Rather than admit she was at a loss for much more than that, Astrid concentrated on the feel of his hand, warm and secure around hers. This is where he tells me, so gently and regretfully: we really cannot continue like this, and he will be leaving me soon.
“Astrid,” Andrew said as a shower of sparks disappeared up the flue, “we cannot continue the way we’ve begun in this marriage.” Her worst fears, put into words, but Andrew wasn’t finished. “I love you—”
She dropped his hand. “What?”
“I love you.” He eyed her hand but didn’t make a grab for it. “I’ve loved you since you were a girl of seventeen trying not to cry because you’d beaten out a fire with your bare hands. I’ve loved you across three continents, several years, and more stupid behavior on my part than I can recall. I love you, and I’ve done a damned poor job of owning up to it.”
“Yes, you have.” Astrid subsided against him, at a loss to label what she was feeling beyond… shock.
“You don’t have to choose now to be agreeable.”
“Civil and agreeable are two different things,” she retorted. “So why have you gone to such great and unpleasant lengths to convince me my husband did not love me?” Because that question desperately needed an answer if she was to maintain her sanity.
He was silent for a moment, while Astrid contemplated smacking him.
“It’s complicated.”
She mashed her nose into his shoulder. Love was not complicated. “Then you’d best have a good explanation.”
“I have for many years been under a serious misapprehension,” he began. “I was wrong about myself, among other things, and I want to choose my words with utmost care, Astrid, because I doubt you’ll give me a chance to refine on them.”
She did not tell him he likely had the right of that, for his tone was too grave.
Haltingly at first, then more easily, Andrew related to Astrid the events of his fifteenth summer. About the accident, Astrid had thought she’d been well informed, but about Andrew’s involvement with Julia Ponsonby, she’d had no clue—neither, apparently, had Gareth, at least not until it was too late.
When Andrew paused to pour them both a tumbler of brandy, Astrid was aware that she’d rather he not have left her side even to cross the room.
“I had clues as to this misapprehension of yours,” she said, considering a drink she did not want but probably needed. “I once overheard Gareth wondering why you never entertained women he’d been involved with, despite their many attempts to gain your notice, but you didn’t mind in the least where your castoffs went for consolation.”
Andrew’s expression was… bewildered. “You consider that a clue?”
“Of a sort. Or there’s the way you would not allow Gareth to help you, not with your property, not with your various scrapes and peccadilloes—why did it never occur to you, if you’re going to fight a duel, your brother should have been your second, not the last to know?”
Andrew sat beside his wife, his drink untouched.
“I did not want my brother to be as ashamed of me as I was of myself. I did not want him to ever, ever find out what a weak, immoral, dishonorable man I was.”
This reasoning was flawed. Understandable, but badly, badly flawed. “If anybody knows about being immoral with women, it is your brother. He convinced himself he could misbehave with Felicity, a spinster virgin if ever there was one.”
Andrew settled his arm around Astrid’s shoulders, a warm, welcome weight. “Gareth apologized to me. It about broke my heart. He said my brothers ought to have protected me.” Now he slugged back his drink, a gesture that struck Astrid as despairing.
“I’ve seen him looking at you lately with an odd expression on his face. Was this a recent discussion?”
“Shortly after the babies arrived,” Andrew replied. “I waited for Gareth to come down the stairs, knowing he’d have to get something to eat or drink eventually. When he found me, he was a man who believed his selfish rutting had cost his wife her life. I thought to comfort him by confessing to costing my own child—conceived with Gareth’s fiancée—his or her life. In hindsight, it was a deuced odd sort of comfort to offer, but under the circumstances, it made a kind of sense.”
Astrid was silent, feeling utterly weary. Andrew’s revelations explained a lot, but she wasn’t ready to believe their marital problems were solved.
She squirmed down to lay her head on his muscular thigh. “Something bothers me.”
His hand settled on her hair, the near reverence in that simple touch making Astrid’s heart beat harder. “Tell me, love.”
“You believed you were responsible for the death of an unborn child, but now you know there was no child. Morally, is that a material distinction to you?”
Andrew put his drink on the end table and let his hand drift from Astrid’s hair to her face. She had asked the ultimate difficult question, but she was also coming to know her husband, and the matter had to be faced:
How was Andrew to reconcile himself to the fact that he’d been willing to put the life of that unborn child second to his mother’s welfare, and in his own eyes, second to his own convenience? Had there been a child, the child would have died with Julia, and by virtue of Andrew’s choice.
“I made a mistake,” he said. “I made a selfish mistake, the results of which are no more than I deserved for having slept with a woman who was, as far as I knew at the time, otherwise chaste. Had there been opportunity, I would likely have slept with her again at other times and places.”
Such remorse would have felled a lesser man, and yet, the conversation could not end with that guilt-wracked recitation. Astrid covered Andrew’s hand with her own, lest he try to extricate himself from the discussion.
“Let me put a question to you, then, Andrew,” she said. “Why do you define your entire self, your entire life, in terms of those mistaken moments?”
Andrew’s hand went slack in hers.
A silence grew, punctuated by only the crackling of the fire.
