Was his wife actually trying to joke him out of his bad humor, with talk of bed? Was she beginning to think of a shared bed as a probability rather than a possibility? It was so unexpected he couldn’t help smiling back. “Only in the most active, vigorous possible way,” he assured her.
She rolled her eyes, but she laughed, too. Oh, it would be such a pleasure to finally get her into bed.
* * *
There were moments the day after Jack came home when Elizabeth was almost tempted to yield and invite her husband to her bed that very night. They were not the moments when he was trying to be charming, or making those obvious innuendoes of his. Where had he got the idea there was anything winsome about those? Had his other women found them seductive, and was she the odd one out in her inexperience? Yet surely she wasn’t so humorless as all that.
No, the moments that made her want to yield to Jack were when he showed himself vulnerable. When he stumbled on his aching leg or yawned and blinked weary eyes between callers, she wanted to put her arms around him and comfort him. She even wondered what it would be like to rub the sore muscles of his thigh—such dangerously intimate contact, but how would his leg feel under her hands?
When he spoke of Giles, she wanted to slip her hand into his and lean into his solid shoulders, letting their shared grief draw them together. And when he admitted, without saying it in so many words, that the confident, heroic face he presented to the world felt like a sham when he’d done so little compared to the generals who had fought in Europe’s larger theater and made their names household words—why, then she wanted to sit down beside him and draw up plans so that, war or peace, he could find the accomplishments, the glory, that clearly drove him. She’d become a great hand for planning as mistress of Westerby Grange, and she rather relished the idea of trying out her skills beyond the confines of the farm.
But she knew if she stepped into his arms—and probably even if she offered him a neatly written list of suggestions for proving his usefulness to the army and the government—one of two things would happen. He would either instantly transform back into the annoyingly cocksure Jack who made her so weary and impatient, or else he would kiss her, she would kiss him, they would consummate their marriage, and half an hour later she would come back to herself, furious she had yielded her husband everything he wanted out of a moment’s pity.
Pity...and desire, too. She had to be honest with herself and admit the desire. He had kissed her, once, five years before, and she had liked it very well then. She expected she’d like it even better now that she wasn’t dazed with grief, and now that he was coming home instead of going away.
She liked his eyes, too, so dark a brown and alternating between storms and merriment. And there was something about the way he moved, the careful grace with which he tried to hide his limp. She couldn’t stop watching him.
What was she thinking? Why was she letting him charm her already? One couldn’t take so dramatic a stand as barring one’s husband from one’s bed only to invite him there after only one night. He would never take her seriously, and he would always believe himself free to do just as he liked, if all he needed to do to get back into her good graces was come home, smile at her and arouse her pity. She must remember that he’d charmed her once before, made her halfway to falling in love with him through those witty, enthralling letters of his, all the while he was cheerfully flirting and philandering his way through Canada as though she didn’t exist.
So Elizabeth kept her distance for the rest of the day and tried to keep the dinner conversation to commonplaces about the marriages, births and deaths that had taken place in Selyhaugh while he was gone.
But he took advantage of a slight lull in the conversation when the servants removed the mutton and brought in dried fruits and cheeses to ask, “Have you thought of where you wish to go first?”
“Go?”
“On the Continent. Where else?”
“But nothing is decided yet, with us,” she sputtered. “And we—I couldn’t leave now. It’s almost foaling and lambing season.”
“That’s what the Purvises and the hands are there for,” Jack said firmly. “If they aren’t enough, we can well afford to hire another man or two now. Besides, just because nothing is decided yet doesn’t mean you can’t have the fun of planning. So, where first? Don’t tell me you haven’t thought of it.”
She had indeed, while she lay awake the past night. “Why, Paris, I suppose. Only I’d wager all of England will have the same idea.”
“That’s no reason to avoid it. If I—if we take this Grand Tour together, Paris would be my choice as well. You’ve spent the past six years on a farm, while I spent them on the frontier. We could use a good dose of crowds and civilization.”
