The Devil's Web

by Mary Balogh

  Well, it was as well to meet her this way. Now, before he had time to think about it. Casually. He would look at her, greet her, converse politely with her for a few minutes, and put behind him once and for all the obsession of four years.

  He stood outside the doors of the drawing room, his sister’s arm in his, her animated face smiling up into his, while the butler announced them. He smiled back.

  The room was crowded with people, though only a remote part of his mind knew it. He saw only her as he entered the room. She was not with either of the two groups into which the occupants had divided themselves, but was partway across the room, obviously on her way to greet them. Except that it was clearly not him she had expected to greet. She stopped, frozen, in her tracks.

  Time rolled back as if it had never been. Madeline. She was exactly as he remembered her, only more slender and lithe, more fair-haired, more lovely, more vivid in every way. Every part of his insides seemed jolted out of place.

  He saw her in a moment that was quite outside time. A moment that would always be etched on his consciousness. And yet in actual fact he did not look at her at all. His eyes touched on her and slid away and no force on earth could have forced them back to her again.

  He obeyed the pressure of Alex’s arm and reacted to her voice and was soon bowing over the dowager countess’s hand and answering her polite queries. And he was being presented to a crowd of people he had never met before and would probably not remember again. And he was shaking the hand of Sir Cedric Harvey and settling into a conversation about his employment.

  He found himself sitting with the dowager’s group while Alex had joined the other group, the one that included Madeline. And all the time he talked and listened and laughed and drank tea and ate scones he was aware of her with every nerve ending in his body, aware of every move she made, every expression on her face, every sound of her voice, though he never once looked her way.

  He had not greeted her, or she him. They had shown no sign that they had even so much as set eyes on each other before.

  And yet he had held her in his arms. He had unclothed her to the waist and kissed and fondled her. He had wanted her with every instinct of his body and every atom of his mind. And he had been raw with the pain of leaving her for months and even years afterward.

  And now they were strangers in a room together. Strangers, except that his pulses pounded with the knowledge of her. Except that he could not look at her or speak to her. Except that he felt an irrational urge to kill the handsome officer who sat beside her, and even Lord North, with whom she was making arrangements to drive later in the afternoon.

  Fool! He would have given anything in the world, he felt after half an hour, if he could only go back and make that entrance all over again.

  MADELINE HAD BEEN holding court in her mother’s drawing room, if entertaining two gentlemen who were currently showing a marked interest in her could be called holding court. She had been laughing gaily and assuring Lord North that she would indeed have gone driving with him in the park if only the day were not so beastly cold and the rain not drizzling down intermittently.

  And while Lord North had looked somewhat crestfallen, she had turned toward Colonel Huxtable and said that yes, she was to attend the concert at Mrs. Denton’s that evening with her mama and would be pleased with his escort. After all, Sir Cedric would undoubtedly be accompanying her mother, as he had accompanied her almost everywhere since his return from Vienna, and she herself should have an escort of her own.

  When the butler had opened the doors of the drawing room, Madeline had looked up brightly to see who the latecomers might be. She was taken completely off her guard. She had known he was coming, of course. Alexandra had talked of little else for months. But she had not known he had come.

  She did not listen to the butler’s words. She saw her sister-in-law.

  “Here come Edmund and Alexandra,” she said gladly, rising to her feet and stepping past her two admirers to greet the new arrivals. And only then, when she was stranded in the middle of the room, did the butler’s words register on her hearing and did she see that the man with Alexandra was not her elder brother.

  He was different. Very much darker of complexion and more agile-looking. And his eyes were less brooding and less hostile. Very different. He had changed.

  And yet he was no different at all. She was paralyzed with the sameness of him. James as he had lived deep in her memories for four years, dark and intense, seemingly coiled like a spring, an almost frightening power in him. James, more handsome than any man she had ever known, though not in a drawing room kind of way. He belonged in the wilderness and not in the ballrooms and salons of society.

