“Oh, dear,” Vanessa said. “I thought perhaps she would consider that things have changed somewhat.”
“As they dashed well have,” he said. “I am Merton now, Nessie. I have land and a fortune and a life. I have new friends. I have a future. It is not that I don’t love Meg. It is not that I am not grateful for all she has done for me since Papa died. I will never forget, and I will always be grateful. But I resent having to account for my every movement every single hour of the day. And I resent being made the cause of her rejecting the best marriage offer she will probably ever have. If she does not like him well enough, then fine. I applaud her having the gumption to refuse him. But if it is not that ... If it is just me ... Ah, this must be Constantine.”
He brightened considerably.
Vanessa had no wish to come face-to-face with their cousin. She patted Stephen’s arm.
“I’ll see what she has to say,” she said. “Have fun.”
“Oh, I will,” he said. “Constantine is a capital fellow. So is Lyngate, Nessie, I must confess. He keeps an eye on me, it is true, but he does not try to put leading strings on me.”
He left the house without waiting for Constantine to knock on the door.
Margaret was tight-lipped and uncommunicative when Vanessa arrived in the drawing room and explained that she had just been talking with Stephen.
“The trouble with our brother,” Margaret said, “is that he thinks his new circumstances have added four years or so to his life. But the truth is, Nessie, that he is still a boy, and a boy who is becoming more rebellious by the hour.”
“He is a boy who perhaps needs a somewhat less firm hand on his reins,” Vanessa suggested.
“Oh, not you too,” Margaret said, clearly exasperated. “He should be at Warren Hall with his tutors.”
“And soon he will be,” Vanessa said. “He also needs to become acquainted with the world that awaits him when he reaches his majority. But let us not quarrel over him. The Marquess of Allingham has paid his addresses to you?”
“It was very obliging of him,” Margaret said. “But I have said no, of course.”
“Of course?” Vanessa raised her eyebrows. “I thought perhaps you were growing fond of him.”
“Then you thought wrongly,” Margaret said. “You of all people ought to know that I cannot even consider marriage until I have fulfilled the obligation to our family that I took on eight years ago.”
“But Elliott and I live close to Warren Hall,” Vanessa said. “And Kate will reach her majority in a few months’ time. Stephen will be at university for most of the next several years. By that time he will be a full adult.”
“But that time is not yet,” Margaret said.
Vanessa tipped her head to one side and regarded her closely.
“Do you not want to marry, Meg?” she asked. “Ever?”
Crispin Dew had much to answer for, she thought.
Margaret spread her hands on her lap and contemplated the backs of them.
“If I do not,” she said, “the time will come when I will have to live at Warren Hall with Stephen’s wife as the mistress. Or at Finchley Park with you. Or with Kate somewhere and her husband. I suppose the time will come when I will marry anyone who is kind enough to offer. But not yet.”
Vanessa stared at her bent head. There was a lengthy silence.
“Meg,” she said eventually, “Stephen probably does not know about ... about Crispin, unless Kate has said anything to him. He thinks your refusal of the Marquess of Allingham is all about him.”
“And so it is,” Margaret said.
“No, it is not,” Vanessa said. “It is about Crispin.”
Margaret lifted her head to look at her, a frown creasing her brow.
“Stephen needs to know that,” Vanessa said. “He needs to know that he is not responsible for keeping you from happiness.”
“Stephen is my happiness,” Margaret said fiercely. “As are you and Kate.”
“And so you put fetters upon all of us,” Vanessa said. “I love you dearly, Meg. I love Kate and Stephen too. But I would not describe any of you as my happiness. My happiness cannot come from another person.”
“Not even Lord Lyngate?” Margaret asked her. “Or Hedley?”
Vanessa shook her head.
“Not even Hedley or Elliott,” she said. “My happiness has to come from within myself or it is too fragile a thing to be of any use to me and too much of a burden to benefit any of my loved ones.”
Margaret got to her feet and walked to the window to stare down on Berkeley Square below.
“You do not understand, Nessie,” she said. “Nobody understands. When I made my promise to Papa, I knew I was making a twelve-year commitment—until Stephen reached his majority. I am eight years into that commitment. I am not going to shrug free of the remaining four years just because our circumstances have changed, just because you are happily married and Kate is being courted by half a dozen or more eligible gentlemen and Stephen is chafing at the bit to be free. Or because I have had a good offer and might go off to Northumberland to begin a new life and leave Kate and Stephen to your care and Lord Lyngate’s. This has nothing to do with Crispin Dew. It has nothing to do with anything except a promise freely made and gladly carried out. I love you all. I will not abandon my duty even if Stephen finds it irksome. I will not.”
Vanessa moved up beside her and wrapped an arm about her waist.
“Let’s go shopping,” she said. “I saw the most glorious bonnet yesterday, but it was royal blue and would not suit me at all. It will look quite ravishing on you, though. Come and see it before someone else buys it. Where is Kate, by the way?”
