Mary Balogh (49 page)

“So that you might neglect me, too?” she said. “What nonsense you speak. Sometimes I think you almost believe your own words. Do you know yourself so little?”

He released one of her arms to set the backs of his fingers lightly against one of her cheeks. “And you might have had my seed,” he said, “as you did that one night. I might have been able to offer you babies, Mary.”

She opened her mouth to speak, but the muscles of her face worked somewhat out of her control for a moment.

“Only you could possibly say such a very improper thing to a lady who is not even your betrothed,” she said.

“We might have changed that, too,” he said. “If only I had met you fifteen, sixteen years ago. You were a child then, were you not? And I, too, Mary. I was the veriest child until my twenty-first birthday, and a man the next day. What a coming of age it was. The weight of ages.”

“You merely reaped the consequences of drunkenness,” she said.

“Yes.” He dropped his hand from her cheek. “So I did. You are in the right of it there.” He turned to walk on, his hands at his sides.

She hurried to catch up to him. “Why did you not stop,” she asked, “after the accident? Did it not teach you a lesson?”

He wanted to stride away from her suddenly. He wanted to be alone. But he could neither stride nor leave her. They were among the trees and had to wind their way carefully to the site of Apollo’s temple with the circular seat within and the view down to the lake.

“If you had killed your brother, Mary,” he said, “would you slap yourself on the hand and promise that you would never be bad again? Would you promise to be a good little girl for the rest of your life? With your brother dead at the age of twenty-three? No life left at all? No second chances? And for you one mistake and a lifetime of hell to face before death brought the real thing for the rest of eternity.”

“One mistake,” she said. “Was it the only time you drank? Or was it the only time that you brought nasty consequences?”

He felt inexplicably like crying. His nose and his throat and his chest ached with the need. He clasped his hands tightly at his back.

“It was the only time,” he said. “The first. You would not believe what I was like, Mary. An innocent. A prude. A bookworm. A moralizer. I lived with my head in the clouds. And so they set themselves to get me foxed for my birthday. Not Dick, but the others—Wallace, my father, my friends. They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. I was still foxed the morning after, when I lifted him up from the ground with his broken neck and stroked his hair and told him all would be well and scolded him for doing anything as foolhardy as to attempt that gate.”

She had stopped walking. She was looking at him, her eyes wide.

“You look as though you had seen a ghost,” he said. “Do you want to take my arm again?”

“Oh,” she said. “I did not know. Though I might have begun to guess. Is it true, then?
Were
you different before the accident? You were at university? You were going to be a clergyman?”

He laughed. “The joke of the century, is it not?” he said.

He watched her swallow. “And you have never been able to forgive yourself?” she asked.

“For murder?” He shrugged. “It was all a long time ago, Mary, and I am what I am. Perhaps it is as well that you despise me so. If you liked me just a little, you would be trying to reform me. Women are famous for that, are they not? I am thirty-six years old. Beyond reform.”

“It was not murder,” she said. “There were others equally to blame, including your brother himself. Your aunt was right when she explained a few things to me—it was just a terrible accident.”

His smile was twisted. “Pat me on the head, Mary,” he said, “and I will feel all better. Where the devil is everyone else?”

They had reached the temple, only to find it deserted, though there was the sound of distant voices.

“Ahead of us,” she said. “You deliberately planned it so that we would lag behind.”

“Did I?” he said. “Was I planning to steal a kiss from you?”

“Probably,” she said.

He indicated the stone seat inside the folly and sat down on it himself. “I have probably incurred the undying wrath of your betrothed already anyway,” he said. “I suppose I might as well try to deserve it to the full. If
you would care to move a little closer, Mary, I will attempt that kiss.”

“I was right, was I not?” she said. “You do hate yourself.”

“Devil take it,” he said, reaching out and taking her hand in a firm clasp. “Do we have to have this conversation? What does it matter if I am not overfond of myself? At least I thereby make the opinion of the world unanimous.”

