The Devil's Web

by Mary Balogh

  He was her universe.

  “James. Please. Oh, please. James.”

  And then he penetrated her. Deeply. To the heart of the ache that was in her. And moved and moved, thrusting and thrusting against the ache until she became mindless and twisting need. Need to be taken and held and loved. Need to give and to hold and to love.

  “James!”

  It sounded like someone else’s voice, very far away. But it must have been her own, because the sobs that followed it gradually became hers. They were coming from inside her, hurting her chest even as the rest of her seemed to have turned to jelly.

  And it was against his chest that she sobbed. He was lying on his side, holding her close against him with one arm while his free hand smoothed through her hair.

  “Hush!” he was whispering. “Hush now, Madeline. My God, what have I done to you? Hush now.”

  If she held her thoughts completely blank, she did not believe she had ever felt so happy. She was in James’s arms, the only place where she had ever really wanted to be, and his hand was soothing in her hair and his words were gentle, his breath warm against her ear.

  She wanted to stay there forever and ever. And even longer than that.

  When she finally stopped sobbing—she could not even begin to explain to herself why she had been doing so—she let herself relax completely and pretended to be asleep. If she were awake, she would feel obliged to pull back from him and announce that she was a perfect goose for crying just because he had made love to her again after so many months of the other dispassionate encounters. Or else she would have to confront him with her own accusations.

  And she did not want their relationship to return to normal again. Not yet. Tomorrow there would be all sorts of things to consider, which she absolutely refused even to think of at the moment. But tomorrow would come soon enough. For now she would pretend sleep, and perhaps he would hold her awhile longer.

  But not for nearly long enough. She felt obliged to continue to feign sleep when he eventually slid his arm very slowly from beneath her head and rolled away from her. He got out of bed and she knew, though she did not open her eyes, that he stood for a long time looking down at her.

  She watched him for a few minutes as he stood at the window again, looking out from a darkened bedchamber onto a darkened world. He was still naked and magnificent in his nakedness.

  She closed her eyes as he turned his head toward her once more. And then she heard the door into his dressing room open and close.

  He did not return for the rest of the night. Nor was he at breakfast the next morning. He had ridden out, Cockings told her when she asked. But by that time it no longer mattered. She did not want to see him.

  Ever again.

  • • •

  HE HAD RAPED HER. The thought pounded through his brain like the regular beating of a drum for the rest of the night and on into the following morning as he rode, he did not know where, out on the moors. He had raped his wife.

  He had raped Madeline. The woman he loved.

  Some love! Some way of showing an emotion that was supposed to be all giving. He had taken from her in the worst possible way a man could take from a woman.

  He had raped her.

  Oh, it was true that she had been willing after he had actually started to do it to her. More willing than he had ever known her. Wild and wanton in her desire. He could still feel the sting on his back from the raking of her fingernails.

  But she had not wanted it to happen. She had told him before it started what he would know in his heart afterward. And he knew. It did not matter that she had enjoyed it while it was happening every bit as much as he had. She had cried immediately after.

  Her sobs had killed something in him. He had exulted in their lovemaking, in the sound of his name as she begged him to come into her and shouted out as he took her through the climax. He had been finding her ear with his own mouth so that he might whisper her name.

  And then had come the sobs, tearing at her, tearing into him. Telling him what he had become.

  A man who would force his own wife against her will. A man who found it necessary to do so. “I hate you and despise you,” she had said to him.

  James spurred his horse into a fresh gallop.

  And why had it all happened? Did he really believe that she had given herself to Beasley? He would not believe it of her, could not do so. Not Madeline. She was not the sort of woman who would be unfaithful to a husband, no matter how she hated and despised him.

  And if she ever were and was confronted with her infidelity, then she would react with tears or some sign of inner torment, not with laughter and defiance.

  She had not been unfaithful to him. She had met Beasley, she said, because she could talk with him and confide in him. She had no other man to talk with.

  And whose fault was that? It certainly was not hers. He could distinctly remember that at the start of their marriage she had made an effort to speak with him, to make a friend of him. And he had found himself unable to respond.

  If she did take a lover, the fault would be more his than hers.

  He looked about him in some surprise to see that he was riding in daylight and that the sun was not even newly risen. It must be well past breakfast time already. He ran a hand over the rough bristles on his jaw and grimaced.

  He should go back to her. Talk to her. But what did one say to the woman one had raped the night before? I’m sorry? It will not happen again? I was distraught with the fear of losing you to another man? It was not really rape because you enjoyed it?

  What could he say to her?

  But he was free at last. Free to love her. He had not ruined another woman’s life. He had no son.

  He was free and whole for Madeline. That was what he had wanted to celebrate with her the night before.

  If it were possible for him now to love openly.

  Perhaps it was too late.

  Perhaps the events of last night had proved that. Perhaps he was incapable of giving love. Perhaps he could only take it for himself with violence, destroying what he loved most in the world.

  But he must try. If he did not try, he would never know.

