Longing for a Liberating Love: A Historical Regency Romance Book

by Bridget Barton

  My wife and brother. Alina. Where was Alina?

  “They must have been overjoyed,” one of the women said. She was a one-time fling, an artificial beauty made of powder and lace, and her statement seemed as artificial as she.

  “Of course. My wife has laid aside her mourning clothes with great joy.” Jonas’ voice was hard as flint, and his eyes shot up to meet Theo’s. “She will be joining us after dinner. I have insisted she play for us in this time of revelry.”

  No one but Theo seemed to notice how odd it was that a man recently returned from a near-death experience should not want to be with his wife at dinner. Everyone nodded, familiar enough with the way Jonas treated Alina to expect this possessive behaviour. Theo wanted to leave the room and find her, wherever she was. She must be reeling—she must be miserable and uncertain. A week—she had known for some time, then, and been kept from contacting him. Or perhaps—the thought came to him with bitter intensity—perhaps she had chosen not to contact him of her own will. She was a married woman again, after all.

  Dinner was an agonizing affair for Theo. Every elegant dish, every outburst of raucous laughter reminded him of Alina’s exclusion. He felt that he was contributing to her shame by partaking in the meal that she was held away from. He thought about leaving, but the promise of seeing her later that evening was too strong. Jonas meant to have her play the pianoforte, performing as she always did at his social functions, and Theo would be damned if he wasn’t there to give her what small comfort he could afford.

  Jonas was conspicuously silent to him during the meal, but as they made their way into the drawing room after the wine had flowed freely, he came up and laid a heavy hand on Theo’s shoulder. “We have much business to discuss,” he announced simply, but there was a deadly note in his voice.

  When the group was assembled in the drawing room, Jonas stood and went to the door, calling gruffly into the hallway behind. Then he turned and said mockingly, “My wife, ladies and gentlemen, come to herald her husband’s safe return.”

  Alina stepped into the light of the chandelier and Theo’s heart stopped in his throat. She was dressed in scarlet from head to toe, the glimmering silk catching the firelight and welcoming it, as though Alina was made of fire herself. The bodice was low, and her skin milky-white against the edging. Around her neck she wore a heavy ruby necklace, and matching earrings hung from her small ears.

  She looked above the crowd, not making eye contact, like a woman in a dream. He couldn’t read her face, and he saw that she’d slipped effortlessly back into the role Jonas had fashioned for her when they were first married—cold, distant, and unobtainable.

  She glided silently to the pianoforte, and pulled out some sheet music. Jonas walked to her side, and pushed her choice out of the way, pulling a rolled scroll of music from behind his back. “No, this one, my dear.”

  She looked at it, then raised her eyes to his with a pained expression. “Tonight?” she asked, so softly her voice almost didn’t carry in the crowded room. Jonas leaned down and hissed something in her ear and she drew back, shivering. Then, she put his music up and began to play, singing in a clear but reluctant voice.

  “One evening as I rambled among the leaves so green, I overheard a young woman converse with Reynardine.” She looked up, her voice floating to the ceiling like a bird taking flight, and her eyes fell at last on Theo’s face. He hated the way she stayed frozen, stayed in the song and didn’t allow more than a flicker of her eyes to acknowledge his presence. It was the surest sign that she was back under Jonas’ influence—that whatever warmth and beauty he’d tasted was forever out of his reach. She continued on, singing the tale of a woman seduced by a sly man. “Her lips as red as wine,” she sang, “and he smiled to gaze upon her, did that sly, bold Reynardine. She said, ‘kind sir, be civil, my company forsake, for in my own opinion I fear you are some rake.’”

  There was a tremor in her voice as she continued through the lyrics, and a shimmer Theo could barely detect in the corner of her eye. He ached for her, set there above the crowd, singing of the naïveté of a woman trapped in the grip of a fox.

  “Sun and dark, she followed him,” she sang, drawing near the end of the ballad. “His teeth did brightly shine, and he led her up the mountains, did that sly, bold Reynardine.”

  She finished with a trill of chords, and the room burst into applause and discussion. One of the men near the front, someone Theo had long recognized as one of Jonas’ gambling partners, stood up and guffawed loudly, speaking with a speech slurred with heavy drink, “That’s a fine little wench!”

  Theo half rose out of his chair, expecting Jonas to be moved to anger at the slight to his wife, but the other man simply laid a heavy hand on Alina’s shoulder and laughed along with the offender. “She is fine,” he said, “at this single talent, at least.”

  “It’s a sad tune,” one of the ladies said with an affected sniff.

  “Perhaps,” Jonas answered with a jolly wink, “but you’d expect the ending from the beginning. Women’s sensibilities are no match for a man’s, when it comes to seduction.”

