The Truth About Lady Felkirk

by Christine Merrill

  She pushed him away and straightened her dress. ‘They expect me back at the house. It was only to be a short walk. I will be missed if I tarry. And if Felkirk comes down to breakfast, he will want to see me there.’ Then she kissed Montague once, gently on the mouth, hoping that he would believe she was not simply avoiding him.

  ‘Of course,’ he agreed, smoothing her hair and straightening her bonnet for another excuse to touch her. ‘Go back to the house. Do not arouse suspicion. But do not take too long about it. Remember, Margot is coming home for Christmas. If you cannot be with us, I will send your love...’

  She turned and hurried back to the house, surprised, as she always was, at the way that her guardian could turn a simple, parting phrase into a threat.

  Chapter Five

  Will slept uneasily, waking often and with a start, as though proving to himself that it was truly possible to open his eyes again. But by morning, the ache in his head had diminished. He was able to take a few shaky steps around the room before calling for the crutches that the servants had found, to help him.

  In the breakfast room, he found other servants, already clearing away a plate that still held a half-eaten slice of toast slathered with the marmalade from Tim Colton’s orangery. It was his particular favourite. The pot on the table was half-empty.

  His brother barely looked up from his coffee. ‘If you are looking for your wife, she is up and out of the house already. She favours a morning walk, much as you do when you are in the country.’

  ‘Oh.’ He stared out the window at the fading green of the park and the coloured leaves swirling in the breeze. ‘That particular habit will be quite beyond me for a time.’

  Adam nodded, then smiled. ‘You have no idea how good it is to see you on your feet again, even if you are a trifle unsteady.’

  ‘Probably not,’ Will agreed. ‘For me, it is as if no time has passed at all.’

  ‘It is a blessing, then,’ Adam said. ‘You do not remember the pain.’

  ‘That is not all I have lost,’ Will reminded him, glancing at the marmalade pot.

  ‘And as I told you, there is nothing to fear. Unlike my own darling Penelope, Justine is the most patient of women. She will not be hurt by your forgetfulness.’

  ‘I had not thought of that,’ Will said. If he had married her, then the hardship was not all on one side.

  Adam looked even more surprised. ‘How inconsiderate of you. While you were the one who was injured, there were others who bore the brunt of the pain and worry. And over something so uncharacteristically foolish as a fall from a horse.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Will said. ‘What would have caused me to do such a thing?’

  ‘Showing off for Justine, I expect,’ Adam said, moderating his voice to sound less like a scold. ‘All men are idiots, when they are in love.’

  On this, Will agreed. ‘That is why I have always avoided being so.’

  ‘Until now,’ Adam finished.

  ‘And that is one more thing I do not understand,’ Will said, feeling more desperate than he had before. ‘You claim she is just like me. Perhaps it is true. But why did I not take the time to bring her home to meet you, and to marry properly, in a church? If she is so like me, why did she not insist on it? It is not reasonable.’

  His brother laughed. ‘You cannot think of a single reason to marry such a woman in haste? You poor fellow.’

  ‘She is pretty, of course,’ he allowed.

  ‘Was your vision affected?’ Adam asked, drily. ‘She is a damn sight more than just pretty.’

  ‘A beauty, then,’ Will admitted reluctantly. ‘But the world is full of those and I have resisted them all.’

  ‘Until now,’ his brother replied.

  ‘But I have no clue as to what caused this magical change in me? And what took me to Bath?’

  Adam frowned. ‘It will come back to you in time, I’m sure. If not, you can ask Justine.’ Adam gave him a searching look. ‘You have spoken to her, haven’t you?’

  ‘Briefly,’ Will admitted.

  ‘Which means that you have exchanged fewer words with her than you have with me.’

  William shook his head. ‘I would rather hear your version of events first.’

  ‘You will find her story is much the same as mine,’ Adam said. ‘While you cannot remember her, there is no reason to assume that she will not be forthcoming if you ask these questions of her.’

  Will paused, unsure of how to explain himself. Then he said, ‘It is not just that I have forgotten our marriage. I have the strangest feeling that she is not to be trusted.’

  Adam stifled an oath before mastering his patience. ‘The physicians told us that you might be prone to dark moods, if you recovered at all. Do not let yourself be ruled by them.’

  ‘Suppose I cannot prevent it?’ he said in return. ‘You claim I will love her as I once did, given time. Suppose I do not?’

  ‘Then I would assume that you are not fully recovered from your injury and tell you that even more time was required.’ Adam seemed to think it was much less complicated than it seemed to him.

  ‘Then you must ready your advice,’ Will replied. ‘For when I look at her, I do not love her, nor can I imagine a time when I did.’

  Adam sighed. ‘You always did lack imagination.’

  ‘Perhaps that is true. But I do not wish to develop it, simply to create a likely scenario for my previous marriage. If I cannot remember her, would an annulment not be a possibility? Surely a mental deficiency on my part...’

