Slightly Tempted

by Mary Balogh

  “Come walking with me, chérie?” Gervase suggested to Morgan.

  She took his arm and he led her along a grassy, tree-lined avenue perpendicular to the lake.

  “What is that in the distance?” she asked him, pointing.

  “A summerhouse,” he told her. “It is a quiet refuge on a rainy day with a lovely view in all directions. Perhaps down the years you will enjoy sitting there with a book.”

  “In order to escape all the children in the nursery, I suppose,” she said.

  “Or the constant demands of an amorous husband,” he suggested.

  “But would the amorous husband not suspect where I had gone?” she asked him.

  “I believe, chérie,” he said, “he would pursue you there and convince you that what you had wanted to escape was visitors who might have arrived to disturb our privacy.”

  “Delightful,” she said. “Are there any other such retreats in the park? It would be too unsporting if I could not at least keep you guessing as to which one I had chosen on a particular day.”

  “There is the grotto,” he said. “It is at the end of the wilderness walk, but not obvious to anyone who does not know it is there. I will take you there one day. You may wish to paint there.”

  “Ah, but you would not wish me to do that,” she told him as they strolled onward between the straight lines of trees, which shielded them from the full glare of the sun. “I get very absorbed in my painting.”

  “But I have all the patience in the world,” he told her. “I will sit and wait, and when you have finished I will help you relax before carrying your things back to the house for you.”

  “Indeed?” she said.

  “We will make love there,” he told her, “and in the summerhouse here and in the more secluded areas bordering the lake.”

  “I thought the boats looked interesting,” she said.

  “And in the boats too,” he agreed. “Both of them. We will decide which is the more comfortable and which rocks more pleasantly.”

  She turned her head at the same time as he did and their eyes met. They both laughed.

  “Have you forgiven me yet, chérie?” he asked her.

  But she would only laugh again and then look about her with a great sigh of what sounded like contentment.

  “How beautiful this all is,” she said. “I love summertime.”

  They had reached the summerhouse by then. He had not intended that they stop there but that they turn back to rejoin the others. There was no reason they should, though. They were officially betrothed. Both his family and hers were consequently indulgent about their being alone together for lengthy periods of time. He opened the door and stood aside for her to precede him inside.

  It was hot in there, though not as bad as it might have been as it sat within the shade of two tall trees. It was a round structure with a stone wall to waist height, glass windows above, and a painted wooden dome over their heads. A wide leather seat circled the wall with a round oak table in the center.

  She did not sit down immediately. She looked back along the avenue they had just walked and then turned to look at the narrower, flower-bordered avenue to the house and at the thin line of trees with part of the wilderness walk beyond and at the river flowing toward the lake on the fourth side.

  “So much beauty,” she said, and sat down.

  “So much indeed, chérie.” He smiled down at her before taking a seat beside her. She had left off her mourning. He had noticed that yesterday when she arrived. She was wearing a pretty pale blue muslin dress with a flower-trimmed straw bonnet.

  “How does it feel,” she asked him, “to have all your family about you again?”

  “Strange,” he said. “Monique and Cecile were just girls the last time I saw them. Now they are married ladies with children. Pierre was little more than a boy. And I have two nephews and three nieces.”

  “Do you feel bitter,” she asked him, “that you have missed so much of their lives?”

  He considered his answer. But there was no point in denying it, was there?

  “Yes,” he said. “I feel almost as if I had come back from the dead, expecting that everyone must have spent the intervening years mourning me only to discover that they had continued with their lives and proved to me that I was not indispensable to them after all. It is a foolish objection. Why do we always assume we are so important to other people? None of us is irreplaceable even to those closest to us.”

  “There is one member of your family missing,” she said. “How do you feel about your father, Gervase?”

  He gazed down the avenue toward the house.

  “He was the model husband and father,” he said, “and the model landowner too, it seems. I admired him greatly. We were very close. I always believed I was his favorite even though he was dearly fond of all of us. I was never rebellious as other sons were and never wild despite the fact that I liked to cut a figure in London and cultivated the friendship of men of influence, like Bewcastle.”

  “His rejection of you must have been devastating,” she said.

  “One might say so.” He glanced at her and chuckled, though quite without mirth. “None of us had ever done anything to disappoint him before then. We were a singularly dull lot, chérie. And thus, I suppose, he reacted to what he thought I had done with all the implacable fury of a man who had never had to deal with anything like it before.”

  “Do you still hate him?” she asked.

  “Ah,” he said softly. “It is too late for that. He is dead.”

  “Where is he buried?” she asked. “In the village churchyard?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Have you been there?” she asked him.

  He shook his head. The vicarage was beside the church and the churchyard, and he had been there several times. He had been to church too. But he had averted his face from the churchyard each time.

  “We will go together.” She rested her hand on his.

  “Will we?” He chuckled again.

  “And what about Marianne?” she asked him. “What has happened to her? Do you know?”

