by Mary Balogh
Why had she left? the earl asked himself. She had gone in a hurry while he was kissing Lizzie Gaynor beneath the mistletoe. The answer to his question was obvious, of course, and it irritated him no end. Kissing boughs were doubtless heathen creations, and kissing in public—perhaps even in private!—was the work of the devil. It was a good thing he had not got around to pecking Rachel on the cheek, he thought grimly. He might have found himself accused of all manner of atrocities.
He was glad she did not come back down for tea. He did not want to see her thin-lipped, disapproving face again any time soon. It was a discourtesy not to put in an appearance, of course, but that was her problem, not his. She was not his wife, for which blessing he would be eternally thankful. Tess, who had been playing with Alice and the younger Langan boy all through tea, came and stood before him when Laura Cannadine was about to herd all the children back to the nursery, and wanted to know where her mama was. He went down on his haunches before her.
“I believe Mama is being a sleepyhead,” he told her. “You exhausted her this morning, Tess, by making her climb trees and getting her stuck.”
She giggled.
“You go on up with the others,” he told her, patting her plump cheek. “Mama will come and see you later. And, Tess? Thank you for helping with the kissing bough. It is really lovely.”
She smiled sunnily and skipped off to join the other children.
Where was Christina? She had not told anyone she was unwell. It was unlike her to abandon her duties or to lie down in the middle of the day.
“Ask her ladyship’s maid if she is in her room, Billings,” he instructed the butler after stepping out of the drawing room. “And if she is well.”
But the message came back that her ladyship was not in her room at all. One of the scullery maids, who had been shaking a cloth outside the kitchen door an hour earlier, had seen her walking up behind the house, going in the direction of the woods.
At twilight? When it was snowing rather heavily? If she had been going for a stroll in order to get some fresh air— but was that likely after all the air and exercise she had got during the morning?—would she not have mentioned the fact to someone? Would she not have asked if anyone wished to accompany her? At the very least her children?
What the devil?
Everyone had dispersed after tea to amuse themselves at various informal activities or to rest after the exertions of the day. There were a few hours to spare before it would be necessary to dress for dinner.
She had been gone for longer than an hour. Without a word to anyone. And she was still not back. It was heavy dusk outside now. Not that the night was going to be a dark one with all the light snow clouds that were still disgorging their load. But even so it was a strange time to go out for a prolonged stroll—alone.
Damn the woman, he thought. He had been going to suggest a game of billiards with Harry and Ralph and anyone else who cared to join them. There was a cozy fire in the billiard room. He had had enough of the outdoors and of physical exertion for one day. If she had gone off alone, it was because she wanted to be alone. There was no danger to her. Despite the snow, there was no blizzard, and she must know her way about the park. He would certainly be the last person she would want to see.
But he knew he would not be able to rest again until he was sure she was safe. And since it had never been in his nature to wait passively for something to happen if he could possibly help it, he knew that he was going to go out there looking for her. Just to see annoyance, even contempt, in her eyes for his pains, no doubt.
The marks of her bootprints were not quite obliterated, he discovered when he went outside. Slight depressions in the snow revealed that she had indeed gone toward the forest in a diagonal line, heading north. It was too dark when he finally got among the trees to find any sign still remaining that she had passed this way, but if she had not swerved out of the direction she had taken, she would have reached the river eventually. And if she had been headed there at such an angle, the chances were that she would not then have turned south. If she had gone north along the riverbank, it seemed probable that her destination was Pinky’s hut. She had been living at Thornwood long enough, after all, to have discovered it ages ago.
Why would she decide to go to Pinky’s hut today of all days? And at this time of day? And during a heavy snowfall? One answer was obvious to him. It was so that she might enjoy some privacy. He waded onward nevertheless, feeling somewhat murderous. Though she was not to blame, he supposed, if he was foolish enough to follow her, unbidden.
At first he thought he had been mistaken. There was no sign of a light in the window, not even the flickering light of a fire. And there was no smoke coming from the chimney. But he climbed the slope to the cottage anyway and opened the door.
He thought there was no one in there. Certainly there was no light, no sound, no movement. But there was something lighter than the surrounding darkness on the bed, and he stepped closer in order to have a clearer view. He left the door open behind him.
His eyes registered the fact that it was indeed she who was sitting silently there at the same moment as she moved. She jerked closer to the wall farthest from where he stood, and her arms came free of the sheepskin blanket in which she had been wrapped in order to cover her face protectively. She made a guttural sound in her throat.
He froze.
And then he turned to cross the single room of the hut again in order to shut the door. He found the tinderbox by touch alone—he knew where it had always been kept—and lit the single candle that stood in a holder on the table. He knelt in front of the hearth and set a light to the kindling so that the fire would burn and bring some warmth to the room.
“I am not going to hit you,” he said quietly.
