One Night for Love b-1

by Mary Balogh

  He was her father. She tested the idea in her mind without shying away from it. The Duke of Portfrey was her father. And Papa had always intended that she know it eventually. He and Mama had given her the locket to wear all her life, and Papa had always insisted that she must take his pack to an officer if he should die in battle. She did not know why he had kept the truth from her for so long or why he had not tried to contact the Duke of Portfrey. Oh, yes, she did. She could remember how her mama had doted on her, how her papa had acted as if the sun rose and set on her. They had found themselves unable to give her up and had doubtless found all sorts of good reasons for not doing so. Papa had intended to tell her when she reached adulthood. She was sure he must have intended that.

  She would never know for sure what his intentions or motives had been, Lily decided. But she did know two things. Papa had not intended to keep the truth a secret from her forever. And Papa had loved her.

  It was not, she thought suddenly, a bad thing to be the daughter of a duke and the granddaughter of a baron. She had dreamed of equality with Neville and had believed that perhaps she would achieve it in everything except birth and fortune.

  She smiled rather wanly.

  Elizabeth was dressed and in the breakfast room before Lily—an unusual occurrence. She got to her feet, took Lily's hands in hers, and kissed her on both cheeks before looking searchingly into her face.

  "Lily," she said, "how are you, my dear?"

  "Awake," Lily said. "Fully awake."

  "You will receive him this morning?" Elizabeth sounded rather anxious. "You need not if you do not feel quite ready to do so."

  "I will receive him," Lily said.

  He came an hour later, when they were sitting in the drawing room, working at their embroidery—or at least pretending to. He came striding into the room close on the butler's heels, made his bow, and then hovered close to the door as if he had suddenly lost all his confidence.

  "Gracious, Lyndon," Elizabeth said, hurrying toward him, "whatever happened?"

  "An unfortunate encounter with a door?" he said, phrasing the words as a question, as if asking if they would be willing to accept a patently ridiculous lie. His face was shiny with bruises. His left eye was bloodshot and purplish at the outer corner.

  "You have been fighting Mr. Dorsey," Lily said quietly.

  He came a few paces closer to her. "You have not been in grave danger from him for some time, Lily," he said. "Kilbourne, I gather, has had a close watch put on you, and I have had a close watch put on Dorsey. I knew it was he, you see, but did not have proof of it until last evening. He will not be bothering you ever again."

  Lily supposed that she had known last night why the duke and Neville left the party so early. But her mind had not been able to cope with the knowledge, or with anything else for that matter.

  "He is dead?" she asked.

  He inclined his head.

  "You killed him?"

  He hesitated. "I knocked him insensible," he said, "in a fist fight. Kilbourne and I had agreed with considerable regret that we could not reconcile it with our consciences to kill him in cold blood or even in a duel to the death, but we did agree that we would punish him severely before turning him over to a constable and a magistrate for trial. But we were careless. He snatched up a gun before he could be taken away and would have killed me if Kilbourne had not first shot him."

  Elizabeth had both hands to her mouth. Lily merely looked calmly into the duke's eyes and knew that she had heard everything that he was prepared to tell. She knew that although Mr. Dorsey had probably killed her mother and Mr. William Doyle, that although he had tried three separate times to kill her and had almost killed Neville, it might have been difficult to prove any one of those murders or attempted murders in a court of law. She was not sure if it was carelessness that had left a gun within Mr.

  Dorsey's reach. Perhaps they had wanted him to have that gun. Perhaps they had wanted him to try to use it so that there would be a perfectly good excuse to shoot him in self-defense.

  The duke himself would never say, of course. Neither would Neville. And she would never ask. She did not really wish to know.

  "I am glad he is dead," she said, almost shocked to realize that she spoke the truth. "Thank you."

  "And that is all we need say on the topic of Calvin Dorsey," he said. "You are safe, Lily. Free."

  She nodded.

  "Well," Elizabeth said briskly, "I am due to meet with my housekeeper. It is our day for going over the accounts. You will excuse me for half an hour, Lyndon? Lily?"

  Lily nodded and the duke bowed.

  He looked wary when he turned back from seeing Elizabeth out of the room, but Lily smiled at him.

  "Will you have a seat, your grace?" she asked.

  He took a chair quite close to hers and looked at her silently for several moments.

  "I will understand," he said at last, sounding as if he were delivering a well-rehearsed speech, "if you feel yourself unable to acknowledge the relationship, Lily. Kilbourne told me a good deal last night about Sergeant Thomas Doyle. I can understand your pride in him and your affection for him. But I beg you—please!—to allow me to settle a considerable portion of my fortune on you so that you may live in comfortable independence for the rest of your life. At the very least allow me to do that for you."

  "What would you wish to do," she asked him, "if I said I was willing to accept more than the very least?"

  He leaned back in his chair and drew a deep breath, looking at her consideringly as he did so. "I would acknowledge you publicly," he said. "I would take you home to Rutland Park in Warwickshire and spend every available minute of every day getting to know you and allowing you to get to know me. I would clothe you and deck you with jewels. I would encourage you to continue with your education. I would take you to Nuttall Grange in Leicestershire to meet your grandfather. I would… What is left? I would try in every way available to me to make up for the lost years." He smiled slowly. "And I would have you tell me every single thing you can remember about Thomas and Beatrice Doyle and your growing years. That is what I would wish to do, Lily."

