Only a Kiss

by Mary Balogh

  Yes, she imagined he had been loved.

  “I was proud of myself a few mornings ago,” he said. “It was unkind of you to notice my discomfort and remark upon it.”

  “Well,” she said, “it takes courage to confront one’s worst fear and move into it and through it. Perhaps it was your courage I was remarking upon.”

  He laughed outright and she realized something she would really rather not know. She did like him. Or, rather, she had to admit that he was a likable man who disturbed an inner calm she had spent years establishing. She did not like what he did to that hard-won discipline.

  “Your turn,” he said so softly that she almost missed the words.

  But their echo remained.

  Imogen swallowed. Her throat was dry. Her tea was untouched, as was the single biscuit she had taken. The tea was probably cold by now, though, and she hated cold tea. And if he had feared that his hand might be shaking, she knew hers was.

  “There is not much to tell,” she said. “They knew my husband was a British officer, though the fact that he was not in uniform gave them all the excuse they needed to pretend they did not believe him and to use every means at their disposal to force information from him.”

  “Torture,” he said.

  She spread her hands across her lap and looked down at them.

  “They treated me with the utmost respect,” she said. “I was given a private room in their temporary headquarters and the services of a maid, the wife of a foot soldier. I dined each day with the most senior of the French officers, and they made an effort to converse with me in English though I speak French reasonably well. I had not been so well treated since leaving England.”

  “But you did not see your husband,” he said.

  “No.” She drew a slow breath and licked dry lips with a dry tongue. “But sometimes, seemingly quite by accident, for which they always apologized profusely afterward, they let me hear him scream.”

  Her skirt was pleated between her fingers.

  “He did not divulge his secrets?” he asked her after what seemed like a lengthy pause.

  “Never.” She smoothed out the creases. “No, never.”

  “They did not try to get information from you?” he asked.

  “I knew nothing,” she told him. “They understood that. It would have been a waste of their time.”

  “And they did not use you to pry information out of him?”

  And he understood too much. Her skirt pleated itself between her fingers again.

  “He never told them anything,” she said again, raising her eyes to look at him. He was looking a bit pale and grim about the mouth. “And they never . . . did anything to me. They never hurt me. After his . . . death, a French colonel escorted me back to British headquarters under a flag of truce. He even had the soldier’s wife accompany us for propriety’s sake. He was gracious and courteous. And of course he was all surprise and regret when he was informed that I was indeed the wife—the widow—of a British officer.”

  “You were present when your husband died?” he asked.

  Her eyes were locked with his, it seemed. She could not look away.

  “Yes.” She spread her fingers, releasing the creased fabric.

  He stared a moment longer and then got abruptly to his feet. The dog scrambled to his, and Blossom eyed them both without raising her head, saw that her ownership of the chair was not about to be disputed, and closed her eyes again. Lord Hardford set one forearm along the mantel and one booted foot on the hearth and gazed into the fire.

  “He was a brave man,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “And you loved him.”

  “Yes.”

  She closed her eyes and kept them closed.

  She opened them with a start of alarm when he spoke again. He had crossed the room to the love seat without her realizing it and was leaning over her. His face was not many inches from her own. But his intent was not sexual. She realized that immediately.

  “War is the damnedest thing, is it not?” he said without either apologizing for his language or waiting for her answer. “One hears about those who were killed and feels sorrow for their relatives. One hears about those who were wounded and winces in sympathy while believing they were the lucky ones. One imagines that once they heal as far as is possible, they continue with their lives where they had left them off before they went to war. One scarcely thinks of the women at all, except with a little sorrow for their loss of loved ones. But for everyone concerned, dead or alive, it is the damnedest, damnedest thing. Is it not?”

  This time he waited for her answer, his face pale and grim and almost unrecognizable.

  “It is,” she agreed softly. “It is the damnedest thing.”

  “How did they know you were there?” he asked.

  She raised her eyebrows.

  “The French,” he explained. “They were behind enemy lines when they took you, were they not? Your husband thought it safe enough to take you that far. How did they know you were there? And how did they know he was important enough to take? He was not in uniform.”

  “It was a scouting party,” she said. “The hills were full of them, theirs and ours, on both sides of the line. The line was not a physical thing, like the wall between the park here and the land beyond, and it changed daily. There is nothing tidy about war. Even so, he was assured that that particular part of the hills was safe for me.”

  He straightened up and turned, all impatience and arrogance once more.

  “There is that evening of cards with the Quentins tonight,” he said. “Shall I have the carriage wait for you? I will take my curricle. Or would you prefer that I make some excuse for you?”

  “The carriage, please,” she said. “I may choose to live alone, Lord Hardford, but I am not a recluse.”

  He looked at her over his shoulder. “Are you ever tempted to be?”

  “Yes.”

  He regarded her in silence for a few seconds. “One ought to consider the women,” he said. “Your husband was not the only brave one in your marriage, Lady Barclay. Good day to you.”

