The Last Waltz

by Mary Balogh

  The countess was tall, slender to the point of thinness, tight-lipped, hard-eyed. She was dressed in unrelieved black from neck to wrists to ankles. Not a single curl showed beneath her black cap. She even looked Puritanical, he thought. She was a woman without joy. He was surprised that that younger daughter of hers had been allowed bright colors with which to paint—and that her fair curls had not been tamed.

  She stayed where she was, he noticed, straight-backed, silent, disapproving. And she would stay too, he guessed, if only to confirm her own impression that the waltz was a wicked dance straight from hell. Her silent presence irritated him. He wished he had suggested that only Margaret and his aunt come.

  “Now, then,” he said to Margaret, “we will not try to move to music yet or take up the correct posture for the waltz.” The clutching as she had described it at luncheon very much to his amusement. “We will practice the steps first. There are really only three, performed over and over again in a variety of patterns. But you must remember that we will face each other during the dance. Your steps, then, should mirror mine and not copy them exactly.”

  She stared at his feet, a frown of concentration creasing her brow.

  Either he was not a good teacher, he thought several minutes later, or she was a particularly poor pupil. Uncharitably, he thought the latter was the more likely. She kept complaining about running out of feet at critical moments. She tripped over the two she had. She giggled. She pronounced the whole thing impossible. She apologized profusely. But finally she appeared to have grasped the basic three steps of the dance.

  The countess watched from just inside the doors without moving a muscle—or offering any comment, criticism, or encouragement. Her silence fairly shouted at the irritated dancing teacher.

  “Let us try to set those steps to music,” he suggested. “It will be easier, perhaps, once you hear the rhythm.”

  It was not. Music, it seemed, was the one additional factor that destroyed everything Margaret had learned. She was probably tone deaf, he decided, and lacking in any sense of rhythm. And yet she had played competently enough the evening before. He was the world’s worst teacher, then.

  “Unclench your teeth,” he advised her. “Stop frowning. Listen to the music. Move to it.”

  Margaret giggled.

  But eventually, after Aunt Hannah had started and stopped a score or more times, she had improved quite markedly.

  The countess said nothing. Doubtless she was thinking a great deal.

  “Splendid!” the earl said with an enthusiasm he was far from feeling—what in the name of thunder was he doing in the ballroom at Thornwood of all places, trying to teach the waltz? He could think of at least a dozen of his Canadian acquaintances who would make very merry indeed with the fact for a decade or longer if they only knew. “Now let us try to do it together.”

  He took a step closer to Margaret and directed her to place her left hand on his right shoulder while he set his right against the back of her waist. He took her right hand in his left. She blushed rosily even though they were the length of their bent arms apart.

  “Start with your left foot,” he told her. “Listen to the music and feel the rhythm. Follow my lead. Aunt Hannah, if you please?”

  His aunt, eternally good-natured and patient, struck up the tune yet again. Margaret’s forehead crashed into his chest at the very first step.

  “Oh, dear,” she said and giggled.

  “Margaret,” he said, trying to emulate his aunt’s patience, “you must not watch my feet. Look at me or over my shoulder. Eventually you must learn to smile and converse while you dance, but we will not press that point today.”

  “But how am I to know what your feet are doing unless I watch them?” she asked.

  He sighed. How was she to know? But all the partners he had had in London had seemed to know by instinct. It was, he supposed, easier to be the man in such a dance than the woman.

  “Trust me,” he said. “Try again. Aunt Hannah?”

  But they had clearly reached their limit for today, he realized after six or seven more tries, none of which were very much more successful than the first. Perhaps tomorrow she would do better or he would have thought of another way to teach her. If worse came to worst, he supposed she could sit out the waltzes at the Christmas ball. She would not be able to perform the dance in London, after all, until one of the patronesses of Almack’s gave her the nod of approval. But she would be disappointed, he believed, if she were forced to miss one of the pleasures of the ball over Christmas. And he did not wish to see her disappointed.

  The countess was still standing where she had been for the past hour. Perhaps she had thought it incumbent upon herself to act as chaperon, he thought unkindly. Perhaps she had imagined that while Aunt Hannah was engrossed in her music he would have been busy seducing Margaret behind the bench.

  And then he had one of those sudden memories that had haunted him for a couple of years after he left England, and even in more recent years had come upon him out of the blue, so to speak, often when he had least expected them, to disturb his peace. A memory of dancing the minuet with a young and smiling Christina. Graceful, light of foot, almost ethereal in one of the delicate white ballgowns she had always worn, she had held his eyes and the whole of his attention. There had always been warmth in her sparkling eyes, in her flushed cheeks, in her parted lips.

  She had, he had told her once, been born to dance. She had laughed at him and danced on.

  She stood now, dark and cold and disapproving just inside the ballroom doors—Christina ten years later. He felt another wave of the growingly familiar dislike.

  “Thank you, Aunt Hannah,” he said. “And thank you, Margaret. I believe that will do for today. You will learn more, perhaps, from watching the dance performed correctly. You will watch her ladyship and me waltz together.” He was leading Margaret across the floor as he spoke—and he had raised his voice.

