Mary Balogh (7 page)

“She can be won over,” Sophia said eagerly, her cheeks flushed becomingly. Her look could easily be mistaken for one of complete adoration. “She is uneasy about the match, Francis, but it is merely anxiety for my happiness. She said—or she implied very strongly—that she will not forbid our marrying even if she does advise strongly against it.”

“That part I understood very well,” he said. “You must have been speaking more loudly and distinctly when you said that. It was the next part I misunderstood—or I think I surely must have, anyway.”

“The part about the wedding?” she said. “I told her we were eager to marry in the village church, or that I was eager, anyway, and that you wished only to do what
pleased me. I told her that as soon as our betrothal was announced, she could stay and help plan the wedding.”

“You are getting close,” he said. “I believe it was the next sentence.”

“We want the banns read immediately after the betrothal announcement,” she said.

“That was the one,” he said. “And I might have saved you the trouble of repeating yourself, Soph. I heard correctly the first time. May I ask you something? Are you trying to trap me into marriage? Are you playing a more clever game than all the other females who fancy me? It is a good thing you don’t wear stays, Soph—you don’t, do you? You would be popping them all over the place at this moment.”

“Well!” The word finally found its way past Sophia’s lips. “The conceit. The unmitigated conceit. All the other females.
All
? How many dozen, Francis? How many hundred? Or should I go higher? I would marry a toad sooner than marry you. I would marry a snake sooner than marry …”

“I follow your meaning,” he said, smiling even more warmly and lifting her hand briefly to his lips. “It is just that you are chuckleheaded then, Soph? Smile, darling.”

She smiled. “Don’t you ‘darling’ me,” she said from between her teeth.

“When on the stage,” he said, “you have to throw yourself heart and soul into the part. Once the banns are read, my darling, we are going to be dead ducks, you and I. It will be bad enough to have to face down a broken engagement, Soph. But that? It is out of the question.”

Tears sprang to her eyes. “But she will go back home,” she said. “As soon as this is settled one way or the other, she said she will return to Rushton. Whether we become betrothed or not, she will go. And what is the point of being engaged, Francis, if she does not stay?”

“What indeed?” he said.

“She will stay if there is a wedding to prepare for,” she said.

Lord Francis scratched his head and apparently watched the bowlers for a few moments. “Maybe so, Soph,” he said. “But will she go home anyway after we are married? That is the question. And what am I talking about, saying
after
we are married? Insanity is infectious. It must be.”

“She still loves Papa,” Sophia said. “She as much as admitted so to me. And he must love her, Francis. She is so much lovelier than his mistress.”

“Good Lord, Soph,” he said. “You are not supposed to know anything about mistresses, and even if you do, the word should never be allowed to pass your lips.”

“His ladybird then,” she said, exasperated. “His bit of muslin. His …”

“Yes,” he said, tossing a look up to a fluffy white cloud that was floating by. “Lady Clifton is certainly a better looker than Lady Mornington. But it does not follow that he therefore wants her more, Soph. If you want my opinion, trying to bring them back together again after fourteen years is rather like trying to flog the proverbial dead horse. Oh, Lord, waterworks?”

“No,” she said crossly, turning with hurried steps back toward the house. “Just a little insect in my eye, that is all. And the sun is too bright. I forgot to bring my parasol with me.”

He caught up to her, drew her hand through his arm, and patted it. “Perhaps I am wrong,” he said. “Perhaps I am, Soph.”

“No, you are not,” she said, fumbling about her person for a handkerchief, then taking the one he offered her. “She has been here for a whole day and they have scarce said a word to each other except last night out on
the terrace when we forced them together. It is quite hopeless. She will go back home, whether it be tomorrow or next week or next month.”

He curled his fingers beneath hers on his arm. “Perhaps all they need is time,” he said. “It must be awkward meeting again after so long and with so many other people around to provide an interested audience. Perhaps in time they will sort out their differences.”

“Oh, do you think so?” she asked, looking up at him hopefully.

