by Mary Balogh
She saw the look in his eyes—admiration? He found her attractive? She wondered again what his lovemaking would be like. Would he, even then, be concerned with what was right and proper? But she did not know herself what was right and proper—or what was wrong and improper, for that matter.
She just hoped there would be some—oh, some passion. The thought took her quite by surprise.
“I know now,” he said, smiling at her, “what I will give you as a wedding gift. Something unusual, perhaps, but something I am sure will please you. I shall engage the services of the best drawing master I can find for you. I could see this morning that you very much wish to paint but do not know how. I shall see to it that you learn how—from an expert. And I will predict that before a year is out I shall be replacing my sisters’ paintings in my bedchamber with paintings of my wife’s.”
She had watched intently. She had understood what he said. But he had so totally not understood that she could only stand now and stare at him. And feel the hurt and frustration again despite herself. What was worse, he did not even realize that he did not understand. She thought unwillingly of Ashley. He had understood instantly when she had explained that there were both passion and meaning in that wretched painting. And afterward he had put into words exactly what she had been telling him with her hands and her body.
But Ashley had always understood. He had always known that there was a person behind the silence—not just a person who listened with her eyes and would have responded in similar words if she could have, but one who inhabited a world of her own and lived in it quite as richly as anyone in his world. With Ashley there had always been a language. There had always been a way of giving him glimpses of herself.
“I could see the anger in your painting,” Lord Powell said. “The impossibility you felt of ever painting what you wanted to paint, of ever reproducing what you saw with your eyes. ’Tis something you feel often?” His eyes were warm with sympathy.
She saw his words—and his intended kindness. He had entirely misinterpreted the emotion that lay behind her painting. How could she marry a man who knew her so little that he believed her unhappy and frustrated, all locked up inside herself, wanting only to be able to hear and to speak?
“Harndon told me you can read and write,” he said. “When you are in my home, Lady Emily, as my wife, I shall give instructions that there are to be paper, ink, and quill pens in every room in the house. You must write down what you wish to express. I would not have you unhappy with suppressed anger and frustration. I would know what you have to say. I would listen to you—to the writings of your hand—as you listen to the motions of my lips.”
But he was a kind man. He wanted to help unlock her from her perceived misery. He was willing to give her a voice and to listen to her. He could not know that when Emily wrote it was for merely practical purposes, not for the revelation of self. She did not have enough skill with language to translate her world into written words.
But he was kind. She smiled at him.
Their attention was distracted. Someone had come hurrying out of the house and down the steps into the garden and almost collided with them before he saw them. Ashley. He stopped abruptly, said nothing, laughed, and skirted around them to go scurrying on down through the terraces and over the low hedge at the bottom to the lawn beyond. He was hatless.
“Strange,” Lord Powell said, looking again at Emily. “Lord Ashley Kendrick is rather peculiar. It must be the effect of a foreign clime.”
Ashley had been different this morning, she thought. He had been as friendly toward her as ever. He had listened to her and understood what she had said to him. He had accepted her, both her appearance and her painting. He had neither condemned nor covertly criticized. But he had not talked to her as he used to do. He had spoken to her, yes—even at some length. But it was more what he had not spoken of than what he had actually said that had put the bitterness, the tautness, the haunted suffering in his face. There was a great deal shut up inside him. Once he would have sat there with her, time forgotten, and poured out his whole heart to her. But no longer. He had sent her away this morning. He had told her to go.
She was aware of him striding away down the lawn in the direction of the stone bridge.
It was as well. This morning at the falls had been the end. The end of everything that was past. This now was the beginning of everything that was future. Perhaps she would not so easily be able to put the past behind her, where it belonged, if she carried the burden of Ashley’s confidences in her heart.
Yet even now, knowing nothing, her heart ached for him. She had seen him laugh just now, but the look on his face had not been one of amusement. It had been a grimace. There had been wildness in it.
Lord Powell had both her hands in his, and she gave him her full and determined attention. “I was very annoyed with him for forcing you against your will to dance last evening,” he said. “I was almost ready to call him out, but I would not create a scene and embarrass you or my host. If he had succeeded in drawing you into making a spectacle of yourself, though, I believe I would not have been able to contain my anger. But you acquitted yourself well. I was proud of you.” He squeezed her hands.
Against her will. He thought she had danced against her will. She knew that she would never ever forget the exhilaration and the sheer wonder of that half hour and that minuet. Her heart already ached with the memory.
“I would have our betrothal announced today if you will,” he said. “Your family is almost all gathered here, and Lord and Lady Severidge are to come from Wycherly later for dinner, I believe.”
Yes, it would be a good time for the announcement. Suddenly she wanted it to be soon. She regretted that she had not allowed it last evening. She wanted her future to be final and irrevocable.
Ashley, she was aware though she did not look in that direction, was standing on the bridge.
“May I speak with Royce?” Lord Powell asked.
Victor would make the announcement at dinner. Everyone would be pleased. Even Anna, who kept insisting that Emily did not have to marry anyone.
