The Devil's Web

by Mary Balogh

  When he put her from him finally, so that she was leaning against a tree trunk, his questioning face still very close to her own, she touched his cheek with her fingers and spoke breathlessly. “Let’s get married, Jason. Marry me soon.”

  But he continued to look deep into her eyes. “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  She laughed softly. “The matter is that I have come to my senses,” she said, “and realize how much I want to accept your offer. Is my capitulation so strange that you must look at me so? Frowning instead of smiling?

  Have you changed your mind? Do you no longer want to marry me?”

  “I want to marry you now as I have done for the past year,” he said. “The question is, do you want to marry me?”

  “Have I not just proved it?” She laughed again. “And I am not at all sure that you are not honor-bound to marry me now, Jason, having just kissed me so. Or rather, to be quite honest about the matter, having allowed me to kiss you so. Can we announce our betrothal when we get back to the others? Can we marry this summer?”

  But instead of laughing and hugging her and twirling her about as she expected him to do, he continued to search her eyes with his own. Madeline felt a coldness settle deep inside her.

  “You are a very unhappy person,” he said, “aren’t you? I felt it in you last year in Brussels on that day when I first broached the subject of marriage between us. And I have felt it all this spring. Despite all the exuberance and bright smiles and dazzling beauty. It is fairly bursting from you today. I can’t take advantage of your unhappiness, Madeline.”

  The coldness was replaced by a hot flush that she could feel creeping up her neck and into her cheeks. “You are rejecting me,” she said, pressing her head back against the tree, trying to laugh.

  He shook his head. “No,” he said. “I am trying to look after you, to protect you from yourself. I have known it, of course. I have known that I do not really have a chance with you. But I have hoped. Now I know that there is no hope.”

  “You are the best thing that has ever happened to me,” she said. “Jason, I care for you deeply. I do want to marry you.”

  “No,” he said, flicking her cheek with one finger. “Temptress!”

  She felt turned to stone. She closed her eyes.

  “Can I help, Madeline?” he asked. “I am not very expert with women, perhaps, but I have had men under my command for many years and have had vast experience with hearing their woes and helping solve them. Can I help? Sometimes it is a great relief just to unburden oneself of one’s thoughts. And I have a broad shoulder if you wish to avail yourself of it.”

  “Jason,” she said. She did not open her eyes. “I am sorry, I am so very sorry. I have been desperately wanting to love you, to marry you, and to will my life into a happy-ever-after ending. But I have been utterly selfish. I have been using you and not thinking of your happiness at all. How could I make you happy? I have been thinking only of myself. I am so dreadfully sorry.”

  There was a thread of humor in his voice when he spoke. “You must not add guilt to your other burdens,” he said. “Not at all, Madeline. I am not a victim, you know. I am a man of six-and-thirty years who has risen to the rank of colonel of the Guards. A man of some firmness of character, I suppose. I have known and understood you better than you think. And I have pursued you regardless.

  But I would never have allowed you to deceive either yourself or me. If you had married me, it would have been because you truly wished to do so. I have never been in danger of being your victim.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said again. “I would love you if I could, Jason. I so very much want to love you.”

  “I have wanted it too,” he said. “But you are not to think you have broken my heart or destroyed my life, Madeline. I think I am too old for such romantic and poetic sentiment. You must not burden yourself with that idea. Do you understand?”

  She looked at him hopelessly and knew her loss. And knew that she had hurt him despite his words. And she had used him cruelly.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Come.” He stood away from her and offered his arm. “I’ll take you back to the others. I daresay it is almost time for tea.”

  “I can’t,” she said. “I need to be alone for a few minutes. Will you go back without me, Jason? It is not far, I am not like to be devoured by either bears or bandits, you know.”

  He looked about them. “Very well,” he said. “But Madeline, you are not to torture your conscience over me. Please? Smile at me. We will still have to meet back at the picnic site without drawing everyone’s attention and having everyone guessing what might have happened out here.”

  She smiled bleakly at him. “I shall smile and be gay,” she said. “I promise, I will not have anyone suspecting that you tried to steal a kiss from me.”

  “Then they will all think me a thorough slowtop,” he said before grinning at her and turning to stride away.

  Madeline did not think she had ever felt more dreadful in her life. She could not think of a way in which she might have acted more selfishly. She had used Jason without any regard at all to his feelings. Had he accepted her suggestion, she would have rushed into a marriage with him without pausing to allow herself any further thought. And she would have made him unhappy for a lifetime.

  Her own terrible misery held her motionless against the tree, her hands behind her and resting against the bark, her head, too, thrown back against it. But it was not the self-pity that mattered. What mattered was that she had been willing to use another human being for her own ends. Despite Jason’s insistence, she would find it very hard to forgive herself for that.

  She heard them several minutes later—the members of the other group. First the chatter and giggles of the girls, and then Dominic’s voice and Walter’s. But they were a safe distance away. And they would not see her, hidden as she was by the broad trunk of the oak. She did not want to be seen. She was not capable yet of putting on her social self.

