The Devil's Web

by Mary Balogh

  “Well,” James said, resisting the urge to tell his son that he could do with a lesson in compassion and remembering that many children are by nature cruel to each other, “you have a long hop home, Patrick.”

  The child sniffed and took one hop forward, clinging to his brother’s shoulder.

  “Unless you would like me to lift you up before me and see if I can coax a gallop out of this stallion,” James said.

  Two red-rimmed eyes looked up at him.

  “Father will be cross,” Jonathan said. “He will say that we have inconvenienced you, sir.”

  “Perhaps I can stay long enough to convince your father that I have not been inconvenienced at all,” James said, leaning down from the saddle, taking the smaller child beneath the arms and swinging him up to sit before him. He lifted the child’s injured leg with one hand and felt the ankle with gentle fingers. “Can you walk, Jonathan? There must be more than a mile to go.”

  “Easily, sir!” his son said with some contempt.

  “Will Papa be cross?” Patrick asked, looking up at him with wide gray eyes and a running nose.

  James took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the nose. “I don’t know your papa,” he said. “But I’ll wager that your mama will bathe your foot and make it feel better. And probably cover you with kisses too.” He winked at the child, who proceeded to burrow his head beneath his cloak and against the warmth of his coat.

  Dora came out of the house behind her servant when the horse stopped at her gate.

  “Hello, Dora,” he said, swinging down from the saddle and lifting the child down into his arms.

  She curtsied. “My lord,” she said.

  “I am afraid we have one wounded soldier here,” he said. “It seems the climb down from a stile was a little much for him, and his ankle turned under him. It is not broken, I think, just badly swollen.”

  He followed her into the house and parlor, where he set Patrick down on a sofa. And only then discovered that John Drummond was from home.

  He stood watching, his hands clasped behind him, as the servant brought in a basin of water and Dora proceeded to bathe her child’s foot. She had first smoothed back his hair and kissed him, as James had expected, and assured him that his papa would not beat him for falling and hurting himself.

  “But Jon said he would,” the child said accusingly.

  “Then you must be thankful that Jonathan is not your papa,” she said, kissing him again.

  “Won’t you take a seat, my lord?” she said finally, flustered, when she realized that James was still standing behind her. “I will have tea brought.”

  “Don’t trouble yourself, Dora,” he said. “I merely wanted to see the child safe. How are you?”

  Patrick’s foot had been bandaged and elevated on a cushion. She turned to her visitor.

  “Well,” she said. “My last confinement was a difficult one, but I have recovered fully.” She flushed.

  “Are you happy?” he asked, and wished immediately that he had not tried to make the conversation personal.

  “Yes,” she said. “I have a good home and a good husband and a growing family. What more could I ask for?”

  “It has been a long time,” he said.

  “Yes.” She flushed again. “A long time.”

  “I have often wondered,” he said, “if you were happy.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Yes. It was kind of you.”

  “My foot still hurts, Mama,” Patrick wailed from behind her.

  Jonathan came into the room as Dora turned back to the invalid. “I told him he shouldn’t jump, Mother,” he said. “He is such a nuisance. He will not do as he is told.”

  “He fell, Jonathan,” she said, whirling on him. “You will say nothing to your father about his jumping. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes, Mother,” the boy said, that hint of contempt in his voice again.

  “This is Lord Beckworth, who was so kind as to bring your brother home,” she said. “Did you know? Make your bow to him, Jonathan.”

  The boy bobbed his head in James’s direction. “Yes, I knew,” he said.

  James took his leave of them. Strange, he thought. It had been so very different from the way he had imagined it would be—he and Dora and their son all in one room together. In the event, he had been able to see her only as the mother of those children. Someone whom he could surely never have desired.

  Was it really she he had raged over and almost driven himself mad over?

  And for his son he felt nothing but a mild animosity. If he were that child’s father in fact as well as in body, he had a conviction the boy would feel the flat of his hand more often than he seemed to do. No son of his would speak to his mother with contempt and escape without a stinging rear end and an earful of home truths.

  A strange meeting indeed when he remembered all the passions that had raged more than nine years before. There was an unreality about the whole situation. Almost as if none of it had ever happened. Except that there was Jonathan as living proof that it had.

  It was a meeting he did not repeat or want to repeat. Though he did want to question her. He would never be completely satisfied until he heard the answers to some questions.

  It was also a meeting he did not find the right opportunity to tell his wife about. But then he did not tell her a great deal about any of his daily activities. And she told him as little about hers. They were strangers who happened to live in the same house and sleep in the same bed. Strangers who were intimate with each other for a few minutes of each night for a little more than three weeks out of each month.

  They meant no more to each other.

  Except that he happened to love her. A quite irrelevant fact, it seemed, when one settled down to the reality of a marriage that should never have been contracted.

  MADELINE FOUND the winter long and tedious although there were friends and plenty of social activities to attend and to host. But the snow, which she had been warned would be more plentiful in Yorkshire than it had been in the southern part of the country, kept her housebound for days at a time. And being housebound meant having only James for company.

  In other words, it meant having no company at all.

