But he wasn’t going to give it to her. Already he was stepping back, putting the safety of distance between their bodies. “You are a married woman, Lydia,” he was saying in a strained voice. “We cannot behave this way.”
Lydia balled her fists so tightly that she could feel her nails cutting into her palms. Honor, and respectability, and doing one’s duty! It had done them no good at all, and even now he would not relinquish his high morals. “Honor makes a cold bedfellow,” Lydia said shortly. “Though I would prefer it to a cruel one.”
His face changed. “He is cruel to you?”
She paused before she answered, thinking. Was Frederick cruel? He did not strike her, though he was not gentle either. He did not speak to her gently, but she was not sure that was quite the same thing as cruelty. “He is not kind,” she said finally. “He has no love for me.”
Peregrin swallowed, and she could see the emotions at war within: the desire to protect her against his notions of honor. Marriage was unbreakable, and she was not safe enough yet to send her husband into the arms of a mistress and to take her own lover. Years must pass, and children must be borne, before husband and wife could stop pretending. They might be Quality, but they were not royalty. There were still boundaries she could not cross, and keep her position.
But a widow…
“Peregrin,” she began. “We do not know what is going to happen—”
“My lady, the lord wakes. He asks for you.”
Lydia whirled, face reddening. The footman who had helped bring Frederick inside was in the doorway of the kitchen. He gave her a little bow, and she saw his eyes widen slightly before he gave Peregrin a deferring nod. “Your pardons, my lord,” he offered.
“I’m not a lord,” Peregrin corrected him with a twisted grin. “Take this lady up to see her husband.”
Lydia looked at him over her shoulder; his face was still rucked up in a grimace that was less smile and more a painful rictus. “This conversation is not over,” she hissed, and he nodded and waved her away as if he did not have another moment to spare for her.
The footman, to his credit, had already turned his back and started down the corridor, where he could not overhear the dangerous whisperings of the ruling class.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
To Lydia’s chagrin, Frederick was already sitting up and weakly sipping at beef broth when she was ushered into the room, really the picture of the recovering patient. Impressive, she thought, for a person who had been declared on death’s door not ten minutes before, and she cast a suspicious glance at the disappearing back of the so-called doctor as he left the room.
It was very good for Frederick, of course, and it surely wasn’t respectable to hope one’s husband would expire of his wounds, but Lydia was in no mood to be charitable. She was feeling sorely disappointed the universe’s workings tonight, from Peregrin’s unsatisfactory performance in the hero department to this, her unloving husband’s awakening.
The bedchamber was rather small and dark, with rain pounding against the casements, to intensify the claustrophobic feeling. A few lackluster candles lit the sconces and cast a dim pall around the room, which had evidently been last furnished sometime in the last century. Heavy dark curtains, blue or green or perhaps even black, hung in dusty swags from the bedposts and above the windows, and everywhere there was a general feeling that things had not been aired out properly in a long time. So Peregrin was not a wonderful household manager, she thought wryly. A man in need of a wife, some might say.
Frederick hardly spared her a glance as she came through the door, he was so busy lapping up broth from a chambermaid’s silver spoon. The girl, on the other hand, threw her a wild look; she looked positively petrified. And no wonder: one need only observe the ample bosoms swelling from beneath her plain white apron to know that Frederick, no matter how low he had been laid by a head wound, had already been acting less than a gentleman with the girl.
Lydia supposed she ought to take pity on the maid and take over the broth distribution, but decided against it; let the girl suffer this one night. As healthy as Frederick was looking at this moment, they would be on their way in the morning, jouncing through the muddy, potholed roads to Marston as if nothing had ever happened. And then, she thought, she might never lay eyes on Peregrin again. The thought made her stomach clench in despair, and for a moment she thought she might be ill herself. But she took a deep breath, and held her head up high — she would not let Frederick know how low being brought to Peregrin’s house had left her.
Instead, she positioned herself behind the chambermaid, leaving the shapely girl as a buffer between herself and her husband, and waited to be greeted.
He looked up, slurping at the spoon like an infant, and then looked back at the chambermaid’s breasts. Lydia put her hands behind her back and waited.
The clock had chimed one o’clock before he decided to acknowledge his wife’s presence and bade the maid put away her spoon. Relieved, the girl snatched up the tray and fairly raced to the door, only remembering before she closed it behind her to poke her head back into the room with a breathless “Will there be anything else, milord? Madam?”
“Nothing else,” Frederick said, and Lydia startled; his voice was raspy and thin. Perhaps, she thought, he really was in more danger than he looked. And she felt neither relief nor fear, but just an emotionless curiosity about what was going to happen next.
“Are you feeling better?” she asked, settling into the chair the maid had vacated.
“Much,” he breathed, and smiled at her, but now she saw how heavily he leaned back against the nest of pillows they had made for him, and she wondered.
“Well, that is good. The doctor was concerned, but I see you are up and eating, so I am sure you will be just fine,” she said lightly. “We will doubtless be on the road to Marston in…” she paused and looked at the whiteness of his face, the lines around his eyes. In the dim candlelight, she had not seen the telltale signs of sickness and pain, but now that she was sitting closer, she spied weakness. Her stomach plunged with uncertainty. “A few days,” she finished at last.
