Web of Love

by Mary Balogh

  “Yes, Grandpapa,” Jennifer said, leaning forward to place a kiss on Sir Jasper’s cheek. “You look very like Papa.”

  “Do I?” he said. “Even to the bald head? Did your father lose his hair?”

  Jennifer nodded.

  Sir Jasper turned to the couple standing silently behind him with Lady Habersham. “Meet your aunt and uncle, my dear,” he said. He took Ellen’s hand in his as Jennifer curtsied and smiled uncertainly at the strange couple. “Meet your brother-in-law, Phillip, and his wife, Edith, my dear. It is high time, is it not?”

  Mr. Phillip Simpson took Ellen’s free hand in his and laid his other on top of it. He looked closely into her eyes. “You are Ellen?” he said. He did not smile. He was not wearing mourning, though there was a black band on the sleeve of his coat. “I am glad you have come. Old quarrels should not go on for twenty years and more.”

  Edith Simpson pecked her on the cheek and expressed pleasure at meeting her.

  Ellen was directed to a seat, and found herself in conversation with her brother-in-law and his wife while tea was served. Phillip did not look anything like Charlie, she thought. He was thin and narrow-faced and sandy-haired. His wife looked remarkably like him.

  They were a perfectly civil couple even if there was no great warmth in their manner. They told her about their two sons, both away at school. Charlie’s nephews. Ellen wondered how much Phillip regretted not having seen his brother again before his death. They had been close as boys. Most of Charlie’s stories had included his younger brother.

  Jennifer, she was pleased to hear, was chattering with some animation to her grandfather. From the few snippets of their conversation that she heard, Ellen gathered that the girl was telling him about her schooldays and about her stay in Brussels.

  “Well,” Sir Jasper said eventually, his raised voice drawing the two groups together, “we must repeat this pleasure. We must have tea again. And perhaps I will organize some sort of dinner and evening party that will be suited to our state of mourning. Something to celebrate my reunion with my daughter-in-law and my granddaughter.”

  Lady Habersham took his words as a signal to rise and take their leave.

  “I must not lose you again now that I have found you,” he said to Ellen as he was squeezing her hand at the doorway of the drawing room when she was leaving. Dorothy and Jennifer had already started on their way down the stairs. “I have been a foolish old man. I have been all these years without my own son. But I will not be without his children. I swear it.”

  Ellen smiled and swallowed. “I am glad we have met,” she said. “Charlie would be glad.”

  “Is this one to be a son?” he asked, patting her hand.

  Ellen shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Well,” he said, “we will hope so, my dear.” And he leaned forward to kiss her cheek.

  Ellen scurried down the stairs in pursuit of the other two.

  MADELINE HAD FINALLY PERSUADED her betrothed to venture beyond the doors of his cousin’s house. He was to take tea with her at the Earl of Amberley’s town house. Her mother was to be there too.

  But if he was feeling nervous, then she was feeling no better, she thought, seating herself beside him on a love seat, almost but not quite touching him, resisting the urge to take his hand in hers. She was chattering brightly to Alexandra and Edmund and to her mother.

  Edmund had chosen a downstairs salon in which to entertain his guests, Madeline had been relieved to discover. And he had not offered to help Allan into the room. Neither had she, but she had hovered at his side as he had moved awkwardly on his crutches, ready to help him if he had needed her assistance.

  “I can manage,” he had said to her, looking somewhat tight-lipped. He had thought she was about to reach out to him. “You need not concern yourself, Madeline.”

  So she had smiled brightly and seated herself beside him and begun to chatter. Thank goodness Dom was not there. She had forbidden him to come, but whether for Allan’s sake or for her own, she did not know.

  She was not doing very well, she knew. She was taut with worry that someone would ask her betrothed some personal question that would embarrass him. She found herself jumping in with answers to every question directed his way. She knew she was doing it, but she could not stop herself. She could feel him growing tenser beside her.

