He heard footsteps from the other side, and his wife opened the door herself. Jack had half expected to find her fully clothed, but she had made sufficient concessions to appearances to allow her maid to undress her for bed.
Yet her appearance was severely unsensual. Over her long white nightdress she wore a plain wrapper of blue wool, fastened tight and high to prevent any inviting gaps that might reveal a glimpse of her lovely figure. He missed the dress from dinner. While he had seen far more daring gowns in his time—Sarah Boyd had worn several that only just avoided baring the roses of her nipples—Elizabeth’s dress had still put a tantalizing expanse of soft creamy bosom on distracting display.
Perhaps it was just as well. It would be distracting enough merely to be in the same room with her, a room with a wide warm bed at its center.
“Good evening,” he said. “May I come in?”
She raised a sardonic eyebrow. “You may.”
She stepped back, and he followed her inside, shutting the door softly. She perched on the stool at her dressing table and waved him to the slightly sturdier chair that sat before a small table she had evidently made into a reading and writing desk. He took it without protest. Best to ignore the presence of the bed for now.
“I’ve brought you gifts.” He held out the two paper-wrapped packages.
She took them gingerly. “Thank you,” she said, her voice wary.
“Go on, open them,” he said when she did not immediately do so. As dissimilar as the women in his life had been, he had never before met one who did not open a present on the spot.
She bit her lip and started with the smaller one. She took the sapphire ring out of its box and held it up to the candlelight. “It’s lovely,” she said reluctantly.
“If it doesn’t fit, any jeweler should be able to adjust it,” he said, for she had not yet tried to put it on.
“It must have been expensive,” she said, slipping it tentatively down the first finger of her left hand, stopping at the middle knuckle.
“Not more than I could afford,” he assured her. “You should have more. You’re Lady Armstrong now.”
“I don’t feel like it.”
“Nor do I, most days.”
She smiled, her eyes dancing. “I shouldn’t think you would ever feel like a lady.”
He rolled his eyes but failed to suppress a chuckle. “You know that isn’t what I meant.”
“Yes. It is, however, what you said.”
He waved a hand in helpless acknowledgment of her hit. He hadn’t meant for it to come from a joke at his own expense, but he had at least succeeded in his primary goal for the night—he had made his wife smile.
She relaxed a little, too, condescending to try the ring on her other fingers before settling it onto the third finger of her right hand.
“Emeralds,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“You should have emeralds. A necklace, I think. They’ll match the green in your eyes.”
“Stop trying to flatter me.”
“It’s not flattery. Look in your mirror. Your eyes are shot through with green.”
She shook her head. “But not emerald. They would outshine me.”
“I don’t think so.”
She closed her lovely eyes and turned her head aside. “You needn’t buy me jewelry. I’m not some—you cannot buy your way into my good graces.”
“That wasn’t my intent,” he said, conveniently ignoring the degree to which it had been when he picked out the ring and the book. “I only mean to give you everything in keeping with our new station in life.”
“Oh.” She looked at him again. “I’ve just been going on as before. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to be.”
“Neither do I. We’ll work it out, together, but we needn’t do it all tonight.”
Her expression grew wary. “If we’re together.”
He hid a sigh. He didn’t want to even consider the possibility of a separation, but pushing her on that point tonight would be rushing his fences. “Well, that cannot be decided immediately either, can it?”
She shook her head and twisted the ring. “Open the other,” he urged, the better to turn the subject.
She ran her hands across the package before untying the string that held it together. “A book.”
“I hope you like it. You may already have it, but I tried to find the newest one I could.” There were several books stacked on her table, though all were novels.
She carefully unfolded the paper wrapping. “‘Travels in the Ionian Isles, Albania, Thessaly, Macedonia, &c.,’” she read aloud.
“I remembered you were fond of travels,” he said, albeit uncertainly, since she hadn’t gone into transports of joy. “At least, you brought several here with you, when you first came.”
She blinked at him. “I never dreamed that you’d noticed.”
But she didn’t sound delighted that he had. “You don’t like it, do you? Are you not interested in Greece?”
She set the book down with a sigh. “Of course I am. Who wouldn’t be? And I used to read every book of travels I could get my hands upon. But I haven’t opened one in, oh, at least three years.”
In other words, she’d stopped reading them around the time she had turned cold to him. “Whyever not?” he asked.
“Because I have never, in all my life, been more than ten miles south of York. I have been to Scotland exactly twice—to Coldstream for our wedding and to Blainslie Keep when your uncle invited me for a visit the summer before last. I had never seen the sea until three years ago, when the Ildertons took me with them on a visit to Bamburgh Castle.”
She sounded every bit as angry about her limited travel as she had about his affairs. Jack rubbed his forehead. It made no sense. They lived perhaps twenty miles from the sea. “But why not?” he asked.
“What do you mean, why not?” Her voice climbed so much Jack glanced involuntarily toward the door. No one would think they were having a tender reunion if they heard them fighting.
“What was stopping you?” he elaborated.
