by Mary Balogh
But Dorothea had been rather plump and plain, ten years his senior, an aging courtesan even when he had first gone to her to lose his virginity.
No other woman could ever want him. Certainly not Miss Samantha Newman. The idea was laughable. He laughed softly, his eyes closed again.
But she had enjoyed their two afternoons together. She had enjoyed his company. And there was to be another. She was going to allow him to show her his greatest treasure, his home. And he was going to have the memory of her there, inside Highmoor Abbey, gazing admiringly at all the state rooms. He was sure she would admire them. And all the while, as unobtrusively as he could, he would admire her and commit to memory her every look and gesture and word.
Oh, yes, he was going to remain Mr. Hartley Wade for one more afternoon. He prayed for good weather. In the meanwhile, the days seemed endless and dreary, and the only way he could bring himself any peace was to walk to the lake and stand on the bank staring at the place where the three-arched bridge and the rain house—he smiled at her name for the pavilion—would stand when he had had them constructed later in the year.
But the morning of the appointed day finally came, and then the afternoon. And all his prayers had been answered. Not only was it not raining, but the sun was shining down from a cloudless sky. There was even heat in the air. He gave instructions at the house before he left. Until they saw Miss Newman and drew their own conclusions, his staff would think him mad—first forbidding them to spread word of his return and now forbidding them to use his title for the rest of the day.
He rode down the long, winding driveway toward the gatehouse, from where he would be still out of sight of anyone riding along the road. He tried to persuade himself that he would not be too disappointed if she did not come.
But he knew as soon as he saw her, a scant two minutes after his own arrival, that he would have been very disappointed indeed. Devastated.
She saw him almost immediately and raised a hand in greeting. At the same time, her beautiful face lit up with a happy smile. Yes, happy. She was happy to see him.
She was dressed in a very smart and fashionable riding habit of dark green velvet. She wore an absurd little matching riding hat perched on her blond curls, its paler green feather curling enticingly down over one ear and beneath her chin. His mind searched for a more superlative word than beautiful but could not find one.
“Have you ever known a more glorious spring day?” she called to him gaily when she was within earshot.
“No, never,” he said truthfully, smiling at her.
Never. And there would never be another such.
HE DID NOT TAKE her immediately to the house. He took her off the driveway and through old and widely spaced trees.
“It was a tangled, overgrown, ancient forest,” he said, “and quite impenetrable except to wild animals of the smaller variety. I had it cleared out so that it could become a deer park and so that it could be walked and ridden in. Of course”—he laughed—“the marquess then decided that there was to be no hunting on his land. The deer have an idyllic life here.”
“Oh,” she said, “I am so glad. Do you disapprove?” She hoped he did not. She hoped he did not enjoy blood sports. But almost all men did. They saw it as a slur on their manhood to admit otherwise. Her respect for the Marquess of Carew rose.
“No,” he said. “I created the deer park only on the understanding that it be in the nature of a preserve. Look.” He pointed with his whip. There were five of them, lovely and stately and quite unafraid, though they must have seen and heard the horses and humans no more than a hundred feet away.
“How can anyone want to shoot them?” she said, and he smiled at her with his eyes.
He took her all the way around the more open part of the park, with the abbey always visible. From the front it still looked as if it might be a cathedral. The other three sides were a strange mixture of architectural designs. Successive marquesses had obviously all made their mark on the building. And yet the result was curiously pleasing. Samantha could not think of a house—and she had seen many of England’s most stately—that she admired more.
“Thank you,” Mr. Wade said when she told him so.
“Have you had a hand in its design, then?” she asked him.
He looked at her blankly for a moment before laughing. “No,” he said. “But I shall pass along your compliment to the marquess. I am merely anticipating his response and expressing it to you while you are able to hear it.”
“How absurd you are,” she said.
The park was quite unconventionally designed. There were no formal parterre gardens before the house but only a wide cobbled terrace and several large flowerpots, empty at this time of year. But there were flower beds and rock gardens, some of them already full of green shoots; one of them, in a more sheltered area, was overflowing with blooming crocuses and primroses. But there was nothing symmetrical about their design. Most of them were unexpected, in hollows that were hidden from the eye until one was almost on top of them. All of them took careful advantage of the contours of the land.
“It is strange,” she said. “But I like it. Is it your work?”
“Not so much my work, to be fair to the gardeners,” he said. “But my design. I suppose it is strange. To the human mind, anyway, which demands orderliness and symmetry. Nature makes no such demands. Had you noticed? That tree on the slope where we first met, for example. And sometimes I have to argue a point with nature. But not always. I like to work with nature rather than against it, so that everything in a park looks natural even if it is not so in fact.”
“You must have spent a great deal of time here,” she said. “The marquess must have a deep respect for your work.” Again her respect for the master went up.
“He has no artistic sense himself,” he said, a twinkle in his eye. “But he can recognize it and encourage it in others. I have designed several parks in other parts of England. But this is my favorite.”
