Only Beloved

by Mary Balogh

  But not yet.

  The carriage returned from the village soon after noon. The inn had apparently been bursting at the seams with the interested and curious—Julian’s words. The earl’s death had been ruled an act of justified defense of the life of his stepdaughter, the Duchess of Stanbrook, by Sir Everard Havell.

  His body, Julian explained, was to be taken back to his home in Derbyshire for burial. A cousin of his would succeed him to the title. And there was an end of the matter.

  An end of the matter.

  Dora looked across the room at George, who was looking gravely back at her.

  An end of something, yes, but not of everything.

  We will talk, he had told her, but she wondered if they ever would.

  22

  Sir Everard and Lady Havell left after breakfast the following morning, bound for Candlebury Abbey in Sussex.

  “I only hope we get there in time,” Dora’s mother said as the two of them strolled a little way along the terrace while the bags were being loaded into the carriage. “This is one thing I can do for Agnes after so many years of neglect, and she has asked for me, bless her heart.”

  “There are a few weeks to go yet before her time,” Dora said.

  Her mother stopped walking. “I cannot thank you enough, Dora,” she said, “for inviting us here and being so kind. I can never ask your forgiveness for the past because it is not forgivable, but—”

  “Mama!” Dora caught up her mother’s hands in her own. “This is an altogether new phase of all our lives. Let it be new, unshadowed by the past. If the past had been different, everything would be different now. I would not be married to George, and you would not be married to Sir Everard. Either would be a pity, would it not?”

  Her mother sighed. “You are generous, Dora,” she said. “I do love him, you know. And it is very clear that yours is a love match.”

  Was it? Dora loved George with all her heart, but did he love her with all his? Sometimes she believed it. Oh, most of the time she did. Surely he did. She smiled.

  “I have adored having you here,” Dora said. “And Sir Everard too, even apart from the fact that I owe him my life.”

  A teary-eyed farewell followed before George’s traveling carriage was finally bowling along the driveway. Seeing Philippa and Julian and Belinda on their way an hour or so later was altogether more cheerful, for they lived not very far away.

  George set a hand on Dora’s shoulder as the carriage disappeared from sight. “Alone at last,” he said.

  She laughed. “Is it not strange, that feeling?” she said. “I can remember when I used to have visitors at the cottage. I enjoyed most of those visits immensely, but when I shut the door behind the last of the callers, there was always a huge feeling of almost guilty relief that I was alone again. This is even better, however, because we are alone together.”

  He squeezed her shoulder and they went inside.

  The house felt very quiet for the rest of the day with all the guests gone and all signs of the ball cleared away. George went off somewhere with his steward, and Dora spent some time with Mrs. Lerner in the morning room and Mr. Humble in the kitchen. She wrote long letters to her father and to Oliver and Louisa. She briefly considered returning a book she had borrowed from Barbara, but even the prospect of a cheerful conversation with her particular friend was more than she could cope with today. She wanted peace.

  George found her later in the music room, playing the harp. She spread her hands over the strings to stop their vibrations and smiled at him.

  “It will always be the most wonderful gift ever,” she said.

  His eyes smiled. The rest of his face did not. It looked austere, she thought, thinner and paler than it had looked even just a few days ago. If she were meeting him now for the first time, she would be far more awed than she had been last year.

  “Summer is playing us a swan song,” he said. “It is really quite warm outside. Would you care to sit in the flower garden?”

  She stood the harp upright and got to her feet. He stood too and looked at her for a few moments before offering his arm and leading her outside. They sat on the wooden seat beneath the window of the morning room in the small flower garden that was her favorite part of the cultivated park. It was always sheltered from the wind and it had a special rural appeal because it was out of sight of the headland and the sea. Multicolored daisies grew in the stone urn that stood at the center of the plot. Late in the year though it was getting to be, there were still chrysanthemums about them and asters and snapdragons among other late-blooming flowers.

