The Devil's Web

by Mary Balogh

  “What a fascination babies are,” Madeline said. “Have you noticed, Dom, how a baby will always be the center of attraction in any room?”

  “I have noticed that you have no eyes for anyone but Olivia,” he said with a grin, “and occasionally Charles. You have scarcely glanced my way, Mad, even though we have not seen each other for almost two months until today.”

  “How foolish,” she said, smiling back at him. “You know I am always glad to see you, Dom. There is always something missing when you are not close by. I am so glad you and Ellen came to London after all. I feared you would not come this year with the children so young and with this newfound delight of yours in the country.”

  “Well, you know,” he said, “the chance of bringing the children to town for the admiration of Mama and Edmund and Alexandra and you was quite irresistible. Not to mention Ellen’s father, who has made no fewer than three whirlwind visits into Wiltshire already to assure himself that his grandchildren are growing and Ellen recovering her health. And of course Ellen wanted to bring Jennifer back to town to her grandfather. You must not forget that Ellen is the stepmother of a marriageable young lady, at the grand age of six and twenty. When Charlie died at Waterloo last year, he left Ellen a widow with responsibilities—Jennifer is only eight years younger than she. She is here for what remains of the Season.”

  “Whatever your excuse,” Madeline said, “I am glad. She has green eyes, Dom, like you and me. Olivia, I mean.”

  “You have been enjoying the Season?” Lord Eden asked. “You are in good looks, Mad, as usual.”

  “It is quite shameful, is it not?” she said. “This is my ninth Season, though last year did not really count, as I was in Brussels for most of the summer. One of these days, I swear, I am going to take to wearing caps and carrying my embroidery around with me.”

  Lord Eden grinned and glanced down at his son, who stirred before settling back to sleep again. “Anyone special?” he asked.

  Madeline’s eyes sparkled back into his. “Well, of course there is someone special,” she said. “Isn’t there always? Actually, Dom, he is no one new. Jason Huxtable is in town and I am quite in love with him.”

  “Colonel Huxtable?” he said, eyebrows raised. “Your old beau from Brussels? I thought you had rejected him.”

  “Well, I have changed my mind,” she said. “He is quite the most handsome man in London. He has made me an offer already.”

  “Has he indeed?” he said. “And?”

  She laughed softly. “And nothing,” she said. “I turned the question. I am not at all ready to give my answer yet. Though I think I might accept him before the Season ends, Dom. The single state sometimes becomes tedious. Geoffrey is being a little troublesome, too.”

  “North?” he said. “He is smitten with your charms, too?”

  “Silly, is it not?” she said. “We have been friends forever and now suddenly he has begun to see roses in my cheeks and stars in my eyes and other nonsense like that. Poor Geoffrey. I really do not know how to cope with a friend turned lover.”

  “Madeline,” Ellen, Lady Eden, called from across the room, “are you tired of holding Olivia? You must not feel obliged, you know. Shall I take her?”

  “Oh, please let me have her for a little longer,” Madeline said.

  But her attention had been effectively diverted. Her other brother, with his daughter on his lap busily trying to undo the buttons on his waistcoat, was laughing at his wife.

  “Do you realize how often you have asked that question during the past year, Alex?” he said fondly. “How am I to know beyond the shadow of a doubt if James will come or not? I can only say, as I always do, that he wrote to say he was coming and that there is no reason to suppose he will not.”

  “But it was last autumn when we heard from him,” the Countess of Amberley said with a sigh. “So long ago. Anything could have happened since then. But your letter also said that he was coming, Mama?” She turned to her mother, who was seated beside her.

  “It is too bad of him to be coming here as a common tradesman,” Lady Beckworth said fretfully. “He could have come home as a decent gentleman instead of shaming us all this way.”

  “Oh, Mama,” Alexandra said, laying a hand over her mother’s, “let us be thankful that he is coming at all. If he comes. Four years seems to have been an interminable time, and for a while it seemed that he might never come home again. Will he have changed, I wonder?”