“Do you live close to here?” she asked. It seemed a shame for him to have spent so much time and creative energy dreaming up such beauty if he rarely had the chance to see it all.
“Not too far away,” he said. “Shall we take the horses to the stable and go into the abbey?”
“Yes, please,” she said. She hoped the interior would not be disappointing. But she desperately wanted to see it for herself, now that she had been so close. She worried a little about what the servants would think. Would they know who she was? Would they be scandalized to see her alone with their master’s hired landscape gardener? But she was not going to allow servants to spoil her afternoon. The three-day delay had seemed endless. And she had felt so happy to see him again, waiting for her at the gatehouse. Her friend.
The hall robbed her of breath. It was two stories high and seemingly all carved stone pillars and great Gothic arches. It felt as though one were walking into a cathedral.
“The oldest and most magnificent part of the house,” he said. “Apart from the tiled floor, which my gr—, which my employer’s grandfather had put down, this is the entryway almost exactly as it was until the abbey was confiscated by Henry the Eighth.”
“Oh!” was the most intelligent comment she could think to make.
A footman bowed to her after Mr. Wade had signaled to him, and took her hat and her whip and the outer jacket of her riding habit. He made a very stiff half-bow to Mr. Wade and, without a word, took his hat and whip. Samantha found herself biting her lower lip at the obvious slight. They must see him here as a servant, little better than themselves, though he was very obviously a gentleman. Servants could be far more discourteous than their betters. But Mr. Wade made no comment. Perhaps he had not noticed.
They spent all of an hour walking about the state rooms—the grand ballroom, the drawing room, the dining room, the reception hall, the bedchamber where King Charles the Second himself had once slept. She looked at Rembrandts and Van Dycks and one magnificent seascape by Mr. Reynolds. It was all more
glorious than even she could have pictured.
“Imagine living here,” she said to Mr. Wade when they were in the ballroom, stretching her arms wide and twirling twice about. “Imagine all this being your very own.”
“Would you like it?” he asked.
“Perhaps not.” She stopped twirling. “Surroundings are not everything, are they? There are other things more important.” She laughed. “But that will not stop me from imagining living here.”
“You should marry the Marquess of Carew,” he said.
“Indeed.” She laughed. “He is a single gentleman, is he not? How old is he? Is he young and handsome? Or is he old and doddering? But no matter. Bring him on and I will set about charming him witless.”
“Would you?” He was smiling at her, his head to one side.
“The Marchioness of Carew,” she said, waving an imaginary fan languidly before her face. “It has a definite ring to it, does it not? I do believe you should bow to me, sir.”
“Do you?” He did not bow.
“I shall have you beheaded for insubordination,” she said, raising her chin and looking along the length of her nose at him. “I shall have my husband, the marquess, order it. The marchioness. Of Highmoor Abbey in Yorkshire, you know.” She waved a hand before his face for him to kiss.
He did not kiss it.
“I told you I am still a child at heart,” she said, reverting to her normal self. “I would not try charming him even if he were the proverbial tall, dark, and handsome gentleman—like Gabriel. I would not exchange my freedom even for all this.” She waved an arm about the ballroom without looking away from his face.
“Is your freedom so precious to you, then?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Have you wondered why I am unwed at my age? It is because I have decided never to marry.”
“Ah,” he said. There was a smile in his eyes, but very far back. Most people would not have even realized that it was there. “I think you must have been hurt badly.”
She was jolted with surprise. Gentlemen were in the habit of telling her that she was the happiest, sunniest-natured lady of their acquaintance.
“Yes,” she said. “A long time ago. It does not matter any longer.”
“Except,” he said, “that it has blighted your life.”
“It has not,” she said. “Oh, it has not. What a strange thing to say.”
“Forgive me,” he said, smiling more fully. “Come to my office and let me order tea. It is the marquess’s office, of course, but I have appropriated it for my use while I am here and he is not.”
Friends knew each other, she thought. He had seen something that no one else had ever seen. And he had perceived something about her that even she had not perceived—or not admitted, anyway. Had her life been blighted? Had she allowed him such power over her?
“Thank you,” she said. “Tea would be nice.”
4
HE WAS GLAD HE HAD THOUGHT OF OFFERING her tea in his office rather than in the drawing room. He found the drawing room cold and impersonal unless he was entertaining a large gathering. His office, on the other hand, was where he spent most of his time indoors when he was out of his own apartments. It was a cozy room, not small really, but filled with his own personal treasures and never quite tidy since the maids had learned not to move books—especially ones that lay open.
He seated her in an ancient, comfortable chair to one side of the fire, which his servants always made up as soon as he stepped inside the house, and sat in its twin at the opposite side. His father had been going to have the chairs thrown out years ago, calling them a disgrace to so grand a place as Highmoor Abbey, but he had appropriated them for his study and he did not believe he would ever let them go.
Now he knew that he would not. And he knew that his study would become even more precious to him in the future, because the greatest treasure of his life had been there for tea one afternoon. She looked small and dainty in the chair. She looked comfortable.