“Why do I…?” Andrew repeated slowly, stupidly, as if drunk.
“Why do you define yourself, your entire life and worth, in terms of the mistakes you made with Julia?”
“Because some mistakes are so great as to define one.”
Astrid sat up, hoisted herself off the couch, then turned and lowered herself to straddle his lap, her tummy bulging between them.
“You listen to me, Andrew Penwarren Alexander. You are a good man, an honorable man, and a loving man,” she pronounced slowly, as if he might have trouble comprehending her. “You faced a decision when you risked your life charging over here from Enfield. You could have let my sister quietly die, and her children with her, but you did not. You took a chance, you made an effort, and now Felicity, James, William, Pen, Joyce, and Gareth all have a chance to enjoy long, happy lives as a family.”
She framed his jaw in her hands. “Why don’t you allow those moments—those moments when your courage carried the day for all of us—to define you? Why don’t you allow the moments today when you again risked your life for me to define you? Why don’t you allow the moments years ago, when you also risked your life for me, to define you?”
She lowered her forehead to his and let her tears trickle onto his cheeks.
“I am not finished,” she admonished him, though where the fortitude to persevere would come from, she did not know.
She laid a hand over his heart, as if she’d prevent him from setting her aside and leaving the room, the property, her life.
“You were a friend to both Felicity and Gareth when they had no friend. You behaved honorably with respect to me when I was a girl, even if your notions of honor were misguided. You danced attendance on your mother when his blooming lordship, the marquess, couldn’t pause in his wenching long enough to notice she was lonely for her sons. You took yourself off t
o God knows where, Andrew, to try to protect the people who love you from yourself…”
She was crying openly now, but wasn’t sure all the tears on his cheeks were hers.
“You make me out to be some kind of bloody knight in shining armor,” he whispered, his lips seeking hers for a quick kiss.
“You hopeless man,” she said, kissing him back, “you are some kind of bloody knight in shining armor. You were prepared to let Henry m-murder you today, and I thought I would die right there with you if he did.”
He enfolded her against his body, letting her cry out all the fear and upset and loneliness and sorrow that was in her. She cried for him, and for Douglas, and even some for Henry, miserable, murderous, and mad though he’d been. She cried for Felicity and Gareth, who had come through such a frightening situation. She cried for the children who would have lost their mother, as Astrid had lost hers, and thus lost a part of their father…
And she cried for herself, finally. For her miserable excuse of a first marriage, for Herbert, so misguided and manipulated. For the child she might yet not safely bear. In the end, Astrid cried herself to sleep, her husband’s arms around her, his lips murmuring comfort against her hair.
Nonetheless, despite the revelations of the previous evening, despite Andrew’s presence beside her as she’d drifted off to sleep, when she rose the next morning, Astrid found she had, again, slept alone.
***
Douglas was escorted to the library the next morning by Fairly, who’d forced hot tea and buttered toast on him, then valeted him into proper morning attire. Greymoor and Heathgate were waiting for them, and to Douglas’s surprise, Astrid was also present, sitting beside her husband on the hearth.
Immediately beside him.
Douglas bowed to each, greeting them in turn. Fairly took up a post by the French doors, his back half-turned to the room, a clear reminder to Douglas he had no ally among the assemblage. Not now.
Heathgate perched on his desk, a particularly undignified choice for the marquess, but no more informal than Greymoor, hunkered beside his wife on the stones of the raised hearth.
Greymoor stood and gestured to the sofa.
“Have a seat, Douglas,” he said, the use of Douglas’s Christian name apparently deliberate. There were two explanations, of course, the first being that Greymoor intended humiliation by assuming an ungranted familiarity; the second, possible in theory, was that this was a family gathering, where one needn’t stand on ceremony.
Douglas took his assigned seat and waited, deciding silence was to his advantage. Though it ought to be beyond him, he could yet feel humiliation, whether Greymoor intended it or not.
“We have matters to resolve in this room,” Greymoor said, “and they are best resolved by consensus, but my wife has also requested an opportunity to put some questions to you, Douglas. I believe you owe her that.”
“Of course.” Douglas likely owed the woman his life. He’d not begrudge her a few painful answers.
“Did you know Henry killed your father?”
Astrid’s soft words landed with the force of a blow. Across the room, Fairly had turned, resting his shoulders against the doors likely the better to view the proceedings. Douglas’s gaze swept the room, and on each face he saw more patience than curiosity.
That puzzled him on the level still capable of thought after Astrid’s terrible revelation, but he marshaled his resources to address the question.
“No,” Douglas said. “I never even suspected, not before yesterday, for which I must bear the blame. Henry would have been an adolescent, but he was always keen for weaponry. I should have realized…”
Those words ought to be engraved on his tombstone. So much he should have realized. Douglas remained silent, the confirmation of every dark thought about his family he’d ever attempted to deny battering at him. Greymoor—a man whom Douglas would never understand—chose that moment to sit beside Douglas on the sofa.
Greymoor glanced at his wife before he spoke. “Did you know the missing funds were loans Herbert made to Henry? We think Herbert might have suspected Henry’s patricidal tendencies, and yet feared Henry could engineer things such that blame might fall on Herbert as the one in line for the title.”
