The Temporary Wife/A Promise of Spring

by Mary Balogh

  “There is room for a rose garden here,” she said. “I have always longed for a separate rose arbor. There was not enough space behind the rectory. And there should be daffodils and primroses among the trees. And flower beds.” She gazed about her, obviously seeing in her mind far more than the bare green expanses that surrounded them. “There is room for a splendid orchard over there.” She pointed to another stretch of lawn to the east of the house.

  Peregrine laughed. “My gardener will be handing in his notice,” he said. “I shall have to hire others. And I will learn from you, Grace. I have always wanted a beautiful garden, but I am afraid I gaze about me and cannot picture what can be done. You shall convert me into a devoted and domesticated gardener.”

  Grace looked at him seriously. “You must not curtail your activities on my account,” she said. “I will be content just to be here. You must not change your life.”

  He smiled. “But my life has changed,” he said. “Today. I am a married man now, my dear.”

  It seemed strange to Grace after nine years to have a maid again to help her change her dress for dinner and brush out and coil her hair. It seemed strange to go down to a dinner that someone else had planned and prepared and to have it served by a butler and a footman. Strange to have someone else clear away the food and the dishes, and to know that someone else would wash the dishes in the kitchen.

  And it was strange and somewhat embarrassing to discover that, although she had her own dressing room and sitting room, she was to share a bedchamber with her husband. She had not been at all sure during the past month exactly what kind of a marriage it was that Peregrine planned.

  “I thought that perhaps you were offering me a marriage in name only, Peregrine,” she said when he came to her after she had dismissed her maid and stood in the middle of the bedroom, her nightgown covering her decently, her hair brushed out and lying smoothly down her back. Her one concession to vanity was the absence of a nightcap.

  “Perry, if you please,” he said, coming to stand close to her. “I love my mother dearly and loved my father, but I have always been appalled by the lack of sensibility they showed when they named me.” He grinned. “Grace, I have married you. You are my wife. I would have offered you the position of housekeeper here if I had not wanted more of you. And I have always thought rather strange the frequent custom of a husband and wife occupying separate rooms. I will want to make love to you frequently. It is far more convenient for us to share the same bed. Is it not to your liking?”

  She raised her large calm eyes to his. Her thin face was pale. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I will be the wife you want me to be, Perry.”

  “You have beautiful hair,” he said, reaching up both hands and smoothing them lightly over it. “You are a beautiful woman, Grace.” He bent his head and kissed her pale lips. “Come to bed. I will see to the candles.”

  AS SO OFTEN happened after a gloomy day, the clouds had moved off during the evening, and the night was brightly illuminated by an almost full moon and myriad stars.

  Grace Lampman lay with her head turned to one side, watching her husband sleeping beside her. He looked absurdly young in the repose of sleep, his fair hair rumpled, his usually smiling face relaxed. She felt an ache of tenderness for him. Perhaps there was an end to punishment, after all. For her, that was. Only time would tell what her marrying him would do to Perry.

  She had not expected to come alive again. She had given up life nine years before. Because she could never, even in her worst moments, contemplate suicide, she had been forced to keep on breathing and eating and sleeping and filling in the time until she could stop living indeed. And she had always been thankful for the small but infinitely precious gift of Paul’s love and for his need of her time, that commodity that hung most heavily on her hands. But she had never expected more than that, had never felt the need of more.

  Until Perry had tempted her and in her weakness she had given in to that temptation. And even then she had hoped not to be forced back into life again. She had hoped that what he wanted of her would be no different from what Paul had accepted for nine years. She had hoped to be no more than his housekeeper, to share no more than his name.

  She had always liked Perry, had always brightened at his knock on the rectory door, at his sunny smile, his frequent inquiries after her health, his praise of her embroidery and her garden. She had loved him for the brightness he had brought into Paul’s life. Paul had always been different: small, gentle, studious, misunderstood and reviled by would-be friends as a boy, alienated by a family who would have liked him to be more aggressive, more ambitious as a clergyman. Perry had been not only a friend of the intellect to Paul; he had brought laughter and some gaiety into her brother’s life for the first time ever.

  She had liked to look at him, slender and graceful, handsome in his own very special, sunny-natured way. Yet she had never looked at him in the way a woman looks at a man to whom she is attracted. He was so much younger than she, a boy almost, though he was in fact well past boyhood. It amused her at church, and at the social gatherings she sometimes attended with Paul, to see the young girls look at him with admiration and some longing and to see him smile back and flirt with them. Yet never in a cruel manner. They knew perfectly well that he merely flirted. He did so even with the older ladies, though never with her.

  She had always thought that perhaps he would end up marrying Lady Madeline Raine, a young lady of equally sunny nature and equal ability to flirt quite inoffensively. They would make a handsome and a glittering couple, Grace had thought. They could not fail to be happy together. Lady Madeline was twenty years old. But he had married a thirty-five-year-old woman instead.

  Grace lifted her head from her husband’s arm, on which it had been resting. His arm would be horribly cramped if he left it there. She eased it slowly down to his side. He grumbled slightly in his sleep, but did not wake. He turned over onto his side, facing toward her.