Now that she’d been lured into talking of travel, Elizabeth let Jack keep the subject going. When he came to her room that night, he brought an atlas he’d found on the parlor bookcase, and they plotted a possible route together, not without some debate. Elizabeth wanted to linger in the Alps, while Jack had taken a fancy to the Ionian Islands of the book he had bought her. In the end, they concluded they had time enough to do both, should they choose to travel together, and funds, too, if they spent carefully.
“Living is cheaper on the Continent, after all,” he said. “I’ve heard any number of distressed gentlemen and not a few families have flocked to Brussels already.”
Elizabeth laughed. “We could add it to our itinerary, I suppose.”
“Ah, but our circumstances are not at all distressed, thanks to Uncle Richard. We could stop there and call on any old friends we find, on our way to Paris. No, if I could be anywhere now, I’d want to be in Vienna, deciding the fate of nations.”
“You’re ambitious.”
“I want my deeds to matter.”
“You’ll have your chance,” she assured him.
“I hope so.” He leaned back in his spindly chair and massaged his forehead. He was too large and too male for her room, and Elizabeth was abruptly aware of the intimacy of their situation—her husband in his shirtsleeves, rolled up to the elbow to bare his strong arms. From nowhere her mind was filled with a vision of him atop her in bed, those arms encircling her with gentle force.
Then she blinked and shook her head. Not yet. It was much too soon, even if some part of her wanted to explore just what he had in mind for the most active, vigorous way to lie abed. She produced a yawn. Taking the hint, he smiled, bowed over her hand and took himself off to his own chamber.
She lay awake again, missing him and cursing her own weakness.
* * *
The next day brought Jack’s valet and trunks from York. Elizabeth saw that Macmillan was assigned proper quarters, in the long-vacant room that had belonged to Jack’s father’s valet many years ago, and that he had all that he needed. He wasn’t what she expected in a gentleman’s gentleman, with his heavy accent, a scar on his face where, he said, a French saber had cut him at Fuentes de Oñoro, and his rough-and-ready soldierly bearing. But it was Jack’s business whom he hired as his personal attendant. She wouldn’t take kindly to it if he questioned Jane Hodgson’s suitability as her abigail, after all.
But apparently she didn’t quite hide her doubts. That afternoon when Jack and Elizabeth sat in the parlor, she mending while he read through a stack of correspondence, he said, “Macmillan was a major’s personal servant for the last two years of the war. It’s not as though he has no experience as a valet.”
“I never questioned his suitability,” Elizabeth said earnestly.
“No, but you looked it.”
“Oh, I do hope he didn’t notice, because I certainly didn’t mean to. He simply...stands out, for Selyhaugh. When you hardly venture ten miles from here, a Highlander seems quite as exotic as...as a red Indian, or a Russian.”
Jack smiled. “We must get you traveling. I want to show you so much of the world not even an Indian or a Russian would seem out of the common way.”
“Now, tha
t I can hardly imagine.” She inspected the row of stitches she’d just completed. “I’m sure Macmillan will suit. He seemed courteous, insofar as I could understand a word he said. I thought I was used to Scottish accents from your Armstrong relations, but he sounds entirely different.”
“Oh, that’s just the difference between the Lowlands and the Highlands. You’ll soon grow accustomed. I suppose perhaps I ought to have hired a Selyhaugh man, but when I met Macmillan and heard his stories, and how with the peace he’d been turned out to make his own way even though the reason he’d joined the army in the first place is he couldn’t find work at home...”
“Of course you did what you felt you ought to do.” She’d observed from both Jack and Sir Richard that there was a brotherhood among soldiers, that any man who had fought for Britain had earned a greater loyalty from Jack than he could possibly feel for anyone who merely shared the same birthplace. “Only, I do wonder what became of this major he served, and why Macmillan isn’t still his valet.” She left unsaid her nagging worry that this Major Whoever had turned Macmillan off for some piece of incompetence or dishonesty.
