Only Beloved

by Mary Balogh

  Most people would think it an absurd question to ask when he had Penderris Hall in Cornwall to offer her and Stanbrook House in London and wealth untold and the glamorous life of a duchess, not to mention marriage itself to replace her spinsterhood. But she did not rush her answer.

  “Yes, it will,” she said, her hand still in his. “I made a life for myself here nine years ago, and it has been good to me. Not many women have the privilege of knowing independence. The people here have been welcoming and amiable. When I leave, those of my pupils with the will to learn, a few of them with real talent, will be left without a teacher, at least for a while. I will regret doing that to them.”

  “Vincent?” he asked her, smiling. “Does he have talent?”

  After he had been blinded and had clawed his way out of the fright and anger and despair of knowing that his sight would never return, young Vincent had challenged himself in a number of ways rather than sink into the despair of living half a life. One thing he had done was learn to play not only the pianoforte but the violin and, more recently, the harp. That last he had undertaken only because one of his sisters had suggested selling the harp that was already in the house when he inherited it because “obviously” he would never have any use for it. Vincent’s fellow Survivors, who were never sentimental with one another, had teased him mercilessly about his proficiency on the violin, but he had persevered, and he was constantly improving. They did not tease him about the harp, which had caused him endless frustration and distress. Now that he was finally conquering its mysteries, however, he might expect the insults to start flying.

  Again Miss Debbins did not rush into an answer, though she knew Vincent to be one of the duke’s closest friends.

  “Viscount Darleigh has determination,” she said. “He works hard to be proficient and will never make an excuse of the fact that he cannot see the instrument he plays or the music he must learn by ear. He does extremely well and will get better. I am very proud of him.”

  “But there is no talent there?” Poor Vince. He did indeed have the determination not to see himself as handicapped.

  “Talent is rare in any field,” she said. “Real talent, I mean. But if we all avoided doing anything for which we are not exceptionally gifted, we would do almost nothing at all and would never discover what we can become. Instead we would waste much of the span of life allotted us in keeping to safe, confining activities. Lord Darleigh has a talent for perseverance, for stretching himself to the limits of his endurance despite what must be one of the most difficult of handicaps—or perhaps because of it. Not many people given his circumstances would achieve what he has. He has learned to give light to the darkness in which he must live out his life, and in so doing he has shed light upon those of us who think we can see.”

  Ah, and here was something else that reminded him why he felt such admiration and liking for her—this calm and thoughtful gravity with which she spoke upon topics most people would dismiss lightly. Many people would speak condescendingly of what Vincent had achieved despite the fact that he could not see. Not her. And yet she spoke honestly too. Vincent did indeed lack outstanding musical talent, even allowing for his blindness, but it did not matter. As she had just observed, he had the talent in superabundance for pushing the boundaries of his life beyond the limit of what might be expected of him.

  “I am sorry that in marrying you I will be taking you away from this life, Miss Debbins,” he said. “I hope Penderris and marriage to me will prove to be compensation enough.”

  She rested her eyes thoughtfully upon him. “When I came here nine years ago from my father’s home in Lancashire,” she said, “I knew no one. Everything was strange and a little depressing—living in a cottage that seemed incredibly small compared to what I was accustomed to, being alone, working for my living. But the adjustment to a new life was made, and I have been happy here. Now I have freely agreed to another complete change. You have not coerced me in any way. I will make the necessary adjustments. If you are quite sure, that is, now that you have seen me and spoken to me again.”

  He was still holding her hand, he realized. He squeezed it and raised it to his lips once more.

  “I am,” he said. “Quite sure.”

  He wondered what she would say or do if he dipped his head and kissed her lips. She could hardly object—she was now his affianced bride. The shock of that thought caused him to pause, and he wondered for a moment if he really was sure. It was suddenly difficult to picture himself kissing her, making love to her, becoming as familiar with her body as he was with his own. But he did know that he would have been horribly disappointed if she had said no. For it really was not just marriage itself that had come to his mind a few nights ago in London. It was Miss Dora Debbins and the strange, unexpected yearning to be married to her.

  “When?” she asked him. “And where?” She bit her lower lip as though she feared she was displaying an inappropriate overeagerness.

  He patted her hand and released it, and she sat down again. Rather than loom over her, he resumed his seat too. Idiot that he was, he had not thought much beyond the proposal itself. Or, at least, he had not thought of the actual process of wedding her. His mind had been focused more upon the imagined contentment of the years ahead. Yet he had just been caught up in all the frantic busyness of a wedding and knew it did not just happen without planning.

  “Ought I to go to Lancashire,” he asked her, “to speak to your father?” It had not occurred to him until now that perhaps he ought.

  “I am thirty-nine,” she reminded him. “My father lives his own life with the lady he married before I moved here. There is no estrangement between us, but he has little or nothing to do with my life and certainly no say in how I live it.”

  George wondered about that family situation. He knew some of the facts but not the full reason why she had left home and moved so far away. It was an unusual thing for an unmarried lady to do when there were male relatives to support her.

