The Gilded Web

by Mary Balogh

  Alexandra felt as if she were trapped at the bottom of a deep well. She was about to suffocate or drown. She smiled. “Madeline is a strong person,” she said. “If such a thing were to happen, no one could help her, you know. Not your mother, not Edmund, and not I. But she would survive. You know that too. But why the talk of death? It is far more likely that you will come home the conquering hero.”

  He smiled. “I really do not feel the need for either death or heroism,” he said. “Just to be able to be part of the army and part of the excitement and dirt and danger and exhaustion of a campaign. That is all I want, Miss Purnell: the chance to do my part. But the music is coming to an end. I must return you inside. I am glad we have had this talk.”

  She laughed. “And so you should be,” she said. “You have been released from one problem anyway, sir.”

  He smiled ruefully. “You would not have been a problem, Miss Purnell,” he said. “I would have been proud to fight for you.”

  MADELINE HAD BEEN SO furiously gay all evening that by midnight she was exhausted. She had laughed and chattered and flirted until she was convinced that the whole county must believe that Lady Madeline Raine was as empty-headed a young female as society could offer. She had refused a request to go outside walking with Captain Forbes, sensing that a proposal of marriage was imminent and terrified that in her present mood she might accept it. And her smile had not faltered since she had left her room before dinner.

  She would not have believed how much effort and ingenuity it took to avoid two men. To avoid meeting their eyes, to avoid being close enough to them to hear what they were saying or to risk having to say something to them.

  She would kill Dominic. She would save the French the trouble of blowing him off the face of the earth. She would do it for them. Why did he always have to be bursting with that crusading zeal? Why did he have to be a knight in shining armor? Why did he occasionally have to be Don Quixote? She did not want a brave, adventurous, chivalrous brother. She wouldn’t care if he were the biggest coward in the kingdom, provided that she could know that he was safe. She just wanted Dominic.

  And now he was going to go away and get himself killed. And he did not care at all how she felt or what she would suffer. But she would not give him the satisfaction of pleading with him anymore, she had decided. She was not even going to speak to him again before he left.

  Before he left! Panic grabbed at her when she remembered that he was going to go away in two days’ time. She might never see him again. She would spend the following months and perhaps even years constantly waiting for news, constantly dreading that letter that would bring bad news. How did the army let one know of the death of a loved one in battle? She did not want to know. She shook her head and smiled more dazzlingly than she had intended at Howard Courtney.

  She turned away and slipped out through the French doors. She had one dance free. The rector had engaged to dance with her, but he had been called away suddenly to a sick parishioner. It was no one belonging to the Amberley estate, she had been thankful to hear, or doubtless Edmund would have felt it imperative to go too. No one had yet noticed that she did not have a partner for the set then beginning. It was a delightful feeling to know that she had half an hour during which to be alone, during which to let her face relax and her pretense of enjoyment slip.

  She would not wander on the terrace. Someone would notice her there. She slipped around to the front of the house and past the rose arbor. She would walk in the formal gardens for a while, where it was cool and quiet. No one else had wandered quite so far from the ballroom.

  It was dreary not to be enjoying oneself at a ball, especially the Amberley ball. She could not remember such a thing happening before. But try as she would, she could not feel the gaiety she was acting. And she could not fall in love with Captain Forbes or any other of the young men who could have been hers at the lift of an eyebrow. How dull it was not to be in love, not to be involved in the intrigue of planning just how much she could allow herself to flirt and just when she must draw back and be the demure lady again.

  She unconsciously followed the same path she had taken with James Purnell that first evening. How long ago that seemed! How she had changed since then. Then she had merely disliked him. She had not hated him. Or loved him. She trailed her hand in the basin of the fountain where he had done the same thing that evening. And she walked around the fountain. Just there he had stood when he had talked about his concern for Alexandra. Just there.

  She must have looked at him for several seconds before she saw him. He was in the shadows, leaning back against the marble basin, his arms folded across his chest. It was only when he moved slightly that she realized that he was standing there.

  “Oh,” she said foolishly, “what are you doing out here?”

  “Probably the same as you,” he said. “Escaping. Although it looked to me as if you were having too merry a time to need escape. Did one of your partners abandon you?”

  “The rector,” she said. “He was called away.”

  “Poor Lady Madeline,” he said. “A wallflower at her brother’s own ball.”

  “Don’t,” she said.

  He did not speak or move for a long time. She could not see his face to know what his expression was. It did not occur to her to turn and walk or run away.

  “I could dance with you here if you wish,” he said. “The music carries this far.”

  She shook her head.

  They stood thus for a while longer until he finally uncrossed his ankles, pushed himself away from the basin, and came to stand in front of her. He slipped his right hand around her waist and extended his other hand for hers.

  It was a waltz tune, faint in the distance, but quite loud enough to dance by. Madeline placed one hand on his shoulder and the other in his. She closed her eyes as they began to dance.

  She would not have expected him to be a good dancer. The only time she had danced with him, at the Courtneys’, she had not noticed. But here, where there were just the two of them and the darkness, she knew that he moved with the music, that he felt it with his body and could take her with him into its rhythm.

