One Night for Love

by Mary Balogh

  “LILY, I WANT TO MAKE LOVE TO YOU.

  Do you want it too?” he asked her.

  “Yes.”

  “You must not be frightened,” he told her. “Not at any moment. However far advanced in passion I might become, I will stop the instant you tell me to stop. Will you believe that?”

  “Yes,” she said. “But I will not tell you to stop.”

  She knew that she would want to. Before he made love to her, she would want to stop him. Because once they were together, she would know. She would know if her dreams of love must die forever. And she would know if after all, he found himself repulsed by the knowledge that another man had known her since their wedding day. But she would not stop him. This—tonight, all of it—was meant to be, and she would let it be, however it turned out.

  EVERYBODY LOVES MARY BALOGH:

  “A romance writer of mesmerizing intensity, Mary Balogh has the gift of making a relationship seem utterly real and utterly compelling.”

  —Mary Jo Putney

  “Balogh is truly a find.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Mary Balogh is a veritable treasure, a matchless storyteller who makes our hearts melt with delight.”

  —Romantic Times

  PRAISE FOR MARY BALOGH:

  “Ms. Balogh is a favorite of readers everywhere!”

  —Affaire de Coeur

  “[Mary Balogh] has established a reputation for unsurpassed originality and excellence.”

  —Romantic Times

  “Balogh’s graceful prose will draw you into the glittering world of Georgian England as though you were actually there.”

  —Elizabeth Thornton

  ONE NIGHT FOR LOVE

  A Dell Book

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Dell mass market edition published July 1999 Dell mass market reissue / August 2007

  Published by Bantam Dell

  A Division of Random House, Inc.

  New York, New York

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved

  Copyright © 1999 by Mary Balogh

  Dell is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-79609-7

  www.bantamdell.com

  v3.1_r4

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Part I - The Return Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Part II - Memory: One Night for Love Chapter 3

  Part III - An Impossible Dream Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Part IV - The Education of a Lady Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Part V - A Wedding Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Dedication

  PART I

  The Return

  1

  Despite the early hour and the chilly weather, the yard of the White Horse Inn in Fetter Lane, London, was crowded and noisy. The stagecoach for the West Country was preparing to make its daily run. Few passengers had yet boarded; most were milling about anxiously to see that their luggage had been properly stowed. Hawkers attempted to sell their wares to passengers for whom the day would be long and tedious. Grooms bustled about their business. Ragged children, when they were not being shooed back into the street, darted about, feeding on the excitement.

  The guard blew his horn, a deafening warning that the coach would be departing within a few minutes and anyone with a ticket would be well advised to climb aboard.

  Captain Gordon Harris, looking smart in the green regimentals of the Ninety-fifth Rifles, and his young wife, who was warmly and modishly dressed, looked somewhat out of place in such inelegant surroundings. But they were not themselves passengers. They had accompanied a woman to the White Horse in order to see her on her way.

  Her appearance was in marked contrast to theirs. While she was clean and tidy, she was undeniably shabby. She wore a simple high-waisted cotton dress with a shawl for warmth. Both garments looked well worn and well washed. Her bonnet, which had perhaps once been pretty even if never quite modish, had clearly shielded its wearer from one too many rainstorms. Its wide brim was limp and misshapen. She was a young woman—indeed, she was so small and so slight of frame that she might at first glance have been mistaken for a mere girl. But there was something about her that drew second, more lingering glances from several of the men who were busy about their various tasks. There were beauty and grace and some indefinable air of femininity about her to proclaim that she was indeed a woman.

  “I must be getting into the coach,” she said with a smile for the captain and his wife. “You need not stay here any longer. It is too cold to be standing about.” She held out both her slim hands to Mrs. Harris, though she looked alternately at both of them. “How will I ever be able to thank you sufficiently for all you have done for me?”

  Tears sprang to Mrs. Harris’s eyes, and she enfolded the young woman tightly in her arms. “We have done nothing of any great significance,” she said. “And now we are abandoning you to travel on the stage, the very cheapest form of transportation, when you might have gone more respectably by post chaise or at the very worst by the mailcoach.”

  “I have borrowed enough from you,” the young woman said, “without indulging in needless extravagances.”

  “Borrowed” Mrs. Harris removed a lace-edged handkerchief from her reticule and dabbed at her eyes with it.

  “It is still not too late to alter your plans, you know.” Captain Harris took one of the young woman’s hands in both of his own. “Come back to our hotel with us for breakfast and I shall write that letter even before I eat, and send it on its way. I daresay there will be an answer within the week.”

  “No, sir,” she told him quite firmly, though she smiled. “I cannot wait. I must go.”