  “We have none but our own wishes to consult, then, it would seem,” he said. “Shall we dispense with a lengthy betrothal? Will you marry me soon?”

  “Soon?” She looked across at him with raised eyebrows. And then she lifted both hands and pressed her palms to her cheeks. “Oh, dear, what will everyone think? Agnes? The viscount and viscountess? Your other friends? The people in the village here? I am a music teacher. I am almost forty. Will I appear very . . . presumptuous?”

  “I believe,” he said, “indeed I know that my friends will be more than delighted to see me married. I am equally sure they will approve my choice and applaud your willingness to have me. Your sister will surely be happy for you. I am not a bad catch, after all, am I, even if I am nine years older than you? Julian and Philippa—my only nephew and his wife—will also be pleased. I am certain of it. Your father will surely be happy too, will he not? And I believe you have a brother?”

  Her hands fell to her lap. “This is all so very sudden,” she said. “Yes, Oliver is a clergyman in Shropshire.” She worried her lower lip again. “We will marry soon, then?”

  “In a month’s time if we wait for banns to be read,” he said, “or sooner if you would prefer to marry by special license. As to the where—the choices would seem to be here or in Lancashire or at Penderris or in London. Do you have a preference?”

  Her sister and Flavian had married here at the village church last year by special license. The wedding breakfast had been held at Middlebury Park, and Sophia had insisted that the newly married couple spend their wedding night in the state apartments in the east wing there. It had all been lovely, perfect . . . but did she want to do exactly what her sister had done?

  “London?” she said. “I have never been there. I was to go for a come-out Season when I was eighteen, but . . . Well, it never did happen.”

  He thought he knew the reason. Scandal had almost erupted last year after her sister went to
London with Flavian following their wedding. A former fiancée of Flavian’s, who had abandoned him when he was badly injured in order to marry his best friend, was now a widow and had hoped to marry Flavian after all. When she discovered that she had missed her chance, she had dug into Agnes’s past and found dirt there. Agnes’s mother—and Miss Debbins’s—was still living, but her father had divorced her years ago upon the grounds of adultery. It was a spectacular scandal at the time, and even last year it had threatened malicious gossip and social ostracism for Agnes, the divorced woman’s daughter. The ton would have eaten her alive if Flavian had not stepped in boldly and skillfully to handle the situation and avert disaster. That initial scandal would have been happening when Agnes was a child and Miss Debbins a young lady about to make her debut in society. It would have deprived her of all that excitement and, more important, of the respectable marriage she could have expected to result from a London Season, the annual grand marriage mart. She had stayed home instead to raise her sister.

  Miss Debbins undoubtedly had a few ghosts to put to rest as far as London and the beau monde were concerned. Perhaps now was the time.

  “May I suggest London for our wedding, then?” he said. “As soon as the banns have been read? Before the end of the Season? With almost all the ton in attendance? If we are going to marry, we may as well do it in style. Would you not agree?”

  “Would I?” She looked unconvinced.

  “And, on the more practical side,” he continued, “if we want friends and acquaintances around us, and I would suggest that we do, then London poses the least inconvenience to the largest number of people. I believe Ben and Samantha, Hugo and Gwen, Flavian and Agnes, and Ralph and Chloe are still there after Imogen’s wedding. Percy and Imogen should be back from Paris. Vincent and Sophia will be happy to travel back to town, I believe, if the alternative is to miss our wedding. Perhaps your father and your brother can be persuaded to make the journey. I would guess Agnes and Flavian would be delighted to house them.”

  “London.” She was looking a bit dazed.

  “At St. George’s on Hanover Square,” he said, “where most society weddings are solemnized during the Season.”

  Her cheeks flushed as she gazed across at him, and her eyes were bright. It was only as she lowered her head that he realized the brightness was caused by tears.

  “I am to be married after all, then?” Her voice was almost a whisper. He had the feeling she was not really talking to him.

  “In London at St. George’s one month from now,” he told her, “with the very crème-de-la-crème of society filling the pews. And then a honeymoon if you wish in Paris or Rome or both. Or home to Cornwall and Penderris, if you would prefer. We may do whatever we wish—whatever you wish.”

  “I am to have a wedding with all the world present.” She still sounded a bit dazed. “Oh, my. What will Agnes say?”

  He hesitated. “Miss Debbins,” he asked softly, “would you like to invite your mother?”

  Her head snapped back, her eyes widened, her mouth opened as though she was about to say something—and then it closed again as did her eyes.

  “Oh.” It was a quiet rush of breath more than a word.

  “Have I distressed you?” he asked her. “I do beg your pardon if I have.”

  Her eyes opened, but there was a frown line between her brows as she looked at him. “I am feeling a bit . . . overwhelmed, Your Grace,” she said. “I must excuse myself. I need . . . I would like to be alone, if you please.”

  “Of course.” He got immediately to his feet. Damn him for a gauche fool. Perhaps she did not even know that her mother was alive. Perhaps Agnes had not told her about last year. “May I do myself the honor of calling again tomorrow?”

  She nodded and looked down at the backs of her hands, her fingers spread on her lap. She clearly was overwhelmed, a fact that was hardly surprising when she had been given no warning of his coming.

