The Devil's Web

by Mary Balogh

  MADELINE HAD MADE a decision. She was going to marry Jason Huxtable. It was true that he was an officer of the Guards and she had never felt particularly drawn to the life of a soldier’s wife. A strange thought, perhaps, when she had almost eloped with a half-pay officer at the age of eighteen and had been actually betrothed to a lieutenant just the year before after the Battle of Waterloo. But there it was. Ideally, she would not choose to marry an officer.

  But it would be foolish to reject Jason’s suit just on that score. She could hardly do better. He was a kindly and a dependable man, and she was old enough to realize that those were important qualities in a husband. And she enjoyed his company. She found him attractive.

  More than anything, it was time she married. Very much past time, in fact. She should have married long ago, when she would have found it far easier to adapt to a husband’s ways. Now she would not find it easy to do so. But it must be done. The thought of living her life out as a spinster, forever dependent upon Edmund or Dominic, was rather frightening.

  She must marry. And soon. And if she must, then she could not do better than marry Jason. She was going to marry him. And moreover, she was going to accept him at Edmund’s ball. If he asked her, that was. But he had asked her once already that Season, and her woman’s intuition told her that he would ask again and soon.

  What more appropriate occasion than a ball given by her brother?

  She was going to accept him. Perhaps she would even have Edmund announce the betrothal before the evening was over.

  And so she dressed with care in a sea-green gown that she had been saving for a special occasion. And she sparkled with the knowledge that her future was about to be settled at long last. With Jason Huxtable, whom she liked as well as she had ever liked any man, and far better than she had liked most.

  She was quite determined to enjoy the evening. And since she was seated at a part of the dinner table where she was surrounded by relatives and friends with whom she felt thoroughly comfortable, the evening started very well indeed. It helped that James Purnell and Miss Cameron were seated farther down the table on the same side as she with the result that she did not have to look at either of them, and did not have to listen to them either provided she kept talking herself.

  If the ball had been a play she was attending, she thought with some happiness as the evening progressed, then she might have written the script. For the colonel claimed her hand for the opening set and then wasted part of his half hour on the dance floor with her by maneuvering her to the door and into a small reception room next to the ballroom and empty at such an early hour.

  “I thought army officers were supposed to be the fittest of mortals,” she said gaily. “Are you footsore already, Jason? For shame!”

  “Not footsore,” he said. “Impatient. I know perfectly well that I should wait for a later and more romantic hour. I know all about tactics in battle, it seems, but not about tactics in love. I want you to marry me, Madeline. Will you? You know that I adore you. And you did not answer me when I asked you last.”

  Madeline opened her fan and waved it slowly before her face. She could have written the script thus far. And she knew the ending of the play. But she had not written the middle of it, and did not know how it should proceed. “Oh, dear,” she heard herself say, “I wish you would not.”

  “Adore you?” he said. “But I do, you see.”

  “No,” she said. “Propose to me so early in the evening. I did not expect it quite so soon. I like you very much, Jason, and greatly enjoy your company. Oh, dear, I had hoped to enjoy the dancing for the rest of the evening.”

  “I hate it,” he said, “when women tell me that they like me.”

  “You would prefer me to say that I hate you?” she asked.

  “Infinitely so,” he said. “There is some passion in hatred. I would be quite confident of turning it into love. Do you not feel a little more than liking for me, Madeline?”

  She looked at him dumbly and waved her fan foolishly before her face. She was not at all overheated. And all the eloquence that had sustained her through dinner fled. “I don’t know,” she said at last. “I think I have been on the town for so long that I am no longer capable of knowing what I want or how I feel. I do not know what to answer.”

  “Do I understand that you are not saying an outright no?” he asked.

  “But I am not saying an outright yes, either,” she said, fanning her face more vigorously.

  “When I broached this topic with you last year in Brussels,” he said, “you told me there was someone else. I thought soon after that you must have meant Penworth since you proceeded to betroth yourself to him. But you broke off the betrothal. Is there still someone else?”

  She frowned and snapped the fan shut. “There never was,” she said. “I lied to you. At least, I think I lied. Jason, you really do not want to be loving and marrying me, you know. I know my mind less and less as the years go on. I mean it.”

  He took her right hand and raised it to his lips. “I thought you would say yes,” he said. “You have sparkled this evening, and I was conceited enough to think that I was the cause.”

  She looked at him uneasily. “I thought I would say yes, too,” she said. “Forgive me, please. I seem unable to say the words I intended to say. I like you, Jason. I think perhaps I even love you, or soon will. I think perhaps I will want to marry you. But I find that at the moment I cannot promise to do so, though I wish I could. I do wish I could. I think you should put me from your mind. I do not want you to think that I am dangling you on a string.”

  He squeezed her hand, which he still held. “I will take my chances,” he said. “At least you are honest with me. I may ask you again sometime, then?”

  She frowned up at him and considered her answer with some care. “Yes,” she said, “as long as you fully understand that the answer may be no.”