  And that truant lock of dark hair fallen across his forehead as it had always used to do, the one feature she had forgotten about, though it was so very familiar now that her arm ached to lift and put it back to join the rest of his thick hair.

  James, as he had always been. Throwing only one brief, contemptuous glance her way before turning away to greet her mother. Though how she knew about that glance when she had not once looked fully at him, she did not know. She behaved with all the gaucherie of a girl only one day out of the schoolroom. She neither looked at him nor greeted him, but smiled at Alexandra and continued on her way to the tea tray, where she poured her sister-in-law a cup of tea, but not their other guest.

  And then she rejoined her group and behaved with all the mindlessness of the most flighty of social butterflies.

  “But where is Lady Beckworth?” she asked Alexandra, far too brightly and far too loudly.

  “She would not come with us,” Alexandra said. “She thought the weather too inclement for an outing. And Edmund would not come.” She laughed. “He said that since he is of no more importance to me now that my brother has arrived, he might as well retire to the nursery and sulk. He is being very silly. He is teasing me, of course,” she added, for the information of Colonel Huxtable and Lord North, who might have taken her words seriously.

  “Are you going to Mrs. Denton’s tonight?” Madeline asked, smiling at Jason Huxtable with a flirtatiousness that she had not intended.

  “We are all going,” Alexandra said. “Even Papa, if you can imagine. Of course, he does not consider concerts quite as frivolous as other forms of entertainment. James will be coming too, naturally.”

  Madeline felt rather as if a giant fist had punched her just below the waist. She felt as if she had just run hard for a mile. She had glanced across the room and almost met his eyes. She drew her head back as if to ward off a touch, though he was clear across the room from her and really had not looked at her at all.

  “I have just had a thought,” she said, and heard in some dismay the high pitch and volume of her voice. But she seemed unable to do anything about it. She turned to Lord North and laid a hand lightly on his sleeve. “When a gentleman offers to take me driving, I immediately visualize a curricle or a phaeton. You were not by any chance offering a closed carriage, were you, Geoffrey?”

  “It could certainly be arranged,” he said, brightening.

  “I should not even dream of accompanying you in a closed carriage without the presence of my maid, of course,” she said gaily. “But one advantage of having been on the town forever is that one does not have to pay heed to all that faradiddle.”

  “On the town forever, Lady Madeline?” Lord North said gallantly. “Why, you look not a day older than the newest young lady in town.”

  “Gracious!” she said, tapping his arm and laughing merrily and altogether too loudly across at the colonel. “I am not at all sure I take that as a compliment, sir.”

  She was aware of Sir Cedric and Mr. Brunning in the other group smiling across at her. And she could not stop herself from smiling. She could not force herself to be quiet and let the conversation continue around her.

  She was behaving as she had always behaved in the presence of James Purnell. He had always despised her as silly and empty-headed. She had a
lways been aware of his contempt. And yet she had always lived up to his expectations when he was in the same room. She had never been able to act naturally with him. Except perhaps on that last occasion, when she had offered herself to him and told him she loved him.

  Her cheeks burned with shame at the memory.

  She wished she could relive the last half hour, have another chance to do it right, to greet him civilly, to behave with the coolness and poise of a mature woman. Oh, she wished she could have the time back again.

  When Lord North rose in order to return home for his town carriage, all the guests took his doing so as a cue to take their own departure.

  “I shall look forward to seeing you again this evening,” Alexandra said, kissing her mother-in-law’s cheek.

  “Of course, dear,” the dowager said. “We will see you there as well, Mr. Purnell?”

  He answered her question, bowed, and extended a hand to her. Madeline turned away and took an effusive farewell of Colonel Huxtable.

  “I AM QUITE SURE this cannot be real. Any minute now I am going to wake up and find it is all a dream.” Jean Cameron clung to James’s arm and looked behind her at the grand carriages that were disgorging their elegant passengers and ahead to the shallow marble steps leading to the open front doors of Mrs. Denton’s house and numerous impeccably clad footmen.

