The Devil's Web

by Mary Balogh

  She still felt bewildered and panic-stricken when she remembered that she had refused Jason, or as good as refused him. She had fully planned to accept, had even planned that their betrothal would be announced during the course of the evening.

  But she had refused, or deferred her decision. But if she had said no now, when she had been expecting the offer and had planned her answer, how would she ever find the courage or the good sense to say yes?

  Dominic was looking at her across the ballroom in that way he had of boring right through her skull with his eyes. If he came close, there would be no keeping any secrets from him, and her whole frightening foolishness would be exposed. One part of her wanted more than anything to cry out her woes on the safe and familiar shoulder of her twin. But the days for such dependence were past. He did not need the extra burden of a sister who did not know her own mind at the age of six and twenty.

  She fled to the card room, where she stood looking over the shoulder of a young man wearing a dark patch over one eye, until the hand was finished. Then he turned to smile up at her.

  “Hello, Madeline,” he said. “You were not at home when I called on you either yesterday or four days ago.”

  “No,” she said. “I am almost always from home. You should have let me know you were coming, Allan. It is so good to see you again. You look wonderfully well.”

  She clasped her hands behind her as he lifted himself from his chair with the help of crutches. She resisted the urge to offer her help.

  “Let me get you some lemonade,” he said.

  “That would be wonderful,” she said, “but I will get it, Allan.”

  He laughed at her. “Yes, nurse,” he said. “I will try not to argue.”

  She flushed. “I am rather domineering, am I not?” she said. “I can see why you did not want to marry me, Allan.”

  “I protest,” he said. “You were the one who did not want to marry me, Madeline. I was the one who was jilted, if you recall.”

  She went for the lemonade.

  “I really am happy to see you again, Allan,” she said when she returned with their drinks. They settled side by side on a love seat in an anteroom. “But we would not have suited as husband and wife, would we?”

  “No, we would not,” he said. “You are far too lovely and vibrant, Madeline. You need someone very special.

  Someone like Huxtable, maybe?”

  “Oh,” she said, shrugging, “I don’t know, Allan. I don’t know. I have never been as happy as I was last year when you were hurt and needed me so badly. Not that I wish you back in that state, of course. But life had meaning then.”

  “And has not now?” he asked, taking her hand. “Poor Madeline. You have so much to give, and there are so many gentlemen falling all over themselves just in the hope of receiving one of your smiles. Yet you cannot find happiness.”

  “But I will,” she said, smiling brightly. “And what is this I have been hearing in the past few weeks from Ellen and Dominic? Is it true that you have an understanding with Ellen’s stepdaughter, Allan? You never mentioned it last summer when we were betrothed or in any of your letters since then.”

  He smiled rather shame-facedly. “There was nothing to tell while you and I were betrothed,” he said. “Really there was not. And I have been too embarrassed to mention it to you since, as it happened rather suddenly in the days after our engagement was broken while Jennifer and I were both still at Amberley. Do you mind, Madeline? Are you offended?”

  “Absolutely not,” she said, squeezing his hand. “Allan, I do love you dearly. You know that. I think of you almost as I think of my brothers. And Jennifer Simpson is a pleasant young lady. I am happy for you. Is it all settled?”

  He smiled. “She is not having a very good bargain,” he said, “as I have told her repeatedly. A man with only one leg and only one eye is not quite a whole man. And her grandfather has told her as much. They have had some fierce arguments over me, I gather. I have told her, just this evening, in fact, that she must enjoy this Season and look at all the gentlemen she will meet with an open mind.

  And I have vowed to myself that I will not make her a formal offer until I can be done with these infernal crutches.

  I will learn to walk again on two legs, even if one of them is not my own, or turn all over black and blue in the attempt.”

  “You will do it too,” she said, smiling at him a little ruefully. “And to think that I once wanted to marry you because you would always be totally dependent upon my loving care. Oh, Allan, dear, I am happy for you. But where is she?”

  “Jennifer?” he said, grinning. “Gone into the ballroom in high dudgeon to show me that she can enjoy herself quite well without me, thank you very much. I forbade her to sit with me all evening, you see. You would not wish to know some of the things she said in reply. They were quite unladylike.”

  Madeline laughed. “And talking about going back into the ballroom to enjoy oneself,” she said, “I must be doing the same, Allan, or Edmund will be thinking I am sick and summoning a physician. There is nothing so enjoyable as a ball, you know.”

  She smiled dazzlingly at him, and he lifted her hand to his lips.

  “You will find him one day soon, I promise you,” he said quietly before releasing her.

  Madeline, on the brink of tears, smiled determinedly and joined a group in the ballroom only a few moments before she was aware of James Purnell doing the same thing. Oh, yes, she would find him soon, all right.

  She had been out of the room during the previous set, and had returned after most of the gentlemen had chosen their next partners. She became aware of the situation in some dismay only one moment before she found herself in the unspeakably embarrassing position of being almost alone with James at the edge of the dance floor while other couples were taking their places for the coming set. It was too late to make an inconspicuous exit.

