by Mary Balogh
Ashley had something of life to learn, and the sooner he learned it the better for him. The better he would be able to survive in a hard world. Sentiment had been all very well between a child and a youth. There was no room for sentiment between adults.
No, he need not feel guilty for the way he had handled this particular situation, Luke decided.
And then he sat up abruptly and got to his feet. He had something else to think about this morning. He glanced at the clock on the mantel. It was high time he got dressed and was on his way to Lady Sterne’s.
At least Ashley’s visit had served one purpose, he thought as he climbed the stairs after giving directions that his valet was to be sent up to his dressing room promptly. It had taken his mind off what was perhaps to be the most fateful hour of his life.
He would not think about it, he decided. He would merely think about his appearance. Something a little more formal than usual for morning wear but not vulgarly ostentatious for the time of day.
He longed suddenly for Paris and the pleasurable routine of his days there. Ashley’s visit and his own handling of the situation had depressed him more than he cared to admit.
• • •
Anna was sitting in the morning room with Lady Sterne. They were working on their embroidery and talking about the social events that were coming up in the next week. Most notable was another ball—Lord and Lady Castle’s—this evening. Agnes was out shopping with one of her new friends and the girl’s mama.
“Perhaps Agnes will meet someone at the ball more to her taste than anyone she has met so far,” Anna said. “Several gentleman have looked as if they might be interested, given a little encouragement. But Agnes has not given any. I did think last evening that perhaps Lord Ashley Kendrick . . . But when he got up for a moment, Lord Severidge took his place beside Agnes. I felt quite provoked, though the poor man appeared perfectly civil.”
“One must remember that Agnes is only eighteen years of age,” Lady Sterne reminded her. “But she is a sensible girl nonetheless. She is one little lady, I vow, who will not grab the first opportunity for matrimony that presents itself unless the gentleman is to her liking. You must not be anxious on her account, Anna. She will do very nicely, given time.”
“Oh, but I am anxious,” Anna said with a sigh. “Victor is so very young himself and about to marry. He will not wish to be encumbered with two unmarried sisters and the duty of finding them husbands—not that Emily is of marriageable age yet and not that it is likely that anyone will be willing to marry her despite her great sweetness. Not at least without a large dowry, which she just does not have.”
“Two unmarried sisters,” Lady Sterne said, clucking her tongue. “I notice you do not include yourself, child, having concluded, I vow, that you are too old to be marriageable.”
Anna flushed and thought of what she had been trying desperately to forget all morning. Not that she had forgotten for a single moment. She glanced down at the new dress she wore even though it was only morning—her godmother had commented on how grand she looked for so early in the day. And she had not told her godmother. It was something that ought to be told.
“I-I almost f-forgot,” she said, hearing in dismay that she was stammering, something she had not done for years. “The Duke of Harndon said he might call this morning.”
“Might?” Lady Sterne looked up sharply, her needle suspended above her work. “This morning? Lud, child, ’tis as I have thought and hoped. He is coming to declare himself.”
“Oh, no,” Anna said in some distress. “Merely to pay his compliments, Aunt Marjorie. I daresay he thinks to ascertain that we enjoyed the visit to the theater last evening.”
“Faith, child,” Lady Sterne said, folding her embroidery away and setting it on the table at her elbow, “you are the cool one. He said no more? No more about the purpose of his visit?”
“N-no,” Anna lied. “No more. Perhaps he will not even come. He merely said he might—in a very offhand manner. I daresay he will not come.”
I would ask leave, madam, to call on you tomorrow morning to discuss a matter of some importance with you.
His words had burned themselves into her memory. And if there had been any possibility that he had meant something different from what had seemed his obvious meaning, his following words had dispelled all doubt. He had asked if she was of age. When she had told him her age, he had commented that he did not then have to speak with Victor before discussing the matter with her.
He was going to offer her marriage.
Her certainty that that was what he had meant had given her a largely sleepless night, a night of waking nightmares.
He must be refused, of course. She had no choice at all in the matter. Even if Sir Lovatt Blaydon never returned from America, she had no choice. She could never marry. But the truth was that he might return, that he had said he would. And if and when he returned, she was bound to him more closely than ever slave was bound to master. Lying in bed, alternatively sweating from the heat and shivering from the cold, she had remembered—and could not stop remembering—his setting his hands loosely about her neck on one occasion and slightly, ever so slightly tightening them as he had described to her how a rope was tied about a condemned criminal’s neck, the knot beneath one ear, and how the rope, after the trapdoor had been released, did not always break the neck but often strangled. She had well nigh fainted.
The Duke of Harndon must be refused. This morning should not even be difficult to face. He would ask; she would refuse; he would take his leave. It was all very simple. Except that she knew that during the few minutes of his visit she would be faced with perhaps the greatest temptation of her life.