  And he strode from the room, the dog trotting at his heels. A few moments after the sitting room door closed behind him, Imogen heard the outer door open and close too.

  Your husband was not the only brave one in your marriage. . . .

  If only she had died when Dicky had, the two of them together, just seconds apart. If only they had killed her, as she had fully expected they would—as Dicky had fully expected they would. Courage, that last look of his had said to her as clearly as if he had spoken the word aloud.

  Courage.

  She sometimes forgot that that was the last word his eyes had spoken. Me had come a few second before it. Me, Imogen. And even those unspoken words she sometimes forgot—or did not trust because they had not been spoken aloud. Though she and Dicky had always known what was in the other’s mind. They had been that close—husband and wife, brother and sister, comrades, best friends.

  Me. And then, Courage.

  She sat where she was while a grayish film formed over the cold tea in her cup—and the Earl of Hardford’s.

  * * *

  He pretty much hated himself, Percy decided as he shut the garden gate behind him and, without conscious thought, took the cliff path until he came to the gap. He scrambled down the steep track to the beach, heedless of possible danger, and strode the short distance to the cave. He went inside without stopping, daring the tide to come galloping up over the sand to trap him in there and drown him. The cave was much larger than he had expected.

  Yes, he did, he decided as he placed one hand on a protruding rock and gazed out into daylight. He hated himself.

  “You came all the way down this time without help, did you?” he asked Hector, who was lying across the mouth of the cave, his head on his paws, h
is bulging eyes looking inside. “Well done.”

  Why was the dog so attached to him when he was a worthless lump of humanity? Dogs were supposed to be discriminating.

  He had just confessed to the big dark blot on the otherwise relatively serene progress of his life—the great terror from which he had never recovered. A boy’s disobedient folly gone wrong. The ghastly humiliation that had dogged him into adulthood, though he had always hidden it well by the simple expedient of staying far from the sea and confronting every other challenge that came his way, the more dangerous the better, with a reckless disregard for his own life. It was mildly ironic, he supposed, that when he had inherited the title totally unexpectedly two years ago, it had come with a house and park that not only were in Cornwall but also were perched spectacularly upon a high cliff top.

  That boyhood episode had been virtually the only dark blot on his life. Well, there had been his father’s death three years ago, and that had been excruciatingly painful. But such losses occurred in the natural course of one’s life, and one did recover over time. It seemed to him that he had spent all the rest of his life studiously avoiding pain and really doing quite a good job of it. But who would not do likewise, given the choice? Who would deliberately court pain and suffering?

  He was not in the mood for making excuses for himself, though. His adult life had been one escapade piled upon another. Since coming down from Oxford almost ten years ago, he had taken care to remain uninvolved in all except shallow, meaningless, often downright stupid frivolity. He was thirty years old and had done nothing in his life of which he could feel proud. Well, except his double first degree with which he had done nothing since getting it.

  Was it normal?

  It certainly was not admirable.

  He had said something—this very morning. He frowned in thought for a moment.

  Living is not merely a matter of staying alive, is it? It is what you do with your life and the fact of your survival that counts.

  And he had said it in criticism of her, pompous ass that he was.

  He was a survivor too, was he not? He had survived his own birth, no mean feat when so many newborns did not. He had survived all the perils and illnesses of early childhood. He had survived that ordeal on the cliff face. He had survived reckless horse and curricle races and a duel with pistols and the jumping of broad gaps between houses from four stories up, once during a heavy rainstorm. He had done a lot of surviving. He had got to the age of thirty more or less intact physically and mentally and emotionally.

  It is what you do with your life and the fact of your survival that counts.

  What the devil had he ever done with his? What real use had he made of the precious gift of breath?

  He left the cave and walked down the beach until he was at the water’s edge. The salt of the air was more pronounced here. He felt exposed, surrounded by vastness, half deafened by the elemental roar of the sea and the breaking of the waves. The sun was sparkling across the water, half blinding him. Hector was gamboling along in the shallows, knee-deep in water, sending up cascades of it behind him. He was going to be caked with sand to take back to the house.

  What was it exactly he feared about the sea? Percy asked himself. Was it that all that water could trap him and drown him? Or was it something more fundamental than that? Was it the fear of vanishing into nothing in such vastness? Or the fear of coming face-to-face with the vast unknown? Was it just that it was easier to cling to his own trivial little inland world?

  But he was not used to introspection and turned his attention back to his dog, which was obviously enjoying itself.

  His dog?

  “Damn your eyes, Hector,” he murmured. “Could you not have been a proud, handsome mastiff? Or taken a fancy to Mrs. Ferby instead of me?”

  She had not played fair—Lady Barclay, that was, not Mrs. Ferby. He had told her the whole of his story, even to the pulling down of his breeches for his spanking. She had told him only part of hers. A chunk of it, the key part of it, had been omitted. And it was the very part that he suspected would explain everything.

