No Man's Mistress

by Mary Balogh

  “I think,” he said, “that I have done one worthwhile thing in my adult life.”

  “Yes. You gave Pinewood back to me before you knew it was mine anyway,” she said. “I will always remember you kindly for that.”

  “Kirby won't be troubling you again,” he said.

  “No.” He saw her shudder.

  “I would have killed him for you, Viola,” he said quietly. “I would like to have killed him.”

  “Oh, no.” She was on her feet then and closing the distance between them. She set one hand on his sleeve and looked earnestly into his face. “Don't get into any trouble on my behalf, Ferdinand. He has no more power over me.”

  He covered her hand on his arm with his own. “Oh, I did not say that he has gone unpunished,” he said.

  She looked at his hand as he spoke, and then she looked down at the other, her eyes widening. “Oh, Ferdinand, what have you done?”

  “I have punished him,” he said. “No punishment could be adequate for what he has done to you, not even death. But I believe it will be several days before he can get up off his bed. Once he is up, he will be taking himself beyond these shores for the rest of his life.”

  She raised his hand and set her cheek gently against his raw knuckles. “How dreadful of me to feel glad,” she said. “But I do. Thank you. But I hope no one else hears of this, especially the Duke of Tresham. You should not be seen to have any involvement with me. But no matter. I will leave for home tomorrow, and no one will ever hear from me again. I did not want to see you today, Ferdinand, but I am glad after all that you caught up to me in time. I will have this as a last memory of you.”

  “Actually, Tresham does know,” he said. “He is the one who brought Kirby to me in the park.”

  She looked at him in horror. “He knows? In the park?”

  “With fifty or so other chosen witnesses,” he told her. “By now there is probably no one in the ton who does not know.”

  She stepped back from him, her face suddenly pale. Then she tried to rush past him to the door, but he caught her arm and held her.

  “By now,” he said, “everyone knows of your courage and selfless devotion to your family when you were little more than a girl. Everyone knows that the villain who preyed upon you has been publicly humiliated and punished. Everyone knows that the powerful and influential Dudleys, led by the Duke of Tresham himself, have taken your part and devoted themselves to restoring your good name and celebrating your heroism. And everyone knows that Lord Ferdinand Dudley has appointed himself your champion.”

  “How could you?” she cried. “How could you? To have exposed me to such public…” She could not seem to think of the right word. Her eyes flashed at him.

  “Do you not see that it is the only way?” he asked her gently. “Tresham is going to invite the ton to a reception at Dudley House. He wants you to be the guest of honor. Everyone will come, Viola. They will all be agog to catch a glimpse of you. But it is our version of you they will come to see. It is the real Viola Thornhill they will meet. You will become all the rage.”

  “I don't want to be all the rage,” she snapped at him. “Ferdinand, I was a courtesan for four years. I am illegitimate. I—”

  “Bamber hopes to escort you to the reception and present you to the ton as his half-sister,” he said.

  “What?” She stared at him. “What?”

  “He was in the park too,” he told her.

  “So were a dozen or more of my former clients, I daresay.” She glared indignantly at him.

  “Yes.” He drew a slow breath and tested the idea in his mind. It really did not matter to him. “But not one of them will reveal the fact by so much as a flicker of an eyelash, Viola. You will be the acknowledged half-sister of the Earl of Bamber. You will be the protégée of the Duke and Duchess of Tresham. You will be my lady—or so I hope.”

  He could see the moment at which anger drained out of her and a certain wistfulness took its place, parting her lips and making her eyes more luminous.

  “Ferdinand,” she said softly, “it cannot be, my dear. You must not do this.” Tears welled into her eyes.

  He possessed himself of both her hands. What he was about to do might look ridiculous, but he felt an overwhelming need to pay homage to her courage and loyalty and unfailing love—to her superiority over him. He went down on one knee and set his forehead against the backs of her hands.

  “My love,” he said. “Do me the honor of marrying me. If you truly do not love me, I will understand. I will send you home to Pinewood in my own carriage the day after the reception. But I love you. I'll always love you. It is my dream that you will marry me and that we will go home to Pinewood together and raise a family there.”

  She drew her hands free of his, and he waited for rejection. But then he felt them come to rest lightly on his head, like a benediction.

  “Ferdinand,” she said. “Oh, my dear love.”

  He was on his feet then and scooping her up into his arms with a whoop that had her laughing. He twirled her about and carried her to the chair by the fireplace, where he sat with her cradled in his arms, her head nestled in the warm hollow between his neck and shoulder.

  “Of course,” he said, “everyone will be expecting our betrothal announcement at Tresham's reception. Angie will want to insist upon a grand wedding in St. George's and a lavish breakfast for five hundred or so afterward. All of it preceded the night before by a great ball.”

  “Oh, no,” she said, real horror in her voice.

  “Ghastly thought, is it not?” he agreed. “She will be even more eager this time because Tresham foiled all her grandiose plans by marrying Jane quietly by special license.”

  “Can we marry quietly?” she begged him. “At Trellick, perhaps?”

  He chuckled. “You don't know my sister,” he said, “though I daresay you soon will.”

