by Mary Balogh
“And will Charity be like my mama?” she asked.
He closed his eyes. Ah. How did one cocoon a child against what would seem like cruelty? How could she ever understand?
“Do you want her as a mama?” he asked.
“Jane and Louisa and Martin have Marianne,” she said, “and Anthony and Harry have Claudia. Now I have someone too. She is all my own.”
“She will keep you safe,” he said, kissing her forehead. “She loves you.”
“Yes, I know,” she said. “She told me. His grace loved me too. He never said so, but Charity says that some people cannot say it or even show it, though that does not mean they do not feel it. He always looked after me and he brought you home to look after me and be like a papa to me after he was gone. I could see this morning that he loved me. He wanted me to kiss him. His face was cold.”
“He loved you, dear,” he said. “You were his own little girl. And now you are mine.”
He wondered how much time his father had spent with her, this child who had killed his wife. Not much, he guessed. She envied Will’s children because they had a papa. But she would not remember their father with bitterness. Charity had seen to that.
It was a brief encounter. There were people and details to occupy every moment of his time until well after dinner. He wondered vaguely during the meal how it was that everyone except Augusta and his wife had been able to lay hands on black clothes so easily. They were all in deep mourning. Charity wore one of her brown dresses and looked endearingly shabby and pretty. Claudia’s modiste, he heard as part of the dinner conversation, was busy making his wife a black dress to wear tomorrow.
He sat at the head of the table and looked about him. Oh, yes, a week had wrought enormous changes. It amazed him now that he had imagined—only a few days before—that he could return here and be untouched by it all. A part of him had known. Something deep within had known that he needed to bring Charity with him if he was to stand even a chance of retaining his own identity. But what he had not understood—or what he had not admitted—was what that identity was. He had not known who he was. He knew now. He was Anthony Earheart, an inextricable part of this family. He always had been, even during the eight years of his self-imposed exile.
He had never been free of them. Yet strangely, now, on the day when all freedom, all choices had been taken from him beyond recall, he felt freer than he had ever felt in his life. And it was not, he reflected, because his father was gone and could no longer exercise power over him. It was quite the opposite. It was because he had now become both himself and his father’s son. His father, he realized, as he had realized this morning, had set him free to live with both those identities. His father had given him love at the last and had set him free.
Your duchess will be a good mother and a good wife. You have made a fortunate choice. There will be mutual love in your marriage.
He gazed down the table to his wife, his duchess, who was speaking kindly to a teary-eyed Countess of Tillden. Yes. Oh, yes. But she would have to be wooed, not commanded. If he loved her—and he did—then he must set her free, as he had agreed to do. And he must hope that she would freely choose to remain with him, to be his wife, to bear his children, to share a mutual love with him for the rest of their days.
He was not without hope. She possessed more warmth, more charm, more love than anyone else he had known—how first impressions could deceive! He could still feel the warmth of her hands framing his face and the look of deep sorrow—for him—in her eyes and the soft kiss she had placed on his lips. No, he was not without hope. But he had lost some of his arrogant self-assurance in the past few days, among other things. He was by no means certain of her. There was anxiety to temper the hope.
Finally, well after dinner, he was free. He had been sitting with his father, who had been laid out in his bed and looked as if he slept peacefully. But Will had come and clasped his shoulder firmly and warmly and told him he would keep watch for a while.
“Go and relax, Tony,” he said. “You look as if you are ready to collapse.”
The duke nodded and got to his feet—and impulsively hugged his brother, who returned the embrace.
Augusta was in bed, he was told, closely watched over by her nurse. But Charity was not in the drawing room with everyone else. She had gone outside for a walk, he was informed.
“She did not want company,” Charles said, “though I offered to go with her, Tony. She looked exhausted. She has been very good to Augusta all day.”
“But she will want your company,” Claudia said with a smile. “She has been watching you anxiously all day long. And you look as tired as she. I believe she said she was going to wander down by the lake.”
“Yes, she did,” Marianne said. “And she has indeed been very good to Augusta, Tony. Her experience as a governess must have helped her, of course.”
Marianne had thawed, he thought as he left the house. But she had been unable to resist that final little jibe.
He found his wife down by the lake. It was an evening very similar to the last, though she wore a shawl about her shoulders. She was sitting on the bank, gazing out across the moonlit water. He sat beside her after she had looked up and recognized him, and took one of her hands in his.
“Tired?” he asked.
“A little.” Despite the peaceful picture she had presented, sitting there on the bank, she was not relaxed.
“This is all too much for you,” he said. “I am sorry. It was not part of our bargain, was it?”
But she only stiffened further. “It was all my fault,” she said, her voice flat.
“What?” He dipped his head so that he could look into her face.
“I killed him,” she said. “Have you not realized that? With my crusading zeal, as you put it. I forced him to the library last night. I forced him to that scene of bitterness and futility. It was none of my business. As you just said, we have a bargain. I am not really your wife. This is not really my family. But I interfered anyway. I put him under that stress. And a few hours later he was dead.”
