by Mary Balogh
SIR GERALD STAPLETON’S butler would see if he was at home, he told Edgar with a stiff bow when the latter presented himself and his card at the main doors of Brookhurst late in the afternoon. He showed Edgar into a salon leading off the hall.
At least, Edgar thought, the long journey had not been quite in vain. Stapleton might refuse to see him, but clearly he had not gone away for Christmas. The butler would have known very well then that he was not at home. He stood at the window. There was as much snow here as at Mobley. It was an elegant house. The park was large and attractive, even with its snow cover.
He turned when the door opened again. The man who stepped inside did not surprise him, except perhaps in one detail. He was not particularly tall or broad or handsome. He was well dressed though with no extravagance of taste. There was something quite ordinary and unremarkable about his appearance. Except for his pleasant, open countenance—that was the surprise. Though a man might look that way merely out of politeness when he had a visitor, of course.
“Mr. Downes?” he said, looking at the card in his hand.
Edgar inclined his head. “From Bristol, as you see on the card,” he said. “My father owns Mobley Abbey thirty miles from here.”
“Ah, yes,” Sir Gerald Stapleton said. “That is why the name seemed familiar to me. The snow must make for slow travel. You are on your way to Mobley for Christmas? I am glad you found Brookhurst on your way and decided to break your journey here. I will send for refreshments.”
“I came from Mobley Abbey today,” Edgar said, “specifically to see and to speak with you. I am recently married. My wife was Lady Stapleton, your father’s widow.”
Sir Gerald’s expression became instantly more guarded. “I see,” he said. “My felicitations to you.”
“Thank you,” Edgar said. It was very difficult to know how to proceed. “And to my wife?” he asked.
Sir Gerald looked down at the card and placed it absently into a pocket. He was clearly considering his reply. “I mean you no offense, sir,” he said at last. “I have no kind feelings for Mrs. Downes.”
Ah. It was not simply a case then of something Helena had blown quite out of proportion with reality. Sir Gerald Stapleton had neither forgotten nor forgiven.
“Then you mean me offense,” Edgar said quietly.
Sir Gerald half smiled. “I would offer you the hospitality of my home,” he said, “but we would both be more comfortable, I believe, if you stayed at the village inn. It is a posting inn and quite respectable. I thank you for informing me.”
“She believes she destroyed you,” Edgar said.
Sir Gerald pursed his lips for a moment. “She did not do that,” he said. “You may inform her so, if you wish.”
“She believes she betrayed your trust at a time in your life when you were particularly vulnerable,” Edgar said. “She believes you have never recovered from her selfish cruelty. And so she has never forgiven herself or stopped punishing herself.”
“Helena?” Sir Gerald said, walking toward the fireplace and staring down at the fire burning there. “She was so much in command of herself. So confident. So without conscience. I remember her at my father’s funeral, cold and proud—and newly wealthy. I beg your pardon, sir. I speak of your wife and do not expect you to remain quiet while you hear her maligned. You may assure her that she has had no lasting effect on my life. You may even say, if you will, that I wish her well in her new marriage. That is all I have to say on the subject. If we can find some other topic of mutual interest, I will order hot refreshment to warm you before you return to the cold. I would like to hear about Mobley Abbey. I hear that it has been restored to some of its earlier splendor.”
There was no avoiding it. “My wife believes that your marriage was an outcome of your lasting unhappiness,” Edgar said, wondering if he was going to find himself fighting a duel before the day was out—or at dawn the next day.
“My marriage.” Sir Gerald’s face had lost all traces of good humor. “Have a care what you say about my marriage, sir. It is not open for discussion. I believe it would be best for both of us if we bade each other a civil good afternoon while we still may.”
“Sir Gerald,” Edgar said, “I love my wife.”
Sir Gerald closed his eyes and drew breath audibly. “You can love such a woman,” he said, “and yet you believe that I cannot? You believe that I must have married out of contempt for my wife and contempt for myself?”
