Shadows of the Night
Page 2
Fern hardly had room for another swallow of anything, but the tea was a welcome intervention, a reminder of things ordinary on what was certain to be the most extraordinary day of her life. Her hands shook slightly as she undertook the familiar ritual of serving, adding Colin’s two lumps without asking, then her own single lump and cream.
Colin was no stranger, she told herself. Their families had known each other for generations. He couldn’t be a stranger. Why was it, then, that she could not reconcile the image of the sober boy in knee breeches with the man who sat across from her now? Why was it that she could not shake the sensation that he was a mere simulacrum of a gentleman, that the real Colin, whoever he was, lurked somewhere deep behind those chilly eyes?
Colin raised the teacup to her in a mock salute, the irony of the motion not reaching his expression. “Thank you, Mrs. Radcliffe.”
Fern made herself smile, deciding to take his words as a tender tease. “My pleasure, Mr. Radcliffe.” But her gut tightened around the words.
He treated her with a thin smile in return, a twitch of the lips that did not reach his dead eyes, and then he reached deftly into his coat and brought out a piece of paper, unfolding it and spreading it next to his teacup on the table between them. He bent his head over it, and Fern felt as if she’d vanished from his world—as if she’d been abruptly turned off. She stared at the top of his dark head, her mouth half opened to speak. But there was nothing to be said—nothing she could say—and so she took an unsteady gulp of her tea, her eyes watering as it scalded the back of her throat.
Colin looked up, his gaze distant, and for the first time, Fern read a true expression in his usually blank face: contempt. His hand, which had been resting lightly upon the leaf of paper, balled briefly into a fist, and her breath caught in automatic anticipation. But the hand loosened just as swiftly, and Fern read, involuntarily, the first few lines of the page beneath it:
June 8,
Lincoln’s Inn.
Dear Mr. Radcliffe—
Jerkily, Colin pulled the sheet off the table and folded it, sliding it back into his coat.
“What is it, dear?” she managed to ask in a slightly strangled voice, not so much because she wanted to know but because some part of her foolishly feared that she might disappear in truth if she did not reinsinuate herself into Colin’s world somehow.
Colin’s upper lip was still lifted in a sneer, and the gaze that he turned on her contained echoes of disdain. “It is business,” he said distinctly. “It is no concern of yours. Do not ask me about such matters again.”
Fern set down her cup too hard, the unglazed bottom scraping across the saucer. Colin did not wait for her response; he was already staring out the window, an uncharateristic frown creasing his brow. The letter had rattled him, and she had never seen Colin so much as surprised before.
Fern felt a chill slip up her spine. She had never been given to prescience, but she had the sudden feeling that the letter he had tucked away held a great and dire significance for their future.
*
Stones rattled beneath their feet as Colin escorted Fern along the beach. Colin kept an eye on his wife—his wife; what an odd thought, that, lying heavy and foreign in his mind—in case she took a misstep among the rounded pebbles in her smooth-soled, high-heeled boots.
Damn that letter, anyhow, he thought with bleak intensity. Damn all the letters, he amended. His solicitor was being singularly unhelpful in the investigation of the affairs at Wrexmere Manor, which, it seemed, had descended into an inextricable muddle. Now Mr. Barnes was attempting to convince Colin that perhaps an application to his father would be best. But Colin had been given direct management of his family’s oldest estate upon his majority, and the solicitor had all the relevant records in his possession. There was no reason to disturb the viscount about it, even if, as Colin was beginning to suspect, embezzlement and mismanagement were involved. It looked increasingly as if the problem would require his own personal attention, however. He did not look forward to it. He had never been to Wrexmere, and from the distasteful manner with which his mother spoke of the place, he had no desire to go. But he knew his duty, and he would fulfill it, as he always did.
Beside him, there was a sudden clatter as Fern’s foot struck a stone and sent it skipping away, and Colin reached out reflexively to steady her elbow. But she shied away at his movement, and then, as if she had caught herself, she seemed to deliberately steel herself before moving slightly closer to him again.
