by Mary Balogh
She could hardly blame people for the conclusions they must have drawn about her motives for marrying him. But she did not care. She could no longer see him as other people saw him unless she deliberately tried—she was not sure that she had ever seen him as others saw him. To her he was Hartley Wade, more recently the Marquess of Carew, her dear friend. Her savior—the word did not seem too extravagant.
He had saved her from herself.
She saw Lionel twice when she was with Hartley, once at the theater and once at a private concert, but neither time did he approach them, to her great relief. She did not still love him, she had decided. Of course she did not. She had more sense than that. It was just the eternal pull of the human will to what was undeniably attractive and evil.
Hartley had saved her from that. She had settled for friendship and contentment. And Lionel would have no further interest in whatever game he had been playing with her now that she was betrothed to another man.
She was safe.
But she attended a ball with her aunt one evening, two weeks after her betrothal. It was an invitation she had accepted long ago and felt obliged to honor. Besides, she loved to dance, and Hartley had urged her not to stop dancing because of him.
This time Lionel did not keep his distance. He approached her before the opening set began—her court was somewhat thinner about her than it had always been—and signed his name in her card next to the first waltz.
He did not speak for the first few minutes after their set began. He merely danced with her and gazed at her, a half smile on his lips. She could not tell if it was mocking or wistful.
“You did not believe me, did you?” he asked her at last, his voice low, intimate, although they were surrounded by dancers.
She looked up into his pale blue eyes.
“You did not trust me,” he said. “You thought I would break your heart again, as I did six years ago.”
When he looked and spoke like this, it was difficult not to forget all else except him and the feelings she had once had for him.
“I should not say anything more, should I?” he said. “It would be the honorable thing for me to step back in silence now that you are betrothed to someone else.”
“Yes,” she managed to whisper.
“You knew,” he said, “that I was going to ask you to be my countess. Because I love you. Because I have always loved you.”
Why was he doing it if he was not sincere? What could he hope to gain now? She looked into his eyes and saw nothing but sincerity and sadness.
It would be the honorable thing for me to step back in silence …
Why was he not doing the honorable thing? If he loved her, as he said he did, why was he trying to cause her distress? Francis, after his first outburst when she had taken him totally by surprise, had gone out of his way to release her from the burden of believing that she had hurt him. He had acted honorably, like the gentleman he was—despite a tendency toward dandyism, even foppishness.
But what if Lionel really loved her? What if he had really intended to offer for her? She might have been his wife. Lionel’s instead of Hartley’s. She felt the now almost familiar stabbing of desire in her womb.
But she would still be better off as Hartley’s wife.
“Someone else asked me,” she said. “And I accepted him. Because I wanted to.”
“Because you love him?” He moved his head a little closer to hers. His eyes dropped to her lips. “Can you say those words, Samantha? Because I love the Marquess of Carew.”
“My feelings for my betrothed are none of your concern, my lord,” she said.
“And for me?” he said. “Can you tell me in all honesty, Samantha, that you do not love me?”
“The question is impertinent,” she said.
“You cannot, can you?” His eyes pleaded with her.
She clamped her lips together.
The encounter upset her for several days. But she was within two weeks of her wedding. She set her mind on it and the preparations that were being made for it. She longed for it.
Jenny and Gabriel were not coming. Samantha was both disappointed and relieved when she had her cousin’s letter. She hated to think of their not being at her wedding, but she had dreaded, too, that if they came they would encounter Lionel somewhere in London.
Jenny herself was very disappointed. But Gabriel was always unwilling for her to travel during the early—and the late—months of her pregnancies, she explained. He was always terrified that she would miscarry and ruin her own health as well as losing their child. But he was disappointed, too.
“He says he is vastly impressed by your good sense, Sam,” Jenny wrote. “And by that he does not mean your sense in marrying a man even wealthier than himself, I hasten to add. He means your sense in choosing a man of Lord Carew’s kindness and good nature.
“I would choose stronger words myself. How naughty of you to have met him at Highmoor before you left for London and not to have told us. For shame! And I was so chagrined when he arrived home apparently the day after you left. I had great matchmaking hopes for the two of you, though I would never admit as much to Gabriel. He would crow with triumph and never let me forget it.
“Sam, how very romantic. I sigh with vicarious bliss. Clandestine meetings in Highmoor Park, the heartrending separation, and the heartsick lover going after you to claim your hand. And they were married and lived happily ever after—sigh! You see what being in an ‘interesting condition’ does to me? Oh, I wish we could be there at your wedding. I like him enormously, Sam, and of course I love you. And we are to be neighbors. I become delirious.”
She had continued with strict instructions for Samantha to use her newfound influence—“all new husbands wrap very comfortably about one’s little finger, Sam”—to persuade Lord Carew to bring her home immediately following the wedding night.