“It is what my wife believes,” Edgar said.
Sir Gerald stood with his back to the fire for a long while in silence. Finally he strode toward the door and Edgar prepared to see him leave and to know that he must return to Mobley with nothing more comforting for Helena than an assurance from her stepson that she had no permanent effect on his life. But Sir Gerald stood in the doorway, calling instructions to his butler.
“Ask Lady Stapleton if she would be so good as to step down here,” he said.
He returned to his position before the fire without looking at Edgar or exchanging another word with him. A few minutes passed before the door opened again.
She was a complete surprise. She was small, slender, dark-haired, decently dressed, and very pretty in an entirely wholesome way. She had a bright, intelligent face. She glanced at Edgar and then looked at her husband in inquiry.
“Priss?” Sir Gerald held out one arm to her, his expression softened to what was unmistakably a deep affection. “Come here, my love. This is Mr. Edgar Downes of Bristol. He has recently married Helena. My wife, Lady Stapleton, sir.”
She looked first into her husband’s face with obvious concern and deep fondness as she moved toward him until he could circle her waist with his arm and draw her protectively to his side. Then she turned to Edgar. Her eyes were calm and candid. “Mr. Downes,” she said, “I wish you happy.”
“You sent Peter back to the nursery?” Sir Gerald asked her.
“Yes.” She smiled at him and then turned back to Edgar. “Has my husband offered you refreshments, Mr. Downes? It is a chilly day.”
She spoke with refined accents and with a graciousness that appeared to come naturally to her.
“Priss.” Sir Gerald took one of her hands in both of his. “Mr. Downes says that Helena has never forgotten what happened and has never forgiven herself.”
“I told you she probably had not, Gerald,” she said.
“She believes she destroyed me,” he said.
She tipped her head to one side and looked at him with such tenderness that Edgar found himself almost holding his breath. “She was very nearly right,” she said.
Sir Gerald closed his eyes briefly. “She considers our marriage as evidence that she succeeded,” he said.
“It is understandable that she should think that,” she said gently.
“She wants my forgiveness.” He looked up. “I suppose that is why you came, Mr. Downes? I cannot give it. But you may describe my wife to her, if you wish, and tell her that Lady Stapleton is the woman I honor above all other women and love more than my own life. Will it suffice? If it will not, I have nothing more to offer, I am afraid.”
Edgar found himself locking eyes with Lady Stapleton and feeling shock at the sympathy that passed between them.
“If Mrs. Downes has not forgotten the pain of that time in her life, sir,” she said, “neither has my husband. It is a wound very easily rubbed raw. I have tried to convince Gerald that in reality there are very few people who are monsters without conscience. I have told him that Helena has probably always regretted what happened. She is very unhappy?”
“Very, ma’am,” he said.
“And you are fond of her.” It was a statement, not a question. Her intelligent eyes searched his face.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Gerald.” She turned to him and looked earnestly at him. “Here is your chance for final peace. If you forgive her, you may finally forget.”
Edgar tried to picture her performing her tricks at a London brothel.
It was impossible.
“You are soft-hearted and sweet-natured, Priss,” her husband said. “I cannot forgive her. You know I cannot.”
“And yet,” she said softly, flushing, “you forgave me.”
“There was nothing to forgive,” he said hotly. “Good God, Priss, there was nothing to forgive.”
“Only because you knew me from the inside,” she said. “Only because you knew of my suffering and my yearning to rise above my suffering. There are few deeds in this life beyond forgiveness, Gerald. For our own sakes we must forgive as much as for the sake of the person we forgive. I find it hard to forgive Helena. She made you so desperately unsure of yourself. But without her, dear, I would never have met you. I would still be where you found me. And so I can forgive her. She is unhappy and has been for all these years, I daresay.”
Sir Gerald stood with bowed head and closed eyes. “You are too good, my love,” he said after a while.
