“Percy was right behind me, believe me, and did his fair share to square things up. We beat them to a pulp, and almost got sent down because of it. Afterward, they still called him Owl, but they never broke his spectacles again.”
Constance sank down on the grass beside him. “What did they call you, John?”
He turned and looked at the woman he and Percy had both known since childhood, remembering the girl both of them had fallen in love with that summer they were thirteen. Constance had been the first girl John had ever kissed. About her, he had written some of the worst poetry ever conceived. About her, he’d had every erotic fantasy a boy could invent. He had stepped aside when she married Percy that autumn nearly ten years ago, pretending for their sakes that it hadn’t hurt. But it had taken a lot of drink, a lot of sleepless nights, and a lot of pretty women to get over Constance.
He looked into the gray eyes and tearstained face of his childhood love and saw his own grief mirrored back at him. Yet he knew it was far worse for her, for she had lost both her husband and her son. He focused his mind on the trivial subject that might keep both of them from shattering. “My nickname was Milton.”
“That’s right. I had forgotten.” She took out her hat pin and pushed back her black straw hat, letting it fall down her back. The sun gleamed on her dark reddish-brown hair, making it look like satin-finished mahogany. “Why Milton?” she asked. “It doesn’t suit you at all.”
He forced himself back once again to nicknames from Harrow. The mundane seemed comforting just now, comforting and safe. “But it does suit me. Very well, in fact. Didn’t Percy ever tell you how I acquired it?”
“Strangely enough, he didn’t.” She paused, then said, “It’s odd, all the things about your spouse’s life you don’t know. After ten years of marriage, I thought I knew everything there was to know about my husband, but I was wrong. The past few days, so many people have been telling me stories about him. Some of them I knew, of course, but some I had never heard before. So many stories—” Her voice broke and tears glistened on her dark lashes, threatening to spill over.
“Connie, don’t cry!” he ordered in a ravaged whisper. “For God’s sake, don’t cry.”
She turned her face away, composing herself for his sake, knowing how much he hated tears. After a moment she turned back around, smiling a wobbly little smile. “So, are you going to tell me how you got your glorious nickname?”
“On my first day at Harrow, I got into trouble—of course—and Master Johnson told me if I kept up that sort of thing, I’d never serve heaven well when I died. I answered that was all right, since I intended to rule in hell.”
“You would say something like that,” she said, laughing even as she fought back tears. “You’ve always gone your own way.”
The nine years of his marriage flitted across his mind in the space of a few heartbeats. He hadn’t ruled his own hell all that well. “I’ve gone my own way too much, perhaps,” he admitted. “So sensible of you to pick Percy instead of me.”
“Nothing sensible about it. You were a viscount’s son, and would have been a far more sensible match for a girl like me. I was the daughter of a man in trade, a girl who had plenty of money but no connections. No, no. I picked Percy because he loved me so very desperately.”
“I loved you,” he said with a rueful smile. “It didn’t help me.”
“Well, he’s the one who proposed.” Constance smiled back at him right through her tears. “Besides, you never loved me, John. Not really.”
He sat back, staring at her, unable to believe what he had just heard. “What are you talking about? If you only knew how it wrecked me to come home from Europe that autumn and find that Percy had stolen your heart away from me. I was in agony at your wedding.”
She shook her head. “Nonsense. That was your pride. You never loved me, not in a way that makes for marriage. You always flirted with me, and charmed me, and remembered my birthday. You wrote me letters from school every week, picked my favorite flowers, and gave me the right compliments. You stole kisses from me behind the hedgerows, and said the most torrid things to me, but you never did the one thing that a man does when he is truly in love.”
“What’s that?”
“You never made a fool of yourself for me.”
He blinked, trying to understand what she meant. “Well,” he said after a moment, “I did write you some god-awful poetry. Does that count?”
“You did?” she asked in astonishment. “When?”
“Cambridge days. I never showed it to you.”
“Exactly my point. If you had read some of it to me, even just once, things might have turned out very differently, for I was madly in love with you.”
That startled him. “You were?”
“I was. But I knew you didn’t really love me, and when you went to the Continent for your Grand Tour, I got over you.”
“With Percy’s help.” He could say that lightly now, for he felt no bitterness. Many years had passed since then.
“He loved me, John.”
“I know.” John glanced over his shoulder, looking up at the stone where the niche was hidden, and he thought of the look in Percy’s face when he’d found that chemise. “He always loved you, Connie. As I said, you were very sensible to choose him.”
She began to laugh. “He blundered his way through the most incoherent marriage proposal you ever heard at the May Day fete, in front of Lord and Lady Moncrieffe, the Miss Dansons, the vicar, and heaven knows how many others. In front of all those people, right on the village green, he got down on his knees, confessed eternal love in the most passionate language you can imagine, and said that if I didn’t marry him and end his misery, he would shoot himself and end it for me.”
He eyed her with doubt. “Our Percy?”
“Yes, our sensible, straitlaced, calm, reasonable Percy. Given his nature, no woman could have resisted a proposal like that. I couldn’t.”
