The Passionate Prude

by Elizabeth Thornton

  He turned on her. His eyes were flashing and his mouth was tight-lipped. “What you did, for whatever reason, was an intolerable breach of my trust. Must I remind you that you are my wife? By God, you had better remember it in future or it will be very much the worse for you. I will have your obedience, or you shall feel the weight of my hand. Do I make myself clear?” and he raised his hand as if to strike her.

  Deirdre had prepared herself to accept the rough edge of his tongue. She knew that he would be sorely provoked by her conduct. But this vicious form of address shocked her to the core. In a moment, her anger blazed to as great a heat as his own.

  “How dare you threaten me! Doesn’t it mean anything to you that I saved Armand’s life? The doctor said—”

  “I’m not interested in excuses. Nor am I interested in St. Jean. A husband takes precedence over a brother. Remember that in future, or by God, I’ll take steps to see that you do.”

  “Then I wish I had never married you,” she lashed out, and turned her back on him.

  In a castle with more bedchambers than Deirdre could number, she had expected Rathbourne to have his own suite of rooms. His baggage, however, was strewn around the floor, making it very obvious that where she was, he intended to be also. She wished she could slam out of the door and find a quiet hole where she could be miserable in comfort, but no other rooms were ready to receive guests and it seemed ill advised to test a temper that was already at boiling point. She climbed into the high tester bed with as much dignity as she could muster and curled herself into a ball on the far edge of the mattress.

  She was to discover that though quarreling might make her averse to the intimacies of married life, it had no such effect on her husband. She tried to remain cold and impassive in his arms, but he seduced her to passion with mortifying ease. Though he was gentle with her, she was never in any doubt that he meant to show her who was master and exact his own peculiar retribution for the last angry words she had flung at him. It was a long time before he finally gave in to her distracted pleas for release from a torment that was driving her to delirium.

  When it was over, she burst into tears. He cradled her in his arms, cherishing her with unending caresses, soothing her with extravagant endearments.

  “Deirdre, don’t cry. There’s no need. You know I would cut off my arm sooner than hurt you. But what you did was wrong. My God, if I had lost you…”

  His ragged voice and trembling limbs betrayed the strength of his emotion. It was a long time before Deirdre could find the means to comfort him. Words proved inadequate. Their protracted lovemaking was as inevitable as it was necessary, but it could not heal the one serious difference that still divided them.

  Sleep, when it came to Deirdre, was fitful and filled with terrifying presentiments. She was mounted on Lustre, riding madly into battle to ward off one of the French lancers who threatened Armand’s back. Armand went down, and Deirdre screamed. The lancer turned to face her and drew back his lance to finish her off. And she saw that it was Rathbourne. He smiled grotesquely and he aimed the bloodied point of his spear at her breast. She leveled her pistol, but her fingers refused to pull the trigger.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Over the next week or so it became customary for the residents of the castle and its environs to catch glimpses of the master of Belmont and his lady as they rode out on an early morning ramble. There was nothing desultory about these excursions, however, for Rathbourne had it in his mind to familiarize Deirdre with every corner and every facet of his domain. He was so eager, so touchingly desirous of her good opinion, that Deirdre determined to be suitably admiring. If Rathbourne hoped to impress her, he succeeded beyond his dreams.

  Until the Earl’s return from Paris, Deirdre had never ventured far from the castle walls unless it was to the stables which lay just beyond the footbridge over the dry moat. Rathbourne now gave Deirdre her first intimation of the extent of his vast holdings and an inkling of the sort of moneyed aristocracy into which she had married.

  It soon became evident that the Earl, as much as anything, wanted to show her off, and she was introduced to a veritable army of personages who devoted their energies to enriching the land for their lord and, as Rathbourne would have it, enriching themselves into the bargain—gamekeepers and under-gamekeepers, gardeners and under-gardeners, woodsmen, parkmen, gatehouse keepers, bricklayers, plasterers, painters, sawyers, and gravel diggers, as well as the tenants and laborers who farmed the land for him. His holdings took in several villages, and the disposition of a dozen church livings was in his hands. There was even a clerk of works on his payroll. It had never occurred to Deirdre that Rathbourne, whom she had once accused of being a lightweight, had that kind of background. It was hard to justify her pride in her own dear Marcliff, which, in comparison, seemed like a pauper’s hovel.