Oh, God! “No.” He squeezed her hand very tightly. “No, Charity. No. You are in no way responsible for his death. I was summoned here because he was dying. His physician told me two days ago that he could go at any time. He had a perilously bad heart. It failed him early this morning. He died. His death had nothing whatsoever to do with you.”
“He had been told to rest,” she said.
“Advice he constantly ignored,” he reminded her. “He knew he was dying, Charity. That is why he swallowed his pride and called me home. But he would not die in weakness. He wanted to die as he had lived, and his wish was granted. You did not precipitate his death. But you did do something very wonderful.”
“I killed him,” she said.
“I told him I loved him,” he said, “that I always had. And of course I spoke the truth, though even I had not fully understood that until you forced me to face it. He spoke to me. He did not tell me that he loved me—not in so many words. But he called me his son, his favorite son. And he set his hand on my head, Charity. It may seem a slight thing, but I cannot describe what it meant to me, feeling his hand there. He tried to stroke my head but he was too weak. He might have shouted out that he loved me and it would not have had the effect on me that the touch of his hand had. He touched me because you had made him admit something to himself. He was so very nearly too late—we both were—but he was not. Because you forced that confrontation last evening. You did it only just in time.”
She gazed out across the water and said nothing. But he could feel from the touch of her hand that some of the tension had gone.
“He was right, you know,” he said after a few minutes of silence. “I loved my mother and resented her. I felt forced to love her. She leaned heavily on me—even when I was just a young lad. I was only twenty when she died. She was very unhappy. She told me about the man she had loved and wished to marry. She told me how she was forced to marry my father. S
he even told me how he forced his attentions on her whenever she was not increasing. She used to cry to me and tell me that soon she would be increasing again because he was coming to her room each night.”
He paused. He felt disloyal saying this aloud, even thinking it. But perhaps he owed his father something too. “He was right,” he said. “She ought not to have burdened her own child with her unhappiness. She ought not to have spoken of the intimacies of her marriage with her son. Her confidences, the necessity of comforting her, of hating him, were a heavy burden to me. I did not even realize it until last night.”
“Your mother demanded too much of your love,” his wife said, “and your father demanded too little. Unfortunately, we find it difficult to see our parents as people. We expect perfection of them. He did love her. That was very clear last evening.”
“Perhaps she was as much at fault as he in their marriage,” he said. “Perhaps even more so. She punished him all her married life for having been forced into an arranged marriage. She made no effort to make a workable match of it. Do you think that is what she did?”
“Be careful not to allow your feelings to swing to the opposite extreme,” she said. “She was unhappy, Anthony. And despite what she told you, you cannot know what happened in the privacy of your parents’ marriage. No one can know except the two of them, and they are both gone.”
“I believe,” he said, “she might have kept us from him. He was reserved and he was stern and—he said it last evening—he would never retaliate by saying anything against her. He never did, you know. She taught us to fear him and hate him, to think of him as a man cold to the heart.”
“Anthony,” she said, “you loved her. Remember that you loved her. She had a hard life. All those children, all those losses.”
“I wonder,” he said, “if you have ever taken anything from life. Have you always been a giver? You have given my family extraordinary gifts.”
But she pulled her hand from his and jumped to her feet. She brushed the grass from her skirt. “Of course I am a taker,” she said. “I am going to take a home and a carriage and servants and six thousand pounds a year from you for the rest of my life—for doing nothing but enjoying myself and basking in an unexpected security. I can scarcely wait.”
He got to his feet too. “You are my wife,” he said. “You will be kept in comfort for the rest of your life by virtue of that fact. That is not taking. It is the nature of marriage.”
She was tense again and quite noticeably weary. It was no time to woo her in the way he planned to woo her once these difficult days were past, once the funeral was over.
“You are tired,” he said, “and so am I. Let me take you to bed.”
“With you?” she said. “Like last night?”
“Yes,” he said, “if you wish. Or to make love first if you wish. It would not be disrespectful to my father. Life always needs to be reaffirmed in the face of death.”
“You have a comfortable shoulder,” she said, half smiling, “and safe arms. I slept so peacefully last night. You did too. Just for tonight again, then, if you will.”
“Come.” He set an arm about her waist and she relaxed readily against him as they made their way back to the house.
But after all, when they were in bed together, they made love by unspoken assent before they slept—he had never experienced silent communication with any other woman, but with her it seemed unerring. They loved slowly, warmly, deeply. She sighed into relaxation when she was finished, and he pressed himself deep and for the first time in his life quite consciously let his seed flow into the woman with whom he mated.
HE HAD RELIEVED what was undoubtedly her chief anxiety. It had seemed to her as clear as the nose on her face that she had killed her father-in-law. But of course she had not. Her husband had quite put her mind at rest on that issue.
The other anxiety gnawed at her less urgently. But it was not one she could share and not one she could talk herself out of. Quite the contrary. Her sense of guilt grew by the hour, it seemed, and there were constant reminders.
I thought you were a fortune hunter.