She nodded and smiled and was rewarded by a wide smile in return.
“You have made me very happy, Lady Emily,” he said. “The happiest man in the world.”
• • •
She had to share her news. Lord Powell had gone to the library to write to his mother. Anna and Luke often spent a half hour or so together in Anna’s private sitting room in the middle of the morning, between the hour they spent playing with the children or taking them outside and the separate duties they busied themselves with for the rest of the morning. The household was not following quite its normal routine this week, of course, what with all the guests. And Luke was supposed to be setting out for London this morning. But perhaps he had not left yet.
She knocked on the door and, after a decent pause, opened it gingerly and peered around it.
At first she was embarrassed. She thought she had walked in on a very private moment. Luke and Anna were standing in the middle of the room, clasped in each other’s arms. But then she saw the pallor of Luke’s face and the shaking of Anna’s shoulders.
“My dear.” Luke held up a staying hand. “Do not go away, I beg of you.”
Anna lifted her head, apparently only just becoming aware of Emily’s presence. Her face was red from crying.
“Oh, Emmy,” she said, “Emmy. Ashley’s Alice and Thomas are dead. They perished in a fire more than a year ago and we were not there to comfort him. He has borne the burden entirely alone. And the burden too of having been from home himself when it happened. How he must blame himself. He has come home for comfort, Emmy.”
She saw every word, as if she really could hear and could not stop hearing.
Luke, as was to be expected, was in command of himself, though only just, Emily guessed as her eyes widened and turned to him.
“Emily,” he said, “stay here with Anna, my dear. She has need of you for a while. I must find my poor Ashley. He has offended my mother by laughing as he told us about it, the foolish man. He is deeply, deeply hurt. You will stay?”
There was a faintness in Emily’s head, but she nodded as Luke transferred Anna from his arms to hers and then hurried from the room.
Ashley, she thought. Ah, Ashley. Why had he not told her? Had he thought her arms not strong enough, her heart not big enough? Seven years was an eternity after all. The distance between them had grown vast. He had not told her.
Ah, Ashley.
As she sat down on the sofa with Anna, their hands clasped tightly together, she forgot why she had come to the sitting room.
“Emmy,” Anna said, her reddened face a mask of grief, “we are going to have to be very gentle with him and very kind to him. Poor Ashley.”
Emily raised her sister’s hands and set them against her cheeks.
• • •
Luke had come to stand beside him on the bridge. He said nothing, as he rested his arms on the stone parapet and gazed down into the water of the river flowing beneath. Ashley was throwing stones into it, trying to skip them, but the angle was too sharp. They all sank quite decisively.
“I suppose,” he said, breaking the silence at last, “you left Anna and Doris in tears, and Mother not in tears?”
“Theo and Lady Sterne bore our mother off between them,” Luke said, “and I left Doris to Weims’s care. Anna was in tears, yes.”
“For something that happened more than a year ago,” Ashley said, throwing the next stone farther than the others. It still sank. “To people she did not even know. ’Tis foolish. Ah, well. I noticed that Powell had Emmy almost in an embrace in the garden a short while ago. Anna must be in high hopes of having a summer wedding to plan.”
“Ash,” Luke said, “you need to talk about it, my dear.”
Ashley laughed. “Zounds,” he said, “I remember how disconcerted and indignant I was when you first called me that, Luke. You have still not abandoned all your Parisian ways, I see. I noted your fan last evening. ’Twas a glittering occasion, by the way. I am thankful I came in time for it.”
“You are as brittle as glass,” his brother said quietly. “And I believe you could shatter into as many pieces.”
Ashley tossed his last stone over the parapet into the water and turned to rest one elbow on the wall. He looked at Luke with some amusement in his eyes.
“No longer,” he said. “Look at me, Luke. I am quite relaxed. ’Twas merely the ghastly prospect of having to break the news to you all, you see. I was sorry in my heart I had not written to you before dashing off home. I knew very well that Anna and Doris would dissolve into tenderhearted grief, that Mother would stiffen her upper lip and accompany it with a face of stone, and that you would square your shoulders and attempt to take my burdens upon them. You play the part of head of the family exceedingly well.”
“I did not come down here as head of the family, Ash,” Luke said. “I came as your brother. Who loves you. You are in pain.”
“Am I?” Ashley smiled. “It was a long and a tedious voyage. I ate poorly and slept worse. Both will be rectified now that I have my feet on firm earth.”
“You came home,” Luke said. “Not just to England, Ash. You came to Bowden. You might have stayed in London. You might have gone to Penshurst—’tis yours, I assume? But you chose to come home. Why? Just so that you might hold us at arm’s length? So that you might spurn help?”
“Help.” Ashley laughed.
Luke turned his head and looked assessingly at him before directing his gaze back at the water. “I have been trying to imagine,” he said, “how I would feel if ’twere Anna and one or all of my children. You are right: There could be no help, no comfort. Not immediately. Perhaps never. But I believe that after a year I might turn to my family. Yet I can see that even then I might be afraid to allow them inside the shell I would have constructed about myself.”
