Silent Melody

by Mary Balogh

  They had not spoken a great deal yesterday. Both he and Luke had spent a long time with the magistrate who had come to the house to investigate the death. Then they had spent an almost equally long time with Sir Henry Verney, who had also called. And finally Luke had played stern elder brother and implacable head of the family—his own words—and had sent Ashley off to bed early.

  But Emily was glad there had been little chance for words. Yesterday had been the wrong time. They had needed this new day. Her heart began to beat faster, and despite herself, despite what deep down she knew to be the truth, she was anxious.

  “Emmy,” he said, shrugging his shoulder and turning his head so that she could see his lips—so very close to her own—“’tis a clear, bright, warm morning. It feels like the first morning that ever was. Is this how Adam and Eve felt, do you suppose? Is this Eden?”

  She loved the warmth and the merriment in his smile. Everything else was gone. She touched her fingers to his cheek.

  “At last I feel that perhaps I have something to offer you,” he said, gazing back at her, his eyes softening to such unmistakable tenderness that she felt her anxiety melting away as if by the warmth of the newly risen sun. “My honor. I will not say that I was guiltless. I have confessed to you that I committed adultery. ’Tis a grievous offense. But there can be pardon for such sins, I do believe. I no longer feel so very responsible for their deaths, and I have avenged them. I feel that I have reclaimed my honor.”

  “Yes,” she said. Foolish man—she had loved him anyway. But she knew that he had been unable to forgive himself and that therefore her love would never have been enough for him. They could never have been fully happy.

  “My love has always been yours,” he said. “’Tis a strange thing to say, perhaps, when I almost completely forgot you during my years away. But that very fact tells me that unconsciously I had deliberately erased you from memory because my feelings for you disturbed me. You were only fifteen, Emmy. Even after my return I fought my love for you. In my mind those years had not passed—you were still a child. But you have always been a woman, have you not? Even when we first met? When you were fourteen?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Ah, Emmy.” He kissed her warmly, and for a while nothing else mattered except that they were together in sunshine, with no shadows at all to darken or chill. “Emmy, my love. Forgive me for forgetting you. Forgive me for denying your womanhood.”

  She set her hands on either side of his face and smiled at him. “Yes,” she said. She was not sure she could say it, but she would try. “I love you.” She knew that he was still unsure of himself, unsure of his worthiness for happiness and peace. “I love you.”

  His smile softened and was again untroubled. He set his hand over one of hers—it was her injured one, still rather sore now that she had removed the bandages, but she stopped herself from wincing—and turned his head to kiss her palm.

  “Thank you.” He grinned at her. Ashley’s grin, all mischief and sparkling eyes and happiness. “If you wish,” he said, “you may tell me all the ways you love me so that we can make a speech lesson out of this.”

  She laughed, and he hugged her and rocked her with his good arm.

  “Ah, Emmy,” he said, releasing her sufficiently that she could see his lips. “You have the most infectious laugh I have ever heard. My love, marry me. Will you? Not because you have lain with me and may be with child by me. But because ’tis the only thing in the world we can do to be complete and happy. Will you marry me?” His eyes were anxious once more.

  “Yes,” she said. “Ahshley.”

  They simply smiled at each other for a long while. She could see no clouds behind his eyes, no troubles, not even any remaining doubts. Only a happiness and a peace that matched her own. His face was lit up by the sunlight.

  “Will we stay at Penshurst?” he asked her. “I will sell it if you wish, Emmy. We can live elsewhere. It does not matter where as long as we are together.”

  But she had set her fingertips over his lips before using her hands to speak. No, she told him. We will live here. This is home.

  And after he had searched her eyes and had seen that she meant it, he looked happy again. Bad things had happened at Penshurst, Emily mused. They had culminated in the death of a man yesterday. But they were over and done with. Penshurst was merely a place, a beautiful house in natural surroundings with congenial neighbors, a few of whom would become close friends—Sir Henry Verney and his sister, Katherine Smith, Mr. Binchley. It was a place she and Ashley would make home, a place in which their children would be born and raised, a place where they would grow old together. They would make of it a good place with good memories.