Jack gave a rueful, mirthless chuckle. “He died at Toulouse, at the very close of the war.”
Elizabeth shook her head. “Poor man. I believe Bonaparte had already abdicated by then, so what a pointless loss.”
“At least it wasn’t a defeat for us like New Orleans.”
She sighed. “I suppose it’s unavoidable, but dying in battle after the war is over does add a certain bitterness.”
On that sober note, she returned her attention to her stitches and Jack opened his next letter. She watched covertly as his brows drew together in concentration, then, after a moment, he grinned and slapped his thigh. “Ha! George Lang married and living in Alnwick? I’ll be glad to see him again.”
Lang... She recognized that name. “Isn’t he the officer who lost his savings because of my father?”
Jack’s smile instantly faded, and he set the letter down. “Yes, though I didn’t fancy you’d remember it.”
“Anything to do with that time is hard to forget.”
“In any case, Lang got word I’d come home and wrote the very same day to invite us to dine—says he’d be delighted to meet an old friend from the Forty-Ninth.”
“Surely he wouldn’t include me if he knew who I was.”
He sighed and regarded her soberly. “You’re not your father, Elizabeth.”
“Still. My family did him harm.”
“Harm which he has overcome. He came home from the war a lieutenant-colonel, and it sounds as though he’s married an heiress and settled down to enjoy peace and wedded bliss.”
“Perhaps he had to marry her to mend his fortunes. Perhaps she wouldn’t have been his choice otherwise.”
“Elizabeth. It’s in the past. You were little more than a child, and it was none of your doing.”
She closed her eyes and quoted the verses branded on her memory. “‘And the LORD passed by before him, and proclaimed, The LORD, The LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, Keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children’s children, unto the third and to the fourth generation.’ The Book of Exodus, the thirty-fourth chapter, the sixth and seventh verses.”
Jack stood and began to pace. “Why do you know that by heart?” he asked, sounding outraged that she did. “It isn’t the Ten Commandments, or the Twenty-Third Psalm, or the Lord’s Prayer, or anything else I can imagine asking a child to commit to memory.”
“I have a good memory for that sort of thing.”
He looked at her as if that wasn’t quite answer enough, and perhaps it was not. “My great-uncle had me read scriptures to him, after my parents died and I came to live with him. That was one of his favorite passages.”
“Sanctimonious bastard,” Jack muttered.
She had thought much the same, as a lonely and resentful girl of sixteen, but— “He wasn’t required to take me in.”
“Only by common decency and family feeling. Tell me, if you gave a home to some young niece or cousin whose father or mother had stolen or murdered or committed adultery, would you oblige her to read you those parts of scripture that most condemned their sins?”
“Of course not.”
“Because you are not a sanctimonious bastard who’d resent being obliged to house such a child and take out your bitterness by using the Bible as a bludgeon.” He huffed out an exasperated breath. “If you truly believe God has cursed you for your father’s sins,” he said after a moment, “then why the devil did you marry first Giles and then me, and run the risk of extending the curse to a third and fourth generation?”
Her mouth fell open. “Sometimes I believe it and sometimes I do not,” she said. “But I cannot imagine that anyone directly affected would forgive me.”
“Hm. Interesting, that you were ready to forgive my mother for her sins the very first time I told you of them, when you cannot forgive yourself for your father’s.”
“But her sins never made me suffer.”
He stopped his pacing and stared down at her with narrowed eyes. “Have you forgiven your father?”
No one had ever asked her that before, not even Giles. Jack may have lived as though he didn’t have a wife while he was in Canada, but he certainly saw her clearly now—so much so it frightened her a little. “Every memory before it happened is damaged, somehow,” she said slowly, “by what he did, and how he died, and what that did to my mother and me. I don’t know if I’ve forgiven him. I suppose I should try.”