  "You must do it, then, your grace," she said.

  They stared at each other for a long time, it seemed, before he got to his feet, came closer to her, and extended a hand for hers. She stood up, gave him her hand, and watched as he raised it to his lips.

  "Lily," he said. "Oh, my dear. My very, very dear."

  She withdrew her hand, set her arms about his waist, and rested her cheek against his shoulder. "He will always be my papa," she said. "But from this day on you will be my father. Shall I call you that? Father?"

  His arms were like iron bands about her. She was a little alarmed when she heard the first painful-sounding sob, but she closed her arms more tightly about him when he would have pulled away.

  "No, no," she said. "It is all right. It is quite all right."

  He did not weep for long. Men did not. She knew that from experience. They saw it as a sign of horribly embarrassing weakness, even if they had just watched a close friend smashed to a thousand pieces by a cannonball or had just had a limb sawn off by the surgeons—or had just discovered a daughter after almost twenty-one years. He drew away from her after a couple of minutes and moved off to the window, where he stood with his back to the room, blowing his nose in a large handkerchief.

  "I am so very sorry to have subjected you to that," he said. "It will not happen again. You will find me strong and dependable, I believe, Lily—a good provider and a good protector."

  "Yes, I know, Father," she said, smiling at his back.

  She heard him draw an inward breath and hold it for a few moments. "I could, I suppose," he said, "have remarried any time during the past twenty years. I could have had a nurseryful of children and been called that a thousand times and more before now. I believe, Lily, it has been worth waiting to hear it first from your lips."

  "When will we leave for Rutland Park?" she asked. "Is it a
large house? Will I like it… Father?"

  He turned to look at her. "As soon as possible," he said. "It is larger than Newbury Abbey. You will love it. It has been waiting for you all these years. We had better see if Elizabeth will come with you. Today is Thursday. Shall we say Monday?"

  Lily nodded.

  He smiled at her and strode to the bell pull. He told the servant who answered the summons to ask Lady Elizabeth to return to the drawing room at her convenience. Then they both sat down again and gazed at each other.

  It would be more accurate, Lily thought, to say that he was beaming at her. Despite the battered look of his face, he appeared very happy. She deliberately kept her own expression bright—not that it was all pretense. But a part of it was. She was stepping into the unknown again as she had done so many times, it seemed, during the past couple of years.

  She remembered traveling down to Newbury Abbey from London and hoping that the long journey was almost ended. She remembered seeing Neville for the first time in almost a year and a half and experiencing, despite the difficulty of the circumstances, a feeling of final homecoming.

  But she had not been home. And she still was not. She wondered if she ever would be. Would the time ever come when she would feel at last that she had arrived, that she could settle in peace to live out the rest of her life?

  Or was life always a journey along an unknown path?

  "Kilbourne," the duke said to her just before Elizabeth came back into the room, "asked me to inform you of his intention to call this afternoon, Lily—if you are willing to receive him."

  ***

  Killing another human being was not something one did with any relish, Neville thought during the night and the morning following the death of Calvin Dorsey. Certainly not in battle—one was too aware of the fact that the men one killed were no more evil or deserving of death than one was oneself. But not even when the man one killed was a murderer and had killed one's wife's mother and had tried on a number of occasions to kill her too. There had been a certain satisfaction, perhaps, in watching Dorsey take the bait of that carelessly abandoned pistol and in being given then little choice but to kill him—especially when Portfrey had won the argument about which of them was to punish Dorsey before he was turned over to the law. But certainly no relish.

  Was there pleasure in having discovered the truth about Lily's birth? In having learned that she outranked him? That he had nothing to offer her that she did not now have in overabudance herself? And was that how he had hoped to win Lily—with his position and his wealth and the hope that her own near destitution would force her back to him? Surely not. He wanted her to be his equal, to feel his equal. The fact that she had felt herself to be by far his inferior had wrecked any chance they might have had for happiness when she had come to Newbury.

  He should be rejoicing, then, in this turn of events. Why was he not? It was because of Lily herself, he concluded finally. Poor Lily had suffered so much turmoil in the past year and a half. How could she sustain the loss of her very roots? Would he find her all broken up when he called at Elizabeth's during the afternoon? Worse, would he find her still quite unlike her indomitable self, dazed and passive as she had been last evening?

  He approached Elizabeth's with a great deal of trepidation. He even found himself half hoping as he entered the house and asked if Miss Doyle would receive him that she would send down a refusal. But she did not. The butler showed him up to the drawing room. Both Lily and Elizabeth were there.

  "Neville," Elizabeth said, coming across the room toward him after he had made his bow and exchanged greetings with them. She kissed his cheek. "I will allow you a private word with Lily." And she left the room without further ado.

  Lily was not looking crushed—or dazed. Indeed, she looked remarkably vibrant in a fashionable sprigged muslin dress with her hair softly curling about her face.

