by Mary Balogh
“Yes.” Her temper was up and, unwise at it was with him standing so close, she spun to face him. “I have disliked and despised you for many years, my lord. And if hatred became muted over the years, it has flared back into existence during the past four months. The thought of being in any way dependent upon you is abhorrent to me. The thought of doing anything merely because you have said I must is—is . . .”
“Abhorrent to you?” he suggested, his eyebrows raised. “Has your eloquence deserted you, Moira? A pity. You were doing remarkably well. And so your stubbornness and your childishness have put us both into a deeply embarrassing predicament. The truth cannot be hidden now, you know.”
She laughed rather harshly.
“And so our child will always have the stigma of near-illegitimacy hanging over his head,” he said.
“Complete illegitimacy,” she said, knowing how foolish she was to give in even now to the temptation to defy him. “He or she will be illegitimate. I do not care. I—”
“Stop being childish,” he said so coldly that she was left standing with her mouth open for a moment. “We will be married tomorrow morning.”
“Never,” she said, knowing it was an argument she could not—and really did not want to—win. Rationality always seemed to desert her when she was confronted with Kenneth. All she could feel was a consuming hatred. “The banns—”
“I have brought a special license with me, of course,” he said. “We will marry tomorrow. You will reconcile your mind to it, Moira. Somehow you will learn to control your abhorrence of me. It will not be insurmountably difficult, perhaps. I cannot imagine that I will wish to be much in your company. And you will learn to be obedient to me. That will not be as dreadful as it doubtless sounds. I will be sure to remember that you are my wife and not one of the men of my regiment. I suggest we return to your mother. Does she know?”
“No,” she said. “And not tomorrow. It is too soon. I need time.”
“Time,” he said coldly, “is something you do not have, Moira. You have already allowed far too much of it to pass. You will be the Countess of Haverford by this time tomorrow. You will be living at Dunbarton. I suggest that you inform your maid so that she may—”
But she heard no more. Ice came knifing through her nostrils and a high-pitched bell shrieked in her ears and the carpet beneath her feet came rushing at her face.
“Just keep your head down,” a voice was saying to her from some distance away, a voice that was quietly assured, a voice she instinctively trusted, “and allow the blood to flow back into it. Breathe deeply.” A firm, reassuring hand was against the back of her head. She was sitting down. The bell that had been ringing without ceasing was growing fainter, to be replaced by a slight fuzziness. Her cold, clammy hands were finding comfort in one large warm one.
Consciousness was returning. She had fainted. She was in the book room—with the Earl of Haverford. She breathed deeply and evenly and kept her head down almost on her knees and her eyes closed.
* * *
HE was down on one knee in front of the chair on which he had placed her, his one hand pressing her head downward, his other holding both of hers, trying to warm them. He was filled with alarm and shame. He had quelled his first instinct, which had been to pull the door open and call for Lady Hayes. Lady Hayes did not know, Moira had just said. There were perhaps less alarming ways for her to find out.
“Are you going to be all right?” he asked. “Shall I send for your mother?”
“No,” she said faintly. He understood that it was his second question she answered.
He had noticed from his first sight of her how ill she looked. She had looked thin, even slightly stooped. Her hair beneath her cap had lost its luster. Her face had been more than pale—it had been tinged with gray. Even her lips had been quite bloodless. She had looked haggard, unlovely, older than her years. Worse even than she had looked at the Trevellases’.
Somehow, the sight of her thus had only inflamed the fury that had driven him homeward with scarcely a stop for either food or rest. She had looked the epitome of the suffering woman abandoned by her man. He had felt little short of murderous. How dared she do this to him.
She was ill. Perhaps she had brought it on herself by harboring secrets unnecessarily, by stubbornly refusing to send for him so that he might release her from at least one major burden. But she was unmistakably ill. It had not been the time to rip up at her. She must be badly in need of a shoulder to lean upon, though he knew that in a thousand years she would not admit it.
She was ill. She was bearing his child, and she was ill.
He took his hand from her head and chafed her hands with both of his. “You looked unwell at the assembly,” he said. “You looked unwell when we met in the valley. You looked downright ill at Mr. Trevellas’s. You looked ill when I arrived this afternoon, before we came in here to talk. Have you been constantly ill?”
“It comes with the condition, I believe,” she said.
“I think not.” He touched the back of one hand to her cheek. It was still unnaturally cool. “I will have the physician—Ryder, is it?—examine you at Dunbarton the day after tomorrow. He had a reputable practice in London before coming here, I believe. If we have no proper satisfaction from him, I will take you to London and have you see a physician there. This will not do, Moira. You should have sought help sooner.” Don’t scold her, he told himself.
“I do not need help.” She lifted her head, though she directed her eyes at their hands rather than at his face. “I am having a child. It is something I have to do alone.”
“Without the help of your mother or of a physician or of your child’s father,” he said, struggling against a return of anger. “Independence of spirit is to be commended, even in a woman. Stubbornness of will is not. Tomorrow you will be giving up much of your independence. You would do well to reconcile yourself to giving up your stubbornness too, if you hope for any compatibility in our marriage.”