  “I will not set my hopes on it,” Lord Beckworth said. “It is doubtful, Alexandra, that James will have changed at his age. The manner in which he is returning—as a tradesman, to break his mother’s heart—proves my point.”

  The countess glanced unhappily at her husband, who smiled back at her with his eyes. “I am longing to see him,” she said. “Oh, Edmund, do you think he will come? And don’t smile at me in that odious way. Caroline, sweetheart, don’t put Papa’s buttons in your mouth. I am afraid you will swallow one of them.”

  “So am I,” the earl said, laughing and disengaging his button from his daughter’s mouth. “They are made of silver.”

  “I am looking forward to meeting your brother, too, Alexandra,” Ellen said. “You have told me so much about him. And I am sure he will come if he told you he would. He would have written otherwise, would he not?” She stooped to examine the toy brought for her inspection by Christopher, Lord Cleeves, the earl’s son.

  Lord Eden, smoothing a hand over the soft down on his child’s head, was examining his twin closely. “Well, Mad,” he said, “and what are your thoughts on the subject?”

  “What subject?” she said, and flushed deeply when he merely raised his eyebrows. “I have no thoughts, Dom. It is nothing to me.”

  “Madeline,” he said, “this is your twin, remember?”

  “Well, then,” she said, suddenly finding it necessary to examine her niece’s fingers with minute care, “I will be glad if he comes. I will be glad to see him. And then finally it will all be over, and I can concentrate all my attention on Jason. I am quite in love with him, you know.”

  “You were quite in love with Purnell,” he said, “but quite against your will, I remember. You did not choose to love him, as you seem to have chosen to love Huxtable. And you did not forget him easily, did you? Or forget him ever, for that matter.”

  “I never loved him,” she said quietly, looking up into her brother’s eyes. “I hated him. I disliked him. I feared him. I didn’t love him, Dom. Not at all. It was an obsession. And nothing will have changed in four years. I want to see him again, that’s all. I need to see him again so that I can prove to myself that it was a foolish obsession of the past. And I want happiness, Dom. I am tired of being alone. I want children, like you and Edmund.”

  “All right,” he said. “Don’t upset yourself, Mad. I was not teasing you. I want you to be happy too, it may surprise you to know. And I remember Huxtable as a thoroughly worthy character.”

  “Anyway,” she said quietly, “perhaps he will not come. Olivia is getting restless, Dom. What shall I do?”

  He laughed. “I think only Ellen can do the doing,” he said, turning to smile at his wife, who was approaching them. “Perhaps Olivia can have a meal in peace for once, if Charles continues to sleep. He is quite ferocious when he is hungry. It is going to be difficult to persuade this one that a prime gentlemanly virtue is allowing a lady to go first.”

  Madeline reluctantly gave up the baby to her sister-in-law and watched the two of them leave the room. She sighed inwardly and glanced at her twin, whose attention was focused on the baby in his arms. She had still not quite adjusted her mind to the fact that Dominic was married and the father of two. And seemingly perfectly happy and domesticated.

  They had been restless together for several years and like each other in their enthusiasms and tendency to fall in love routinely and out of love before any marriage could be contracted. And then he had met Ellen when she was still married to his best friend, and married her himsel
f only months after her husband was killed at the Battle of Waterloo. Ellen was perfect for him. And he was happy, and therefore she was happy.

  But sometimes there was a dreadful feeling of loneliness. A loneliness she hid, as she had always done, in increased activity and gaiety. This was perhaps her busiest and brightest Season yet.

  But she loved Jason Huxtable. And she would be happy with him. He was a man and not a boy. The year before she had betrothed herself to Allan Penworth and broken off the engagement in the autumn. But that was excusable. He had been wounded in battle and she had nursed him back to health. They had both mistaken their dependence on each other for love.