  “Yes,” he said, using his free hand to sign to her as well, “it is home. Because you are here with me, Emmy. But I am going to send you to Bowden tomorrow.”

  Her smile faded and her eyes widened.

  “We should marry at Bowden, not here,” he said. “And we should marry soon, Emmy. Because we wish to and because we must. We will send for your family and mine today, and tomorrow when you go to Bowden with Anna and Luke, I will go to London for a special license. We should be able to marry within two weeks.”

  She bit her lip. She would be two weeks without him?

  “An eternity,” he agreed, smiling ruefully. “This arm sling is mere decoration, you know, worn to arouse sympathy and to invite people to wait on me hand and foot. It does not incapacitate me for any of the important activities of life.”

  She watched him remove it and drop it to the grass before flexing his shoulder and grimacing only slightly.

  “Making love, for example,” he said, looking at her with a curious mixture of playful smile and smoldering eyes.

  “Yes.” She touched one hand to his cheek again. “Yes.” It seemed important that they make love this morning. Not because of any fear or need for comfort, motives that had clouded their past lovemakings. But purely for the sake of love and sharing and joy.

  He took her by the hand and led her into the summerhouse. It was flooded with the bright light of early morning. He turned and drew her against him. They smiled at each other before his mouth found hers.

  • • •

  “Faith, child,” Lady Quinn said, kissing Anna warmly on both cheeks, “you will think us mad. Lud, we are mad.”

  “This is a grand place, I warrant you, lad,” Lord Quinn said, rubbing his hands together and looking about the hall of Penshurst. He was addressing Luke. “I told Marj ’twould look magnificent by the light of the morning sun.”

  “But he has never seen the place before,” Lady Quinn said, tossing her glance upward. “The moon and the stars were bright last night, Anna, my love. We were watching them.” Lord Quinn chuckled. “And Theo concocted the notion that we should leave town almost as soon as we had returned there and come here for breakfast. We have traveled half the night.”

  “And are hungry, by my life,” Lord Quinn said. “I could devour an ox. Now, where is that youngest nephy of mine? Not up yet to welcome his aunt and uncle to his own home? Pox on it, but I have a good mind to go up and turn him out of bed with a pitcher of water over his head. If I but knew which direction to take.” He gave vent to a short bark of laughter.

  “Ashley is outside, Theo,” Luke said, “taking the air.”

  “At this hour? A lad after my own heart,” Lord Quinn said.

  “And how is my dear Emily?” Lady Quinn asked. “I can scarce wait to bring her back to town with me, I vow. Unless—” She looked hopefully, first at Anna and then at Luke. “Unless she has something more important to do with her time, that is.”

  Luke looked at his wife, who was smiling back at him, and raised his eyebrows. He pursed his lips. “By some coincidence, Aunt,” he said, “Emily is out taking the air too.”

  Lord Quinn slapped his thigh with the three-cornered hat he had
removed from his head. “Egad,” he said, “it worked, Marj, m’dear. You did not marry me in vain.” He roared with laughter.

  “Theo,” his wife said, “you will be putting strange notions into dear Anna’s and Luke’s heads, I do declare. We merely thought that if we married and went away on a wedding journey, and if Emily came here with Anna for a fortnight, and if Ashley was not a dreadful slowtop . . .”

  “They did not go out together this morning,” Anna said. “Luke saw them both, but separately,” she added, flushing. “Still, we are hoping . . .”

  “I have been set to spying on my own brother and sister-in-law as an occupation suited to my dotage,” Luke said in his haughtiest, most bored voice. “My duchess has encouraged me.”

  Lord Quinn slapped his thigh again. “And has there been much to spy upon, lad?” he asked.

