If he could undo anything, it would be his marriage.
Why had he wanted Margaret? Had he really imagined ambition would bind them? He had wanted a beautiful hostess of impeccable breeding on his arm. She had wanted a salve for her wounded pride. But while they had dreamed together of the empire they might build, they had never dreamed of each other.
I never would have married you. So she had told him shortly after their first anniversary. Had you told me the whole of it, I never would have accepted you. And you knew it.
He had imagined that she would overcome her anger. She would come to see that he hadn’t deceived her, not really. He would make a far better husband than Fellowes could have done. She would realize this in time.
And in time, she had seemed to forgive him. He’d considered the matter finished.
Obviously she had not.
He walked to the window and pulled open the curtains. What had his housekeeper once told him? If the atmosphere was gloomy, one’s mood followed suit. Very true. But on this night a harvest moon, low and golden, gilded Mayfair’s rooftops, lulling him.
He remembered a similar moon. A spring night at St. Paul’s Cathedral, and himself drunk on a narrow victory in the Commons, a margin of fourteen votes. His father had still lived, then. He himself had been a mere MP, the entire future before him. He’d sprinted up the cramped stairs to the gallery high above, so high that the air was colder, the wind scouring. London sprawled beneath his feet, the ancient river and manicured squares, the dark maws of the parks, the distant slums lit by scattered fires.
He had never liked heights, but that night, he’d not been dizzy. The city had seemed like a private omen, a sacred charge upon him. He would protect and serve this place. He would spend his life striving to improve it. Here was his calling.
He wanted that back. All of it. His youth, the ferocity of his convictions. A time before all the mistakes. Somewhere out there tonight his brother lay sleeping, a stranger to him. Could that be undone? In one of their last conversations, Michael had accused him of giving up, of letting Margaret win. But he’d not spoken in anger. He’d seemed only . . . astonished.
It was true, Alastair supposed, that he had never been the weak one. From his earliest memories, his role had been to protect. You are the heir. Again and again, this message had been driven into him. Protect the family; do honor to your name. Even at a young age, he had taken his duty very seriously. Too seriously, perhaps, for a child. To see others suffer had caused him the sharpest anxiety—the sense of having failed, somehow, to prevent it.
Chicks fallen from nests. Cats trapped in trees. The village idiot in Hasborotown, where his family had wintered. The local children had liked to pelt the man with stones. At eight, Alastair had taken them on, and won a blackened eye and chipped tooth before Nurse and Coachman had intervened.
At home, this protective urge had proved all the fiercer. What had he been to Michael? Never merely a brother. How much simpler that would have been. Perhaps had they only been brothers, Michael would have found it in his heart to forgive Alastair for the madness of last spring. Brothers quarreled—and then they forgave each other. That was the natural way of it.
But Michael had never viewed him with the casual regard of a sibling. How could he? Alastair’s earliest memory was of Michael’s head tucked into the lee of his arm, Michael’s tears soaking his shirtfront. It had never been their mother to whom Michael ran for comfort—even if he spoke of her now as though she’d been a saint. She had been too busy waging combat against their father to coddle her sons.
No wonder Michael loathed him. To be failed by a brother was one thing. To be failed by one whom you counted a hero—well, that was a bitter thing indeed.
Almost as bitter as being failed by yourself.
He knew he would not be able to sleep now. The view could no longer soothe him. He left his room, walking swiftly down the stairs, past the snoring night porter, for the distractions of the library.
Inside, a single lamp was burning. Its dim light illuminated—he felt a strong premonition, a sense of inevitability—his housekeeper curled up on the sofa, a billowing white dressing gown bunched over her feet. As she pored over a book, she tickled her mouth with the ends of her long red plait.
He stood there a moment, gripped by conflicting urges. A housekeeper should not be making use of her master’s library. She should not wander barefooted in her nightclothes. She should not look so young, so untouched, so solid despite her slimness, so composed despite her undress.
He had invited this temerity, of course. Hell, he had hoped for it. If he could have stolen her self-sufficiency, her fierce sense of direction, by laying his hands on her, he would have done it in a moment. He had never felt more of an ass than when viewing himself through her eyes—the eyes of a woman who had been turned out upon the world at the tender age of seventeen, and had made do.
Was he really less courageous than a would-be maid?
“Good evening,” he said.
She flinched violently, then snapped the book shut and yanked her gown over her toes. “Goodness,” she said. “I didn’t think . . .”
When she rose, the light was strong enough, or the robe thin enough, or his appetites imaginative enough, to discern the contours of her body: the slimness of her waist; the curve of her hips; the fecund thickness of her thighs, which tapered neatly into square knees and rounded calves.
He did not admire her simply for her courage.
She took a step toward him—or rather, toward the door. She intended to leave. She felt the way his gaze devoured her. She knew where his interests lay.
He should let her go. But she had started this, somehow. Until she had opened the curtains and disrupted his solitude, he had been content to stay lost. Did he blame her for it? Or was this anger a product of indebtedness? He had never wanted to owe anyone anything. “What are you doing here?” he said.