Fern had been skittish throughout the train ride, and Colin had begun to wonder, with some displeasure, if he had misjudged the woman he had chosen to be his wife. She had seemed so placid and undemanding during their brief courtship, so pretty, plump, and conventional. He had imagined her not so often in his arms as at the head of his table and at the doorway to his ballroom, and the mental picture had satisfied him. But now … he was not certain what she was.
Nervous, he reassured himself. She was merely nervous.
At Fern’s tentative request—and to his own thorough indifference—they had left the shrubbery-bordered promenade to walk closer to the edge of the water. The day had continued as it began: hot, nearly cloudless, with the pale June sun bleaching the grays, tans, and browns of the shingle until it stretched before them as a single motley band squeezed between the white seawall and the gray ocean. Around them strolled clutches of tourists, out for one last walk before supper, hands holding hats to heads and crinolines swaying like ringing bells in the breeze. It was too bright, too hot, and Colin could smell a warning in the wind.
“Look at the seagulls!” Fern said abruptly. Scores wheeled and shrieked in the air above their heads, while on the beach, dozens more stalked among the feet and skirts of the passersby, their beaks darting out to tear at an abandoned picnic lunch.
Colin gave them a distasteful look. “There are gulls on the Thames,” he reminded her.
“Yes, but they’re such dirty birds, as sooty as any pigeon. These are different. They’re almost noble, if such a word could be applied to a gull.” Fern turned her face toward his, and he saw the strain on it as she delivered her little speech in a mimicry of light-hearted chatter.
At least she was trying now. Relenting, Colin looked up at the screaming, wheeling forms silhouetted against the sun. “They are certainly less disreputable.” He did not add that he found them more sinister than noble. Gulls, sinister? He immediately chided himself for his foolishness at allowing his private preoccupations to color his view of the world.
He glanced back at Fern, and she flushed abruptly and shifted her own gaze to the ground before her, the side of her bonnet shutting out his view of her as effectively as a pair of blinders.
The blushing bride … Suddenly the cliché annoyed him, and he had to suppress the urge to scowl. What was wrong with him? Why was it that he was just as dissatisfied when she behaved exactly as he expected her to as he was when she surprised him? If he could not even look at her without growing impatient, this would be a very tedious marriage, indeed.
“When did you first notice me?”
The question pulled Colin abruptly from his thoughts, and he refocused upon her. Fern was still pink with lingering self-consciousness, but her gray eyes were now steadily fixed upon his face. A single light brown curl had slid from under her bonnet to caress her cheek in the sea breeze, and he reached out and brushed it aside experimentally, to see what she would do. Fern’s color deepened at that gesture, but her gaze did not waver.
“I don’t know,” Colin answered, being honest without meaning to. Why not her? was a better question. Fern had always been in the background of his life, starting with house parties and country visits when they were children. But he could say the same of so many others, Fern’s two sisters and the Hamilton twins among them. Why her, specifically, and when? There had been several young things that season who had seemed suitable to become his wife—and eventually his viscountess—but the choice of Fern had simply seemed the easiest.
A pang of something—guilt? incredulity?—shot through him at that remark, but he answered lightly. “You are quite right. It must have been the day that you, Lady Mary, and Lady Elizabeth climbed an apple tree in the Rushworth orchard and you got stuck.”
“Oh!” Fern exclaimed, her face thrown into lines of dismay. “I could have lived my life happily never having been reminded of that. I was trying so hard to be adventurous, like the twins …”
“But you didn’t have it in you. I know.”
“And then two of your horrible brothers started throwing clods of dirt at me—”
“And I rescued you,” Colin finished.
She shot him a disbelieving look, her first unchecked natural reaction since their marriage. “You did no such thing!”