  “Oh, most assuredly,” Luke said. “We had better take you in to breakfast, Aunt Marjorie and Theo. If we await the return of Emily and Ashley, we might well be here until dinnertime. We might well all starve. Madam?” He bowed elegantly and offered Lady Quinn his arm.

  “Dear Emily,” she said with a sigh. “And dear Ashley.”

  “I warrant you, Marj,” Lord Quinn said, roaring his comment after his retreating spouse as he gave his arm to Anna, “she will be brought to bed of a boy come nine months from today.”

  “Nine months from the wedding day, ’tis to be hoped, Theo,” his wife said placidly while Anna blushed and Luke raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips again.

  • • •

  Luke had discouraged him from coming to Bowden Abbey until the day before his wedding. And family members, Ashley had discovered to his chagrin, moved about England with tortoiselike speed. Despite the fact that he had acquired a special license the very day after Emily had agreed to marry him, more than two weeks passed before he was finally permitted to go to Bowden to claim his bride.

  And when he finally arrived there and finally saw her again, it was to find her ringed about, walled about with sisters and sisters-in-law and assorted other relatives, so that all he could do was bow formally over her hand, inquire formally after her health, and converse formally about the weather and other such scintillating subjects. And then she was whisked off to spend the night at Wycherly with her sister Agnes. Anna and Charlotte followed her there early on the morning of the wedding day.

  His wedding day!

  “Zounds, I feel like a damned Paris beau,” he said when he was ready to leave for the church. He frowned at his image in the pier glass of his dressing room. He was resplendent in silver embossed satin skirted coat with silver embroidered waistcoat, gray breeches, white stockings and linen, and heeled and buckled shoes. His hair was powdered white, carefully rolled at the sides and bagged in black silk behind.

  Luke met his eyes in the mirror. “You have something against Paris beaux, Ash?”

  Ashley grinned. As usual on dress occasions, Luke, all in rich green and gold and white, would turn heads even on Paris’s most fashionable boulevard.

  They were early at the church. Or Emmy was late. He did not know which. But it seemed that he waited an eternity at the front of the village church, trying to look dignified, trying to feel calm. What if she had changed her mind? What if she did not come at all? Would she send a message? Or would he stand here like this, feeling the eye of every guest in the pews on him, until noon came and went, until dusk descended?

  And then she was there.

  She looked incredibly beautiful. He watched her as she came closer down the aisle, her hand resting on Royce’s sleeve. She wore an elaborately trimmed sack dress of palest gold, with a train. The heavy robings down the edges of the open gown were of a darker gold and matched the color of her frilled, flounced petticoat and of her heavily embroidered stomacher. The two deep lace frills at her elbows were also trimmed with gold lace. Her hair was piled rather high over pads. Gold rosebuds and green leaves were entwined in it. It was unpowdered.

  She was the other Emily. The one he had first seen and admired without knowing who she was on the night of his return to Bowden. The one he had seen and admired in London. And yet when her eyes met his and when she smiled—her bright, warm, serene smile—she was his Emmy too. His little fawn of the loose dress and the bare feet and the wild mane of fair hair. She was each and both and all. She was everything. He smiled back at her.

  The service began, the marriage service that would make them man and wife, that would bind them together with love for the rest of their lives. The Reverend Jeremiah Hornsby led them through it with a slightly pompous competence until it came Emily’s turn to make her vows. She was to watch Hornsby’s lips and nod her acceptance of the words as her own. But a look passed between Hornsby and Emily, a look of mutual understanding. Almost a look of conspiracy.

  “I, Emily Louisa, take thee, Ashley Charles,” Hornsby said.

  “I, Emily Louisa, take thee, Ahshley Charles,” Emmy said.

  Ashley guessed that they had practiced it endlessly, the two of them. He knew she would speak the whole of it, that she would pledge herself to him in words for him to hear, for the whole world to hear. He knew too that they must have practiced in secret—he was half aware of the distinctly audible gasp and murmuring from their gathered relatives. But he did not look at them. He looked only at her, deep into her eyes, each time she turned back from watching Hornsby’s lips. He tightened his grasp of her hands.