  He hesitated a moment before leaving the room, then closed the sitting room door quietly behind him.

  The village street was empty as he strode along it in the direction of the entry to Middlebury Park, but he was not fooled. He did not doubt that word had already spread of his presence here and the call he had made upon Miss Debbins. He could almost feel curious eyes watching him from behind window curtains all along the street. He wondered how soon it would be before everyone knew why he had come and what answer he had received to his marriage proposal.

  He wondered if he would say something to Vince and Sophia, and decided that he would not. Not yet. He had not asked her permission, and it was important to him not to appear high-handed. He was sensitive to the fact that he had a ducal title while she, though the daughter of a baronet, was now living as a spinster in a country village, teaching music.

  The announcement could wait.

  He wondered how the news would be received at Penderris and the neighborhood surrounding it. He wondered if he would be opening some sort of Pandora’s box by taking a new bride home with him and setting about being a contented married man. He often found himself thinking of another saying, the one about leaving sleeping dogs lie, when he thought about his life at Penderris. There had been so much unpleasantness surrounding the death of Miriam even apart from the horror of the suicide itself. Although all the people whose opinion he valued had rallied around him and stayed staunchly with him ever since, there had been and still was an element of the population who had chosen to blame him.

  Sleeping dogs had been allowed to lie until now. Apart from the weeks of each year the members of the Survivors’ Club spent with him, he lived a pretty solitary life when he was in the country. Perhaps it was perceived as a lonely life, and perhaps the perception was accurate. Perhaps those people who had blamed him twelve years ago felt he deserved his loneliness at the very least.

  What would it be like, taking Miss Debbins there as his duchess? There would be no unpleasantness toward her, surely? Or . . . worse. But what could be worse? All those events, about which he never spoke, not even to his fellow Survivors, had come to their dreadful conclusion many years ago.

  Surely he was entitled not to forget—he could never do that—but to live again, to reach for companionship, contentment, perhaps even a little love?

  He strode along the driveway within the park gates in the direction of the house and shook off the strange sense of foreboding that had struck him, seemingly from nowhere.

  * * *

  Predictably, Mrs. Henry bustled in no more than a minute or two after the duke had left, openly agog with curiosity.

  “You could have knocked me down with a feather when I opened the door, Miss Debbins,” she said as she bent to pick up the tea tray. “I had not heard that the viscount and his lady brought visitors back with them from London.”

  “They did not. His Grace arrived today,” Dora said.

  “And came to call so soon?” Mrs. Henry was rearranging the dishes on the tray. “I hope he did not bring any bad news about Lady Ponsonby.”

  “Oh, no,” Dora said. “He was able to assure me that Agnes is well.”

  “I did make a fresh pot of tea to bring in,” Mrs. Henry said, “but you did not call for it and I did not like to disturb you.”

  “His Grace had tea at Middlebury Park,” Dora explained.

  Mrs. Henry decided that the sugar bowl was not positioned to her liking on the tray, but after moving it and glancing at Dora, who was obviously not going to volunteer any more information, she removed the tray and closed the door behind her.

  Dora set two fingers of each hand to her temples and imagined how her housekeeper would have reacted if she had been told that the Duke of Stanbrook had come to Middlebury Park for the specific purpose of calling here to propose marriage to her mistress. But Dora’s own mind could scarcely grapple with the reality of it. She was certainly not ready to share the news.

&nbs
p; He knew about her mother. That was the first clear thought that formed in her mind. Agnes and Flavian must have told him. Or perhaps he had heard it from general drawing room gossip in London last year. He knew, yet he had still chosen to make her a marriage offer and wanted to wed her very publicly in London before the Season was over. He was even prepared to invite her mother to the wedding.

  Did his status allow him to flout public opinion so?

  For the whole of the evening and on into the night the fact that he would invite her mother if she wished churned about and about in Dora’s mind along with everything else that had happened after he stepped into her living room. Even the next morning the unreality of it all continued to distract her while she tried to give her full attention to Michael Perlman. He was one of her favorite pupils, a bright little boy of five whose plump fingers always flew over the keyboard of his mother’s harpsichord with amazing precision and musicality for one so young. His round little face always beamed with pleasure as he played, and he did so with such total absorption that he would start with surprise if she spoke. Michael Perlman was one she would miss.

  Her mother had run away from their family with a younger man after Papa had accused them at a local assembly one evening of being lovers. In a dreadfully public scene that still had the power to haunt Dora’s dreams, he had accused Mama of adultery and declared his intention to divorce her. He had been drinking too deeply, something his family always dreaded though it did not happen often. When it did happen, he was almost invariably in company, and he would say or do horribly embarrassing things he would not dream of saying or doing when he was sober. His behavior that evening had been worse than usual, the worst ever, in fact, and Mama had fled and never come back. The threat of divorce had been carried out amid lengthy and terrible publicity. Dora had neither seen nor heard from her mother since the evening of that assembly. Nor had she wanted to, for her mother had fled with her lover, surely confirming Papa’s accusation. Dora’s own life had changed catastrophically and forever.