by Mary Balogh
Instead he led her out through the French doors into the coolness of the evening, where several couples were strolling. He took her away from the terrace and the lights of the house, across the lawn toward the lake. He took her hand and linked his fingers with hers. Her hand was warm and smooth and curled firmly about his. When they were beyond the sight of anyone who might have been watching, he released her hand, twined his arm about her waist, and drew her against his side. After a moment’s hesitation she set her arm about his waist. Her head came to rest against his shoulder. They had not said a word to each other since leaving the ballroom.
It could not have been a more perfect night for such a stroll. The air was cool but not at all cold. There was hardly a breeze. The sky was clear and star-studded. The moon was shining in a broad band across the water of the lake. They stopped walking when they were close to the bank.
“Have you ever seen anything more beautiful?” she asked with a sigh after a lengthy, perfectly comfortable silence.
“Yes,” he said. “I have only to turn my head to see it.” He turned his head and his mouth brushed against her hair.
“Where did you learn such foolish gallantries?” she asked, amusement rather than censure in her voice.
“Here at Enfield,” he said. “Today and yesterday and the day before.” Steady, he told himself. Say nothing you will forever regret. Steady.
She said nothing.
“Will and I used to sneak out sometimes at night,” he said. “I can remember swimming here on at least one occasion. Even now I dread to think what would have happened to us if we had been caught.”
“Or if you had had cramps,” she said.
“I suppose,” he said, “rules like the one forbidding children to go out alone at night are made for their own good, are they not?”
“Usually,” she said.
“And I suppose I will be as drearily prohibitive with my own children,” he said.
She did not answer him.
He winced inwardly. “If having children of my own were in my plans,” he said. “But childhood can be a golden age despite prohibitions and punishments. I am sorry you had no brothers and sisters of your own.”
“I had companions,” she said. “I had a happy childhood.”
“I am glad of it,” he said, tightening his arm a little. “I would not like to think of you being lonely.”
And then he felt lonely himself. He was here with her, cocooned against present loneliness, but there was a strong awareness that tomorrow everything would be different. They would be traveling back to London. And after that their separate lives would begin. He would be married to her for the rest of his life, but he would probably never be with her like this again, just standing quietly in the moonlight, gazing across a calm lake. In harmony with another living person.
There was only tonight.
The anticipation of loneliness washed over him.
When he turned her in his arms, she tipped back her head and looked up at him with those very large blue eyes of hers—though he could not really see their color in the moonlight. He did not kiss her—not immediately. He was afraid to kiss her. He did not know what lay on the other side of a kiss. He was not sure he would be able to regain command of himself and his life once he had kissed her, though he could not quite make sense of his fear.
He held her against him with one arm and ran the knuckles of the other hand softly along her cheek and down beneath her chin to hold it up.
“Why did you not let me see on that day that you are beautiful?” he asked her.
“I have never been called beautiful before,” she said. “I wanted the position.”
“My quiet brown mouse,” he said. He was rubbing the pad of his thumb very gently over her lips. He heard her swallow. “Have you ever been kissed, little mouse?”
“No.” It was just a whisper of sound.
She had been bedded, but she had never been kissed. He had bedded, but he had rarely kissed. He moved his lips so close to hers that he could feel the warmth from them.
“Is this a lovely enough setting for the first?” he asked her. “Is the moment right? Is it the right man?”
“Yes.” When she spoke the word, her lips brushed his.
He touched her with his lips—barely touched. He felt warmth and softness and sweet invitation. He felt her breath on his cheek. He moved his lips, parted them slightly, feeling her, feeling what she did to him. Not to his body. He expected his body to react predictably, but it did not do so. He felt what she did to his heart, or whatever unknown part of him was denoted by the name of a mere organ.
He wrapped his free arm about her shoulders, pushed his lips more firmly against hers, tasted her, was warmed by her, soothed by her, healed by her.
He knew all about tongue play. There had been a time when he had practiced it, enjoyed it. He did not touch her with his tongue or open his mouth. She parted her own lips only sufficiently to give him the softness and the warmth of her very essence. This was not a sexual encounter. He was right to have feared it. He raised his head and looked down at her.
“Thank you,” he heard himself say.
He watched her eyes fill with tears and knew instinctively that they were not tears of grief or of anger or of disappointment. He drew her head to his shoulder and held it there for several minutes while she relaxed against him.
He was not after all in love with her, he thought, and he felt terror clutch at him. That was not it at all. He wished it were. Being in love was a youthful, essentially shallow thing. He was not in love with his wife.
He loved her.
“I had better take you back to the ballroom,” he said.
“Yes.” She drew away from him and looked at him speculatively. The tears were long gone. “Will you do something for me? Please?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Will you come to the library with me,” she said, “and wait there while I—until I come back?”