“What was stopping me? Why, Papa never had time for such frivolities, as he called them. And after he died, I was always poor and dependent. What was I to do? Beg my great-uncle for a season in London, when he wouldn’t even allow me to go to an assembly just a few streets away in York? Leave your mother alone while I took a course of sea bathing?”
“You haven’t been poor and dependent or had anyone dependent on your care for three years,” he pointed out, anger driving out his intent to charm. “At any point after Mama died, you could have gone anywhere in the kingdom. Why didn’t you, if you were so full of longing to travel? It isn’t the Ionian Islands, I grant you, but you could’ve seen as much of London and Brighton and Bath and the Lakes as anyone could wish.”
“What was I to do? Go by myself?”
“Of course not. You could’ve hired a companion.”
“The expense...”
“Would not be so great. You aren’t poor anymore, Elizabeth. Do you not realize that? But I daresay you needn’t have hired someone after all. Miss Rafferty would’ve been glad to go, and don’t the Ildertons have several daughters? One of them must be of a suitable age to accompany a trusted family friend for a few weeks’ travel.”
Her eyes widened. “I suppose I could have...” Then she blinked and shook her head. “No. The mockery was bad enough here. I couldn’t have borne being laughed at in Bath or London.”
She was so prickly, so sensitive. She reminded Jack of himself as he’d been fifteen or twenty years earlier, so used to being alternately ignored and mocked that he would’ve given anything to hide in his quarters and never come out. What would he have become if he hadn’t had the demands of his profession to force him to engage with the world, and an Uncle Richard to be ambitious on his behalf before he’d believed himself capable of rising high? Was it too late for her to overcome her fears? Surely not. The woman who had faced him down earlier in
the day did not entirely lack confidence.
“I doubt you would’ve been laughed at there,” he said slowly. “In a great city like London, no one pays as much attention to any one person’s troubles or foibles as in a little village like this.”
“I don’t know. I’m sure there would’ve been gossip.”
He shrugged. “Perhaps. I doubt anyone who hasn’t been there pays much mind to what passes in Canada. But if you’d appeared as you did today, defiant and proud, I believe any gossip there was would’ve been in your favor. Everyone would’ve said what a fool I was, and you would have had your share of chances to take your revenge by putting a cuckold’s horns on me.”
“Impossible!” Her voice rose in incredulity. “I’m not—no one would have wanted—I’m not beautiful.”
“There’s more than one kind of beauty,” he said. “I wish you’d gone. I never meant for you to make such a martyr of yourself.”
“You wouldn’t have liked to be a cuckold, would you?”
“No,” he admitted, “though I suppose it would be only fair, after how I’ve lived. But I do wish someone had tried, just so you would’ve realized how desirable you are.”
She huffed out an annoyed breath. “I have a mirror.”
Jack shook his head. “Mirrors are liars. They tell us what we expect to see.”
“That’s not true—wait, I suppose it is, but how would you know? You’re a man.” She leaned forward a little, looking almost unguarded for the first time since the brief interplay over his inability to feel like a lady.
“You think men never worry over our appearance?” She hadn’t been around many men if she thought that. Giles had been very handsome, of course, but he’d had neither the money nor the inclination to take pains over his clothing or grooming. As for Jack, it had taken him at least a year of being six feet tall and clear-skinned to not see himself as a spotty runt, no matter what the mirror or the fit of his clothing had told him. “Surely you’ve met a gentleman or two who still dresses like a beau even though he last had the face and form for it several decades ago.”
At that, she actually smiled a little. “My great-uncle was that sort.”
“I’m sure he saw a fine, handsome figure when he looked in his glass.”
The smile reached her eyes. “I don’t doubt it.”
Jack ran a hand through his hair just above the ears, where it was grayest. “And I still don’t believe I have all this gray hair. In my mind, I look as I did, oh, around the time I met you, no matter what the mirror says to the contrary.”
“So it isn’t the mirrors that lie, but we who cannot believe their evidence, then.”
“Exactly.”
They studied each other in thoughtful silence for a moment. Jack dared to hope Elizabeth wasn’t angry with him at this instant. He was sure her anger would come back before she was ready to forgive him permanently. If she ever did. He mustn’t allow himself to hope too soon.
“You shouldn’t trouble yourself over a little gray,” she said earnestly. “It makes you look distinguished, as a general ought.”
“It’s nothing to do with my rank. It all came after Queenston Heights, when I was so badly hurt and then so ill.”
“Still, it looks well on you...and really, I can’t believe you pay it so much mind. You don’t really, do you?” Her eyes narrowed with renewed suspicion. “You’re just pretending, to try to make me feel better.”
“No, I truly do. It happened so suddenly, and I cannot become accustomed to myself as I am now.”
She actually laughed a little. “I believe you’re quite vain.”
“It isn’t vanity. It’s only—I’m starting to see my father look back at me from the glass, and I’m still five or six years younger than he was when I was born. It makes me feel so very mortal.”
“And going into battle and being severely injured did not?”
“It’s a different kind of mortality.” The prospect of a quick death in battle had never troubled him. The idea that he might, like his mother, slowly lose his mind, and with it his memory of everyone and everything he had ever loved, could keep him awake at night in sheer shuddering horror.