  “But never a weed,” she said aloud. “I have never been able to find a single one.”

  “It would be more than a gardener’s job would be worth,” he said. “He would be cast into outer darkness, without notice and without a reference.”

  She laughed, and they subsided into a silence that must have lasted for several minutes before he broke it.

  “I was the greenest of boys,” he said at last, “when my father summoned me home from my regiment and expected me to sell out only a few months after he had purchased my commission. It did not occur to me to fight him though I was bitterly disappointed. I was also grief-stricken to learn that he was dying and overwhelmed at what lay ahead for myself. Why he got it into his head that I should marry before he died when I was only seventeen years old, I do not know. I do know that my brother and he were always at loggerheads over something or other. They were too similar in nature, perhaps. My father wanted to make sure I would get to my duty early, I suppose, and produce an heir so that my brother and his descendants would be safely distanced from the succession. However it was, I did not fight him on that issue either. I was young, but I had a growing boy’s appetites. When I saw Miriam for the first time, I could not believe my good fortune, even though I was also consumed with embarrassment, for I was being forced to make her an offer in the presence of both our fathers. She was extraordinarily beautiful and remained so all the rest of her life.”

  He stopped talking as abruptly as he had started. He was sitting, apparently relaxed, on the seat beside Dora, but he was turned very slightly away from her.

  “I was hideously nervous on our wedding night,” he said. “But I need not have worried. She refused me admittance to her room. I did not actually try the door, but she told me the next day that she had locked it. She also told me it would remain locked against me for the rest of our lives. I have no idea if it did. I never put the matter to the test.”

  Dora turned her head sharply to stare at his profile. She could feel her pulse drumming in her ears and her temples. Did that mean . . . ?

  “She also told me,” he said, “that she was passionately in love with someone else, that she always would be, that she was with child by him, and that her father had married her to me with instructions to be very sure to have marital relations with me at the earliest possible moment so that the child would appear to be mine. She even told me, when I asked, who the father was. I suppose he told you?”

  “Yes.” Dora was almost surprised to hear her own voice sounding normal.

  “She defied me to turn her out,” he said, “to refuse to acknowledge the baby as mine, especially if it should turn out to be a boy. It was apparent that she utterly despised me, an impression she gave for the rest of her life. She was three years older than I. I must have seemed like a gangling boy to her, especially when her lover was ten years older.”

  Dora lifted one hand to set against his back, closed it in on itself, and returned it to her lap.

  “I have been inclined to condemn myself as spineless,” he said. “But really I was just young. My father died three weeks after my wedding, and while he still lived he was in no condition to share my burden and give advice. Perhaps I would not have consulted him anyway. I was too ashamed. I said nothing to anyone. I believe that for a few months I was full
of inward bravado and the determination not to remain a victim of such deceit. But when the baby was born—a son—and I saw him for the first time, I saw that he was puny and ugly and crying and my mind hated him while my heart felt his helplessness and his innocence. I was eighteen. I had been dazzled at my first sight of Miriam. But I fell in love at my first sight of her son.”

  He spread his hands before him, closed them into fists, and relaxed them.

  “I do not know what Miriam hoped for,” he said. “That I would accept the child as my own so that she could remain respectable and her son would be heir to a dukedom? Or that I would repudiate him so that she would be irrevocably ruined and beyond the power of Eastham, her father, and could be set up somewhere in a cozy love nest by Meikle, her half brother? She never said which she would have preferred, and I did not ask. Brendan was my son from the moment I saw him. Though I was probably not motivated entirely by love. I probably felt a certain satisfaction in keeping Miriam from the other alternative, which was obviously what Meikle hoped for.”

  He examined his palms for a few moments.