“I am sure,” he agreed amiably, not seeming to notice the pause in her sentence. And then: “You were not hurt?”
“Oh! No. You were thrown against the carriage door and it burst open. I was in the other corner,” she explained. As far from you as I could get.
“That is well then.” He was quiet for a moment, and then he closed his eyes. “I wish you would send in the doctor.”
Lydia had no idea where the little man had gone to, him and his forked beard, but she nodded and got up at once. Just outside the door, the footman waited, his head tilted back against the wall, staring at the darkness of the ceiling. He stood up straight when she came into the corridor. “My lady?”
“Can you find the doctor that saw him before?”
“Aye,” the footman nodded his head. “I saw him head down to the stables to check on the coachman.”
“You will get wet,” Lydia said apologetically, but he just shrugged and grinned at her before setting off down the corridor, his footsteps echoing from the empty walls. She stood alone for a moment, not willing to go back into the room with that sickened man who was her husband, and instead looked around at the empty walls, the threadbare carpets, the peeling paint. So this was Longcastle, she thought. This was the place Grainne wanted me to be chatelaine of. The overseer’s house of a great estate, the plaster falling from the ceilings, the draperies half-alive with moths. “Such a grand dream you had for me, Grainne,” she muttered, rubbing her fingers along a smoke-blackened sconce. An old nub of candle fell over and rolled across the floorboards until it reached a lump of untacked carpet. “All of this could have been mine, for as long as you chose to give it to me.” She shook her head.
And then the tears started to fall, hot and fast, and she dropped her face into her hands. She could have lived here. She could have torn up the carpets and ordered new ones, she could have rippe
d out the drapes and hung bright new curtains, she could have had paintings hung upon the empty walls and fresh plaster slapped upon the drooping ceilings. She could have had a perfect little house and a perfect little life with Peregrin here, far away from the ton who would have laughed at them, or from her parents who would have been horror-struck. She could have had Peregrin all to herself, and never again be coerced into the cutthroat world of Town that had so disgusted her. That had been Grainne’s grand idea: to give her exactly what she wanted, though she did not know she wanted it: a quiet life with the man she loved, the chance to build up a family far from London’s prying eyes, an escape from hypocrisy and supper parties and vainglorious gowns. A life Grainne herself would have chosen for herself, had her husband not had a title.
Her Honorable Nobody, Lydia realized, was exactly what she had wanted.
There were footsteps on the stairs. The doctor, Lydia thought in horror, wiping at her tears, but they would not stop flowing. She whirled around, saw an open door, and darted inside, closing it behind her.
Darkness. Without a candle to guide her, nor a light from a window, she stood still for a long time, willing for shapes to emerge from the shadows, to help her find her way. Outside, the footsteps came closer, and then stopped, tapping at the door of Frederick’s room before they went in. “Why, you’re all alone!” she heard the doctor say in a displeased voice, and then the door closed again, and she sighed.
After a while she thought she could detect a little lightness, and she used the faint glow to navigate across the room and to the window, where she pulled back the curtain a bit. The rain was still streaming down, lashing at the windowpanes, but there was a light in the courtyard beyond the house — the stable, she supposed, where the grooms and the coachman would still be working at settling the horses. And Mary might be out there too, cajoled into staying in the warm friendliness of the harness room instead of carrying baggage through the deluge into a house thrown into crisis. That was just as well, Lydia supposed. She did not want Mary, with her know-it-all lectures. She wanted to be left alone. To think.
She turned and saw a bed in the shadows. Another guest-room, then, and a small one — it was a mercy she had not tripped over the chest that sat at its foot; there was scarcely room to walk between it and the wall. She went and sat down, leaning against the pillows that crowned the old bedstead’s carved headboard. Now she could have a really good cry…
But of course now she didn’t want to.
Think, she told herself sternly. What will you do if Frederick dies? You will be a widow; you’ll have to repair to Marston and stay there in mourning. It will be years before you can think of marrying again. And you will still be an heiress. It will be the Marriage Mart all over again, but with much older men. Widowers. Men your father’s age. Surely that is not better than being married to him.
No, that was not better. The only thing that was better was what she could not have — to stay here with Peregrin. Mrs. Fawkes, could you imagine? How ridiculous. If Mary were here she would laugh.
Or would she? Lydia wasn’t certain any more. She was starting to think that if Peregrin came in and suggested that they run away to Spain together, or something equally insane, Mary would start packing Lydia’s trunks at once. What had she said, that horrible day when Frederick had announced their impending marriage?
“Last time I checked, you were utterly against my marrying Fawkes.”
“Well, that was before I saw what Sutton was capable of.”
Would it have been better to have gone against her parents, against all she had been taught to respect, and insisted that Peregrin was the one who had compromised her? And that he was the one she wanted to marry?
Lydia sighed and sank deeper into the pillows. She would never know. This entire enterprise was a waste of time. Why think about the roads untaken? She could only travel the one she had chosen. And whether it ended with Frederick’s death and her reluctant return to flirtation and dance-cards, or with his health and her life as his down-trodden wife and bearer of his children, that was the road she chosen. It was only her own fault that she hated it.