“I have no choice about marrying you, Kenneth,” she said, raising her eyes to his at last. “Of course I do not. But be very clear on one point. I will marry you because I must. I do not expect to find that we are or can become compatible. I shall make no effort to fit my ways to yours. I despise you and your ways.”
He fought anger and was surprised by the realization that he felt as much hurt as angry. They had a mutual problem, one that could be solved in only one way. Did she hate him so much that she would court lifelong unhappiness for herself rather than try to make the best of a bad situation?
“You do not know either me or my ways, Moira,” he said. “We had a dozen or so encounters when we were very young. We had no dealings at all for longer than eight years. We were not even living in the same country. In the four months since my return, we have had a few brief encounters and the unfortunately more lengthy one in the hermit’s hut. We do not know each other at all. Yet tomorrow we will become man and wife. Can we not agree to make tomorrow a start of something wholly new? Can we not make an effort at least to tolerate and respect each other?”
She seemed to be considering the question. “No,” she said finally. “I cannot so easily forget the past.”
He released her hands and got to his feet. “Perhaps you are more honest than I am,” he said. “I cannot so easily forget, either, that you stood in the hollow on the cliff top one night and held a pistol pointed at my heart and told me to go off home and mind my own business when you had kissed me in that same hollow just the day before and smiled when I told you I loved you.”
“I should have laughed rather than smiled,” she said, “at hearing such a lie.”
He strode over to the door and pulled it open. But there was no one in the hallway. He strode across it and tapped on the door of the sitting room where he had been received earlier. Lady Hayes’s voice bade him enter.
“If you would be so good as to st
ep across to the book room, ma’am,” he said with a bow.
She looked as surprised now as she had earlier, but she came without further prompting and preceded him back across the hall.
“Moira?” she said, hurrying inside. “What is the matter? Have you taken another turn? She has been in poor health for most of the winter, my lord,” she explained, turning her head toward where he stood just inside the door, his hands clasped at his back. “I do hope—”
“Miss Hayes has just consented to marry me tomorrow morning, ma’am,” he said.
She looked at him in blank amazement.
“I am more than three months with child, Mama,” Moira said, looking into her mother’s widening eyes. “I did not spend the night of the Christmas ball at Dunbarton Hall. I foolishly tried to walk home through the storm. Lord Haverford came after me and found me taking shelter in the baptistry. We were forced to spend the rest of the night together there.”
Lady Hayes was fortunately close to a chair. She sat hurriedly down on it. She looked at Kenneth and her lips thinned.
“Lord Haverford offered me marriage the very next morning,” Moira said quickly. It was not strictly true, of course. She had not allowed him to make the offer. “He offered several times after that. He even tried to insist. I would not have him. I wrote to him the same morning I wrote to Sir Edwin. But I found when I took the letter to Dunbarton that he had left for Kent a few hours before. He came as soon as it had been sent on to him. None of this is his fault.”
He half smiled. Moira was defending him?
“I should, ma’am,” he said, “have spoken to you when I escorted Miss Hayes home that morning. I should have written to Sir Edwin Baillie myself that same morning. A great deal of anguish would have been avoided if I had not made grave errors of judgment. I blame myself. But there is little to be gained now from castigating myself for past actions or inaction. I am in possession of a special license and Miss Hayes and I will be married tomorrow. The day after, I will see to it that she is properly attended by a physician.”
Lady Hayes had both hands to her cheeks. “I can only be thankful, my lord,” she said, “that neither your father nor my husband lived to see this day.” She turned her head to look at her daughter. “Moira, why did you not tell me? Oh, why did you not tell me?”
“I suppose,” Moira said, “I thought that if only I did not speak of it or even think of it, the whole nasty nightmare would go away. It seems I have been nothing but foolish since Christmas.” She looked at Kenneth. “It will never go away, of course. It is with me for a lifetime.”
He strode in the direction of the bellpull. “With your permission, ma’am,” he said, “I will summon your maid. I believe both you and Moira would be better for a cup of tea.”
“Moira?” Lady Hayes said, and frowned.
She had not failed to notice the familiarity with which he had referred to her daughter. Well, it did not matter now. Miss Moira Hayes would be his wife within one day. Tomorrow she would be Moira Woodfall, Countess of Haverford—for whom the nightmare of the present was to last a lifetime.
He jerked grimly on the bell rope.
* * *
THE church in Tawmouth was almost empty when the Earl of Haverford married Miss Moira Hayes. Apart from the two principals and the Reverend Finley-Evans, the only people in attendance were Lady Hayes, Mrs. Finley-Evans, a hastily summoned Harriet Lincoln with Mr. Lincoln, and his lordship’s steward.
It was nothing like the wedding she had dreamed of in the long-ago days of her youth, Moira thought. Nothing like it in more ways than the absence of guests. There was no groom to be gazed at adoringly. Only Kenneth. He looked knee-weakeningly handsome, of course, dressed as immaculately as if he were on his way to court to make his bow to the king—or to the prince regent. He was wearing shades of pale blue and white, which looked quite glorious with his blond hair. He looked like the prince of fairy tales. Although she wore a favorite white gown she had almost chosen to wear to the Dunbarton ball at Christmas, she knew she was not by any means in good looks. His own handsome appearance served only to make her feel uglier.