“Suffering teaches one compassion, Gerald,” she said. “You know that. You can feel compassion for everyone except Helena, I believe. Mr. Downes, there is a bigger and warmer fire burning in the drawing room. Will you come up there? You still have had no refreshments. And it is dusk outside already. Will you stay here for tonight? You cannot possibly drive all the way home, and inns are dreary places at which to put up. Stay with us?”
Edgar looked at Sir Gerald, who had raised his head.
“Please accept our hospitality,” he said. “Ride back to Mobley Abbey tomorrow and inform Mrs. Downes that she has my full and free forgiveness.” His voice was stiff, his face set and pale. But the words were spoken quite firmly.
“Thank you,” Edgar said. “I will stay.”
Lady Stapleton smiled. “Come upstairs, then,” she said. “I hope you like children, Mr. Downes. Our son Peter was very cross to be taken back to the nursery so early. I will have him brought back down if I may. He is a little over a year old and terrorizes his mama and papa.” She crossed the room and linked her arm through Edgar’s.
“I like children,” he said. “My wife and I are expecting one of our own next summer.”
“Oh?” she said. “Oh, splendid. And Gerald and I, too, Mr. Downes.”
THE DRAWING ROOM was cozy and looked lived-in. Its surfaces were strewn with books and needlework, but not with breakables. The reason was evident as soon as Peter Stapleton arrived in the room. He toddled about, exploring everything with energetic curiosity, before climbing onto his father’s lap and playing with his watch chain and fob.
The room was decorated for Christmas. A warm fire burned in the hearth. Sir Gerald sat in his chair by the fire, looking at ease with his child on his lap. Lady Stapleton bent her head over her embroidery after pouring the tea and handing around the cups and a plate of cakes.
It was a warm family circle, into which Edgar had been drawn by the courtesy of his hostess, who soon had him talking about his life in Bristol and about Mobley Abbey.
But it was Christmas and there was no sign of other guests and no sign that they were preparing to go elsewhere for the holiday. They were to spend it alone? He asked the question.
“Yes.” Lady Stapleton smiled. “The Earl of Severn, Gerald’s friend, invited us to Severn Park, but his mother and all his family are to be there and we would not intrude on a family party.”
Sir Gerald’s eyes watched his wife gravely.
“We are happy here together,” he said.
They were not. Contented, perhaps. They were a couple who very clearly shared an unusually deep love for each other. But perhaps circumstances had deepened it. Lady Stapleton had been a whore. She would now be a pariah in society.
“I wish,” Edgar said, taking himself as much by surprise as he took them, “you would return to Mobley Abbey with me tomorrow and spend Christmas there.”
They both looked at him, quite startled. “To Mobley?” Lady Stapleton said.
“Impossible!” her husband said at the same moment.
“I would like you and my wife to meet each other again,” Edgar said to Sir Gerald. “To see each other as people again. To recapture, perhaps, some of the sympathy and friendship you once shared. Christmas would seem the ideal time.”
“You push too hard, sir,” Sir Gerald said stiffly.
“There is a large house party there,” Edgar said, turning to Lady Stapleton. “My father and I have friends and their families there, all members of the merchant class. My sister—she is Lady Francis Kneller—has several of her friends there with their families. They are aristocrats and include the Duke and Duchess of Bridgwater and the Marquess and Marchioness of Carew. It would be pleasant to add three more people to our number.”
She was a woman of dignity and courage, he saw. She did not look away from him as she spoke. “I believe you are fully aware, sir,” she said, “of what I once was and always will be in the eyes of respectable society. I am not ashamed of my past, Mr. Downes, because it was a means of survival and I survived, but I am well aware of the restrictions it imposes upon the rest of my life. I have accepted them. So has Gerald. I thank you for your invitation, but we must decline.”
“I believe,” he said, not at all sure he was right, “that you might well find your fears ill-founded, ma’am. I went into polite society myself a few months ago when I was in London. I am what is contemptuously called a cit, yet I was treated with unfailing courtesy wherever I went. I know our situations are not comparable, but I know too that my father and my sister will receive with courtesy and warmth anyone I introduce to them as my friend. Lord Francis Kneller and his friends are people of true gentility. And my wife needs absolution,” he added.