“She has gone for a carriage ride with Miss Flaxley and Lord Bretby and Mr. Ames,” Margaret said. “I have more bonnets than I know what to do with, Nessie.”
“Then one more will be neither here nor there,” Vanessa said. “Let’s go.”
“Oh, Nessie.” Margaret laughed shakily. “Whatever would I do without you?”
“You would have more room in your wardrobe, that is for sure,” Vanessa said, and they both laughed.
With a heavy heart, though, Vanessa arrived home at Moreland House a couple of hours later. The unhappiness of one’s loved ones was often harder to bear than one’s own, she thought—and Meg was undoubtedly unhappy.
Not that she was unhappy. It was just that . . .
Well, it was just that she had known delirious happiness during her honeymoon and again for a few days before and after her presentation. And that happiness had made her greedy for more.
She could not force herself to be contented with a marriage that was just workable and agreeable.
She was, of course, almost certain that she was with child. Perhaps that would make a difference. But why should it? She was merely performing the function for which he had married her.
But oh, dear—she was pregnant with Elliott’s child and her own. With their child. She so desperately wanted to be happy again. Not just happy within herself, despite what she had said to Meg earlier. She wanted to be happy with him. She wanted him to be ecstatic with joy when she told him. She wanted . . .
Well, she wanted the sun, of course.
How very foolish she was.
There were not many free evenings. It seemed like a rare treat when one occasionally presented itself.
On one such evening Cecily had gone to the theater with a group of friends, under the chaperonage of the mother of one of them. Elliott retired to the library after dinner. His mother, who sat drinking tea and conversing with Vanessa in the drawing room, could not hide her yawns and finally excused herself, pleading total exhaustion.
“I feel,” she said as Vanessa kissed her cheek, “as if I could sleep for a week.”
“I daresay one good night of uninterrupted sleep will suffice,” Vanessa said. “But if it does not, then I will chaperone Cecily at the garden party tomorrow and you may have a quiet day. Good night, Mother.”
“You are always so good,” her mother-in-law said. “How very glad I am that Elliott married you. Good night, Vanessa.”
Vanessa sat alone for a while, reading her book. But the growingly familiar feeling of slight depression settled upon her and distracted her attention from the adventures of Odysseus as he tried to return to Ithaca and his Penelope.
Elliott was downstairs in the library and she was up here in the drawing room during a precious evening when they were both at home. Would this be the pattern of their married life?
Would she allow it to be?
Perhaps he would come up here if he knew his mother had gone to bed and she was alone.
Perhaps he would resent her going down there.
And perhaps, she thought finally, getting resolutely to her feet and keeping one finger inside the book to mark her place, she ought to go and find out. This was her home too, after all, and he was her husband. And they were not estranged. They had not quarreled. If they drifted apart into a distant relationship, then it would be at least partly her fault if she had not tried to do something about it.
She tapped on the library door and opened it even as he called to her to come in.
There was a fire burning in the hearth even though it was not a cold evening. He was seated in a deep leather chair to one side of it, a book open in one hand. The library was a room she loved, with its tall bookcases filled with leather-bound books lining three walls and its old oak desk large enough for three people to lie across side by side.
It was far cozier than the drawing room. She did not blame Elliott for choosing to sit here for the evening. Tonight it looked more inviting than ever. So did he. He was slightly slouched in his chair. One of his ankles was resting on the knee of the other leg.
“Your mother is tired,” she said. “She has gone to bed. Do you mind if I join you?”
He scrambled to his feet.
“I hope you will,” he said, indicating the chair opposite his own, on the other side of the fire.
A log crackled in the hearth, sending a shower of sparks upward into the chimney.
She sat and smiled at him and then, because she could not think of anything to say, she opened her book, cleared her throat, and began to read.
He did likewise, without the throat clearing. He no longer slouched. He had both feet on the floor.
Her seat was too deep for her. She either had to sit with straight back against the rest and feet dangling a few inches off the floor or with feet flat on the floor and back arched like a bow against the rest or with feet flat on the floor and back ramrod straight and unsupported.
After a few minutes, during which she tried all three positions and found none of them comfortable, she kicked off her slippers, curled her feet up on the seat beside her, settling her skirt about her as she did so, and nestled the side of her head against the wing of the chair. She gazed into the fire and then glanced at Elliott.
He was looking steadily back at her.
“It is not ladylike, I know,” she said apologetically. “My mother and father were forever telling me to sit properly. But I am short and most chairs are too large for me. Besides, I am comfortable like this.”
“You look comfortable,” he said.
She smiled at him and somehow neither of them resumed reading. They just looked at each other.
“Tell me about your father,” she said softly.
She had kept remembering his mother telling her that she had hoped he would be different from his father. Elliott never spoke of him.
