by Mary Balogh
“Not yet,” she said.
She had been in a state of near-collapse by the time her mother, the last of their guests, had left. But she had refused to miss dinner—though scarcely a mouthful of food had passed her lips—and she had insisted on coming to the drawing room afterward only because he had suggested both times that she retire to her own apartments, he suspected. Had he told her, in a brisk tone of command, that he expected her to bear him company at dinner, she would probably have stayed upstairs and dared him to go to fetch her down.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
He looked down at the paper on the desktop before him and at the quill pen he held in his hand. “I am writing to my mother,” he said, “and to my sister.”
She had lowered her needle though she was not stitching. “They will be thrilled,” she said.
“Their feelings are immaterial,” he said. “You are my wife. We are to have a child in less than six months’ time. They will have no choice but to accept those facts cheerfully.”
“Cheerfully.” She smiled. “They almost had an apoplexy apiece when they expected that I would be spending one night here after the Christmas ball.”
“You exaggerate,” he said. “Had they been consulted on the matter, they would have been pleased to insist that you stay rather than endanger yourself by returning home.”
She continued to smile. “I decided to endanger myself, Kenneth,” she said, “after overhearing each of them in turn express to you her objection to my continued presence at Dunbarton.”
Was it possible? He supposed it must be if she said it. They had both been outraged, after all. That was why she had so recklessly walked off into the storm.
“I beg your pardon,” he said. “Doubtless they did not intend you to hear.”
“Eavesdroppers rarely hear good of themselves,” she said. “Or so it is said. When they read your letters and make some calculations, perhaps they will wish they had urged me to stay. One night at Dunbarton and they would have been rid of me forever.”
“Their wishes are of no significance,” he said. “And you may rest assured that they will behave toward you with perfect good breeding.”
She smiled at him once more before plying her needle again. He watched her for a few minutes before returning his attention to his difficult letter. They would be horrified, of course: at the identity of his bride, at the manner of his wedding, at the circumstances that had dictated its haste. But they would accept her. By God, they would, if they expected to have any further dealings with him.
He finished the first letter and began the second before looking up again. When he did, she was sitting with her embroidery in her lap and her eyes closed.
“What is it?” He got to his feet and hurried toward her.
“Nothing.” She picked up her needle.
“Put your work away,” he said. “I am taking you to bed.”
“Another command?” she asked.
He gritted his teeth. “If you wish,” he said. “If you choose to make this marriage intolerable to both yourself and me by forcing me to issue commands and to insist upon obedience to them, then so be it. If you wish to make some sort of game of our marriage in which I am always the oppressor and you the victim, then I cannot stop you. But at this moment you are tired and unwell and need to be in your bed. I am going to take you there. You may stand and take my arm if you will. If you will not, I shall lift you from your chair and carry you upstairs. I leave you a choice, you see.”
She took her time about threading her needle through the cloth and folding it with the silks inside and setting it aside before getting to her feet. She leaned so heavily on his arm as he led her slowly upstairs that he knew she must be weary indeed.
“I will send for Ryder tomorrow morning,” he said. “We will see what he can do for you, Moira. You cannot go on like this.”
She would not even argue with the truth of his final statement. Her head slumped sideways against his shoulder, alarming him. He sat her down on a chair in her dressing room, pulled the bell rope to summon her maid, and went down on his haunches before her chair to take her hands in his.
“I have done this to you,” he said. “Men escape lightly in such matters, do they not? But I will take every burden except this off your shoulders, Moira. I will try to be a good husband. Perhaps we can learn to rub along well enough together if we try.”
“Perhaps.” Her eyes were on his. It was the first concession she had made.
He raised her hands one at a time to his lips and then released them and got to his feet as her maid arrived.
“Good night,” he said to his wife. He went back downstairs to finish the letter to Helen, but he did not stay up late. He undressed in his dressing room, donned a dressing robe over his nightshirt, and proceeded to stand at the window of his darkened bedchamber well into the night.
It was not the sort of wedding night a man dreamed of. It was not the sort of marriage a man dreamed of. And yet it was real enough. And one thing had been alarmingly clear to him during his wedding. As he had spoken his part of the marriage service, he had meant every word. He had heard it said that the nuptial service was a pious farce, that bride and groom were forced to utter solemn and ridiculous vows that neither had any intention whatsoever of honoring. He feared that he would have no choice but to honor his.
It was not a happy thought. He felt that he had doomed himself today to perpetual unhappiness.
And yet at one time happiness and Moira had seemed synonymous terms. She had seemed made for happiness: lithe and bursting with health and energy and high spirits. She had scorned the feud that should have kept them apart and the social restrictions that should have kept her always within view of a chaperone. She had scorned the rules of ladylike propriety that would have kept her hair pinned up and her shoes and stockings on her feet and her pace at a sedate walk. He could see her now running across the hill above the waterfall, his hat in her hands, while he chased after her to retrieve it, and twirling about on the beach, her arms outstretched, her face turned up to the sun, and sitting in the hollow on the cliff top, hugging her knees, gazing out to sea, wondering what life in other countries must be like. Talking, smiling, laughing—so often laughing. And kissing him with warm ardor and smiling at his protestations of love.
