Julia London (45 page)

Several days passed before Abbey was able to sit up in bed. Sarah and Michael took turns at her bedside, forcing broth and, later, some type of mush into her. Most days Harry was allowed to lie at the foot of her bed. His familiar weight against her leg became the subtle assurance that she was going to live. The pain in her head had become less severe, but she was still troubled by a dull ache and periods of darkness. Dr. Stephens seemed quite confident it would disappear altogether, just as he assured her the pain in her side would go
away eventually. He prescribed less laudanum for her and pronounced her on the mend, given the circumstances.

Late one afternoon she was propped against the pillows, feeling stronger. Sarah had given in to her demands to have her hair washed, but insisted she sit up until it dried. “Don’t want a bad ague on top of everything else,” she had cautioned. Dressed in a silk nightrail, Abbey half listened to Sarah and Molly, a chambermaid, as they chatted while cleaning her room. They were oblivious to her; she rarely said anything. She felt so empty, felt such a dull, aching loss she attributed to nothing and everything, that she had begun to believe the laudanum had destroyed her mind and her senses. She felt peculiar, different somehow. As if she had lost not only her baby but a part of herself.

She was preoccupied with her attempt to dredge up fragments of memory from the recesses of her mind. She had reclaimed snatches of it, but the picture was incomplete. She remembered the time she had spent at Blessing Park and was aware that she had felt as whole and complete in that time as she ever had. Yet she was terribly disconcerted that while she loved Michael dearly, she felt oddly disconnected from him, almost fearful. Was that due to the laudanum? Or something else, something she could not remember? On the few occasions she had asked what had happened to her, no one would answer her, leading her to conclude something terrible had indeed happened. She knew she had been in London. She could remember snippets of a ball and dancing with Michael. She remembered hitting him, too, but that was so fantastic that it had to be part of the fiction she was convinced her mind was perpetrating.

“Whatever happened to your cousin Glory? Hadn’t she met some fine sailor?” Sarah asked Molly as they folded a freshly laundered bed sheet.

Molly clucked disdainfully. “Rotten one, he was. Promised the moon and the stars. I tell you. And not just to Glory. A serving wench on the west side, too,” she said bitterly.

“You don’t say? Poor Glory! She was quite smitten with him, wasn’t she?”

“Oh, she loved him more than life itself. Crushed her, he did.”

“Did he marry the other?” Sarah asked as she took the folded sheet and placed it on a stack of others.

“Marry? Ha! He left town, the coward. Sailed for America, the dirty bounder. Lied to them both,” Molly muttered.

“Lied to them both,” Abbey mumbled unwittingly. Her eyes widened suddenly.
Galen!
Routier! A flurry of images began to swim in her head. Galen holding a doll. Routier’s hands groping her breast in the maze, Galen driving her in a curricle.
A duel
. The memories came in torrents, overloading her senses. The dull ache behind her eyes began to intensify, and her pulse began to pound convulsively in her neck. She heard herself cry out, saw Sarah drop the linens and fly to her bedside.

“Molly! Fetch Lord Darfield! Don’t dally, girl,
go!
” Sarah shrieked.

Abbey stared wildly at Sarah. “I remember, I remember, Sarah! Oh, God, I remember!” she rasped hysterically.

Sarah gripped her hands tightly and held them. “It’s all over now! It’s all over!”

“Routier!”

“He’s dead!”

“No, no! Galen! Where is my cousin? Where is Galen?”

“It’s all over and done!” Sarah pled with her. Abbey shook her head, grimacing in pain as she did. She yanked her hands free of Sarah and began to claw toward the edge of the bed, the pain in her side stabbing her like a hot iron.

“No, no! There is more, much more! Southerland! I want to speak with the duke!” Abbey cried.

“You must stay abed, mum! Molly went to fetch Lord Darfield for you—” Sarah cried as she grabbed Abbey around the waist.

“
No!
I don’t want to see him, Sarah!” Abbey sobbed.

“I am already here,” Michael said from the doorway. Behind him, Molly’s eyes were wide as an owl’s. Michael nodded at Sarah, who reluctantly pulled away from Abbey.