And she felt so very ill that for a few minutes after she had got out of bed in the morning she had considered sending a message to inform him that she must postpone the wedding. It had not been possible, of course. As he had pointed out and as she had realized for herself, she had allowed far too much time to pass as it was. But she felt ill in almost every possible way: Her head ached; she felt faint and nauseated; she was cold and lethargic. And she hated her symptoms, her self-pity. She wanted to break loose and run and run and run. She wanted an impossibility. Perhaps, she thought with grim humor, she was indulging a death wish.
It was not the wedding any woman would have dreamed of. And yet it was startlingly real. It was not, after all, just a nasty necessity that had to be lived through in order that decency be restored to her life. It was a wedding. It was something that was joining her fate to Kenneth’s for the rest of their lives. Perhaps because the ceremony was a physical ordeal for her, it also took on a stark reality. She listened to every word the Reverend Finley-Evans spoke and every word seemed something new, as if she had never heard the wedding service before. She listened to Kenneth’s voice, low and pleasant and very masculine, and heard the words he spoke. He told her he worshiped her with his body. She listened to her own voice and what it said. She promised to love him and to obey him. She felt the shining gold ring surprisingly warm against her finger. She watched him ease it over her knuckle and slide it into place. She heard a hastily suppressed sob behind her: Mama? Harriet? She felt his kiss, warm, firm, his lips ever so slightly parted, his breath warm on her cheek.
Kenneth. She looked into his eyes as he lifted his head. They looked steadily back but told her nothing. They were absent of all expression. Kenneth. I loved you so very much. You were every dream I ever dreamed. You were every breath I breathed.
“Please,” he murmured, leaning closer as the Reverend Finley-Evans began to speak again, “stop yourself from crying. Don’t do this to me.”
He had misunderstood. He thought that her tears were ones of revulsion. They were tears of regret for youthful dreams and ideals. Once, she had believed in heroes and in perfection and in romantic love—all of them embodied in Kenneth. When she had woken up to reality, everything had come crashing down. If she had not loved him, she thought now, perhaps she would never have hated him either.
But she could not imagine reacting to Kenneth without passion of some sort. She could never be simply indifferent to him—unfortunately.
Her mother hugged her and kissed her; Harriet and Mrs. Finley-Evans, both looking puzzled and curious, kissed her cheek; the Reverend Finley-Evans, Mr. Lincoln, and Dunbarton’s Mr. Watkins bowed to her and kissed her hand. And suddenly and strangely, anticlimactically, it was all over. She was leaving the church on her husband’s arm, and he was handing her into his carriage. Everyone else was to come to Dunbarton for breakfast in two other carriages.
It felt even more real when they were alone together, sitting side by side, not quite touching, looking out of opposite windows of the carriage.
“If you are feeling too ill to sit through breakfast,” he said as his carriage labored up the steep hill beyond the village, “you must retire to your rooms. If you feel able to sit with our guests, I would be grateful if you would force a smile or two.”
“Yes,” she said, “I will smile.”
“At the very least,” he said, “try not to weep.”
“I shall smile,” she said. “It is your first command to me, my lord, and I will obey it.”
“Sarcasm is unnecessary,” he said.
She laughed softly and blinked her eyes determinedly, her head turned away from him. He would never again see her tears. He would never again see her vulnerable.
Kenneth. She felt a fiercely nostalgic longing for the man sh
e had loved—just as if he were not the same man as the one who sat beside her now, his shoulder almost touching her own. Her husband. Father of the child she carried inside her.
15
THE drawing room was too large for two people, Kenneth decided. In future they would have to find some other, smaller room in which to spend their evenings except when they were entertaining. The coved and painted and gilded ceiling, the massive doorframes, the marble fireplace, and the huge, framed paintings all succeeded in dwarfing his wife as she sat near the fire, her head bent to her embroidery.
His wife! Only now, on the evening of his wedding day, with their guests gone, did he have the leisure to comprehend the reality of the past week—not even a week. Despite his earlier resolve to make Dunbarton his home, he had been intending after all to stay in London to enjoy the Season with Nat and Eden. He had been quite prepared to participate to the full in all the frivolities and excesses and debaucheries that town had to offer.
Being at Dunbarton, near Penwith, near her, had become insupportable to him. He had hated her and loved her. He had resented her and wanted her. He had despised her and admired her. At the time, perhaps, he had not recognized the duality of his feelings. But he had felt his helplessness. She had rejected him. He now knew that she had even gone to the lengths of lying to him in order to be rid of him.
She looked up from her embroidery and met his eyes across the room. Her hand, holding the needle and silken thread, remained poised above her work. Pale and out of looks as she was, there was still a natural grace about her. But she was thin. Her cheeks were hollow. The evening dress into which she had changed for dinner hung loosely on her. After more than three months, should not the opposite be happening?
They had looked at each other long enough in silence. “You are tired,” he said. “Shall I escort you to your room?”