  Many was the time she almost regretted not accepting his suggestion that they go to Amberley before Christmas. But she would on the whole, she decided, prefer to keep her pride and be lonely than go to Amberley to be with Mama and Dom and Edmund and have them see her misery. And Dom would see it even if the others did not, no matter how good an act she put on. Besides, if she went to Amberley, how would she ever be able to leave again?

  Dunstable Hall was her home now, and she must never again see it in contrast to Amberley. And she must never again see her brothers’ marriages at first hand and know the inadequacy of her own. She must live out her life in self-imposed exile.

  Those brave and gloomy thoughts occurred before the disaster of the duke’s spring ball and all that followed it. Everything changed after that, but winter was well and truly over by then.

  So was the duchess’s confinement. She was delivered of an heir at the end of February. The ball was to be given in honor of the event in the middle of April.

  In the meantime the letters kept coming from home. Letters that filled Madeline with nostalgia and discontent. Jean and Howard had married before Christmas, and already she was thought to be increasing, Alexandra wrote, if one were to read any significance into the fact that Mrs. Courtney was driving over to their house every morning to tend a daughter-in-law who could not stand on her feet before noon without vomiting.

  Susan Courtney, later Susan Jennings, now Lady Agerton, was also in expectation of an interesting event, Alexandra wrote, adding that the terminology was Susan’s own.

  It seemed to Madeline that all the world was giving birth except her.

  Ellen and Dominic were going to London for at least a part of the Season so that Ellen could be close to her stepdaughter and could visit her father.

&n
bsp; The final blow came in a letter from Edmund in March, announcing that Alexandra was with child again.

  All the world except her!

  The letter came on a particularly bad day. She was from home when it arrived, riding out across a somewhat muddy pasture, unable to see her way because she was crying her eyes out over renewed evidence of her own infertility.

  JAMES HAD NEVER BEEN FOND OF THE DUKE OF Peterleigh. Seventeen years older than himself, the duke had always appeared as a remote, haughty, and humorless man. He was tall and thin, with a narrow, aristocratic face and piercing dark eyes. He spent most of his time in London on government business, coming into the country for only a few weeks of the year, usually in the early summer.

  When he had used to come, he had always visited Dunstable Hall. He was one of the few men of the neighborhood with whom James’s father had been on good terms. The two men had shared many ideas on life and morality. Or had seemed to do so. James had been disgusted to discover, when he finally spent some time in London himself, that the duke lived a double life. He kept a mistress with whom he had had several children. And he was rumored to have darker dealings with other ladybirds.

  There had been an understanding between Peterleigh and the late Lord Beckworth that the duke would marry Alex when she was old enough. James had always hated the idea. For many years Alex was the only person in his life whom he truly loved. He knew her as a warm and passionate, artistic and imaginative girl. Those aspects of her character would have been squashed by the duke as they were already severely repressed by their father.

  But Alex had known so little of life. She had never had friends beyond himself. She had never been sent away to school. By the time she was taken to London at the age of one and twenty, with a view to being officially betrothed to Peterleigh, she was quite resigned to the match. She knew nothing else.

  Looking back on that spring now, James could be very thankful to Dominic, Lord Eden, and to Madeline for a stupid incident that should have involved only the two of them but that had dragged Alex in when two of Lord Eden’s friends, sent to kidnap Madeline, mistook Alex for her. And so she had been severely compromised when forced to spend a whole night captive in Amberley’s town house, unknown either to him or to Eden.

  They had both offered for her—Eden and Amberley. James could almost chuckle now at events that had made him beside himself with fury at the time. She had refused them both. Alex was nothing if not courageous—and incredibly naive. Why should she accept either of those two men, she had reasoned, when she was already unofficially betrothed to the Duke of Peterleigh?

  Poor Alex. She had learned fast when Peterleigh had cut her in the middle of Lady Sharp’s drawing room after every other guest present had already done so, except Madeline. Even then she would have refused Amberley’s second offer if he had not almost forced her into accepting him publicly after his arrival at Lady Sharp’s.

  How fortunately events could sometimes turn out. He had to admit to himself now that Amberley was quite perfect for Alex. He had scarcely been able to believe the outward changes in her when he arrived back from Canada—and all changes for the better.

  Most important, she had escaped from the Duke of Peterleigh’s clutches, a more fortunate escape than perhaps he had realized at the time. He had heard during the previous spring in London that the Duchess of Peterleigh occasionally dropped out of sight for a few weeks at a time with some undisclosed indisposition. But once or twice rumor had leaked out by way of servants’ gossip that on those occasions she was hiding facial bruises.

  The duke was not a pleasant character, James concluded. He was quite happy that the man was usually an absentee neighbor. However, when he was in residence, one felt the necessity of being neighborly. He called once, alone, to pay his respects after the duke and duchess’s arrival, and once with Madeline after the duchess’s confinement. And of course he accepted their invitation to the ball that was being given in celebration of the birth of an heir.

  Perhaps the duchess, poor girl, would be treated more kindly now that she had finally performed her main duty, James thought.