  Adam’s eyes narrowed. ‘There is no sign that you were mentally defective when you met her. The accident happened afterwards. A declaration of mental deficiency on your part would cause other problems as well. Do you wish me to take on the management of your money and land, since you are clearly unable to make decisions for yourself? Will you seek to marry again? How will we guarantee to the next woman that she will not meet a similar fate? Unless you want to be declared my ward for the rest of your life and treated as though you cannot manage your own affairs, you had best own what wits you have.’

  Will had no answer to this.

  ‘Far better that you should meet your wife as if she were a stranger and grow to feel for her again. I suspect the answer to it all is quite unexceptional. Standing up at the christening put you in mind to marry. You went to Bath, where you knew many young ladies were to be found, chose the most likely candidate and made your offer. Since you were so adamantly opposed to my own sudden marriage, when it happened, you would not have entered into a similar union had the bond between you not been strong.’

  It sounded right. But Will still could not manage to believe it. ‘What if I was driven by some other reason?’

  ‘Then I would tell you, if you cannot love her, there is nothing about her that is unlikeable. She is beautiful, talented and quite devoted to you. Many marriages are built on less. You could do worse than to keep her.’ Adam was using the matter-of-fact tone he used when settling disputes amongst the tenants. It was the sort of voice that said there would be no further discussion.

  So the decision was already made. He was married. His brother did not seem to care if he wanted to be. Nor could Will explain the nagging feeling, at the back of his mind, that something was very wrong with this. ‘How am I to go about growing this feeling? What advice do you have, oh, wise Bellston?’

  Adam gave a confident smile. ‘I would advise that you find your wife immediately, and spend the day with her. Then you must remove yourself from my household as soon as you are able.’

  ‘You are turning me out?’ Will said with surprise. ‘I am barely recovered.’

  ‘Your own home is less than a mile from here,’ Adam said with a calming gesture. ‘The doctor is even closer to that place than he is to here. It is not that you are not welcome to visit. But the
sooner you stop making excuses and isolate yourself with Justine, the sooner you will come to love her again. The pair of you must stop using the rest of us to avoid intimacy.’

  ‘You expect me to bed a complete stranger, hoping that I will rise in the morning with my love renewed?’

  He could see by the narrowing of his brother’s eyes that Adam was nearly out of patience. ‘Perhaps the bump on the head has truly knocked all sense out of you. You talk as if it were a hardship to lie with a beautiful woman. But I meant nothing so vulgar. You must be alone with her. Talk. Share a quiet evening or two and discover what it was that drew you to her in the first place. I predict, before the week is out, you will be announcing your complete devotion to her.’

  ‘Very well, then. Today I will discuss the matter with her. Tomorrow, I will take her home, and make some effort to treat her as if she were a wife by my choice. But I predict we will be having the same conversation in a week’s time. Then I will expect you to offer something more substantive than empty platitudes about love.’

  So he finished his breakfast and, with his brother’s words in mind, sought out Justine. But she seemed no more eager to talk to him than he was to talk to her. The servants informed him that, directly after her walk, she’d gone out with the duchess to call on the sick and needy of the village.

  * * *

  Penny returned without her. It seemed she had been invited to luncheon with the vicar, to celebrate the miraculous recovery of her invalid husband. That they had neglected to invite Will to the event was an oversight on their part.

  * * *

  By afternoon, she had returned to the house, though Will could not manage to find her. When he went to visit his nephew in the nursery, he was told that the boy was just down for a nap. Her ladyship had sung him to sleep. The nurse assured him his wife had the voice of an angel and was naturally good with children. Apparently he had chosen the perfect mother for his future brood, should he find it in his heart to make them with her.

  It was hard to accuse her of dark motives when she seemed to fill her day with virtues. It explained why his family was so taken with her. But to Will, it seemed almost as if she was deliberately avoiding him. Wherever he went in the house, her ladyship had just been and gone, after doing some kindness or proving her own excellent manners.

  * * *

  In the end, he did not see her until supper, after they had both dressed for it on opposite sides of the connecting door. Adam was entertaining the Coltons, claiming it as a small celebration welcoming him back to health. More likely, it was an attempt to put Will on his best behaviour. Tim and Daphne were old family friends. But that did not give him the right to bark and snap at them, as he had been doing with his own family.

  At least this evening he was able to manage food and drink without subtle aid from his new wife. Though he was fatigued, a single day out of bed and a few hearty meals had worked wonders on his depleted body.

  As the conversation droned on about Tim’s latest experiments in his greenhouse, Will lifted his glass and looked through it, across the table at the woman he supposedly loved. Today, her gown was white muslin shot through with gold threads, her warm gold hair falling in inviting spirals from another dull white cap. But for that, she’d have looked like one of the more risqué angels in a Botticelli painting, pure but somehow a little too worldly.

  She noticed his gaze and coloured sweetly, keeping her own eyes firmly focused on the food in front of her. Perhaps it was simply that he felt better today. Perhaps it was the wine. Or maybe leaving the confines of his room changed his mood. But he wondered what it was that had made him distrust her, when there was nothing exceptional in her behaviour.