He searched her eyes but she offered no explanation. He would ask for none. He had said yes.
“Yes,” he said again, “I will.”
She frowned for a moment, but when he took her hand she twined her fingers about his and walked by his side toward the house and the library.
Tonight he would do anything in the world for her.
Tomorrow he would begin to set her free.
15
CHARITY WAS BEGINNING TO REALIZE THE ENORMITY of the mistake she had made. She had agreed quite cold-bloodedly to a marriage that was not really a marriage just for the sake of money and security. It was a horrible sin she had committed. I thought you were a fortune hunter—Charles’s words had haunted her all day. She had married on the very foolish assumption that her feelings would be no more engaged during a few weeks of a temporary marriage than they would have been during a brief period of employment as a governess. But her feelings had become involved with almost everyone at Enfield.
And now she knew that she was to suffer the ultimate punishment for her sin and for her foolishness. Her feelings were very deeply engaged in a much more personal way than just concern for a family that was living in its own self-made hell.
She had experienced the ultimate embrace on her wedding night and again last night. But she had perhaps been too involved in the wonder of physical sensation on those occasions to feel the full impact of what was happening to her heart. She had understood with blinding clarity during that kiss at the lake. It had been exquisitely sweet, totally different from what she had expected. She had expected passion and had found tenderness. Tenderness was not something she would have associated with the Marquess of Staunton if she had not experienced it there in his arms and felt it in his lips. His lips had even trembled against her own.
She was not in a dream as they walked back up the lawn toward the house. She knew what was ahead for her, and the prospect was daunting to say the least. But there was tonight. And tonight all things seemed possible. It was a magical night, set apart fr
om real time. And so she had suggested, quite impulsively, that he come to the library with her and wait there.
But there was magic elsewhere too.
She stopped walking suddenly, squeezing her husband’s hand a little tighter as she did so.
“Look,” she whispered. Perhaps she ought not to have drawn his attention to what she saw, but she sensed that he too was in a mellow mood.
Not far from the house, but hidden from it by the particularly massive trunk of an oak tree, a man in dark evening clothes stood face-to-face with a woman in a delicate white dress, his hands at her waist, her body arched toward his. Even as Charity watched, they drew closer together and kissed. Charles and Marie.
“They are bound only for heartache,” the marquess said softly, drawing her firmly onward again. “He may be a duke’s son, but he is only a younger son—hardly a worthy substitute for the heir, for whom she has been groomed. Her father will never allow it.” He sounded more sad than cynical.
“Perhaps he can be persuaded,” she said. “Charles is such a wonderful young man. My guess is that they have been friends all their lives and that they have loved each other for a year or more. Maybe all will turn out well for them.”
“You must be a person who believes implicitly in the happily-ever-afters at the end of fairy tales,” he said, though there was no censure in his voice.
“No,” she said. “Oh, no, I do not.” She wished she could.
They walked the rest of the way in silence. The library was in darkness when they arrived there. He lit a branch of candles and turned to look at her, his eyebrows raised.
“I will not be long,” she said. “You will wait?”
“I will wait,” he said. His eyes, she saw—oh, his eyes almost frightened her. She could see right into their depths.
The Duke of Withingsby was strolling about the ballroom between sets, being graciously sociable. Charity stepped up to his side while he was speaking with a group of neighbors—there were so few names she remembered, though she had paid careful attention in the receiving line. She slipped an arm through his, smiled at him and at them, and waited for the conversation to be completed.
“Well, my dear,” he said then. “Your success seems assured.”
“Father,” she said, “come to the library with me?”
He raised haughty eyebrows.
“Please?” she said. “It is important.”
“Is it indeed?” he said. “Important enough to take me from my guests, ma’am? But very well. I shall not be sorely missed, I suppose.”
Her heart thumped as they walked from the ballroom to the library. She had always had a tendency to meet problems head-on and to try to maneuver other people to do the same thing. Sometimes she had been successful, sometimes decidedly not. But she did not believe she had ever tackled anything quite as huge as this. What if she was doing entirely the wrong thing? What if she was precipitating disaster? But she did not believe things could be much more disastrous than they already were. She could hardly make them worse.
Her husband was standing by the window, his back to it. He did not move or say anything when she came in with his father. He merely pursed his lips. The duke also said nothing and showed no sign of surprise beyond coming to a halt for a moment in the doorway.
“Father,” she said, “will you have a seat? This one, by the fireplace? It is more comfortable, I believe, than the one behind the desk. May I fetch you something? A drink?”
He seated himself in the chair she indicated, looked steadily at his son and then at her. “Nothing,” he said. “You may proceed to explain what this matter of importance is.”