He was bemused by her uncharacteristic vehemence. “I called the gardener; isn’t that close enough?” That small boy’s feelings seemed so remote from what Colin was now, if his motivations could even be given the depth of emotion that such a word as feelings implied. He remembered his weary irritation at his brothers’ undignified behavior and the indignant certainty that their malfeasance would reflect, inevitably, upon him as the oldest. As for Fern, he couldn’t remember feeling anything about her at all except annoyance that she’d got herself into such a foolish predicament.
Fern giggled. “I suppose I can grant you that. My knight in shining armor, if a little tardy to save me from a torn dress and mud stains.” She paused for a moment, her expression turning tentative again. “But still, I don’t believe you took any special notice of me then.”
He pressed his lips together. What answer would satisfy her? “Fern, I am afraid I cannot tell you what you want to know, for I do not know myself.”
His chilly tone must have affected her, for Fern said, “Oh,” and her face closed a little. “I apologize for my presumption. I should not have pressed you.”
Abruptly, Colin was weary of walking upon the beach, weary of the conversation, and weary of her. He turned toward the promenade, catching her elbow before she could pull away as he flagged down a fly with his free hand. “I am hungry,” he said, ignoring her slight stiffening at his touch. “Let us go in to supper.”
Fern cast him a queer, unreadable look, and for an instant, he almost thought she would demur. But her face cleared, and she nodded in agreement. “Yes. Let’s.”
The fly stopped in front of them, and Colin handed her up, steeling himself for the ride. As pretty as his wife was, he did not look forward to that evening.
Chapter Two
Colin had imbibed too much over supper, Fern thought miserably. He was not truly inebriated, not quite; no gentleman became drunk in the presence of a lady. But his voice was a shade too loud, his movements a fraction too expansive, and Fern had been enough in the company of men to know what that meant.
It was her fault. The awareness of her guilt settled heavily over her like a smothering drift of wool, making her movements dull and clumsy as she passed through the suite’s drawing room into the bedchamber. She had ruined their walk on the beach, though she was not entirely sure how, and when they had stepped down out of the carriage in front of their rented Clifton Terrace row house, Fern had still felt stupid and awkward … and obscurely angry, which only made her more stupid and awkward. She had stumbled through the introduction to the housekeeper and the three maids who came with the house, and they had surveyed her with a kind of earnest pity and spoken very slowly, as if she were a half-wit. Supper had been delivered from the Grand Hotel and spread on the broad table in the dining room, and she had been left alone with Colin save for a single maid, which had made Fern even more tongue-tied than before.
Over the roast, she had even called him Mr. Radcliffe, not jokingly but as if they were once again in the first stages of courtship. After that, the evening had dissolved into long silences punctuated only by her inane observations about their accommodations, the weather, and the food, and his short replies. Fern had watched as Colin downed glass after glass of wine, conscious of his closeness, conscious of her failure. Colin was a viscount’s heir; he needed a consummate hostess, a woman who could behave with grace and charm in any situation. Before that evening, Fern had thought she was that woman. Now, she no longer knew what she was.
The orange glow of the gaslights bathed the bedroom gently, making the green silk of the counterpane and the Oriental wallpaper shine like the inside of a Fabergé egg. Colin’s valet, who had arrived ahead of them, and Fern’s local maid were nowhere in sight. Automatically, she reached for the bellpull to summon them, but she started when a warm, large hand enclosed her wrist and arrested it mid-motion.
“We have no need of attendants tonight.” Colin’s voice was laced with cool amusement that sent goose bumps across her flesh.
Fern turned to face him, her wrist still encircled by his broad fingers. She was too aware of his touch, of him standing there and looking at her with a distant, hooded expression. She could hardly guess at the meaning in his gaze, but it stirred up a heat in her midsection, part fearful queasiness and part something else entirely, prickly and disconcerting. The heat crept up her body, tightening her skin in its wake, and she knew with sudden mortification that her face was once again scarlet.