She took him completely by surprise suddenly by sliding along the seat until she was close beside him. She had not pulled her hand from his. “I am sorry about Dick,” she said, “and sorry about the hell you have carried within you ever since. I truly am sorry about the nasty and unfeeling things I have said concerning that incident. But hell need not be eternal unless one chooses to make it so. Did your brother love you?”

“Dick?” he said. “He was deservedly everyone’s favorite. There was not a mean bone in his body. Why do you think he came galloping after me? No one else did. They all watched me on my way with laughter. Dick came to save me, the fool.”

“He came to save you,” she said. “Would he have condemned you to fifteen years of hell and perhaps a whole eternity?”

He got abruptly to his feet. “Enough, Mary,” he said. “Who mentioned hell anyway? Me? I tend to overdramatize sometimes. Had you not noticed that about me? There are many men who would give a right arm for a share in my particular type of hell, you know.” He reached out a hand to draw her to her feet.

“Yes,” she said. “The more fool they.”

“Does he kiss you?” he asked. “Do you respond to him as you have always responded to me?”

She shook her head. “Don’t,” she said. “Please don’t.”

“Don’t what?” he asked. “Ask those questions? Or kiss you?”

“Both,” she said.

But she did not fight him as he drew her against him. Her breasts pressed against his coat, and her hands, lightly clenched into fists, rested against his shoulders. She lifted her face to his and closed her eyes.

He kissed first her eyes, feathering his mouth across them before lowering it to brush her lips lightly. He deepened the kiss, savoring the softness and warmth of her, parting his lips only slightly.

And he hated himself anew and ached with his love for her.

She opened her eyes and looked up into his. It was a look of naked vulnerability. She was his in that moment, he knew. And the temptation was almost overwhelming.

“So, Mary,” he said, “what is the answer to my question? Does he kiss you? Does he arouse passion in you? Does he bed you?”

“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t look at me like that.”

He did not know how he was looking at her. Only that he was steeling himself against temptation.

“Don’t sneer,” she said. “Sometimes I think I glimpse someone—someone I might like, someone wonderful—behind your eyes. But I am mistaken. There is no one, is there? Perhaps there was, once upon a time. But no longer. I wish there was not this.”

“This?” he said.

“This attraction,” she said. “This longing for you to kiss me properly, not with the restraint you just showed.” She pushed herself away from him suddenly and straightened the ribbons on her bonnet. “Where are the others? Shall we follow them?”

“A good idea,” he said. “More invitations like that, Mary, and you might well find yourself being tumbled on the hard ground and complaining bitterly to me afterward
about my lack of restraint. If you want me, you have but to say the word and we can make the proper arrangements. But I like my mistresses in civilized surroundings.”

“In scarlet rooms,” she said. Her voice was scornful. “And mistress, did you say? Not wife any longer?”

“Why marry you,” he said, “when you seem so very available without benefit of clergy?”

She drew away from him and began to walk along the path toward the next folly, a tower which had been built ruined. Miss Wiggins was standing fearfully at the top, on the very safe ruined parapets, clinging to the arm of Andrew Shelbourne, and everyone else was either looking up at them or gazing out across the lake, which was close by.

“I have quite lost touch with you over the years,” the Reverend Samuel Ormsby said to Lord Edmond. “Ever since you were sent down from Oxford most unjustly.”

“It was hardly unjust,” Lord Edmond said. “I did call such a hallowed personage as a don an ass, you may recall.”

“At a time when everyone knew you were beside yourself with grief over the passing of your brother and the grave illness of your mother,” the Reverend Ormsby said. “Several of us signed a petition on your behalf, you know. But it seemed to do no good. What have you been doing with yourself since?”

“Perhaps you should tell me about yourself first,” Lord Edmond said.

Mary, he noticed when he turned to look at her, had joined a few of the other guests. Yet others were going in search of the grand pavilion, which was hidden away among the trees farther along the shore of the lake.

L
ADY
E
LEANOR GAVE A FEW INTERESTED GUESTS
, mostly ladies, a guided tour of the greenhouses the following morning. Not that there was a great deal of attraction in the greenhouses, she explained to them, when it was summer and the gardens were bright with flowers. The winter was the time to wander in the warmed buildings and enjoy the summer beauties of nature while all was winter bareness outside.