  Theo wanted to leap across the room at the other man’s blatant flirtation under the nose of his wife. She sat like a marble statue, hardly moving a muscle. He feared for her more than he ever had. She had a quiet desperation that he recognized—the kind of desperation that will lead a woman to do anything to free herself from the grasp of a cruel husband.

  Jonas insisted Alina entertain the group with a slew of other songs, and in the end the crowd had risen to their feet to dance about the room in a giddy whirl of revelry. Theo dodged the few offers he received and made his way slowly to the other end of the room. He had nearly reached Alina’s side when Jonas reappeared there, leering at his wife.

  “That’s enough, woman,” he said coarsely. “You’ve no passion in your fingers tonight. Go upstairs.”

  She looked at him long and hard, and for a moment Theo thought she would finally speak up for herself. She did not. Instead, she stood like an icy specter, curtsied with intoxicating grace, and slipped silently from the room. Theo waited until Jonas had turned the other direction, then he followed her into the hall. It was empty, and she had a hand on the rail at the base of the long staircase before he finally caught up to her.

  “Alina,” he said softly.

  She froze, but did not turn around. He could see the cords of tension in the back of her neck, and her hand shook on the bannister. “What are you doing here?” she said at last. “You are not one of them.”

  “I was invited, I thought by you. I didn’t know—no one knew until tonight.”

  “All of London will know tomorrow.” She turned at last, stepping up a few stairs so that she inadvertently took up a sort of angelic court above him. The blood-red stone at her throat glowed like a brand.

  He wanted to reach for her, but he did not. “Alina—”

  “Please.” She bowed her head. “Please, don’t say anything.”

  “I cannot allow—”

  “I have nothing,” she interrupted, her voice haggard. “Can’t you see that? No more power or freedom. No one to respect me. Can you please be the one person who will respect my request and please, please don’t say anything?”

  He closed his lips, his heart in turmoil. She looked at him, long and tender, like she had never looked at him before. Then, she stepped away up the stairs, backing away step by step and above him.

  “Don’t you see?” she said before she faded at last into shadow. “It was all a dream, Theo.”

  And she was gone.

  Chapter 20

  It was hardest to watch Jinx, Alina decided.

  Even after all the abuse of the last two weeks—her humiliation at Jonas’ cruel wit, the loss of her power over Marshall Gardens, and yes, the return of her husband to her bed—it was most difficult for Alina to watch Jinx navigate his father’s return.

  When she’d first explained it to him, she’d barely gotten Jonas to agree to let
her speak before he appeared before the boy. Jonas had a fascination with the shock and surprise surrounding his ‘death’ and reappearance, and thought it was the greatest bit of fun whenever he encountered someone who had previously not been privy to the ‘miracle.’

  “But not with Jinx,” she’d pleaded, tears in her eyes. “It will be too much for him. He has a tender heart.”

  “Bah!” He’d rolled his eyes. “Nine months away and you’ve already turned him into a molly-coddled idiot. It’s good to keep the boy on his toes. I wouldn’t want him to think he can go his own way now, that his old man’s ‘bit the dust.’”

  No, Alina thought bitterly. It would be no use for Jinx to continue considering himself free. None of us are free. She had tried a different tack.

  “He’ll be happy to see you,” she’d lied. “But if you surprise him, he might get a bad taste in his mouth.”

  Jonas’ vanity won over in the end, and Alina was allowed a few minutes to frantically explain the situation to their son when he arrived with Imogene the next day.

  “Remember what we learned about your father?” she’d begun tentatively. “I have more news, Jinx. Please, sit down—there, you’re a good boy—Jinx, he didn’t die like we thought. He was…rescued.”

  Jinx had blinked, his young mind unable to comprehend this new development. “He’s not dead?”

  “No, he’s not. Someone found him in a boat and pulled him out of the water. He’s alive, and he’s here.”

  It came then, and Alina had hated it with every fibre of her being. His face had flushed with fear. “Is he here?”

  “Yes.” She’d forced a smile, weak as it was. “And he wants very much to see you, but he didn’t want to frighten you. He wanted me to tell you first, and then you can go out to see him.”

  But Jonas had not been able to wait, and while she was speaking he came and stood behind her. She had known at once, because Jinx’s face had paled quite suddenly and he’d opened his mouth wordlessly. Alina turned, saw Jonas, and resisted the urge to push him from the room in her anger. Instead, she smiled as benevolently as she could and put out her hand to him.

  “See, Jinx? He’s here, and he’s alright.”

  Jinx had nodded, silent, only going to his father when Jonas had protested bitterly, “Haven’t you got a hug for your old man after all this time, or do you still only care about your mother’s skirts?”