The longing—oh, the desperate, desperate longing—to escape from herself and from the reality of her life was almost beyond bearing. She had been wrong to give in to the temptation to taste life. Now that she had tasted it, she was ravenous for the whole feast. But like a deadly poison it could only kill her.
Literally kill her.
“I daresay he will not come,” she said more briskly to her godmother, and she smiled. “’Tis the sort of thing gentlemen say, I think, when escorting ladies home.”
“Mercy on me!” Lady Sterne said, shaking her head.
But she had no chance to say more. The butler opened the door to ask if her ladyship and Lady Anna would receive his grace, the Duke of Harndon.
Anna closed her eyes very tightly, but she opened them quickly. Dizziness felt worse with closed eyes.
He was wearing emerald green and gold. He looked to Anna’s eyes more splendid and more handsome than she had ever seen him. But perhaps that was because he was no longer a Prince Charming with whom she dared to flirt, but a man who had come to tempt her. A man she must reject and send away forever. Gone already, after only a few brief stolen days, was the wonderful exhilaration of stepping outside her own character and circumstances to flirt with London’s most dazzling beau. The fairy tale was at an end.
She thought for a while that she had been mistaken after all. He sat and conversed with both her and Lady Sterne for perhaps fifteen minutes, displaying an easy grace and charm that seemed to belie any further motive for his visit. But finally, just when Anna was beginning to relax, he spoke the words she had dreaded to hear. For a moment they scarcely registered on her mind. He had turned to address himself to her godmother.
“Madam,” he said, “might I beg the favor of a few minutes alone with Lady Anna to discuss a private matter?”
Lady Sterne got immediately to her feet, smiling warmly and graciously. “Since she is past girlhood and does not need to be so carefully chaperoned, yes, Harndon,” she said. “But not for longer than ten minutes. I shall return.”
Anna got to her feet while the duke crossed the room to open the door for her godmother. She walked to the window without realizing what she did and gazed out with sightless eyes. S
he could hear her heartbeat loud in her ears. She could feel it in her throat, robbing her of breath.
God. Please, dear God. Please, dear God, she prayed silently and frantically. But she knew such prayers to be futile. God had been silent in her life for years. God had not been kind to her. Or perhaps God was testing her, as he had tested Job, to see how much she could endure before breaking. Sometimes she felt that she was teetering on the brink.
His voice came from close behind her. “Madam,” he said softly, “I believe you must know why I have come this morning and what it is I have to say to you.”
Turn. Tell him now. Look puzzled and tell him that no, you have no idea. No, not that. Look serious. Look troubled. Tell him that it distresses you to know that he has misunderstood the situation. Tell him there is someone else. Someone at home, waiting. But she shuddered at the thought of the man who might even now be there, waiting for her to return.
She turned. But in doing so, she donned her mask. She had not thought of it as a mask before but merely as the manifestation of how she felt and how she wanted to feel until it was time to go home again. But now it was a mask. She smiled brightly and parted her lips and made her eyes shine.
“But no, your grace,” she said. “No woman dare know any such thing. What if she is wrong? Consider her embarrassment.” She laughed at him. She wanted to see one more time that answering gleam in his own eyes. She felt the deep feminine need to feel power over a man, the power to attract. For one last time.
And she watched herself and listened to herself, dismayed and confused. And desperately unhappy.
“You are quite right.” His eyes looked at her keenly from beneath their lazy lids, an incongruity that had the power to turn her knees weak. “Forgive me. This sort of situation is not in my everyday experience.”
He took her right hand in his and turned it palm up to rest in his left hand. He set his other hand flat on top of it. Hands touching. Her own sandwiched between his. It felt impossibly intimate. Anna felt a sudden ache in her throat.
And then he startled her by going down on one knee and not looking even remotely ridiculous as he did so.
“Madam,” he said. “Lady Anna, will you honor me and make me the happiest of men by becoming my wife?”
The words had been spoken. The words she had expected and prepared herself for. Words that would not somehow form themselves into any meaning inside her brain. She gazed downward into his eyes and leaned slightly toward him. And then the meaning was there, the code of his words unscrambled.
They were the words she had expected and prepared herself for. And as new and as wonderful as the sun rising over and over again each morning. She could become his wife. She could step out into freedom and happiness and leave everything behind her, like a snake shedding an old skin. She could be his wife.
No, she could not.
She tried. “Your grace,” she said, her voice little more than a whisper, “I have no fortune. Perhaps you did not know. My father lost almost everything through n-no f-fault of his own, and my brother is young and has not yet had a chance to recover. I have no dowry.”
“I ask only for you,” he said, getting to his feet again but not relinquishing her hand. “I have fortune enough. It does not need to be augmented.”
He wanted her. Her. With no other inducement. Just her.
She tried again. “I am five-and-twenty, your grace,” she said. “You must want a younger bride.”
“I want a bride exactly your age,” he said. “Whatever that age happens to be. I want you.”
He wanted her. Oh, dear God, dear God, he wanted her.
