At Last Comes Love (22 page)

He would at the very least take firm exception to her abductor's returning to society after her death and attending the same social functions as he, just as if he had every right to the forgiveness and respect of society.”

“Perhaps,” she said again very distinctly, “he abhors violence and understands that it is no solution to any problem.”

He sighed.

“And perhaps,” he said, “he possesses that quality that so often goes hand in hand with cowardice.”

She searched his eyes in the darkness. She did not wait for him to explain. Her inkling had been right, then.

“He was a bully?” She was whispering.

He released his hold on her and took a few steps away to lean back against a tree trunk. He folded his arms over his chest, and Margaret grasped the ends of her shawl and drew it more closely about her.

“I promised her that I would never tell a soul,” he said, “and indeed the necessity for secrecy was dire. Her main reason, though, was that she felt guilty. She felt that she had failed as a wife, that she had drawn every bit of censure and violence upon herself. She thought people would blame her if they knew the truth and seemed to prefer being known simply as a faithless wife.”

“He beat her?” Margaret was gripping the ends of her shawl as if her life depended upon her hanging on.

“Among other things,” he said. “She really was in the wrong for running away from him, of course. A man has a right to beat his wife or to administer any form of correction he deems necessary to make her obedient and submissive. She is, after all, his possession. A man has a right to beat his dog too.”

“Oh, poor Mrs. Turner,” Margaret said, looking quickly about. But there was still no one in sight. She had always thought that violence within a family was one of the worst afflictions that could be visited upon any person. One's family ought to be one's safest haven. “How did you come to know?”

“Quite by accident, I suppose,” he said. “I was newly betrothed to Caroline and so was a part of the family. I cannot for the life of me remember why Laura and I were so far separated from the rest of the company one evening that we were able to talk privately with each other for a few minutes. Turner kept her on a very short leash—especially after a beating. Which meant that she was almost always on a short leash. It looked like marital devotion to anyone who did not know differently.
I
thought it was marital devotion at first—until that evening, in fact.”

Margaret stared at him in the near darkness. She forgot about the chilliness of the air, though she shivered anyway. Hooves clopped along the street to her left, but the horse and its rider must have turned into another street. The sound grew fainter and then disappeared altogether.

“However it happened, we
were
separated from the group,” he said,

“and she let her guard down sufficiently to afford me a glimpse of a dark bruise on her upper arm. The sleeves of her gown were somewhat longer than was fashionable, I remember. She appeared frightened when I mentioned it and then turned her head in such a way that her silk shawl fell away from her neck for a moment before she yanked it back in place. The bruise on her jaw was fading but still unmistakable. It was, I realized, the ‘indisposition’ that had kept her in seclusion at home for the past week. There had been numerous such indispositions since I had known Caroline. Laura was known as a woman of delicate health. I can remember being shocked enough to speak bluntly. I believe I can even recall my exact words. ‘Turner is a wife-beater,’ I said, and with one darted glance in the direction of the rest of the company, all of whom were comfortably out of earshot, she settled a smile on her face and told me hurriedly all about it. It had been going on for two out of the three years of her marriage and was becoming both more frequent and more severe.”

“Oh,” Margaret said. She could think of nothing else to say at the moment. She had always thought wife-beaters surely the most despicable of mortals. “And so you took her away?”

“Not immediately,” he said. “It was obvious that she had never told anyone before me and that she was extremely frightened as soon as she had unburdened herself. She blamed herself for everything—basically for being a bad wife who could not please her husband.

When I offered to speak sternly to Turner on her behalf, I thought she would swoon quite away with terror. She would not speak to me for several weeks afterward—but then she did on the night before my wedding. She came to see me privately, an extremely indiscreet and dangerous thing to do, as you must know. But she was distraught and had no one else to turn to. She spoke of taking her own life, and I believed her. I still believe she would have done it. And if she had not, sooner or later Turner would have done it for her. And so I did the only thing that seemed possible to do. I ran off with her—after promising that I would never disclose any part of her story to another soul. It is a promise that I am breaking tonight. You may never marry me, Maggie. Indeed, you would be well advised not to. I will have to trust to your discretion concerning what I have told you.”