  “I hope you do not mind our children being in the room, Lieutenant,” Alexandra said with a smile. “We always have them with us at teatime. I am afraid we are unfashionably attached to our offspring.”

  “Oh, no,” Madeline said cheerfully, “Allan does not mind, do you, Allan? They are such well-behaved children. One would hardly know they were in the room.”

  “It seems that the Battle of Waterloo is going to be seen as something of a landmark in history,” the earl said to the lieutenant. “One does wonder what Europe will do without Bonaparte to worry about any longer. How long will it be, I wonder, before someone else comes along to take his place?”

  “One would like to believe in universal and everlasting peace,” Lieutenant Penworth said. “Unfortunately, human nature inevitably gets in the way. It is my feeling—”

  “Goodness,” Madeline said, smiling about her, “must we be so gloomy? I think we should all take a drive out one afternoon to see the trees before they have dropped all their leaves. Has anyone noticed how lovely they are?”

  “Your home is in Devon?” the dowager asked a few minutes later. “Your family must be quite anxious to see you again.”

  “But Mr. Foster quite insists that Allan stay in London a little longer, doesn’t he, Allan?” Madeline said.

  She noticed the look Edmund and Alexandra exchanged across the room and bit her lip. This was not working at all. If Allan was ready for such a visit, she certainly was not.

  The earl got to his feet and went to stoop down in front of his daughter, who was sitting on the floor playing with some toys. “Why do you not fetch that letter from your brother, Alex?” he said. “I am sure Mama and Madeline and the lieutenant will be interested in hearing of his adventures. My brother-in-law has been in Canada for more than three years, Lieutenant, or rather, far inland beyond Canada.”

  “Will you be interested?” the countess asked with an apologetic smile. “I naturally find the letter quite exciting and fascinating. But then, I am partial. James is my brother. And this is the first letter I have had from him this year.”

  For once Madeline let her betrothed answer the question. Alexandra disappeared from the room.

  “He works with a fur-trading company,” Lord Amberley explained to his guest. “And he has chosen to live in the wilderness where the furs are gathered and traded. Quite an adventurous life, it seems.”

  “Your wife must miss him,” the lieutenant said. “I have three brothers and two sisters at home. And though we fight almost constantly when together, I must confess to beginning to miss them just a little.”

  “Here it is,” the countess said, coming back into the room.

  Madeline was watching her brother talk quietly to the baby and lift her high into the air when she smiled and reached up her arms to him. She chuckled and reached down to grab his nose.

  The winters were so cold where he stayed that any exposed part of the flesh would freeze in less than a minute.

  Edmund sat down with his daughter and held out a toy to her.

  Tears froze on one’s eyelashes. Sometimes if his bed was pushed too close to the wall of the hut in which he lived, the bedclothes would be frozen to the wall in the morning.

  Caroline was chewing on the toy.

  He traveled around by dogsled and snowshoes. Native women netted the latter and sewed moccasins for his feet.

  Christopher was pulling at the leg of his father’s breeches and gazing soulfully up at him.

  He was in the Athabasca country, thousands of miles from Montreal. He had traveled the whole distance by canoe.

  Edmund was ruffling the child’s hair and
lifting him up to sit on his other knee.

  “The rest would be of no interest to you,” the countess said, smiling at the lieutenant. “It is just inquiries about our parents and the rest of my family. He does not even know about Caroline. News takes such a very long time to travel back and forth.”

  “My mother did not know for a whole month that I had survived the Battle of Waterloo,” Lieutenant Penworth said. “And that news had to cross only the English Channel, ma’am.”

  “Oh,” the dowager countess said, “it was three weeks before we heard about Dominic. I can certainly sympathize with your mama, Lieutenant.”

  Madeline smiled brightly. “Are you tired yet, Allan?” she asked. “Are you ready to leave? I am sure Edmund and Alexandra will excuse you if you are.”

  JENNIFER SLEPT LATE THE FOLLOWING MORNING. Lady Habersham was in the morning room going over the weekly accounts with the housekeeper. Ellen was restless.

