side of it while he blew out the candles. He was not wearing his dressing gown when he joined her, just a nightshirt.
