At Last Comes Love hq-3

by Mary Balogh

  She was sore, she realized when they were finished. She had been sore even before they started, but that fact had not diminished her pleasure one little bit. "I will wager," he said against her ear, "that that chocolate is still warm. I believe we were running a race that time. Shall we try it and see?" And so they sat side by side, naked in her bed, propped against the banked pillows, and ate sweet biscuits and drank chocolate that was still a little bit better than lukewarm. "I think, Maggie," he said, "I am going to tell my mother this morning what I told you before our wedding. Will she keep the secret, do you think?" "If you ask it of her," she said, "I am quite perfectly sure she will, Duncan. She loves you." "And I am going to tell my grandfather," he said. "I owed my loyalty to Laura while she lived, but I think I owe something to my family now.

  Would you not agree?" "I /would/ agree," she said. "Your grandfather loves you too, you know." "Yes," he said. "I believe he does. But that love will be put to the test again." She took his free hand in hers and curled her fingers about it. Oh, /this/ part of marriage felt very good indeed. This talking and confiding in each other, this asking for advice of each other. "I think love is always being put to the test," she said. "It bends, but it never breaks. Not if it is real. Your grandfather and your mother really love you." And perhaps, she thought, she would too.

  Perhaps soon. "I think," she said, "I ought to go and get dressed." "A pity" he said. "I like what you are wearing now." She turned her head and laughed at him.

  19

  THEY were traveling in a new carriage, a wedding gift from the Marquess of Claverbrook. Nothing, it was true, could quite make English roads seem smooth and an unalloyed pleasure to travel, but nevertheless there was a marvelous feeling of luxury about being inside a well-sprung conveyance with soft, new upholstery and the smell of new leather.

  It was the afternoon of the second day. They would be arriving at Woodbine Park soon.

  Margaret was trying to decide whether women were more or less fortunate than men when they married. They moved to a different home and sometimes – as in this case – one they had never seen before and one that was far from where they had grown up. Everything was new and strange and different, and there was nothing they could do to prevent it. It was always the wife who moved to her husband's home, never the other way around. It was as though she lost part of her identity. Even her name was forfeited on her marriage.

  On the other hand, there was something marvelously stimulating about starting a wholly new life. One could not literally become a different person, of course, but with a new name, a new home, a new part of the world in which to live, there was the opportunity to start again, to make life better in every imaginable way than it had been before. To make it happier.

  Not that she had been unhappy in her old life. But she had been … Well, she had not been quite happy either. There had been the sense that somehow life had passed her by. Last winter had been the worst. Thirty had been a dreary age to be. Now it seemed the very best age. She was no longer painfully young and vulnerable. But she was still young enough to – "I once thought the world began and ended here," her husband said beside her. "I thought it was ruled by two people who loved me and would always keep me safe." She turned her head to look at him. He was gazing out of the window on his side of the carriage.

  All children – if they were fortunate – felt that way, she thought. Even when they did not live among wealth or plenty. "Your childhood was a happy one?" she asked. "Entirely," he said, turning to her, "though I was not always consciously aware of the fact, especially on those occasions when I had to avoid sitting down for a while because of a stinging bottom. Or on those other occasions when I was suffering from a scraped knee or a bruised elbow or, once, a broken arm. But children grow into boys who cannot wait to be men, and security and love mean little to them. They cannot wait to get out into the wide world, to seek adventure and an elusive happily-ever-after. They go off in search of what they already have, and in the process they lose it." "/Were/ you unhappy after you left home?" she asked him. "No," he said. "I was too busy enjoying myself to be unhappy." She smiled. "Do all children imagine," he asked, "that when they grow up they will be free at last and able to do just whatever they wish?" "I suppose most /boy/ children imagine it," she said. "But not girls?" he asked. He answered his own question. "No, I suppose not. There is nothing much for them to dream of, is there?" "Of course there is," she said, smiling. "There is the perfect marriage to dream of, and the perfect husband – handsome, rich, charming, attentive, gentle, tender, considerate, passionate … What have I missed?

