The Temporary Wife/A Promise of Spring

by Mary Balogh

  “You are wrong,” she said. “All connection between you and me is buried at the end of the lake with Jeremy. All feeling between us was dead before that. Have you ever been there? Have you ever seen your son’s grave?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Once.” He lifted a hand and laid one finger beneath her chin. “The child is buried there, Grace. Not you and I. Despite your protestations to the contrary, you know that nothing is ended between us. Just dormant. This day has been coming. We have both known it.”

  His eyes had that intense, passionate look that had always mesmerized her. In years past she had invariably ended in his arms when he had looked at her like that. She felt a twinge of fear. “You are my past, Gareth,” she said. “Not my present and not my future. My past.”

  “You think that boy is your future?” he said. “Poor Grace. He is a ladies’ man. Have you not seen that? His head is already turned by the admiration of those silly girls. Imagine what will happen when you reach London and all the new little butterflies of the Season. Grace, my love! He is far too young to appreciate your mature attractions. You will lose him, you know. I would give your marriage perhaps another year. Then he will be lost to you.”

  “That is not your concern, and never will be,” she said.

  “Well,” he said, “I am a patient man, Grace. We will see in a year’s time. Do you wish me to walk all the way home with you?” They had been strolling back the way they had come.

  “No,” she said. “No, that is unnecessary.”

  “I shall leave you here, then,” he said, patting the neck of his horse over the fence. “Is this all a secret from the estimable Peregrine, by the way? Does he know of the child? Of me? Does he know who I am?”

  Grace buried her nose in her flowers. “He does not know who you are,” she said. “The rest he does know, and has done since before our marriage.”

  “I see,” he said, smiling down mockingly at her. “Then I am to make sure that the secret does not slip out, am I?”

  “I am not asking anything of you,” she said.

  “You leave yourself very much in my power, do you not?” he said, crossing the fence again and disentangling the reins of his horse.

  “No,” she said. “I ask nothing of you, Gareth. No favor. You may tell Perry what you will.”

  Sandersford swung into the saddle and smiled down at her. “Ah,” he said, “the old defiant Grace. All that is missing is that dark mane loose down your back as you toss your head. But the spark is back in your eyes. I will not tell your secret, Grace. I would not be so poor-spirited. Au revoir, my love. I shall see you again soon.” He touched the brim of his hat with his riding whip and turned his horse’s head to the roadway again.

  “Good-bye, Gareth,” she said, lifting her chin and watching him out of sight.

  6

  GRACE AND PEREGRINE WERE TO LEAVE FOR LONDON five days before her brother and sister-in-law. Priscilla was to go with her aunt and uncle, much to her squealing delight and the envy of Miss Stebbins, whose mama and papa were not leaving for another full fortnight.

  “Aunt Grace,” Priscilla said after Grace had spoken on her behalf and persuaded Martin to allow her to travel with them, “I will be ever so good, you will see. And I will keep you company in Portland Place while Uncle Perry goes out to his clubs—Papa says that is what gentlemen do with their time in town—and I will not beg at all to be taken about until Mama and Papa come and I remove with them to Cavendish Square.”

  Peregrine chuckled. “I belong only to White’s and Watier’s,” he said, “and cannot imagine wanting to spend every hour of the twenty-four at one of those, Priscilla. I shall probably drag myself out of them long enough to take Grace about, anyway. She is as new to London as you are. And I will be delighted to have two ladies for whom I might demonstrate my superior knowledge.”

  “Hyde Park?” Priscilla said with sparkling eyes. “And Kensington Gardens? And St. James’s Park?”

  “And the Tower and Astley’s Amphitheater and one or two other places you might enjoy,” he said with a grin.

  “Oh, Uncle Perry,” Priscilla said, clasping her hands to her bosom and executing a pirouette on the carpet before him while her father frowned his disapproval, “I don’t think I can wait. I really don’t think I can.”

  “You will be waiting five days longer if you cannot remember to act more like a lady, miss,” Martin said.

  Peregrine winked at her as she sank into a chair, her manner more subdued. He smiled at Grace.

  Grace spent much of the day before their departure with her father. She even persuaded him to take a short walk outside with her during the afternoon. Peregrine had gone with Martin and Priscilla to take his leave of the numerous new acquaintances he had made during the two weeks of his stay.

  “So you are going away again, Grace,” Lord Pawley said.

  “Perry’s mother and aunt are to be in London,” she said. “I have not met his mother since our marriage.”

  “You will never come again?” he asked.

  “I would like to, Father,” she said. “I have missed you.”

  “It was a bungled affair,” he said. “All my fault.”

  “No.” Grace drew him to sit on a wrought-iron bench overlooking a bed of daffodils, most of which were now in bloom. “It is a mistake always to blame oneself for the past. And probably a mistake to brood on the past too.”

  “I wanted everything for you,” he said. “Or was it really for you I wanted it? I wanted everything for myself, I suppose. And you were the only one with any spirit, although you were the girl. Or so it seemed at the time. Paul had more spirit than the lot of us put together when it came to the point, didn’t he? And Martin is the one who has stayed loyal to all this.” He gestured with one hand to the house and the gardens and the land beyond.