  After one such foray, as they returned to Belmont, they stopped to rest their horses at a ford across the River Avon. Deirdre threw herself down on the grassy bank and leaned back on her elbows.

  “Why didn’t you tell me before we were married that you owned half of England?” she demanded.

  “Hardly!” he reproved, and came to tower over her, his face in shadow so that Deirdre could not read his expression. “Besides, a sixth sense warned me that all this”—he gestured vaguely with a slight movement of his hand—“might well work against me. Was I wrong?”

  “Probably not. Still, you ought to have given me some sort of warning.”

  “Why?”

  She brushed angrily at the skirt of her riding habit. “Because…because…” she blustered, “because your wife must needs be a public figure. That sort of life doesn’t appeal to me. From now on, everything I do will be sifted by a fine-tooth comb. I’m a private sort of person. Nobody ever noticed me before. Now I shall be under constant scrutiny.”

  He threw himself down beside her and said quite impenitently, “True! The worst of it is, of course, that half of the gossip will be mere fabrication, or at the very least, exaggeration. I’ve lived with it most of my life.” His fingertips, a butterfly caress, brushed her cheek. “I know it’s not pleasant, but you’ll learn in time to ignore it.”

  “Is that what happened to you? Serena said something…”

  “No. I won’t claim an innocence I am not entitled to, not even to gain your good opinion. I was everything you said I was. But that was the folly of youth. You could have converted me to a pattern card of rectitude very easily if you had chosen to.”

  “No I couldn’t.” She hugged her knees and rested her chin on the cross of her arms. “We had different devils driving us. But I was just as driven as you were. We met at the wrong time, that is all.”

  “Not for me. And it was more than lust, as you once threw at me! You gave my thoughts a new direction. I thought of you constantly as you are now, by my side, as my consort, helping me to build a future for our children and our children’s children. My God, I could still throttle you, Dee, when I think that you have cheated me of five years.”

  “I would have made you miserable then. The Fates have been kind to us. Let’s not quibble about something we can’t change. I’ve done a lot of growing up since I first met you. And suddenly the future looks much brighter.” She turned a brilliant smile on him and found herself swiftly pinioned beneath him. She felt the weight of her skirts as he dragged them up.

  She struggled wildly. “Let me go, you devil!” She laughed up at him. “All it needs is one yokel to catch a glimpse of us and it will be all over the county that the master of Belmont has been tumbling some precocious wench in the hay.”

  “But you’re my wife,” he protested.

  “Who would believe it? You have a castle with scores of bedchambers. No man with such resources at his disposal would make love to his wife in the open, as if they were field animals.”

  He let her go reluctantly. “You win this time, but don’t expect such consideration in future.” He kissed her lingeringly, then abruptly hauled he
r to her feet. “Once my people see that the master of Belmont is desperately in love with his wife,” he said reasonably, “they’ll be disappointed if I don’t shock them.”

  “Incorrigible,” she flashed at him, but her eyes were smiling.

  They returned to Belmont in perfect amity. At the stables, Deirdre came face to face with O’Toole, and remembering Brussels and how much the man was in her husband’s confidence, she dropped her eyes and her cheeks took on a healthy glow. She became tongue-tied as she welcomed him home, and even more incoherent as she attempted to thank him for his care of her brother at Waterloo.

  Rathbourne chuckled, and winked broadly at his groom. “What Lady Rathbourne means to say, O’Toole, is that she hopes her hoydenish behavior in the past hasn’t given you a lasting disgust of her. For some unfathomable reason, she values your good opinion more than she does mine.”

  Deirdre’s blush deepened, but O’Toole’s matter-of-fact disclaimer to knowing anything of a nature which could possibly detract from the high regard in which he had always held her ladyship did much to smooth her ruffled sensibilities.