She stood by his chair and rested a hand lightly on his shoulder. “Anthony,” she said, “you brought me here two days ago with the sole intention of hurting your father and destroying all his hopes and plans. You deliberately married a woman far beneath you in rank and with the demeaning stigma of having worked for her living.”
“I did not deceive you about my intentions,” he said.
“And, Father,” she said, “you have shown me affection yesterday and today with the sole purpose of annoying Anthony. Your plan culminated this evening in the gift of the topaz necklet, which you gave me to incense your son.”
“The gift is still yours,” he said. “I have not withdrawn it.”
“You have both succeeded admirably,” she said. “I have been hurt too in the process, but it is not my purpose here to complain of that fact. You have both succeeded in what you set out to do. You are both deeply hurt.”
“You have judged the situation from the perspective of your own tender heart, my love,” the marquess said. “His grace and I do not have tender hearts. I doubt we have hearts at all.”
“Why did you choose your particular method of revenge?” she asked him. “You had alternatives. You could have refused to return to Enfield when summoned. You could have come and refused to marry Lady Marie. Either would have effectively shown Father that he was not to be allowed to control your life. Why did you choose such a drastic method?”
He did not answer for a long time. His eyes moved from her to his father and back again. A curious little half-smile lifted the corners of his mouth.
“Because marrying the right woman has always been the single most important duty of the Dukes of Enfield and their heirs,” he said. “Regardless of the personal inclinations of either the bride or the groom. If his bride has been chosen for him from birth, he marries her even if she feels the strongest aversion to him, even if her feelings are deeply engaged elsewhere. The right marriage, the right lineage for one’s heirs, are everything. And so I married you, my lady, a woman who had answered my advertisement for a governess. Oh, yes, sir. That is exactly the way it happened.”
Charity had felt the duke’s shoulder stiffen beneath her touch even before the end of his son’s speech.
“And you, Father,” she said. “Why did you choose to give me the topaz necklet, of all the jewels that must be in your possession?”
Like his son, he did not answer quickly. There was a lengthy silence. “It was my wedding gift to her,” he said at last. But the silence that succeeded his words was almost as long as the first. “My love gift to her. She spurned my love for over twenty years. She offered cold duty, and gave all her warmth, all her weakness, all her unhappiness to her children—most notably to her eldest son. She gave my gift to him before her death, and I whipped him for it, my lady, because I had never whipped her. Nor would have done so if she had lived as the ice in my veins for another twenty years. I whipped him for it again tonight by giving the gift to the wife with whom he had shown his contempt for me.”
“You never knew the meaning of the word love,” the marquess said.
“As you wish,” his father said. “And so, my dear, you have contrived to bring us together here, my son and me, so that we may humbly beg each other’s pardon and live in loving harmony for the few days that remain to me.”
Yes, that had been her hope. It sounded silly expressed in the duke’s cold, haughty voice.
“I told you we could not be expected to kiss and make up,” the marquess said. “You are too tenderhearted, my love.”
“The duchess is at the root of all this,” she said. “You both loved her. And as a consequence you hate each other—or believe you do.”
The marquess laughed. “He did not love her,” he said. “All he did was keep her here when she would have enjoyed visits to London and the spas. All he did was burden her with yearly confinements, though she would cry to me in her anguish. She was nothing to him but a woman of the right rank and lineage to be bred until she could breed no more. My apologies, ma’am, for such plain speaking.”
The duke’s chin had lifted and his eyes had half closed. “She took your childhood and your youth away from you,” he said. “She made a millstone of her own unwillingness or inability to adjust to a dynastic marriage and hung it about the neck of her eldest son. Her marriage and what happened within
it were her concern—and mine. They should not have been the concern of any of her children, but she made them your concern. Your life has been shadowed by the demands she made on your love.”
“It is a sad state of affairs,” the marquess said, “when a woman can turn for love and understanding only to her children.”
“It is sad for her children,” the duke agreed. “But I have never spoken one word of criticism of her grace until tonight and will never utter another. She was my duchess, my wife—and there is no more private relationship than that, Staunton. If you ever again speak critically of your own wife—as you did tonight in your description of the way you obtained her hand—then you are not only a fool, but also a man without honor.”
They gazed at each other, stiff, cold, unyielding.
“I think,” Charity said, “that we must return to the ball. I can see that nothing more can be achieved here. I am sorry for it. And your lives are the poorer for it. But perhaps you will each remember the other’s pain and the other’s love.”
“I believe, sir,” the marquess said, “that you should withdraw to your bed rather than to the ballroom. My wife and I will see to the duties of host and hostess there. May I take you up myself?”
His father looked coldly at him. “You may ring for my valet,” he said.
The marquess did so and they all waited in silence until the servant arrived to bear his master off to bed. The duke looked drawn and weary, leaning heavily on his man’s shoulder. Charity kissed his cheek before he left.
“Sleep well, Father,” she said.