Jack didn’t want to talk about death, not tonight when he was home at last and trying to win his way back into his wife’s good graces, so he changed the subject back to where it had begun. “In any case, there’s nothing to stop you from traveling wherever you like now.”
She blinked, then her eyes widened and her cheeks grew flushed. Elizabeth might not be a beauty in any conventional sense, but whenever her spirit animated her features she was lovely to look upon. But the moment passed quickly, and her eyes shuttered behind a frown. “Of course there is. You want me to bear you an heir.”
“If you can ever forgive me enough to allow me, indeed I do.” He rubbed furtively at his right leg, which was beginning to ache from his old injury. Should he tell her he would want her in his bed even if he had no line to continue and no land to pass on, or would that alarm her more at this stage?
“Well, then. You wouldn’t want your heir born in the Ionian Islands, instead of here at the Grange, would you?”
“Supposing good attendants and a capable accoucheur could be had there, and I don’t know if that’s the case. But we could learn. And I’m certain you and the baby could have even better care than you could get here in any number of places. London, to name the most obvious, but also Edinburgh, Dublin...Paris, Vienna, Rome, Brussels, Berlin...” He warmed to the theme as he began ticking the great cities of Europe off on his fingers. He’d hardly got the chance to fight in Europe as a soldier, how would it be to travel there in peacetime simply for the pleasure of it? He decided he wanted to find out. “We could go on a Grand Tour together.”
Her eyes narrowed. “So I can travel, then, but only if we consummate the marriage.”
Part of him wanted to drive such a bargain, if only it would work. But she might call his bluff. Even if she did not, did he really want a wife who only tolerated his presence in bed? Especially this wife, with her unexpected loveliness and prickly, defiant soul? “If we separate,” he said patiently, “then I won’t have any say in your comings and goings. You could certainly live on the Continent, if you chose. But I hope it won’t come to that. I’d like to see Paris with you.”
She frowned at him in utter bewilderment. “Why,” she said at last, “are you being reasonable?”
He raised an eyebrow. “Would you prefer me to be unreasonable?”
“Yes—no—I don’t know!” She shook her head and glared at him. “If we separate,” she said, “you have no heir for all this.” She indicated Westerby Grange and its lands with a wave of one hand. “I expected more rage at the very possibility.”
He hid a smile. Without a conscious plan, he’d hit on the right strategy, and now he would stick with it. If he didn’t rage back, surely her fury—her perfectly justified fury—would spend itself more quickly. “Would it do my cause any good, given that I’ve no intention of throwing you onto that bed and asserting my rights against your will?”
Her jaw fell open, and she stared at the bed, then back at him. “No.”
“So I won’t do it.” He stood, shifting most of his weight to his good leg. “I want you. But unless you want me too, it’s no good.”
“You don’t want me. You want an heir.”
He smiled a little. “That’s what I would’ve said this morning. But now I’ve seen you. Good night, Elizabeth.”
Without waiting for a reply, he bowed to her and left her to seek his solitary bed.
* * *
By the time her husband left her, Elizabeth was exhausted from the strain of maintaining a civil façade, but she could not sleep. She opened the book he’d given her and read till her candle burned down, then climbed into bed and lay awake, staring into the darkness. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected from Jack, but it wasn’t this. As for his parting words—when he claimed to want her, and not merely the legitimate heir she a
lone could give him—surely those were lies. She knew how very ordinary she was. A man of his experience could not possibly burn with desire for such as her. And yet, the way he had looked at her then, that avid hunger... No. She rolled onto her stomach and punched at the pillow. It couldn’t have been real. It must all be an act, the skill of a practiced seducer.
And how dare he suggest her troubles, her loneliness, were in any way self-inflicted wounds when he had been the instigator of them all with his careless, adulterous ways?
Yet, what if he was right, at least in part? Might she have actually endured less mockery, not more, if she had gone to London or Bath and made an effort to make a place for herself in Society? And could she truly, at last, have the sort of life she had always dreamed of until the last few years when she had decided, with bitterness, that dreams were for children and fools?
At last she fell asleep, and if she dreamed, she did not remember it. In the morning she put on the blue dress she’d meant to wear when she first confronted Jack and went down to breakfast at her usual early hour.
But Jack was there before her, looking bright-eyed, handsome and well rested, attacking with evident relish a plate laden with black pudding, bacon and hot rolls.
He stood when she stepped through the dining room’s doorway and inclined his head. “Good morning, my dear. You slept well, I hope?”
Somehow he managed to make those commonplace words sound suggestive. “Well enough,” she replied shortly. “You’re up early.” She filled her plate from the unusually abundant breakfast Mrs. Pollard had set out for her master’s homecoming, choosing her usual simple morning meal of toasted bread and hot chocolate.
He smiled. “This isn’t early. It’s after dawn.”
“Oh.” She supposed that compared to a soldier’s, her farmwife’s life at Westerby Grange was one of luxury. “I’m often up before dawn,” she said. She couldn’t claim her life had been as hard or dangerous as his had been, but she didn’t want him to think she had idled the years away. “Especially during foaling and lambing time.”
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