It was hard—almost impossible—to believe that she was the same woman as the one he had left sitting on a chair in the dressing room next to his own. Except that the soreness about his heart told him that she was indeed the same and that he was responsible for the differences.
“Moira,” he whispered, but the sound of his own voice startled and somewhat embarrassed him. He closed his eyes and set his forehead against the glass of the window.
* * *
IT was a strange room in a strange house—large, high-ceilinged, warm. The bed was large and comfortable. Everything was far superior to her room at home—at what had been her home. But she could not sleep.
She wondered where he was, where his own rooms were. Close to her own? As far away as they could be?
She had been perfectly horrid all day. She had not quite understood herself. He had made an effort to be civil, even amiable. She had twisted everything, thwarted him at every turn. She had behaved like a spoiled child. She had not seemed able to stop herself. But they were married. She could not continue like this for the rest of their lives.
She touched her thumb to the smooth gold ring on her finger. They were married—she and Kenneth. She had reached the summit of her girlhood dreams. He was surely the most handsome man in the whole world, she had once thought—and still thought.
Tomorrow she must try to do better. Tomorrow she must be civil. No marriage could be so bad that a little effort at civility could not make it bearable, unless the man was abusive or had some uncontrollable addiction. Neither applied to this marriage. Tomorrow she would try.
>
She could not sleep. The room tilted beyond her closed eyelids, bringing on the too-familiar nausea; her head pounded, and the muscles in her abdomen were clenching involuntarily and causing discomfort and even pain. She wondered if her confinement would take a more normal course now that all the anxiety and uncertainty and secrecy and guilt were at an end. She wondered if Mr. Ryder would be able to suggest something to make her feel well again. It would be so embarrassing to have to admit the truth to Mr. Ryder, to have him examine her. She wondered if Harriet had suspected the truth—and Mrs. Finley-Evans. She did not know how they could not have done so. She was so very tired. She would sleep for a week if she could but nod off, she was sure.
And then she was waking up, clawing her way out of a nightmare that had left her hot and sweating, gasping her way free of claws that had clamped onto her and were knifing into her flesh. She lay staring at the canopy over her bed, breathing loudly through her mouth. And she knew that only a part of what had happened had been a dream. She lay very still, closed her eyes, tried to relax. She had almost succeeded before it happened again.
There was a bell rope beside her bed. There was another in her dressing room. She forgot about both. She stumbled barefoot to the door of her bedchamber and flung it open. But she did not know where he was. The house was strange. Everything was strange.
“Kenneth,” she said. She filled her lungs with air. “Kenneth!”
A door opened somewhere close as she clung to the doorframe, and then two hands were on her arms, drawing her to rest against the silken warmth of a night robe. She buried her face against him and tried to draw sanity from him.
“What is it?” he was asking her. “What is wrong?”
“I do not know,” she said. But it was starting to happen again and she clawed at him, moaning as she did so. “Kenneth—”
“My God.” He had swept her up into his arms and was setting her back down on the bed. But she clung to his neck, in a panic.
“Don’t leave me,” she begged him. “Please. Please.”
He wrapped his arms about her, kept his head close to hers, talked to her. “Moira,” he said over and over again. “My love. Moira.”
He must have pulled on the bell rope. There was someone else in the room, someone with a candle. He was instructing whoever it was to send for the doctor immediately and to inform him that it was an extreme emergency. He was using the voice he must have used on the battlefield, she thought. And then the pain gripped her again.
She did not know how long a time passed before Mr. Ryder came. But she knew what was happening long before he arrived. There was the waking nightmare of recurring and tearing pain without the sustaining expectation of joy waiting at the end of it all. Her maid was in her room. So was the housekeeper. So was he, talking to her, smoothing his hand over her head, bathing her face with a cool cloth. Eventually, she heard another man’s voice—Mr. Ryder’s—telling him to leave, but he did not go.
He did not go until it was all over and she had heard Mr. Ryder tell him—she did not think he had intended her to hear—that he did not believe her ladyship’s life was in danger. But he would return in the morning, early.
“Moira?” Kenneth’s voice. She opened her eyes. “Your maid will stay here with you. She will come for me if you have need of me. You must not hesitate to ask. Sleep now. Ryder has given you a draught that will help you.” His face was a cold, impassive mask.
She closed her eyes again. She heard someone laugh very weakly. “What a wonderful irony,” someone said—was it her? “One day too late.”
“Sleep,” he said, and the coldness was in his voice, too, now.
* * *
HE felt deeply bereaved and was surprised by the feeling. Apart from the fact that Moira’s pregnancy had forced them into marriage and that her illness resulting from her condition had caused him concern, he had not had a chance really to think about a child being born—his child. A person. A part of himself and her. A son or a daughter. Now there was to be no child, and he grieved for his own loss—and for Moira’s.