  “Ferdinand.” She tipped back her head and gazed up at him. “Are you sure? Are you quite, quite—”

  There was only one way to deal with such foolishness. He covered her mouth with his own and silenced her. After a few moments her arm crept up about his neck and she sighed her surrender.

  Ferdinand found himself thinking all sorts of mindless drivel—about being surely the happiest man in the world, for example.

  25

  Viola was seated in the Earl of Bamber's opulent town carriage, her mother beside her, Y the earl opposite. They were on their way to Dudley House.

  It had been a turbulent week. The Duchess of Tresham had called at the White Horse Inn the day after Ferdinand stopped Viola from leaving on the stagecoach. She had issued a formal invitation to Viola and her mother to attend the reception she and her husband were giving. She had stayed for twenty minutes and had shown an interest in Claire, who was not working downstairs at the time. Her grace had mentioned that her godmother, Lady Webb, was considering employing a companion to live with her—she spent half the year in London and the other half in Bath. The duchess had wondered if Claire would be interested in the position.

  The day after, Claire had gone with their mother, by invitation, to call upon Lady Webb, and the two had appeared delighted with each other. Claire was to begin her new position in two weeks' time and had looked during the past few days as if she were walking on air.

  “This is very kind of you, my lord,” Viola's mother said to the earl.

  He was looking stout and florid and very fine indeed in his evening clothes. He must be eight or nine years her senior, Viola guessed. She had not asked her mother how it had come about that she had progressed from being the boy's governess to becoming his father's mistress. That was her mother's private, secret life.

  “Not at all, ma'am,” he said, stiffly inclining his head.

  He too had called on them during the week. His manner to his former governess had been distant, but not discourteous. With Viola herself he had been scrupulously polite. He had requested the honor of escorting both ladies to the Duke of Tresham's rec
eption. Viola wondered now why he was doing it. Her mother had been his father's mistress, and she was the offspring of that illicit union. But he answered her question even as she thought it.

  “M'father wanted Miss Thornhill to be recognized as a lady,” he said. “I will have no part in thwarting his wishes.”

  “She is a lady,” Viola's mother said. “My father…”

  But Viola was not listening. She was nervous. Yes, of course she was. It would be pointless to deny it. Even without her scarlet past—and even if she had been Clarence Wilding's legitimate daughter—she could never have hoped to be on her way to a ton party. Although both he and her mother were of the gentry class, they were not high enough on the social scale to mingle with the beau monde.

  But she refused to give in to her nerves. She had decided to trust Ferdinand and his family to know what they were doing. In a sense, it was a relief to have everything out in the open. To have no more secrets. No more hidden fears. And no more doubts.

  She was wearing a white satin gown with a delicately scalloped hem and short train but with no other adornment. She had been to several tedious fittings during the week with one of Bond Street's most prestigious dressmakers. The gown, as well as the silver slippers and gloves and fan she had chosen to wear with it, had been exorbitantly costly, but the loan she had asked of Uncle Wesley until she could send the money from Pinewood had turned into a gift. Her mother had told him everything and he had been angry with Viola—but in a tearful, hugging sort of way. It had hurt him that she had borne the burden of her stepfather's debts instead of going to him.

  She had scarcely seen Ferdinand all week. He had called once formally to ask her mother's and her uncle's permission to marry her, even though she was twenty-five years old and he need not have asked at all. She had seen him only once—briefly—since then. Her hands closed firmly about her fan, and she smiled.

  Tomorrow she was going home.

  The carriage turned into Grosvenor Square and rolled to a halt before the doors of Dudley House.

  She looked like Miss Thornhill of Pinewood Manor. That was Ferdinand's thought as he watched her through much of the evening. She was the picture of understated elegance in her deceptively simple white gown. She wore her hair in the familiar braids, but they were looped and coiled in an intricate design. She bore herself with regal grace. If she was nervous—and she undoubtedly was—she did not show it.

  He kept his distance. Everyone at Dudley House—and the drawing room and the adjoining salons beyond it were thronged with the crème de la crème of society-would know what he had done on her behalf in Hyde Park the week before. He would not have it said, then, that she had to cling to him tonight, that without him she could not have done what she clearly was doing quite magnificently.

  She was mingling with the ton. She was conversing with ladies whom one might expect under other circumstances to avert their faces from her and gather their skirts about them lest they rub against her. She was talking and laughing with gentlemen who had known her in her other, now-dead persona.

  And she was doing it alone.

  It was true that Bamber, distinguishing himself by his good manners as he had perhaps never done before, hovered at her elbow for the first hour until he had personally introduced her to every guest as his half-sister. And Jane, Angie, Tresham, and even Heyward made sure that one of them was always in any group that gathered about her.

  But she behaved like Miss Thornhill of Pinewood. However she was feeling inside, she appeared to be perfectly at her ease.

  Ferdinand watched her, at first with some anxiety, then with pride.

  He had not been at all sure that day he had stopped her from leaving London that she would agree to the daring scheme he and Tresham had conceived. Perhaps in her own way, he thought, Viola was as drawn to a difficult challenge as irresistibly as he ever was. Nothing had been more chancy than her appearance here tonight.

