The servants knocked at the door, and with a muttered oath, Geoffrey bid them enter. First through the door was Martha, carrying over her arm a great rustling, ruffled swath of emerald green silk taffeta that must be Serena’s dressing gown.
He watched Serena slip from the bed, her breasts trembling and her pale skin luminous in the candlelight. He hadn’t had much time in bed to admire her, and now he was struck by the narrowness of her waist, made to appear even smaller by the full swell of her hips, and all of it without the ordinary contrivance of stays or hoops. He was thankful for his own dressing gown, hiding as it did his growing erection inspired by his wife. His wife, he thought, marveling. She moved so gracefully, unself-conscious of her nudity, that he couldn’t help but watch, and feel a most fortunate man. When Martha stepped forward to wrap the dressing gown swiftly around Serena, he felt chagrined that it was hiding her beauty, and disappointed, too.
Unaware of his thoughts, Serena pulled her hair free of the gown, glancing around the room. “I should like to wash, Geoffrey. I could go to my own rooms—”
“Use my dressing room if you wish,” he said, feeling a bit boorish and woefully insensitive. “There, through that door.”
She smiled, dazzling him, as she and Martha disappeared. For a long moment, he stood there staring after her, letting the enormity of this night sink in. He was married, yes, and he was also in love. He hadn’t expected that to happen so quickly, but it had, or perhaps it had been there for a while and he’d simply been too dense to notice. He noticed now, that was certain. He loved Serena, and he was overwhelmed by the intensity of it. Now he realized he’d never really been in love before, not like this, and he smiled to himself.
He loved his wife, and she loved him. Could there be anything finer, or more right?
Quickly he opened the door for the other servants who’d been waiting with their supper on platters with domed silver covers, plus the necessary linens, plates, goblets, and silverware. He urged them to hurry as they pulled a nearby table before the fireplace and set it for dining. He wanted everything ready when Serena returned—even after the earlier disturbances of nightmare and the fact that it was still a good hour before dawn, an ungodly hour for him to be awake.
He studied the table critically, wishing he’d thought to plan this first meal together, instead of not seeing beyond seducing her. There should have been flowers—lots of flowers—and he should have had Mrs. Potter create some sort of lavish Frenchified specialties instead of humble tea and sandwiches. Perhaps he should have consulted Gus about the niceties of pleasing new wives.
As it was, he was glad he’d hurried the servants, for Serena returned far sooner than he’d expected. He appreciated that, knowing she was as eager to rejoin him as he was to see her again. He was also glad that she hadn’t disappeared for hours of primping and preening, the way some ladies would have, and that she’d already dismissed Martha. She’d washed her face and brushed the tangles from her long hair, but that was all: no powder, no paint, no hairpins.
Yet although she smiled, her expression was still guarded, and he couldn’t tell how much was due to her nightmare, and how much was the unfamiliarity of being his wife. Clearly if he wanted her trust, he’d have to earn it. He’d been forceful enough earlier in bed—seduction was something he knew how to do—but perhaps a little politesse now wouldn’t be amiss.
He sent away the footmen, seating her himself, in one of the armchairs. With a flourish, he lifted the cover to find her toast and placed it on her plate, then poured her tea for her. He’d never done that before, not for anyone, and he concentrated hard to make sure the tea didn’t come slurping out from the pot.
It was worth it. Her smile warmed at the simple gestures, things most gentlemen—especially the son of a duke—would never do. When he bent to kiss her, tucking his fingers in the back of her hair, she turned her lips up to meet his with an eager little sigh that would undo any man. Immediately he considered forgetting this makeshift meal altogether and taking her back to bed, then just as quickly thought better of it, or at least the thinking part of him did. He had to remember that Serena was his wife, not his doxy. They’d have their entire lives together, and with considerable willpower he sealed the kiss, and took his own chair beside hers.
“Sugar, or cream?” he asked with determined nonchalance as he poured coffee from the other pot into his own cup.