She had been almost relaxed, almost warm, almost at peace. She had been in a half dream, though still awake. She had not heard anyone approach—but how could she have when any footfall would be deadened by the blanket of snow? When the door had opened and she had seen the silhouette of a man, first standing there and then stepping inside, she had been paralyzed with terror. Not of strangers. It had not for a moment occurred to her that some dangerous vagrant or fugitive might have found his way to the shelter of the hut.
She had acted from sheer instinct. She had tried to duck out of his reach. She had tried to protect her face. She had thought he was....
But he had not touched her. And even as he walked away and closed the door and groped for the tinderbox, even before she saw him clearly, she knew that she had been disoriented. Dead men did not walk. She knew who he was. The light from the candle, suddenly illumining his face as he bent over it, merely confirmed the fact. He did not look at her. He proceeded to light the fire. Only then did he speak.
“I am not going to hit you,” he said.
“I did not know who you were,” she said. It seemed that there was warmth in the room already. Perhaps it was just the light and the crackling sounds of the fire catching hold that gave the illusion.
“No,” he said. “I suppose you did not.”
He came to stand before the window beside the bed, though he did not look at her at all. He stood gazing out. Probably, she thought, with the light inside the room he could see nothing out there. But he stood there for a long time, not moving. She could have reached out and touched him if she had wanted to do so. She stayed where she was and did not move at all.
Why had he come? How had he known where to find her?
The answers did not seem important. Neither, for that matter, did the questions. He had come. It had been somehow inevitable.
She had been aware from the beginning of her marriage that it was here at Thornwood that he had grown up. She had never tried to place him anywhere in the house or park. She had never wondered which bedchamber had been his, which rooms he had spent most of his time in, which parts of the outdoors had been his favorite playgrounds. She had not wanted to know. But she had known, though neither she nor Mr. Pinke
rton had ever mentioned his name, that this hut had been a haunt of his, that it had been a special place for him. How had she known? There was no answer to the question. She simply had.
And she knew now that she had been right. He belonged in this cozy little room. It breathed his presence. She had never consciously admitted to herself that she had come here through the years in order to allow herself the very small comfort of that knowledge.
“We left something unfinished at Vauxhall,” he said at last without turning from the window.
“Yes,” she said.
“We should have finished it and been done with it,” he said.
“Yes.”
He turned from the window but still did not look at her. He went to stand in front of the fire and gazed down into the flames, which were dancing about the logs piled in the hearth. He stood there for a long time before taking off his hat and gloves and greatcoat and setting them on the rocking chair where Mr. Pinkerton had loved to sit. He shrugged out of his coat and stood for a few moments in his shirtsleeves before starting to unbutton his waistcoat.
And so it would be ended, Christina thought as she watched him undress until he stood before the fire wearing only his breeches and stockings. It was a strange moment, beyond time. It was unreasonable, what was happening, what was about to happen, but it was a moment beyond reason. It did not need to be talked about, discussed, argued upon. It did not even need the spark of passion.
Something had not been finished. And so they would finish it now. There was no looking to the future. It was a moment without future.
He turned to her then, his expression blank, as she supposed her own was. Nothing needed to be said. She got off the bed and spread the sheepskin blanket over the woolen ones. She turned them all back to reveal white sheets. She took off her cloak. There was no need to spread it over everything else. The room was not large—it already felt almost cozily warm. She reached up her arms to undo the buttons at the back of her dress, but he turned her with his hands on her shoulders and did it for her. She drew off her dress, removed her stockings and undergarments, and turned to him, wearing only her shift.
She stepped against him, breathed in the warm, distinctive, musky smell of him before spreading her hands over his bare chest and lifting her face to his.
There was something to finish. They had both acknowledged that with a quiet sort of resignation. There had been no passion in their decision. But it was passion that had not been completed between them, the passionate desire—no, the passionate need—to give and to take, to share all that was themselves—bodies, minds, hearts, souls. To rid themselves of the brokenness, the incompleteness of their separate selves in order to make one whole.
That was what had never been finished. And never forgotten. It was a hidden fire that had needed only a spark in order to ignite again and blaze to its finish.
A kiss was not enough—that was soon apparent. Not even when they were wrapped in each other’s arms, straining together, their mouths wide over each other’s, their tongues touching, circling, deeply exploring. Not even when their hands pressed hungrily over bare flesh and beneath their few remaining garments.
“Lie down,” he told her harshly, but he held her up long enough to peel her shift off over her head. He tossed it aside. He unbuttoned his breeches as she lay down, pulled them off hastily with his stockings, cast them onto the floor, and came down on top of her.
It was not an encounter for pleasure, for subtlety, for the erotic building of desire, for intimate play. Something needed to be finished, and that something was a passion that had smoldered for longer than ten years.
He thrust her legs wide with his knees, pressed his hands beneath her buttocks, held her firm while she lifted her knees and braced her feet against the mattress, and plunged deep. They both cried out.