  Oh, and /doting/. Girls dream of love and romance, I suppose, because there is no real point in dreaming of much else. But it can be a pleasant dream for any girl as she waits for her prince to come riding along." She had never particularly thought about that most basic of all contrasts between men and women. Was it only the pointlessness of dreaming of freedom and adventure that made most women romantics, dreaming instead of home and a warm lover for a husband and children to bear and nurture? Or was it a nesting instinct built into the very fabric of the female being to ensure the preservation of the human race? "And for you that prince was Dew?" he asked.

  Her smile faded, and she looked down at her hands clasped loosely in her lap. Lush green countryside moved past the carriage windows. "That is the trouble with dreams," she said, "as you discovered after you had left home. They do not always translate well into reality. But new dreams always come along to take their place. We are, on the whole, an endlessly hopeful species." She certainly had new dreams, even if they were not wildly romantic.

  Their marriage had not made a bad beginning, all things considered. And there was hope … "Poor Maggie," he said, reaching across the space between them to set a hand over both hers. "This is hardly the perfect marriage of your dreams, is it?" "And this is not the perfect life of adventure and freedom of /your/ dreams," she said. "But you are on the way home again, where you were happy as a child, and I am married to a man I can respect and admire. We have not done badly. It is up to us to make something special of the future." He was looking broodingly at her when she turned her head again. "/Are/ we a hopeful species?" he asked her. "Or is it just a few of us – or of /you/ rather? Have you always been an optimist?" "Always," she said. "Well, almost always, anyway. Sometimes something happens that is so catastrophic it is impossible for a while – or even for a long time – to see beyond the darkness, even to believe that there /is/ anything beyond it. But there always is. Even, perhaps, at the moment of death. Especially then, in fact." He did not answer her, and she turned away to watch the scenery. They must be almost there now. He had said there were two hours still to go when they had stopped to change horses and eat luncheon, and surely they had been traveling for almost two hours since then. "When were you last home?" she asked him. "Six years ago," he said. "Even when I planned to marry Caroline and bring her here, I was aware that it had been a whole year. And even then it seemed a lifetime. I longed to be back here." "You must have known when you fled with Mrs. Turner," she said, "that you might never come here again." "Yes," he said.

  She tried to imagine that decision, that realization of all he would sacrifice if he took her away from an abusive marriage that had become intolerable to her. Had they found comfort together? To a certain degree they must have done if they had had a son together – though he had told her he had never loved Mrs. Turner. What had his life been like during those five years? They had moved about a great deal from place to place, he had also told her. But had he found a measure of contentment, even happiness? Had she? He had said she had fallen into a depression after Tobias's birth. Had it been endless? Or just occasional?

  How difficult her moods must have made his life!

  Had her death devastated him? Or had there been some sense of release?

  But she had been his son's /mother/. She had died only four months or so ago – very recently. Perhaps he was still grief-stricken.

  She could not
ask him about those years. Not yet. Perhaps never. She did not believe she would ever be ready to talk with him about Crispin. Some things belonged to one's own heart. "But I /am/ coming home again, after all," he said. "You are right, it seems, Maggie. There always is something beyond the darkness." "When will your son arrive?" she asked him. "Tomorrow," he said, "if there are no unexpected delays." She turned one of her hands beneath his and clasped it. "There is the prospect of plenty more light to come, then," she said. "Yes." She had not told her family about the child. She had noticed that he did not mention him to his mother or grandfather either, though she had been present when he explained to them exactly why he had run off with Mrs.

  Turner the night before his wedding to the present Mrs. Pennethorne.

  His mother had hugged him hard and shed copious tears. She had assured him that she would not say a word to anyone since Graham was seated beside her now and therefore already knew – although it was going to be /extremely/ difficult not to give Randolph Turner a very large piece of her mind the next time she saw him and not to say a thing or two to Caroline Pennethorne the next time she saw /her/.