“Mr. Downes.” She had tears in her large, intelligent eyes. “It is impossible, sir.”
“I will not take my wife into a situation that might pain her,” Sir Gerald said. “I will not have her treated with contempt or worse by people who are by far her inferior.”
Edgar’s eyes focused on the little boy, who had wriggled off his father’s lap and was into his mother’s silk threads, undetected.
“There are children of all ages at Mobley,” he said. “I counted fourteen, but there may well be three or four more than that. Children have an annoying tendency not to stand and be counted. Your child would have other children to play with for Christmas, ma’am.”
She bit her lower lip and he saw her eyes before she turned them on her husband. They were filled with yearning. Her child was her weakness, then. And she expected another. How she must fear for their future, isolated from other children of their class.
“Gerald—” she said.
“Priss.” There were both pain and tenderness in Sir Gerald’s voice.
If he had calculated wrongly, Edgar thought, he had several people headed in the direction of disaster. He felt a moment’s panic. But it was the sort of exhilarated panic with which he was familiar in his business life. It was a calculated risk he took. Forgiveness was not enough. Helena needed to know that she had not permanently blighted the life of her stepson. Contented as the Stapletons clearly were together, they were equally clearly not living entirely happy lives. And those lives would grow progressively less happy as the years went on and their children began to grow up.
“Please come,” he said. “I will promise you the happiest Christmas you have ever known.”
Lady Stapleton smiled at him, her moment of weakness already being pushed aside in favor of her usual serenity. “You can do no such thing, Mr. Downes,” she said. “We would not put such responsibility on your shoulders. It is just as likely to be the most uncomfortable Christmas of our lives. But I think we should go. Gerald, I think we should.”
“Priss.” He frowned. “I could not bear it.…”
“And I cannot bear to hide here for the rest of my life,” she said. “I cannot bear to keep you hiding here. And Peter adores other children. You can see that at church each week. Besides, I want to meet Helena. I want you to see her again. I want—oh, Gerald, I want fre
edom even if it must come at the expense of some contentment. I want freedom—for both of us and for Peter and the new baby.”
“Then we will go,” he said. “Mr. Downes, I hope you know what you are doing. But that is unfair. As my wife says, you cannot be held fully responsible for what we decide to do. Let us bring everything into the open, then. I will see Helena, and Priss will be taken into society. And Peter will be given other children with whom to play. We will leave in the morning? Christmas Eve? You are quite sure, Priss?”
“Quite sure, dear.” She smiled at him with a calm she could not possibly be feeling.
But then Edgar, too, sat outwardly calm while inwardly he quaked at the enormity of what he had just set in motion.
Sir Gerald and his wife pounced simultaneously in the direction of their son, who was absorbed in making an impossible tangle of bright threads.
16
CHRISTMAS EVE. IT HAD BEEN A RELATIVELY QUIET day for Helena. Although several of the adults had made visits to the village for last-minute purchases, and the young people had gone outside for a walk and come back again with enough snow on their persons to suggest that they had also engaged in a snowball fight, and several individual couples had taken their children outside for various forms of exercise—despite these things, there had been a general air of laziness and waiting about the day. Everyone conserved energy for Christmas itself, which would start in the evening.
Dinner was to be an hour earlier than usual. The carolers would come during the evening, and Mr. Downes and all his guests would greet them in the hall and ply them with hot wassail and mince pies after they had sung their carols. Then there would be church in the village, which it seemed everyone except the younger children was planning to attend. And afterward a gathering in the drawing room to provide warm beverages after the chilly walk and to usher in the new day.
Christmas Day itself, of course, would be frantically busy, what with the usual feasting and gift-giving with which the day was always associated and the children’s party in the afternoon and the ball in the evening.