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

  Lifting her eyes beyond his chin to meet his was the hardest thing she remembered doing in a long while. “Yes,” she said, placing her hand in his. “Thank you.”

  IT WAS A WALTZ. Of all the dances it might possibly have been, it was a waltz.

  Madeline rested a hand on James’s shoulder, set her other hand in his, and wondered if he was remembering quite as vividly as she the last time they had waltzed together. The music had been so faint that the rhythm had been felt rather than heard. The gravel of the formal gardens at Amberley had crunched underfoot. The water from the fountain had tinkled into the stone basin.

  He had been staying there with his family following the betrothal of Edmund and Alexandra. And she was there, as she always was during the summer. As they all were. Even Dominic in those days had chosen to spend most of his time at his childhood home rather than at his own estate in Wiltshire. It was before he had bought his commission and long before he had met Ellen.

  It had been at the annual summer ball at Amberley. She had been feeling restless, as she so often did even in those days. And for the same reason—she had been bewildered by her own powerful and conflicting feelings for Alexandra’s brother. Always James. Always the blight of her life. She had wandered out into the formal gardens, not knowing that he was there before her.

  He had held her correctly for a while and then drawn her against him. And after a while they had stopped moving. The music and the waltz had been forgotten. That was the time when during an embrace that had grown hotter and more intimate over the course of several minutes she had offered herself to him in all but words. The time when she had told him she loved him. And the time when he had told her that he felt nothing for her but lust. She had not believed him at the time, although she had left him there and although he had left Amberley that same night without another word to her or any message left for her.

  She glanced up, hoping that he would be looking about him at the other dancers, hoping that he would be smiling sociably. Hoping that he would not be the old James, whom she had
disliked and feared. And loved. She met dark, unfathomable eyes. That lock of hair had fallen across his forehead again. Sometimes things were so frighteningly the same that she wondered if she had imagined the four intervening years.

  She licked her lips nervously and watched his eyes follow the movement of her tongue.

  “It is a pleasant evening, is it not?” she said, smiling. “I am glad. Edmund and Alexandra do not like to entertain, you know—or to be entertained, for that matter. They are never happier than when they are at home alone with the children. But the evening is turning out well. I think everyone who was invited must have come.”

  “It would seem so,” he said. He did not return her smile. “The room is quite crowded.”

  “Of course,” she said, “it is all in your honor. Alexandra has been very excited since your letter came last summer to say you were coming home. I don’t think they would have left Amberley for any other reason even if it is the Season. They like the greater freedom of the country for the children’s sake.”

  “I have expressed my gratitude to Alex,” he said.

  “Have you met Ellen?” she asked. “She is so lovely tonight dressed in blue.”

  “Alex took me to call on them,” he said. “Lady Eden is quite charming.”

  Madeline listened to herself in some dismay. And she felt the bright social smile frozen to her face. She always knew she was going to behave just so with him, yet she seemed quite powerless to stop herself. Because he was so silent and because he looked at her always with those unsmiling eyes, she was always totally unnerved. She felt like a butterfly caught and spread by pins for his inspection.

  She deliberately relaxed the muscles of her face and shifted her gaze to the hand that rested on his shoulder. They danced in silence for a while. And would dance in silence forever and a day before she would break it.

  “You have not changed,” he said at last.

  She looked back up into his eyes. “Is that meant to be a compliment?” she asked.

  “Most women, I suppose, would be glad to be told that they had not changed in four years,” he said.

  “But you did not approve of me four years ago,” she said, and flushed. “You did not like me.”

  “But I never disputed the fact that you are beautiful,” he said.

  Madeline’s stomach felt as if it had turned a complete somersault inside her. “It was my character of which you disapproved, then?” she said.

  “That was a long time ago,” he said.

  It seemed he had nothing left to say. And she had done with nervous prattling. Or with any honest effort to initiate a conversation to which she could expect only monosyllables in reply. She tried to concentrate on the music and the couples dancing around them.

  But he was so very unmistakably James. He was leaner, stronger. But James, nevertheless. She would have known him at a touch, blindfolded. Her heartbeat would have known it and the muscles of her legs and the blood beating through her temples.

  She was touching him again, one hand on his shoulder, the other resting in his. And she could feel his other hand warm at her waist. She had spent so many weeks, even months, reliving his touch, at first with a desperate misery, and later with a dull unwillingness. So long. And now she was touching him again. And he was a stranger again. Yet so familiar that her throat ached with the tears she must withhold.

  He still disliked her. He still despised her and withheld from her even the common courtesies he would accord any other woman. She wondered why he had asked her to dance.

  “Why did you ask me to dance?” she asked.

  He raised his eyebrows. “It seemed the civil thing to do,” he said. “This occasion is for dancing, is it not?”

  “Was it because Anna said no and I was the closest lady to you apart from her?” she asked.

  “Yes, I suppose that is the reason,” he said. “Are you offended?”

  “No,” she said. But she was offended. Or hurt, perhaps.

  Or outraged at honesty that did not try to mask itself in tact and good manners. “Why should I be offended?”