“Only a splash of cream,” she said, holding out her cup. When they were alone together, she let more foreignness creep into her voice, or perhaps he simply was more aware of it. Whatever the reason, he found the hint of Indian inflections impossibly seductive and exotic, full of warmth and mystery.
“There you are,” he said, adding the requested splash, and trying hard not to think of a more masculine kind of cream he’d like to be offering her. Being so damned domestic was a trial. “Jam?”
“Thank you,” she murmured as he set the silver jampot before her. “I see you prefer coffee to tea, the way so many gentleman do.”
“At this hour, I do,” he said. “And as strong and black as can be.”
She smiled shyly, and he realized she was trying to find her way in all this, too.
“I have so many things to learn about your likes and dislikes,” she said. “That was what Aunt Morley advised: that I must learn how you take your tea in order to ensure happiness in our marriage.”
Immediately he imagined “taking tea” as a euphemism, one that Lady Morley surely had never intended. “I shall have to consult Her Grace on all your whims,” she continued, stirring the silver spoon through the tea and cream. “She’ll know them from your boyhood onward.”
“I’m afraid she won’t,” he said. “As charming as Celia may be, she’s not party to my deepest peculiarities. She’s Father’s second wife. My own mother died when I was very young.”
“I’m sorry,” she said automatically, yet genuine sympathy filled her eyes. “I didn’t know.”
“Then that’s a testament to how contented my father is with her,” he said, unable to escape the rush of sadness he still felt whenever he spoke of his mother. “He grieved deeply for Mother, for years and years. We all did. But my brothers and I were pleased when Father married Celia three years ago, for she makes him happy in ways we’d never thought to see again.”
“I have no memory of my mother at all,” she said wistfully. “Do you of yours?”
“Oh, yes,” he said, smiling as he remembered. “Though I was only six when she died, I remember her as if I’d seen her yesterday. I was her favorite, you see. Harry was special to Father, because he was his heir, and Rivers was still in the nursery. Mother always said she and I were two of a kind. She taught me to read, and to ride my pony, and the names of the stars in the sky at night. Toward the end, when she was too ill to rise, I sat on the bed and invented songs and stories to amuse her. She said I was the only one who could make her smile and laugh, no matter how she suffered, and I believe I was.”
“I believe it, too,” Serena said softly, reaching out to cover his hand with her own. “Because you do the same for me now.”
He nodded, surprised by how grateful he felt for her touch, and turned his hand over to twine their fingers together. He’d intended to stop his reminiscing there. It was all old history now, hardly fit for their wedding night. Yet there was something about the gentle pressure of her fingers around his, the kindness in her eyes, or perhaps the way she didn’t pry, but simply waited for him to go on or not, and before he’d quite realized it, he was telling her more, more than he’d ever spoken to anyone beyond his family.
“I was so young that I didn’t truly understand what was happening to her,” he said. “It was a cancer in her breast that was eating away at her, killing her slowly, and all the surgeons could do was dose her with laudanum against the pain. Everyone told me that we would lose her soon, that Mother’s suffering would end when she was called to the angels and other rubbish like that. What I knew was that she was grow
ing weaker and weaker each day—even I could see that—but I believed that as long as I stayed close to her, she wouldn’t be lost. It unsettled Father, having me always perched on Mother’s bed, but he hadn’t the heart to send me back to my own room.”
He sighed, recalling how wrongly he’d misinterpreted the genteel expression. “One afternoon Mother seemed better, and an uncle took me to Bartholomew Fair as a lark, to free me from the sickness in our house. But in the middle of a show of dancing dogs, a footman came to summon us at once, for Mother had worsened. I wept and fretted all the way home in the carriage through the fair-crowds, desperate to join my mother, but we were too late, and by the time I reached her bedchamber, they’d already begun to dress her body.”