“Yes, I do,” he said. “No, you keep the handkerchief, Soph. It looks rather soggy. You certainly are not one of those females who can keep their eyes from turning red after a few tears, are you?”

“Oh,” she said. “The word ‘compliment’ is not in your vocabulary, is it, Francis? I am sorry in my heart that you have to escort me about in all my ugliness. Perhaps you should resurrect one of your old tricks. You always used to be able to get rid of me, usually by stranding me somewhere.”

“The island I always thought was the best one,” he said. “How many hours were you there, Soph? And you would have been there longer if I had not eventually whispered your whereabouts to Claude.”

“It was most cruel of you to row back to shore before I could get down from the tree,” she said, “knowing that I could not swim and that the water was just too deep to be waded.”

“I never confided another secret to Claude after that,” he said. “He almost broke a leg in his haste to take the glad tidings to our father. I believe I was too sore to sit down for the rest of that day.”

“There was not a great deal of it left,” she said tartly.

He grinned.

“Do you really think there is still hope?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Your father has taken himself off from the bowling green already,” he said. “Perhaps they are talking even now.”

“Do you think so?” she asked. She looked back to the bowling green to verify the fact that her father had indeed disappeared. “You will do it then, Francis?”

“Do what?” he asked suspiciously.

“Allow the banns to be read if they will consent to our betrothal,” she said. “Will you?”

“And allow the ceremony to take place, too?” he asked. “And the wedding trip in the hope that she will remain here to greet our homecoming? And our first child to begin his nine-month wait for birth in the belief that she will stay for the happy event and for the christening to follow? Perhaps we can have ten children in a row, Soph. Or an even dozen. Perhaps at the end of that time your mother will think it not worth returning to Rushton. Our eldest will be coming up to marriageable age.”

“You are making a joke of my feelings,” she said, “as usual. It will not get as far as that, Francis. Of course it will not. I shall break off the betrothal before the wedding, whatever happens. You have my word on it.”

“Good Lord, Soph,” he said. “Do you have any idea of the scandal there will be?”

“I do not care about scandal,” she said.

“You will,” he said. “No one will want to touch you with a thirty-foot pole after you have jilted a duke’s son almost at the altar.”

“That will suit me,” she said. “I have already told you that I have no intention of marrying anyone. I don’t want to be touched with a pole or anything else.”

“I am not talking only of suitors,” he said. “No one will want to invite you anywhere, Soph. You will be an outcast, a pariah.”

“Nonsense,” she said.

“Well,” he said, “never say that I did not warn you. But go ahead and do it if you must. As long as I have your word on it that you will do the jilting, that is. I will certainly not be able to do it.”

“Oh, Francis,” she said, looking up at him with bright eyes, “how kind you are. I did not think I would be able to persuade you to agree. You are wonderful.”

“Soph,” he said, frowning, “a little less enthusiastic with the
kinds
and the
wonderfuls
, if you please. They make me distinctly nervous coming from you. I think we had better hope that your papa says no and sends me on my way. We had better hope quite fervently, in fact.”

“A wedding in the village church,” she said, her eyes dreamy. “With the bells ringing and the choir singing and the rector decked out in his grandest vestments. And the organ playing. Oh, Francis, it cannot fail to remind them and affect them, can it?
Can
it?”

“Ah, Bedlam, Bedlam,” he said. “Your doors are wide open to me and beckoning, it seems.”

T
HE
E
ARL OF
Clifton was almost finished with a game of bowls when he saw his daughter walking up from the house. Olivia must have had her talk with her, then. Mrs. Biddeford had come out almost an hour before.

He relaxed somewhat. Olivia would have talked sense into Sophia. She seemed to have a gift for doing so. It had been a great relief to read her letter announcing that she was coming. A great relief—but something else, too. He had not been at all sure that he really wanted to see her again, even though her portrait followed him about wherever he went. It always stood beside his bed, where it was the last thing he saw at night before blowing out the candles and the first thing he saw in the morning before getting out of bed.