  But she heard the footsteps coming. And she knew without any doubt at all whose they were. She could have run. She could have shown herself and smiled brightly and called out to the others or merely spoken to him.

  She stood where she was and did not move even when he stepped around the tree and stood in front of her. She merely looked at him.

  “Madeline?” he asked. “What is it?”

  “I REALLY SHOULD KEEP Lady Beckworth company,” the dowager Lady Amberley said to Sir Cedric Harvey as they strolled across a wide lawn. “But I find it quite unbearable to sit constantly.”

  “And so you should,” he said. “You are a mere girl, Louisa.”

  She laughed. “With three grown children and four grandchildren?” she said. “Hardly a girl, Cedric.”

  “You don’t look any older than when I first knew you as Edward’s bride,” he said.

  “It is strange, is it not?” she said. “One grows older. One counts the years passing and feels that one is growing older in wisdom. But I don’t feel old. And fifty-two is not such a dreadfully advanced age, is it?”

  “That is what I keep telling myself,” he said. “Though I have white hair to suggest that perhaps it is.”

  “Oh, not white, Cedric,” she said, looking up at him, her head to one side. “Silver, my dear. And very distinguished.”

  “I thought my life was at an end when Anne died,” he said. “I thought the rest of my life would be merely a case of waiting patiently for the end. That was twenty-two years ago. She seems very far in the past, poor Anne. I can remember her only by her portrait.” He sighed.

  “And Edward has been gone for fourteen years,” she said. “The pain is almost beyond endurance for a long, long time, is it not? And then there comes the guilt when one hears oneself laugh with real amusement or realizes that a day has passed in which one has not thought consciously of that person even once. But he was all the world to me while he lived.”

  “No one having seen you together could ever dispute
that,” he said.

  They strolled on in companionable silence.

  “I missed you during all that time in Vienna,” he said at last. “All of you. I did not realize how much. I have come to think of you all as family.”

  “But you are family,” she said. “You were when Edward was still alive. And you were like a rock on which we all leaned when he died so suddenly. Edmund was so young. Depending on you became a habit with all of us.”

  “In fact,” he said, “it is amazing that Dominic was able to make such a wise marriage without having access to my expert advice.”

  She laughed. “Ellen is a dear girl, is she not?” she said. “Definitely my favorite daughter-in-law. Equal with Alexandra, of course.”

  “And who are we to find for Madeline,” he asked, “now that I am here to lend my expert counsel? Huxtable?”

  “She is fond of him,” she said with a sigh. “But there is a spark missing somehow. Madeline is like all the rest of us, you see—Edmund, Dominic, and me. There has to be a spark. I do not believe she will accept him, though I may, of course, be wrong.”

  “Purnell, then?” he said after a small hesitation.

  “James?” she said. “Ah, you have noticed it too, have you, Cedric? Yes, there is definitely a spark there, is there not? More than a spark. A raging fire, I would say. Though it drives them apart instead of bringing them together. He is a strange young man. Far more approachable than he was when Edmund first met Alexandra, it is true, but strange still. There is an inner tension. An anger, perhaps. He does not get along well with his father, but then who could? And I am being uncharitable again. I shudder for Madeline if she should end up with James. And I despair for her if she does not. And never let me tell you that age has brought me tranquillity, Cedric.”

  He patted her hand and laughed down at her.

  MADELINE DID NOT MOVE, or answer for a while. Her face was quite without color, James noticed.

  “Nothing really,” she said at last. “I have just rejected a good man, that is all.”

  “Huxtable?” he said. “Why?”

  She shrugged. “I am too caught up in the frivolity of a London Season, I suppose,” she said, her voice bitter. “If I were to marry one man, I would have to forfeit the admiration of all the others.”

  He stood looking down at her, his hands clasped behind him. Her gaze was fixed beyond him. “I thought you were fond of him,” he said.

  “I was.” She closed her eyes briefly. “I am. I think I have waited too long. I should have married in my first Season.

  I would have adjusted to a husband at the age of eighteen.

  Now I have waited so long that I want the moon and the stars and the whole universe too. I cannot be satisfied with simple goodness and kindness and devotion.”

  He merely stood there looking at her. But then she had long passed the stage of expecting James Purnell to speak when there was a silence. Not that she would admit to herself that it was James to whom she talked. She had not looked at him.

  “Sometimes,” she said, “one yearns for something. For the ultimate in happiness. I yearn for it, and I don’t know where to look for it any longer. And I don’t know if I would recognize it if I found it. And the longer I look, the more selfish I grow. For I think only of my own happiness. I think I have lost the ability to make someone else happy. If I ever had it. And I suppose we can never be happy unless we can also give happiness.” She shifted her gaze to him at last, and her eyes were troubled and intensely green. “Why am I talking to you like this?”

  “Because I am here, I suppose,” he said. His hands behind his back were so tightly clenched into fists that his fingernails were cutting into his palms.

  She laughed and looked away among the trees. “You are the perfect person to talk to, anyway,” she said. “One is unlikely to be interrupted.”