  Since that first revelation, Alina had only allowed herself to worry about Jinx. She’d tried not to think about the life that she’d built in Jonas’ absence, for it was all gone now. Georges no longer answered to her, she had no control over her schedule or the house, and she had no more peace and quiet with Jinx. She didn’t even allow herself a single thought about Theo.

  It was hard enough watching Jinx battle externally with the difficulties that Alina knew all too well in her own heart. He wanted to love his father—she could see that with painful accuracy—but he, too, felt the shift in the home and was suddenly without the love and peace that he’d known since the news of Jonas’ presumed death.

  In the days leading up to the dinner party, Jonas was so set on his grand surprise that he’d stayed indoors at Marshall Gardens, growing increasingly desperate for company and whittling away at Alina’s patience with his demands upon her energies and Jinx’s.

  “The life of a woman is so dull,” he commented one day, sighing and throwing his feet up on the ottoman. Alina was sitting nearby with embroidery in her hands, trying to avoid any conversation that would bring his familiar frustration down on her head. Jinx was playing nearby, also keeping an eye on his father. “I can hardly wait inside any longer.”

  “You could just tell people,” Alina ventured tentatively. “It will still be a surprise, Jonas, without a dinner party as accoutrement.”

  “You would like that, wouldn’t you?” There was something dangerous in his voice. “No, my dear wife. The dinner party isn’t just for me. There’s another fox that I want to trap in my snare.”

  She couldn’t fathom what he meant, but dismissed it as another allusion to one of his many affairs and tried not to let him know how deeply it all cut her. Her preoccupation with protecting Jinx was a blessed distraction, and it wasn’t until the evening of the dinner party that she was forced at last to confront the chasm of grief that had opened by degrees since that awful revelation at the hospital.

  She could almost forget Theodore, almost pretend that she hadn’t felt the Brighton wind in her hair and the freedom of happiness after Jonas’ supposed death, but then she had looked up from the ivory keys and had seen him standing there in the corner of the room, heartbreakingly strong and handsome, his eyes in shadow. Why had he come?

  It was worse than the mockery of all the false women gathered to watch her play like a trained monkey. Them, she knew. The indignity of Jonas, she knew. But to have it all unfold under the watchful eyes of a man as pure and good as Theo was unbearable. She’d wanted to hide herself from him—she couldn’t allow herself to draw strength from his presence, and so instead she wanted him to leave as quickly as possible. She sent him away on the stairs, hoping her eyes didn’t give away her heart, but as she’d watched him go, the whole of last few months—especially the days in Brighton—flashed hot white before her eyes and she took herself upstairs to weep in silence.

  Those were the first tears she’d shed since Jonas’ return. The role of dutiful wife came back to her as naturally as though he had never left, but only now, shivering under the realization that Theo’s hands would never touch her again, that his eyes would never turn in her direction with that laughing gaiety they’d experienced at the seaside, was like a crushing weight. She laid down on her bedspread, fully dressed, and tried to breathe with her chest beneath the vise.

  A small knock came on the door, and Willa slipped in and began moving about the room like a north wind. She’d changed, too, since Jonas’ return—her icy attitude had melted away as quickly as it had come, and she seemed somehow chagrined. Alina didn’t understand it, but she welcomed it. The maid put up the fire again and pulled out a lace nightgown for her mistress.

  “Do you want to change, my lady?”

  Alina nodded wordlessly, pulling herself back upright and going through the motion with a sinking weariness in her bones. She let Willa pull the hideous red gown from her shoulders and she changed into the soft nightgown, watching herself transform from a painted doll in the mirror to a pale young woman who looked more like a little girl than the weary life traveller she was. Willa brushed her hair out and said, almost hopefully, “Aren’t you glad of the master’s return?”

  Alina looked at her with that same habitual smile quick to join her lips. “Of course I am, Willa.”

  But Willa did not seem convinced. She slipped from the room with a shadow drawn over her face.

  Alina hadn’t quite made it to the bed when her door opened again, this time without the prelude of a knock. She stiffened, and Jonas stepped silent as a ghost into the room. “My lady.” Mocking, as always.

  She stood from the edge of the bed and gave a weak little curtsy. “My lord.”

  “Why did you change?” He wrinkled his brow in annoyance. “I liked that gown.”

  “Thank you.”

  “It’s a compliment to the dress, not to you—true, such a color would be more striking on a taller woman, but I work with what I’m given.”

  She sighed, unwilling to engage him, and sat back down on the bed. “I changed for bed, Jonas. You didn’t seem as though you were likely to call me back to the party, and I thought it only wise to retire to bed. There was no one here that claimed my attentions.”

  “No,” he agreed. “I saw that Mr. Pendleton made his exit quickly enough after your performance.”

  She looked up with a sharp glance, her heart fluttering in her throat. “Excuse me?”