  His grandfather, when they had called upon him later, had frowned fiercely and pursed his lips and harrumphed and told Duncan he was a damned fool. But Margaret had not been deceived for one moment. His eyes beneath the shaggy white brows had been suspiciously bright. "The village," Duncan said quietly now from beside her – his hand had tightened about hers.

  She could see through the window on his side that the road curved around a wide bend, following the line of a river, and that around the bend there was a cluster of red-brick cottages and a church spire rising from among them. Trees had been planted on either side of the river.

  And then the carriage followed the curve, and they lost sight of the buildings for a few minutes until they were among the cottages and approaching a village green. They drove along one side of it.

  They passed the church and, next to it, a thatched and whitewashed public house and inn. The publican, wearing a long white apron, was standing outside brushing off the step with a broom. He raised a hand in greeting after peering curiously into the carriage and seeing who was within. Three children at play on the green stopped to gawk and then went streaking off in three different directions, presumably to tell their mothers that a grand carriage was passing through the village.

  And then the carriage turned between two high wrought-iron gates, which stood open, and onto a tree-shaded driveway. Almost immediately the wheels rumbled over a bridge as it crossed the river.

  Margaret turned to look at Duncan.

  He was looking back, his eyes dark, his face inscrutable.

  He had not been here for six years. When he had planned during the past four months to return here, he had not intended to bring a wife. But he was not the only one whose plans had gone awry during the past three weeks.

  Oh, goodness, three weeks ago they had not even met each other. Three weeks ago she had been planning to accept an offer from the Marquess of Allingham. "Take comfort," she said, "from the thought that it took Odysseus something like twenty-eight years to get home to Ithaca after the Trojan War." "A sobering thought," he said. And there was that smile lurking deep in his eyes as it had on a few previous occasions. "Look out /your/ window." At first there were only the tall trunks of ancient trees to look at and thick undergrowth between. And then, as the carriage moved out of the woods, she saw a wide, tree-dotted lawn sloping upward to a house on the crest of the hill – a large mansion of mellow red stone and long windows and a gabled roof with a pillared portico and what looked like marble steps leading up to double doors. And a stable block to one side, a little farther down the slope, and a flower garden at the other side – a riot of color flowing down the slope to the river, which looped around behind the hill and the house.

  It was, Margaret thought, one of the prettiest houses and parks she had ever seen.

  And it was home. /She/ was home. /They/ were.

  Duncan's clasp on her hand was almost painful.

  Neither of them spoke.

  If he had come alone, as he had intended, Duncan thought, he would have prowled about the house, looking for what was familiar, what was not, trying to recapture the presence of his father in the library, of his mother in the morning room and drawing room, standing at the window of his old bedchamber, looking down the steep slope behind the house to the river and across it to the wide, straight, laburnum-shaded grass avenue, which ended with the summer house and views of fields and meadows and woods in every direction. He would perhaps have strolled along the portrait gallery, viewing the old family portraits through adult eyes.

  He would have spent the evening slouched in a chair, perhaps in the drawing room, more probably in the library, reading a book.

  Reveling in the feeling of being home where he belonged.

  At last.

  It had been a long, weary exile – much of it self-imposed. He had gone away to sow some wild oats, and he had stayed away because he had stepped past the invisible but nonetheless real boundary between wild oats and that barren land that stretched beyond the pale. For five years he had yearned to be here with a gnawing ache of longing.

  Oh, he might have paid a visit now and then, he supposed. But there had been no leaving Laura, even with the Harrises, whom she knew and trusted. A few times he had gone away for a night or two just because he had needed some time to himself, some semblance of a life of his own.

  But each time he had been sorry when he returned. Not that she had railed at him. She had never done that. She had always … loved him. Yes, that /was/ the correct word, though it had not, of course, been a romantic love. And she had needed him. Oh, how she had needed him!