  “But it is real,” he said very quietly so that Alexandra and Edmund, walking behind them, and his parents walking ahead, would not hear. “And I can pinch you to prove it if you wish, though I assure you the pain is not necessary. And moreover, you look quite as pretty as any other young lady within my line of vision.”

  She had wanted to come. He had seen that in her face as soon as he had called on her at her father’s house. At the same time she had been filled with misgivings. Her clothes, which had been perfectly fashionable in Montreal, would be laughed at in London, she had said. And her manners, which had been quite acceptable in Montreal society, would appear awkward here. Besides, he was being kind. He could not really want her with him when he would have his mother and father and his sister and brother-in-law, the earl, for company.

  But he had wanted her with him. He had not had to use any hypocrisy in assuring her of that. Her anxiety and her eagerness had appeared very endearing to him after the artificiality of Madeline’s behavior earlier that afternoon. But he would not think of that, or of her, again. He had been right in his original impression of her. She was shallow and silly. Certainly not worthy of the kind of obsession that had haunted him for four years. He would put her from his mind. He was free of her now at last.

  Jean blushed and looked at him with large, questioning eyes when Alexandra turned to her inside the crowded hallway and suggested that they go together in search of the cloakroom. She seemed quite overawed by the fact that she was being addressed by a live countess. His parents proceeded on their way upstairs.

  He found himself smiling gently down at the girl as he released her arm and feeling a definite surge of tenderness for her. And of nostalgia for Canada, where he had met her and where he had learned to live in relative peace with himself. He wished he were there now. He wished he had not come back.

  There was no sign in the hallway of the dowager Lady Amberley’s party. They might be upstairs already in the concert room. Or theirs might be among the crush of carriages still outside. He hoped Alex and Jean would not be long. He felt alone and exposed, standing with his brother-in-law, his hands clasped behind his back.

  And he wished again that he could relive that afternoon, or rather that he had lived it differently at the time. It could have been all over now, just as it was in his emotions. He had seen her and realized that she was every bit as lovely and as attractive as she had ever been. And he had heard her and known that she was as foolish as he had ever thought her. He had understood and accepted that he could never have loved her, that he had invented the woman who had lived unwillingly in his dreams throughout his exile from England.

  But he had ignored her. And having done so once, he had set up an awkward situation that could only get worse with every meeting. Or with every nonmeeting. Why had he put himself in this ridiculous situation when she was nothing to him?

  He listened to his brother-in-law’s amiable chatter and watched the doorway with unease and the hallway leading to the ladies’ withdrawing room with impatience. Just like a schoolboy who did not know how to conduct himself in company.

  “Ah,” the Earl of Amberley said from beside him, “we have not been abandoned after all, James. The ladies are returning, having assured themselves, doubtless, that the unthinkable has not happened and a curl worked loose during the carriage ride here.” He smiled at his wife.

  “Are you satisfied that you are as beautiful as I told you you were when I helped you down from the carriage, Alex?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Having looked in the mirror, I can safely say that you were quite right, Edmund. I apologize for having doubted your word.”

  The earl chuckled and Jean looked up into James’s face in some surprise. It seemed to amaze her that an earl and his countess could joke with each other. James offered her his arm and smiled reassuringly at her.

  “I am so afraid to walk into that room,” she said breathlessly as they climbed the stairs. “You will let me hold to your arm the whole time, James?”

  “Of course,” he said. “And then all the gentlemen will look at you and from you to me with envy.”

  “Oh, how silly,” she said, and giggled.

  What she did not know was that he was as nervous about walking into the concert room as she was. They were among the last to arrive, and the room was crowded already. He was very glad of the excuse of having Jean on his arm to save him from having to look all about him. And he was not sorry for the crowded room and the necessity of sitting on some of the few vacant chairs close to the doors.