A little sanity returned after that. He lay still on her and in her, pressed deep, his hands unyielding beneath her. She tilted and strained upward to draw him even deeper into herself. They were both panting audibly.
He withdrew his hands, braced himself on his elbows, and lifted himself enough that he could look down into her face from a mere few inches distant.
They gazed deeply into each other’s eyes.
“Oh, yes,” he whispered, “it will be finished between us.”
The passion in his face might have been love, might have been hate, might have been both.
And this, she thought, disoriented again, was not the marriage act with which she was long familiar. This was not passive endurance. This was not repugnant to her. This was the culmination of the dream she had dreamed at Vauxhall.
He lowered his head until his forehead was against the hair that had pulled loose from her chignon, and began to move.
At first there was merely an awareness of impossible intimacy, of incredible pleasure. But very soon there was only passion again—raw, mindless, heavy, panting, aching passion. And a frightening pain that was beyond either pleasure or passion, and yet was not quite pain, until—ah, then ...
She heard someone cry out—two persons. And then terror and peace clashed strangely together, leaving her with the sudden clear awareness that it had happened—that she was no longer herself, that he was no longer himself. That they were another being, a single entity that was the two of them and yet was different from either of them separately.
They had become one.
For the merest heartbeat of a moment.
Even as the awareness was speaking itself to her mind it was gone, beyond her grasp, beyond recall. A little flash of heaven, which was a something or a state of being beyond either place or time or the ability to be expressed in words and was therefore to be sensed fleetingly but never to be grasped.
But for a moment there had been heaven. Not for her. Not for him. For them. And then it was gone, and they were a man and a woman on a bed in a gamekeeper’s hut, at the end of a sexual coupling, their bodies still joined.
When he withdrew from her, moved to her side, and pulled the blankets over both of them, she felt relaxed, happy, and sadder than she had ever felt in her life before.
She turned her head to look at him. He gazed back at her. She could see his eyes, but she could not see into them. His face was blank. So, she guessed, was hers. Reason and time had come back and so had the future. There was too much to be lost by not looking blank.
They were two very separate people again.
They had finished what they had started long ago. Without understanding quite why, they had completed something that had haunted them both, something that had prevented them from moving happily along with their lives. Now it had been done. And everything was in the past.
“At last,” he said, echoing her thoughts, “it is finished.”
“Yes,” she said and closed her eyes.
Yes, it was finished. Now, everything was finished.
Everything.
She hit the frightening bottom of despair.
Chapter 12
“I AM glad,” he said, “that I came back—back to England and back to Thornwood. I thought it was all over but it was not. Now it is.”
“Yes,” she said.
He caught her elbow and steadied her. The snow was still falling. It was deeper now than when he had first come outside. “When walking in snow or on ice, you know,” he told her, “you need to keep your center of gravity over your feet. You will slip less, and when you do, you will fall less.”
“Thank you,” she said, turning from the riverbank and moving into the trees, removing her elbow from his hand as she did so. “I can manage.”
As he had guessed, it was not a dark night. It was a good thing too since he had not thought of bringing a lantern with him.
“Now I can go back to Montreal, where I belong,” he said. “And I will have the satisfaction of knowing that I live there from choice. There will be no more fear of coming here, though I will not come again. You can live in peace here with your daughters. You need not consider
remarriage unless you really wish to do so.”
“No,” she said.
“We can be free of each other.” The foolish words kept spilling from his mouth, though they seemed to have come from nowhere. Had his brain really processed them? Did it really believe them? Did he really believe them? Did she?
“Yes,” she said.
This whole strange episode was like some sort of bizarre dream. He could scarcely believe what had just happened. There had been no thought behind it, no reasoning, no sense. The strangest thing of all, perhaps, was that the blame, or the explanation, could not even be laid at the door of passion. It had not started as a passionate encounter—though it had very quickly become that.
Had some part of his mind really believed that if he could just bed her he would then be able to forget her?
“All this might have been avoided,” he said irritably, “if one of your daughters had only been a son.”
She stopped walking suddenly, and he almost collided with her from behind. He had said and done some remarkably stupid things during the past couple of hours, but this really surpassed everything.
“Forgive me,” he said. “Your daughters are perfect. They really are, Christina.”
“I had two sons,” she said. “The one was born early and never breathed. The other was fully developed and seemed perfect. I held him for maybe an hour until he died. Strangely, Gerard, for the weeks and even months that followed the deaths of both my sons, I did not once dwell upon the annoyance of the fact that you were still Gilbert’s heir.”
Oh, hell!
He set his hands on her shoulders. She shrugged, but she did not shake him off. He knew so little of her life for the past ten and a half years. She had been a wife. She had borne four children and known the agony of losing two of them. She had been widowed.
“What I said was unpardonable,” he said. It was. He could not ask her forgiveness again.
