The Arrangement: Number 2 in series (Survivors' Club)

by Mary Balogh

  His eyes snapped open and he turned his head her way. “I am married to you.”

  “Yes,” she agreed. “But if we are living apart from each other—”

  “I am married to you,” he said again, feeling his temper rise.

  But what would he do if she left? After one year. After five. After ten. Good Lord, he would be only thirty-four even then.

  “Will you take a lover?” He had reached the point of fury, he realized.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I am married to you,” she said, her voice low and flat.

  “Would you want to?” he asked.

  “No. Would you?”

  “I do not know,” he said brutally. “Perhaps so. Perhaps not.”

  The ensuing silence bristled with tension.

  Perhaps he would need to employ mistresses. He was no monk, after all. But the thought only infuriated him more.

  A stormy silence ensued.

  “Was that our first quarrel?” she asked softly.

  “Yes, dash it all, it was,” he said.

  He felt her hand creep into his, and he laughed ruefully.

  “We will be home soon,” he said a short while later, “and you will no longer feel that our marriage is all give on my part and all take on yours. I am going to need you. In personal development I have made progress I can be proud of, but I have not done as well in my role as master of Middlebury Park. I have allowed others to look after me and to rule my world for me, and changing that will not be easy, because those others either love me or feel the benevolent wish to make my life easier. But changing the way things are will be done. I am determined on that. I will need your help, though.”

  “To take over from those others?”

  “No,” he said. “I do not intend to transfer dependence upon my mother and my steward to dependence upon you. I merely want you to help me reach that point at which I will not need—”

  “Even me?” she asked when he stopped abruptly, having realized that those final words would probably sound insulting, though that was not what he had intended.

  “I just do not want to be dependent upon you, Sophie,” he said. “Or upon anyone else.”

  “And yet,” she said, “I am totally dependent upon you. Without you, I would be starving in the streets of London now.”

  “It is the nature of marriage, Sophie,” he said with a sigh. “A wife is always dependent upon her husband for the material things in life. And he is dependent upon her for other things, some of them tangible, most not. But I hate that word dependence. It should be struck from the English language. I prefer to think of marriage as an equality of give and take.”

  They lapsed into silence again.

  Her shoulder touched his after a while and he could hear from her breathing that she was almost asleep. He turned, wrapped one arm about her shoulders, and slid the other beneath her knees. He lifted her across his lap and braced his feet against the seat opposite.

  She sighed again and nestled her head on his shoulder, and he dipped his head and kissed her. She kissed him back with warm, languid mouth—mouth, not just lips. And he would refuse to believe, even if someone with perfect vision told him so, that she did not have the loveliest woman’s mouth ever created. He was not aroused, nor did he want to be. Not here. But his mouth lingered on hers, and his tongue lazily explored her lips and the smooth flesh behind them. Her free hand was on his shoulder and then behind his neck.

  “I have never done anything with my life,” she said. “I have merely endured and observed and dreamed—and laughed at the foolishness I see around me. I have always lived on the outer fringes. Now I am to be mistress of Middlebury Park. No, not to be. I am.”

  “Frightened?” he asked.

  He felt her nodding against his shoulder. It would be strange if she was not.

  She yawned and he tucked her head beneath his chin and settled her more comfortably on his lap. He closed his eyes and drifted toward sleep.

  It was not even a major rut in the road. They had jarred through far worse in the past day and a half. But it happened just when he was hovering between wakefulness and sleep, and he jolted awake, completely disoriented, and opened his eyes to see what was the matter.

  And was assaulted with a massive dose of panic.

  He could not see.

  He could not breathe.

  He could not see.

  “What is the matter?” a voice was whispering in his ear.

  Could she not speak louder? Louder? LOUDER!

  He thrust her from him and leaned forward until he could paw at the front panel behind the seat. He felt sideways until he found the window and then the leather strap hanging beside him. He grasped it and clung to it and gasped for air. There was not enough air.

  There was not enough air.

  “Vincent? What is the matter?” She sounded alarmed. Horribly alarmed.

  Could she not speak up?

  She touched his arm, and he flung her hand away. He clawed at the seat opposite, clung to the edge of it, bowed his head over it.

  There was no air.

  He could not see.

  “Vincent? Oh, dear God, Vincent? Shall I stop the carriage and call Mr. Fisk?”

  Martin would set one arm across his chest and beneath his chin and pat his back firmly with the other hand. And he would tell him bluntly and calmly that he was blind. That was all. He was blind.

  There was a certain magic in Martin’s treatment. He might even go so far as to tell Vincent that he was being a silly clod. All that was the matter was that he was blind.

  But it was humiliating, after all this time, still to have to have Martin to calm him down.

  “No,” he gasped. “No.”

  And he found his breath and concentrated his whole attention upon it lest he misplace it again. He could hear the air rasping in through his nose, shuddering out through his mouth.

  In. Out.

  “I am sorry,” he said.

  He felt the tentative touch of her hand on his back. When he did not shrug it away, she moved it in light, soothing circles. She did not speak—or make any move to stop the carriage.