  “She lives not five miles away,” he said. “You must ask Henrietta if you want to know more about her. They have remained friends.”

  “Ah,” she said, “that must rankle too.”

  “Why should it?” he asked her. “Nine years is a long time and they are neighbors. They were always friends.”

  “Gervase,” she said, “all this has been dreadfully hurtful to you. More than I realized.”

  Her hand was still on his. He set his free hand over it.

  “But I will not be seen as a victim, chérie,” he said. “I made a life for myself on the Continent. I saw places I would not otherwise have seen and met interesting people and experienced things I would not have done if my life had continued along its dull, blameless course. I met you.”

  “And that is something you will yet regret,” she told him. “But I think it is the only way you can make your life bearable again, is it not? To believe that everything that happens in life can serve a positive purpose, that no time is wasted unless we refuse to learn the lesson that is there in that apparently wasted time. You can be a better person than you were.”

  “Or a worse.”

  They sat for a long while before walking back to the house together, in a silence that was surprisingly companionable, their hands joined, their shoulders almost touching. If he relaxed, he could almost imagine that they were back in Brussels during that week when time had seemed suspended and all his energies, all his emotions, had been centered upon her and her courage and energy and impending grief.

  She would make him fall in love with her, she had promised. Was that what she was doing now? If so, she was succeeding.

  Or was this all genuine?

  There was no way of knowing.

  CHAPTER XVIII

  MORGAN WAS THE YOUNGEST OF A FAMILY OF six. Life had been boisterous while they were growing up. She could particularly remembe
r wild, vigorous, often dangerous games with the neighboring Butlers, sons of the Earl of Redfield. But the trouble was that they had all grown up long before she did. The last few years had been relatively lonely ones. And until recently she had been technically in the schoolroom. She had had very little experience of being one among other adults. Even through the spring she had been merely a young girl making her come-out.

  She loved being at Windrush. She was surrounded by her own family and Gervase’s. And she was very much one of them, the focus of all attention. They called upon neighbors, and neighbors called upon them, and she was no longer the very young Lady Morgan Bedwyn, but the affianced bride of the Earl of Rosthorn. Everyone was excited at the prospect of the garden fete and evening ball the countess was busily planning in honor of the betrothal. The mansion and the park were spacious and beautiful surroundings for a summer of social activities in which she could finally play a full part.

  Sometimes she forgot that it was all a charade, that she had been driven into this false position by outrage and the burning desire to exact revenge.

  She really had not realized how badly Gervase had been damaged by an ancient injustice. When he had spoken of it in vague terms in Brussels, she had assumed that now that he was no longer exiled, he could return to England, take up his duties as Earl of Rosthorn, and live happily ever after. But it had been very unimaginative of her to think thus. In a very real sense his youth had been taken from him. He was a man who had wandered aimlessly for nine years, building an impressive and doubtless a well-deserved reputation as a rake, but nevertheless robbed of the life that ought to have been his in the country that was his own.

  He was full of hatred and bitterness, much of which he was denying.

  She still strongly resented what he had done to her. She could never forgive him for that. She could never trust him again. But it was basically against her nature to hate. And since she was here at Windrush for a while, she might as well try to do some good.

  Becky wanted to play with Jonathan on a chilly, blustery day when everyone else was content to remain indoors. Morgan offered to take the child to the vicarage, and of course Gervase came along too. Pierre was out on a sick call, but Emma was at home and was delighted to have another child to amuse her son, since she was busy in the kitchen with her housekeeper making jam.

  “We will not disturb you,” Morgan assured her. “We will go for a walk and come back for Becky later, if we may.”

  The walk turned into several calls on villagers, all of whom worked for Gervase in some capacity.

  “I need to get to know my people, chérie,” he explained to her. “I still feel like a stranger among strangers. Worse, I feel like an impostor. When people ask me for some favor, it is on the tip of my tongue to refer them to my steward, as if I do not have the authority to grant or refuse requests myself. And when I do agree to something, like reroofing the schoolhouse, which leaks like the proverbial sieve every time it rains, I feel instant guilt and wonder if my steward will scold me when he learns of it.”

  He chuckled, but she guessed he was confiding real truths to her. She could not imagine Wulfric’s steward daring to voice an opinion even if ordered to have every field on the home farm sown to salt. But Wulf had been carefully trained for his position from the age of twelve and had been Duke of Bewcastle since he was seventeen.

  “They like you,” she said. “Your people like you, Gervase.”

  It was true too. He talked with them and laughed with them and listened to them. They responded to his charm, which seemed very genuine in his dealings with them.

  “I believe, chérie,” he said, “it is because they perceive that they can wrap me about their little fingers. They set eyes upon me and biblical quotations leap to their brains. Ask, and it shall be given.”

  “What you need to do,” she told him, “is to discover how profitable Windrush is. You need to study the books and talk with your steward. Generosity is a fine thing, but if you give what you cannot afford to give, then ultimately everyone will suffer and you will be in ruin.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He looked down at her, laughter in his eyes.