  It should have felt good to be needed.

  It had not.

  Poor Laura.

  He had loved her too. /Not/ with a romantic or sexual love.

  He had not come here alone now, alas. He had brought a wife with him.

  He showed her the house after their arrival and marveled at how little it had changed in six years. Why had he expected that it would have done? Any orders for change would have had to come from him – or from his grandfather.

  He could not dislike Maggie, he found, even though he had half expected to. She was sensitive and compassionate. Good Lord, she had insisted upon having Toby in their home as if he were a legitimate son of the house. It was not just that, though.

  It was … Well, he did not know what it was. "You have not seen the gallery yet," he told her as they sat together at a late dinner, one at the head and one at the foot of the dining room table, from which the butler had had the forethought to remove all the extra leaves so that they were not a great distance apart. "It is best seen in the daylight. I will show it to you tomorrow, if you wish." "Are all your family portraits there?" she asked. "It is an interesting gallery," he said. "All the main family portraits are at Wychen Abbey, my grandfather's country home. But all the marquesses for the past seven generations grew up here, just as I did, and so the portraits of them as children and young men are here, as well as portraits of all their other family members, of course. It is a cheerful place. I was an only child and did not always have the company of other children, though my cousins were forever coming for extended stays. I spent a great deal of time in the gallery, especially in wet weather. My pictured ancestors were my playmates. I weaved stories about them and me." She was smiling. "It must be lovely," she said, "to have an ancestral home, to have that connection with your own roots and with those who went before you." "It is," he said. "There is a wonderful portrait of my grandfather when he was fifteen or sixteen, astride a horse and bending down to scoop up a shaggy little dog. And another of him as a young man with my grandmother, my father an infant on her knee." She smiled along the length of the table at him. "I shall so enjoy looking at those particular paintings," she said. "Oh, Duncan, he loves you very dearly. I am going to persuade him to come here before the winter." "He has
not been here," he said, "since my father died – fifteen years ago." "Then it is time he came again," she said. "We will see to it that he replaces those sad memories with happier ones." /We will be happy, then/? he almost said aloud. "If you can persuade him," he said, "you will be a miracle worker." "Watch me," she said, laughing. "Shall I leave you alone to your port?" It would have seemed mildly eccentric of him when they had no company.

  Besides, he did not want to sit alone – strange, really, when he had been dreaming of returning here by himself. "We will retire to the drawing room," he said, getting to his feet and going to draw back her chair, "and have tea brought there. Or coffee?" "Tea, please," she said, and he looked at the butler and raised his eyebrows. "And that," he said as he led her toward the drawing room, her arm drawn through his, "was gauche of me, Maggie. I should have left the ordering of the tea tray to you. You are not a guest in my home, are you? You are my wife." "How improper it would be," she said, laughing again, "if I were only a guest. I /will/ pour the tea, however." Which she proceeded to do as soon as the tray arrived in the drawing room. He watched her, poised and elegant and beautiful. Still a stranger. Was it inevitable in any new marriage? Was it possible to know any woman in advance of living in intimacy under the same roof with her?

  He had courted Caroline for several months before offering her marriage, and they had been betrothed for several more months. And yet he had not known her at all until very close to the wedding. And even then, he supposed, he had not completely known her – only one fact about her that had repelled him.

  Perhaps it did not matter that he had known Maggie for less than three weeks. "It /is/ awkward, is it not?" she said into a rather lengthy silence as they sipped their tea. "The silence?" he said. "I could keep talking," she said. "So could you. But not forever. What /do/ we talk about, Duncan?" "What do you talk to your brother about?" he asked her. "And your sisters?" She was looking directly at him. "I am not really sure," she said. "With strangers and even acquaintances I can keep a conversation going indefinitely. It is a part of being polite, is it not? With my family I do not have to make conversation.