He might think often of his mother, but not the way she’d been that evening, still and hard and pale as wax, the looking glass on her dressing table already shrouded with black. The joy in their house had vanished, replaced by a crushing darkness that had been very nearly unbearable for his six-year-old self. No: he’d no wish to revisit that day.
“Then that’s why you came racing back to England from Calcutta,” Serena said. “You needed to save your brother.”
He stared at her, almost startled by her voice. How could he have forgotten she was here with him?
“I returned because it was my duty,” he said slowly, firmly, the way he’d explained his haste to everyone else who’d asked. “That always came first with Father. It was my duty to be in England in the eventuality that I had become Father’s heir. Which, most fortunately, did not happen. I’ve told you that before. I’ve never wanted the dukedom, especially at such a cost.”
She nodded, her expression solemn as she reached out to place her hand on his chest. “That might have been part of it, yes. But in your heart, here, you believed you could save your brother the way you hadn’t been able to save your mother.”
He shook his head, resisting what she suggested, yet not wanting to hurt her. He raised her hand from his chest to his lips, lightly kissing her palm to turn her gesture into something more flirtatious.
“Many years separated the two, Serena,” he said, striving to lighten the moment. “I don’t see how there could be much of a connection.”
“I do,” she said, her eyes filled with sorrow that went far beyond sympathy. “The past is with us always, Geoffrey, no matter how we might wish it otherwise. It can’t be changed. You had to try to join your brother in time, no matter how many months your voyage took. In your heart, your mother was guiding you. You went to him from love, not duty.”
“It wasn’t that I thought I could change things, Serena,” he insisted, for it now seemed oddly important that she understand—or perhaps that he understand himself. “I’m not so great a fool, nor so arrogant, as to believe that. But I suppose what I hoped for most was that last chance to talk, to say things that needed saying. It may sound foolish to you, but—”
“I never said good-bye to Father,” she said, her voice scarcely above a whisper. “I was sick, and he was, too, and Asha, and everyone else who could not flee, and then I was the only one left.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, all he could say. He knew almost nothing of her last days at Sundara Manōra. She’d always made it clear that she’d no wish to speak of it, and he hadn’t pushed, not wanting to cause her the pain of remembering. “As you said, the past is always with us, whether we wish it to be or not.”
But she was so lost in that past that he doubted she heard him.
“Asha was still alive when I went to her,” she said, slipping her hand free of his. She made one hand into a fist, and clasped the other tightly over it, her eyes staring. “I lay beside her and told her that together we would survive, but instead they took me, and left her behind, as if she didn’t matter.”
“Who was Asha?” he asked carefully. “A servant?”
She shook her head, a quick little jerk. “My sister. She was too weak to fight the fever alone. I loved her, but that wasn’t enough.”
Geoffrey was stunned. She’d never once mentioned having a sister, nor had he heard it from anyone else. Then he thought of their earlier conversation, of how her father had kept his mistresses in the same house with his true family, and it all made sense. Asha must have been a bastard daughter born to one of these mistresses, and raised side by side with Serena. In England, such an arrangement would have been shockingly scandalous, but in India, Lord Thomas had done what he pleased. And clearly it had pleased Serena, too, for her to feel such devotion to her half sister.
“It could not have been your fault, Serena,” he said. “Where were the servants?”
“Gone.” She was clenching her hands so tightly together that the knuckles were white, and the fact that she wasn’t crying somehow seemed much worse than if she had. “Once Father was dead, they’d no reason to stay. The servants, the guards, the eunuchs, the slaves, all fled if they could, and left the gates open. But many of them died, too, wherever they fell, as is the way with fevers. It was the rainy season, the monsoon, and in the heat and damp the bodies soon bloated and began to rot. There were clouds of flies, and hyenas and other animals came in through the gate to—to feed. I was weak, and I could barely stand, and I was so afraid the hyenas would hunt me down, too.”
