Gentle conquest

by Mary Balogh

  And Ralph was educating her, though she thought he would be surprised if he realized that she put the matter that way to herself. She was learning to enjoy reading when he was in the same room. One of the greatest pleasures of her days came when they sat together and shared a book, discussing some poem. She talked and gave her views, but she loved to listen to him interpret a passage that had seemed to her to have a very obvious meaning. He could see depths of thought that had completely passed over her head. And yet there was no intellectual conceit in him. She doubted that he even realized that his ideas were of such greater value than her own. He always listened to her attentively.

  He took her to art galleries and museums, places she had always shunned as dry gatherers of dust and worthless junk. She would still not have enjoyed the visits greatly, she admitted, if Ralph were not there to explain things to her and bring to life an object that was just that to her and no more. She started for the first time to believe that it would be a pleasurable experience to travel to Florence and Milan and Rome and all those other places that many travelers visited out of a sense of duty only.

  With Ralph she was learning that one did not need to be constantly out and doing in order to bring meaning and enjoyment to life. Not that they shunned the brighter entertainments. Now that more and more members of the ton were returning to the capital for the winter, there were frequent invitations. And they refused only those they genuinely could not keep. They attended parties, musical evenings, theater parties, even one ball.

  Ralph did not shine at such entertainments. He was not naturally sociable. But he did not shun contact with others. He could be relied upon to seek out someone-usually a female-who was isolated from the company for one reason or another. And he would sit quietly conversing with these people-aging spinsters, young girls without either looks or fortune, even chaperones, who were usually beneath the notice of the ton. If some of his friends from the House of Lords were present, of course, he would be engrossed in serious conversation.

  Georgiana loved to keep an eye on him while she danced or chatted with gayer companions. She was inordinately proud of him and came very close to quarreling loudly with Dennis Vaughan one evening when he joked that Ralph blended in quite well with the row of chaperones amongst whom he sat for one particular set.

  One afternoon Ralph took her to visit the Broomes. They did not live in the most fashionable part' of London. Georgiana felt apprehensive. The school would be in progress. Were they to expect noise and chaos and dirt?

  She was pleasantly surprised when a maid ushered them into a tiled hallway and took their coats. The only sound was a distant, unidentifiable murmur. And the hallway, though rather small, was neat and spotlessly clean. Sylvia Broome came hurrying down the staircase before they could be shown into any room, her hands extended.

  "How wonderful!" she said. "I am so happy you have come. We do not have very many visitors during the daytime. Some people, I believe, think that they will be coming into a den of thieves if they set foot in here." She laughed lightly and instructed the maid to take Lord Chartleigh to her husband.

  “That is, if you wish to meet our boys?" she said, eyebrows lifted in inquiry.

  "I had hoped to do so," Ralph said. "Will your husband mind?"

  Georgiana was taken to a cozy sitting room by her hostess, who immediately rang for tea. And she found again that she liked this girl, who was the same age as herself yet who seemed very mature.

  "I am so happy to see you, Georgiana," Sylvia said. "I lived a quiet life in the country until last spring, you know, but I always had my cousin with me to talk to. She is on a wedding trip in Italy and like to be away for almost a year if Edward has his way. And I do miss her. Do you mind my calling you by your given name?"

  "My friends call me Georgie," Georgiana said.

  Sylvia laughed. "I like it," she said. "It suits you. You used to be quite a madcap, didn't you? I remember hearing of your racing in the park during the fashionable hour, when it is considered quite unacceptable to move faster than a slow crawl."

  "Oh dear," Georgiana said. "That does seem to be a long time ago. Is it your cousin who married the Earl of Raymore? I heard of his wedding a few months ago."

  Sylvia nodded. "We were both most fortunate," she said. "We both made love matches. Is it not wonderful to love one's husband? I can tell that you and Lord Chartleigh are very attached to each other too. He is a lovely person. I had not met him before Standen's party."

  "He has been at university," Georgiana explained. "He is only one-and-twenty, you know. Three years older than I. I had not met him myself before… Well, he offered for me at our second meeting, you see. It was an arranged marriage."

  "How dreadful for you!" Sylvia exclaimed. "But how wonderful to discover that your parents had allied you to the very man you would have chosen for yourself if given the chance."

  "Yes," Georgiana agreed. "Except that I do not believe I would have had the good sense to choose him. I have grown to love him since our wedding."

  Sylvia laughed again. "I was foolish enough to let Nigel talk me into betrothing myself to his brother," she said. "It was only afterward that we realized that it was each other we wanted. I had to think of a desperate scheme to set things right. I still feel almost guilty when I think of it. Almost! But when I look at Standen, I know that we would have been very unhappy. As a brother-in-law I can admire him and even feel affection for him. As a husband I would have feared him and come to hate him."

  The hour that passed until Ralph and Nigel Broome joined them in the sitting room seemed no longer than five minutes. Georgiana found a very easy friendship developing between Sylvia and her. The other couple had promised to dine with them before they left for home.

