Elizabeth Mansfield (27 page)

Mr. Massey, her ladyship's butler, greeted her with sincere warmth. "We've all missed you, Miss Jane," he said.

"And I you," she replied with a fond smile. "Is there time for me to have some breakfast, Mr. Massey, or is her ladyship down already?"

"She's awaiting you in the library," the butler said. "She has some sort of surprise for you. I'll see if I can bring up something for you to eat a bit later."

"A surprise? I can't imagine—" Jane flew down the hallway eagerly and threw open the library door. "Good morning, your ladyship," she said as she crossed the threshold. "What's this Mr. Massey said about a—?"

Her breath caught in her throat. The dark-clad figure silhouetted in the window was not Lady Martha. It was a man.

"Good morning, Jane," he said.

Her heart jumped into her throat. "My lord!"

The Viscount strode across the room to her. "Don't you think it's time to stop 'my lord'ing me? The name's Luke."

She could not keep her eyes from his face. He was unshaven and looked weary. He must have driven all night to be here now. Had he come to see her? Moved at the mere possibility, she had to fight the urge to reach up and touch his cheek. "I don't think I should—" she began.

He frowned down at her. "You
don't
think," he scolded. "If you used even a grain of that superior brain of yours, you'd never have run off without a word of goodbye to me. How dared you do it?"

"I didn't think you'd mind."

"Not
mind?
Are you mad?"

"But you yourself admitted that there was nothing left for me to do about your finances—"

He grasped her shoulders in the angry grip she remembered so well. "The devil take my finances! I love you!"

"
Luke!
"
She was so shocked by the words, she didn't believe she'd heard them aright. She could only gape at him.

"You said the name quite adequately," he said, a smile beginning to curve the corners of his mouth, "but my declaration requires a bit more of a response than that. Isn't there anything else you can say?"

With her heart bouncing about in her chest, she had to drop her eyes. "I don't... I c-can't..."

"You don't, you can't love me?" he demanded, taking her chin in his hand and forcing her to look up at him.

"Oh, Luke," she whispered, wondering if she was dreaming this scene, "surely you must know how I feel."

"How can I know if you don't say it?"

"I gave myself away both times you took me in your arms."

"Did you?" His whole expression brightened, and he pulled her to him. "Let's see if that's true." And he kissed her with all the fervor that had pent up in him since he'd discovered her gone.

This time she let herself respond with unabashed enthusiasm. "There, you see?" she said, smiling, when he let her go.

"My dearest, sweetest Jane!" he breathed, holding her close and pressing his lips against her forehead. "It is almost too wonderful to believe that so brilliant and beautiful a creature can wish to marry me." Suddenly he held her off and looked down at her. "You do wish to marry me, don't you?"

"Marry you?" She gazed up at him wide-eyed. She'd often dreamed of kissing him, but she'd never let herself even dream of marriage. It was too like a fairy tale. He was a viscount, but she was not Cinderella. It couldn't be real. "You want me to
marry
you?" she asked in astonishment.

"Of course! Do you think I'm so depraved as to offer you a
carte blanche?
"
 

"Well, no, but—"

"I'd be honored to wed you, Jane Douglas," he said, looking down at her adoringly. "Not only will I be taking unto myself a most delightful woman to love but the cleverest of business advisers to manage my newly acquired fortune."

Her head was spinning. "Newly acquired fortune?"

"Yes, my love," he said proudly, pulling a wrinkled paper from his coat pocket. "When I showed Mama this paper this morning, proving to her that I've succeeded not only in maintaining my wealth in the month of my probation but in increasing it, she signed the papers giving me control of the finances and sent them off to Mr. Fairchild."

Jane stared down at the slip of paper he offered her.

Sir Rodney Moncton hereby affirms this I.O.U. to be a valid testament of his debt to Lucian Hammond, Lord Kettering, in the amount of one thousand pounds sterling.

Her head stopped spinning. Reality was asserting itself again. The joyous feeling of the last few moments hung precariously suspended in the air. "Sir Rodney owes you a th-thousand pounds?" she asked quietly.

"Indeed he does." Luke grinned.