  He had no right to know. He had had no right to ask in the first place. He had only more or less tricked her into telling her story by offering his own in exchange. And he did not want to know what she had withheld. He had cringed even from what she had told him. He had the feeling—no, he knew—that the missing details would be unbearable.

  He always avoided what was unbearable.

  She had spent three years at Penderris Hall. And she was not mended even now. Far from it. It was not simple grieving that kept her broken.

  He did not want to know.

  He did not usually pry into other people’s lives. He was not usually curious about what was of no personal concern to him, especially if it promised something painful.

  Lady Barclay was not of any personal concern to him. She was not in any way at all the type of woman to attract him. Indeed, she was all that would normally repel him.

  What was abnormal about his dealings with her, then?

  Devil take it, he thought abruptly, he needed to leave. Not just the beach, though he turned to stride back up it anyway, leaving Hector to catch up to him. Hardford Hall. Cornwall. He needed to put them behind him, forget about them, send a decent steward down to manage the estate and content himself with the knowledge that he had done his duty by coming and setting things in order. He needed to get back to his own life, to his friends and his family.

  He needed to forget Imogen Hayes, Lady Barclay—and she would surely be only too delighted to be forgotten. She would not have to hide out so much in the dower house with him gone.

  He would definitely leave, he decided as he scrambled up the path to the top, out of breath but unwilling to slow down. Today. Or at worst first thing in the morning. He would get Watkins to pack his belongings and would send word to Mimms in the stables. But he would not have to wait for either of them. He could ride his horse home as he had ridden it here.

  He would leave today.

  He would send an excuse to the Quentins.

  He was feeling purposeful, even cheerful, as he pushed through a gap in the gorse bushes without quite murdering his boots, and then strode across the lawn toward the house. The only decision that remained was whether he would take Hector with him—not running beside his horse, of course, but in the carriage. Watkins might well abandon stoicism and hand in his notice. And Percy would be the laughingstock of London. But who cared?

  He would be many miles on his way before darkness. His spirits were buoyed by the thought and his stride lengthened at the pleasant prospect of going home—and never coming back.

  There was no one in the hall when he let himself into the house. But there were two letters on a silver tray on the table facing him. Percy looked down at them, hoping they were for anyone but him, as they probably were. No one had written since he came here.

  He recognized the writing on both—that of Higgins, his man of business in London, on the one and . . . his mother’s on the other.

  11

  Percy frowned at the letters. He could have done without this distraction when he was all set to march upstairs and ring for Watkins before his purpose cooled.

  Perhaps Higgins had found someone to take on the job of steward. Now that would be well-timed news—and fast too. But how the devil did his mother know he was here? He had been very neglectful and not written since he came here. Perhaps Cousin Cyril had passed the word on. And then his frown deepened as he cast his mind back. Had he written to her himself? That night before he set off for Cornwall after writing to warn Ratchett that he was coming here and to suggest that the cobwebs be swept off the rafters before he arrived? Devil take it, had he really added that to the letter? That was what came of setting pen to paper when one was inebriated. Had he written to his mother too? And if so, what the deuce had he said?

 
He broke the seal and opened the single sheet. His eyes scanned the closely spaced lines of her small, neat handwriting.

  Yes, she had indeed received his letter from London, and she was delighted that he was at last doing his duty by going down to his Cornish estate. However, she was deeply disturbed to learn how unhappy he was with his life and how lonely . . .

  He would swear off liquor from this moment on. Not a single drop would ever again pass his lips. What sort of sentimental, self-pitying drivel had he written in that letter? To his mother?

  He read on.

  Perhaps taking up his responsibilities at Hardford Hall would be the making of him, and it would not surprise her at all if his neighbors were welcoming him with open arms after two long years of waiting. He would surely discover purpose and friendship there—and perhaps even a special someone?

  Percy grimaced. His mother was ever hopeful and ever the hopeless romantic. He must write to reassure her—and squash her expectations—before he rode off in the direction of London. Dash it all, that was going to delay his departure by at least half an hour.

  And double dash it all, he was going to be letting her down.

  Again.

  And disappointing her.

  Again.

  She never said as much, but he knew she was still hoping that one day he would make her truly proud of him. She was forever declaring her love and her pride, but he knew he had disappointed her from the moment he left Oxford after scaling such heady academic heights there and slid into a life of idleness and frivolity.

  His eyes had become unfocused and gazed through the page rather than at it. There was only a sentence or two left, though, probably just the courtesies with which one always felt obliged to end a letter. He focused his eyes upon them.

  “I will do all in my power to lift your spirits, Percy,” she had written. “I and perhaps a few of your aunts and uncles and cousins. We never did have a chance to celebrate your birthday together as a family. We will do it belatedly. I will be leaving for Cornwall tomorrow morning.”