  She did not know when her body first touched his or when both his arms moved around her waist and both of hers around his neck. She did not know when his cheek came to rest against the top of her head. They continued to move to the music and finally to sway to it. By that time she was in a world beyond reality.

  When the music stopped, she lifted her face for his kiss. Not with the coyness and excited anticipation with which she had offered as much to other men. Not with fear of the man who had hurt and insulted her a week before. But without thought or clear intention. She offered herself to her lover.

  She would not have known with her conscious mind that this was James Purnell, this man whose lips took hers with gentle tenderness. But with every other part of her being she knew her lover as she had always known he would be. She abandoned herself to him. She was his, and no other man would ever matter to her. Could ever matter to her.

  He tasted her lips lightly, caressingly, opening his mouth over hers, probing between her lips with his tongue, stroking the soft flesh behind with its tip. When she moaned, he removed his arms from her waist and took her head in his hands. He caressed her cheeks and her temples with gentle thumbs, his mouth moving over her face and back to hers, over her chin and along her throat.

  His hands followed the line of her neck and her shoulders, touching her lightly, worshiping her flesh. And she gave herself to him, arching the lower half of her body against him, hunching her shoulders when he pulled her gown over her arms so that it would slip down more easily, moaning again when he took her breasts in his hands and sought out the nipples with his thumbs. She gasped and threw back her head when his mouth trailed kisses down her throat and took the place of his hands at her breasts. His hands moved lower, pushing downward on her hips, moving behind them to draw her closer.

  “Madeline.” His mouth was at her ea
r, over hers again. His hands were straining her to him. “Madeline.”

  She was aroused and languorous all at the same time. She did not know where they would make their bed. But it did not matter. She was his. She would let him decide. She would go where he wished to go, lie where he chose to lay her.

  “My love,” she said in wonder against his mouth, her hands twining themselves in his long dark hair. “Oh, James. My love.”

  When he held her head against his shoulder, she closed her eyes and abandoned herself to what he would do. She breathed in the smell of him, gloried in the roughness of his waistcoat against her naked breasts, felt her body humming with awareness and soon-to-be-satisfied desire.

  But he held her quite still. She could both hear and feel his heart thumping beneath her cheek. But she was aware with an extra sense that he was imposing control over himself. He was not going to take her. He was not going to dishonor her. She relaxed against him and closed her eyes. Perhaps she felt relief as well as regret, she thought. But whatever she felt, she knew that she was utterly, utterly happy.

  She helped him when she felt his hands pulling at her dress. She covered herself before moving back a step and looking up at him. But she could not see his face. He was standing with his back to the fountain again.

  “Go back to the ballroom, Madeline,” he said, “while you are still reasonably safe.”

  She shook her head. “I am safe,” she said. “I am where I want to be. And none of that was against my will.”

  “Then it should have been,” he said. “I have warned you before to stay away from me for your own good.”

  She felt bewildered. His voice was flat, not the lover’s voice that had spoken her name a mere few minutes before.

  “I love you,” she said.

  He laughed low and harshly. “Love!” he said. “It is so easy to love, to make vows to last beyond the grave. So easy to forget again before the echo of the words has died away. I loved once and was destroyed by it. Never again!”

  She swallowed painfully. “But you love me,” she said. “I felt it. I did not imagine it.”

  “You confuse love and lust,” he said. “For a few minutes I forgot that you are a little butterfly. I wanted you. Do you understand me? I wanted to mount your body and take my pleasure from you. There would have been nothing more. Nothing after. No love. Only satisfied lust.”

  “No.” She shook her head. “Why do you hate yourself so much? Why will you not allow yourself to be touched? No, don’t laugh. Don’t say what I know you are about to say. I have touched you with my hands and my body. But I have never touched you. You have made yourself untouchable, James Purnell. But I have glimpsed you, for all that. I do not believe that you felt only lust a few minutes ago. I do not believe it.”

  “You are a dreamer,” he said, “a romantic. You think it shameful that you have been panting to lie beneath me. You must dignify the bodily craving with the name of love.”

  “I love you,” she said.

  “Go away from me,” he said. “Go away now.”

  Madeline looked at the still, dark figure in the shadows. Again, he might not have been there. There were miles and oceans between them. She turned and hurried away.

  Purnell, his arms crossed over his chest, listened to her go, her slippers crunching lightly over the gravel walk. He let his head drop forward and closed his eyes.

  LADY BECKWORTH CONGRATULATED LORD Amberley on the success of the ball. They were sitting with Lord Beckworth and Alexandra, Lady Amberley and Sir Cedric Harvey in the supper room after everyone else had returned to the ballroom.

  “This ball always has been a gala occasion,” Lady Amberley said. “And we have usually been fortunate with the weather, have we not, Edmund? It is such a disappointment when it is wet or cold and we have to keep the doors closed.”

  “We always welcome the excuse to open the state apartments to more than just visitors passing through,” Lord Amberley said. “Such rooms were meant to be lived in, I think. They are not just museum pieces.”

  “This year I am hoping that the rooms will be used on more than this one occasion,” Lady Amberley said, beaming at Alexandra.

