The Secret Pearl

by Mary Balogh

  “Yes,” Lady Pamela said. “I can scarcely wait. But Papa wanted to come here first. I am not to tell why. I got to tell you about not being sick on the boat.”

  Fleur laughed. And she was aware suddenly of the hum of voices behind her. She straightened up and turned.

  “This is Lady Pamela Kent,” she said, taking the child by the hand and drawing her into the schoolroom. “She has just come from a year of traveling on the Continent. This is Miss Booth, Pamela, and all the children of the village.”

  Lady Pamela smiled about her and moved closer to Fleur’s side. Miriam was curtsying—to Lady Pamela and beyond her.

  “Good morning, your grace,” she said. “Children, make your bows and curtsies to his grace, the Duke of Ridgeway, if you please.”

  And Fleur turned her head jerkily at last and met his eyes.

  And she felt instant shock. He was taller than she remembered, his hair blacker, his eyes more piercingly dark, his nose more prominent, his scar more noticeable. All had been softened in memory. She felt an unexpected surging of the old fear.

  She curtsied to him. “Your grace,” she murmured.

  He inclined his head to her and to the room in general. “Good morning,” he said. “I hate to interrupt classes, but if I know young people and the way their minds work, I would guess that I am the most popular man in the village at the moment.”

  Giggles from the girls, shouts of laughter from the boys.

  Classes were at an end, it seemed. The girls were openly admiring Lady Pamela’s fashionable clothes and she was eyeing them with shy interest. The boys were gazing at the duke in some awe. He was conversing politely with Miriam. And then Dr. Wetherald was there, and Daniel too, and Lady Pamela was gazing pleadingly up at her father.

  “May I, Papa?” she was saying. “Oh, please, may I?”

  “You are hardly dressed to go rambling,” he was saying with a smile.

  “But I have other dresses,” she said. “I can change. Oh, please, Papa. Please. Miss Hamilton, may I go? Please?”

  Miriam was looking very directly at her. It was Miriam, it seemed, who had suggested that Lady Pamela might enjoy joining the school ramble, though his grace must realize that they intended to be gone for several hours.

  “Only Papa can say yes to that,” Fleur said, smiling at the eager, pretty face of her former pupil. “But I know you would have a great deal of fun.”

  One minute later Lady Pamela was dashing for the carriage, having been granted the permission she had begged for.

  “I am going to bring Tiny,” she shrieked. “May I, Miss Hamilton?”

  Miriam was laughing. “I will take very good care of her, your grace,” she said. “And my brother and Dr. Wetherald will be with me to lend a hand. Three adults will be more than enough. We will not need your presence, Isabella. You had better stay to entertain his grace, since he will have a wait of several hours.”

  Fleur opened her mouth to speak and closed it again.

  It seemed that all the children found it impossible to speak in less than a shriek. The schoolroom sounded very quiet indeed when all of them and the three adults had set off on their way.

  “Miss Booth is a kind lady,” the Duke of Ridgeway said from behind her shoulder. “Pamela will talk about this treat for weeks to come.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I am glad for her, your grace.”

  “Your grace?” he said quietly.

  She glanced over her shoulder and fixed her eyes on his neckcloth.

  “Can we go somewhere else?” he asked. “To your home, maybe?”

  “Yes,” she said. “It is quite close by.”

  She locked the school carefully and walked by his side along the street to her cottage. They did not touch or speak a single word.

  SHE LAID DOWN THE BOOKS SHE HAD BEEN CARRYING and watched him set his hat and gloves on a table. She turned and led the way into a square and cozy parlor, the pianoforte in one corner dwarfing the rest of the furniture in the room.

  It was as he had thought, as he had led himself to expect. She was not really pleased to see him. She was awkward and embarrassed.

  “Won’t you have a seat, your gr …?” Her hand was gesturing to a chair. She stopped and flushed.

  So very beautiful. His breath had caught in his throat as soon as he had seen her stooping down to hug Pamela. More beautiful even than he had remembered. There was a poise about her, a sense of dignity that was more pronounced than it had been before.

  He was very aware of his own ugliness, of his scar. And he had to consciously resist the impulse to turn sideways so that she would not see it.

  “I shall ring for some tea,” she said, “and for something to eat. It is luncheontime. Doubtless you have been traveling since breakfast, have you? You must be hungry.”

  “I am not,” he said quietly. “Are you happy, then? The school seems to be a merry place. This is a cozy cottage, and larger than I expected.”

  “Yes.” She smiled at him. “I am happy. I am doing what I like doing, and I am surrounded by my friends.”

  “I am glad,” he said. “I had to come to make sure.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “That was good of you. You must be very eager to be home, having been away so long.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Very eager.”

  And yet, he thought, he had not prepared himself well at all. He had thought he had. He had thought he was prepared for the worst. But his heart was a lead weight in his chest and he could not think of home or the winter ahead or of all the years after that.

  Not without Fleur. Willoughby would not be home without her, or the future worth living. Not after a year of hope that he had tried to persuade himself was not hope at all.