Margaret was biting hard into her bottom lip, she realized.

“People ought to know,” she said. “They ought to be told that you are not the villain you are depicted as being.”

“But I am,” he said. “A man has the power of life and death over his wife, Maggie. He has the right—some would say even the obligation—to correct and discipline her in any way he sees fit. No man who is
not
her husband, even her father or brother, has any right to interfere. Both church and state will tell you that. I am exactly the villain everyone thinks me—just a slightly different sort of villain, perhaps.”

Margaret drew a deep breath.

“Why,” she asked him, “did he not pursue you?”

“Because he is a coward,” he said, “as bullies usually are. And also perhaps because we hid very carefully indeed—for almost five years, until her death. He could have taken her back if he had found her.

Both the law and the church would have been on his side. I could have done nothing to prevent it. He would have killed her, Maggie. I feel no doubt about that. Sadly, she did it for him. She did not literally take her own life, but she put up no fight for it either. He had taken away her belief in her own inherent goodness. And when one does not believe oneself in any way good, there is very little for which to live—and one feels unworthy of even what little there is. I will not apologize to a man who effectively murdered a woman whose only fault was a certain mental and emotional inability to fight back against cruelty and injustice.”

Margaret sighed and took a couple of steps forward until she stood against him. He uncrossed his arms, and she laid her forehead against one of his shoulders. She felt instant warmth.

And she had acted purely from instinct, she realized too late to act with greater propriety. She had felt the overwhelming need to seek out his human warmth and had acted upon that need—just as Laura Turner had done five years ago.

“Now I understand,” she said, “why I could not spurn you even when all the evidence and the opinion of everyone I know said that I ought. Sometimes one's intuition is to be trusted above all else. I could not convince myself that you were an evil man.”

“But I am,” he told her. “There is no law, either temporal or ecclesiastical—or moral—that would support what I did, Maggie. A woman is her husband's property, to be dealt with as he sees fit.”

“That is utter nonsense,” she said, still without lifting her head.

“The law often is,” he said. “But it is the only glue that holds society together and prevents utter chaos. We can only hope, I suppose, to reform the law gradually until it represents true morality and the rights of all—including women and the poor and even animals. I will not hold my breath waiting for that day, though. It could be a long time coming—if it ever does. What I did was wrong, Maggie. Evil.”

“Then thank heaven,” she said, lifting her head, “for a little bit of evil in the world. Morality is not a black-and-white thing, is it? And what a profound statement
that
is. As if no one had ever noticed before.”

He could not be totally absolved of
all
he had done, though, she remembered suddenly.

“But what about Miss Turner?” she said. “She was left behind on her wedding day, an innocent victim of both humiliation and heartbreak.”

“She was the only one to whom I confided some of what I had been told,” he said, “before I promised not to do so, that was. I can remember feeling afraid that perhaps Caroline had suffered similar treatment at her brother's hands. I was quite prepared to pummel him within an inch of his life if she had. But she had not. She knew about Laura, though, and defended Turner quite vigorously. If Laura did not push him to it, she told me, he would not be forced to punish her. It was all Laura's fault. The day after that Laura went into seclusion again and remained out of public sight for well over a week, even longer than usual. I believe I caused her one of the worst beatings of her life by speaking with Caroline. She had good reason to swear me to secrecy.”

“Miss Turner
told
him?” Margaret asked unnecessarily.

“Do you wonder,” he asked in return, “that I fell rather hastily out of love with her, Maggie?”

No, she did not.

She kept her forehead against his shoulder and closed her eyes as a carriage drawn by four horses made its rather noisy way past them and continued on.

“I think,” she said when they were alone again, “I had better marry you.”