  Perhaps it was not too late.

  “I hate you and despise you for what you have done to me,” she had said.

  He frowned. For what he had done to her? Shutting her out of his life? Killing the glow that had always been the main source of beauty in her?

  “I need a lover too,” she had said.

  Too? As well as whom? Him? Did she think he had a lover? Had she seen him with Dora? Or more to the point, had she seen him leave the ballroom with Dora? And did she know about Dora? About Jonathan?

  She was friendly with Carl Beasley. Once Carl had vowed to get revenge on him for what he had done to Dora. But what had he done to her beyond lying with her when she was already with child? And Carl had known that. Why the threat of revenge, then? Carl had allowed him to believe a lie all those years ago. But he must surely have forgotten that foolish threat. He had smiled the evening before, though. Not a pleasant smile.

  What had he been telling Madeline?

  There really was only one thing to do. If he had the courage to do it, that was. He must go home to her and somehow persuade her to sit down and have a long talk with him. He must tell her everything—the whole of his past and the whole of his present. Dora and Madeline.

  Madeline. His present and the whole of his future if she would forgive him. He must make her understand. He must somehow find the words.

  He did not know when he reached the house whether he should go up to his room first and change his clothes and shave before finding her, or whether he should find her out immediately. But he would lose his courage if he put off the moment. And he would lose the words, which were now bursting from his lips.

  Surely after she had heard him out she would understand the reason for his haggard and untidy appearance.

  “Where is her ladyship?” he asked Cockings
, handing him his riding whip and hat.

  The butler coughed. “Not at home, my lord,” he said. “I believe she left a note with your valet.”

  James went very still and looked closely at the man. “Then send him to me without delay,” he said, striding in the direction of the library.

  She had not even taken a carriage from their coach-house. She had taken a gig into the village and presumably the stage or the mail coach from there. Her destination was undoubtedly London, though she did not say so. She knew no one in York or Harrogate or any other northern town.

  “If you follow me and bring me back,” she had written, “you will have to keep me locked up. I shall leave again whenever I am able.”

  She would be going to her mother. And to her twin. They would both be in London. She would be safe.

  “I will not be a thing to you,” she had written, “to be used as a toy for your pleasure. If you still love Mrs. Drummond, then I am sorry for you. And if you pine for your son, then I feel for you. But under the circumstances you should not have married me, James. I am a person and I have feelings and needs, and I am not the sort of wife who will turn a blind eye to her husband’s philanderings and smile bravely for the benefit of the rest of the world.”

  God!

  “You may go to hell and welcome to it,” she had written above her signature.

  James closed his eyes and crumpled the letter in one hand.

  He did not go after her for almost a month.

  MADELINE SAT SILENT and dry-eyed throughout the long journey by mail coach to London.

  She would live with her mother. For a time, anyway. And Dom and Ellen were in town for the Season. After a while she would set up her own establishment somewhere. She did not know on what. But Edmund would not see her destitute. And her needs would be modest for what remained of her life.

  And if James came after her, she would fight him all the way back to Yorkshire and leave him again as soon as she was able. Time and time again if necessary until he gave up coming for her.

  It was true, perhaps, that she did not despise him one half as much as she despised herself. But she hated him for what he had made of her.

  A woman who had panted and begged and sobbed for his favors only hours after discovering that his heart—and probably his body too—belonged to someone else.

  A woman who had allowed herself to be taken against her will without clawing and fighting every step of the way.

  A woman who had enjoyed being ravished.

  What kind of a woman was that? What kind of a woman had she become?

  “I have done with you, James Purnell, Lord Beckworth,” she told him, her eyes on the scenery beyond the coach’s window, her lips not moving. “Five years is long enough for any sick obsession. I have done with you now. I have my own life and my own pride to piece together again. And there is no room in either for you.”

  She withdrew the glove from her left hand slowly without taking her eyes from the passing hedgerows, and coaxed her wedding ring off her finger. She earned a frown of annoyance from a clerical gentleman sitting in the opposite corner when she pulled down the window with the apparent purpose of drawing some deep breaths of fresh air.

  Her right hand, resting on the window, dropped the ring to the roadway.

  IN A SALON IN THE EARL OF HARROWBY’S London house, Lord and Lady Eden had just sunk down onto a sofa, side by side. They were laughing.

  “I have only just begun to really appreciate my mother,” Lord Eden said, draping his arm along the back of the sofa behind his wife’s shoulders. “How is it that she is sane and serene after having brought up Madeline and me? I may well be in Bedlam long before Charles and Olivia reach their majority.”

  Ellen laughed. “I have heard,” she said, “that once children reach their fourth or fifth birthday, they finally learn to walk, not run.”

  He looked at her with mock gloom. “You mean we have only three or four years to wait?” he asked.

  “Of course,” she said, “in the meantime, we could abandon them to a nurse’s care and merely tiptoe into the nursery when they are sleeping to gaze adoringly at them. It is not obligatory to take one’s children walking in Hyde Park every day, you know, Dominic.”