“I-I have sisters,” she said. “Two sisters, for whom I feel responsible now that my mother and father are both dead. My brother is too young to take responsibility for them except financially. I must go home to look after them.”
“Your sisters,” he said, “may live with us if it is what you wish. And if it is their lack of a dowry that makes you fear for their future, then I will supply them with a dowry.”
Her fears for Emily went far beyond the lack of a dowry. But he was willing to give Emily a home and Agnes too, and dowries in return for her marrying him. He wanted her that badly.
“Are there other reasons,” he asked, “why I should hesitate to press my suit? Any other dark secrets, Lady Anna?”
Only the fact that she might be thrown in prison for a number of offenses. Or hanged for others—including murder. And the fact that even apart from those reasons, she could never, never marry.
“No,” she whispered.
“Well, then.” His hands were warm, she realized suddenly, and strong and steady. Comforting and sustaining. “Will you have me? Will you be my duchess?”
If he removed his hands, she would be unable to stand. She would crumple to the floor. And if he removed his hands, there would be no source of heat to her body. She would freeze. If she said no, he would remove his hands. The foolish thoughts teemed through her head, not pausing long enough to be judged for common sense.
“Yes.”
The word was whispered but the volume and power of it felt as if they would shatter Anna’s brain and her very existence. She could not believe that the word had come from her, and yet no one else could have spoken it. And she was doing nothing to retract it. It floated in the air about her head like a tangible thing.
He had removed his right hand from hers and was raising her hand and setting his lips against her palm, holding back her fingers with his thumb.
“Then you have made me the happiest of men, madam,” he said.
The conventional words caressed her like a velvet glove. And sliced into her like a sharp blade.
She smiled dazzlingly at him. Her mask, it seemed, was a mobile thing.
7
LUKE was thankful for the busy nature of the rest of the day. Lady Sterne, as good as her word, returned to the morning room ten minutes after leaving it. She was delighted at the news, of course. He was convinced that she had planned it all with Theo and was now congratulating herself on the speedy fulfillment of their hopes.
Lady Anna Marlowe did not want a large wedding, the sort that might take a month or more to plan. She wanted only that her brother be summoned; he was less than a day’s ride away at the home of his betrothed. She did not want to wait for her youngest sister to be brought—it would take too long.
He was relieved. Now that he had taken the momentous step, without having given himself time for proper consideration, he wanted it all over and done with. He did not want to have to live through weeks and perhaps months of wondering if there was still a way out. There was no way out. He might as well be married so that he could become accustomed to the new fact in his life.
They would marry, he suggested—and she agreed—by special license in three days’ time. They would marry in London and remain in London for a while afterward. He could not yet commit himself to going to Bowden. Perhaps it could still be avoided. Yet he knew deep within himself that it could not, that the inevitability of his return there had played a large part in his decision to marry. He was not marrying from personal inclination.
And yet, looking at his betrothed—his betrothed!—he was not sure that was strictly true. She smiled and glowed and looked vibrantly beautiful. For the first time he noticed that she must have dressed for the occasion, rather more grandly than was normal for the morning. She was so very obviously happy, though she had been quite honest and open about her disqualifications to be his bride. He wondered if she loved him.
He always felt a distinct unease when he suspected that a woman was in love with him. He had no such emotion to give in return. He always put a decisive end to a liaison when it happened even if he had not yet grown tired of the woman concerned. And yet with Lady Anna Marlowe matters were different. She was to be his wife. And though he could not love her, he felt a certain pleasure in the knowle
dge that he was to possess that beauty and that happiness and vivacity.
If he must marry someone, he thought as he got to his feet to take his leave—and it seemed that he must—then he would rather marry her than any other woman he had ever met.
Except Henrietta, an inner voice prompted, uninvited. But that had been a lifetime ago.
He bowed over Lady Anna’s hand, taking it in both of his again. “Madam,” he said, “I trust you will do me the honor of dancing the opening set and the supper set with me at Lord Castle’s ball this evening?”
Her smile was radiant. Seen up close, it made him almost take an involuntary step backward.
“Thank you, your grace,” she said. “I shall look forward to both sets.”
“And I,” he said, “will look forward to no others but those two. Your servant.” He raised her hand to his lips.
• • •
The visit to Harndon House was necessary, he decided reluctantly. He might regret having returned to England and having renewed his acquaintance with his family. But he had done both. It seemed that now he could only go forward. There was no point in wishing that he could go back and decide not to leave Paris or his familiar life there.
His mother and his sister were both at home. They talked to him about last evening’s visit to the theater. Doris commented on the fact that he had paid far more attention to Lady Anna Marlowe than to anyone else in his box. She smiled mischievously as she said so.
“I think her rather beautiful,” she said. “More so than the Marquise d’Étienne for all her Parisian magnificence.”
“Doris!” the dowager duchess said sharply while Luke raised his eyebrows. “Do watch your manners.”
Doris winked at Luke.