  Her own youth seemed such a very long time ago, Grace thought. It could have been another lifetime altogether. She had always been restless and headstrong, stubborn, the spoiled daughter of a father who had only two sons besides her. Her mother had died soon after Paul’s birth. And she had been the close friend of Gareth, only son of the Viscount Sandersford, for as far back as she could remember. Gareth, as headstrong and as stubborn as she, arrogant, intelligent, vibrant with life, yet with a streak of cruelty that often showed itself on weaker playmates, especially Paul.

  She had played with him, defended him, argued with him, fought with him, and ultimately loved him. And she had given herself to him during those final days before he left for the wars, heedless to the consequences that she must have known were a strong possibility. She must have known. She had been one-and-twenty already. She could even remember feeling a stubborn, frightened sort of pride when she first suspected that she was with child, though Gareth had no longer been there to scorn with her the opinion of the world.

  It had been a love with a cruel ending. A love and an ending that could only deaden anyone who survived it. And she had been dead to all intents and purposes for nine years since Jeremy had left her, and only painfully alive for more than four years before that, knowing when it was far too late to acquire such wisdom that her own selfish heedlessness of the moral code would ultimately bring more suffering to her innocent son than it would to her. She was half-dead anyway with Gareth gone. Jeremy was the only light in her life. Yet she had doomed Jeremy from the moment of his conception.

  And was she to come alive again now? It was far more peaceful to live in the shadowed land of the half-dead. There was no pain there. She had fought off the pain of Paul’s death, fought desperately, allowing it to force itself past the barriers she had built around her emotions only on the morning after his funeral when Perry had come to her, and put outside the barriers again immediately after.

  But Perry had married her in good faith, with every intention of making her his wife indeed. And he had mad
e her his wife, in the quiet ceremony that morning, with a strange rector taking Paul’s place, and in this bed an hour before. And though she had not made the comparisons at the time, she could not help making them now. Gareth and Perry.

  She had allowed Gareth numerous intimacies in those few days, because she knew she was losing him perhaps forever and because she did not care what her father or her stuffy brother and despised sister-in-law might say, and because she was young and very, very foolish. It had always happened outdoors, almost always on the hard ground, Gareth heavy on her so that sometimes she had almost screamed with the pain of stones or hard earth pressing into her back. She had loved what he did to her because it was forbidden and daring and dangerous. He had always done what he did quickly and lustily, intent on his own pleasure. But then she had assumed that that was what sexual relations were supposed to be like.

  Perry had not been like that at all. Perry had called her beautiful and he had made her feel beautiful in what he had done to her very unhurriedly on the bed before he had fallen asleep. She had been embarrassed and tense at first because she was a woman approaching her middle age and he little more than a boy, and because it had been fourteen years since she had last been with a man, but he had made her feel like a woman again, like someone of worth, someone desirable before he had lain on her and come into her.

  And the barriers had come crashing down under the gentle caress of his hands, the warm touch of his mouth, the soothing murmurings of his voice. She had come alive again. All her feelings had come slowly and painfully and achingly alive for him, so that when he had come inside her finally, she had been unable to present herself to him as a dutiful wife. She had become a woman opening to her lover. And if there had been any chance that she might have recollected herself before he finished, he had destroyed that chance by working slowly and rhythmically in her even at that culminating stage of his lovemaking. And so she had given herself openly to her husband and had received his gift of pleasure.

  She had said nothing. She had held him with her arms, but she had kept her inner trembling in check. And she had closed her eyes and turned her face into his shoulder when he had moved to her side and put his arm beneath her. So, when he had kissed her cheek and pulled the blankets up around her shoulders, he had assumed she was asleep already and had fallen asleep himself. She did not know if he knew. She did not know if she wished him to know.

  But she knew that he was a man with far greater depths of kindness and gentleness and love than she had ever suspected. She knew that he was a man in a thousand. A man who deserved the very best that life could give him. A man who should have love and laughter in his home. And children.

  And she knew that she was alive again and so full of pain that she did not know quite how she could lie still so as not to disturb him. She must not allow it. She dared not allow it. It was too late now for her to come alive and be the wife Perry needed and deserved. If she came too much alive, she would become too terribly aware of the injustice she had done him, and she would not even be able to be a good wife to him. She would come to watch for signs of discontent in him. She would come to watch him with other, younger women, watching for signs of longing and restlessness. And she would come ultimately to hate him for having reminded her that life could be for living if only one had not misused one’s youth so very badly.

  But the tautness of her body must have disturbed him after all. His eyes were open when she looked across at him again. He was smiling, as he usually was.

  “Still awake, Grace?” he asked, running one knuckle down the length of her nose. “Is this very strange to you, dear? It is to me too, I do assure you. I am not accustomed to waking up to find a wife on the pillow beside me.”

  “Yes,” she said, “it is a little strange.”

  His smile faded. “I did not hurt you, Grace? Or outrage you? Or embarrass you?”

  She shook her head. “I am your wife,” she said.

