by Mary Balogh
She would look up at him eventually with her large gray eyes and sometimes a fleeting smile, and he would resume his reading, not wishing to embarrass or to make self-conscious the grace of her movements. If his parents had made a disaster of naming him, Grace’s parents could not have picked a more perfect name for her.
He was never sure how happy or unhappy she was. She went about her work with quiet energy and created beauty wherever she went. She had taken quiet control of his household and won the ungrudging respect of a housekeeper and servants who had gone largely their own way since his mother had left three years before to live with his aunt, her sister, in Scotland. And he had noticed that she was taking her rightful place among their associates as his wife. She was no longer the silent presence in company that she had always been when Paul was alive.
He was not sure, either, how she felt about sharing his bed each night. She never complained or showed any sign of distaste or reluctance, even when he awoke her in the middle of the night or in the early morning, as he very frequently did. He could not leave her alone. He had never consciously found her attractive when Paul was alive, even though he could look back now and remember that his eyes had rested on her often and found her pleasing to look at. She was not beautiful in any universally accepted sense. And yet he had found her so since his marriage to her.
He never tired of looking at her narrow, rather pale face, her dark hair, her slim, graceful figure. And he never tired of touching her with his hands and his mouth and his body. There was a woman’s maturity to her body that excited and aroused him to loving her over and over again. And she was not entirely indifferent, he thought at times. She never openly participated in their lovemaking, never by word or sound showed any emotion.
But her body betrayed some enjoyment. There was a tautness to her breasts, which he occasionally touched beneath her nightgown, a welcoming wetness when he came to her, a certain tightening of her inner muscles as he worked toward his unhurried climax, a tilting of her hips to allow his deeper penetration. And her arms always held him when he lay on her and in her.
He hoped he did not misread the signs. He would hate to discover that the nights of their marriage, which were becoming more and more magical to him, were something only to be endured for her. He knew that she did not love him, that he could never expect her to do so. She had done so much more living than he. Her eyes showed that she had lived and suffered and survived. And she had loved. He could not forget the look of agony on her face and the sounds of anguish in her voice as she had told him about her lover and her son. He could not fight against the past, against the dead. He had accepted both, had accepted her just as she was at the particular moment when he had found her, had decided that he would take just and only what she had to give.
But he did not want her to give out of reluctant duty. He wanted her life to be tranquil, secure, peaceful. She could never be happy again, perhaps. But he wanted to bring her contentment, as she was bringing it to him.
It was not at all clear to Peregrine why he demanded so little for himself from his marriage, when he was a young man who had always loved life and who had seen for several years past that it was possible to attract the interest of almost any female he cared to have. He might have married almost any beautiful young girl he wished to choose. He might have commanded her admiration and love. Yet he had chosen an aging woman of questionable beauty and charm, whose love had long ago been given elsewhere and from whom the most he could hope for was respect and affection.
However it was, Peregrine grew content, even if not wildly happy, during the first year of his marriage. Perhaps he did not realize fully the extent to which he loved his wife. But he did know that she mattered to him, that he cared for her, that seeing to her contentment gave meaning and shape to his days, that her presence in his life gave pleasure to his days and joy to his nights.
And Grace was content. She had a home on which to lavish her energies and her creative talents. And she had a husband whose almost constant presence in her company took away the long loneliness and emptiness of nine years, even though she had had Paul during those years. She was very conscious of the selfishness of her feelings. It was all very well for her at her age to feel contentment with the quiet routine of their life. Perry, she felt sometimes, should have more excitement and gaiety. And yet he seemed not to be unhappy. The laughter had not gone from him. It played about his eyes almost constantly when they were in company and when he worked with her in their garden. And even in repose, when he was reading or sleeping, his lips had a good-humored curve.
She knew that she was capable of giving him actual pleasure, and she consoled herself with the knowledge. She knew that he admired the orchard and the rose arbor and the flower gardens she was creating around his home. And she knew that he liked to watch her at her embroidery, though she tried not to lift her head to reveal that she knew herself being observed. And she knew that he liked the quiet efficiency with which she ran his household. And strange as it seemed to her, she knew that he enjoyed making love to her at night.
And so there was a measure of contentment in her life. She lived for each day as it came, knowing from past experience and from the strange nature of their marriage that good times could not be expected to last. Although at unguarded moments, particularly at night if she lay awake as he slept beside her, she knew that she loved him, she kept the knowledge from her full consciousness. It would be easier to bear the pain in the future if she never admitted to herself that he was more to her than a kind and fun-loving and lovable boy.
And there would be pain in the future. For both of them. He could not continue contented forever with the kind of life they had established during their first year together. He was still only six-and-twenty at the end of it. Sooner or later, however kind his nature and sincere his intentions, he must realize how much of life and happiness and pleasure was passing him by while he was tied to an aging wife.