  The countess stared at him with her impassive face, though her lips compressed more if that were possible.

  “I cannot waltz, my lord,” she said. “And I have informed you that I will not dance at all at the Christmas ball.”

  “As you will,” he told her, shrugging carelessly. “But Margaret needs to watch the steps demonstrated and I need a partner if she is to do that. You are the only one available.”

  “But I do not know the steps,” she said.

  “You have been watching them for a full hour,” he pointed out

  “And it looks as impossible to me as it seems to Meg,” she said. “And it is quite as improper as I had been led to expect.”

  Because the partners touched and stood face-to-face and very nearly body to body for its duration? And why had he made such a suggestion anyway? he wondered. He would have to touch her. He had no wish to do so. He had the strange impression that he might be turned to ice if he did so.

  “Margaret,” he said in the bored voice he sometimes affected when he wanted to annoy someone, “I believe her ladyship is a coward.”

  “Oh, do try it, Christina,” Margaret said, sounding somewhat tired and dispirited, “if only to prove to me that it cannot be done.”

  The countess’s chin had lifted a notch.

  “She does not even have your courage to try,” the earl said. “Doubtless she is afraid of making a cake of herself, Margaret.”

  The dark eyes darted sparks. “We will see about that, my lord,” she said, and she gathered the side of her skirt in one hand and swept past them in the direction of the pianoforte. “Are you very tired, Aunt Hannah? Or are you willing to play for a little longer? A very little.”

  “Oh, I am enjoying myself vastly, dear,” Lady Hannah assured her.

  The Earl of Wanstead raised his eyebrows and winked at Margaret.

  Margaret laughed.

  But he was not feeling amused, his lordship thought as they crossed the ballroom again and his cousin moved behind the pianoforte bench in order to watch. Good Lord, he did not want t
o dance with her. He especially did not want to waltz with her.

  With a black icicle.

  Chapter 5

  “IT IS quite possible, dear Christina,” Lady Hannah was saying, beaming her encouragement. “I have seen it done. I have watched several couples twirling about a ballroom without any one of them coming to grief or treading on one another’s toes, though quite how they did it I do not know. I never saw anything more delightful in my life.”

  But Christina was unable to give anything like her full attention to the words. Into what had she allowed herself to be goaded? She should have given in to nothing short of a direct command, but he had not needed to give that. He had called her a coward and she had risen to the bait just like a hot-tempered schoolgirl. And now there was no way back.

  She was going to waltz—or try at least. With him. She could not bear the thought of touching him, let alone standing face-to-face with him barely an arm’s length apart.

  And yet for the past hour she had been dancing without ever moving either her feet or her body. She had been dancing with him as she had once done in many London ballrooms. She had danced with numerous partners, but with him it had always been different. With him she had danced on gilt-edged clouds—she had even been foolish enough to tell him that once, and he had taken her hand in his, raised it to his lips, and held her eyes with his own in that intense way he had had....

  She had been standing close to the doors of the ballroom, longing and longing to dance—-to waltz. With him. And asking herself if there really was anything so sinful about dancing. It was an activity designed to arouse inappropriate passions, Gilbert had said. Oh, yes, there was at least some truth in that.

  He was not going to begin at the beginning with her, she realized in some alarm after he had followed her across the ballroom floor. He stepped close to her even as Margaret moved off to stand behind the pianoforte bench, slipping his arm beneath hers, and spreading his hand against the back of her waist. She felt the shocking heat of it through the wool of her dress, through her shift, against her flesh. And the alarming nearness of him. He seemed suddenly taller, broader, more—male. She raised her left hand and rested it on his shoulder. It was all hard muscle. The bare skin of his throat and jaw seemed very close. So did his face. He took her right hand in his.

  She felt flustered beyond bearing and had to concentrate hard on keeping her cool outer bearing. This was far more intimate, far more improper even than it had looked when Meg had stood in her place. No wonder her sister-in-law had been unable to concentrate on the steps.

  “Remember the steps,” he told her as if he had read her thoughts. “They are grouped in sets of three. You begin with your left foot. After that, you simply follow my lead.”

  Simply! “Impossible,” she said, and then wished she had not spoken at all. The word came out sounding all breathless. She felt as if at least half the air had suddenly seeped out of the ballroom. She felt dizzy with the subtle, musky odor of his cologne. She had never, she suddenly realized, been this close to Gilbert except for their brief encounters in the marriage bed.

  “Aunt Hannah, please?” he said. And then he spoke to her again. “Relax, my lady.”

  He might have instructed her to turn herself into a winged rhinoceros with better hope of success. She was all wooden legs and arms and whirling thoughts. Poor Aunt Hannah, she thought dimly after they had stopped for the third time in quick succession and she had been requested yet again to play the opening bars of the music. This was not working at all.

  But he spoke in the seconds before it came time to try moving again. “Christina,” he said softly, “look at me. Feel the rhythm. Feel my rhythm.”

  She was not sure if he had meant the words to sound risqué. She did not immediately think of them that way herself. But she did obey him. For one thing, she felt humiliated that she could not do something as simple as master the steps of a dance. For another, she felt annoyed that he of all people was to be the witness to her failure.