His hands came to rest lightly on her hips.

“Because you find me pathetic?” he asked.

“Because I find you anything
but
,” she said. “You need some peace in your life, Lord Sheringford. So do I.”

“Peace,”he said. “That is a word from a long-ago past. And you think marriage to you will bring me that, Maggie?”

“Life atWoodbinePark will,” she said. “And unfortunately for you, that can be achieved only at the expense of marriage to me—or to someone else you may be able to find in the next week or so. I would be better for you than anyone else, though. I know the truth about you and can respect you, even admire you.”

His arms circled her waist as he sighed.

“Don't make the mistake of believing that you know me now any more fully than you did before,” he said. “You merely know a few more facts.”

“Oh, there you are wrong,” she told him, sliding her own arms as far about him as the tree at his back would allow. “I know more than facts now. I know
you
. Or at least I am on the way to knowing you.”

“And you believe I can bring you
peace
?” For a moment she felt his cheek against the top of her head. “Or that Woodbine can?”

“I have no real way of knowing,” she said. “We can never know the future. We can only take calculated risks.”

She lifted her forehead from his shoulder and looked into his eyes.

“
Very
risky,” he said. “The world will always despise me, Maggie—and you too if you marry me.”

She smiled at him.

“You have been desperate to persuade me to marry you,” she said.

“Are you now trying to persuade me
not
to?”

He set his head back against the tree and closed his eyes.

“Reality creeps up on one, does it not?” he said. “For a few days—is it two or three or more? I have lost count already. For a few days, anyway, I have been desperate to do whatever I must do to prevent the loss of Woodbine. And yet now, when it seems that what I want is within my grasp, the reality comes home to me that I can do it only at the expense of the happiness of another innocent.”

“You believe,” she said, “that I will be unhappy as your wife, then?”

“How can you not be?” he said without opening his eyes. “We have known each other for two or three or four days—which
is
it? For a very brief time, anyway. I have only mercenary reasons for wishing to marry you. I believe I like you, though it is only this evening that I have come to that opinion. I do not love you. How could I? I do not
know
you and I have become an incurable cynic where romantic love is concerned. And you do not know me. You have lived an ordered, decorous life with a close, affectionate family. You have always been very well respected. It is possible that you still love a man who has angered you. You would be stepping into a yawning unknown with a social pariah if you married me.”

He was right about everything—except Crispin. So very right. She did not know quite why retaining possession ofWoodbinePark
now
was so important to him since it would be his eventually anyway, along with a great deal more, and in the meanwhile he was young and fit and surely capable of earning a perfectly decent living. But however it was—perhaps it was just his reaction to a long exile, now over—Woodbine
was
important. Yet she sensed that if she said no now, he would walk away from it. If he could not bring himself in all conscience to marry her purely for his own convenience, then he would not be able to do it with anyone else.

It was a pleasant surprise to discover that he was after all a man of tender conscience. Perhaps more than usually so. He had pitted his conscience against the whole of his world five years ago.

“I will marry you if you still wish to marry,” she said. “But only
if
.

You must not now feel that you are obliged to wed me only because you made me an offer which I have accepted.
If
you wish to marry, then I will marry you. I will take a chance on the future.”

He had opened his eyes though he had not moved his head. He was looking steadily back into her own eyes. His looked very black. His face looked very severe and angular in the darkness. A few days ago she might have been frightened.

“I wish to marry you,” he said.

“I would ask only one thing,” she said, “and this I beg of you as a great favor. Allow me to tell my family what you have told me tonight—Stephen, Vanessa and Elliott, Katherine and Jasper. I would stake my life on their honor and discretion, on the fact that not one of them will say a word to anyone else without your express permission. But I really cannot bear to have them believe that I am marrying an unconscionable villain. I cannot bear their puzzlement and pity. And I cannot bear that they will dislike and despise and avoid you for the rest of our lives.”