by Mary Balogh
But she did not want to go. Or did she? She was not looking for any kind of reconciliation. She never would be. She tried not to judge her mother’s actions or hate her or blame her for the damage she had done to Agnes and herself—and probably to Oliver, but she could not . . . forgive her, just as could not really forgive her father. Yet she had invited him to her wedding—and to give her away. Ought her mother not to have equal consideration? The thought made her feel a bit light-headed.
“How strange!” she said. “If my mother had stayed, if my life had proceeded according to plan, I would almost without any doubt not be walking here with you now. And I would have hated that. Though I would not have known what I was missing, would I?”
She turned her head toward him, and they both laughed.
“I would have hated it too,” he told her.
11
The years during which Penderris Hall had been a hospital for wounded officers had saved George’s sanity. He was convinced of that. And it was not just because the house had been full and life busy enough to keep his mind off himself. It was more that he had been needed. That fact had surprised him at first, for he had assumed that the success of his scheme would depend almost entirely upon the marvelous skills of Joseph Connor, the physician he had hired. All he would do, he had thought, was provide the space and the funding. He had found, however, that he had a function almost as important as Connor’s, for he had discovered in himself a vast ability to empathize, to put himself in the place of the sufferer, to listen, to find just the right words to say in reply. He had discovered that he was a patient man, that he could spend as much time with each wounded man as was needed. He had spent many hours, for instance, simply holding Vincent during the ghastly months when the boy was both deaf and blind. During those years he had discovered in himself a capacity to love that reached out to anyone who needed it.
The reward of it all—ah, the biblical aptness of it!—was that in giving of himself he had also received in abundance. Every one of the officers who had been at Penderris and survived still wrote regularly to him. And the six who had formed the Survivors’ Club with him loved him, he knew, as dearly as he loved them. It was a rich reward.
He could empathize with Dora. She had sacrificed her own prospects of a happy life as a young wife and mother so that her sister could grow up feeling secure and cherished. And then, when it had seemed that no one needed her any longer, she had made a new life for herself that had been admirable in its dignity and usefulness. But the wounds went deep—probably far deeper than she realized herself. She could forgive her father more easily than she could her mother because he had never been central to her life and because the bond of affection between them had always been lukewarm at best. But her mother had been all in all to her when she was a growing girl, and the woman’s desertion and subsequent silence had devastated her. There was, he knew, a great black hole in his wife’s life where her mother had been—no, worse than a hole. An empty hole did not feel pain. Pain had been pushed deep inside Dora, but it was there nonetheless, probably as raw as it had ever been.
He would do anything to put things right for her, though he knew from experience that no one could ever put someone else’s life to rights. One could only listen and encourage and love. And hold when holding was appropriate.
He did not make love to his wife that night. He knew that he had caused her pain on their wedding night, though he knew too that she had welcomed it, that the physical side of their marriage would be important to her. Good Lord, what must half a lifetime lived in celibacy be like? And let no one try to tell him that women did not feel sexual yearnings and frustrations as men did. But now he would give her body a chance to heal. He would and did simply hold her. She had been quiet since their walk in the park, and he knew that her mind was on tomorrow and her decision to see her mother.
He slid an arm about her shoulders and snuggled her against him. With his other hand he cupped her chin and kissed her.
She was eminently kissable. She had a warm, soft, sweet mouth, and when he traced the line of her lips with his tongue she parted them and he was able to reach his tongue in to touch hers. There was heat and moisture there and a welcome. She turned onto her side to move closer to him and sighed deep in her throat.
There was something surprisingly lovely about cuddling a woman when one had no intention of having full sex with her. It was an entirely new experience for him, in fact. He kissed her forehead, her temple, her ear, her chin, her throat. And his hand moved over her, skimming the side of one breast, tracing the line of a hip, the flatness of her abdomen, circling the roundness of a buttock. She was warm and fragrant and sweet and . . . his.
That was the greatest marvel of all, the greatest miracle—that she was his. His wife, till death parted them. And not just his wife—ah, no, not just that. She was his companion, his bedfellow, his friend. And yes, they would be friends. They already were, though there was much still to know about each other and would doubtless be many adjustments to make. He liked her . . . oh, more than he liked anyone else in this world.
Her hand was light against his back.
“May we dispense with the nightgown?” he asked, his mouth against hers. “But only if you are comfortable with being skin to skin with me.”
“I suppose it is what is done between married people, is it not?” she said, sounding so much like Miss Debbins of Inglebrook that he smiled in the darkness.
“We need do nothing that ‘married people’ do,” he told her. “We will do only what we want to do.”
“Very well,” she said, and would have sat up if he had not held her in place with his arm about her shoulders.
He slid her nightgown slowly up her body, brushing the backs of his fingers over her thighs as he did so and then over her stomach.
“Raise your arms for me,” he said at last, and removed the gown completely and dropped it over the side of the bed. “You are very, very beautiful, Dora.”
“That is because the room is in darkness,” she said.
“Ah, but my hands and fingers and mouth do not require light,” he told her.