  She should never have begun the deception. She should have told the full truth from the start. Now it was becoming increasingly difficult to do so. She should tell Dorothy immediately. And she should take a maid and pay a call on Sir Jasper that very morning and tell him. She should trust that Jennifer would be well enough looked after by her aunt and her grandfather, and she should make immediate plans to leave. She could find somewhere to live until she could settle in a more permanent home.

  But she knew that she would do none of those things. She would put them all off until the next day, fully aware of what she was doing. Sometimes, she thought, it is so much easier to know what one should do than to do it.

  And then there was the afternoon’s visit to the dowager Countess of Amberley’s home. She had no idea if Lord Eden would be there or not, but it really did not matter. She should not go. She did not want any further involvement with either him or his family. And yet Jennifer was eager to make the visit. And Jennifer was becoming friendly with his cousins and had sat in a confectioner’s with them and with him the morning before.

  Life was becoming hopelessly tangled.

  Ellen was normally of a frugal nature. She had always had to be. There had never been a great deal of money to waste. But just occasionally she had the urge to go out and spend money. Charlie had laughed at her sometimes, when they were in a town, Madrid or Badajoz or one of the others, and she had come back to their rooms loaded down with small items that she did not need at all—bright and cheap earrings, a gaudy shawl, some sweet-smelling lotion for him, a new fob for his watch. And he had always kissed her and called her his treasure and told her that she should enjoy herself more. He had always teased her out of the pangs of guilt she would feel at her extravagance.

  She was in that mood now. And she would not stop to talk sense into herself, she decided as she hurried out into the hallway to order the carriage brought around, and upstairs to put on a pelisse and bonnet. She would not even take a maid with her.

  She had Dorothy’s coachman take her to Oxford Street. She bought two lace-edged handkerchiefs that she did not need, and spent many minutes at a jeweler’s looking at a bracelet that would very nearly match the earrings Charlie had bought for her. But they were too precious a gift to be matched with anything of her own choosing, she decided at last. She bought instead a small porcelain jar with a lid to keep the earrings in.

  She was coming out of the shop when a carriage pulled up in the street beside her and the Earl of Amberley leaned out of the window and hailed her. The countess was beside him, smiling. Ellen walked closer.

  “How do you do, ma’am?” the earl asked. “Alex said it was you, and she was quite right.”

  “I have not seen you for an age,” the countess said after Ellen had bidden them both a good day. “I met you and your stepdaughter once in the park, if you recall, but that must be well over a month ago. And you have still not called for tea.” She smiled.

  “I am sorry,” Ellen said. “I have no excuse. We have been somewhat preoccupied, I’m afraid.”

  “That is quite understandable,” the earl said gently. “Is Prudence giving you good service?”

  “Yes, I thank you,” she said. “She is a very sweet girl. I have become quite attached to her.”

  “Christopher—our son—asked for Miss Simpson several times after we came home,” the countess said. “She had endless patience with him on the journey back, when Nanny Rey was busy with Caroline and Edmund was busy with me. I was very sick on the crossing, I’m afraid. Your stepdaughter was proud of the fact that she was not. Will you come and take tea with us one afternoon?”

  “We would be delighted,” Ellen said.

  “Let us make a definite day, then,” the countess said. “Are you free on Tuesday next?”

  Ellen inclined her head.

  The countess smiled at her.

  “We will expect you then, ma’am,” the earl said. “And if I do not give my coachman the order to drive on soon, someone is going to come to fisticuffs with him for blocking the roadway.”

  They were gone almost immediately. And there she was again, Ellen thought ruefully, with yet another involvement with Lord Eden’s family. The sooner she found some quiet corner of the country in which to hide herself, the better.

  To hide herself? Was that what she was trying to do? How despicable! She did not need to hide herself. And she would not do so. She would remove herself from London to the cottage of her dreams when she was fully ready to do so.