  Ralph was impressed with Nigel Broome's school. He talked to her on the journey home about his own dream of doing something worthwhile with his time and fortune and position of influence. Chartleigh was a large estate. Could he set up some sort of project that would occupy the people from the village workhouse? he wondered. Charity was not the answer. He could give all the inmates of the institution enough money on which to live in comfort and still not beggar himself. But that would not restore their self-respect or satisfy their human need to feel in control of their own lives and destinies. It was jobs they needed. What did Georgiana think?

  Georgiana had never done any thinking along those lines. She was in the habit of agreeing with the general feeling of her class that the poor were poor because they were idle and lazy. But she had learned respect for Ralph's mind. If he said these people needed jobs and faith in themselves, then it must be so. She felt a warm glow of happiness that he would discuss his thoughts with her and ask her opinion. Just as if she were a real person who mattered, instead of a feather-brained female who needed to be bullied to stay out of scrapes.

  "I don't know, Ralph," she said. "But I am sure you will think of a solution. And I know it will be the right one. And if it means spending a great deal of money, you are not to mind me. I shall be quite content to stay at Chartleigh if we cannot afford to keep up the town house. And I have quite enough clothes and faradiddles to last me until I am quite middle-aged."

  And what was more, she thought in some surprise as he laughed in amusement and assured her that he did not think they would be reduced to utter destitution, she meant it. She could live naked on a desert island for the rest of her life, provided Ralph was there with her, she thought with all the intense unrealism of one newly and deeply in love.

  They were a happy seven weeks.

  ***

  They were not quite so happy for Ralph. He was happy when he was with Georgiana and when he was with Sally. But he could find no peace of mind when he was alone.

  He was delighted with the way his relationship with his wife was developing. She appeared to have lost her fear of him and a fragile friendship was growing. He was making an effort to spend more time with her, to get to know her, and to share something of himself with her. The las
t was not easy to do. Ralph had always been a very private person. He was accustomed to being alone, to feeling somewhat despised by most of the people with whom he was forced to associate. He had accepted his essential loneliness.

  It was not easy for him to open his mind to his wife and risk indifference or ridicule. He took her to look at paintings and other works of art that meant a great deal to him. It would have hurt to find her impatient or openly contemptuous. And he shared some of his favorite works of literature with her, mostly poetry over which he had pondered for years. He knew that she was not a reader, that she had no use for the education that had been offered to her as a girl. She had told him as much.

  He found true delight in discovering that she was receptive to the important things of his world. She had no confidence in her own opinions. She constantly belittled the power of her own mind. But she had an intelligence that seemed to have been untapped in her eighteen years of life. Her ideas were fresh, untainted by the opinions of books and scholars. More than once she gave him a fresh insight into some work he had long been familiar with.

  And she showed no reluctance to use her mind. It seemed as if she genuinely wished to enter his world, to be a companion to him. One evening she had been invited to join a theater party with her own family. Knowing that he would be at home alone if she went, she had chosen rather to remain with him. They had spent the evening in the library, quietly involved in their own pursuits until she took a volume of Pope's poetry from a shelf and drew a chair close to his. She had smiled eagerly and handed him the book when he closed his own and put it down.

  But it was not his wish to change her. He delighted in her gaiety, which he had so little suspected when they first married. She loved company and shone when other people were around her. She seemed made to dance, to converse, and to laugh. It became his practice to accept invitations that his own inclination would have led him to refuse. He did not particularly enjoy these parties, but he delighted in watching her, her face animated and flushed, her small, shapely figure always at the center of activity.

  She was very popular with men; he guessed it was because she always looked directly at them and talked quite candidly. She never put on feminine airs, and she never flirted. Perhaps it was because of that fact that it never occurred to him to be jealous. And she did not ignore him. She always appeared to know where he was is a room and frequently looked across at him and smiled. He was very proud of her. How other men must envy him his wife!

  He thought several times of trying to begin a physical relationship with her. There seemed to be no reason why he should not. She appeared to like him. She certainly madee no attempts to avoid his company. But he was araid. Things were going perhaps too well between them. He did not have the courage to risk losing all by forcing himself on her before she was ready. He would wait a little longer. He loved her too dearly to risk losing tier.

  His relationship with Sally Shaw had become much more serious than he had ever intended. He had certainly not planned for it to last so long. He had merely wanted to gain some experience and some confidence. He now had both and there was no reason to continue seeing her. But he found that he could not face the thought of losing her.

  When he was with her, he was happy, utterly so. She had a perfect body. He had never failed to be totally satisfied with their couplings. He knew a feeling of wellbeing when he was with her that stayed with him for the days in between. Had that been the whole of it, though, he felt that he would have been willing to put an end to their affair.

  But that was not the whole of it. There was something more than the physical between them. Why was it that one of his favorite times during their hour together was the spell between their lovemaking when they would merely lie together, their arms wrapped around each other? Why was he always so reluctant to leave her even when his body was thoroughly satiated?