  “I was a mere boy,” he said. “Such a green boy. She doted on Brendan and kept him from me as much as she could. She used to go off to visit her father for weeks at a time, and I did not forbid it. Meikle used to come here to visit her—and it was years and years before I had backbone enough to show him the door and tell him never to return. I like to believe I would have matured far faster than I did if my father had lived and my life had continued as it was. But life is as it is. We never know what twists and turns it will take or what hand we will be dealt. It is what we do with the unexpected and with that hand that shows our mettle. I did not lose my virginity until I was twenty-five. Pardon me, I should not mention this, I suppose. But even then I felt guilty because I was married and had vowed to be faithful. I may not have lost it even then if Miriam had not told me she was with child again. She miscarried after three months. I was a cuckold and a weakling, Dora, and ultimately, an adulterer.”

  This time she did set a hand on his back. He was leaning slightly forward, his arms draped over his thighs, his hands hanging between them. His head was lowered.

  “I was twenty-five,” he said.

  “George.” She circled her hand over his back and patted it.

  “Whenever I felt rage against the two of them and felt I must at last say something and do something,” he said, “I thought of Brendan and what any scandal would do to him. He was not an attractive child. He was overweight and petulant. Miriam was overprotective of him. She always fancied he was of a delicate constitution and would not allow him to mingle with any of the neighborhood children or do anything she deemed dangerous or anything at all with me. She gave in to his tantrums and gave him whatever he wanted. The servants disliked him. So did the neighbors. Miriam loved him. So did I. It was perhaps the only thing we ever had in common. And she hated me for it.”

  Dora patted his back again.

  “Self-pity,” he murmured. “I have always fought against it. It is not an admirable trait. She would not allow me to send him to school when he was old enough, and she fought against the hiring of a tutor. It was one thing over which I did assert myself, though. I did not want my son to grow up both ignorant and detestable. I chose the man with care. And then one day, when Brendan was twelve, I caught a look on his face when he heard that I was about to go to London for a month or so. He looked—wistful. I asked if he would like to go with me. He had never particularly liked me, perhaps because I would never take notice of his sulks, but he brightened when I asked him that. And he said yes before sneering and adding that of course I would not take him. I had to fight Miriam over it, but he was legally my son and she could not stop me. We were in London for three weeks, my boy and I, and they were three of the most precious weeks of my life. Of his too, I believe. He blossomed before my eyes, and we saw everything there was to be seen. Only once did he try sulking and having a tantrum. I observed that he was being a prize ass, and we looked at each other and both—laughed.”

  He paused to smile and then sigh.

  “He was my son indeed after that,” he said. “Oh, I will not say that life changed and became suddenly perfect. It did not, and Brendan often returned to his old self, especially in his mother’s presence. But we did things together. We went fishing and shooting targets. We went riding. He had never been allowed to ride before then for fear he would fall and kill himself. He lost some of his weight and his sulky looks. I took him over to my brother’s a number of times and he and Julian established something of a friendship, certainly more than I had seen Brendan establish with any other boy. I had great hopes for his future.”

  He inhaled, lifted his head, and looked around him as though he had forgotten where he was.

  “And all that,” he said, “was the good part of my married life, Dora.” He turned his head to look over his shoulder at her. “Perhaps you can see why I have kept it all to myself until now. I have never told even my fellow Survivors, all of whom have bared their souls to me and one another. I have kept it to myself, however, only partly because it reflects badly upon me. That does not matter that much.” He snapped two fingers together. “I have kept it to myself out of respect for my dead son. He was my son, and no one knew differently except Miriam and her father and her half brother and me. Now I am the only one left and I have told you. I did not intend to do even that, as you are well aware. Brendan must live in memory as my son. But I owe you all of myself, past, present, and future. I would trust you with my life. I can trust you with my son’s memory.”

  Dora blinked and bit her upper lip.

  And all that was the good part of my married life.

  What, then, was the bad part?

  “Thank you,” she said. There seemed nothing else to say.

  He looked up at the sky. The afternoon was growing late, and the air was cooler. But neither made a move to go back indoors.