She closed her eyes, listening to the rain splashing against the windows, and tried very hard not to think at all.
And then the door latch lifted with a click.
Lydia sat up straight, heart pounding in her chest. Her first thought was that it was Frederick, out of bed and looking for her. But no, that was ridiculous — there was no way he would be healthy enough to do that, even if he was recovering. The door opened, and a shadow appeared. The doctor, she thought. It’s the doctor’s room. But then the shadow held up a taper in a brass holder, and she saw his face.
“Peregrin,” she whispered.
“Lydia?” he asked, voice hushed, and he closed the door very quickly behind him. “What on earth are you doing in my bedchamber?”
Lydia blushed a rich, rosy red, very probably all over her body, and she thought it was lucky that he couldn’t really see her with that candle or he would have thought she was dying of sunstroke. “I had no idea this was your room, really. I was just looking for someplace to be alone.”
“I would have given you a bedchamber,” he said regretfully. “My housekeeper goes home to the village at night, but I could have managed that much.”
“No, it is not that. I was hiding —” She stopped herself. “Thank you. I should get some sleep.” But she did not get up.
“Lydia, I —” and then he was very quickly coming around the bed, and sat down beside her. He placed the taper on the table next to the bed and took her cold hands in his. “Lydia, I am just so sorry. For everything. For the way I spoke to you. For the things I didn’t do. For not being brave enough to stand up for you when I had the opportunity. I thought — I thought you wanted to marry him… I thought you would prefer him to me. I was foolish,” and here his voice broke and he took a deep, shuddering breath that pierced her heart. “I should have known what you wanted —”
“I didn’t know what I wanted,” she interrupted him, squeezing his fingers in hers. “It’s not your fault — it’s not!” she continued as he tried to argue. “I told you I wanted to marry him, didn’t I? Over and over. I said I loved you but I was marrying him. I was wrong. I was wrong. I’m so, so sorry, Peregrin. Ah, God, there are no words for how sorry I am.”
He looked at her sorrowfully. “And what are we to do now?”
She shook her head. “Walk the road we have chosen. That’s what I told myself a few moments ago, anyway.”
He pressed his lips together, hard, fighting the idea. “That’s not good enough.”
“You want to run away? A man is sick, perhaps dying. We cannot leave him here while we go gallivanting across the world.”
“Stop being so honorable for just a moment,” Peregrin hissed. “Just for one moment, and listen to me. We should have been married when we had the chance. If we do get a second chance, Lydia, we must take it.”
“What is that second chance? After he dies and I have done my year of deep mourning?”
“It’s right now.”
She stared at him with wide eyes, as startled as a rabbit facing a hound. He could not be serious, he could not mean it. “You’re joking.”
“I’m not joking.” His eyes were intense, the hazelnut dotted with golden pinpricks from the lone candle’s flame. “Let’s go, right now.”
“We’ll lose everything,” she said, shaking her head. “You’re mad.”
“Is that what you care for?” He leaned back from her, disappointed, and she immediately missed the warmth of his body. “My place here, your position, your money — can it still be about this, even now? My God, Lydia! You don’t love me at all!” He let go of her hands and rubbed them on his damp breeches as if they stung him. “This has all been a game to you.”
“No — no!” Lydia could not fight the tears now, though she did not know if they were from rage or sorrow. She just knew that her heart was twisting, breaking in two, a
nd that she wanted to press close to Peregrin again. Run away, stay and be miserable, it mattered not — she flung herself against him, knocking him lengthwise across the bed, and pressed her lips to his. Anything to stop his words. Anything.
His hands immediately went around her back and worked their way up to her soft neck, the only skin her traveling costume left bare. He dug his fingers into her hair as his lips molded to hers, then he slid another hand down her back, pressing her against him. She could feel his hardness already and it sent shivers through her body. But they were nothing like the shivers of fear that she felt when her husband pressed himself against her. This was sheer erotic pleasure.
“Peregrin,” she whispered, coming up for air. “I do love you.”
“Yes,” he sighed, and pulled her lips back down to his.
She felt her hair tumbling from its pins as his fingers worked through it, she felt her dress and her petticoat being pulled up by his other hand, and she knew what was happening, and she welcomed it. This was what she had been longing for, his touch and his kiss and his burning burning heat, and her own answering warmth — she could feel herself changing, blossoming, ripening, and when he rolled her over so that he was on top of her, fumbling at the lacings of his breeches, she was ready for him.
They would have this sweetness, at least.
When they came together at last, Lydia had to bite back a scream, her head flung back on the pillow with such force that her hair came loose, hairpins scattering across the sheets. Peregrin took her mouth in a forceful kiss and she lost her breath in the moment that her hips rose and her world shattered. His hands were everywhere, her body was alight with his touch, sheer awareness making every stroke an explosion of sensation. She kissed him back with ferocious intensity, feeling as if she wanted to eat him up, taste every inch of him, and if she couldn’t get her breath what did it matter? This was love, this was passion, this was life, and she was fully willing to die if that was the price.
The Honorable Nobody (Heroines on Horseback Book 2) Page 23