“I’m sorry; I didn’t think to ask …” She realized she was babbling and took a deep breath. “That is, you were quite right to stop me, Mr. Radcliffe—I mean, Colin.” The familiarity of using his Christian name did not come as easily as it should to a wife. “I did not consult you before acting, and I apologize.”
Colin’s mouth twisted, his eyes narrow, and she caught a whiff of postsupper port on his breath, sweetly intoxicating. “Do you think that’s what a good wife does? Consults her husband about every little thing?”
“Yes—I mean, no, of course not.” Fern scowled at her stumbling tongue, but Colin’s smile only broadened, taking on an edge that made her stomach flutter. He was diverted by his wife’s foolishness, no doubt, she thought with a bitterness she hardly recognized as her own. Yet, like every expression she had seen on his face, his smile seemed more like an accessory than a reflection of genuine emotion. Every expression except for one—when he had read that letter in the train, then she had seen a trace of something that was incontrovertibly real. She suppressed a flash of apprehension and made herself explain. “But since you obviously cared about this, I thought I should have asked you in this instance—”
“Mon ange, my dove—it is our wedding night.” His words were tinged with a faint amusement, whether sympathetic or mocking, she could not tell. He pulled her toward him, using his grip on her wrist to place her arm around his waist while cradling the back of her neck in his other hand. Her skin prickled at his touch; even though it was light, she felt that she would not be able to escape his grasp if he did not choose to let her go. “Don’t you know what that means?”
Fern’s instinct was to pull away and drop her gaze, but she forced herself to meet his eyes. His thumb brushed against the nape of her neck, and she shivered, that small movement reminding her how close they were as her wide skirts rustled against his legs.
“Yes.” She was glad to find that her voice was steady, even if her nerves were anything but. “We will go to bed together.” And more, she knew from the Hamilton twins’ whispered stories and the vague hints her elder sister Faith had dropped. There would be kissing, too, and something else that Fern was too embarrassed to ask about, something that had made the imperturbable Faith blush and mumble and the twins burst into gales of laughter and exchange meaningful looks. Trust your husband, Faith had said finally, and that was what Fern must now do.
But he wasn’t as easy to trust as Faith seemed to think he must be. In Colin’s eyes was a light that made Fern wary, an interest that seemed to have col
d intellect behind it rather than a warmer tenderness, and though the arms that held her were sure and strong, they felt like another kind of trap. As traitorous as it might be, Fern was not quite certain that she wanted to be defined by her husband’s surety. He was, as always, every inch a gentleman, utterly self-composed and completely in command—of himself and, at that moment, of her, too.
The perfect husband. So why was she afraid of him?
His face filled her vision, and Fern realized abruptly that it was not some trick of her agitated mind: He was bending toward her. To kiss her.
Her breath quickened as heat flared anew deep within her center, shooting through her limbs and downward, deeper, with an intensity that made her jerk away without thinking.
But Colin’s hand on her neck and the other that slid around her waist held her firmly, brought her up short, and in another breath his mouth caught her.
Astonishment froze her. It was like nothing she had experienced—nothing she had imagined. The restrained and formal kiss in her parents’ parlor after she accepted his hand had left her pink and breathless for minutes after, little shivers of happiness dancing across her skin, but that—that was a spark to a bonfire.
Colin possessed her mouth, moving his lips against hers in an utterly thorough way that sent her senses whirling as tension curled tautly in her midsection. She had never thought that a man’s mouth could be so hot. He pulled her tightly against him and kissed her again, harder. She could feel the contours of his chest against her hand, trapped between them—could feel the size and heat of his body that sucked her strength until her knees went weak and her mind plunged into confusion.
Her sudden twinge of fear was drowned in the roar of heat that followed, surging through every nerve and dimming her vision until nothing was left but the touch of him, the heat of him, the taste of him. His tongue was inside her mouth, and she sampled the warm, rich aftertaste of port. She felt herself falling into his arms, dissolving into him—