Mary hung back as everyone else strolled from the last of the greenhouses on the way to the rose arbor.

“Ma’am?” she said as their hostess made to follow them. “May I have a word with you?”

Lady Eleanor smiled at her and closed the door. “What is it, Mary, my dear?” she asked.

Mary fingered the velvety leaf of a geranium plant. “I need to know …” she said. “That is, there are certain gaps in my knowledge. It is really none of my business, of course, but … I need to know,” she ended lamely.

“Of course you do, dear,” Lady Eleanor said, and she took Mary’s arm and began to stroll with her back along the length of the greenhouse. “Sometimes we cannot order our lives as we would wish, can we? We should be able to secure our own happiness with logical planning, but life does not always work that way. You have planned well, and look to be succeeding admirably—on
one level. On another you wonder why it is you cannot force yourself to feel happy. Of course you need to ask more questions.”

“You know?” Mary said.

“It was very obvious to me the first time I saw you together,” she said. “An exceedingly odd couple, I overheard someone say, and I would wager that she was not the only one to say it that afternoon. But not as odd as it would seem, dear, to one who has known and loved Edmond all his life.”

“I do not wish to have any interest in him at all,” Mary said. “I have fought against his persistence and against my own feelings.”

“It would be strange if you had not,” Lady Eleanor said. “Edmond is probably the most disreputable member of the
ton
now gracing its ranks. He is fortunate that he is still being received at all. Only his title and his fortune have saved him from complete ostracism, I believe. No lady in her right mind would willingly fall in love with him.”

“I did not say I have fallen in love with him,” Mary said hastily. “Only that I—”

Lady Eleanor patted her hand. “If only you knew for how many years I have waited for him to meet you, Mary,” she said, “or someone like you. I had almost given up hope. Dorothea, of course, was all wrong for him. And Lady Wren, too, though I heard about his attachment to her and was pleased at first. She is a beautiful lady and must have had a dull marriage to her elderly first husband, though I never heard a whisper of scandal surrounding her name. But she was in love with her Mr. Russell, and Edmond could not see it.”

“Please,” Mary said, “I did not mean to give the impression that I am going to—”

“Of course not,” Lady Eleanor said, and turned at one end of the greenhouse so that they could walk back
along its length again. “What exactly did you need to know?”

“Yesterday,” Mary said, “he told me much the same story about his brother’s accident that you had told. Except that he added that his father and his eldest brother had deliberately set out to get him drunk. It must have been easy. He had never drunk before, he said.”

“Very likely,” Lady Eleanor said. “I would not doubt the truth of that.”

“They laughed when he insisted on going riding the next morning,” Mary said. “They thought it all a great joke, even though he was still drunk.”

“Unfortunately,” Lady Eleanor said, “we often laugh at those who are inebriated, my dear. There appears to be something funny about people behaving differently from their normal selves. Seeing Edmond foxed must have seemed hilarious. He was always so very serious, so very much in control of himself.”

“But if that is all true,” Mary said, “they were more to blame for what happened than he was.”

“I have always thought so,” Lady Eleanor said, “though I was not there at the time to know exactly what happened. They were not a vicious family, Mary, none of them. And they were a very close and loving family, though I used to think that perhaps Edmond suffered from Richard’s great popularity. They were alike—both quiet and home-loving. They both adored their mother and looked up to Wallace and my brother as types of heroes. Edmond was by far the more intelligent of the two, but Richard had the gift of sweetness, which Edmond never had. I think perhaps Edmond was a little jealous of Richard.”

“And therefore his guilt would have been stronger,” Mary said. “He would have felt as if unconsciously he had wanted his brother dead.”

“Oh, dear,” Lady Eleanor said. “Yes, I suppose that is
altogether possible. Edmond always looked inward far too much for his own good. He always had too tender a conscience.”

“He was banished, he said.” Mary frowned. “He was cast out from the family. And yet it was not his fault, or at least it was no more his fault than anyone else’s. How could they have treated him so cruelly?”