  “How long has O’Toole been in your employ?” she asked Rathbourne as they made their way across the castle bailey.

  “Forever. I inherited him. O’Toole was my father’s under-groom as a lad, as I remember, but a nurse to me from the time I was in leading strings.”

  “You seem to be on terms of intimacy with him.”

  He gave the matter some thought. “Very true. It comes, I suppose, from our long association, that and my brother and I being left very much to our own devices when we were children. Our parents never seemed to have time for us. When one’s father was so frequently absent or unavailable, it was natural to find a father figure to replace him. O’Toole was always there, though the poor man could have seen us far enough on occasion.”

  He pushed open the solid, carved door which gave on to the Great Hall, and he stood aside to permit Deirdre to enter. “My father was never there for me either,” she said, and suddenly turned into him with a little sob catching in her throat.

  His arms went round her, and he held her in a loose, comforting clasp till the bout of weeping subsided. “Deirdre,” he murmured. “Oh Dee, I’ll try to make it up to you.” He was shaking with emotion. He turned her face up and gently brushed the tears from her eyes. He could not have felt closer to her if he had entered her and was filling her with his own hungry body. “Deirdre,” he said again, and when her mouth opened to gulp in air, he ran the tip of his tongue over the soft swell of her parted lips. Her mouth opened wider to permit his entry, and on a sudden surge of passion, he plunged his tongue into the moistly hot recess in an intimacy that had her melt into him on a mewling whimper.

  Inevitably, his body took fire. He crushed her closer, beyond caring for the curious stares of the odd footman and housemaid who passed through the Great Hall. At length, he pulled himself together, caught her wrist in an unrelenting grip, and half dragged her behind him up the long staircase to their bedchamber.

  When the door was shut with a resounding slam, there was many a jest and knowing wink between maid and manservant, and Deirdre’s devoted lackeys went about their business with a lighter step and a smile on their faces. Love was in the air, and so Martha’s old ma said to Beecham as he presided over the servants’ hall at luncheon, it warmed the cockles of the servants’ hearts to see that the young master had lost the blighting look which he had habitually worn since the accident to his brother.

  That cynic, however, merely remarked that as far as he was concerned, the top-lofty Earl had finally met his comeuppance and no bad thing either.

  It was a slightly shamefaced Deirdre who descended the stairs an hour or so later. Rathbourne had taken himself off to attend to estate business with Guy Landron, and she had belatedly realized that her regular interview with Beecham to discuss the day’s disposal of servants’ duties had come and gone. Since everyone seemed to be managing without her direction, she happily thought to steal a few minutes’ solitary reflection in her secret retreat above the hayloft.

  As she was crossing the courtyard, or bailey, as the servants referred to it, she caught a glimpse of Caro making her way through the gatehouse to the bridge over the dry moat. Deirdre quickened her step to catch her up, but when some minutes later she came out of the dark entrance, there was no sign of her sister-in-law. On her right were the stables; on her left, hidden by a thick screen of trees, was the Little Chapel and graveyard where all the Cavanaughs were finally laid to rest. Since the chapel had burned down the previous year during a ferocious late summer thunderstorm, and it was only an empty shell of a building, it did not seem likely that Lady Caro would have any business there. Deirdre made for the stables.

  Her search of the stables and its environs proved fruitless and twenty minutes later saw Deirdre retracing her steps to follow the well-worn path that led to the Little Chapel. There was nothing of a particular nature she wished to impart to Caro, nothing that could not wait for another place and hour, but a feeling of disquietude which she could not shake had roused an inexplicable anxiety in her heart.

  As she rounded the east wall of the building, she heard masculine voices raised in anger. From the corner of her eye she saw Guy Landron with the reins of two restive horses in his hand. His free arm was clamped securely around a weeping, struggling Lady Caro. But it was on the two men who were shouting at each other that Deirdre’s eyes became riveted.

  “By God, St. Jean, this passes all bounds,” she heard Rathbourne say in a rigidly controlled tone.