He continued to stare at her for a while. Then he turned his gaze on the fire and set his book down on the table beside him.
“I adored him,” he said. “He was my great hero, the rock of my existence. He was the model of all I aspired to be when I grew up. Everything I did was done to please him. He used to be away from home for long spells at a time. I lived for his return. When I was very young, I used to camp out at the gates of the park watching for his horse or carriage and on the rare occasion when he came while I was there, I would be taken up beside him and made much of before my mother and sisters could have their turn. When I was older and started getting into scrapes with Con, my behavior was always tempered by the fear of disappointing my father or inciting his wrath. When I began sowing wild oats as a young man, part of me worried that I would never be worthy of him, that I would never measure up to the standard he had set.”
He was silent for a while. Vanessa did not attempt to say anything. She sensed that there was more to come. There was pain in his eyes and his voice, a frown line between his brows.
“There was never a closer, happier family than ours,” he said. “Never a husband more devoted to his wife or a father more devoted to his children. Life was in many ways idyllic despite his long absences. It was filled with love. More than anything else in this world I wanted a marriage and a family like his. I wanted to bask in his approval. I wanted people to be able to say of us, ‘Like father, like son.’ ”
Vanessa let her book close on her lap without marking her place and clasped her arms with her hands, though she ought not to have been cold when she sat so close to the fire.
“And then a year and a half ago,” he said, “he died suddenly in the bed of his mistress.”
Vanessa stared at him, shocked beyond words.
“They had been together for more than thirty years,” he told her, “a little longer than he had been married to my mother. They had five children, the youngest fifteen, a little younger than Cecily, the eldest thirty, a little older than me.”
“Oh,” Vanessa said.
“He had provided well for his mistress in the event of his death,” he said. “He had placed two of his sons in steady, lucrative employment. The third was still at a good school. He had found respectable, well-to-do husbands for his two daughters. He had spent as much of his time with that family as he had with mine.”
“Oh, Elliott,” she said, so aware of his pain that her eyes filled with tears.
He looked at her.
“The funny thing was,” he said, “that I knew about my grandfather and his other family. His mistress of more than forty years died only ten years ago. There were offspring of that liaison too. I even knew that it was a sort of family tradition—a way in which we Wallace men proved our masculinity and our superiority over our women, I suppose. But it never once occurred to me that perhaps my father had upheld that tradition too.”
“Oh, Elliott.” She could think of nothing else to say.
“I believe,” he said, “the whole world must have known except me. How I could not have known, I do not know. I spent enough time here in town after I came down from Oxford, heaven knows, and I thought I knew everything that was happening among the ton, even the seamier goings-on. But I never heard so much as a whisper about my own father. My mother knew—she had always known. Even Jessica knew.”
She tried to imagine how his whole world must have shattered just over a year ago.
“Everything,” he said as if he had read her thoughts. “Everything I knew, everything I had lived and believed—everything was an illusion, a lie. I thought we had our father’s undivided love. I thought perhaps I was extra-special because I was the son, the heir, the one who would take his place eventually. But he had a son older than I and one almost exactly the same age and three other children. It was hard to grasp that fact. It is still hard. All those years my mother was nothing to him except the legal wife who had provided him with the legal heir. And I was nothing to him except that legal heir.”
“Oh, Elliott.” She unfolded her legs from the chair, got to her feet, not even noticing her book thudding to the floor, and hurried across to him. She sat on his lap, burrowed her arms about his waist, and nestled her head against his shoulder. “You do not know that. You were his son. Your sisters were his daughters. He did not necessarily love you the less because he had other children elsewhere. Love is not a finite commodity that will stretch only so far. It is infinite. Don’t dou
bt that he loved you. Please don’t.”
“All those lies,” he said, setting his head back against the chair. “About how busy he had to be in London, about how much he hated leaving, and then about how much he had missed us, how lonely he had been without us, how very glad he was to be back home. All lies, doubtless repeated to his other family when he returned to them.”
She lifted her head to look into his face and drew her hands free so that she could smooth her fingers through his hair.
“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t doubt everything, Elliott. If he said he loved you, if you felt he loved you, then no doubt he did.”
“The point is,” he said, “that none of this is rare. I could name a dozen other such instances without even having to think too hard. It comes of living in a society in which birth and position and fortune are everything and strategic marriages are the norm. It is common to seek sensual delights and emotional comfort elsewhere. It is just that I did not know it of my father, did not even suspect it. Suddenly I was Viscount Lyngate with precious little preparation for all the duties and responsibilities that were now mine—my fault, of course. I had been a careless young blade for far too long. And suddenly I was Jonathan’s guardian. All of which I would have handled, suddenly and unexpectedly as they had come to me. I was my father’s son, after all. But just as suddenly and unexpectedly I was—”
First Came Marriage Page 32