  She had been gazing fixedly over his shoulder. She looked now, instead, into his face, which was embarrassingly close. She did not, of course, have to look directly into his eyes. She might have looked at his chin or his mouth. But it was into his eyes she looked, and having once done so, she could not look away again. And this time when she recognized the cue for the dance to begin, she moved off with her left foot, fitting the steps to the rhythm of the music instead of counting determinedly, shutting all else out, including the music and the movements of her partner.

  She danced with him step for step and suddenly discovered that she could feel his movements and sense where he would set his feet next. She could match her steps to his. She could feel his rhythm and could relax into it and follow it. She did not need to count, to concentrate on her steps, to wonder if she would get them right. She merely had to let him lead.

  Sometimes his eyes could look dreamy. It was when he drooped his eyelids over them as he was doing now. It was a familiar, long-remembered look. His size, his nearness, his body heat, the smell of his cologne no longer seemed threatening. They became like a shelter around her, wrapping her in the sensual pleasure of the present moment, shielding her from everything that threatened from the outside.

  His movements had changed, she only half realized after a few moments. He was no longer dancing her back and forth over the same small area of floor. He was taking her around the perimeter of the ballroom, twirling her slowly but perfectly in time to the music. And she felt something she had not felt in years, something she had thought long, long dead in herself.

  She felt a great welling of exhilaration. Of joy.

  Gerard. Ah, Gerard.

  She had no idea how many seconds or minutes passed before he spoke—though they had circled right about the ballroom, she realized then.

  “You see?” he said. “It really is possible.”

  His voice broke the spell, and she realized what she was doing, what was happening. She was dancing. Not only dancing, but waltzing. She was waltzing in a man’s arms and smiling at him and enjoying every moment and dreaming of him as he had once been—and of herself as she had once been. She was being seduced and she was allowing it to happen just as if she had no will of her own, no character or principles of her own.

  Just as if she were that same naive, heedless girl and he was that same flawed golden boy.

  She lost the rhythm and they drew to a halt.

  But Margaret was applauding and Aunt Hannah joined her after lifting her hands from the keyboard.

  “Oh, you waltz beautifully, Christina,” Margaret said wistfully. “But how on earth did you know when to twirl about and how to keep your feet from beneath Cousin Gerard’s?”

  “Now you must admit that I was right,” Lady Hannah said. “Is it not the most romantic dance there ever was, Christina?”

  “It really is not the thing at all,” she said, dropping her left hand, withdrawing her right, and taking a step back. “I daresay our neighbors would be scandalized if it were included in the Christmas ball. It must not be. We would not wish to make anyone uncomfortable, after all.” She felt decidedly uncomfortable, remembering how she had forgotten everything but the dance—and her partner.

  “I am going to learn it if I must die in the attempt,” Margaret said.

  “I hardly think it will come to that, dear,” her aunt assured her. “Tomorrow you will do better, mark my words.”

  “Those of the neighbors who know the steps will probably be eager to show off their superior skills,” the earl said.

  “Those who do not will doubtless enjoy seeing them demonstrated before their eyes. We will demonstrate the waltz for them, my lady. You and I.”

  “But I do not intend to dance at all,” she reminded him coolly. His eyes, she noticed, had lost that dreamy, seductive look. They were mocking her. “I shall be your hostess at the ball, my lord, and greet everyone and make sure that all the young ladies have partners. But dancing itself is for young people.”
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  “Precisely,” he agreed. “You and I will waltz together.”

  “Oh yes, Christina,” Lady Hannah said. “You really must. You do it exceedingly well, especially when it is remembered that this was your first try. And you are only eight-and-twenty. Of course you are young.”

  “Gilbert would have disapproved.”

  “But Gilbert, my lady,” the Earl of Wanstead reminded her, his voice almost silky, “is dead.” His blue eyes, she saw when she looked into them, had turned hard as steel. He was going to insist that she dance with him, not because he really wished to do so, but simply because he knew she did not wish it.

  He was no different from any other man, she thought bitterly. He enjoyed exercising power over women, especially any who tried, however feebly, to defy him. He particularly enjoyed his power over her since she had once rejected him.

  “It will be as you command, my lord,” she said and quelled the twinge of fear she could not help feeling when he narrowed his eyes on her as he had done in the library during the morning—before warning her not to try impertinence on him.

  The rest of the week before his guests arrived was an extremely busy one for the Earl of Wanstead. He prepared for their visit in a number of ways, though it was the countess who saw to the hiring of extra servants, and the servants who undertook all the numerous menial tasks, like cleaning and airing every available bedchamber in the house, for example. He undertook a few journeys into the town eight miles away to purchase various supplies, among them a large box of skates of various sizes. It was his hope that the ice on the lake would be firm enough to allow skating over the holiday.

  He diligently made the acquaintance of all his neighbors, calling upon most of them in company with his aunt or Margaret or both. Many of the people he remembered from his boyhood, of course. He issued verbal invitations to the Christmas ball even though Margaret had already sent out cards. It seemed that everyone was planning to attend.