The Last Waltz

by Mary Balogh

  But if he stayed in England, she thought—Gerard, that was—then she simply must find some way of escaping an intolerable situation. And there was only one way.

  She expected that the earl would be as eager to avoid her this morning as she was to avoid him. That kiss! The memory of it, brief as it had been, so consumed her with embarrassment that her mind shied away from it altogether—and could think of nothing else. Not just the kiss, but the mortifying knowledge that she had burned for him, that her womb had throbbed with the need to feel him there. Mortifying indeed!

  But seemingly he did not share her embarrassment. As soon as they had all returned to the house and most of the guests were on their way upstairs to change from their outdoor clothes, he summoned her to the library. She wished it might have been anywhere else if they must talk. She felt embarrassed just to see the room again and to remember that just there before the hearth, close to the chair on which she had been sitting .. .

  She crossed the room to the large oak desk, and ran her palm over the smooth top of it as if testing it for dust.

  “Christina,” he said, closing the door behind him. His voice was brisk and businesslike, she noticed. “Last night I suggested that we try to do better today, that we try to be more civil to each other. It is something I still hope we can do, but it has been very clear to me that I also owe you an apology.”

  She turned her head to look at him.

  “You hurt me once,” he said in the same impersonal tone. “It was long ago. We were both young, very different people from what we are now. But the ignoble urge to hurt where we have been hurt is hard to resist, I have found to my chagrin. I have been trying to hurt you ever since I arrived here over a week ago.”

  She could acknowledge what he said only with a brief nod—and with inner surprise at his honesty. It seemed somehow to set her at a disadvantage.

  “I beg your pardon,” he said. She heard him draw breath. “And for the disrespect I showed you last night by kissing you.”

  She felt heat in her cheeks and hoped that her blush was masked by the heightened color the outdoor chill must have whipped into her face.

  “It was nothing,” she said, and her eyes locked on his for just a few moments too long. She lowered her gaze. What a patent and foolish lie to have uttered in the face of his honesty.

  “I am a wealthy man,” he said, his voice brisk again. “When I marry, I will make a settlement on you and your daughters. Included in it will be a home of your choice and the upkeep of that home. There is no need for you to consider a marriage of your own unless it is your wish to do so.”

  Despite herself—she knew he was trying to be conciliatory—she felt a flaring of anger. When I marry... “You are determined, then,” she said, “to consider me a heavy millstone about your neck and to keep me constantly aware of the fact. Is this sugar-coated revenge, Gerard?”

  He stared at her, hard-eyed and tight-jawed.

  “Before I forget—” He strode toward her so that for a moment she felt a resurgence of last evening’s blind terror. But he was looking at something on the desk rather than at her. She stepped smartly aside and he picked up a sealed letter from the top of a pile and handed it to her. “This came with the morning post. I beg your pardon, I should have handed it to you before we went outside.”

  Christina did not receive many letters and looked down curiously at the one he had just given her. It was addressed in a somewhat shaky hand, as if it had been written by an elderly person. It was handwriting she had not seen in many a long year, but she recognized it instantly. And then doubted the evidence of her own eyes. Lady Milchip’s words in the drawing room last evening had planted the idea in her mind. It would be too much of a coincidence....

  But a second glance at the letter confirmed her first impression. It was from her father.

  “Are you all right?” a voice asked her, and she looked up blankly, a buzzing in her ears.

  “Oh,” she said. “Yes. Yes, thank you.”

  He glanced down at the letter in her hand and up into her face again. “Why do you not sit down by the fire and read it?” he suggested. “I can come back later.”

  But she had noticed the pile of letters on his desk that doubtless he had hoped to deal with while his guests were busy about their own business.

  “Please do not feel obliged to leave,” she said, crossing the room and taking the chair in which she had sat last evening—though she was scarcely aware of the fact. It was only later that she thought she ought to have taken her letter to the privacy of her own room. She broke the seal.

  He had heard that the new Earl of Wanstead was in England. He wondered if he was at Thornwood. He wondered if he should send his compliments. The words were difficult to read, written as they were in the same shaky hand that had addressed the outside. Christina scanned the letter quickly, hungry for news of her father, for the expression of some personal concern for her or the granddaughters he had never seen. There were words of affection, quite lavishly expressed, much as she had expected. But affection was clearly not what had motivated him to write.

  She folded the letter carefully after she was finished, set it down on her lap, and stared into the fire.

  “Not bad news, I hope?”

  “No.”

  Only memories—of an uncertain and frequently unhappy childhood, of a mother she had loved and grown to despise, of a father she had loved and come to hate. Of that contempt and that hatred turned against herself. How could she despise the mother who had always shielded and protected her? How could she love the father whose weaknesses had them all living constantly on the brink of hell? How could she conspire with both her mother and her father—though no single word of conspiracy was ever spoken among them—to live a lie?