  Madeline was looking forward to the ball. Not that she said much about it to him. They rarely now exchanged any but the commonest civilities when they were in company together. But she talked with enthusiasm about the event when Mr. and Mrs. Hooper and their daughter called for tea one afternoon. He was talking to Mr. Hooper about crops at the time, but at least half of his attention was on his wife. He could experience that sparkle in her only secondhand these days. She never looked like that for him.

  “His grace has hired an orchestra at great expense,” Mrs. Hooper was telling Madeline. “They are coming all the way from York, if you would believe it. And candles by the crateful. And extra cooks to help with supper; it will be a very grand occasion, my dear Lady Beckworth. The last time there was a ball at the manor was after the duke’s nuptials. And goodness knows when the next will be.”

  “And there are guests at the manor?” Madeline said with a smile. “Goodness, it will be wonderful to dance again. I shall have to dust off my best ball gown.” She laughed gaily.

  “Mama is having Miss Fenton make me a gown,” Christine Hooper said, “but I’m terrified that it will be dreadfully unfashionable, Lady Beckworth, and that all the guests from London will look at me with contempt or pity.”

  “But, my dear,” her mother said, “you know that Miss Fenton is copying an illustration from a recent copy of the Belle Assemblée. How can it not be all the crack?”

  “Perhaps Lady Beckworth will give her opinion,” Christine said.

  “I will be glad to,” Madeline assured her. “Shall I ride over tomorrow? Though I am sure that the Belle Assemblée is more up-to-date than I am. It is almost a year since I was in London.”

  Did she sound wistful? James wondered. Did she wish that she were setting out now for this year’s Season and all the admiration and flirtations it had always brought her? How could she wish otherwise? She was quite unhappy married to him. He shook off the thought and returned his attention to Mr. Hooper.

  MADELINE HAD more than a few rueful smiles at herself in the weeks preceding the ball. She was as excited about it, her mind was as focused on it, as if it were her very first ball in her very first Season. And yet for years during the spring she had attended so many balls and other entertainments that she had come to sigh at yet one more and to feel occasionally oppressed by the tedium of it all. How her life had changed when she could so grasp at a single event.

  She had her maid lay out her blue ball gown and the yellow and green. After two days of dithering and constantly changing her mind, she discarded all three and brought out the white and the pink. She even considered once—and laughed at her own madness—dragging James in and asking his opinion. She so very much wanted to wear something he would admire. And she despised herself for the wish.

  She decided finally on the pink. She had never considered it her color, but she had fallen in love with this particular shade the previous spring. It was a rich pink that made her feel young and vivid and attractive.

  James came into her dressing room on the night of the ball as her maid was putting the finishing touch to her appearance. She was clasping her pearls at her neck. Madeline looked up in breathless surprise when the door that adjoined their dressing rooms opened. She met her husband’s eyes in the mirror. He stood just inside the door, his face quite expressionless. But he was looking handsome enough in his black evening clothes to take her breath away.

  “Well?” she said, twirling around to face him and feeling herself flush. Just like a girl!

  His eyes took their time about inspecting her from head to toe. If only his face were not quite so impassive, his eyes so inscrutable. And if only she did not care quite as much what his opinion would be.

  “Wait here” was all he said finally, and he turned and left her dressing room again.

  “You may leave,” Madeline said to her maid, trying to keep the desp
erate disappointment from her voice. She sat down on the stool before her dressing table and made a conscious effort not to let her shoulders sag. She was on her way to her first ball in many months and perhaps her last for many more. She was going to enjoy herself. Despite James. Despite her basic unhappiness. Despite everything.

  James came back with a large velvet box in his hand. He set it down on the dressing table. She watched him in the mirror as he bent his attention to the back of her neck. He tossed her pearls onto the glass tray in front of her. And then he opened the box.

  Madeline swallowed. And gasped from the coldness and weight of the diamond-studded circlet he clasped about her neck.

  “Are they not your mother’s?” she asked as she lifted her right arm obediently for him to clasp the matching bracelet around her wrist.

  “No,” he said. “Not these. These belong to the baroness—to the title, not to the person. They are yours for as long as I live.”

  She did not know what to say. “Thank you” seemed inadequate—and unnecessary since it was not a personal gift. She said nothing, but stared at the jewels in the mirror and at his hands, dark-skinned against the white of her shoulders. And she felt them there, warm and strong.

  “They suit you,” he said at last. “You are tall and slender and bear yourself proudly.”

  It was as much of a compliment as she could expect, Madeline supposed. She looked up into his eyes, which were inspecting her in the mirror. Oh, surely there was more in them than usual. Surely it was not just wishful thinking on her part. There was a trace of admiration, surely.

  “You look beautiful,” he said abruptly. His words sounded almost grudging.

  Madeline stood up and turned to face him. She smiled. “And you look very splendid, James,” she said. She touched the diamonds at her neck and said something that surprised herself. “I will try to wear them proudly.”

  She did not know for a moment whether his eyes were on her diamonds or her lips. She thought for the merest fraction of a second that he was moving toward her. She felt her heart begin to pound and the color rise to her cheeks. And then she saw him swallow. And she knew that it was the necklace he looked at.