  “You are very upset,” he said. “Did he hurt you in any way?”

  “No!” She looked sharply back to him. “No, not in any way at all. I am the one who did the hurting. I have just taken a good look at myself, that is all. And I do not like what I have seen. I don’t think I am a very pleasant person.” She laughed rather shakily as the silence lengthened. “And you are not the one to contradict me on that or to reassure me, are you?”

  “I hated myself for years,” he said. “They were dark, lost years. Useless years. Don’t do that to yourself. Life is too short as it is.” There was a desperate need in him to take away her pain. His hands clenched even more tightly.

  “Kind words from James Purnell?” she said, looking up at him with a smile. “This must be a first.”

  And then she could feel nothing but total astonishment and humiliation as his face blurred before her eyes and a raw ache swept upward from her chest into her throat and nose. She dared not move.

  And he felt rather as if a knife were twisting in him. He felt so powerless to help her. She was Madeline. “I am not quite a monster,” he said. “Not quite the devil, though you may think I am.” And his hands unclenched at last.

  Her humiliation was complete when she felt both his thumbs brush at the tears that had spilled over onto her cheeks. His fingertips were light against the sides of her face.

  “I am not good company,” she said, appalled at the thinness and high pitch of her voice. “You had best go away.”

  “But then I never expect you to be good company, do I?” he said, his own voice more bitter than he had intended. And he lifted his thumbs and brushed away two more tears.

  She stayed back against the tree, her hands flat against it behind her back, the back of her bonnet resting against it. And she closed her eyes and tried to keep her mind working rationally.

  Was his kiss so vastly different from Jason’s? He held her face cupped in his hands, whereas Jason’s had been at her waist. But his lips were closed as Jason’s had been. Like Jason, he did not touch her with any other part of his body.

  There was no difference. None at all, except that her knees felt as if they were made of jelly, and her insides somersaulted, and she could feel her mouth trembling quite out of control against his. And she wanted to cry and cry.

  Her lips were cool and wet and salty from her tears, and they trembled against his own. Lips he had kissed once—no, twice—a long, long time ago, and lips he had been kissing ever since in those unwary waking moments when dreams were remembered. Not the lips of any other woman, though he had kissed many in his time.

  Madeline’s. She was Madeline. He had been able to think of no other way to comfort her. Or himself.

  Her eyes had cleared when he lifted his head. He was looking into her—not into her eyes, but into her—with those dark eyes of his. There was no trace of a smile on his face. But then there was none on hers either. She looked back, no more able to look away or to say anything than she would have been able to stop breathing.

  Her eyes looked back into his with no defenses. There was none of the customary gaiety and sparkle in her look. She was pale and vulnerable. As was he.

  When he kissed her again, she moved her hands finally from behind her and set them at his waist. And she let his mouth open over hers and paid no more heed to the trembling of her lips. She stopped thinking and comparing. She clung to his waistcoat beneath his coat and allowed herself finally and at long last—after four endless years—the luxury of feeling.

  James! James!

  All she had ever wanted, or would ever want.

  But he did not bring her against him. He did not deepen the kiss.

  “You see?” he said eventually, not at all in the voice she had expected to hear, the voice that would have matched her own feelings. “You needed company after all.”

  She had been too vulnerable. He could not take advantage of her vulnerability. But he was James Purnell and she Madeline Raine. His only alternative was to hurt her. And he did so quite unavoidably, without ever wanting to.

  She spun away from him, brushing twigs and creases from her muslin skirt, undoin
g the strings of her bonnet so that she might tie them afresh. “It will be teatime,” she said. “Everyone will wonder where we are.”

  But he caught at her shoulder from behind as she would have rushed away. It was a firm grip, which she would not have been able to shrug off even if she had felt like trying.

  “Madeline,” he said quietly, “it would not work. There is nothing at all except this. We cannot be five minutes together without quarreling. We are two very separate beings who by some strange quirk of fate happen to feel a powerful physical attraction for each other. There is really nothing else. And we are from different worlds. Literally. In little more than a month’s time I will be gone. It would not work.”

  “No, it would not,” she said. “But you were right just now. I did need the company. And the comfort. I feel better already. Thank you.”

  She took his arm since she could scarcely walk beside him all the way back through the trees and across the wide lawn without touching him. And they walked back in total silence.

  And if this was feeling better, she thought with grim humor as the carriages and the blankets and the company came into sight, then feeling merely good must be death itself.

  And James walked beside her and cursed himself. For if it was true that they could never agree, then perhaps his cruelty and his moroseness with her were to blame. And if it was true that there was a powerful physical attraction between them, then it was also true that he felt the pull of a far deeper emotion. And if it was true that a relationship between the two of them would never work, then he had only his past to blame. His thoughtless and irresponsible past.

  He really would not need his father’s hell as punishment for his sins. He lived there very effectively already. A hell of his own making.

  Madeline smiled brightly at her mother when the latter raised a hand in greeting as they approached.

  “Are we late?” she called gaily. “I hope Dom has not devoured all the lobster patties. He used to have a dreadful habit of doing that.”