“I wouldn’t blame you if you cannot. To have all your prospects ruined, and to be covered in scandal, at sixteen, and none of it your own doing? I don’t forgive him for that. But you must understand it’s over now. Let us dine with the Langs, and you can see for yourself if he holds it against you.”
She shuddered. “What if he does?”
“Then I won’t forgive him, either.”
Was he truly willing to take her part if his friend still bore a grudge? “You make it sound so simple.”
He shrugged. “Perhaps you’ve been making it more difficult than it needs to be.” He set Colonel Lang’s letter down and picked up another he’d already read and set aside. “There’s another invitation, too. The Ildertons are giving a dinner on Wednesday next, and they particularly desire our attendance.”
“I suppose we must go, then, though I hope she isn’t planning to have too large a party.” Eugenia Ilderton meant well, but Elizabeth hated the thought of being on display for all of Selyhaugh.
“Whyever not? I beg your pardon, but you never struck me as especially shy. I got the impression from your letters—your early letters, that is—that you enjoyed such company as this place can offer.”
She avoided his eyes, concentrating on her stitches. “I refused all invitations to dinners and parties for a season, after your mother died, and somehow I never got back in the habit of attending or giving them again.”
Still she didn’t look up, but she heard his heavy sigh. “I wish you hadn’t made things so difficult for yourself.”
I wouldn’t have, if you hadn’t made them so difficult for me. But she left the thought unspoken. She had already made it clear she was angry and intended to punish him, after all.
After a moment, he spoke again, this time with nothing but calm curiosity in his voice. “What’s that you’re working on?”
“Mending,” she said. “Nothing very exciting.”
It was one of her own shifts, but she didn’t mention that. He sat down opposite her again, watching her sew. From the serious regard in his dark, heavy-lidded dark eyes it seemed as though he did find something of interest in watching her work, but soon he dispelled that impression by drifting off to sleep. She set her work down and smiled at him, affectionate despite herself. He was as tired as
anyone would expect from a man who’d endured such a long journey on a leg still not completely sound. She supposed as a man and a soldier he could not help his reluctance to actually admit his weakness, but it was there.
His head lolled to the side, his mouth fell open and he snored. Elizabeth suppressed a giggle and took up her needle again.
Jack started and sat upright again. “What? What is it?”
“Nothing. You only snored, a little.”
“I was not asleep,” he said with dignity. “I may have shut my eyes for a moment—”
“Shut them for a long moment and snored.”
“I do not snore,” he protested.
“Yes, you do. I heard you, just now.”
“No one has ever told me I snore before.”
She pasted on a falsely sweet smile. “Perhaps your other companions felt a need to flatter you to remain in your good graces. Since I am your wife, and you cannot be rid of me...you snore, my dear.”
He stretched his legs out straight and smiled back. “Surely my fellow soldiers and the men I’ve shared ships’ berths with would have no need to flatter me.”
“No doubt they were all snoring themselves and couldn’t hear you above their own noise.”
“Just you wait, madam. If I catch you snoring...”
“You won’t.” She punctuated her words with stabbing, emphatic stitches. “I do not snore.”
“How do you know? You’re asleep, so you wouldn’t hear yourself, and—”
“And I sleep by myself? I haven’t always.”
“No. But Giles never would’ve told you. He was too polite.”
She blinked. He might have been, at that. She realized, abruptly, that it didn’t pain her anymore to think of Giles and the life they might have led together. She’d loved him dearly, and it had been cruel and unfair that he had died so young. But he had been happy in his short time and had lived his life well. If he’d wanted her to spend the rest of her life in mourning for him, he wouldn’t have spent his dying hours arranging her second marriage.
Jack made a vaguely inquisitive noise, and she shook off her brief reverie. “We shall see,” she said at last. “But I don’t think I snore. It wouldn’t be ladylike.”
An Infamous Marriage Page 12