Deceived

by Nicola Cornick

  “Would you care to go riding with me this morning?” The words surprised him almost as much as they seemed to surprise Isabella. He was not sure what had prompted them, beyond a desperate urge to put matters right before anything else went wrong between them.

  Isabella looked up and the color came into her face. She looked shyly pleased. Marcus felt a brute. He knew that he was punishing her for his own lack of tolerance and he struggled to find a way around it.

  He forced a smile. “We could ride up the path to Kinvara cliffs. You always enjoyed the view from there.”

  For all his effort, the words came out stilted. Isabella did not miss it. The happy expression in her eyes faded a little as she nodded.

  “I would like that. I will meet you at the stables in twenty minutes.”

  And that was that. Marcus drained his coffee cup and reflected bitterly on how smoothly and superficially life could run without any kind of real conversation between the two of them. No doubt he would have plenty more time to observe that in future.

  Down in the stables, they were at least able to mask the atmosphere of strain between them by making a fuss of the horses. They rode straight out of the yard, up the track to the downs and out onto the top of the cliffs. Once again there was silence between them as the horses picked their way slowly across the springy turf. Marcus knew that Isabella was waiting to see if he would either broach the subject of their conversation last night, or indicate that it was to be ignored forever. He felt angry. He felt exasperated, equally with himself as with her. Yet what could he say? I resent the fact that you married Ernest Di Cassilis and even more do I resent the fact that you slept with Heinrich Von Trier and I am even furious at the thought of you flirting with all those other men who use your name with such abandon. His lips tightened. It should not be like this.

  Isabella’s face beneath the riding hat was serious and she did not look at him. The strain between them intensified until Marcus felt it snap into a mixture of frustration and rage that had to have some outlet.

  “I will race you to the chapel,” he said.

  Her head came up, her eyes suddenly bright. She saw the angry challenge in his eyes and understood without need of words exactly what he was thinking. Without a word she dug her heels into Aster’s flanks and gave the horse her head, and Marcus was left watching her flying figure galloping away.

  Marcus turned Achilles to follow, urging every ounce of anger and bitterness and mistrust from his body as they thundered across the heather and turf. For a long, breathless time, there was nothing but the thud of the horses’ hooves on the grass, the rush of fresh air in his face, a strange exhilaration in his heart and the blur of color that was Isabella still outrunning him.

  She was only a few yards ahead of him now and the stone wall that encircled the chapel and marked the end of the race was rushing toward them. Isabella reined Aster in so hard that the horse almost reared. She came to a grinding halt a few feet from the walls of the graveyard with Marcus slowing down beside her.

  “You won,” he said. “I thought I would catch you—” He broke off.

  Isabella was not looking at him. It seemed she had not even heard him. She was staring over the wall of the graveyard where a small procession of people straggled toward the door of the squat chapel, carrying a tiny wooden coffin. Isabella made a slight sound and pressed her hands to her mouth. She grabbed Aster’s reins fiercely, turned the horse, and was away into the trees on the edge of the ridge before Marcus could even move.

  Marcus stared as the door of the church closed behind the cortege. A child’s funeral.

  He knew nothing of children. He had wanted a family with India in the conventional sense of securing the inheritance, but his feelings had gone no deeper than that. He had no concept of loving a child and losing it and the destruction that that could wreak in a life. But he had imagination.

  He thought about how Isabella might feel on seeing such a thing and it felt as though his stomach had dropped and the bottom had fallen out of his world. He kicked Achilles to a gallop. He had no idea where Isabella had gone or even if she would stop, but he had to find her.

  In the end it was not difficult. He found her in a sodden heap within the ruins of the old beacon tower on the edge of the cliff. Aster was peaceably cropping the grass outside. Isabella had not tried to hide. She had simply taken refuge. Marcus had wanted to ask her how she felt but when he saw her face, he realized that there was no need to speak. Silently he gathered her into his arms and held her until the sobs that racked her had ceased and she rested her head against his shoulder. She had turned her face into his chest without thought or hesitation and it humbled him that in her grief she would entrust herself to him without question. He smoothed the hair away from her hot cheeks with gentle fingers, feeling her tears wet against his skin.

  “The child,” she said brokenly, and he gathered her closer, as if holding her so tightly could banish the pain inside her.

  “I am sorry,” he said. “I wish I could understand.”

  She shook her head and burrowed closer to him. “I do not want to lose you, Marcus,” she said. “I have lost so much and been so hurt. I could not bear for it to happen again.”

  Marcus pressed his lips to her hair. “It will not,” he said.

  And silently he felt the anger and the grief and the jealousy inside him melt as he realized that she was his now in all the ways that mattered—and that she always had been.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  IT WAS FORTUNATE THAT ASTER knew the way back down to the stables since Isabella refused to let Marcus lead her down the cliff path but she was equally incapable of doing more than sit on the horse like a sack of potatoes. She knew now why she never normally cried. She felt dreadful—her nose was at least two sizes larger and felt like a beacon; her cheeks radiated heat and she was certain that she looked at least as bad on the outside as she felt on the inside. It was fortunate that Marcus had not tried to kiss her, but for one tender touch of his lips to her forehead. Poor man, no doubt he would not want to do more anyway. Anyone who envisaged that a passionate physical reconciliation would follow so emotional a moment was fair and far out.