  "You killed Mr. Dorsey," she said. "My father told me this morning. I am not sorry that he is dead though I have never before wished for anyone's death. But I am sorry you were forced to do it. I know it is not easy to kill."

  Yes, Lily would know that, having grown up with an army whose business it was to kill.

  But—my father?

  "This one," he said, "was almost easy."

  "We will say no more of it," she said firmly. She had risen from her chair and came across the room toward him. "Neville, I am going to go to Rutland Park on Monday with my father and Elizabeth. There is to be a notice in the papers tomorrow. I am going to spend some time with him, learning to be his daughter, letting him learn to be my father. I am going to see my grandfather and my mother's grave. I am going to… go."

  "Yes." His heart felt as if it somersaulted and then sank all the way to the soles of his boots—even as he told himself that he was glad for her.

  She half smiled at him. "I was Lily Doyle," she said. "Then I was Lily Wyatt—and then not. Now I am Lily Montague. I have to discover who I really am. I thought I was discovering the answer after I came here to London, but today it feels as far away as ever."

  "You are Lily." He tried to smile back at her.

  She nodded and her eyes brightened with tears.

  "How long?" he asked her.

  She shook her head.

  He could not press her on the point, he realized. She did not need one more burden to carry. And he knew the question to be unanswerable.

  He had begun to believe that there was a future for them after all. He had been on the brink of putting the matter to the test at Vauxhall. He hated to remember that night, which had started with such magical promise. Now he would have to wait an indefinite length of time again with no certainties to make the wait easy.

  He reached out both hands for hers, and she set her own in them.

  "You will like him, Lily," he said. "You will even love him, I daresay. He is a good man and he is your father. Go then and find yourself. And be happy. Promise me?"

  She was biting on her upper lip, he could see.

  He squeezed her hands and raised them one at a time to his lips. "I am not overfond of London," he said. "I shall be glad to return to Newbury for the summer. I daresay I will go tomorrow or the next day. Perhaps, if you think it appropriate, you will write me a letter there?"

  "I cannot… write well enough," she said.

  "But you will." He smiled at her. "And you will be able to read my reply too."

  "Will I?" she asked him. "Sometimes I wish—oh, how I wish I were Lily Doyle again and you were Major Lord Newbury and Papa…"

  "But we are not," he said sadly. "I want you to know something, though, Lily. Not so that you will have one more burden to shoulder, but so that you will know that some things are unchanged and unchangeable. I loved you when I married you. I love you today. I will love you with my dying breath. I have loved you and will love you during every moment between those time spans."

  "Oh. But it is not the right moment," she said, her eyes clouding with some emotion he was unable to enter into. Poor Lily. So much had happened to her recently and she had borne it all with dignity and integrity.

  "I will not prolong this visit," he told her. "I will take my leave, Lily. Make my excuses to Elizabeth?"

  She nodded.

  They clung to each other's hands for a few moments longer. But she was correct. It was not the right time. If she came back to him—when she came back to him—there must be no other need in her except to be with him for the rest of their lives.

  He withdrew his hands gently, keeping the smile in his eyes, and left her without another word.

  He was halfway back to Kilbourne House, striding unseeing along the streets, before he remembered that he had driven his curricle to Elizabeth's.

  PART V

  A Wedding

  Chapter 25

  Lily gazed eagerly from the carriage window, not even trying to appear properly genteel. The village of Upper Newbury looked so very familiar. There was the inn, where she had descended from the stagecoach, and
the steep lane leading down to the lower village. And there—

  "Oh, may the carriage be stopped?" she asked.

  The Duke of Portfrey, from his seat opposite, rapped on the front panel, and the carriage drew to an abrupt halt. Lily had the window down in a trice despite the coolness of the day and leaned her head through it.

  "Mrs. Fundy," she called. "How are you? And how are the children? Oh, the baby has grown."

  While the duke and Elizabeth exchanged glances of silent amusement, Mrs. Fundy, who had been gawking at the grand carriage with its ducal crest, smiled broadly, looked suddenly flustered, and bobbed a curtsy.

  "We are all very well, thank you, my lady," she said. "It is good to see you back again."

  "Oh, and it is good to be back again," Lily said. "I shall call on you one day if I may."

  She beamed at Mrs. Fundy while the carriage lurched into motion again. She was not coming home, she reminded herself. Newbury Abbey was not home. Oh, but she felt as if it were. She had come to love Rutland Park, as her father had predicted she would. She had come to love him too, as she had been determined to do, though it had not proved difficult at all. She had even enjoyed their extended visit to Nuttall Grange, where she had won the affection of her bedridden grandpapa and of her two aunts who were not really aunts at all—Bessie Doyle and her mama's sister. She had even come to feel happy and settled and at peace with herself and the world. She had not once, since leaving London, dreamed the nightmare.

  But Newbury Abbey, though she had not seen either the park or the house yet, felt like home.

  "Oh, look!" she exclaimed in awe after the carriage had turned through the gates and was proceeding along the driveway through the forest. The trees were all glorious shades of reds and yellows and browns. A few of the leaves had fallen already and lay in a colorful carpet along the drive. "Have you ever seen anything more splendid than England in autumn, Father? Have you, Elizabeth?"