She came to a stop just out of reach. Very wise. She had called herself tall, as though it was a mere matter of height, rather than abundance. So many more inches to her, so much more skin, white, smooth. He’d learned Margaret too easily, and never learned her at all. He would not make that mistake again. The next time, he would not leave the bed until he had mastered the woman in it. He would learn that trick, no matter how much study it took.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she said. Her voice sounded strange, unusually rough.
He reached for the light. For months, he had lacked any clear sense of his own motives. But clarity was coming back to him, bit by bit. If he decided to keep the lights low now, it was simply to blur this scene, and what he intended to do here.
The dim, rising glow showed tears on her face.
He felt disoriented, as though the room had swum around him. Crying? Why? “Are you well?”
She dashed her wrist across her eyes, a furtive and embarrassed gesture. “Yes. Of course. Forgive me—I shouldn’t have come in here.” She glanced beyond him. By the way she shifted her weight, he knew that she was contemplating a dash for the door.
He should let her go. He did not like the sight of her upset. It squared with nothing he knew of her. But her distress should not concern him. He would let her go.
“Take a seat,” he said instead.
She obeyed with obvious reluctance, choosing the wing chair nearest the door. He picked up the book she’d abandoned on the sofa. The Tale of the Midnight Voyager, he read from the spine.
She grimaced. “A piece of rubbish. It—” And then she appeared to recall whose library this was, and reddened.
“Would you like another?” He browsed the shelf. Augustine seemed too weighty, though the saint’s prayer held a sudden interest for him: Grant me chastity, O God, but not yet. “Austen, perhaps?” Always a favorite with the ladies.
Her reply was hesitant. “Oh, I . . . didn’t see her books there. Yes, please.”
He pulled out two titles and offered her the choice. She took Pride and Prejudice and then sa
t staring at the cover, an air of bewilderment about her, as if she did not know what to do with it.
He carried the other volume to the sofa, opening it pointedly. “Do read, Mrs. Johnson,” he said.
No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine. Her situation in life, the character of her father and mother, her own person and disposition, were all equally against her . . .
At last, he heard the whisper of a turned page. Leather creaked as she settled into the chair.
He eased back against his own cushions. It was a forgotten luxury to share the silence with someone. He could hear, if he listened for it, the soft rhythm of her breathing. The small noises, the whisper of cotton, as she shifted again.
“You’re really going to read Northanger Abbey?”
He glanced up, found her gawking. “That surprises you?”
She went pink. “No, of course not.” Then she shut her book and rose. The flutter of her robe provided a brief glimpse of her ankles, sufficient to burn them into his mind completely. They looked all the better without stockings: trim, pale as snow. “If I may borrow this—”
“Or you may read it here,” he said. “Unless you fear an impropriety.”
She bit her lip. Looked between chair and door. “Should I fear it?”
He smiled. A fair question, but her boldness never failed to surprise him. “Not tonight.” Not when she’d been crying.
Hesitantly she sat again. He did not miss the way she ran a quick, furtive hand over her hem, to make sure no hint of ankle remained visible. What a pity. If one must have a young housekeeper, let her be reckless with her hemlines.
“I suppose Miss Austen is not typical masculine fare,” he said. “I’ll confess I probably would have chosen a different book for manlier company. Something in Latin.”
She fought against her smile and lost. “How fortunate for you that I’m not manly.”
“My thought precisely.”
Her smile faded. She looked down to her book.
He had an inkling of his own villainy then—a flash, as from the headlamp of a passing train, briefly illuminating his motives. Her tears did not matter, after all.
Where was the regret, the revulsion, which that thought should inspire? He could not locate it. She sat not five feet away, her flush creeping steadily down her throat, soon to stain the smooth wings of her collarbones. The robe bared tantalizing inches of her throat and chest that wool normally disguised, alabaster, so pale that he could see the delicate tracery of veins that surely must slip farther down, beneath the neckline of her robe, all the way to her breast. To her nipples. God, but he would taste them.
She cleared her throat. “What do you like about her novels?” Her question sounded stiff, full of forced courtesy. She had noticed his stare, and meant to draw his attention back to more proper pursuits.
“The world she paints.” He watched her thumb fret with a corner of her book, rubbing back and forth over the sharp point. He had no inkling what troubled her. It disturbed him. He had the outlines of her, and a sense of her inner mettle. But the details? Her childhood. Her origins. These large gaps in his knowledge suddenly felt wrong, strange, demanding of redress.
“What do you mean, the world?” she asked.
“The portraits of families. How well she paints them.”
Her thumb fell still. “They’re quite quarrelsome, on the whole.”
“Yes.” That was exactly what he liked about them. “Messy, sprawling, imperfect. But they love each other regardless.” He felt briefly surprised by himself, by this sentimental claptrap he was spouting. But she was watching him expectantly, so he shrugged and went on. “Even the loathsome sorts, like”—he nodded toward the book in her lap—“what is her name? The insufferable one, who runs off.”
“Lydia.”