  He grinned and leaned forward to kiss her lightly and tentatively on the lips. “If I ask to do that a little more thoroughly,” he said, “will the answer be no?”

  “No,” she said. “I mean, the answer will be yes.”

  She gave herself up to his embrace far more deliberately than she was used to doing with the men who ever got close enough to her to be granted a kiss. She set her hands on his shoulders and her body against his. She parted her lips slightly.

  She allowed the embrace to be as long as he chose to make it. He chose to prolong it for all of a minute, and perhaps longer. Madeline examined the experience. It was far from unpleasant. It was even mildly exciting. He felt very large and strong and masculine.

  Perhaps, she thought, feeling his tongue pushing between her lips, she would find the courage when he lifted his head, to look into his eyes and tell him that she would be his wife. She wanted to be his wife. She wanted the security of marriage with him. And it would not be unpleasant. Not by any means.

  James was dancing the opening set with Miss Cameron. The girl was looking very dainty in a fashionable and new gown of blue silk. James had been smiling at her as he led her out onto the floor. And she had noticed in one glance at the two of them that that lock of dark hair that had always used to fall down over his brow was there again. Far away as she had been from him, her fingers had itched to push the hair back.

  Jason was looking down into her eyes. He still held her close.

  “I think you are probably very good and very experienced at this,” she said, smiling at him. “And I think you had better not give me any further proof of that right now, Jason, or someone might come in and collapse in a fit of the vapors.”

  “I am hoping to be discovered by your mama or one of your brothers,” he said, “so that you will be forced to marry me.”

  “Gracious!” she said, laughing. “If I were forced to marry every man who has ever kissed me, I would have a veritable harem, you know. Can a woman have a harem?”

  “I’ve no idea,” he said. “Madeline, I have not spoiled your evening, have I?”

&nb
sp; She shook her head. “Not if I have not spoiled yours,” she said. “It is very flattering, you see, to be offered for by a gentleman whom all the ladies sigh over. But I would not want to hurt you, Jason, and I might, you know, if you are serious about this and if you are confident of eventual success.”

  “I am closer to forty than thirty in age,” he said. “I think I have learned in all those years that no one really does die of a broken heart. I will doubtless survive if you do finally reject me. And you see how jaded one becomes with advancing age? I should be declaring, hand to heart, that I will expire on the spot if you cannot declare yourself to be mine for all eternity.”

  She tapped him on the wrist with her fan. “The music has stopped,” she said. “Lord North will be expecting me for the next set. He will doubtless have all sorts of nonsense to say to me. I have known the man forever, but he has never been silly until this year.”

  “I really would expire,” he said, “if I thought you would ever call me silly, Madeline.”

  She chuckled and took his arm. And felt lost and a little frightened as they returned to the ballroom. She seemed to have lost all control over her own life. She had been so sure of herself only an hour before. Less, even. And now emptiness yawned. If she rejected Jason, what was there in her future? If she could not love him, then perhaps she could love no one.

  Miss Cameron was being led onto the floor by Walter. Dominic was laughing with Ellen over some joke. Edmund was sitting beside Lady Beckworth and making conversation with her. James was not in the room.

  There was a painful emptiness where the excitement had been until just a short while before. And she knew what had caused the emptiness. She was not free of him. She had not been for four years. And perhaps she never would be.

  It was a thoroughly frightening prospect.

  DUNCAN CAMERON WAS ENJOYING HIMSELF. James watched him dance with an unknown young lady and remembered the amusement his friend had shown when he received the invitation.

  “Heady stuff this, man,” he had said, “for a simple homme du nord, this mixing with the aristocracy. Of course, I have been doing it for some time. I must never forget that you are heir to a baron’s title.” He had clapped his friend on the shoulder.

  “You never did forget,” James had said. “Do you think I don’t know why you befriended me?”

  Duncan had punched him none too gently on the arm.

  It amused James to know just how out of place his friend was in such a setting, though he was undoubtedly enjoying himself. Duncan was a man who craved the free and often lonely life of a northman, who longed to go back into the interior and rejoin the Cree wife and son he had left at a trading post on the Saskatchewan River more than a year before. He was determined to be on his way back to them the following spring.

  Jean had been so excited by her invitation that she had been able to talk of nothing else for a whole week. Douglas had sent her with Miss Hendricks to a fashionable and expensive modiste on Bond Street so that she would have a gown suitable for the occasion.

  And very suitable it was, too. Not that the gown accounted for all of her loveliness. She fairly sparkled. James danced the opening set with her and wished that he was not hemmed in by the etiquette of London society. He would have liked to dance with her all night, feasting his eyes on her freshness and youth, focusing his mind on the sweetness and simplicity life with her would offer.

  “Is this really me, James?” she asked when the pattern of the dance brought them together. “Even in my fondest dreams, I could not have quite imagined this.”

  “It is real,” he said. “And so are you. And so is the almost full card at your wrist. Enjoy yourself, Jean. That is what you are meant to do at your age.”

  “Oh,” she said, looking at him wide-eyed. “I do not need to be told to do that. You are wonderful, James. This is all your doing, I know that. I do love you.”