  He knew the reason. He was in love with her. No, not exactly. Not in love with her. In love with Georgiana. He was still repelled when he forced himself to recall with whom he was so frequently intimate. Once he even went to the opera, alone, just to remind himself of how she looked. He was appalled. His box was quite close to the stage. He was even more aware than on the previous occasion of the heaviness of the paint on her face and the artificiality of her hair color. He had gazed at her, quite unable to associate the unseen yet very familiar body of his mistress with this vulgar-looking creature on the stage.

  She caught his eye at one point and smiled at him. No. Leered. There was a coquetry in her look that repelled him. He left the theater almost immediately and never went back again.

  He found that he did not put her face to the body of his mistress. It became his fantasy that it was Georgiana he held. It was her with whom he made love. Sometimes he deliberately slowed down his own impulses so that he might give her pleasure. He would play with her with his hands and his mouth until he knew she was ready for his entry. And then he would move in her, denying his own climax until he knew by some instinct that she was ready for hers. And he would release into her at the very moment when he knew she would shudder against him and give that smothered cry he was becoming used to.

  Why would he do so for a woman who was merely earning her living thus? It was in her interests to have the business over with as quickly as possible. He did it for Georgiana, dreaming that it was she to whom he was giving a pleasure that he knew was often denied women. He refused to puzzle over the surprising fact that he was obviously giving pleasure to a practiced courtesan.

  He could have been happy if, like many men of his class, he had seen no wrong with having a wife and keeping a mistress both at the same time. But when he was alone, away from the pull that both women exerted on his heart, he did see wrong in what he was doing. What he had done had never been right, but at least at first it had been a purely business arrangement with a very definite motive on his part.

  Now it was a lot more than that. The girl still rendered him a service. He still paid her well on each occasion. But there was a relationship between them for all that they did not exchange a dozen words during their encounters. In a strange way that defied words, he loved her. And the longer he had her, the more he grew familiar with her body, the more they slipped into happy routine, the harder it became to give her up.

  Yet he loved his wife more deeply with each passing day. Quite passionately. He wanted her desperately. And he despised himself for making love to her through the body of another woman. Ralph's self-esteem was not growing any greater despite the vast improvements in almost all other areas of his life.

  On the whole, he was not a happy man at the end of the seven weeks, when everything changed.

  CHAPTER 15

  LEAVING MIDDLETON HOUSE for a few hours late at night in order to go to Kensington and back again had become a matter of some routine for Georgiana. Her maid helped her don the heavy black dress and a dark cloak. The veils, she had not put on until she arrived at her destination. The same maid then checked to see that the back stairs were deserted and let her out through a side entrance. The door was left unbolted so that she could return again without disturbing anyone.

  Roger's plain carriage always waited around a nearby corner to take her to Kensington and to return her at a prearranged hour. Roger had accompanied her on the first two occasions, but he no longer did so. As he had explained, he could think of rather more entertaining ways to spend his evenings than in conveying his cousin's wife to clandestine meetings with her husband.

  "And quite frankly, my dear Georgie," he had added, "the sight of your flushed face when you return reminds me painfully of all that I am missing on my own account."

  Georgiana had never come even close to being caught. Eventually she abandoned some of the caution that had always set her heart to thumping at first. She did not even have her head covered by the hood of her cloak the night she saw Stanley. She was hurrying along the pavement on her way to the carriage. He was walking toward her on the other side of the street.
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  She immediately felt panic. She hastily raised her hood, lowered her head, and hurried on. She did not think he had seen her. Certainly he did not hail her or cross the street. She breathed a sigh of relief when the postilion handed her into the carriage and she was on her way. But she remembered the near-disaster. The next time she was far more cautious, though on that occasion the street seemed deserted. She thought no more about the matter.

  Two evenings later there was a ball at Viscount Roth's mansion on Charles Street. It was an occasion Georgiana much looked forward to. Entertainments on a grand scale were still fairly rare. She dressed with particular care in a pale green velvet gown that had just been delivered from the modiste's. Its design was very simple, but she thought that it showed her figure to advantage. She wore Ralph's pearls with it.

  The ballroom was surprisingly crowded. It seemed that everyone who was anyone had been invited. Georgiana's card began to fill with flattering rapidity. Ralph claimed the first set and the supper dance. Roger, Dennis, Stanley, other acquaintances: all signed her card. She was rather surprised at Stanley. She felt he did not like her. And besides, he rarely danced. He felt it to be a rather juvenile activity, she guessed, and cultivated a mature image by playing cards and playing rather deep, she had heard.

  She thoroughly enjoyed the first part of the evening. The set with Ralph was too soon over, but she had the supper dance to look forward to. And she could see from her card that it was a waltz. Dennis Vaughan amused her with the story of his latest escapade, in which he and a friend had put frogs into the carriage of Lady Sharp, who had boasted at a dinner party that she was a strong-minded female and never had the hysterics or the vapors.