  This was different. There was no dependence on either side. They were both strong and independent individuals. It was real love. She had drawn back from accepting Jason’s offer only because she had made so many mistakes in the past. But she would accept him before the summer was out. She was six and twenty. If she did not marry soon, she never would. And she would hate to go through life without the experience of marriage and motherhood.

  She wished James Purnell were not coming. It was not fair. It had taken her months, perhaps years, to recover from his leaving. It was not fair that he should come back now to throw her feelings into turmoil again.

  And why should there be any turmoil? There really had been nothing between them except a mutual dislike and a strange, inexplicable attraction.

  If only she had not hated him as well as disliking him, perhaps she could have forgotten him more easily. But the manner of his leaving had caused intense hatred, an emotion she had been unfamiliar with and unable to cope with.

  They had met, by accident, out of doors during a summer ball at Amberley Court in Hampshire, and he had kissed her. They had danced together to the distant sounds of the music from the ballroom, and he had kissed her. If it could be called a kiss. It had been far more than that. He had made love to her in all but the ultimate way, and she had given herself to him, even for the ultimate consummation.

  She had loved him during that moment of total madness. All dislike and distrust had faded, and she had offered herself to him. She had even told him that she loved him. She had humiliated herself that much.

  And he had put her from him, sneered at her, told her that it was lust only he felt for her, and told her to leave him if she knew what was good for her. She had gone and never seen him since. He had left Amberley that same night and sailed for Canada a few days later.

  She had been totally destroyed. It had taken her months to put herself back together again, to regain her spirits and something of her old self-esteem. And she had come to hate intensely the man she had loved as intensely for a few insane minutes.

  She wished he were not coming back.

  “When is the very soonest he could possibly be here?”Alexandra was asking of no one in particular, having found it impossible to concentrate on any other topic of conversation for longer than a few minutes.

  “About now,” the earl said, smiling gently at her. “Or if not him in person, then a letter from him. You should have some definite news soon, Alex.”

  She smiled apologetically at him. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I am becoming a bore, am I not?” She turned to her mother-in-law, the Dowager Countess of Amberley. “Do tell me about the opera last evening, Mother. You must be very happy to have Sir Cedric Harvey back in England again. You missed him last year when he was away in Vienna, did you not?”

  Perhaps he would not come, Madeline thought. Perhaps she was living through all this agony for nothing. Perhaps he would not come. Perhaps he would never come.

  Would she be able to bear never seeing him again? Never in this life?

  She caught her twin’s eyes steady on her and flushed. Sometimes it was an uncomfortable feeling to know that she had a brother who knew her and understood her almost as well as she knew and understood herself.

  JAMES PURNELL WAS SITTING INSIDE THE EARL of Amberley’s town carriage with his sister. She held his hand firmly clasped between both of hers. He was looking at her with mingled amusement and wonder.

  Amusement because she was like a child with a new treat, her cheeks flushed, her eyes sparkling, her words tripping all over themselves. Wonder because she was so changed. Gone was the quiet, serious, demure Alex who had accepted life for whatever it offered. And in the place of the old Alex was the woman he had always known she could be, the woman he had always hoped she would become and had always feared she never would.

  “I did not send word, just as I said last night I would not,” she was explaining to him. “I want it to be a surprise.”

  He laughed outright. “But you cannot expect your mother-in-law to greet the surprise with quite the wild excitement you showed last evening when I was ushered into your drawing room,” he said. “Indeed, Alex, she may show no enthusiasm at all about my arrival.”

  “Oh, there you are wrong,” she said. “She is the dearest person, James, though I know that mothers-in-law are reputed not to be, and she knows just how much I have looked forward to your coming. I have had to exercise the utmost restraint all morning not to dash off a note to her with the news but to wait until this afternoon. And you must not laugh at me. Edmund has been doing quite enough of that, odious man.”

  He squeezed the hand that was below his own. “You are happy with him, Alex, are you not?” he said.

  “Happy?” she said in some surprise. “With Edmund? Well, of course I am happy, James. Why would I not be?”