That had started it. She was a fortune hunter. She had committed a dreadful sin—oh, more than one. They multiplied with alarming speed. She had made a mockery of one of the most sacred institutions of civilization. She had married and had repeated all the marriage vows, knowing very well that she had no intention whatsoever of keeping most of them. She had done it all for money. Oh, she could try to rationalize what she had done by telling herself that she had done it for Phil and Penny and the children. But when it came to calling a spade simply a spade, then she must admit that she had done it for money.
And so the one great sin had led her into a whole series of deceptions. Her father-in-law had guessed much of the truth, but he had not realized that the marriage was only a temporary one. He had probably died in the belief that soon there would be a new heir to the dukedom. Perhaps too he had died in the comfort of the belief that Augusta would have both a mother figure and a father figure to watch over her as she grew to womanhood.
She hated to think of the deception she had perpetrated against Augusta. Augusta, she realized within a day of the old duke’s death, loved her. It had happened suddenly but quite, quite thoroughly. Augusta was unwilling to leave her side. She would do so only to spend a little time with Anthony. Irreparable harm might come to Augusta when the truth came out.
And then there was Charles, who treated her with the easy affection of a brother, and Claudia and William, who were almost as affectionate. Even Marianne had begun to treat her with civility. Marianne’s children and Claudia’s always brightened considerably whenever she came in sight.
She felt a total fraud. She was a fraud. And all the servants called her your grace and treated her with marked respect, and all the neighbors who called on them with condolences addressed her by her title and looked upon her with almost awed respect.
She was a fraud.
She was a fortune hunter.
And since she was in the business of calling spades spades, then she might as well simply admit that she was a sinner.
There was only one thing she could do. The realization came to her gradually in the days leading up to the funeral, but finally it was firm in her mind. There was only one thing. It would not right all the wrongs—she thought in particular of Augusta. But it would show her sorrow for what she had done. It was the only honorable thing to do, the only thing that might in time give her a quiet conscience.
And so late on the afternoon of the funeral itself, when many of the guests had left and the few remaining ones sat in the drawing room, while Augusta slept in the nursery after the emotions of the morning, while the duke was riding with Charles for some relaxation, Charity walked down the driveway to the village, a small valise in her hand. There was a stagecoach leaving from the inn—she had checked the time.
She was going home—alone. She had left behind a note for her husband, but she had not named her destination. If she had, he would have sent her money—six thousand pounds a year. If she had, he would have sent his man of business to make sure that she had a suitable home and all the trappings that had been mentioned in the agreement. He would have insisted on paying for everything. And perhaps she would have found it impossible to resist. Perhaps she would have been tempted not to resist as much as she was able.
She had married and performed all the duties of her marriage while it lasted. Perhaps in time she would be able to forgive herself for marrying in the full knowledge that she would be called upon to fulfill those duties for only a short while. But she would never be able to forgive herself or live with herself if she accepted payment for what she had done.
Marriage was not employment.
Marriage was involvement and caring and loving. Marriage was—commitment.
She had thought him wrong when he had said she was a giver and not a taker. But perhaps after all he was right. She could not become a taker. She would lose her own
soul.
Perhaps in time she would be able to forgive herself.
17
IT SEEMED INCREDIBLE TO THE DUKE OF WITHINGSBY when he thought about it later that his wife had left him during the afternoon of his father’s funeral, yet he did not discover it until the following morning.
He returned from a long ride and a lengthy talk with Charles, feeling somewhat refreshed. But he understood that it had been a stressful few days for all his family. Charity had retired to her rooms for a rest, he was told. He hoped she would sleep and feel the better for it. He was busy with the remaining guests for the rest of the day. He did not call at his wife’s dressing room to escort her down to dinner. When she had not appeared in the drawing room by the time dinner was announced, he sent a servant to inquire. Her maid had been told, he was informed, that her grace would not need her for the rest of the day, that she did not wish to be disturbed.
He did not disturb her. He made her excuses to his guests. She had given tirelessly of herself ever since her arrival at Enfield. They had all made demands on her energies, most notably Augusta and himself. She must be exhausted. He did not go up to check on her himself—he was afraid of disturbing her rest. And for the same reason he did not disturb her when he went to bed, though he did let himself quietly into her dressing room and noted that there was no light beneath the door of her bedchamber.
It was only when he went for a rather late breakfast the following morning, after attending to some other business first, and discovered that she had not yet been down that he went to investigate. And then, of course, he discovered the letter she had left on her pillow. Not that it was on her pillow when he first saw it. Her maid was coming from her rooms with it in her hand, a look of fright in her eyes. She curtsied and handed it to him after telling him where she had found it, and obeyed his nod of dismissal with alacrity.
“Your grace,” his wife had written, “I will be leaving on the stagecoach from the village inn this afternoon. I hope you do not discover this soon enough to come after me. I know you will wish to because we signed an agreement and being an honorable gentleman, you will wish to honor it. But please do not come. And please do not try to find me. I release you from your part of our agreement. I do not wish to receive payment for what I have done. It would be distasteful and distressful to me.”