She felt herself tumbling from the clouds onto the cold, ungiving ground. "Is it in payment of a gambling debt?" she asked, backing away from him.

His smile faded as he heard the sudden coldness in her voice. "Yes, it is," he said tentatively.

"But I don't understand. Hadn't you just lost a thousand to him?"

"Yes, but this wager was for two thousand. The win canceled my debt to him and left me with this. It will cover all my debts and leave something over."

She felt more than disappointment. She was overcome with anger. "Am I expected to congratulate you for wagering so great a sum?" she said, trying not to show her outrage. "Where would you be if you'd lost?"

"But I didn't lose." He grasped her hands and tried to coax a smile from her. "Don't look at me that way, my love. I was not as rash as it might seem. The bet was a sure thing."

"Evidently Sir Rodney didn't think so."

"But he didn't know you as I did."

"Know
me?
What had I to do with it?"

"We wagered on you. I knew you'd never agree to run off with him."

She pulled her hands from his grasp and stared at him, white-lipped. Her heart plummeted as a kind of rage dissipated whatever was left of the dream. It was he, Luke Hammond, who'd incited Moncton to attempt the monstrous seduction in the carriage. "I can't believe this!" she cried. "Are you saying you wagered on the possibility that I'd go off with him? That he could induce me to become his... his
fancy piece?
"

His eyebrows rose, startled by her vehemence. "Well, I would not put it quite that way."

"How would you put it? Is there another way? Sir Rodney told me himself that he planned to take me to an inn by the sea. I would have the pleasure of listening to the waves as he seduced me."

Luke clenched his fists. "Damn him! I should've killed him,"

"And what if he'd succeeded in his abduction? He would have, if I'd not had the good fortune to have a weapon on my person."

"I would not have let him succeed."

"You can't be sure of that."

"But, dash it all, Jane, he
didn't
succeed."

"Is that your answer? Do you so easily forgive yourself?"

He looked at her intently. "Is there so much to forgive? I put my money on the soundness of your character, and I was right."

She made a gesture of despair. He didn't even see how immoral his act had been. "You
are
a degenerate!" she cried.

"Jane!" Luke turned white. "You can't believe that."

"I can and I do," she said, turning her back on him so that he would not see her tears.

"That is a terrible thing to say to me," he said quietly.

"It is a terrible thing to be," she retorted in a choked voice.

There was a long silence. "Then I must assume," he said at last, "that marrying a degenerate is not an act you would consider."

"No, it is not."

"I see." His voice was hoarse. "Then I bid you goodbye, ma'am. I'm sorry to have troubled you."

She did not turn until she heard the door close behind him. Then she went to the window. In a few moments she saw his curricle make off down the drive. Only then did she collapse onto the window seat and clap a trembling hand to her mouth. It was a gesture meant to hold back the torrent of tears swelling up in her chest. But a hand is an inadquate barricade against such a flood of emotion. The suppressed sobs shook her shoulders and made her chest heave until, finally, they burst through the dam with a force that shuddered her whole body. She let them come, knowing all the while that they could not do much to ease the pain of the sudden shattering of a lovely dream.

THIRTY-FIVE

"Jane Douglas, what have you done?"

Lady Martha asked the question from the doorway, but Jane's gasping sobs kept her from hearing it. Nor did she hear her footsteps crossing the floor. She was not aware of another presence in the room until her ladyship laid a hand on her shoulder. She jumped. "My 1-lady!" she cried in a hiccoughing gasp.

"My poor, sweet child," Lady Martha murmured with sincere sympathy. But then she repeated her question: "What have you done?" There was something more in that question than sympathy. There was a decided note of disapproval in it.

Jane made a brave attempt to suppress the heaving of her chest. Brushing at her cheeks with the back of her hands, she said, "I've s-sent him away."

"Yes, I know. I listened at the door."

Jane stiffened. "Are you saying you... you heard it
all?
"

"Yes. Every word." Without a smidgeon of shame in her eyes, her ladyship looked down at the girl sitting before her. "I am an unscrupulous old woman. As degenerate as my son."