“Lydia,” he agreed. His housekeeper’s half smile put him in mind of a Greek icon—a Sybil, perhaps. He could see her dispensing wisdom from some sacred cave, her long, pale face a light in the darkness, her round, deep eyes bracing a man for solemn predictions. Her hair was the color of copper, sacred metal; men would have made amulets from it in ancient times.
Bizarre, fanciful thought. Frowning at himself, he turned back to his book.
She spoke, hushed and hesitant. “I longed for such a family as a girl.”
He stared at the page. Late nights, sleepless nights, made some conversations too easy to have, and some thoughts too easy to entertain. But he did not want her friendship. He should not want her confidences.
Yet he replied. “As did I.” His family’s unhappy history was hardly a secret. “A larger family, perhaps. Or a warmer one.” Growing up in an echoing house where his parents rarely exchanged two civil words, he had recognized nothing of Austen’s domestic scenes. But even as a child, he’d felt them far superior to his own experience.
Her chair creaked. “It was siblings I wanted. I think it would have made a difference.”
“I have a brother. But a larger family . . .” He hesitated. Imagine it: he not the eldest, not the heir. Someone else to rely upon. “I would have liked that.”
“Perhaps you will create one. Have a dozen children of your own.”
“No.” The denial was hard and instinctive. Children would require marriage. Marriage would require that he trust his own judgment, which had been exposed as profoundly and irreparably corrupt. Never again. It was Michael’s job now to carry on the family line. He looked at her. “I will have no children.”
“Oh.” She turned the book around in her hands, a nervous fiddling gesture. “Well. Nor will I, I expect.”
What nonsense was this? “You’re still very young, Mrs. . . .” She was no missus, of course. “What is your Christian name?” The reference must have mentioned it, but he could not recall.
She blinked at him. “Olivia.”
It had a musical ring. A slight bite on the V. A name that encouraged one to take one’s lip in one’s teeth. Olivia. It suited her perfectly.
“Olivia,” he said. “Why should you think you won’t have a family?”
She met his eyes. “First I must have a home.”
For a brief, clear moment, he felt the stirring of his old skill, the ability to look at an opponent and divine his secret ambitions. Here was hers: a place of her own.
Or perhaps he recognized it because it had once been his ambition, as well. Oh, he’d known he would inherit houses to spare; but what he’d wanted was a place, distinct from his family’s legacy, wholly his own.
He did not think she meant a house, either. Otherwise, would not a girl such as this—clever, bold, enterprising—have found a husband for herself, in whatever bucolic little village had spawned her?
“Where are you from?” He had asked her that before. But now, in this strange hush, he knew he would have the answer.
It gladdened him to a strange degree that she did not hesitate before replying. “East Kent. My mother’s family lives on the coast, in a village called Shepwich, near Broadstairs.”
“A beautiful part of England.” He could envision her walking the seashore, the salt breeze lifting strands of her hair, her skin opalescent in the cool gray light. “Is that where you dream of your home?”
Her lashes dropped, veiling her eyes. She ran a finger down the page of her book. “I don’t know that I dream of a specific place.”
He’d been right. “What, then?”
She shrugged. “I suppose I want somewhere to . . . belong. To feel safe,” she said softly.
He considered her. It made sense that a girl forced to do for herself would long for stability, rootedness. Why had she not taken the quickest route to it? “Many women leave service for marriage.”
She looked up, meeting his eyes. “And many men remarry. What of it?”
He sucked in a breath. “Well. That was bold of you.” Why was he surprised?
Color came into her face. “It’s half past three. I am sitting in
dishabille with my employer. Etiquette does not address such situations.”
“Touché. Let me be equally blunt. You were weeping before. Why?”
Her jaw assumed a granite cast. “Surely a servant must be allowed some degree of privacy.”
He snorted. “I have never noticed you nursing a high regard for that concept. Indeed, given that I found you in my private library, our definitions of it seem to differ.”
Her brows flew up. “Given that you rarely leave your rooms, I could not have foreseen that I might interrupt you here!”
He rose, powered by a welter of emotions—chief among them amazement. “I think marriage might be the best thing for you. God knows you aren’t cut out for service. Had you been born a man, I would have recommended you to the bar.”
She gave him a look rife with disbelief, one that required no verbal translation: now he would judge her? “Your Grace—”
“Did one of the staff molest you? Is something awry below?”
She came to her feet. “I am well able to manage the staff. Nor would I weep over such passing trifles as disobedience from a servant!”
“Then what—”
“I will tell you if you answer me one question,” she said flatly.
It was no longer clear to him who was in control of this conversation. How absurd. He was not bound by her terms; in return for her answer, she could demand the moon, and it would make no difference to him. “Very well, then, answer me: why were you crying?”
“Because I am not the person I hoped to be. And I dislike myself for it.”
That told him nothing. “What do you mean? Who had you hoped to be?”
“Someone better. Someone who abided by her ideals.”
Christ. Blackly amused, he turned away from her toward the bookshelves. “Then we both were drawn here by the same mood. But I assure you, Mrs. Johnson, you will overcome your disappointment.”
“As you have?”
Fool Me Twice Page 16