  It was those last words that jolted him back to reality. For they were not the words of a young lady who was in love, but the words a girl might say to her brother or to a very dear friend. He must be careful. He must remember that a decision to marry involved two people, and not just one. It was not enough for him to decide that he wished to marry Jean. She must wish to marry him, too.

  “I may remind you of that one day,” he said, smiling back at her.

  But of course he had not been entirely absorbed in her even though he had wished to be so. He knew that Madeline was not in the ballroom and had not been after the first few minutes of the dancing. She had left with Colonel Huxtable. And all evening she had looked even more vibrantly beautiful than usual, and had glowed with an inner happiness that could be attributed only to her partner.

  It seemed wholly likely that an announcement would be made during the evening. He must brace himself for it.

  Brace himself? Would the announcement affect him in any way, then? Did he care?

  He felt slightly sick.

  His father was not present, either. That was not at all surprising, of course, since his father never attended any entertainment that he considered frivolous. And he considered most entertainments frivolous, even sinful. He was doubtless sitting somewhere in the house, wishing he had chosen to live somewhere else during his stay in London and blocking from his hearing all sounds of merriment and focusing his mind on the God he had created for himself. A God of wrath and gloom.

  James relinquished Jean to her next partner and decided not to dance himself. He felt restless and depressed. Time was slipping by and he had as yet accomplished nothing by his return home except a gradual loss of his own hard-won tranquillity.

  He must speak with his father. The middle of a ball was hardly a suitable time, but then he had had nothing but suitable times since his return yet had made nothing of them. He went in search of his father.

  He found him in the earl’s library, alone and seated at the desk, a large, ornately bound Bible before him.

  “You are not joining in the festivities, sir?” he asked rather unnecessarily. But for years he had not found conversation easy with his father.

  “There are more important ways to spend one’s time,” Lord Beckworth said, looking steadily at his son. “We never know when we may be called upon to meet our Maker. It is our responsibility to make sure that we are ready.”

  “You have not been well,” James said, coming right into the room and taking up a position with his back to the empty fireplace. “Alex wrote to tell me so. The physician said you must be careful of your heart?”

  “I am as well as can be expected,” his father said. “I am ready, James, when I am called. Are you?”

  James did not immediately reply. “After I had read that particular letter of Alex’s,” he said, “I applied to come to London with the furs instead of going back inland this spring as I was scheduled to do. I wanted to see you again.”

  His father smoothed his hands over the pages of the Bible. “Perhaps you are showing concern for the wrong father, James,” he said. “Perhaps it is your heavenly Father whom you should be wishing to meet again.”

  James licked dry lips. “I had hoped we could be civil with each other, sir,” he said. “I will be returning to Canada before the summer is ended. I will probably stay there for years. Perhaps for the rest of my life. It is possible we will never meet each other again.”

  His father was regarding him with a face that looked as if it were carved out of marble. “I don’t believe we have treated each other with incivility since your return, James,” he said. “I am trying to read the Good Book and drown out the sounds of frivolity. Do you care to join me?”

  “The ball is in my honor,” James said. “Alex and Edmund have thought to give me pleasure. They are showing their love for me. I hoped somehow to share the evening with you.”

  Lord Beckworth turned a page of the Bible.

  James sighed. “It is the wrong time,” he said almost to himself. “I should not have sought you out tonight.” He stared broodingly at his sil
ent father. “Nothing has changed, has it? Dora and the past will always be there between us.”

  His father did not look up, though his lips thinned.

  James nodded after a few silent moments and left the room without another word.

  The dancing was between sets. He approached a large group of young people, which included Jean and Duncan, Anna and Walter Carrington, Madeline, and a few other people he did not know.

  “Mr. Purnell,” Anna said, smiling brightly at him and standing to one side so that he was included in the group, “I thought you must have run off to Canada again. Jean has been telling us about the sleigh rides in Montreal during the winter months, and we have all been thinking of removing there.”

  He smiled at her. “Months and months of nothing but snow and ice,” he said. “But it is a marvelous excuse for innumerable parties and dances, of course.”

  The dancing was about to resume. Walter led Jean onto the floor, and Duncan was holding out a hand to another young lady.

  “Would you care to dance?” James asked Anna.

  Anna looked at him regretfully. “It is already promised,” she said. “But you simply must ask me again later. Will you?”

  “Of course,” he said, and watched her being led away by her new partner.

  And suddenly the group was not there any longer, but only himself and one other young lady, who inexplicably had not yet been claimed by any partner. He drew in a deep breath and closed his eyes briefly.

  “Lady Madeline?” he said, and extended a hand to her.

  Her green eyes lifted to his chin and then looked up unwillingly into his. “Yes,” she said. “Thank you.”

  MADELINE HAD FLED from the ballroom after dancing with Lord North, who had behaved in quite as silly a manner as had become habitual with him of late. Indeed, with very little encouragement he would have been making her her second offer of the night. But she gave no encouragement. She did not want to hear it.