  And he smiled at her.

  “Until death do us part. So help me Gahd.”

  He would tease her about that pronunciation later.

  “God,” she said, correcting herself and then smiling in triumph.

  Ashley heard nothing else of the service until Hornsby was telling them and the world that they were man and wife. She was his—for the rest of his life. How could he possibly have come to deserve such happiness? But of course he had not. All he had done was love—and allow himself to be loved. So simple—so complex.

  He lowered his head and kissed her. His wife. His love. His serenity and peace and joy.

  Her eyes, when he raised his head again, said all the same things back to him.

  They were married.

  • • •

  They had decided to stay at Bowden Abbey for the night and leave for Penshurst early enough in the morning that they could make the journey in one day.

  They had retired early to Ashley’s old suite of rooms amid the knowing smiles, the tears—from Anna, Agnes, and Constance—and the mildly ribald comments of Lord Quinn. They had gone immediately to bed and had made love with lingering slowness and exquisite sweetness. And Ashley had called her his wife, whispering the words against her mouth—at least, she guessed that that was what he had whispered when he lifted his head and apparently repeated the words so that she could see them in the candlelight.

  They had lain quietly in each other’s arms and then made love again and relaxed once more—until he had told her that there were no more sounds, that he was convinced everyone, even down to the last servant, was in bed. They had smiled conspiratorially at each other as they had got up and dressed and slipped down the stairs and outside.

  And now they were where they had planned to come ever since they had been alone together for a few minutes in the carriage after their wedding. They were at the falls, standing side by side on the highest rock, the one that jutted out over the water. Their fingers were entwined. It was a beautiful, warm night. The stars seemed almost close enough to touch. They were like lamps in the sky, so that even without the moon, which was almost full tonight, it would have been nearly as bright as day.

  “Well, little fawn,” Ashley said, turning her to him and taking her other hand in his free one. “We are back where it all started.”

  “Yes,” she said. They had first met in Luke’s drawing room, but this was where they had first talked, sitting together on this r
ock, her feet dangling in the water. She thought of him as he had been then—very young and handsome and restless. And of herself focusing on him all the love and devotion of her girl’s heart. She thought of lying here facedown, alone, living through the terrible pain of his departure for India. And of his return and all that had followed it.

  “But not where it will end,” he said. “Tomorrow we will go home. To Penshurst. To our new life. I have had those rooms cleared out, Emmy. All is gone. And I want you to change everything else that does not suit you. I want it to be your home. Ours. There will be a wedding to attend soon—Henry Verney is to marry Katherine Smith. And I am encouraging my steward to desert me—as he phrases it—in order to move back to the north of England, where he comes from and which he misses. I will offer his position to Binchley.”

  She smiled at him, then used their private language to reply. I am very happy, she told him.

  I am very happy too. He spoke to her without words. He pulsed a lightly closed fist against his heart. I really mean it. I feel deeply.

  But there was something else she wished to say in words, though she could have signed it to him. She wanted to tell him.

  “Ahshley,” she said.

  “Emmy.” He smiled. “I love my name on your lips more than on anyone else’s in the world.”

  “Ahshley,” she said again, using her hands too. “You. Me. A baby.”

  She was not quite certain, of course, and she had felt unable to ask Anna. But she was almost certain—with her body. With her heart she knew it beyond a doubt.

  She watched his eyes brighten with tears. He bit his lip. And then he caught her up in his arms and held her very close. He was talking to her, she knew. But it did not matter that she neither heard nor saw the words. Words were not important.

  She kept her eyes open and looked up at the vast sky and at the stars. The whole sky and the earth too, the whole universe was singing. Did it matter that she could not hear? The melody, the dance, the joy were in her heart. And in his.