“Sarah, don’t go!” Abbey begged. Sarah stopped halfway across the room and looked at Michael.

“She’ll be quite safe, Sarah. Go on,” Michael said softly, and waited for Sarah to skirt around him and shut the door behind her.

Confused and oddly apprehensive, Abbey shrank against the linens as he crossed to the bed. “I want to talk to the duke!” she insisted desperately, pushing herself into the mound of pillows.

“Alex is presently in London. But you can talk to me, sweetheart,” he said calmly.

“
No!
Something is not right!
You
are not right!”

Michael squatted next to the bed and reached for her hand, but she pulled it away. “We will make it right, Abbey, you and me.”

“I remember! I remember Galen and Routier!”

Michael winced, his jaw clenching. “I know it must be hard for you. It was very traumatic, love. But I’m glad you are remembering—it means you are healing, and I so want you to heal.”

“
Glad?
Why? So you can cease pretending to care? I remember, Michael!”

Michael’s face fell. He pushed a hand through his hair as his eyes danced across the blanket covering her. “I
do
care, very much, Abbey! You’ve no idea how much! But unless you remember, we can never rebuild what we had.”

Abbey closed her eyes against the pounding in her head. Oh, God, it was so confusing. She wanted to believe him, but she remembered that he despised her. He had refused to believe her, had chosen to believe she had intentionally lied to him. As the memories continued to stream in, she recalled how she had loved him and how he had hurt her, had gone to Lady Davenport. God, how she hated him. How she
loved
him. It was more than she could bear. “Please leave me,” she muttered through clenched teeth.

“Abbey, darling, don’t send me away! We should talk about this!”

“You didn’t want to talk before, Michael. Please go!” she
cried, and rolled away from him, squeezing her eyes tightly against an onslaught of tears.

Michael stood unsteadily. He was not surprised. He instinctively understood that her recovery would not be complete unless it was both physical and emotional. He stood solemnly, his heart aching as sobs racked her emaciated frame. He leaned over and touched her shoulder, but she recoiled from him.

His heart leapt to his throat. He would win her back. Maybe not today, but by God, he would win her back. With a heavy sigh, he turned and walked slowly to the door, fervently hoping she would call him back and closing the door quietly when she did not.

“She is remarkably well, Darfield. It seems she has completely regained her memory and her wound has healed nicely.” Dr. Stephens and Michael stood on the back terrace of Blessing Park overlooking the gardens. Below them, in a circle of rosebushes, Abbey was seated on a wrought-iron bench with Harry at her feet, quietly reading. Her garish gardening hat obscured her view of them.

“I am pleased to see that she’s put on some weight,” Stephens continued.

“Cook’s tarts,” Michael replied.

Dr. Stephens chuckled. “Yet she still suffers from melancholy. I would be more encouraged if her spirits were brighter. If it’s the miscarriage that has her down, then you should set the matter to rights, Darfield,” the doctor said gruffly.

If only he could get close enough to her to set the matter to rights. “I do not think it’s that, Joseph.” Michael sighed wearily.

Stephens peered over the rim of his spectacles at Michael. “Indeed?” he drawled.

Michael ignored the doctor’s pointed question. It was no secret at Blessing Park that the Darfields were estranged, and Michael could hardly defer to her physical condition as the excuse any longer. In truth, Abbey looked very well. Her color was back, and although she was still a little on the thin side, she was well on her way to fully recovering her health.

But her heart had most definitely not healed. In the six weeks since she recalled the accident and the events surrounding it, Michael had tried to talk to her about it. But she avoided him, making feeble excuses. He had done everything he knew to do, including sending armfuls of roses as a peace offering, although it had cost him any hope of peace with Withers. What she thought about them, he never knew. She steadfastly refused to accept his invitation to walk with him, to dine with him, to be with him at all. He had to appreciate the irony; four short months ago, he would have been grateful for her indifference. But that was before he had fallen in love with her, and nothing that had ever happened to him, not war, not his father’s betrayal, nothing hurt as badly as her indifference.