  He laughed again. “I’m sorry I asked,” he said. “It was a foolish question. I just happen to remember that you were destined to marry the Duke of Peterleigh before circumstances forced you to marry Amberley.”

  “I was not forced to marry Edmund,” she said quickly. “I married him freely, because I wanted to. Because I loved him and he me. And I don’t need to be reminded of the duke, James. He is in London, you know, though I have been fortunate enough not to have seen him at all. Oh, yes, I am happy, James, and very well aware of how fortunately my life has turned out.”

  “Well, I am glad,” he said. “You know how much I hated the thought of your marrying Peterleigh. I like the children, by the way. It is quite a novelty to be Uncle James, you know.”

  “Christopher has been telling anyone who would listen for the last several months that his uncle was coming in a big ship,” she said. “Edmund says that the two of us have sounded like a Greek chorus. James, you have changed.”

  “Have I?” he said, looking into her searching eyes. “In what way?”

  She put her head to one side. “You are thinner,” she said. “Though you look very strong. And healthy, too. Your face is thinner. And so very bronzed. Mama was not at all pleased about that, was she?” She laughed a little guiltily.

  “Well,” he said, “gentlemen are not supposed to expose their faces to the sunshine, you know. Poor Mama. If she would only sometimes relax and stop worrying about what people think. She quite spoiled the effect of all her scolding when she cried all over my cravat, though, did she not?”

  But Alexandra was still concentrating her looks on him and appeared not to hear his words. “It is not just your appearance, though,” she said. “You have changed in other ways, haven’t you, James? You look less haunted. Have you learned to live again in Canada? Have you put the past behind you? I can quite forgive you for going if that is the case.”

  “Four years have passed, Alex,” he said quietly. “And a great deal has happened in those years. Yes, I have a new life there. I am content.”

  “Ah,” she said, sighing, “then I must resign myself to losing you again at the end of the summer. You will go back again. Do you have anyone there, James? I mean, is there any special lady?”

  “I lived in the interior,” he said, “where there are no white women at all. Only the native women. Very beautiful many of them are, too, and it is quite customary for the men to take them as wives. But they are of a different culture, Alex. When the men come out, they mus
t leave the women behind, and the children too. It would be a cruelty to bring them out into a world they do not know. I would not wish such heartbreak on myself.”

  “Ah,” she said.

  “There is a little Scottish girl, though,” he said, “from Montreal. Jean Cameron. Her father is a partner in the company and is in London at the moment. She came across in the Adeona with her brother. I have promised to take her to some of the entertainments of the Season.”

  She smiled brightly at him. “And she is special?” she asked. “I will like her?”

  “Yes to both questions, I would imagine,” he said. “But that does not mean you may start planning my wedding, Alex. She is just a child. A very sweet child.”

  “A very special sweet child,” she said, lifting his hand to lay briefly against her cheek. “I can hardly wait to see Mother’s face when she sees you, James. And Madeline’s.”

  He smiled at her. He had discovered the night before, of course, that Madeline was not staying at her brother’s house on Grosvenor Square. He had not known if she was at her mother’s. She had not been mentioned before this moment. He had not even known if she was in London.

  “She still is not married, James,” Alexandra said. “Can you imagine? She was betrothed last summer, of course, and we all were very fond of Lieutenant Penworth. But they were not really meant for each other. Dominic was telling us two days ago that Mr. Penworth and Ellen’s stepdaughter, Jennifer Simpson, are promised, though her grandfather has not given his approval yet. I think Madeline is going to marry Colonel Huxtable.”

  “Huxtable?” he said.

  “A Guardsman,” she said, “and wonderfully handsome, though the uniform helps, of course. They met in Brussels last year. She told Edmund and me that he has made her an offer already and that she will probably accept before the end of the Season. Will that not be splendid? Ah, here we are.”

  So he was to meet her again. In her mother’s drawing room, doubtless in the presence of other guests. And she was in love again. Almost betrothed again. Soon to be married.