  Her poor opinion of her appearance was reinforced when they entered the hall at Salterton to find Pen and Alistair already there. Pen, with her customary openness and staggering lack of tact, took one look at Isabella’s face and exclaimed, “Bella, you look dreadful! What on earth can have happened?”

  “Perhaps you could show me the library, Miss Standish,” Alistair intervened, catching Marcus’s eye. “I understand that your aunt had a remarkable collection of the work of the late seventeenth-century poets?”

  “Oh, she did,” Pen said, “but they are dreadful. I can never read more than a couple of cantos.” She looked back over her shoulder at Isabella as Alistair steered her toward the library door. “Are you sure that you will be all right, Bella? I hope it is not Marcus who has upset you so. He would be a brute to do that.”

  Isabella heard Marcus sigh, more with resignation than anything else.

  “I am perfectly well, Pen,” she said. “Something upset me, that is all. It has nothing to do with Marcus.”

  Pen gave her brother-in-law a suspicious look. “I hope not,” she said darkly. “Yes, Mr. Cantrell, I am coming!” She gave in to Alistair’s importuning gestures and preceded him through the library door.

  “Poor Alistair,” Marcus remarked. “He detests late seventeenth-century poetry.”

  “That is something else that he and Pen have in common, then,” Isabella said. She caught sight of her appearance in the pier glass and shuddered. There were sprigs of heather caught in her hair and bracken stuck to her riding outfit. Her nose was, as suspected, red and shiny, and her eyes were piggy and tiny.

  “I think I shall go up and rest,” she said faintly.

  “A good idea,” Marcus agreed. “I will escort you.”

  “There is no need,” Isabella said. “I can manage very well on
my own.”

  Marcus looked at her and smiled slightly. She could have slapped him because she knew he was laughing at her appearance, but that gleam of intimate amusement in his eyes made her feel happier than she had imagined she ever could be. Something had happened between them, wordless but all the more powerful for that. It had washed away the bitterness and anger and misery of the previous night and left them able to start afresh.

  “And to think,” Marcus said conversationally, his eyes meeting hers in the mirror, “that I believed you could never appear ugly!”

  “Marcus!”

  The indignant word had barely left her lips when Marcus swooped on her and kissed her insistently, not stopping until he had drawn a response from her. Isabella clutched the banister for support, breathing hard.

  “Oh! You—”

  He kissed her again, rough but tender, parting her lips to the relentless demand of his tongue. Isabella felt her legs weaken. She let go of the banister and held on to Marcus instead.

  There was a clatter behind them and they pulled apart to see one of the housemaids, her cleaning irons tumbled on the floor, staring at them with excitement and mortification.

  “There is no privacy in this house,” Marcus grumbled. He kissed her cheek. “I think you should rest, sweetheart. Will you be quite well? There is something that I must do, but I shall be up to see you shortly.”

  Isabella squeezed his hand briefly. She realized that she did feel exhausted but very light of heart. Marcus kissed her lips again briefly, and she made her way slowly upstairs, falling asleep as soon as she had laid her head on the pillow.

  She woke when the door opened to admit her sister, carrying a tray of tea and biscuits.

  “Marcus said that you would probably require some refreshment,” Pen said cheerfully. “I only just managed to stop him ordering you soup and a thin gruel.”

  Isabella laughed. She sat up, pushing the tangled hair back from her face, peered at her face in the mirror above the basin and then decided not to bother.

  “Oh dear, I suppose I look a fright.”

  “You do rather,” Pen agreed blithely, “although you have more color than before. What happened, Bella? Marcus said I was not to tease you with questions, but I need to know you are all right.”

  “I am quite well now,” Isabella said.

  “But you looked as though you had been crying!” Pen looked quite distressed herself. “You never cry, Bella!”

  “Not normally,” Isabella agreed, “but this was rather exceptional. We saw the funeral of a child whilst we were out riding.”

  “Oh, Bella!” Pen’s face puckered. She grabbed her sister’s hand.

  “I am quite well,” Isabella repeated, afraid that Pen was about to cry in sympathy. “It was a long time ago.”

  Pen looked distressed. “I know, but I have sometimes wondered…. They say you never wished for more children, Bella.”

  “No.” Isabella rubbed her eyes. “It is true that I do not want children. The risk, the danger of losing everything again is too great.” She turned away and studied the pattern on the bed hangings with fierce concentration to keep the tears at bay. What she said was true, and yet the real conflict for her arose from the fact that a part of her did want Marcus’s child and she could not understand why. She felt torn.

  “I fear I am making a shocking mull of things at the moment, Pen,” she said despondently. “I swore I would never marry again, least of all for love, yet I find myself falling more in love with Marcus every day. I know he wants children of his own—” she gulped “—but the idea fills me with abject fear.” She clutched Pen’s hands tighter. “I knew it was a mistake not to insist on an annulment or a legal separation in the beginning.”