He knew instinctively why she was hurting. She believed he had wronged her, had not trusted her when he should have. On one level, he understood it. He should have believed her. But on another level, it angered him, and he could not understand it. He loved her. Yet she had lied to him. For Galen. Even after everything that bastard had done, she still asked Sarah about him, wondering where he was, if he was all right, if he had tried to see her. It angered him and he could not reconcile it, but he was willing to put it behind them. He was willing to do anything to have her back.

Abbey, apparently, was not.

The six weeks of her recovery had been agony for him. He missed her terribly, their conversations, the quiet evenings they had once spent together. He missed the sound of her violin and her light, lilting laugh. He missed her brilliant smile. His need for her was too great; when she was nearby his body turned to marble from sheer longing. During days that seemed endless, he was drawn to wherever she was. He
could not stay away from her any more than he could stop torturing himself by gazing at her and thinking of burying himself deep within her.

“Do you think she can withstand the stress of a surprise now?” Michael asked Dr. Stephens.

“Of course. Have a good one in mind, do you?”

“A visit from her family. Sebastian should be returning any day now from America with one aunt and two cousins in tow.”

“She should be fine. But do not overtax her, is that clear?”

Michael nodded. He, of course, would not know if she was overtaxed, since he could barely draw more than monosyllabic answers from her about anything. According to Sarah, she was fine. At least on the surface, she seemed alive and well, he thought grimly as he looked down at her from the terrace and swallowed past a lump in his throat. “I’ll never be able to thank you enough, Joseph. I was sure I had lost her. If it weren’t for you …”

“Really, Darfield, it is my duty as a physician,” the doctor said self-consciously, his cheeks coloring. “Well, I suppose I had best be on my way. I shall come again next week. Mind you treat her well, old boy,” he said, and with a curt nod, turned to leave.

Michael saw the family doctor out and returned to the terrace. Withers had joined Abbey and was relating some animated tale, waving his hamlike fists in the morning sun. Abbey was laughing. God, would she ever bestow that dazzling smile on him again? He settled his hip against the stone wall and watched as Withers motioned toward the hothouse. Abbey placed her book on the bench and walked slowly alongside the gardener, her hips swinging softly beneath the pleats of her skirt as they strolled casually through the garden. As Michael watched her pause to examine some new buds on a rosebush, he decided if he was ever going to have the chance to stroll in the gardens with her again, he had to talk and she had to listen. She could not avoid it any longer.

Neither could he.

Abbey had taken to having her meals in her sitting room, but Michael sent word that he expected her in the dining room at eight-thirty that evening. When she had sent a terse, handwritten note replying she preferred to dine alone, Michael had smiled wryly and penned a note to her saying he would brook no argument. If she was not in the dining room at precisely eight-thirty, he would physically retrieve her.

He prowled the room like a caged animal past two nervous footmen standing at the sideboard. When the mantel clock chimed eight-thirty, Michael looked expectantly at the oak door. She was a fool if she thought he would not carry through on his threat. At eight-thirty-two, she pushed the heavy oak door open and marched into the room, planted her fists on her hips, and glared angrily at him.

“May I ask why I have been summoned?” she snapped.

Michael silently sucked in his breath. She looked ravishing. She had not bothered to dress her hair, and it flowed freely down her back. Her dark-gold gown, free of petticoats, flowed to the floor in gentle folds.

Best of all, her violet eyes were sparkling with complete irritation.

“I want your company, my dear.”

“My
company?
That’s quite surprising. You have never wanted it before!”

“That is hardly true, Abbey, and you know it. Please be seated. We can argue over supper,” he said cheerfully, and pulled out a chair for her. She glanced suspiciously at the chair, then at him. He lifted one dark brow in question. With a sigh of exasperation, she marched over and plopped down without ceremony, giving him almost no time to slide the chair beneath her. He could not help grinning as he took his seat at the head of the table. Abbey glared at the footman when he set a bowl of soup in front of her, causing the poor man practically to sprint back to the sideboard.

Michael was unaffected by her anger. At the moment, he did not care what she did. He was so delighted to have her
sitting at his right where she belonged that little else mattered. He stole a glance at her; she stared at her bowl, making no move to eat it. He shrugged indifferently and began to eat.

For several moments, there was no sound but the clink of Michael’s spoon against fine china. Abbey abruptly pushed her soup aside. “What do you want?”