  He did not argue further but sighed, patted her hand, and then impulsively pulled her into a hug as his wife had done. By that time she was in danger of losing the inside seat he had quite adamantly insisted upon. He had even slipped the coachman a tip to ensure her a window seat for the long journey to the village of Upper Newbury in Dorsetshire. But a large woman, who looked as if she might be ready to take on any coachman or any army captain who dared cross her, or indeed both at once, was already settling herself into the only window seat still available.

  The young woman had to squeeze herself into a middle seat. But she did not appear to share the captain’s wrath. She smiled and lifted a hand in farewell. As she did so, the guard’s horn blew again as a warning to everyone nearby that the stage was about to begin its journey.

  Mrs. Harris’s gloved hand was still raised in an answering farewell wave after the stagecoach had rumbled out of the yard, turned onto the street, and disappeared from sight.

  “I have never in my life known anyone so stubborn,” she said, using her handkerchief again. “Or anyone so dear. What will become of her, Gordon?”

  The captain sighed once more. “I fear she is doing the wrong thing,” he said. “Almost a year and a hal
f has passed, and what seemed like madness even at the time will doubtless be a total impossibility now. But she does not understand.”

  “Her sudden appearance is going to come as a dreadful shock,” Mrs. Harris said. “Oh, foolish girl to have refused to delay even a few days while you wrote a letter. How will she manage, Gordon? She is so small and so frail and so—so innocent. I fear for her.”

  “For as long as I have known Lily,” Captain Harris replied, “she has looked much the same, though admittedly she is thinner than she used to be. The appearance of fragility and innocence are largely illusory, though. We know that she has been through a great deal that would severely test the roughest and toughest of my men. But she must have experienced worse things that we can only imagine.”

  “I prefer not even to try,” his wife said fervently.

  “She has survived, Maisie,” he reminded her, “with her pride and her courage intact. And her sweetness too—she seems not to have been embittered. Despite everything there still appears to be more than a touch of innocence about her.”

  “What will he do when she arrives?” she asked as they began to walk back to their hotel for breakfast. “Oh dear, he really ought to have been warned.”

  Newbury Abbey, the country seat and principal estate of the Earl of Kilbourne in Dorsetshire, was an imposing mansion in a large, carefully tended park that included a secluded, fern-laden valley and a private golden beach. Beyond the gates of the park, Upper Newbury was a picturesque village of thatched, whitewashed houses clustered about a green with the tall-spired Church of All Souls and an inn with its taproom belowstairs and its assembly room and guest rooms abovestairs. The village of Lower Newbury, a fishing community built about the sheltered cove on which fishing boats bobbed at rest when not in use, was connected to the upper village by a steep lane, lined with houses and a few shops.

  The inhabitants of both villages and the surrounding countryside were, on the whole, content with the quiet obscurity of their lives. But, when all was said and done, they were only human. They liked a spot of excitement as well as the next man or woman. Newbury Abbey supplied it on occasion.

  The last grand spectacle had been the funeral of the old earl more than a year before. The new earl, his son, had been in Portugal at the time with Lord Wellington’s armies and had been unable to return in time for the somber event. He had sold his commission and come home later to take up his responsibilities.

  And now—in early May of 1813—the people of the Newburys were about to experience something far more joyful, far more splendid than a funeral. Neville Wyatt, the new Earl of Kilbourne, a young man of seven-and-twenty years, was to be married to his cousin by marriage, who had been brought up at the abbey with him and his sister, Lady Gwendoline. His father, the late earl, and Baron Galton, the bride’s maternal grandfather, had planned the match many years before.

  It was a popular match. There could be no more handsome couple, the villagers were generally agreed, than the Earl of Kilbourne and Miss Lauren Edgeworth. His lordship had gone away to the wars—much against his father’s wishes, it had been rumored—as a tall, slender, blond, and handsome boy. He had returned six years later improved almost beyond recognition. He was broad where a man should be broad, slim where a man should be slim, and fit and strong and rugged. Even the scar of an old saber wound that slashed his face from right temple to chin, only narrowly missing both his eye and the corner of his mouth, seemed somehow to enhance rather than mar his good looks. As for Miss Edgeworth, she was tall and slim and elegant and as pretty as any picture with her dark shiny curls and eyes that some described as smoky and others as violet, though all were agreed that they were uncommonly lovely. And she had waited patiently for her earl to an almost dangerously advanced age—she was all of four-and-twenty.

  It was all very proper and very romantic, everyone agreed.

  For two days a steady stream of grand carriages had passed through the village and been duly gawked at by the more vulgar and peered at from behind parlor curtains by the more genteel. Half the quality of England was coming for the occasion, it was said, and more titled persons than some of them had known existed in all of England, Scotland, and Wales combined. Rumor had it—though it was surely more fact than rumor since it had come directly from the first cousin of the brother-in-law of the aunt of one of the kitchen maids at Newbury—that there was not a bedchamber at the abbey that was not to be filled with guests. And that was a prodigious number of rooms.