“And do not—I repeat, do not—listen with more than half an ear to the lecture Aunt Aggy will give you the night before your wedding,” she had written in conclusion. “She will have you quaking in your slippers, Sam, with admonitions about duty and pain and discomfort and enduring for a mere few minutes each night and all the advantages accruing from marriage that quite offset such an unpalatable duty. Performing that particular duty is beautiful and wonderful and utterly pleasurable, Sam—I speak from personal experience, though I blush even as I write—when one loves the man concerned. So enjoy, my dear, your wedding night and every night following it—my blush deepens.”
Even Jenny did not know their real reason for marrying. But it did not matter. Love had worked for her and Gabriel. But happy love was a rare commodity. Samantha was happier to settle for something else.
She waited for her wedding day with longing and a thinly veiled impatience. Once she was married, everything would finally be settled in her life. She could proceed to live contentedly ever after.
Sometimes it felt as if the day would never come.
12
ST. GEORGE’S, HANOVER SQUARE—THE FASHIONABLE church in which to wed. The first day of June—the fashionable time to marry. The weather was kind. More than kind—there was not a cloud in the sky, and the morning was hot without being oppressively so. The church was filled with modishly dressed members of the ton.
If he had ever had a dream of the beginning of wedded bliss, the Marquess of Carew thought as he waited rather nervously at the front of the church with an unusually solemn Duke of Bridgwater, then this was it. There was a great deal to be said for the quiet intimacy of a private ceremony, with only family and very close friends in attendance, but it was not what he wanted for himself.
He wanted the whole world to see their happiness. He wanted the whole world to know what a lucky fellow he was. He had never dreamed of winning for himself such a sweet and beautiful bride, and one, moreover, who had chosen him entirely for himself. He had never expected to find a bride who would love him. And although he had dreamed of loving a woman, he had never really expected to feel
that love so powerfully and to have it returned.
To be marrying the woman he loved and the woman who loved him, especially when she happened to be the most beautiful woman in all England—oh, yes, it was an occasion to be celebrated with his peers and hers.
Brides were always late. There were some who would say that it was ill-bred for them to arrive early, or even on time. It showed an overeagerness, something a lady must never show for anyone or anything.
Samantha was on time. If he had been able to smile at that particular moment, the marquess would have smiled. If she was overeager, then his happiness could only be more complete. But he could not smile. At first he was so nervous that he was afraid when he got to his feet his legs would not hold him up. And then he saw her.
He was aware only that she was so beautiful his breath caught in his throat. He did not really see the delicate pink muslin high-waisted dress, as simply and elegantly styled as most of her clothes, or the flowers woven into her blond curls, or the simple posy of flowers she carried in one hand. He did not notice Viscount Nordal, on whose arm she walked down the aisle of the church toward him.
He saw only Samantha. His bride.
She was looking pale and rather frightened. She looked neither to left nor to right at the gathered congregation, though everyone, perhaps without exception, was looking at her. She was looking—at him. And he recognized the slight curving of her lips as an attempt at a smile. He smiled back, though he was not sure that his face responded to his will. He hoped she would know from his eyes that he was smiling at her, encouraging her, welcoming her.
And then they were there beside him and he knew, almost as if he had not yet realized it, that this was their wedding day, that in a matter of minutes they would be married. Irrevocably. For life. Lady Brill, he noticed, was already sniveling in the front pew.
“Dearly beloved, we are gathered …”
The familiar words. The familiar ceremony. So very familiar. And yet new and wonderful. Because this time the words were being spoken and the ceremony was being performed for them—for him and his own dearly beloved.
Such a very short ceremony, he thought, promising to love and to cherish and to keep her through all the vicissitudes of life, listening to her promise to love, honor, and obey him—though he would never, ever demand obedience of his love against her will. So short and yet so momentous.
In those few minutes and with very few words, two lives were being changed forever. Two lives were being interwoven, being made one. Man and wife. One body, one soul.
Bridge’s hand, as he passed him the ring, was slightly unsteady, he noticed. His own was no longer so. He slid the ring onto her finger. The visual symbol of the endlessness of their union and their love.
“With this ring I thee wed …”
And with my body I thee worship, he said with his heart and his eyes as well as with his lips. My beloved.
And it was over. Almost before his mind had begun to comprehend that this was it, the most important event of his life. It was over.
“—I now pronounce you man and wife together …”
She was still pale. Her eyes, luminous and trusting, gazed into his.
He kissed her, very lightly, very briefly, on the lips. And while the congregation murmured with what sounded like a collective sigh, he smiled at her. His facial muscles obeyed his will this time. He smiled at his bride, his wife.
And she smiled back.
Sometimes happiness could be almost an agony, he had discovered on the day she had accepted his offer. But sometimes it could be such a welling of pure joy that it seemed impossible that one human frame could contain it without exploding into a million fragments.
There was the register to sign. And then the organ was pealing out a glorious anthem as he set his bride’s right arm on his left and took her back along the aisle she had descended such a short while ago with her uncle. She was smiling, he saw, looking across at her, and there was color in her cheeks again. He smiled about him at the gathered ton, only a few of whom he knew well, but most of whom he had met within the past month. There was Lady Brill, with red-rimmed eyes and watery smile. And Gerson, grinning and winking. And Lionel, with an unfathomable expression.