She did not feel like a girl, for which fact he was thankful. She had a woman’s body, not voluptuous, but very feminine nonetheless. She was warm and soft-skinned and silky, and if he was not careful he was going to become more aroused than he wanted to be.
She was perfection.
He fondled her breasts with featherlight fingers and kissed her mouth and stroked the moist flesh within with his tongue.
“You may touch me too if you wish,” he told her.
“I am touching—” she began, but he deepened his kiss.
“Wherever you wish,” he said. “I am your husband. I am yours. I am for your pleasure as well as for everything else.”
“Oh.” She breathed softly into his mouth.
“I hope this will always be a pleasure for you as well as for me,” he said.
“Will be?” She was Miss Debbins again. “Oh, George, it already is. You have no idea.”
Yes. Yes, he did.
She moved her hands up his back to his shoulders and down to his waist. She slid them to the front and circled them over his chest, over his shoulders, down his arms to the elbows.
“You are very lovely,” she said.
If he had been thinking in terms of romance, he might well have slid a little more in love with her at that moment. But he was thinking in terms of pleasure—hers more than his own. And in terms of holding her, protecting her, cherishing her, easing her burdens, especially the ones that she would face head-on tomorrow. He hoped he had done the right thing in nudging her in the direction of calling on her mother. He drew her close with both arms about her, trapping her hands between them, and kissed her softly.
“Sleep now,” he said. “Tomorrow night we will make love again.”
“Yes,” she said, settling her neck on his
arm and her head on his shoulder. “Yes, please,” she added sleepily a few moments later.
George smiled and kissed the top of her head.
* * *
The following afternoon Dora, George, Agnes, and Flavian were together in the duke’s carriage on their way to call upon Sir Everard and Lady Havell in Kensington. George had stepped around to Arnott House late yesterday to ask Flavian where the house was to be found and had returned a short while later with the news that Agnes was insisting that if Dora was going to visit their mother, then so was she.
Last year Agnes had refused to go. She was happy with what she had learned, she had protested when she told Dora of Flavian’s visit, but she had no wish to become acquainted with the mother who had abandoned her when she was little more than a baby.
The sisters, seated side by side facing the horses, were gazing out through opposite windows while their husbands carried on what seemed like a strained conversation, though Dora did not try to follow what was being said. Instead, when Agnes’s hand found hers on the seat between them, she clasped it and felt herself slip back to those years when she had been more of a mother than a sister to her younger sibling.
She would not be doing this, she was convinced, if George had not pressed her into it. Though that was grossly unfair. He had not exerted any pressure whatsoever. He had not even suggested she come. He had merely smiled kindly at her as she talked herself into doing what she had thought she would never do. He had listened while she explained to herself as much as to him that if she did not do it now, she probably never would and she might always regret it and continue to both hate and mourn the mother who had left her without a word. He had done nothing to persuade her before she decided or to dissuade her when her decision was made.
Yet she had a suspicion that he had somehow led her to it.
She caught his eye across the seats—their knees touched whenever the carriage swayed—and he smiled. Oh, that smile! It was a powerful thing. It suggested strength and support and kindness and approval. It was also a bit like a shield. How had he got her to talk about her family yesterday and about that most disturbing of events in their family history? She could not recall that he had asked any direct or intrusive questions. Yet talk she had. He had told her nothing of his own family, however, or of the terrible disaster that had put an end to it and left him alone and lonely. Would he ever tell her? She had the uneasy suspicion that he was not only unknown to her but also in many ways unknowable.
It was far too soon to draw that conclusion, though. They had been married for only two days. Soon, probably tomorrow, they would set out for Penderris. Once they were home he would surely open up his life to her as she had opened up hers.
She smiled back at him.
“Here,” Flavian said at last as the carriage turned off the road. “It looks rather as though w-we are driving into unruly w-wilderness, but there is a pretty, well-kept garden about the house itself—at least, there was last year when I was here.”
And indeed there still was. The house itself was a sturdy manor with an air of slight neglect though it was by no means derelict. Agnes’s hand tightened convulsively about Dora’s.
“Perhaps,” she said hopefully, “they are not at home.”
“I did not get the impression last year,” Flavian said, leaning forward on his seat and possessing himself of her free hand, “that they are away from home often, Agnes.”
“I doubt I will know her,” she said. “I cannot really remember what she looked like—and I have not seen her for more than twenty years.”
Dora merely gazed at George for courage. Neither of them spoke.
An elderly servant answered the door after George had rapped on it with the head of his cane. The man looked from one to the other of them before his eyes paused with recognition upon Flavian. He stood back from the door to admit them and took the calling card George handed him.
“The Duke and Duchess of Stanbrook and Viscount and Lady Ponsonby for Sir Everard and Lady Havell, if they are receiving,” George said.
The man bobbed his head and made his way up the stairs to one side of the hall. He reappeared a minute or two later.
“My lord and my lady will receive you in the drawing room,” he informed them, and turned to lead the way back up.