  Armand’s head went back, and he said furiously, “Think what you like. I have nothing to say to you. But if you lay a hand on Caro, I swear I’ll kill you.”

  Deirdre watched in horror as the riding crop in Rathbourne’s hand rose and descended with full force against Armand’s shoulder. She was sure Armand would make some move to defend himself, but he stood like a statue, grim-faced and white-lipped, his knees slightly buckling. Rathbourne raised the crop again, and without thinking, Deirdre flew at him. She grabbed for his hand and in the next instant she was sent reeling backward as Rathbourne shook her off with a savage, involuntary movement, and the crop caught her a stinging blow across the cheek. She stumbled, and Armand caught her in his arms.

  “Deirdre,” she heard Rathbourne say in a stricken voice, and his hand went out to her. She flinched from him, and he drew back as if stung.

  A slow flush suffused his face. He felt betrayed, like some blissfully ignorant husband who suddenly discovers that his wife has cuckolded him. He would not allow that the provocation was great. She had rushed to Armand’s defense, as she always did, without making the least push to discover the facts of the case. She was his wife, he worshipped her, but the galling truth was that he would never be first in her loyalties or affections. That place was reserved for St. Jean.

  A wave of bitter anger rose in his gorge as he eyed the pair who stood so defiantly before him. Deirdre was half turned into Armand’s arms, as if she was seeking protection from the wrath of a violent husband. After the intimacy they had shared, and so recently, that little gesture cut him more than anything.

  He fixed her with a look of quiet menace. “Get away from him,” he said curtly, “or by God you’ll take the thrashing he deserves.”

  “For God’s sake, Gareth!” exclaimed Guy Landron, and the girl in his arms renewed her attempts to free herself.

  “It’s all my fault,” Lady Caro sobbed. “I followed Armand here. He warned me to keep my distance. Armand, for pity’s sake tell him.”

  Armand waved her to silence. “Do as you wish with me,” he gritted out, “but leave Deirdre out of this. I would have thought that even a man of your violent nature would give some thought to his wife’s condition.”

  “Armand, no,” Deirdre interrupted, “he didn’t mean anything by it. It was just temper—”

  “For God’s sake will you get away from him?” roared Rathbourne, and made as if t
o snatch his wife out of the other man’s arms.

  Armand thrust Deirdre behind him and stood glaring into the stormy eyes of the Earl. “Thrash me and have done with it,” he said cuttingly, “but leave my sister alone.”

  “Armand, tell him I’m to blame,” cried Lady Caro brokenly. “Oh why didn’t I listen to you?”

  “Don’t say another word, Caro. We shall be married once you have come of age, as I promised, and there is nothing he can do to prevent it.”

  “Over my dead body,” said Rathbourne venomously. “D’you think I’d let my sister marry a penniless ne’er-do-well? You’ll never get your thriftless paws on a penny of her fortune as long as I live!”

  Deirdre had no intention of allowing the two people she loved best in the world to come to cuffs with each other. She stepped swiftly between them and laid a restraining hand on the Earl’s chest. “No,” she pleaded. Neither man paid her the least attention.

  Armand’s lip curled. “Keep Caro’s fortune with my goodwill. If rumor is anything to go by, you’ll need it to keep all your bits of muslin in handkerchiefs. La Divine Dewinters’s sojourn in Paris this last month cost you a pretty penny or two, or so I’ve been told.”

  Deirdre’s eyes opened wide and she looked a question at Rathbourne. “Mrs. Dewinters was in Paris?” she asked softly. There was an appeal in her eyes, but Rathbourne ruthlessly crushed the impulse to respond to it.

  Armand looked stricken. “Dee, oh Dee! I am sorry. I never meant for you to know.”

  Her expression hardened, and her glittering eyes swept the Earl’s stiff figure in slightly contemptuous dismissal. “No! Nor did Rathbourne, I shouldn’t wonder,” she drawled.

  The silence stretched taut, and Rathbourne and Deirdre held each other in a coldly calculating gaze. The Earl’s eyes shifted to Armand and narrowed.