They were outside on the pavement, the sounds of the organ suddenly faint behind them, a small crowd of the curious standing at a little distance from the waiting carriages. Soon the congregation would spill outside and there would be a damnable crush. He reached across with his stiff right hand and set it lightly on top of hers.
“Samantha Wade, Marchioness of Carew,” he said. He wanted to be the first—after the rector—to say it aloud. “You look more beautiful than there are words to describe you.”
“Oh, I do sound very grand.” She laughed breathlessly. “And you look splendidly handsome, Hartley.”
She was looking through the eyes of love, he thought fondly.
Their one moment of near privacy was at an end.
THE BALLROOM AT CAREW House, Stanhope Gate, was large. Even so, it appeared crowded, with tables set up along its whole length and the cream of the ton seated for the wedding breakfast. Samantha, sitting beside her husband, still felt numb, as she had done since waking up from a fitful sleep. It was hard to grasp that it was over, that it was done. She was married. Hartley was her husband.
All yesterday she had been sick with indecision. Literally sick. She had vomited three separate times and had noticed her aunt’s look of startled speculation. But the vomiting had been caused entirely by nerves and last-minute doubts. Was it right to marry just for convenience—for safety? What if, after all, life had love to offer her? It would be too late to discover that it did after tomorrow.
She had told Aunt Aggy only about the nerves. She had had to say something after her aunt had asked her straight out if it was possible she was increasing.
“Because if you had been,” Aunt Aggy had said with a sigh after she had been assured that it was no such thing—she had sounded almost disappointed, “I would not have to proceed to instruct you on what you must expect of your wedding night. I have no wish to add to your fears, dear, but it is as well to be prepared.”
She had proceeded with the lecture Jenny had warned about. Samantha had blushed at the graphic and quite dispassionate description of the physical process—some of it she had not known before. But part of her mind had been elsewhere, unwillingly turning over her doubts once more.
Lionel had danced with her twice in the past two weeks. Each time he had been pale and restrained and serious and, of course, impossibly handsome. He had made no further reference to her betrothal. In fact, he had spoken very little—with his voice. His blue eyes had spoken volumes. And somehow she had found it difficult during those sets—waltzes, of course—to stop herself from looking into his eyes.
He had behaved honorably for the past two weeks. As honorably as Francis and Jeremy and Sir Robin and all the rest of her gentlemen friends. She would have preferred it if he had been more obviously snakelike.
She had begun to doubt again. To doubt her own judgment of him. Six years was a long time. He had spent those years traveling abroad. He had aged during those years from five-and-twenty to one-and-thirty. From young manhood to maturity.
What if he had been sincere all the time? He had told her that he had wanted her as his countess. She might have known with him again the heights of romantic love.
And perhaps the depths, too. Perhaps he was not sincere. And even if he had really wanted to marry her and had done so, would he have remained faithful to her for the rest of their lives? Would she have known again the misery that was the exact antithesis of the joy of love?
She was doing the right thing. The sort of affection she and Hartley felt for each other—she did not believe she was using too strong a word—would remain constant. He would always be kind and gentle with her. They would always be friends. She need never fear that he would be unfaithful. And she—she would devote herself to him once they were marrie
d. She would hope that there would be a child soon—surely he meant for it to be a normal marriage. She would be safe.
But the doubts had started again and had continued all day and on through the night—a constant cycle of fear and panic and reassurance and good sense.
And now it was all over. Now she could let the doubts rest. It was too late now to doubt. They were married. The wedding ceremony had affected her far more deeply than she had expected. It had seemed up until she had seen him this morning, looking smart and even handsome in a new blue coat with gray breeches and very white linen, that it was a practical and sensible alliance they were contracting. But in the event it had turned out to be—a marriage. He was not just a friend she had decided to live with for the rest of her life. He was her husband.
She shivered with the finality of it.
He touched her hand with light fingertips and leaned toward her. “You have eaten very little,” he said.
She smiled at him. “Would it not amaze everyone if the bride ate heartily?” she asked.
She loved the way his eyes smiled. She could almost fall in love with that smile, she thought, startled.
“Tomorrow,” he said. “Tomorrow you will be able to eat again.”
She felt herself blushing. And yet she did not dread the coming night, despite Aunt Aggy’s warnings and her new realization that there was more than the mere penetration of her body to be expected. But she did not dread it. She was only a little embarrassed at the thought of doing it with a friend rather than with a lover.
They had been greeted by a dizzying number of people outside the church, almost all of whom had kissed her cheeks and squeezed her hand and pumped Hartley’s hand—he had offered his left, she noticed—and kissed him, too, if they happened to be female. But even so, she had not seen everyone. And even now, she had been sitting and eating—or not eating—in such a daze that she had not looked at each separate guest. There were a few—friends of Hartley’s—that she did not even know or knew only very vaguely by sight.