Dora would have loved to turn and flee, but she had not come this far merely to play coward. She took George’s offered arm and followed in the servant’s wake. Agnes came behind with Flavian.
Sir Everard did not wait for them to be announced. He met them at the drawing room door, which stood open. He was smiling in welcome.
He had not aged particularly well, Dora thought, though he was easily recognizable as the once-handsome, once-dashing young blade she remembered from several lengthy visits he had made to relatives in their neighborhood during her girlhood. He had been much sighed over by the women. Several of the younger ones had set their cap for him. But in the years since then he had acquired a bit of a paunch, his fair hair had thinned and faded, and his face had grown rounder and ruddier. He was probably, she thought in some shock, no more than a few years older than George.
Her eyes assessed Sir Everard Havell’s person because she did not wish to turn her attention upon the other occupant of the room, who was standing just beyond him.
“Welcome all,” he said, his tone effusive and a little overhearty. “We have a previous acquaintance with Viscount Ponsonby, do we not, Rosamond? You, then, sir, must be the Duke of Stanbrook. And the ladies . . .”
Dora did not hear what he had to say about them. She had turned her gaze upon the woman he had called Rosamond.
She had aged quite noticeably. Well, of course she had. She was twenty-two years older. She had put on weight, though she bore herself well and the extra pounds were proportionately distributed and became her well enough. Her hair, formerly as dark as Dora’s own, was a uniform silver-gray. Her face was lined, her jawline less defined, as was inevitable, though she still retained traces of her former beauty. Her eyes were still dark and unfaded.
She seemed like a stranger. For a few moments it was well nigh impossible to reconcile the appearance of this elderly woman with the memory of a vibrant, laughing, youthful Mama, dancing with each of her daughters in turn, giving the impression that for her the sun rose and set upon them and upon her absent son. But the unfamiliarity lasted for only those few moments before Dora saw in Lady Havell the mother she remembered.
Sir Everard was making an attempt to take Dora’s hand and bow over it, but she ignored him. Indeed, she was virtually unaware of him.
“Dora?” Her mother’s lips scarcely moved, and there was very little sound behind the word, but oh, dear God, she spoke with the remembered voice. “And . . . Agnes?”
“The duchess certainly inherited her mother’s handsome looks,” Sir Everard said, his voice still overhearty, “as I recall from the time she was a very young lady. Would you not agree, Stanbrook?”
Dora did not hear George’s reply, if, indeed, he made one. She was experiencing the exact same problem she always had with the former Mrs. Brough. She did not know what to call this woman.
“Ma’am?” she said as she inclined her head. She was aware of Agnes making a slight, stiff curtsy beside her without saying a word.
“You came,” their mother said, her hands clasping each other very tightly at her waist—and, oh, she was wearing a silver ring that had always been on the little finger of her right hand. “We read the announcement of your coming nuptials in the morning papers, Dora. The wedding was the day before yesterday? I did not expect you to come, but I have dressed for visitors each day since I read the notice just on the slim chance . . . Oh, you have both done exceedingly well for yourselves. I am more pleased than I can say. But where have my manners gone begging? I have not even greeted the Duke of Stanbrook and Viscount Ponsonby.” She dipped into a curtsy and looked at e
ach of them in turn.
“Sit down, sit down,” Sir Everard directed them. “Our man will be back here with the tea tray in a few moments.”
It was all horribly, horribly painful, Dora found as Sir Everard talked and no one else had a word to say. It was an even worse ordeal than she had feared it would be. When she spoke at last, Sir Everard seemed almost to slump in relief, but she did not see his reaction to what she said.
“I have been haunted by your desertion since the night it happened,” she said, addressing her mother with words she had not planned to speak—she had not really planned anything beyond the visit itself. “I have had enough of being haunted. I came here so that I could see for myself that a long time has passed and the woman I remember, the mother I remember, no longer exists. I have seen and now I am satisfied. You are Lady Havell, ma’am. You bear only a passing resemblance to my mother.”
She listened to herself, appalled at her rudeness, yet glad she had found the courage to speak the truth. It would have been absurd if they had sipped tea and talked platitudes and then taken their leave.
Her mother looked back at her, her face without expression. But her hands were clasped, white-knuckled, in her lap.
“I do know,” Dora continued, “that my father was as much to blame as you were—more so, in fact, on that night. Even if there had been truth in what he said, it was unpardonable of him to accuse you so publicly. I can understand that his words were an intolerable humiliation to you and that the prospect of living on as his wife seemed insupportable. I can even understand the lure of a younger man and a new love when your marriage was so obviously an unhappy one. But what I cannot understand—or at least what I cannot forgive—is your complete abandonment of us as well as of Papa. What had we done to you? You were our mother, our Mama, and we needed you. Agnes was a child. She could not even understand. She knew only that her mother was gone, that perhaps you had left because she was not lovable enough.”
Her voice was shaking, she realized. So was she. She was also breathless. She had sat down upon a love seat, George beside her. He covered one of her hands with his own, though he did not clasp it or say anything.