  But for all that he did not need Alex’s words.

  “Your mother is sitting clear across the room,” she said to her husband. “And Madeline and Aunt Viola. What a shame there are no empty seats near them, Edmund.”

  “But you can all content yourselves with smiling and nodding at one another,” he said, “something you would all feel foolish doing if you were sitting next to one another. There are compensations for every annoyance, you see, Alex.”

  “I see you are in one of your nonsensical moods,” she said, tapping him on the arm with her fan. “I shall confine my conversation to James and Miss Cameron. Perhaps I will have some sense from them.”

  “If I were you,” the earl said, “I would satisfy myself with no conversation at all. The music is about to begin, and you may annoy your neighbors if you chatter.”

  But crowded as the room was, and as much as he had not looked about him, James had known exactly where Madeline was the moment he walked through the doors. She was wearing a jonquil-colored gown and she was seated between her mother and the Guardsman who had been paying court to her that afternoon. The one she was about to marry, according to Alex.

  And he was welcome to her, too.

  The pianist was seated at the grand pianoforte in the middle of the room. Looking at him, James found it very difficult to keep his eyes focused there and not to let them stray beyond to fair curls and flushed cheeks and shining eyes, which he knew to be green, and an enticing mouth curved upward into a smile. He was surprised to see that she concentrated on the music, her eyes not moving from the pianist.

  Just as his own did not.

  “Which is the earl’s mother?” Jean whispered. Her voice became anxious. “I will not have to meet her, will I, James?”

  He assured her at the time that she would probably not, since the room was so crowded. And indeed, he was proved correct. During the interval, when Sir Cedric Harvey went for refreshments, the dowager countess stayed where she was, talking with her sister-in-law, Mrs. Carrington.

  But Madeline did not stay where she was, although for a while she spoke with the colone
l and with the couple who sat in front of them. After a few minutes, she got to her feet with the young lady with whom she had been talking, and the two of them began to make their way across the crowded room.

  James became engrossed in his conversation with Jean and Alexandra. And felt again like the schoolboy he had not been for more than twelve years.

  MADELINE APPLAUDED with enthusiasm at the end of the pianoforte recital. She was enjoying herself immensely. The music was good, she had Jason Huxtable sitting beside her, easily outshining any other gentleman in the room with his scarlet regimentals, and she had her mother and Sir Cedric on one side of her, and Aunt Viola and Uncle William on the other side of Jason, and her cousins Anna and Walter Carrington in front of them, Anna with Mr. Chambers and Walter with Miss Mitchell.

  Edmund and his party were clear across the crowded room. She had scarcely noticed their entrance and had paid them no attention beyond a smile and a nod in their direction. Except that he put even Jason in the shade with his dark evening clothes and his vividly dark hair and complexion. James Purnell, that was. And except that there was a young lady clinging to his arm, even after they had seated themselves. A very young lady, a stranger. A pretty young lady, on whom he looked with a fondness he had never directed her way.

  Not that it mattered one little bit, of course. She was having a marvelously enjoyable evening with the company she had.

  “Mama and I called on Dominic and Ellen at Lord Harrowby’s this afternoon,” Anna said, turning around in her seat. The gentlemen had gone to fetch some lemonade. “We went to see the babies really, of course, though we pretended to be calling on Dominic and Ellen.” She giggled.

  “I know,” Madeline said. “I find myself doing the same thing.”

  “They were awake,” Anna said, “and I was allowed to hold Olivia. She is quite adorable, isn’t she? Charles would not be picked up. He was exercising his lungs. Ellen says that he has still not reconciled his mind to the fact that he is a twin and must share everyone’s attention. He deserves to be ignored, she said, when he is being so cross. But for all that she picked him up and kissed him and soothed him, and Dominic laughed at her and told her that he could see already that all the disciplining of their children was going to fall on his shoulders.”