"No, you are not." Jane met the older woman's critical gaze with a reproachful one of her own. "Eavesdropping is deplorable, but not degenerate."

"I could use those identical words about gambling," Lady Martha retorted.

Jane shook her head. "When I called your son degenerate, the word did not refer to gambling in general. It referred to a very specific wager: a wager on a libertine's ability to rob me of my virtue. To engage in such a wager sounds very much like degeneracy to me."

"But, my dear girl," Lady Martha argued earnestly, "Luke's money was on you! He was wagering on the strength of your virtue, not on your capitulation. And he was certain of the outcome. The degeneracy was all on the other man's side."

There might be some logic in that argument,
Jane thought. She wanted with all her heart to believe it. But her brain was not easily convinced. If she were too eager to believe the best of Luke Hammond, how could she trust herself to think clearly? "You're his mother," she said, putting up a hand as if to ward off any vindication of the man she'd so severely convicted. "Naturally, you'd wish to interpret his actions in the most favorable light."

Lady Martha smiled down at her. "And you're the woman he loves," she pointed out. "Shouldn't you, too, try to see him in the most favorable light?"

The woman he loves!
What a miracle of joy those words would have created in her breast a mere hour ago. Now, however, there was only this almost unbearable ache. She turned away from the kindly woman standing over her and rested her fevered forehead against the window-glass. "I wish I could," she said brokenly, the tears beginning to flow again.

Lady Martha slipped down on the seat beside her and took the girl in her arms. "There, there," she said, rocking her gently, "cry it out. My grandmother used to say that tears are like midnight—it's dark, but there's always the promise of morning coming."

"I don't think m-my morning will ever c-come," Jane sobbed.

"Nonsense." Lady Martha stroked the girl's hair soothingly. "In time, you'll find the perfect man for you... a young man who's proper and bookish and mathematical, and you'll—"

"Like F-Ferdie Shelford," Jane said, sitting up and snuffling back her tears.

Her ladyship seemed to stiffen. "You've met such a man already?" she asked, peering at Jane intently. "How... er... delightful!"

"Not at all," Jane said, pulling out a handkerchief and blowing her nose. "He's a dreadful bore."

"Is he indeed?" She smiled in relief. "Well, no one can say that of Luke."

"No, that's true. He's anything but a bore."

"Just think of it," her ladyship remarked with a distinct twinkle in her eyes. "You were bored with the young man who was perfect, and you fell in love with the young man who was full of flaws. Doesn't that suggest anything to you?"

"It only suggests that Shakespeare was right," Jane said bitterly. "He said that love is a madness and deserves a dark house and a whip, as madmen do."

Luke's mother continued to smile serenely. "It suggests to me, my dear, that your heart is wiser than your head. Would you wish Luke to change his character and be more like this Ferdie you spoke of?"

"Good heavens, no!" Jane exclaimed. The words had no sooner left her tongue than her eyes widened. "Are you saying I love Luke
because
of his flaws?"

"I'm saying you love him
with
them. His flaws as well as his virtues—and he does have virtues, you can't deny that!—are what make him what he is."

Jane stared at the lady beside her, a terrible awareness slowly dawning in her eyes.
His flaws and virtues make him what he is.
The words echoed in her head like a flourish of orchestral music. To love him was to love
all
of him!

When the full import of these words burst upon her, she dropped her head in her hands. "Oh, my lady," she moaned in abject misery, "what have I done indeed?"

THIRTY-SIX

It was not yet nine when Luke returned from the club. He'd never before come home so early. He'd gone there to try to recover from the dismals that had enveloped him since his return from Cheshire, but he'd found the company and the activities not at all congenial. The gaming seemed a dreadful bore, and Taffy, whose companionship had always been so satisfying, was tonight so repetitious in his effusions about his forthcoming betrothal—and to the sister of the woman Luke was trying to forget!—that getting away from him seemed a necessity.

All the way home he'd berated himself for the weakness of his character. To feel so wounded by a woman's rejection seemed to him to be unmanly. But no amount of self-reproach relieved the unhappiness that weighted down his chest like the stone of Sisyphus.
Blast you, Jane Douglas,
he cursed inwardly,
you have unmanned me!