  “Yes, you are.” He gazed at her in silence for a while. “Grace, I know you have a great many memories. I know that you have loved. And tonight especially the memories must be painful. I cannot compete against the father of your child. I do not wish to compete. I do not wish you to try to suppress those memories or put me in his place. I just want to give you some comfort, dear, some security. Some affection. Don’t feel guilty if you are remembering him tonight.”

  Grace could only gaze mutely back into his eyes.

  He smiled and closed the distance between their mouths. “But I do like waking to find a wife here,” he said before kissing her.

  He should not have woken when he had, Grace thought. She had not had time to come to terms with her very live feelings. And perhaps she never would again, living with him by day as she must, sleeping beside him and with him by night. Perhaps she would never be able to die inside again for as long as they were wed. Perhaps she must step out into the world again and learn again how to live, how to love, how to enjoy, and how to suffer.

  She found herself wanting more than the warm kiss. She wanted to know if it would always be as it had been the first time, if he would always be her lover as well as her husband. It was only when his mouth moved to her throat and his hands found their way beneath her nightgown and his weight bore down on her and his manhood came into her that she let go of her anxieties and allowed herself to become a woman beneath him again, made beautiful by the gentle force of his lovemaking.

  3

  SPRING WAS COMING FAST. THERE WAS NO TIME TO BE wasted indoors. Not when a large and barren garden cried out for an artist’s touch. Grace could no more resist the call than a painter could resist a large bare canvas, or a pianist a new and priceless pianoforte, or a writer a block of blank paper.

  Peregrine’s old gardener and two new lads hired from the village began the heavy work under her directions, but it was Grace herself who did all of the planning and much of the planting, kneeling on the newly turned soil in an old black dress she had had since Jeremy’s passing, an equally old straw hat shielding her neck and face from the early spring sunshine, a pair of gloves protecting her hands.

  Much of the time she stood gazing about her, seeing with narrowed eyes her dream begin to take shape, seeing with her mind the fruit trees and blooms that would make their home beautiful later in the year and in the years to come.

  And Peregrine as often as not knelt or stood at her side, planting bulbs and seedlings under her directions, laughing as she reached over to turn a bulb he had planted upside down (“Would it bloom in China, do you suppose?” he asked her), teasing her when she stood silent, with her narrow-eyed gaze, that she was just too weary to do more work and was merely pretending to concentrate on other matters.

  Yet he admitted as he looked about him after a few weeks that already, even with much bare earth and only a few frail plants pushing their way toward the sun and rows of trees that looked impossibly fragile, his house and its surrounds were looking more like a home. It would all be a showpiece within a few years, he was convinced. And he glanced in some wonder at his wife, who was working the miracle.

  They went about a great deal together in the afternoons and sometimes in the evenings, visiting their friends and neighbors, attending the few assemblies and social gatherings with which the families of the area entertained themselves. Grace was a little less withdrawn than she had been as the rector’s housekeeper, recognizing that more was expected of Lady Lampman than had been of Miss Grace Howard. She discovered that her neighbors were quite prepared to accept her in her new status. She had been afraid that they might resent her rise to social prominence and her taking away of their favorite.

  Peregrine was as charming and as sunny-natured as ever and every bit as willing as he had ever been to converse with the ladies and compliment them on a new cap or lace collar or a recovery from illness. But he no longer flirted.

  The young ladies accepted reality, with perhaps a sigh of resignation, and wondered when they might expect the Earl of Amberley to re
turn from London. Several were agreed that he was without a doubt the most handsome gentleman in the county even if his manner was a little more reserved than they might have wished and even if his title and wealth and property did set him somewhat beyond their touch. Others, especially the very young, protested that his younger brother, Lord Eden, was by far the more handsome. And so tall. And with such open, pleasing manners. And would he come home to Amberley for the summer, or would he take himself off to his own estate in Wiltshire?

  Peregrine went about very little on his own, a fact that somewhat disturbed Grace at first. Not that she minded having him near her. It was a pleasing novelty to have company in her gardening, and a constant amusement to discover the vast extent of his ignorance about plants and landscape gardening. But she had not wanted to tie him down. She had not wanted to kill the joy in his life. She relaxed more as time went on and he seemed to be quite happy to spend his days with her and to see his garden being transformed before his very eyes.

  When they were not out of doors and not visiting or entertaining, Peregrine sat reading as often as not. It had always been his favorite hobby. He enjoyed it even more now after discovering that he could share interesting facts from his books with Grace without either boring or mystifying her. Indeed, he realized soon, Grace was an intelligent and well-informed woman. He thought of all the times he and Paul must have talked in her silent presence and he had never suspected that her mind was as active and as interesting as his friend’s had been, even if not perhaps quite as knowledgeable.

  Sometimes he read aloud to her as she stitched at her embroidery. And he never tired of watching the design grow from the blank linen beneath her long, slim fingers. On occasion he did nothing else but sit and watch her, her black-clad figure slim and shapely, her hair sleek, the black lace cap that she wore indoors hardly distinguishable from the color of her hair, her dark eyelashes fanning her pale cheeks as she bent to her work.