He rose and went to stand behind her, wrapping his arms around her shoulders to comfort her as best he could. He longed to protect her, even if there was no way he could protect her from the ghosts that haunted her. In all the things that he’d imagined about her unspoken past, he’d never pictured this. His mother’s suffering had been very real and grieved him still, but at least she had died in her own bed, with her husband by her side. The horror of what Serena was describing, and what she had witnessed and endured, was unfathomable to him.
“But they didn’t,” he said. “You escaped. You’re here, and you’re safe.”
She shook her head again, her shoulders bowed with misery. “I didn’t escape. The English physician that Father had sent for came too late to help. Instead he and the English soldiers carried me away, and burned our house to the ground to destroy the contagion. They left Asha and Father and the others inside, to be burned in the fire with the house. Why was I saved, and they were not?”
Overwhelmed, she slipped forward in the chair. He caught her before she fell and carried her to the bed. She didn’t sob or cry aloud, but her face was pale and twisted in sorrow, her eyes empty.
“Listen to me, Serena,” he said urgently, bending over her. “None of that affects you now. It’s over, done. You’re safe here with me.”
She reached up and laid her palm against his cheek. Her hand was cold, and she was trembling; he could feel it. “I should never have told you, Geoffrey. Not about the fever, or my sister, or the fire.”
“Of course you should have,” he said. “I want you to trust me, Serena, in this and in everything else.”
“But I’ve never told anyone, not a word.”
He sighed. “It’s your nightmare, isn’t it? The fever, the wild beasts, the fire. We spoke earlier of your father and India. Likely that was enough to make you remember the rest. It all comes back when you sleep, doesn’t it?”
Her eyes widened, answer enough.
“No one knows,” she said frantically. “I should never have told you. No one knows!”
“Hush now, hush,” he said, striving to calm her. “I guessed, that is all.”
“But now you know, and—and you shouldn’t,” she said, the panic rising in her voice.
“It was a long time ago, Serena,” he said. “While it may still seem very like yesterday to you, to most other people it will be too long ago for them to care.”
“Seven years ago,” she said, “and that’s no excuse. I still shouldn’t have told you any of it.”
“And why the devil not?” he demanded. He knew he should be more understanding and show her only kindness, but her instant regret that she’d shared such a momentous confidence made him feel as if he’d alr
eady failed her. “You were a young girl in a terrible situation. It has been your secret to keep, and now it’s mine as well, until you tell me otherwise.”
“But it wasn’t my secret to share,” she said, faltering. “Not entirely. My sister—no one here knows of her. No one.”
“Then we shall change that,” he said, determined to prove that he did understand. “She won’t be forgotten. We’ll have a monument made to her memory for St. Stephen’s, beside the one for your father.”
“No!” she exclaimed vehemently, sitting upright and backing from him against the pillows. “My grandfather and my uncle must never know of Asha, nor your father, either.”
“Damnation, Serena, do not mention my father in the same breath as your grandfather!”
“Why shouldn’t I?” she said defensively. “Your father may be a duke, but he’s just as proud, and as English, as my grandfather. If either of them learned of Asha, they would both say nothing but hateful things of her because of who she was.”
He hadn’t expected that from her. He pushed away from the bed and went to stare down into the dying coals in the fireplace, his arms crossed over his chest as he struggled to control his temper.
“I know they cannot help it,” she said, her voice softening a little. “It is how they have always thought the world to be ordered, with themselves at the very top. But I could not bear to hear them speak cruelly of Asha because of things that were never her fault. She does not deserve that, not at all.”
She was entirely right, but he couldn’t bring himself to admit it. He’d his measure of pride, too. Instead he simply pretended she hadn’t just lumped his father in with her appalling grandfather.
“Very well, then,” he said, turning back to face her. “We will have a monument here, in the back garden, where only we will see and understand its significance. A statue, a tree, anything you desire that will help you to keep Asha’s memory alive.”
She frowned, still troubled. “Why would you do that for her? You never met Asha, or knew her. Because of who she was, in England she would be nothing to the son of a duke.”
A Sinful Deception Page 24