  “Meikle came for a visit the year Brendan turned seventeen,” he said. “His father was still alive at the time so he had not yet inherited the Eastham title. And I had not yet forbidden him the house, though I had made it clear for the previous few years that he was unwelcome here. He liked to spend time with Brendan, but Brendan did not particularly enjoy his company. I do not know why. Actually, I do. I cannot remember the context, but I do recall Brendan’s saying to me in clear resentment one day when he was fifteen or so, ‘sometimes he acts as if he is my father.’” On this occasion, Miriam wanted to go back home with Meikle for a while, and she wanted Brendan to go with them. He refused and she got upset. Brendan dug his heels in. Meikle tried to wheedle and persuade, and when that failed, he lost his temper and told Brendan everything. The full truth. I was away from the house at the time.”

  Dora closed her eyes and clenched her hands in her lap. There was a silence that seemed to go on forever. But he broke it eventually.

  “I came home,” he said, “to find Miriam distraught, Brendan locked inside his room and refusing to come out, and Meikle roaring with rage against me for corrupting his son and turning him against his mother and father. I soon understood what had happened. That was when I told him he had half an hour to leave Penderris land and never return. Interestingly enough—sometimes I forget—Miriam was shrieking the same thing at him. She was beside herself.”

  Dora noticed that her knuckles were white and uncurled her fingers.

  “The damage was done, of course,” he said, “and there was no mending it. I finally got inside Brendan’s room, but I could not persuade him to accept that he was my son in every way that mattered, and that I loved him. All he would say, in a horribly flat sort of voice, was that he was his mother’s bastard, that if he ever set eyes upon his father again, he would kill him, and that I was not his father and he would never be the Duke of Stanbrook after me even if he had to kill himself to prevent it. He would not look at me. All I could do over
and over again was tell him I loved him. Love has never felt more inadequate. The next day he came to me, and he looked me in the eye and told me that if I loved him, as I claimed to do, I would purchase a military commission for him with a regiment that was active in the Peninsula. I held out against him for two days, but I could not prevail. If I did not do it, he told me, then he would go off and enlist as a private soldier—and I believed him. I did as he asked even though Miriam did not cease weeping over him and raging against me. He went away, Dora, to fight a war against every imaginable enemy a boy could ever have. A young officer who was with him out in Portugal came and told me afterward that he was skilled and brave and daring and happy and well liked by his men and his fellow officers. I cling to that image of him, true or false.”

  “George—” Dora said. Her chest felt tight with pain. She could scarcely breathe.

  “Miriam was inconsolable afterward,” he said. “So was I, but I held to sanity better than she did. She blamed me; she blamed Meikle. He came. I do not know where he stayed, but it was not here. She would not see him. And then one day she could bear it no longer and did what she did. I saw her when I was returning to the house from somewhere. I tried to reach her in time—I never for one moment doubted what she was about to do. But although in all my nightmares since I come close enough almost to touch her, almost to think of the right thing to say to persuade her to step back, in reality I was still some distance away and yelling incoherently into the wind when she threw herself over.”

  “George,” Dora said, wrapping her arms about his waist from behind and resting one cheek against his shoulder blade. “Oh, my dearest.”

  “After a few years,” he said, “I conceived the idea of turning Penderris into a hospital for wounded officers. I thought perhaps that way I could atone somewhat. I felt oppressed by guilt—at how I had mismanaged my life and those of all who had been my own to protect. I blamed myself for two deaths, one of them of the person most dear to me in this world. And the scheme was largely successful. My money was able to purchase the services of an excellent physician and good nurses, and my home was able to provide a spacious, quiet environment for healing. And I was able to give time and patience and empathy and even love to everyone who came here. I received abundantly in return. Six of the patients at that hospital are now the dearest friends anyone could dream of having. And then a short while ago, after Imogen married, I conceived the idea of marrying again, but a real marriage this time. I thought perhaps I could allow myself some contentment and perhaps even real happiness at last. I thought perhaps I could forgive myself.”