“Damn you,” Ashley said.
“I would be bitter and brittle. I might laugh from behind my shell.”
“You know nothing,” Ashley said. “You know nothing.”
“No, I do not,” Luke admitted. “Tell me, Ash. Tell me what happened.”
“I told you,” Ashley said. “They died. They burned with the house. I did not know until a friend came to fetch me. I came home to smoking ashes. I had been away—at a business meeting.”
“How did the fire start?” Luke asked. “Was the cause ever determined?”
Ashley shrugged. “A candle caught the draperies,” he said. “A lamp was tipped over. Who knows? There was a war in progress. There had been any number of sporadic and inexplicable atrocities.”
“There was a suspicion of arson, then?” Luke asked.
“But no proof,” Ashley said with another shrug.
“Did you have enemies?” Luke asked.
“A nationful,” Ashley said with a laugh. “I am an Englishman, Luke. Englishmen were at war with Frenchmen. And there were Indian men fighting on both sides. ’Twas not a wise time to leave one’s wife and son alone at home.”
“Anna said that you must be blaming yourself,” Luke said. “She was right. Were there no servants, Ash?”
“My valet was with me,” Ashley said. “Alice had dismissed the other servants for the night except her faithful nurse and companion, who had been with her since she was a girl. She died with them.”
“Only one servant.” Luke frowned. “Why did she dismiss the others? Was it customary? Even when you were from home?”
Ashley merely shrugged. “There were those, you know, who said I did it,” he said. “When a wife dies in inexplicable circumstances, the husband is always suspect.”
“Zounds,” Luke said.
“They were, of course, wrong.” Ashley laughed and drummed his fingers on the parapet of the bridge. “I should not have come here, Luke. I should have gone straight to Penshurst. Yes, ’tis mine. I was penniless seven years ago, but I am now in possession of two sizable fortunes: the one that I amassed for myself and the other that my wife brought me. And I am free to enjoy both, unencumbered by wife or child. What more could any man desire?”
“Stay here for a while,” Luke said. “Let yourself be loved, Ash. Let yourself be healed. I cannot know what you have suffered or what you still suffer—’tis beyond imagining. But there is love to be had here. And perhaps healing too if you will but give it a chance. If you will give it time.”
“I will stay for a few days,” Ashley said with a shrug. “And then I will be on my way to Penshurst. To my new life. ’Tis the one I have worked toward since joining the East India Company, Luke. And now ’tis within my grasp. And so he lived happily ever after.”
Luke turned his head to smile at him. “And perhaps ’twill do the trick, too,” he said. “But stay here for a while. Anna will want to fuss over you. The children will wish to become acquainted with you and discover how indulgent you can be when wheedled. And I have missed you. Come back to the house with me? I will have toast and coffee brought to the study, unless you wish for something stronger. I noticed you ate almost no breakfast after all.”
“Later,” Ashley said. “I still revel in the coolness of English air. I would not willingly exchange it so soon for the indoors.”
Luke nodded and after a moment turned to walk back to the house alone. Emmy, Ashley noticed when he looked after him, was no longer in the formal gardens with her beau.
He should have written to them a year ago. And when he returned to England, he should have gone straight to Penshurst. He was a mature man now, independent, confident, assertive, resourceful. He had spent six years achieving that effect, overcoming the handicap of having grown up as a dependent, irresponsible, bored younger son of a duke. So he had lost a wife and a child. Eve
ry day men lost wives and children.
He should have continued with the life he had made for himself and by himself.
But he had resorted to instinct rather than to cool judgment and good sense. He had come running home—home to Bowden and to Luke. And, without consciously realizing it, to Emmy. To a wild and happy child who no longer existed.
He should have told her this morning, he thought. It somehow hurt to know that she would learn it from someone else. She would be sad for him. He should have told her himself. But he knew that he could not have done so. He could not have told her the bald facts as he had to his family at breakfast. If he had said that much to Emmy, he would have grabbed for her and poured out everything else too. Somehow with Emmy words could never be used as a shield. She seemed to know them for the inadequate vehicle of truth they were. Emmy saw to the heart.
But he had no desire to use a woman as an emotional crutch.
He had a sudden unbidden image of Thomas with his soft down of gingery hair. It was an image he often held behind his sleepless eyelids when he lay down. Poor child. Poor innocent little baby. The sins of the fathers . . . No! It had been an accident. A tragic accident. That was all. No one, least of all God, would punish a child . . .
8
THE Earl of Royce was delighted by his talk with Lord Powell. He had begun to have doubts when nothing had been said after all last evening during the ball. Now he was happy and relieved for his youngest sister, whom he had not really expected to be able to settle in life. And he was grateful to his brother-in-law, who had made such efforts to find her a husband of suitable rank and fortune and one who would be kind to her. Powell seemed genuinely fond of Emily.
The earl did, though, hesitate about making the announcement on this particular day. It had not taken long for the news to spread through the house, to those who had not been present at breakfast, that Lord Ashley Kendrick’s wife and child had perished in a fire a year ago in India.