John tried to imagine Percy on his knees babbling declarations of love and desperate threats of suicide. He failed utterly. He couldn’t make his mind form that picture, not even to win a prize like Constance.
“He made me happy, John. So very happy.”
“I am glad of it, Connie,” he said, and meant it. “The two of you are the only people in my life who ever gave a damn about me.”
“What about your wife?”
The question was soft and cut him like a knife. He did not want to talk about Viola, not with Connie, of all people. Not today, of all days. He opened his mouth to make a flippant remark, but for the life of him, nothing came to mind.
Constance studied him without speaking for what seemed an eternity. Then she laid a hand on his arm. “If there were only one thing I could wish for you, my dear, I would wish you happiness in your marriage. The women, John. The gossip—”
“Isn’t worth listening to,” he cut her off. “I beg you, do not concern yourself with the wagging tongues of scandalmongers. They talk all the time and say nothing. Amazing, but there it is.”
“I am concerned about you.”
“No need to be,” he said at once. “I am content.”
“Contentment is all very well.” She let out her breath on a soft sigh. “But John, though marriage is very difficult, it can give so much joy. Mine did.” Her voice cracked on a sob. “Oh, God in heaven, what am I going to do without Percy? And my son, my darling son—” She put her face in her hands.
This time he did not admonish her not to cry. He said nothing. There was nothing he could say, no amusing anecdote to make her laugh, no antidote to the pain. For either of them. He closed his eyes, lifted his face to the sun and leaned his weight back on his arms, bearing the sound of her sobs because he had to, feeling her tears flay him with his own grief as if each one were a whip. He envied her that—the ability to cry. He never could.
He was thirty-five years old, and the last time he had cried, he’d been seven. In the nursery at Hammond Park, staring into a glass
bowl of trifle that had been brought to him for dessert. He had listened to his nanny as she had broken the news to him about his sister, Kate. He remembered how the tears had rolled down his face, and how the colors of jam and cream and custard had all blurred and swirled together. He loathed trifle to this very day.
He listened to Connie’s sobs, and he wanted to do that, too. Lie down, bury his face in the cool grass, and feel the cathartic relief of bawling like a baby. But his eyes were dry, his stomach felt like lead, he wanted to cut his heart out. He curled his fingers into the turf on either side of his hips, set his jaw and did not move.
They sat there for a long time before she finally lifted her head. “What will happen to Hammond Park now?” she asked, wiping at her eyes with the back of her hand. “Bertram will inherit everything after you, won’t he?”
“Not if I can help it.” He pulled his handkerchief from his pocket and handed it to her. “Besides, if Bertie ever becomes the viscount after my death, he shall rue the day. For I vow to return as a ghost and haunt him.”
She almost laughed even as she dabbed at the tears in her eyes. “Is there any possibility you and your wife could reconcile?”
“We already have,” he lied. “Viola and I both know our duty. Pray do not burden yourself with concern for Hammond Park. Everything will turn out well.”
John spoke with far more assurance than he actually felt, for he knew that as far as Viola was concerned, duty would never be more important than love. And love for him was something Viola hadn’t felt for a long, long time.
One month later, John discovered just how right he had been about Viola’s notions of love and duty. By the time he had finished helping Constance settle Percy’s business affairs, the scarlet fever epidemic had subsided, the risk of infection was gone, and he was able to return to London. But when he arrived there, he found that his wife had not moved her things into his town house. Nor was she at Enderby, the villa in Chiswick outside London where she lived most of the year. The servants there did not know her destination, for she had taken only her maid and one footman with her, but John had a pretty fair notion of where she had gone.
When he called at the Duke of Tremore’s home in Grosvenor Square, his suspicion was confirmed. She had taken refuge there. He could envision Viola on Tremore’s doorstep, asking to be sheltered from her shameful excuse for a husband.
Tremore was as haughty toward him as ever. He came into the drawing room bearing the ducal countenance he reserved for recalcitrant servants, ill-mannered commoners, and John. What his brother-in-law still did not understand about him was that he had never been intimidated by all that hauteur.
Thankfully, Tremore did not try to make polite conversation. He came straight to the point. “I assume you have come to see my sister.”
Not in a mood to be clever just now, he met the other man’s hard gaze with an equally hard one of his own. “No,” he answered, “I have come to fetch my wife.”
Viola stared at her brother in dismay. “So Hammond can just drag me off and there is nothing you can do?”
Anthony looked back at her without replying. In his hazel eyes so like her own was a look she recognized, a look of many emotions she had seen before. Rage at Hammond, compassion for her situation, regret that he had allowed the marriage in the first place. But Viola also saw something else—inevitability.
“How can I go with him?” she cried, feeling the chains of her marriage vows tightening around her like a noose around her neck. “After everything that has happened, how can I live with him as his wife again?”
“You are his wife,” her brother said, his voice strangled, as if the words choked him. He looked down at the glass of brandy in his hand. “However much I might wish it were otherwise.”
Viola turned to give the other woman in the library a pleading glance, a glance that impelled her sister-in-law to speak. “Is there nothing you can do, Anthony?” Daphne asked her husband. “You are a duke, after all, and have enormous influence.”