  “Too late now,” Pen said. “You and Marcus are meant to be together, Bella. Have faith.” She sighed and sat back a little. “When you arrived back looking so upset I was afraid that it had something to do with India,” she confessed, adding with unwonted fierceness, “I know that Salterton was her home but the way this house is stuffed full of her belongings seems a little unhealthy to me!”

  Isabella felt a little shocked. It was true that she had noticed the very same thing herself but in the week that she had been in Salterton she had had no thought of changing things. She knew that she did not wish to broach the subject with Marcus. It would be like putting weight on a broken ankle and deliberately inducing pain. And now, when finally matters were beginning to improve between them, raising the ghost of India was the last thing she wanted to do.

  “I would go through this house removing all the pictures of her and those silly little figurines that she collected,” Pen was continuing. “Do you know, Bella, that Marcus never cleared her bedchamber after she died? Everything was left exactly as it had been during her life. Mrs. Lawton told me. It was only when there was the fire at Salterton Cottage that Marcus had all India’s effects packed away in trunks and stored in the attic here.”

  “Pen,” Isabella said reprovingly. “You have been gossiping.”

  “Well.” Pen looked mulish. “It is like being haunted.”

  “I feel a little like that myself,” Isabella admitted. “It is as though India is always present.” She sighed. “But I cannot supplant her. She was Marcus’s first wife, after all.”

  Pen stared. “If you think that Marcus had half an ounce of feeling for India compared with the way he feels about you, Bella, then you are fair and far out! Why, he never cared tuppence for her!”

  “Then why keep all her possessions?” Isabella asked. “Why leave her room untouched? Why fill this house with things that must remind him of her? That argues an uncommon devotion. Besides—” her shoulders slumped “—I have spoken to Marcus of India. I know just how much he cared for her.”

  Pen looked cross. “Well, I did not like her much. She was sly.”

  “Pen!”

  Pen flushed. She poured the tea, then sat down on the edge of the bed, cup in hand.

  “I suppose I did not know her well, being younger than the two of you. I expect that you remember her better than I.”

  “I do not recall her very well,” Isabella said. “All I remember is a thin slip of a girl with a pale face and huge blue eyes. We never spoke intimately. She was always quiet.”

  Pen was frowning. She picked up a second biscuit, completely forgetting to offer them to her sister, and bit into it absentmindedly.

  “It is odd that you remember her as thin, Bella, for I have quite a different recollection of India. The second to last time we were all here for the summer—not the time before you—” Pen hesitated “—before you married Ernest, but the year before that—I remember that India was considerably fatter. The two of you must have been about sixteen then and there was nothing of the thin slip about her at all.”

  Isabella nodded. “Oh yes, I remember. Girlhood plumpness.”

  “She was thin again when we came back to Salterton without you the following year,” Pen said, reaching for the biscuit plate again. “Did not Aunt Jane take her away somewhere in the intervening time? Her health was supposed to be poor, I recall, yet she came back even more thin and sad and quiet, so it cannot have done her any good.”

  “Was she not always rather withdrawn, though?” Isabella said.

  “Oh yes, but in a different way,” Pen said. “When we came down here in oh-four she was excited quiet, as though she was hugging a secret. The following year she was sad and quiet. I wondered what had happened to her.”

  “You were a most observant child,” Isabella said. “I noticed nothing different about her.”

  To her surprise, Pen blushed. “I did tend to watch people,” she muttered. “I knew that India had a beau that first year.”

  Isabella looked up sharply, remembering Martha Otter’s words about India’s suitor being turned away.

  “Did you meet him?”

  “No, I…” Pen looked awkward. “I know she used to meet him in secret, though. I saw them once in the garden
s together.”

  For a moment, Isabella wondered whether Pen had been confused and it was in fact her trysts with Marcus that her young sister had unwittingly spied upon. Then Pen said, “He was a soldier, I think. Very goodlooking, with an arrogant smile, laughing, confident, a swagger in his step.” For once, Pen sounded quite dreamy. “I wonder what happened to him.”

  “His suit was rejected by Uncle John,” Isabella said. She dredged up a memory that had seemed quite insignificant at the time. “I remember him now. He came to the Assembly Rooms one night in my final season here, and tried to approach India. Uncle John called him a blackguard and had him ejected. It was most embarrassing.”

  She frowned, trying to remember more of the incident. She had not regarded it much at the time, for she had been dancing with Marcus and had been quite lost in the delicious and forbidden sensations created by his physical proximity. There had been a commotion at the other end of the ballroom, over by the door. Lord John Southern had been shouting—a remarkable departure from good manners—and the object of his ire had been a young army officer who was struggling against the restraining grip of the master of ceremonies and looking desperately through the horrified guests for a glimpse of India.

  “How strange,” she said slowly. “I had forgotten all about it.”

  “What happened?” Pen asked curiously.

  “Not a great deal,” Isabella said. “India burst into tears, of course, and had to come home, and the rest of us carried on as though nothing had happened.”

  “And the young man?” Pen asked.

  “I never saw him again,” Isabella said. She paused, for something was troubling her. Had she seen India’s suitor again? Something recently had struck a chord of memory…The recollection did not come back to her but the elusive thought stayed at the back of her mind and did not quite go away.