  There was nothing else to say. Madeline waited tensely for the music to end and guessed that her partner was no less eager to be rid of her. What neither of them had realized, she discovered with dismay when the music actually did draw to an end, was that it was the supper dance they had been engaged in. The members of the orchestra laid down their instruments.

  “There is no need for you to lead me in to supper,” she said hastily.

  “But there is every need,” he said. “Good manners dictate that I now offer you my arm and take you in. Do you think I have forgotten such niceties of polite behavior in the North American wilderness, Madeline?”This time it was her heart that somersaulted. And all at the sound of her given name on his lips without the formality of her title before it. Was she a green girl fresh from the schoolroom to be so affected by one word spoken by an attractive gentleman?

  She placed a hand on his arm without replying.

  THE EARL OF AMBERLEY seated his wife at a table in the supper room. “I don’t care if it is not quite the thing to lead my own countess in to supper,” he said. “I have been apart from you quite long enough for one evening, Alex.”

  “I am not arguing,” she said. “You do not need to defend yourself to me, Edmund. I was hoping that James would dance the supper dance with Miss Cameron. She truly is a delightful girl, is she not? And I do not care at all that some people might say that she is not quite haut ton. But I suppose it was unrealistic of me to expect some sort of announcement tonight.”

  “Probably,” he said, smiling at her with amused affection. “Here come Ellen and Dominic. They are together, you see. I feel reassured.”

  Lord Eden held a chair so that his wife could seat herself beside Alexandra. “We have been upstairs feeding the babies,” he said, “and giving them strict orders to sleep through until a decent hour of the morning. Or rather, it would be more accurate to say, I suppose, that Ellen has been feeding the babies. Have we missed anything startling? Madeline has not contracted or broken any engagements, has she?”

  “Not to my knowledge,” the earl said. “But North has a tendency to gaze on her like a lost puppy, poor devil.”

  “I do believe she is at last serious over Colonel Huxtable,” Alexandra said. “Indeed, when I saw him draw her aside during the very first set of the evening, I thought perhaps matters would come to their conclusion tonight. But no matter.”

  “Here she is with Mr. Purnell,” Ellen said, looking toward the doorway. “I cannot help thinking that they make a rather splendid couple. It is a pity you cannot persuade him to stay in England, Alexandra.”

  Her sister-in-law looked at the approaching couple, arrested. “James and Madeline,” she said. “Gracious, I had never thought of it before. How very splendid that would be. But of course there is no chance. He is to return to Canada before the summer is over, and Madeline has eyes for no one but the colonel these days. Oh, Ellen, do you think there is the faintest chance?”

  Lord Amberley pursed his lips and looked with marked amusement across the table at his younger brother. But Lord Eden, his face quite serious, was gazing across the room at his twin sister.

  Jennifer Simpson and Lord North, Duncan Cameron and Miss Marshall were also approaching their table.

  JAMES STOOD UNDECIDED IN THE DOORWAY, looking about him. Should he choose an empty table? One occupied by strangers? Or one with family members? His companion’s hand burned through his sleeve and through his arm.

  “Shall we join your brothers?” he suggested.

  “Yes,” she said.

  He had been determined this evening to treat her no differently from the way he would treat any other lady. He would ignore her if he could, he had decided. And if he could not, then he would behave toward her with a cool courtesy.

  And what had happened? He had been rude to her again. He had agreed with her suggestion that he had asked her to dance only because her cou
sin had been engaged to dance the set with someone else. And he had made almost no effort to match her attempts at conversation. He had felt quite unable to prevent himself from putting on the usual defenses against her. He had become surly.

  Sometimes he did not understand himself at all. And sometimes he angered himself. He seated her at the table and found himself quite unable for the moment to smile at any of its occupants.

  “James,” Alexandra said, her cheeks flushed, “I had no idea there would be such a crush here tonight. Everyone must have come out of curiosity, knowing that it is all in your honor.”

  James managed a grin at her. “More likely it was out of curiosity to see the Amberley ballroom,” he said. “I gather it is not used a great deal.”

  “For which I make no apology,” the earl said. “One ball a year is usually quite sufficient for my peace of mind, and the neighbors at Amberley Court would be severely disappointed if we were to discontinue the annual ball there.”

  “You must realize what a great honor is being done you, Purnell,” Lord Eden said with a chuckle. “Edmund has a reputation in town as something of a hermit. Yet here he is, playing amiable host to the crème de la crème.”

  “You will all be making Mr. Purnell decidedly uncomfortable to know that he is the cause of all this,” Ellen said, giving him a quiet smile. “I for one think it all very splendid, and I am glad you came home and made it all possible, sir.”

  Madeline was sitting straight and silent in her chair beside him, not at all her customary sociable self.

  “I danced with Mr. Cameron earlier,” Jennifer Simpson said, smiling at that gentleman across the table. “He told me that he has traveled thousands of miles inland by canoe, climbing in and out of the boat constantly to pass rapids and waterfalls. It sounds like the most exciting job in the world.”

  “But do you prefer this part of the job?” Ellen asked Duncan. “Coming to England, I mean?”