  In. Out.

  There was plenty of air. Of course there was.

  The reason he had not heard her voice clearly was that she had spoken softly, even whispered the first time, and the horses and the carriage wheels were making enough racket to drown her out. But he had heard the racket. All that was wrong, as Martin would have told him, was that he was blind.

  It was a manageable affliction.

  Life was still worth living, still rich with meaning and possibility.

  He was no longer concentrating upon his breathing, he realized. He was breathing by instinct.

  Had he hurt her? Either physically or emotionally? Had he frightened her?

  “I am sorry,” he said again, still hanging his head over his hands clenched on the edge of the seat opposite. “Did I hurt you, Sophie?”

  “No.” But her voice sounded a little thin.

  He sat back in his seat. He could feel his heart pounding in his chest, but it was slowing.

  “I am sorry,” he said once more. “For a few months—” Ah, he never spoke of it. For a moment, his breath threatened to go again. “For a few months I was deaf as well as blind. And there never seemed to be enough air. Ahhh. I am sorry. I cannot—”

  She had one of his hands in both of hers and was holding it against one cheek.

  “You do not need to,” she told him.

  “After an eternity,” he said, “there were arms. The same arms all the time. They held me and fed me and gave me air.”

  “Your mother’s?”

  “George’s,” he told her. “The Duke of Stanbrook’s. He held me to life and sanity, though that would surely have gone anyway if my hearing had not returned. But it did, at first faintly and fuzzily and then fully. I am blind. That is all. I can live with that. But sometimes—”

  “You hav
e attacks of panic,” she said. “Do you need to be held when it happens, Vincent, or left alone?”

  She would need to know. She was his wife. It would surely happen again when he was with her. And he could never predict exactly when.

  “A human touch usually helps me back after the first few moments,” he said. “Beware of getting hurt in those first moments, though. Oh, Sophie!”

  She kissed the back of his hand.

  “I am glad I am not the only needy one in our marriage,” she said. “I do not mean I am glad you are blind or glad that you have these attacks. But I am glad you are not some sort of superhuman pillar of strength. I would not be able to prevail against it. I am too weak, too fragile. In each other’s weaknesses, perhaps we can both find strength.”

  He was feeling too tired to comprehend what she was saying to him. But he felt soothed, wondrously comforted. At the same time he felt he could weep.

  “Come back on my lap,” he said. “If you trust me not to fling you off again, that is.”

  She scrambled across him and snuggled against him, one arm about his neck. He braced his feet against the seat opposite again, twined his fingers in her curls, and felt safe. And somehow cherished.

  He slept.

  Sophia was warm and comfortable despite the jolting of the carriage. She was curled up in Vincent’s arms, her head nestled in the hollow between his shoulder and neck, her arm about him. She did not sleep even though he did. She pictured him as he had been the first few times she saw him. Not that he had changed in the week since. Only her perception of him had.

  Elegant, beautiful, courtly. A viscount. Someone to admire from afar. Someone from a different world than her own. Someone quite untouchable. She remembered her consternation when he had offered his arm outside the assembly rooms and she had touched him for the first time.

  It had felt like touching a god.

  Now she was his wife. She knew him intimately—very intimately. And though he was beautiful almost beyond belief, he was just a man. Just a person. Like her, he was vulnerable. Like her, he had been living a life that was in many ways passive. Like her, he felt the need, the intense desire, to live. To prevail against life rather than merely to endure. To be free and independent…

  They were not as unequal as she had thought.

  And now they were on their way home. She savored the word. She had lived in numerous rooms and houses during her first fifteen years, some of them grand, most of them shabby. And then there had been Aunt Mary’s house in London and then Barton Hall. But there had never been rooms or a house that she had called home.

  Home had always been a place to dream of.

  But would Middlebury Park be home? Or would it be just another house in which she lived for a while before moving on? But she would not think of that—moving on, that was. He had been right on their wedding day. They were married now. Middlebury Park was to be her home now. She wished—oh, she wished she had not told him her dream at the assembly, for it had been based entirely upon her belief that she would never marry, that no one would even want to marry her. And it had always been one of those impossible dreams anyway, apparently harmless for that very reason.

  They would be arriving anytime now. She had heard Mr. Handry say the last time they stopped for a change of horses that that would probably be the final time.

  She was terrified.

  So what was she going to do about that? Hide in a corner somewhere where it was safe?

  Or pretend that she was not afraid at all?

  She was about to discover who she was, she realized, and what she was made of.

  She had a sudden mental image of the next picture in her sketch pad—a huge mouse, almost filling the page, blank terror in its eyes as though a giant cat were bearing down upon it, a silly, sick grin on its face. And a series of straight lines leading from it to converge on the bottom corner, where the exact same mouse, hugely reduced in size, cowered in cowardly safety.

  She smiled and felt her body shake against Vincent’s as she quelled the bubble of laughter that threatened to erupt in sound.

  “Mmm,” he said. “Was I snoring?”

  “No.”