The knowledge, the discontent, the eventual misery would be painful to him. For Perry was a good and honorable man. And it would be painful to her. But not unbearably so. Not unless she began to listen too closely to the whisperings of her treacherous heart. Not unless she lost the daily battle to keep herself at least partly dead. She loved Perry as one friend loves another, as a mother loves her child, as any human being must love someone full of goodness and kindness and laughter. Not as a woman loves the other half of her being. No, never that. The whisperings were very rarely allowed to reach her hearing.
SOON AFTER HER marriage, Grace wrote to her father, on the advice of her husband, to inform him of the death of his son and of her marriage. It was a difficult letter to write. She had had no communication with her father for nine years. Indeed, she did not know for sure that he still lived.
But he was still alive. He answered her after a month, in a brief, stiff letter that gave almost no indication of his feelings on either of the events she had announced. The only clue perhaps was in his request that she send to him any of Paul’s effects that still remained.
Peregrine took the box from her and undertook the painful task of sending away all that remained to her of her brother except for his books, which were in their library. Afterward he brought Paul’s vestments to her in her sitting room, where she sat with her embroidery, and laid them beside her on the chaise longue. And he bent and kissed her on the mouth, something he rarely did during the daytime.
“You must keep something of him, Grace, as I do,” he said. “And I know that you would not have chosen his most valuable possession, his watch. That and everything else have been sent on their way.”
And she wrapped her arms up around his neck—something she did very rarely—and looked earnestly into his eyes. “Thank you, Perry,” she said.
It was not until well into the autumn that another letter came, from her sister-in-law this time, Grace saw with a lift of her eyebrows. It was too bad that Paul had been stubborn and had consequently never seen his father again afte
r their quarrel, Ethel wrote. The same thing must not happen with Grace. She must come home while there was still time. The need for reconciliation was long overdue. She must come with her husband for Christmas.
It was a strange letter. Grace showed it to Peregrine at the breakfast table and read it again over his shoulder. Was she being invited now as an equal? Was she being offered forgiveness and therefore still being viewed as the lost sheep of the family? Was she being blamed for the fact that they had not seen Paul before his death? Did her father want her to go? Her brother? Was her father sick? And should they go?
Peregrine handed the letter back to her after reading it through twice, and looked searchingly into her eyes. “What do you want to do, Grace?” he asked. “That is all that matters. You cannot know their attitude toward you unless you go there, and you can always leave again if you find it intolerable, you know. Besides, I am invited too, and I would be there to protect you from insult. It will be as you wish, dear. Exactly as you wish.”
She sat staring at the letter for several silent moments. “I was a different person,” she said. “You would not know me if you could meet me as I was then, Perry. I think perhaps I deserved much of the treatment I received. I no longer blame them entirely, as I used to do. Perhaps it is time to forgive and forget.”
“You want to go, then?” he asked.
“But there was Jeremy,” she said. “He did not deserve any of it. And they would not welcome him back if he were still with me.”
He touched the back of her hand with his fingertips.
“But he is there,” she said. “I do not even know if anyone has tended his grave in nine years.”
She made no decision that morning before going to confer with the cook on the day’s menu. But her eyes were troubled, Peregrine saw, and she chose to go out walking alone when he sat down with a book after young Walter and Anna Carrington had called on them in the afternoon to invite them to an evening of charades the following evening.
“Tell me about your father and your brother, Grace,” Peregrine said to her that night before he made love to her, easing his arm beneath her head on the pillow and pulling the blankets warmly up around her. “And about your childhood.”
And she turned her cheek onto his arm and began to talk. She remembered her father as a tall and handsome man, strict even to the point of oppressiveness with his boys, generous and indulgent with her. She had loved him with all a child’s mindless and uncritical faculties. And he had never seen any fault in her, despite the repeated complaints of a string of governesses, despite the accusations of a jealous older brother. But he had turned on her when she had told him—in his office one morning, her feet planted firmly on the Turkish carpet before his desk, her head thrown defiantly back, her color high—that she was going to have a child.
He had raged and stormed and ultimately—since there was nothing he could do about the matter at that late date—turned cold and acted almost as if she did not exist. In the four years when Jeremy had lived in his home, she did not believe he had once looked directly at his grandson or ever spoken his name.
“I suppose now I can see there was some leftover feeling, some grudging sort of love, in the fact that he did not turn us out,” she said, “and in the fact that he never once questioned the bills for either my clothes or my son’s. Or for his toys and books. And I did not spare the expenses. I did not want my son to have any less than his two cousins had.”
And she told him about her older brother, Martin, with whom she had never enjoyed a close relationship, and about Ethel, his wife, who had resented her when she had first been brought to the house as Martin’s wife, and who had not failed to make the most of her sister-in-law’s disgrace afterward.
“But perhaps she had some reason to hate me,” Grace said. “I was a headstrong, arrogant girl who did not want to share the position of privileged female in my father’s home. You would not have liked me, Perry. I do not like myself in memory.”