  Grace took his arm and patted his hand.

  “I wanted someone to be proud of, someone to boast of,” he said. “I wanted you married to Sandersford and lording it over everyone for miles around. He was a fine figure of a man. Is, rather. Have you seen him, Grace? Yes, you went there for dinner, did you not? I was angry with both of you for making a mess of it. But only you were here to vent my anger on.”

  “It is all long in the past,” she said.

  “Hmm.” He brooded on the flowers for a few minutes. “I should not have taken it out on the lad,” he said.

  “You were not cruel,” Grace said. “You gave him a home. You provided for him.”

  “I gave him nothing,” he said. “Nothing at all. I was punishing you. I did not even attend his funeral.”

  “No,” she said.

  “So.” He seemed to forget her presence for a while. “I am judged. It is too late now. Too late to give anything to my grandson.”

  “It is not too late,” she said. “It is never too late. There are always other people to whom you can give your love. Some of it might be given to yourself. It is time you came out into the light again, Father. You are not an old man.”

  “Seventy,” he said. “How old would the boy have been, Grace? Jeremy.”

  “Fourteen,” she said.

  “Well,” he said. “Well. I’m glad you came back, Grace. Can you be content with this husband of yours? Seems like a very young puppy to me. Fond of you, though.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I have been very happy with him for the year of my marriage.”

  He nodded.

  LORD PAWLEY CAME downstairs the next morning when the travelers were about to be on their way. He stood leaning on his cane on the cobbles, having rejected the assistance of both his valet and his son. He kissed his granddaughter and shook hands with Peregrine.

  “Perhaps you will be well enough to visit us later in the summer or next Christmas, sir,” Peregrine said. “You would be very welcome.”

  The baron nodded. “I would like to see my son’s grave before I die,” he said.

  Grace held out a hand. “Good-bye, Father,” she said. “I hope you will come.”r />
  He ignored her hand. “I like what you have become, Grace,” he said. “I am proud of you, after all.”

  She lowered her hand and looked into the fierce eyes of her father. “Papa,” she said. She set her hands on his shoulders. “Oh, Papa, I never meant to disappoint you. But I was never able to apologize for Jeremy. Maybe what I did was wrong, but he was not wrong. How can a living being, a child, be wrong? I can never be sorry for having him, though I had him for such a short time. But I never stopped loving you either. I never did, Papa.”

  She kissed him on the cheek, hugged him quickly, and turned away to where Ethel and Martin were both simultaneously trying to remind an agitated, tearful Priscilla of the thousand and one rules and pieces of advice they had drummed into her head the night before and indeed for all the days since it had been decided that she would travel to London with her aunt and uncle.

  Peregrine, who had been standing close to Grace, looked searchingly at his father-in-law to see that no assistance was needed there, then he followed his wife to the waiting carriage, handed her inside, and climbed in after her to sit beside her and hold her hand in a very firm clasp while final farewells were being said outside and Priscilla scrambled in to take the seat opposite, her father’s large linen handkerchief pressed to her eyes.

  He felt Grace’s cheek touch his shoulder for a few moments after the carriage lurched into motion. She did not, as Priscilla did despite her tears, scramble toward the window for one final view of her relatives gathered before the doors of Pangam Manor. He clasped her hand even more tightly.

  THE PRESENCE OF Priscilla did not leave the other travelers with a great deal of time for reflection or any time at all for private conversation. Even at the inns where they stayed for two nights, they were never alone together. Grace’s maid was with them, riding in the baggage coach with Peregrine’s valet, and could have slept in a room with Priscilla, but both her uncle and aunt thought it safer and more proper to have Grace stay with her.

  Peregrine spent two restless and lonely nights, tossing and turning on his bed, wondering how he had ever got a good night’s sleep before his marriage. The bed felt uncomfortably and coldly large. It was almost disturbing, he thought, how easily one became accustomed to married life, how quickly another person could become quite indispensable to one’s comfort and peace of mind.

  Accepting on the second night that he probably would not sleep a great deal and that he would merely make matters worse by turning restlessly from side to side and punching his pillows vengefully, Peregrine propped his head on his hands, his fingers laced together, and considered the state of his marriage and his own life.

  He had been living now for a year in a marriage that he had contracted rather hurriedly and with little consideration. He had been fond of Paul and had liked Grace and had felt the necessity of looking after her. After hearing the story of her past, he had also felt a deep respect for the woman whose life he would have guessed to have been rather dull and uneventful. He had come to see that her quiet dignity had been won at great cost, that she was a woman of extraordinary strength of character.

  Had he given her the comfort he had set out to give? A few weeks before he would have answered with a cautious yes. There had been no great passion in their marriage, and they had reached no high pinnacles of ecstasy. But there had been companionship and affection, mutual friendship with respect, a satisfying sexual relationship—for her as well as for himself, he believed, despite the fact that she never openly showed that satisfaction.

  There was no question of the fact that she had brought him far more contentment than he had dreamed of. His house, in which he had always spent a good deal of his time and which he had always loved, had become a home under Grace’s quiet and efficient management. And a place of great beauty. Indeed, he lived in far greater comfort than any man had a right to expect.