  “I would be accused of cruelty to my own servants,” Lord Eden said with a grin. “Why is it, Ellen, that Charles must always not only run but also make off in quite the opposite direction from that favored by everyone else? Does he take after your side of the family by any chance?”

  She turned her head and met his lips briefly. “Let us be thankful that there were enough daisies in the park to keep Olivia busy,” she said. “At least she was relatively stationary while she was picking the heads off the flowers. And besides, Dominic, you know that you almost burst with paternal pride every time some dowager pauses to admire the twins.”

  “Hm,” he said, placing his free hand beneath her chin so that he might return the kiss at more satisfactory length. “Are you intent on staying here much longer, love, or shall we go home soon?”

  “I miss it,” she said, smiling at him. “I always said that I would be happy if I could but live in the country, and I have not changed my mind now that my dream has come true. I just wish Jennifer was settled. She is not happy.”

  “She is only twenty,” he said, “and has enough suitors to make one dizzy remembering all their names. But I know what you mean. Is she still pining for Penworth, do you think?”

  “Oh, yes, undoubtedly,” she said. “But he was too proud to beg her grandfather for her last year, you see, and she was too proud to beg him to do so. So there was an impasse. Perhaps he will come back this year. But there is no point in our waiting around in the expectation of his arrival, is there? Perhaps we should go home.”

  “We’ll stay another week,” he said. “Kiss me again, Ellen. We seem to have so little time to ourselves these days.”

  “Mm,” she said, laying her head back against his arm and offering him her mouth.

  But there was a tap on the door before they could settle too deeply into an embrace. Dominic cursed quietly under his breath before the butler opened the door.

  “From Mama,” he said with a frown, getting to his feet and glancing at the letter he was handed. “Perhaps she wants us to take her up in our carriage tonight after all.”

  “What is it?” Ellen asked a couple of minutes later, watching his face as he read the letter.

  “Madeline has arrived,” he said.

  Ellen clasped her hands to her bosom and beamed at him. “Oh, they have come,” she said. “I am so glad for you, Dominic. You have been missing her, I know. Oh, how wonderful. When will we see them?”

  “Not them,” he said, still staring down at the letter. “Madeline. Alone. She came on the mail coach today. And apparently collapsed into bed immediately afterward and has been sleeping ever since.”

  “On the mail coach?” she said. “And without James?”

  Dominic swallowed and looked up at her. “She has left him,” he said.

  “Oh, Dominic.” She took a step forward and lifted his free hand to her cheek.

  “I REALLY CAN’T get up, Mama.” Madeline rolled over onto her stomach and buried her face in the pillow. “I am so tired. I just want to sleep.”

  “Come down for dinner at least,” her mother coaxed. “And then come back to bed early.”

  “I’m not hungry,” Madeline said. “I just want to lie here. I want to die.”

  Her mother sat on the edge of the bed and sighed. She set a comforting hand on her daughter’s head. “I know,” she said. “I don’t know quite what you are going through, Madeline. I have never lost a man in that particular way. But I can remember how I felt when Papa died. It was the most wretched feeling imaginable. The bad part is that life continues. The good part is that the pain goes away.”

  “This never will,” Madeline said, her voice muffled by the pillow.

  “Come downstairs and talk to me,” Lady Amberley said. “I ha
ve sent word to Cedric not to come tonight. We will be alone. Come and tell me what happened exactly. It sometimes helps to talk.”

  “I hate him and I have left him forever,” Madeline said.

  “Yes, dear.” Her mother ruffled her hair gently. “You told me as much when you arrived. But there must be a great deal more. I am not going to force information from you. You may sleep all night, if you wish, and all day tomorrow. But I will be dining alone if you want to talk with me. In less than an hour’s time.” She got to her feet and left the room.

  And paradoxically Madeline felt abandoned. She rolled over onto her back and stared upward. She felt so very, very alone. She was in London and Mama was downstairs and Dom was in town. And there must be any number of her friends within visiting distance.

  She could talk again. There were people around her to whom she could talk nonstop if she wanted. People who loved her and would listen to her and participate in her conversations. Her loneliness was over. No more of James’s silences and morose moods.

  But she was so lonely that her stomach ached and her throat ached, and she felt such a massive inertia that she could scarcely move on the bed. She had not realized until after she had thrown away her wedding ring how she had been in the habit of playing with it on her finger. Her finger was so terribly bare.

  And though they had never touched in bed during the nights after he had finished his business with her, the bed she was now lying on felt huge and cold and empty without him. She turned onto her side and spread an arm across the undented pillow beside her.

  He was not there. He never had been there and never would be. She was back in the home she had shared with her mother for several years. She was back home. Where she was loved and wanted. And Dom would probably come the next day or she would go to see him. And Ellen and the babies. No longer babies—they were more than a year old.

  She was back home. She could forget the nightmare of the past eight months. She could relax and let the healing begin.