“My influence is useless in this situation, my dear. Hammond has legal right on his side, and even I cannot protect Viola from that.”
His glass in his hand, Anthony rose from his chair and crossed the room to sit beside his sister on the settee. “If I were to gainsay Hammond and prevent him from taking you, he could bring action against me in the House and force your return to him by legal decree. If you wish me to fight him, I will. But I will lose.”
It was so tempting to beg him to try anyway, despite the certainty of the outcome. “It would be quite a scandal, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes, and you would be the one blamed, Viola, not he. What with his appearance at Kettering’s ball the other night and the news of his cousin’s death, the gossip is all over London.”
“What are people saying?”
Her brother did not answer, but he did not have to.
“No doubt, Hammond is being applauded for finally bringing his recalcitrant wife to heel,” she said, fuming at the unfairness of it all.
Anthony did not confirm nor deny her conclusion. Instead, he handed her his glass of brandy. “Here. Drink this. You look as if you need it.”
Viola stared down into the fiery liquid that was the exact color of her husband’s eyes. After a moment, she set the glass on the table beside her. “I don’t need brandy. What I need is a divorce.”
“You know that is impossible.”
“I know, I know.” She leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees and clasping her hands together. “What am I going to do?” she whispered, feeling almost as if she were saying a prayer. “What am I going to do?”
Anthony muttered an oath and rose. “I’ll go down to the drawing room and talk to him again,” he said. “God knows, Hammond has taken my money in the past willingly enough. Perhaps I can bribe him to go away.”
Her brother left the library, and his wife crossed the room to take his place on the settee.
“Oh, Daphne,” Viola mumbled against her clasped hands, “how I wish I could go back and undo the past. What a stupid girl I was.”
Daphne, always a good listener and loyal friend, said nothing. Instead, she put a comforting arm around her shoulders. “You have never been stupid.”
“Oh, but I was. Anthony tried to warn me all those years ago,” she went on. “He told me Hammond was stone broke. He said I was too young, and he wanted me to wait. He tried—in the most delicate terms, of course—to tell me about Hammond’s reputation with women. He was just like his father, Anthony said, a scoundrel and a rake. But I was so in love with Hammond, so determined to marry him, I could not see reason. I was relentless, and Anthony gave in. Why did I not listen?”
Daphne’s arm around her tightened. “Don’t do this. Dearest Viola, do not berate yourself for the past, do not torture yourself with what cannot be undone.”
Viola turned and looked into Daphne’s violet-blue eyes, the eyes that had so enslaved her brother’s heart three years before. In a small way, she had helped to bring Daphne and Anthony together, and she had been delighted to see them fall in love. Yet there were times when she could not help but envy her sister-in-law. To have the honest, true love of one good man must be a wonderful thing indeed. She had always longed for it. She once thought she’d gotten it. How wrong she had been.
She forced herself to smile. “You’d best go down and make certain Anthony doesn’t kill Hammond,” she advised, and stood up. “They are none too fond, you know.”
Daphne hesitated as if unwilling to leave her alone, then nodded. “We will not let him take you against your will,” she said and rose to her feet. “We will fight him any way we can if that is what you wish.”
Her sister-in-law left the room, and Viola walked to the window. It was a brilliant April afternoon, warm and sunny. Looking down over the square, she could see Hammond’s carriage below, and she remembered another spring nine years before. She remembered the countless times she had stood at this very window during that season so lo
ng ago, staring down at Grosvenor Square, waiting for the sight of Hammond’s carriage, eager and impatient, scared and hopeful, and so, so in love.
God, it hurt to relive those days, to remember how her spirits would soar every time his carriage came into view, how she could barely stand the wait until she heard his voice in the foyer below, how he could twist her heart with sweet, painful pleasure just by looking at her.
Do you love me?
Of course I do. I adore you.
It hurt to remember the innocence with which she had believed him. It hurt to remember her own vulnerability and the blind devotion with which she had entrusted him with her heart, her soul, and her future.
She pressed her forehead to the window glass, remembering the pain of heartbreak, of learning that his words and acts of love had been false, that Anthony had been right all along, and it was her money John loved. It was other women he wanted. She still remembered how he had turned his back on her without even trying to understand her feelings about what he had done, how he had abandoned her and walked into the arms of another woman. Then another. Then another. As she stared down at the carriage below, she felt her frustration settling into the deep rage she thought she had overcome a long time ago. The rage of betrayal.
The liar.
Viola turned her back on that square below and those memories. She wasn’t a girl anymore, she wasn’t in love with him anymore, and she most certainly wasn’t a fool anymore. There had to be a way out of this mess, and she was going to find it.
Chapter 3
John had always been an amiable sort of person, even-tempered and slow to anger, but when his anger was provoked, when he was pushed beyond his limits, the results could be catastrophic. Most of the time it was easy for him to maintain his good humor, finding from long experience that a clever remark here and there could ease tensions and keep things civil. There were rare occasions, however, when keeping things civil took some serious effort, and those occasions usually involved someone in the Tremore family.
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