  She plumped a cushion on a chair quite unnecessarily and sat down, although he had not accepted her invitation to seat himself.

  And she searched in her mind for something to say and kept her expression politely bright.

  For a whole month—for eleven months—she had persuaded herself that he would not come, that he would forget about her, regret his hasty words of love to her. And yet for the past month she had expected him hourly and told herself and told herself that he would not come.

  He was standing in her parlor, his hands behind his back, looking dark and morose, looking as if he wished to be anywhere else on earth but where he was.

  He had come out of a sense of duty, because he had said he would come. Adam and his damnable sense of duty! She hated him again, wished him a million miles away.

  “You have not been troubled by Brocklehurst or his family?” he asked her stiffly.

  “No,” she said. “I have heard nothing of Matthew, though rumor has placed him anywhere from South America to India. Cousin Caroline is here, but I believe she intends to visit her daughter for the winter.”

  “And the Reverend Booth and his sister are still your friends,” he said. “I am glad.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  She wished with all her heart that Lady Pamela had not gone on the ramble. She wished that he could leave without further delay. She wished she could start living the rest of her life.

  If only he had not allowed Pamela to go with the other children, he thought. If only there were some way he could leave immediately. He could take himself off to the village inn, he supposed, but if he suggested doing so, she would think that she had failed in hospitality.

  “Thank you for the pianoforte,” she said. “I have not had a chance to thank you before. You intended it to be kept in the schoolroom, of course, but both Miriam and Daniel agreed that it would be safer here.”

  “You know that it was a gift for you alone,” he said.

  And he watched broodingly as she flushed and looked down at her clasped hands. Her knuckles were white with tension.

  He remembered her hands touching him, moving lightly over the wounds on his side. He remembered her telling him he was beautiful. He remembered her telling him that she loved him. He felt an almost ov
erwhelming sadness. He strolled toward the pianoforte and stood looking down at the keys. He depressed one of them.

  “The tone is good?” he asked.

  “It is a beautiful instrument,” she said. “It is my most prized possession.”

  He smiled, and he glanced up at the vase standing on the pianoforte and the letter propped against it. He reached out and picked the letter up.

  “This is my letter to you,” he said.

  “Yes.” She got to her feet, flushing, and reached out a hand for it.

  “Has it been there for almost a year?” he asked.

  “Yes.” She laughed breathlessly. “It must have been. I am not a very tidy person.”

  He glanced about him at the neat, uncluttered room. And he felt a quite unreasonable surging of hope.

  “Why?” he asked her. “Why do you keep it there?”

  She shrugged. “I … I don’t know,” she said foolishly. She could think of no reasonable explanation. How foolish he would think her. How humiliating if he should guess the truth. She smiled, her hand still outstretched for the letter. “I shall put it away.”

  “Fleur?” he said.

  She dropped her hand. She had told him just a little more than a year before that she loved him and always would. Should she be ashamed now that she had spoken the simple truth? Was pride to be guarded at all costs?

  “Because it is not only the pianoforte that is my most treasured possession,” she said, fixing her eyes on the top button of his waistcoat. “That is too. I keep them together.”

  “Fleur,” he said softly.

  “I have nothing else of you,” she said. “Just those two things.”

  She wished she could see that button clearly. She wished that he would not see her with tears in her eyes. But she was not ashamed of loving him. She had said she would and she did.

  She watched the blur of white as he tossed the letter aside. She watched his waistcoat come closer. She felt his hands framing her face.

  Her jaw was set hard. Her face looked as if made of stone. But there were the tears glistening on her eyelashes. And there were her words. And the letter, propped on top of the pianoforte almost a year after she had received it.

  “My love,” he said, cupping her face in his hands. If she was to reject him, then so be it. But she would know that he had kept faith with her, that he still loved her more than life and would do so always.

  He watched her bite at her upper lip, reach out with trembling hands to touch his waistcoat, withdraw her hands again.

  “I love you,” he said. “Nothing has changed in the fifteen months since I told you that. And nothing will ever change.”

  “Oh,” she said. She could find no other words and knew that she would not be able to speak them even if she did. She reached out to touch him again and found her hands to be as far beyond her control as her voice was.

  But she did not have to find words. Or control. His head bent to hers and his lips touched her own and parted over them, and his hands left her cheeks, one arm to come about her shoulders and the other about her waist. She was drawn against the strength of him, and it did not matter that she was trembling.

  Fleur. Soft and warm and feminine, her body arched unashamedly to his, her lips parting beneath his own, her mouth opening to his tongue, her arms coming up about his neck.

  Fleur. He allowed himself the full luxury of hope.

  “I love you too,” she whispered against his mouth. She kept her eyes closed. There could be no more thought to pride. “I have not stopped loving you for even a moment. And the letter is not always against the vase. Only by day. By night it is beneath my pillow.”

  “On the assumption that the pianoforte is too large to put there?” he said with such unexpected humor that she burst into laughter.

  He joined in the laughter and hugged her to him.

  “Fleur,” he said at last against her ear, “this cannot really be the first time I have laughed in a year, can it? But it feels like it.”