Worse and worse. “I did not know anything regarding Astrid’s funds until Herbert’s death. I can understand, though, why you would make the mistake of misreading Henry. To my everlasting sorrow, I read him no more accurately.”
Everlasting being the operative word, for how was a man to transcend scandal and heartache of this magnitude?
Greymoor’s expression became terrifyingly compassionate. “Henry told Astrid he had killed both your father and your brother.”
Douglas had to stand, had to move, had to do something to avoid the truth of Greymoor’s words.
“I can’t—” He wanted to say he couldn’t believe it. But the brutal, unbearable truth was that he could believe it. He had overheard Henry in that stable and slapped a weapon into Greymoor’s hands, then allowed the earl to court death by entering the barn first.
Douglas had been stunned and sickened, listening to his younger brother chatter blithely with Astrid about murder and worse. Through the long, cold night since, Douglas had done nothing but think of all the signs he’d missed, all the clues he’d ignored.
“I don’t know what to say.” He came to rest like a rudderless ship against the end of a long set of shelves. The smell of books came to him over the pleasant scent of the wood fire. What would prison smell like? What was the scent of complete social ruin, and did Douglas care either way?
The assemblage seemed to expect more words of him, and his fool mouth obliged. “I simply do not know what to say. I had suspicions Henry was up to no good when he didn’t stay put with Mother, and he didn’t tell me he was leaving Town. Details, such as motive and opportunity, began to fall together, so when I got word he’d taken a notion to travel through deep snow in this direction, I trailed him here. Then I found his horse at the bottom of the lane, shivering, in a sweat such as a decent animal ought never to be left… But about all this… I am at a loss for coherent speech.”
Greymoor resumed his place beside his wife, a cozy couple in an informal posture before the hearth. Thank God they, at least, were alive.
Greymoor took his wife’s hand and kissed her knuckles. “If you want my suggestion, Douglas, you say as little as possible. We will inform the magistrate Henry’s gun, damp from the snow, misfired while he was cleaning it out in the stables. The magistrate can be given to understand Henry was not coping well with his beloved older brother’s death, and might conclude we are putting about a polite fiction—unless you would prefer to tell the magistrate something else?”
Douglas heard the words and comprehended them. Across the room, Fairly was once again studying the view toward the stables, as if covering up attempted murder and suicide were all in a morning’s work. Douglas reviewed the words Greymoor had spoken, and found they held the same meaning, still, and yet his mind must continue to examine them.
“Come on, man,” Heathgate growled from his desk. “We need to decide this before the bloody magistrate comes bumbling up the drive.”
Fairly didn’t turn, but rather, drawled over his shoulder, “The bloody magistrate can bloody wait in the bloody guest parlor, swilling your finest gunpowder and chatting up the rather buxom maid. Astrid, my apologies for the language.”
Douglas paid attention to not a word of that exchange—though Fairly was being protective of him, and that was remarkable—because he’d found a name for what was being offered here: sanctuary.
A safe place, a place where one need not be always on guard. He didn’t want to trust it, but his defenses were in shambles, and he frankly lacked the strength of will to resist the lure.
“That plan should suffice,” he told Greymoor, his voice shaking a bit. “What of my moth
er?”
“Mothers,” said Greymoor with a glance at his wife’s belly, “are always a complication. I see no need to provide the dowager Lady Amery any details at variance with what’s told to the magistrate.”
A look passed between members of the Alexander family, but Douglas was at a loss to interpret it. Pity, maybe? Dismay? His mental faculties had become like those of some mute beast, capable of observing human behaviors, but unable to make sense of them.
“All right,” Fairly said briskly, again facing the room. “If that’s settled, then what say I found the body? Went out to check on my mare, and alas, tragedy had struck.”
That turned the discussion to the story to be prepared for the magistrate. When that matter had been dispatched, the next order of business became Henry’s final arrangements.
“We have a family plot on the estate,” Douglas said, drifting back to the sofa. “I can deal with it there.”
Greymoor glanced at his wife again, an assessing glance the lady probably didn’t even notice. “I’d rather you held at least a memorial service in Town. Henry was well liked among the hunting set, and it would save both my wife and my brother the journey to your estate.”
The sense of sanctuary, of being protected, swelled again in Douglas’s chest. “You really need not make that effort.”
“Oh, yes, we really do,” Heathgate said. “The man we bury would have been uncle to Astrid’s child, and there will be no taint on the family honor if we can manage it.”
Douglas felt a faint inclination to smile at the fig leaf Heathgate had extended. This great effort, this show of solidarity and civility, wasn’t for him, it was for the child.
Of course it was.
“A memorial service, then,” Douglas said, “and a funeral at the estate. I will take my leave of you once the magistrate has finished, and you have”—he paused to look particularly at Astrid and Greymoor—“you all have my sincerest thanks.”
“One more thing,” Fairly said, pushing away from the French doors and taking a seat beside Douglas on the sofa. “Who shall have guardianship of Astrid’s child?”
Andrew: Lord of Despair (The Lonely Lords) Page 29