He kissed her. “You are harsh on yourself,” he said. “I do not believe you can have changed so much. And I like you very well now.”
But it was difficult to imagine another Grace, he thought, and a family and a life that were wholly unknown to him. Difficult to know what ghosts haunted her, what might be accomplished by bringing them to life again, what harm might be done. He closed his arm around her and kissed her more deeply.
He drew her arm more closely against his side the next morning when they were out walking along the leaf-strewn lane that passed Reardon Park, their feet crunching on the dried leaves. “You are very quiet this morning,” he said. “No laments for the bare branches and the death of the leaves?”
“No,” she said. “Spring will come again. It always does. That is one lovely certainty of the seasons. And there is a certain beauty in bare branches, Perry. Look at the clouds scudding along behind them. We would not even be able to see them so clearly if all the leaves were still there.”
Peregrine laughed. “That is what I call making the most of a bad situation. What were you thinking about before I spoke, Grace? Your letter?”
She nodded.
“We will do what you wish, as I said yesterday,” he said. “But if you want my opinion, I would say that I think you need to go back. I think you need to see your father again, and your brother and your sister-in-law too. And their children who were growing up with your son. I think you need to come to terms with your past.”
“I believe you are right,” she said, reaching up with her free hand to grasp his arm through which her other one was linked. “I dread going, Perry. I don’t know how I can face the people or the memories. But I think I must. Not at Christmastime, though. Oh, not at Christmas, Perry. We are going to go caroling with the Carringtons and the Mortons. And the earl has invited everyone to Amberley for the evening. And I want us to celebrate Christmas Eve at the church here with our friends and to have our goose and our Yule log and mince pies at our own home here. And everything.”
“My mother and my aunt are going to London during the spring,” Peregrine said. “And I have been thinking to suggest to you, Grace, that we go for a few weeks too. I would like to show you the sights and take you to some of the theaters and assemblies and have you meet my mother again. And Edmund and the countess and the twins are always there too for the Season. Why do we not go to your father’s home in the early spring for a while and then move on to London? And we can be home in time to enjoy our summer garden.” He grinned. “Do you notice how I said ‘our’?”
“Yes,” she said. “We will do that, if you please, Perry. London? I have always wanted to see London.”
“Only for a few weeks, though,” he said. “I have never been very happy away from home for any great length of time. Now more than ever I find that I am content here. Are you, Grace?”
“Yes,” she said, gazing up through the bare branches above her head to the blue sky and the racing clouds, “I am content.”
IT WAS WITH considerable misgiving that Grace leaned forward for her last glimpse of Reardon Park through the carriage window at the end of the following February. She had not been away from it for one night or even one full day since Perry had brought her there on their wedding day. They would miss the coming of spring there, though they had discovered a small clump of snowdrops and three separate crocuses in the grass among the trees just the day before.
Perry was holding her hand suddenly, she found, at the same moment as she realized that she could no longer see the house. He was smiling his usual cheerful, comforting smile when she turned to him.
“It will still be there when we come back,” he said. “And much as I love my home when I am living there, Grace, I find that I love it even more when I am returning to it after an absence.”
“Yes,” she said, returning his smile and settling her shoulders back against the squabs. She was glad that he did not relinquish his hold of her hand, though he did lean over her to tuck the fur-lined rug more snugly around her
legs.
Yes, Reardon Park would doubtless still be there when they returned. But would they be the same? Would everything be spoiled by the time they came back? Was this the end of their contentment, here and right now?
They were journeying back into her past. She did not know what her reception would be at home, what her relationship with her relatives. And she did not know how strong or painful the memories of Gareth and Jeremy would be when she was once more in the places where it had all happened a lifetime ago. She wanted to see her father. She wanted to see Martin. And she wanted to be close to Jeremy again. But she could not picture Perry in such a setting. Perry was everything in her present and perhaps a little of her future. She did not want him mixed up with her past. And yet she could not even contemplate going back there without him. She might become trapped there. She might never be free.
She had made no mention in her letter to her father or in the two letters she had written to Ethel of the age of her husband. She felt something of the old stubborn defiance when she thought of the look that might well be on all of their faces when they saw and looked at him. She would not care what they thought. They might look and think and say what they pleased. She did not care.
Ah, but she cared every bit as deeply as she ever had. They would think that she had made a selfish grab for Perry. And they would think he had pitied her. They would not know that there was a contentment, a certain tenderness in their marriage. And they would have her doubting again. They would revive the feelings of guilt and inadequacy that she had ignored for almost a year.
And then they were to go to London, and she must face the same ordeal when they met Perry’s mother. What would she think when she met her daughter-in-law? They had met, of course, when Grace had been Paul’s housekeeper. And what would others think, all the members of the beau monde to whom she would be presented? And what would it be like for Perry to be surrounded by people—women—younger and more vibrant and more lovely than she?