  Lord Beckworth did not miss her meaning. “And what have you decided, Amberley?” he said. “Is it to be St. George’s in the early autumn? The invitations should go out soon.”

  “Oh,” Lady Amberley said, looking at her son in surprise, “is the wedding to be in London? How foolish of me to have assumed that it would be here.”

  Lord Amberley looked at Alexandra and half-smiled. “Not St. George’s, sir,” he said. “Perhaps we can all gather again tomorrow and discuss the matter further. At present I am hosting a ball.”

  “There is not going to be a wedding,” Alexandra said quietly. Lord Amberley reached for her hand, but she clasped both of hers very firmly in her lap. She raised her chin.

  “What did you say, Alexandra?” Lord Beckworth’s eyebrows had drawn together.

  “There is not going to be a wedding,” she said again more distinctly. “I have decided not to marry Lord Amberley.”

  “What in thunder are you talking about?” Lord Beckworth was on his feet. “Amberley, if you will excuse us, Alexandra and I will retire to her room for a while. The girl has clearly taken leave of her senses.”

  “No,” Lord Amberley said. “What she says is quite true. And the decision has been mutually made. I have decided not to marry Alex either. It is an amicable agreement, you see.”

  “Edmund, my dear!” Lady Amberley too was on her feet. “Alexandra? What is this? You cannot be serious.”

  “But we are, Mama,” Lord Amberley said. “We have decided, I am afraid, that we would not suit and that we will each be far happier without the other.”

  “Alexandra!” Lady Amberley turned a face full of concern to her. “But I have grown to love you, my dear. I think of you already as my daughter. I am so very sorry.”

  “You cannot do this, Amberley,” Lord Beckworth was saying. “Your word was given. This is insufferable.”

  “I am afraid it has been done,” Lord Amberley said quietly. “The betrothal has been ended, sir.”

  “Alexandra,” her mother said, “how could you do this to your papa, you ungrateful girl?”

  Sir Cedric coughed. “Might I suggest that we follow Amberley’s advice and gather downstairs tomorrow to discuss the matter?” he said. “My presence excepted, of course. This hardly seems the time or the place.”

  “You are quite right,” Lord Amberley said, getting to his feet. “The music is beginning already, I hear. Alex, this is my dance, I believe?”

  It seemed absurd, totally unreal, he thought a few minutes later, to be dancing with his betrothed—no, with his former betrothed—just a short while after such a scene, waltzing with her, smiling at his neighbors, smiling at her.

  “I thought I was to be the one to break the engagement,” he said.

  “I changed my mind,” she said. “There was no need for you to take any of the blame at all, you know.”

  “Your father would have eaten you for dessert if I had not,” he said.

  “That would have been my problem,” she said.

  “Ah, yes.” He twirled her around one corner of the room. “I must never try to lighten your burdens, must I? Well, Alex, you are free now. No longer my responsibility. But I fear you are in for a thundering time of it. And don’t tell me. I know. That is your problem, not mine.”

  He watched her as they danced—his beautiful dark-haired, dark-eyed Alex. No, not his any longer. But very beautiful and very desirable. He dared not let his thoughts slip past the moment, ahead into the next day and the next. And the next. It was hard to believe, looking at her now, so familiar, so beloved, that just a few weeks before he had not even known her.

  He tried to remember her as she had looked to him that first time—disheveled, frightened, proud, defiant, voluptuously beautiful. Yes, it was clear to see now that she had been all of those things. And he re
membered her as she had appeared on the second occasion, when he had made her his first offer. Or tried to remember. At the time he had thought her unlovely, unapproachable, cold.

  Unlovely? He looked down at her shining dark hair and the teasing curls at her neck, at the dark lashes fanning her cheeks, the heightened color in those cheeks. He looked down at the creamy smooth skin of her shoulders and at the generous swelling of her breasts beneath the delicate fabric of her gown. Alex unlovely? She must be the most beautiful woman he had ever known.

  And cold? He thought of her fierce independence and of the passion she had shown in his arms on more than one occasion. He thought of the music he had heard her create. Alex was probably capable of more feeling and more passion than even he could imagine.

  She looked up at him. “What are you going to do?” she asked. “You will marry? You will have children?”

  “I have been looking around the room wondering to whom I could pay my addresses before the end of the ball,” he said.

  “Oh!” she said, her eyes startled. “Oh, pray be serious.”

  He smiled. “No,” he said. “I shall not marry, Alex. I don’t think I could do so after knowing you.”

  She stared at him for several moments, her dark eyes wide and unfathomable. Then she looked sharply away.

  “Excuse me,” she said as soon as the music came to an end. “I must leave for a while.”

  He released his hold on her hand and watched her go, his smile firmly in place.

  LORD EDEN WAS STANDING WITH HIS BACK TO one of the French windows, enjoying the coolness of the night air on his back and wondering if he should ask his Aunt Viola to dance the set that was forming or if that evening breeze was going to prove too tempting. He wished there were someone he could wander outside with, but he had to remember that this was Amberley and not London. It was not so easy here to indulge in a casual flirtation. Besides, he was not in the mood.