  A number of local families had received invitations—to the wedding itself and the breakfast that would follow it at the abbey, and to the grand ball that was to take place on the evening prior to the wedding. Indeed, no one could remember more elaborate plans. Even the humbler folk were not doomed to being mere spectators. While the wedding guests were partaking of their breakfast, the villagers would be enjoying a sumptuous repast of their own, to be served inside the inn at the earl’s behest and expense. There was to be dancing afterward about the maypole on the green.

  The wedding eve was a time of heightened activity in the village. Tantalizing aromas of cooking wafted from the inn all day long in promise of the next day’s feast. Some of the women set the tables in the assembly room while their men hung colored streamers from the maypole and children tried them out and were scolded for tangling them and getting under everyone’s feet. Miss Taylor, spinster daughter of a former vicar, and her younger sister, Miss Amelia, helped the vicar’s wife decorate the church with white bows and spring flowers while the vicar set new candles in the holders and dreamed of the glory the morrow would bring him.

  The next morning would see the convergence of all the illustrious guests and their carriages on the upper village. And there would be the earl to admire in his wedding finery, and the bride in hers. And—bliss of all blisses—there would be the newly married couple to cheer as they emerged from the church doors with the church bells pealing out the glad tidings that there was a new young countess for the abbey. And then the feasting and frolicking would begin.

  Everyone kept a wary eye on the western horizon, from which direction most weather approached. But there was nothing ominous to see. Today was a clear, sunny, really quite warm day. There was no sign of clouds building in the west. Tomorrow looked to be a fair day—as was only right and proper. Nothing was to be allowed to spoil the day.

  No one thought to look east.

  The stagecoach from London set Lily down outside the inn in the village of Upper Newbury. It was certainly a pretty place, she thought, breathing in the cool, slightly salty evening air and feeling somewhat restored despite her weariness and the stiffness of her limbs. It all looked very English to her—very pretty and very peaceful and rather alien.

  But the dusk of evening was falling already and she still might have a way to go on foot. She had neither the time nor the energy to explore. Besides, her heart had begun thumping in her chest, making her slightly breathless. She had realized that she was very close now—at last. But the closer she came, the more uncertain she was of her welcome and of the wisdom of having made this journey at all—except that there had seemed to be no real alternative.

  Lily turned and walked into the inn.

  “Is Newbury Abbey far?” she asked the innkeeper, ignoring the near silence that fell over the taproom as she entered it. The room was full to overflowing with men, who all appeared to be in a festive mood, but Lily was not unaccustomed to such situations. Large numbers of men did not embarrass or frighten her.

  “Two miles if it is anything to you,” the innkeeper said, leaning massive elbows on the counter and looking her up and down with open curiosity.

  “In which direction?” she asked.

  “Past the church and through the gates,” he said, pointing, “and follow the driveway.”

  “Thank you,” Lily said politely, and turned away.

  “If I was you, my pretty wench,” a man seated at one of the tables called to her, not unkindly, “I would knock on the vica
rage door. Next to the church this side. They will give you a crust and a mug of water.”

  “If you cares to sit down between me and Mitch ’ere,” someone else called with rough jocularity, “I’ll see that you ’as your crust and a mug of cider to go with it, my lovely.”

  A hearty guffaw of laughter greeted his words as well as a few whistles and the sound of tables being pounded with the flat of the hand.

  Lily smiled, unoffended. She was accustomed to rough men and rough ways. They rarely meant any harm or even any great disrespect.

  “Thank you,” she said, “but not tonight.”

  She stepped outside. Two miles. And it was very nearly dark. But she could not wait until morning. Where would she stay? She had enough money to buy herself a glass of lemonade and perhaps a small loaf of bread, but not enough to buy lodging for the night. Besides, she was very close.

  Only two miles.

  The ballroom at Newbury Abbey, magnificent even when empty, was laden with yellow, orange, and white flowers from the gardens and hothouses and decked with white satin ribbons and bows. It was ablaze with the lights of hundreds of candles set into the crystal chandeliers overhead and by their myriad reflections in the long mirrors that covered two facing walls. It was crowded with the cream of the ton as well as with members of the local gentry, all dressed in their finest for the wedding eve ball. Satins and silks shimmered and lace and white linen glowed. Costly gems glittered. The most expensive of perfumes vied with the scents of a thousand flowers. Voices were raised in an effort to be heard above others and above the strains of the music, provided by an entire orchestra.

  Beyond the ballroom, guests strolled on the wide landing and ascended or descended the twin curved staircases to the domed and pillared great hall below. They strolled outdoors—on the balcony beyond the ballroom, on the terrace before the house, about the stone fountain below the terrace, along the graveled walks of the rock and flower garden to the east of the house. Colored lanterns had been strung about the fountain and hung from trees though the moonlight would have offered illumination even without them.