  She drew her head back and looked fully at him for the first time. “I thought I would never see you again,” she said. “When you broke every bone in my hands that morning and jumped into your carriage and drove away, I thought I would never ever see you again.”

  “Well,” he said, smiling at her, “that should be no tragedy. I am not much to look at, am I?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, tilting her head to one side. “Aren’t you? To me you are all the world.”

  “A dark and scarred world,” he said.

  “A beautiful world,” she said. “A face with character. The face I love most in all the world.”

  He took her quite by surprise suddenly by bending down and scooping her up into his arms and sitting with her on his lap on a sofa.

  “Guess what I have in my pocket,” he said.

  “I don’t know.” She circled his neck with her arms and smiled at him. “A priceless jewel you bought for me.”

  “No,” he said. “Try again.”

  “A snuffbox,” she said.

  “I don’t use the stuff,” he said. “You are not even close.”

  “A linen handkerchief,” she said.

  “My other pocket.” He was laughing again, and she with him. “What do I have in my other pocket?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “How am I supposed to guess?”

  “You should know,” he said. “What, of all other things, would I be sure to bring with me when I came for you at last?”

  She shook her head, her smile fading.

  “A special license,” he said, suddenly serious too. “A special license, my love, so that I can make you mine without delay once I have got you to say yes.”

  “Adam,” she said, touching his scarred cheek. “Oh, Adam.”

  “Will you?” he said. “Will you marry me, Fleur? I know I am no prize, and you know some unsavory things about me. But you would have my undivided love and devotion for the rest of a lifetime. And you would be a duchess, if that is any lure, and mistress of Willoughby. Will you, Fleur?”

  “Adam,” she said, tracing the line of the scar downward from his eye to the corner of his mouth. “Think carefully, do. Think of what you know about me, about what I was, what I am.”

  “A whore?” he said so that her eyes flew to his in shock and her face flushed painfully. “I am going to tell you something, Fleur, and I want you to listen very carefully. Sybil had consumption. It is very unlikely that she would have survived this year. But she could have had that year or part of it, anyway. She could have had my support and even affection and all of Pamela’s love. But she had had one cruel disappointment in life and another lesser one last summer. She lost her will to live. She would not accept the comfort I tried to give her. She almost totally ignored Pamela. And finally, when she had word of Thomas’ death—before I did—she took what little remained of her life.”

  “The poor lady,” Fleur said. “I do feel desperately sorry for her, Adam.”

  “So did I,” he said. “But listen to me, Fleur. You were put into a dreadful situation over a year ago. You faced either a noose about your neck or a nightmare of a marriage if you went back home, or starvation if you stayed in hiding. But did you give in to self-pity? No. You fought, doing everything you had to do to survive. You did the ultimate, Fleur. You became a whore. I pity my wife. I honor you more than I can say in words.”

  She swallowed. “Perhaps because you know you were the only one,” she said. “How would you feel if there had been a dozen others? Two dozen? More?”

  “Fit to kill,” he said. “Before my marriage, Fleur, I slept with more than a dozen women. I could not possibly put a number on them, the women I bedded. How do you feel about that?”

  She was silent for a while. “Fit to kill,” she said.

  “Does it make you stop loving me?” he asked.

  “No.” She laid a palm against his cheek. “That is in the past, Adam. I have no control over that and you cannot change it. I don
’t care about your past.”

  “And I don’t care about yours,” he said. “Will you be my duchess, Fleur?”

  “Pamela?” she said.

  “She seemed a little troubled that I was willing to sacrifice myself by making you my wife just so that I could also make you her mama,” he said. “I had to assure her that it was what I wanted too.” He smiled.

  “She adored her mother,” she said.

  “Yes, and always will,” he said. “We will have to make sure that she never forgets Sybil, Fleur. And we will hope that memory somewhat distorts the truth. We will hope that she remembers Sybil as a constantly attentive mother as well as a beautiful and indulgent one. You will never be her mother, but you can be her stepmother. And I can tell you from experience that it is possible for her to love both. I have faint, flashing images of my mother and have always associated those images with unconditional love. But I was dearly fond of my stepmother, Thomas’ mother.”

  She lowered her head to his shoulder.

  “Will you marry me?”

  “Yes,” she said, and closed her eyes. There were no other words to say. How could one put into words a happiness that filled one so full to the brim that it was almost a pain?

  He settled his cheek against the top of her head and closed his eyes. And felt that there was no further need of words for the moment. It was as he remembered it the night they made love. They could communicate more perfectly through the silence than through the imperfection of words.

  “I have a confession to make,” he said at last. “I dreaded having a letter from you to say you were with child, and yet I looked for that letter and hoped for it. You see how in my selfishness I would have made you suffer?”

  “I cried when I knew I was not,” she said.

  He laughed softly and turned her face up to his with one hand at her chin and kissed her deeply and lingeringly.

  “We will have you with child just as soon as can be,” he said. “Tonight maybe?”

  “Tonight?” She was laughing against his neck.

  “On our wedding night,” he said. “Is it too soon?”

  “Tonight?”