  Everyone had thought them a perfectly happy family. It was the mask they had all put on for the world. Everyone had loved her sociable, charming, handsome father. Everyone had admired her serene, dignified, loyal mother. Everyone had envied her as the focus of their love.

  As she grew up, loving and hating them, she had dreamed of a different life for herself than the one she had always known. And she had planned it, intending to let sense and reason and wisdom determine her choices.

  A hand appeared in front of her face suddenly. It held a glass half full of some brown liquor.

  “Drink this,” the Earl of Wanstead said. “It will make you feel better.”

  “I do not drink,” she said, turning her head away.

  “No, of course not.” He set the glass down on the mantel. “It is sinful, no doubt.”

  And then she wished she had taken the glass and at least pretended to sip from it. He came down on his haunches in front of her and took both her hands in a firm clasp. She had not realized how like ice blocks her own were.

  “How may I be of service to you?” he asked.

  By telling her how she might be wise—she never had learned the trick. By telling her how to stop loving people who had not earned her love—quite the contrary, in fact. How could she possibly still love her father? How could she read a letter that was so predictable in its selfish, self-absorbed contents that she might as easily have written it herself and saved him the effort—and feel her heart yearn toward him?

  “You cannot,” she said. “It is a—a petty debt is all. Yes, perhaps you can help. I told Mr. Monck that it would be more convenient for everyone if he started paying the allowance you so generously granted me in the first quarter of the New Year. May I—may I ask him to pay it to me now instead? I will not ask for more before the second quarter, of course.”

  She thought she might well die of humiliation. She kept her eyes on the dancing flames of the fire.

  “Of course,” he said, tightening his hold on her hands. “I shall speak to him myself today. He will pay you a quarter’s allowance now and another in January. Will it be sufficient to cover your debt? Tell me now if it will not. I will not have you anxious over money.”

  But his kindnes
s, over which she should be feeling nothing but deep gratitude, only succeeded in suffocating and irritating her.

  “It will be sufficient.” She withdrew her hands from his and looked at him. “And you will not pay me again in January. You will not, Gerard.” Her humiliation was complete when she found herself having to blink back tears.

  He stood up and looked silently down at her. “This house is just not going to be big enough for the two of us, is it, Christina?” he said. “I must return to Montreal. Or if I marry and remain in England, I must house you some distance from Thornwood. Or you must marry.” He ran the fingers of one hand through his hair.

  “It would be just like you,” she said hotly, “to go away again and leave me here to be plagued by the guilt of having driven you away from your own home.”

  “Would it?” He clasped his hands behind his back. “Would it be just like me, Christina? To go away rather than live where I might see you again? Would guilt at having driven me away plague you? Did it the last time?”

  She did not answer him. But she would not look away from his eyes either.

  “You need not so burden yourself,” he said. “If it was you who drove me to go to Canada, Christina, then I must thank you. I found activity there to satisfy my restless yearning for adventure. I prospered there. And I was happy there. If you have believed all these years that I have been lonely and pining for you or for a wasted life, you have been much mistaken. It is only a sense of duty that has me thinking now of possibly staying. If you make the next week or so here as intolerable to me as the last week has been, then perhaps you will be doing me a similar favor to the one you did me before. I shall go back home and be happy again.”

  “Then I wish you would go tomorrow,” she said. “Today.”

  “Do you?” He smiled. “At least I have brought you back from the brink of fainting. I have my uses, my lady. Pardon me, I must summon Monck. I imagine you would rather not be present to hear yourself spoken of as if you were a child without a voice of your own.”

  She rose hastily to her feet, grasping her letter in one hand. How rude she had been. She was beholden to him. He had been kind and he had been generous and she had hated him for it and ripped up at him without any just cause.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you for granting my request.”

  “If it is any comfort to you, Christina,” he said, crossing the room ahead of her and holding the door open for her, “I find your financial dependence upon me as suffocating as you. I would dearly like you to feel free to invite me to go to hell without suffering pangs of guilt at the thought that you owe me allegiance. For God’s sake if you must hate me, do so wholeheartedly. You were Gilbert’s wife. You are the mother of his daughters. As such you have every right to the support of this estate. As much right to it as I have. In future when you want something of it, tell me so. You do not need to ask. Much less do you need to thank me.”

  “Oh,” she said, pausing to look at him, “how you enjoyed that. And how very true your words are. I have a right to the support of this estate. Not to your support, but to its support. I wish I had realized that before. But it is true. And now I may hate you with my whole heart.”

  “Yes,” he said curtly, but there was the merest suggestion of a smile lurking behind his tight-jawed glare.

  She smiled dazzlingly at him as she passed through the door.

  It did not take long to instruct Charles Monck to pay her ladyship a quarter’s allowance without delay and to talk with him about a few other items of business. It did not take much longer to go through the morning post and dispose of the bulk of it and set aside the few items that would need more attention when he had the time to spare.

  He needed to think.