He was glad she had made a joke of marrying the Marquess of Carew after some demon in him had made him suggest it as a possibility. But he was sorry that someone had broken her heart. She made light of it now and she always seemed cheerful enough, but he did not believe he had exaggerated in saying that it had blighted her life. Most ladies of her age would have been married long ago and have had children in the nursery by now. Especially ladies as lovely as she was. But there was no other lady as lovely as she. …
They talked about books after she had seen some of the titles of those lying on the small table beside her. And about music and opera and the theater. Their tastes were similar, though she had never studied Latin or Greek, as he had, and she had never read the plays she had seen performed. And she preferred a tenor voice to a soprano, unlike him, and a cello to a violin. Both of them preferred the pianoforte to either.
He had never known a woman easier to talk to. But then he had never known a lady who was unaware of his identity. He wondered if it made a difference. She had said in the ballroom that she would not set her cap at the Marquess of Carew even if she had the opportunity to do so. But if she did know that he was the marquess instead of just a gentleman so far down on his luck that he was forced to hire out his services as a landscape gardener—if she did know, would it make a difference? Would she be less comfortable with him? Would she feel the impropriety of their behavior more acutely? She seemed quite unaware of it now. And yet it was even more dreadfully improper for them to be indoors alone together thus than it had been for them to roam the park together.
“What happened?” she asked him quietly. He realized that they had been sitting through one of their silences, which never seemed awkward, and that he had absently fallen into one of his habits. He was massaging his right palm with his left thumb and straightening his fingers one by one. Her eyes were on his hands. “Was it an accident? Or were you born—” Her eyes flew to his face and she blushed. “I am so sorry. It is none of my business. Please forgive me.”
It was a measure of the friendship that had grown between them, perhaps, that he could tell her, a virtual stranger, that an unhappy love affair the details of which he did not know had blighted her life, and that she could ask him what had happened to leave his right hand and foot deformed. Good manners would have kept both of them silent on such personal matters had they been merely acquaintances.
“It was an accident.” He smiled at her as he told her the lie he had been telling for most of his life. He had never told the truth, even to his parents right after it had happened. There was no point in telling the truth now. “I was six years old. I was out riding my new pony with my cousin.” His cousin had been ten. “We had left the groom far behind. I was showing off, showing how I could gallop to match the pace of a cousin four years older than I, and showing how I could jump a fence. But I did not clear it. I crashed very heavily right down onto the fence, breaking bones and tearing ligaments. By some miracle my pony escaped serious harm. The physician told my father that both my leg and my arm would have to be amputated, but fortunately for me my mother had a totally genuine fit of the vapors.”
He smiled at her grimace of horror.
“It was a long time ago,” he said. “The physician did his best to set the broken bones, but of course there was permanent damage. Both my father and I were told that I would never be able to use either my right leg or my right arm again. But I can be stubborn about some things.”
“Courageous,” she said. “Determined.”
“Stubborn.” He laughed. “My mother shrieked when she first saw me limping about and swore that I would do myself dreadful harm. My father merely commented that I would make myself the laughingstock.”
“Poor little boy,” she said, head to one side, blue eyes large with sympathy. “Children should not have to suffer so.”
“Suffering can make all the difference in a person’s life,” he said. “It can be a definite force for good. At the risk of sounding conceited, I would have
to say that I am reasonably happy with the person I have become. Perhaps I would not have liked the person I would have been without the accident.” Perhaps he would have always been the sniveling, cringing, self-pitying coward he had been as a young child.
“I am sorry for my unmannerly curiosity,” she said. “Please forgive me.”
“There is nothing to forgive,” he said. “Friends talk from the heart, do they not? I believe we have become friends. Have we?”
“Yes.” She smiled slowly and warmly. “Yes, we have, Mr. Wade.”
There was not even the glimmering of a sign in her eyes that they were anything more than that. Of course. How foolish of him even to have dreamed of such a thing, let alone to have hoped. But how unbelievably wonderful it was to see Miss Samantha Newman smiling so kindly at him and agreeing with him that they were friends.
“And this friend,” he said, getting reluctantly to his feet, “had better see you on your way back to Chalcote before every constable in the county is called out to search for you. You did not tell Thornhill or his lady where you were going?”
“No.” She flushed rather guiltily as she got up herself without his assistance. “They might have thought it improper. My aunt—Lady Brill—might have felt obliged to accompany me as chaperone. I suppose it is improper. I suppose I should have a chaperone. But it does not feel wrong, and I do not feel the need of a female protector. And if one cannot exercise a little personal judgment and enjoy a little freedom at such an advanced age as mine, one might as well be shut up inside a cage.” She laughed lightly.
“I will ride with you as far as the gatehouse,” he said, opening the door of the study for her to precede him from the room. “There is a folly overlooking the lake that I have not shown you yet. And farther back behind the house there is a stretch of rapids where the stream flows downhill. I have ideas for creating a more spectacular series of waterfalls there, but I do not want to spoil the natural beauty. I would like to hear your opinion. Will you walk there with me, perhaps three afternoons from today?”