  “Something was funny.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Not really.”

  “Did you sleep?” he asked her. “I believe I did.”

  “I was too busy feeling comfortable,” she said. “There is one advantage to being small. I can snuggle up to you on your lap.”

  This was one thing she had discovered about herself. She could relax with him and talk with him. She was not quite paralyzed in his presence as she had been a week ago.

  “You may do so anytime you choose,” he said. “Well, within reason, I suppose. My steward might be a trifle disconcerted if you were to snuggle up when I was in consultation with him in his office. But touch is important to me, Sophie, perhaps more important than it is to most men. Never be afraid to touch me.”

  She had not thought of his need in quite that way. For a moment she thought she might well weep. But she was distracted when she realized the carriage was slowing and then turning.

  “Oh.” She sat up and her stomach lurched.

  “We must be there,” he said. “Describe it to me, Sophie.”

  “Tall stone gateposts,” she said, her eyes widening, “with wrought iron gates. They are open so we do not have to stop. A stone wall stretching to either side, though it is half hidden beneath moss and ivy. A shaded driveway with woods on either side. I see oaks and chestnuts and other trees whose names I do not know. I am hopeless on the names of plants.”

  “Which does not matter,” he said, “since plants do not name themselves. Or so you informed me once upon a time.”

  The grounds must be huge. There was no sign yet of the house or of any cultivated park. They seemed to be in the depths of the countryside.

  “I can see water,” she said then, clambering off his lap and sitting beside him, the better to see through both windows. “There must be a lake, is there? Oh, yes, there it is. A big one. There is even an island in the middle of it with a little temple or something on it. How picturesque! And a boathouse. And reeds. And trees.”

  “I have been out in one of the boats,” he told her. “I have to have someone with me, of course, or I am inclined to row into banks and marshes and islands and other assorted obstacles that insist upon getting in my way.”

  “You need to learn to look where you are going,” she said. “Better yet, take me with you and I will look where you are going. I shall scream when you are about to collide with something. Oh. Oh, Vincent.”

  Wonder and terror clutched at her in equal measure.

  The house had come into view. House—ha! It was a mansion. It was a palace. It was … It was Middlebury Park. It was her new home. She was mistress of it.

  “Oh, Vincent.”

  “Struck dumb by my charms, are you?” he asked her. “Or are you seeing something else that has tied your tongue in knots?”

  “The latter,” she said. “I can see the house. The driveway straightens here on a direct axis with the front doors, and there are lawns on either side with some small topiary trees on either side. And up ahead I can see parterres with more little trees and flowers and statuary. And the house. Oh, how can I describe it?”

  “It has a high, imposing central block,” he said, “with twelve steps leading up to massive double doors. There are long wings to either side and round towers at the four corners. The stable block is off to the left. We will turn to the right very soon and drive between the lawn and the parterres and so approach the house from the east side. Behind the house the park rises into hills, and there are many more trees covering them and descending almost to the kitchen gardens. It is a bit of a wilderness back there. Each side of the park is two miles long—eight miles all told. It would take two and a half hours to walk around the outside of the wall at a fair pace. I have done it in three and a half. The farms are beyond the walls.”

  “You peepe
d when no one was looking,” she said.

  “My secret is out.” He took her hand in his. “Are you impressed with your husband’s great consequence, Sophie?”

  Impressed? That did not nearly describe how she felt, but no other word in her vocabulary did either.

  “Oh, Vincent,” was all she could say. The carriage had indeed turned right and then left and left again until it drew to a halt at the foot of a flight of marble steps. She would take his word for it that there were twelve.

  “Do I take that to be yes?” he asked her.

  “I am impressed at my consequence,” she told him, desperately trying to convert terror to humor. “I am mistress of all this, am I not?”

  The great front doors, she could see now that they were close, had opened, and a lady had appeared in the doorway. She moved to the top of the steps as Sophia watched.

  Vincent’s mother?

  Mr. Handry had jumped down from his perch and was opening the carriage door and lowering the steps.

  Sophia raised her chin—what else was there to do?

  14

  Vincent stepped down from the carriage and was immediately engulfed in his mother’s embrace. She had seen the carriage approaching, then. She must have been watching for it. She had probably had a dozen or more letters from Barton Coombs and had been hovering near a window for days.

  He felt a familiar rush of guilt and love.

  “Vincent,” she cried. “Oh, at last you are safely home. I have worried myself to a shadow.” She clung to him wordlessly for a while and then loosened her hold and held him by the shoulders. “But what have you done? Tell me it is not true. Please tell me you did not do anything so foolish. I have been sleepless with worry since I heard. We all have.”

  “Mama.”

  He turned slightly and must have given her a view of the carriage behind him. Her hands fell away from his shoulders and she went silent. He raised a hand to help Sophia alight.

  “Mama,” he said, “may I present Sophia? My wife? My mother, Sophie.”

  Her hand came to rest on his. She had pulled her gloves on, he could feel.

  “Oh, Vincent,” his mother said faintly as Sophia came down the steps. “You have married her, then.”