  But she had done it, and it had worked. Oh, he knew she had no wish to mingle with the ton after tonight. He knew she longed to go home to Pinewood and to resume her life there. But she had done this first, and now it would be known that society had accepted her and she could return anytime she wished.

  “Well, Ferdie.” His sister had come up beside him without his noticing. “I can see now why she was always so celebrated for her beauty. If I were a few years younger and still on the marriage mart, I would doubtless hate her.” She laughed merrily. “Heyward said you were mad, you and Tresh, and that you could never pull this off. But you have, as I told him you would—and of course Heyward is pleased about it. He says he always knew that when you finally did fall in love, it would be with someone wildly ineligible, but that he was going to have to throw his support behind you because you are my brother.”

  “That is magnanimous of him.” He grinned.

  “Well, it is,” she agreed. “There is no higher stickler than Heyward, you know. I believe it is why I decided the first time I set eyes on him that I would marry him. He was so different from us.”

  It had always been a source of amusement to Ferdinand and his brother that their shatterbrained, chatterbox Angie and a dry old stick like Heyward were locked up tight in a love match.

  “Ferdie.” She set one gloved hand on his arm. “I simply must tell you, even though Heyward said I must not because it would be vulgar to talk about such a thing at a public event. Just you, though. I have already whispered it to Jane and Tresh. Ferdie, I am in an interesting condition. I saw a physician today and it is quite, quite certain. After six years.”

  Her eyes were swimming with tears, he saw when he looked down at her and set his hand warmly over hers.

  “Angie,” he said.

  “I hope,” she said. “Oh, I do hope I can present Heyward with an heir, though he says that he does not mind if it is a girl as long as both she and I come safely through the ordeal.”

  “Of course he will not mind,” Ferdinand said, raising her hand to his lips. “He loves you, after all.”

  “Yes.” She searched out her husband with her eyes and beamed at him while he looked back with an expression of pained resignation—he knew very well, of course, that she was spreading the embarrassing news of his impending fatherhood. “Yes, he does.”

  She chattered on.

  There was a formal supper later in the evening, during which Ferdinand sat with Mrs. Wilding and Lady Webb, who had taken Viola's mother under her wing during most of the evening. Viola was at the opposite side of the room with Bamber and Angie and Heyward. But they were very aware of each other. Their eyes met halfway through the meal, and they smiled at each other—though it was more a smile of the eyes than of the face.

  I am so proud of you, his look said.

  I am so happy, hers replied.

  I love you.

  I love you.

  And then Tresham was touching his shoulder and bending his head to speak quietly.

  “You want the announcement made, then?” he asked. “And you still want me to make it?”

  “It is your house and reception,” Ferdinand said. “And you are the head of the family.”

  His brother squeezed his shoulder, straightened up, and cleared his throat. The Duke of Tresham never needed to do more than that to command the attention of a large number of people. The room was silent within moments.

  “I have an announcement to make,” his grace said. “I daresay most, if not all of you, have half guessed it.”

  There was a murmuring as all eyes moved between Ferdinand and Viola. His own were on her. She was flushed, her gaze lowered.

  “But only half,” Tresham continued. “Lord Ferdinand Dudley asked me several days ago if I would announce his betrothal to Miss Viola Thornhill this evening.”

  There was a swell of sound and a smattering of applause. Viola was biting her lower lip. Tresham held up one hand for quiet.

  “I prepared a suitable speech,” he said, “of congratulation to my brother, of sincere welcome to our fam
ily of my future sister-in-law. But we Dudleys can never behave ourselves as we ought, you know.”

  There was laughter.

  “My sister and my duchess were already planning a grand wedding at St. George's and a breakfast and ball,” Tresham continued. “It was to be the event of the Season.”

  “What do you mean by were and was, Tresh?” Angeline cried, her voice filled with sudden suspicion. “Ferdie has not—”

  “Yes, I am afraid he has,” Tresham said. “This morning I was informed an hour after the event that Ferdinand and Miss Thornhill were married by special license, his valet and her maid the only witnesses. Ladies and gentlemen, I proudly present to you my brother and sister-in-law, Lord and Lady Ferdinand Dudley.”

  Viola had found the courage to look up while the duke spoke. She gazed across the room at Ferdinand, handsome and elegant in his crisp black and white evening clothes, and so very, very dear.

  Her husband.

  How she had longed for him all day. But she had had the reception to prepare for, and he had had business to attend to so that he could be ready to leave with her for Pinewood tomorrow morning. And they had wanted no one to know except her mother and the duke, whom they had told after their brief, achingly beautiful wedding early in the morning.

  How she had longed all evening to go to him, to have him come to her. But she had insisted, and he had agreed, that this evening was something she must do for herself, in her own person. She would not hide behind anyone's coattails. The evening had been incredibly hard, but she had felt his powerful, comforting presence at every moment of it, and she had done it—for herself and for him. He had taken a great gamble, marrying her this morning before he knew for sure that the ton would not spurn her and turn its back on him.

  She gazed at him now across the room and rose to her feet as he came striding toward her, his dark eyes alight, one arm lifting as he drew close. She set her hand in his, and he raised it to his lips.