  She had not had money of her own since her marriage. Monck had confirmed her claim that Gilbert had paid all her bills, and those bills had been few. The earl had looked himself through the account books for the past six years and had discovered incredibly few entries relating to clothes or jewels—there were none at all of the latter, in fact—or other personal items for either the countess or her children.

  She had had no spending money since Gilbert’s death. She had submitted the bills for her few mourning clothes but had never asked for money.

  What debt could she have incurred now that she would not merely submit as a bill for payment? There was no evidence that she had ever been extravagant—quite the contrary. Her spontaneous reaction to the proposed card games last evening, which she had expected to be gambling games, had demonstrated her puritanical horror of wagering.

  It was no trifling debt despite her description of it as such. She had come very close to fainting. Even before she had opened the letter her pallor had been apparent—it had shown up shockingly in contrast to the two bright spots of color that remained high on her cheeks from the outdoor chill. She had recognized the handwriting and had known what debt was being called in.

  What debt?

  It was none of his business, he told himself. He would willingly pay it, whatever it was, but she had rejected any more help than an advance on next quarter’s allowance.

  It had looked like the handwriting of an old or sick person.

  He was prevented from further thought on the subject by a light tap on the library door followed by its opening. A head peered cautiously around it.

  “Oh,” Jeannette Campbell said, looking mortified, “there is someone in here. I am so sorry for disturbing you, Gerard. I was told I might find a book here, but I can come back another time.”

  “Come in.” He strode toward her, smiling. “I cannot imagine anyone by whom I would more prefer to be disturbed. There are shelves of books, some few of them even readable, I believe. But can your choosing one wait, Jeannette? Will you put your cloak and bonnet back on and come outside with me again?”

  She looked at him in some surprise, but she shared his love of the outdoors, he knew. They had agreed long ago that it was the best place in which to do one’s thinking and relaxing.

  “Of course,” she said. “Give me two minutes.”

  They were striding off in the direction of the lake five minutes later. They did not talk. That was one thing he liked about Jeannette. She did not need either to chatter constantly or to be chattered to. They could be perfectly comfortable together in silence.

  “There,” he said at last after they had threaded their way through dense trees. “It is rather large, but it is quite hidden from the house.”

  “Ah,” she said, gazing at the lake, which was completely iced over now. It was surrounded by trees, many of them evergreens, most with bare branches. “The sight makes me feel homesick. There is a vastness and a starkness about the scene untypical of what I have seen of England. It is lovely.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  She looked at him after they had stood side by side in silence for a while. “Do you wish to talk about it?” she asked.

  He chuckled softly. That was another thing about his friendship with Jeannette. They could sometimes sense each other’s mood. “Not really,” he said. “I am not even quite sure what it is. Have you ever hated anyone, Jeannette?”

  She gave the question some consideration. “You do not mean just the flashes of intense dislike and anger we feel against people sometimes, do you?” she said. “You mean something deep-rooted and long-lasting, something that eats away at you.”

  “Yes.” That was it exactly.

  “No,” she said. “I have never hated like that. Is it something fairly recent, Gerard? Perhaps it will pass off and you will forget about it. Does it hurt badly?”

  “I thought I had forgotten,” he said. “But maybe I just pushed it deep and denied it and let it fester.”

  “And coming home has brought it all back to you,” she said. She added quietly. “Coming here. You did not have a happy childhood here, did you? I remember your telling me about your uncle’s volatile temper, about his openly favoring you over his own sons and causing them to hate you.
But they are all dead, and it is not the place you hate, is it? It is someone. I am sorry. I do not wish to—”

  “She accepted Wanstead’s marriage offer on a three-week acquaintance,” he said, “because he was an earl and had property and a vast fortune.”

  “Gerard,” she said, touching his arm, “many women marry for such security. It is not easy being a woman. The prospect of being left destitute is more frightening for us than for men. We are so limited in the ways we can provide for ourselves.”

  “Mmm,” he said. He did not want her making excuses for Christina.

  “Perhaps,” she said, “she was fond of him or grew fond of him. You cannot know unless she has told you differently. You have been far away. She has two very sweet little children—I met them this morning.”

  He smiled at her. “You are too easy to talk to, Jeannette,” he said. “I did not intend to burden you with my problems— certainly not with the specifics. Do you think you are going to enjoy being here?”

  “Of course,” she said. “We expected, Andrew and I, that we would spend Christmas alone together in London. We were already feeling rather sorry for ourselves, far from home and family and particular friends. And then you invited us here. It was extremely kind of you. And yes, we are both already enjoying ourselves. It is a beautiful place and our fellow guests are amiable.”

  “I suppose,” he said, only because she was Jeannette and it was not in the nature of their friendship to keep anything secret that concerned them both, “you have some idea of the reason behind this house party? Apart from the celebration of Christmas, that is.”

  Her eyes wavered from his for just a moment. “Andrew suggested it,” she said, “and I have seen since yesterday that it is probably true.”