  And his neighbors, of whom he had always been fond and whose company he had always enjoyed, had become friends during the past year. He had, he realized in some surprise, grown during the year from a young man whom other, older adults tended to treat with amused indulgence into a full-grown man whom they accepted as a peer. And he liked the change.

  And he liked Grace a great deal better than he had when he married her. He found himself so totally comfortable with her that for much of his days he was almost unaware of her as a separate person. He could talk with her, complain to her, laugh with her, be quiet with her as if she were just another part of himself.

  Then, of course, she had become a very important part of his nights. He had always found her pleasing to look at and had certainly not been repelled for even one moment when he decided to offer for her by the knowledge that as his wife she must also be his sexual partner. But he had not expected to find her quite as attractive as he did find her. He made love to her probably far more frequently than was normal after a year of marriage, he thought, ruefully aware again of the emptiness of his bed for the second night in a row.

  But it was not just the lovemaking. Just to have her there beside him in his bed was enough to fill him with contentment and settle his mind for sleep. Even during the fourth week of each month, when he could not make love to her, he could feel happy just to lie with his arm beneath her head, talking with her until one or both of them fell asleep.

  His marriage had been quietly successful, Peregrine felt. Had been. He was not so sure that it still was. He was not at all sure that their few weeks at Pangam Manor had not sent Grace away from him. He did not really want to think the matter through. He felt a little ball of panic in his stomach when his mind touched on the thought. But what else was there to do but think when one was lying awake in a less-than-comfortable inn bed, one’s wife not beside one either to love or merely to hold?

  He had encouraged the visit. He knew that when Paul had taken Grace from her home, the past had been bottled up. It had not been erased. There was a great deal of unhappiness, pain, anger, grief, misunderstanding throbbing beneath the surface of her life. He might have lived with Grace for the rest of their lives in mild contentment. It could be a reasonably happy life. But there would always be that something. Peregrine had learned in his year with his wife that that calm in her eyes he had always admired was not really calmness at all. It was death. She had put all feelings of any intensity to death when she had gone away with Paul.

  She had to live again. She needed to do so. And so he had taken the risk of encouraging the visit they had made. And he was not at all sure that his hopes had been realized. On the surface their visit would seem to have been successful. Her father, Martin, and Ethel had appeared genuinely pleased to see her again and had made an effort to be more than just civil to her. And she had responded. But he did not believe that any of them had talked openly about the painful events that had led to her leaving. The baron had begun to do so just before they left, and there seemed to have been something of a reconciliation in those last few minutes. But was it enough?

  And had it been good or bad for Grace to revisit the grave of her son? It was impossible to know. She had been wretchedly unhappy for a few days after doing so, though perhaps no one but him would have known it. But neither of them had spoken of the matter since.

  And Grace was still unhappy. Withdrawn. Taut as a bow. Haunted. And with that tightness about her face and about her mouth that had made one largely unaware of her beauty for the five years she had spent at the rectory. Perhaps it was necessary for her to go through that in order to eventually come to life again. And perhaps she would still be his at the end of it all. He did not know. But the panic was there inside him. She was not talking to him.

  Oh, she was not silent with him. Had he not been her almost constant companion for a year, perhaps he would not have even realized that she was not talking to him. He had strolled out into the garden with her the evening before their departure for London. They had talked about trivialities for several minutes.

  “Are you glad you came, Grace?” he had asked
at last.

  “Yes,” she had said. “It has been good to see Father again. And Martin and Ethel. And Priscilla, of course. It is time that old quarrels were allowed to die.”

  “I am glad,” he had said. “And so you have your family again.”

  “Yes,” she had said.

  “Has everything been put quite to rights, Grace?” he had asked.

  “Yes.” She had looked at him with her calm eyes. “Of course, Perry.”

  “What is it?” he had asked, stopping in order to look into her eyes. “What is it that is still troubling you?”

  She had looked hunted, trapped for several unguarded moments. She had stared back into his eyes, and he had felt her tension, her need to communicate with him, her inability to do so. He had felt failure at that moment. She was unable to tell him about the torment that he clearly saw because he knew her. And he had been unable to do anything but stand there and look back at her as gently as he knew how, telling her with the whole of himself except his voice that he was her husband, her friend, that she might say anything in the world to him and not lose one ounce of his respect or affection.

  “Nothing,” she had said. “Nothing at all, Perry. Have we done the right thing to allow Priscilla to go with us, do you think? It is a great responsibility to have her in our care.”

  He had grinned and started to walk again, her arm tucked through his. “I will vouch for it that there will not be a silent or dull moment during the whole journey,” he had said.

  And so the torment was still there, safely tucked away behind the calmness of Grace’s eyes. Perhaps she would never be able to bring it out and fling it from her. Perhaps all the visit had done for her was to open old wounds and scarcely close old ones at all. Perhaps he had made a mistake. Perhaps he should have sheltered her from the past, from life itself, as Paul had done. And perhaps he would lose her now. Perhaps she would find it increasingly impossible to share her inner self with him. And he would lose her.