  She went inside another shop, scarcely looking to see what type of wares it dealt in. She came out ten minutes later, smiling to herself in some amusement. She must be perfectly mad. Dorothy and a thousand other women would doubtless screech in horror at the way she was so tempting fate. She had bought a pair of tiny leather baby boots. A ridiculous, pointless extravagance. How did she know what size her child’s feet would be? Maybe they would never be quite that small. How could any feet be that small?

  Perhaps, the superstitious would say, there would be no baby to wear the boots and the question of their size would be quite irrelevant.

  But she had bought them anyway. And she was not sorry. She would doubtless keep them in a drawer beside her bed, in the drawer where she kept her Bible. And she would take them out night and morning to look at them and touch them.

  She was not at all sorry. Or sorry for the fact that her purse was considerably lighter than it had been when she left home. She bought a plain ivory fan for Jennifer and a small vial of perfume for Dorothy.

  She was balancing five packages in her arms as she walked along, telling herself with a smile that it was a good thing she had not brought more money with her. If she had, she would doubtless be lost behind a mountain of boxes by the time she reached the carriage.

  She was still smiling when she collided with a large gentleman who was on his way out of a bootmaker’s. Two packages flew off in opposite directions, and the other three slid to her feet.

  Ellen bent with anxious haste to retrieve the perfume and the porcelain jar.

  “Beg pardon, ma’am,” the gentleman said, stooping down at the same moment. Ellen grimaced at the strong smell of brandy on his breath and realized that the collision had been caused not so much by her own carelessness as by the fact that he was foxed.

  “There,” he said, holding out to her the two packages that she had not retrieved herself. “I hope there’s nothing in them to break, ma’am.”

  Ellen stood staring stupidly at him and made no move to take the parcels that he held out to her. His eyes were glittering as they always had done when he was in his cups. His cheeks were perhaps a little more flushed than they had used to be. They were certainly more fleshy. And he was altogether heavier. His double chin looked strangled by his cravat.

  He looked at her, his eyelids rather heavy. He frowned. “Do I know you?” he asked. “Deuced if I can place you, ma’am. I’ve had one too many, I’m afraid.”

  “I’m Ellen,” she said.

  “Ellen.” His hands, which had been holding out the parc
els to her, dropped to his sides. “Well. You grew into a beauty after all. I knew you would. I’m foxed, I’m afraid. I wouldn’t have taken a drop if I had known I would bump into you. Ha! I really did bump into you, eh, Ellen?”

  “Yes,” she said. My lord? Sir? Father? Papa?

  “Who died?” he asked, indicating her black clothes with a somewhat uncoordinated wave of an arm.

  “My husband,” she said.

  “A soldier, wasn’t he?” he said. “I’m sorry, Ellen. Did he treat you right?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Better than your father did?” he asked. He grinned suddenly and hiccuped. “Pardon me. Indigestion. You don’t know to which father I refer, do you?”

  “How are you?” she asked. Her lips and her jaw felt stiff. They would not quite move as she wanted them to move.

  “As you see,” he said, making that expansive gesture with his arm again. “Not a care in the world, girl. That’s me.”

  “I’m glad,” she said. And then she became aware of the world around them again. “I must be on my way.”

  “Oh, yes,” he said jovially. “Mustn’t keep you.”

  But after she had hesitated and hurried past him, he called to her.

  “You forgot your parcels,” he said, holding them at the ends of outstretched arms. And when she walked back to retrieve them, “Do you have a kiss for your papa, Ellen?”

  She looked mutely at him.

  “I was your papa,” he said, his arms still extended. Attracting attention. “You don’t always have to beget a child to be its father, Ellen. Wasn’t I a good papa?”

  “Yes,” she said, taking her packages from his hands. “Most of the time.”

  “I was human,” he said. “We are all human. Come and see me. Will you come to see me, Ellen? I will stay sober if I know you are coming.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I will come. Tomorrow. Shall I come in the afternoon?”