  “I suppose,” she said, “you are already doing that.”

  “I am,” he said. “I am also realizing how irresponsible it was of me to stay away for a full year after I succeeded to the title and inherited all this. But then if I had not, chérie, I would not have met you.”

  “We both would have been better off if you had not,” she said tartly.

  He laughed softly.

  They had been strolling back along the main village street, a full hour or more after leaving the vicarage. The clouds were still low overhead and the wind still blustering, but at least it was at their backs.

  “I want to see the churchyard,” she said when they drew abreast of it.

  “It is chilly,” he said. “Let us go and wangle a cup of tea out of Emma. Maybe Pierre is back home.”

  “I want to see the churchyard,” she said again, turning to face him. He was looking rather grim, the laughter all gone from his eyes. “You cannot avoid it for the rest of your life, Gervase. If you try, you will find that it looms larger and larger each time you come to the village.”

  “And who filled your head with such foolish wisdom?” he asked her, flicking her chin with one gloved finger.

  “Show me the graves of your ancestors,” she said.

  It seemed appropriate that it was a gray and blustery day. But at least, she thought, there was a grave for his father. Wulfric intended to erect a stone memorial for Alleyne in the churchyard at home, but they would all be painfully aware that his remains were buried in some unknown grave in Belgium.

  He did not waste time, as she had expected he would, making a show of giving her a guided tour of the churchyard. He led her straight toward the marble headstone whose shining whiteness proclaimed it a recent addition. There were flowers on the ground before it—Cecile and Monique had come here together yesterday.

  Here lie the earthly remains of George Thomas Ashford, Sixth Earl of Rosthorn . . .

  There followed a reminder to the living of his virtues and the fact that he had been beloved by all who knew him.

  They stood silently side by side, the wind at their backs.

  “Did you hear from him at all after you left England?” Morgan asked.

  “No,” he said.

  “Did you write to him?”

  “Every week for six months,” he said. “Often more than once a week. Begging, groveling, indignant, reasonable, furious, self-righteous, self-pitying, accusing letters—they ran the gamut of human emotions. And no, he never answered any of them. My mother wrote occasionally, though her letters often took a year or more to find me. So did Pierre and my sisters, though only for the first two or three years.”

  “He must have suffered,” she said.

  “My father?” He looked inquiringly at her. “He suffered?”

  “You told me that you were a close family,” she said, “that he loved you. He must have believed the worst of you to have acted as he did. He must have been convinced beyond a reasonable doubt. He acted harshly and probably hastily. But having done so, he must have felt bound by his decision. I daresay he wished there were a way out.”

  “There was a way out,” he told her. “He could have believed me. He could have trusted me.”

  “He is the unfortunate one,” she said. “It is too late for him to admit that perhaps he made a mistake. It is too late for him to discover or to admit that perhaps love is more powerful and more enduring than all the negative emotions with which we punish ourselves as well as the person against whom they are directed. If he had time before he died to know that he was dying and to look back on his life, I feel almost certain that he would have given anything in the world to have you there so that he could forgive you.”

  “So that he could forgive me,” he said softly.

  “And perhaps he wanted your forgiveness too,” she said. “Hatred
and love—they can be such overpowering emotions, and very often it is hard to distinguish the one from the other. If he had not loved you deeply, would he have been so harsh on you—and on himself?”

  He touched one hand to the headstone and patted it lightly and then over and over again, not so lightly.

  “What are you suggesting?” he asked her. “That I forgive him? Does it matter? If I shout curses into the wind or whisper forgiveness into the ground, will he hear me? He is gone.”

  “But you are not,” she said. “If you shout curses, poison will lodge in your heart. If you forgive, you will be cleansed.”

  He turned his head to look at her and laughed.

  “How old are you, chérie?” he asked her. “Eighteen or eighty?”

  “I have spent a great deal of time alone,” she said. “I may not have done a great deal of living, but there are things I understand about life.”

  She was a Bedwyn through and through—she was bold and unconventional and not easily cowed by other people or by life itself. But she was different from the others too. She had always known it. There was a solitary, mystical side to her nature that she very rarely revealed to other people.

  He was still patting the stone. He had looked away from her again.

  “It is something I should do, then,” he said, laughing again. “It is strange, is it not, that all these years I have convinced myself that it is another man whom I hate most in this life—a man who meant nothing to me and so was safe to hate. But it is my father . . . My father . . . Can you even imagine what it would be like if Bewcastle did to you what my father did to me? It was like a living death—to be so misjudged, so utterly rejected, so completely cut off . . . If I ever have children of my own . . . If . . .”

  He turned then and strode abruptly away until he was standing some distance off, one hand propped against the ancient stone wall of the church, his head bowed. His shoulders were shaking.

  Morgan did not go after him.

  He came back after perhaps five minutes. He did not look at her but at the grave and the headstone.