Especially for Moira’s. And he still feared for her health, for her life. When he went back into her bedchamber early in the morning after dressing, she was lying still and quiet on the bed, turned onto her side facing away from him. But he could see when he walked closer that her eyes were open. She was staring straight ahead. He raised his eyebrows at her maid, and the girl bobbed a curtsy and left the room.
“Have you slept at all?” he asked. He clasped his hands at his back. He could not bring himself to touch her this morning.
“I suppose so,” she said after a lengthy silence.
“You will feel better after you have rested for a few days,” he said. He could hear the stiffness of his own voice. “There will be other chances for—for children.”
He closed his eyes. What stupid, stupid things to say. Why had he not simply grieved with her? But he felt he had no right to his grief. He had done none of the suffering that had led to the miscarriage of his child. All he had done was keep her warm on a cold night. She would not appreciate his trying to share her grief.
“If this child had only had the good sense to die one day sooner,” she said, her voice a dull monotone, “we would not find ourselves this morning facing a life sentence, my lord.”
The words were more brutal than any whip could be. He winced from the pain. He stood where he was, trying to think of something to say. There was nothing. No possible words to be spoken.
“Yes, I will feel better after a few days,” she said. “How could I not? I am the Countess of Haverford, mistress of Dunbarton Hall. Who would have expected it of a mere baronet’s daughter? And a Hayes into the bargain?”
“We will make the best of it,” he said. “There is nothing else for us to do. People marry all the time for reasons that have nothing to do with love or affection. Women miscarry. Children die. People live on. They get on with their lives. They make the best of them.” He tried desperately to convince himself with his own words. How did people get on with lives that had been dragged down into the deepest gloom?
But she had turned over on the bed and was gazing up at him with hostile eyes. “Women miscarry,” she said. “I do not care that women miscarry. I have miscarried. I do not care that children die. My child has died. It cannot possibly matter after only three months, of course. It was not a real baby. It was nothing at all. Of course I must just get on with my life. Of course I must make the best of it. How foolish of me to be very slightly despondent this morning.”
He opened and closed his hands behind his back. “Moira—” he said.
“Get out of here,” she said. “If there is any decency in you, get out of here. The fact that it was your child should perhaps have made it abhorrent to me. But it could not help its paternity. I loved my child.”
“Moira—” He could feel his control slipping. He blinked his eyes.
“Get out of my sight,” she said. “You are cold, cold to the very center of your heart. You always have been. I wish I might never have to set eyes on you again. Oh, how I wish it.”
Cold through to the center of his heart, he stood looking at her; then he turned on his heel and strode from the room. He closed the door quietly behind him, spread both hands over his face, and gasped for breath. Last night’s ordeal had made her distraught, he thought. He must not believe that she would speak thus or think thus once she had had time to recover her health and her spirits. He should not have gone to her so early. He should have waited for the doctor’s arrival. He should have—oh, devil take it, he should have chosen his words with far greater care.
But no words he might have spoken would have comforted her. She was seething with a hatred of him that was very real, even if it seemed somewhat in excess of the facts. There seemed now no way of making anything of their marriage. She had consented to it with the greatest reluctance only becaus
e of her pregnancy. And now, that pregnancy had been terminated less than twenty-four hours after the wedding. An irony indeed, as she had observed last night. The reason for the marriage—at least in her eyes—had been taken away, but the marriage had been solemnized and was quite indissoluble.
He strode back into his dressing room to don outdoor clothes, and within a few minutes was on his way, on foot, toward the cliffs, an exuberant Nelson bounding on ahead of him. He had not even waited for the doctor’s visit, he realized half an hour later.
* * *
MOIRA was in the small, cozy sitting room that was part of her own apartments, reclining on a chaise longue. She was neither reading nor sewing. She had not done much of either during the past week. But her lethargy was beginning to be irksome to her. She doubted she would be able to follow the doctor’s orders to remain in her own rooms for another week. She was not supposed to go outside for a whole month. She would be out long before that.
Her mother had left an hour ago, Harriet just five minutes ago. Poor Harriet. She had accepted at least outwardly the myth that Moira’s chill, which had lasted from Christmas almost to the present time, had finally culminated the day after her wedding in a serious but short illness, from which she was finally recuperating. The truth had not been spoken, yet Moira was sure Harriet knew it but could not understand how it could possibly be. Other ladies who had called on her during the past two days had looked puzzled and curious but had been too polite to pose any probing questions about either her marriage so soon after the ending of her betrothal to Sir Edwin or her illness. Conversation in the drawing rooms of Tawmouth must be lively indeed these days, Moira thought ruefully.
She had scarcely seen her husband all week. Ever since the morning after her wedding—and her miscarriage—he had appeared only once a day at her sitting room door to inquire after her health, to make his bow to her, and to take his leave.
She tried not to think about her husband or about her marriage—or about her miscarriage. But it was hard not to think.