But there was something quite different between a portrait and reality.

He excused himself at the end of the game and laughed when Lord Wheatley remarked that it would be a pleasure to let such an expert at the game go.

“I’ll wager you spend every waking moment of your summers out here practicing, Clifton,” he said, “just so that you may make the rest of us ordinary mortals look like clumsy oafs.”

“I have an especially large umbrella that I use to keep myself dry during the rainy weather,” the earl said, “so that I don’t have to waste a single one of those moments.”

Sophia and Sutton had strolled a little apart from everyone else, he noticed, and were deep in conversation. Was she telling him? But she did not look particularly tragic. He had no misgivings about letting them out of his sight. They were surrounded by his houseguests, including Sutton’s own parents. He made his way back to the house.

His wife was not in her private apartments. Neither was she in the drawing room or the morning room or any of the salons. Her ladyship had stepped outside, a footman told him when he finally thought to ask. To the bowling green? But he would have passed her on the way. He went out onto the terrace and looked along all the walks through the formal gardens. They were deserted. The seat surrounding the fountain was empty, he discovered when he walked all about it to see the stretch that was not visible from the terrace.

Where could she be? The village? But she would have gone with the Biddefords and Sophia earlier if there had been anything she needed, surely. The hidden garden? Would she have gone there? Would she remember it?

It had been allowed to deteriorate during his father’s
last years. The lock had been rusty and the garden hopelessly overgrown when he had gone there after his father’s funeral. He had stood on the spot where he had kissed Livy for the first time and felt even more bereft than he had felt in the churchyard looking down at the box that had held all that remained of a much-loved father. He had felt that the state of the garden somehow mirrored the state of his life. Tidying it up, putting it to rights seemed a monumental task and somehow futile.

Why tidy up a garden that almost no one knew about, that almost no one now living cared anything about? After all, there were the large gardens surrounding the house and the well-kept miles of the park beyond. Who needed a small garden hidden in the middle of a wood?

He
needed it, that was who, he had decided. Like the portrait, it was one small memory he had left of her. She had loved the garden. He had always known during that month before their marriage where he might find her and he had frequently gone to her there. She had never bolted the door against him, though together they had bolted it more than once against the world so that they might enjoy a private embrace.

Would she remember it? Would she go there? Would it not be the very last place she would go?

And yet he had hoped from the start. He had left the door unlocked since he knew she was coming, hoping that perhaps she would find it again, hoping that no one else would do so. He did not want his guests, or even Sophia, in the hidden garden.

He strode through the woods, veering off the main path until he came to the ivy-covered wall. The arched door was almost hidden by ivy. It was shut. He set his hand on the latch. She would not be in there. It was the most foolish place of all to look. And even if she were, it would be wrong to go in. If she had come there, it would
be because she wanted quiet and privacy. If she were there, she would have bolted the door from the inside.

But it was not bolted. It swung inward on well-oiled hinges when he lifted the latch.

The contrast between the scene inside the garden and that outside would have caught at the breath of a stranger not expecting it. Outside all was tall old trees and muted colors and semidarkness. Inside all was exquisite blooms and riotous cultivated beauty and color. A stone sundial in the center was surrounded by delicate fruit trees between the seasons of blooming and bearing fruit. Smooth green lawns were on either side of the cobbled path inside the door and sloping rock gardens, carpeted with a profusion of flowers, at the opposite corners. Roses climbed the walls.

The earl’s gardeners spent a disproportionate amount of their time keeping the hidden garden immaculate.

She was sitting on a flat stone in one of the rock gardens, her arms clasping her knees. The green of her muslin dress was as fresh as the grass. He closed the door quietly behind him. He did not bolt it. She was looking steadily at him, her eyebrows raised.

“You have kept it, then, Marcus?” she said.

“Yes.” He strolled toward her.

“Why?”

He did not reply for a while. How could he tell her the real reason? “Family sentiment, I suppose,” he said at last. “And because when something is so exquisitely beautiful one feels the need to cling to it.”