  She seemed shy of him, of course. But could she be blamed for it? Since the first moment he’d opened his eyes, she had shown him nothing but kindness and patience. He had responded with suspicion and hostility. Even a real angel would grow tired of such treatment and draw away.

  Almost as an experiment, he looked directly at her, long past the point where she could ignore him. Slowly her face rose, to return a nervous smile, head tilted just enough to express enquiry. Then he smiled at her and gave the slightest nod of approval.

  She held his gaze for only a moment, before casting her eyes down again. But there was a flicker of a smile in response and tension he had not noticed disappeared from her back and shoulders. If possible, she became even prettier. She was more alluring, certainly. She had seemed almost too prim and virginal, perching on the edge of her chair.

  But as she relaxed, her body looked touchable, as though she was aware of the pleasures it offered. If he had been married to her for even one night, he knew them himself. He would not have been able to resist. But it was an odd contrast to the woman she had been last night. As she’d sat on his bed, near enough to touch and waiting for intimacy, she’d been as stiff as a waxwork and just as cold.

  After the meal, he’d been hoping for a relaxing glass of port with Adam and Sam as the ladies retired. But they took that hurriedly, wanting to join the women in the parlour and using the comfort of the chairs, and his semi-invalid status, as an excuse. At first, he thought it a trick to throw him back into the presence of his wife and force some memory from him. But it seemed that, as their bachelor days receded into the past, his brother and friend had grown used to spending their evenings in the company of their wives. They were less willing to forgo it, even after his miraculous recovery. Now that he was married, they expected him to behave the same.

  Married.

  It always came back to that. Once again, his feelings were in a muddle. Perhaps he was still avoiding her. He should be able to engage Justine in easy conversation as Adam and Sam did with their wives. But he could not think of a word to say to her, other than the thought that was always foremost in his mind: Who are you?

  No one else wondered. They all seemed to know her well. She was settled into what was probably her usual chair beside a screened candle, chatting amiably as though she belonged here. She reached into a basket at its side to take up her needlework: a complex arrangement of threads and pins on a satin pillow. The other women smiled at her, admired her work and discussed children and households.

  Adam and Sam seemed to be in the middle of a political conversation that he’d had no part in. How long would it take him, just to be aware of the news of the day? Probably less time than to discover the details of his own life. He could read The Times for a day or two and find everything he needed. But no matter how he prodded at the veil covering the last six months, it was immovable. If the present situation was to be believed, there was a trip to Bath, love, marriage and who knew what other events, waiting just on the other side.

  His headache was returning.

  He struggled to his feet and manoeuvred himself to a decanter of brandy that sat on the table by the window, pouring a glass and drinking deeply. That he had done it without spilling a drop deserved a reward, so he poured a second, leaning on his crutches to marshal his strength for a return to his chair. The trip across the room had brought him scant feet from Justine and he paused to watch her work.

  There was a scrap of lace, pinned flat to the pillow in front of her. It took him a moment to realise that this was not some purchased trim, but a work in progress. The finished work was held in place with a maze of pins more numerous than spines on a hedgehog, the working edge trailing away into a multitude of threads and dangling ivory spools. As though she hardly thought, she passed one over the other, around back, a second and a third, this time a knot, the next a braid. Then she slipped a pin into the finished bit and moved on to another set of threads. The soft click of ivory against ivory and the dance of her white hands were like a soporific, leaving him as calm as she seemed to be. Though he was close enough to smell her perfume, he saw no sign of the shyness that was usually present when he stood beside her. There was no stiffness or hesitation i
n the movement of her hands. Perhaps their problems existed outside the limits of her concentration. She worked without pattern, calling the complex arrangement of threads up from memory alone. There was hardly a pause in conversation, when one or the other of the women put a question to her. If it bothered her at all, he could not tell for her dancing fingers never wavered.

  Though he stood right in front of her, he seemed to be the last thing on her mind. Now he felt something new when he looked at her. Was this envy that she gave her attention to the lace, and to the other women, while ignoring him? Or was this frustration that he’d had her attention, once, and slept through it.

  Slowly, the roll of finished work at the top grew longer. No wonder she had nursed him, uncomplaining, for months at a time. She had the patience to measure success in inches. Penny noticed his interest and announced, ‘Her handwork is magnificent.’

  It brought a blush to the woman’s fair cheeks, but she did not pause, or lose count of the threads. ‘In my homeland, lacemaking is quite common,’ she announced. ‘My mother was far better at it than I.’

  ‘Your homeland?’ he prompted, for it was yet another fact that he did not know.

  ‘Belgium,’ she said, softly. ‘I was born in Antwerp.’

  ‘And we met in Bath,’ he added. It did not answer how either of them came to be there. But perhaps, if repeated often enough, it would make sense.

  ‘You may think it common, but your work is the most delicate I have seen,’ Penny reminded her with a sigh. Then she looked to Will. ‘It is a shame that you did not bring Justine to us before the last christening. I would so have liked to see a bonnet of that trim she is making now.’

  ‘For the next child, you shall have one,’ Justine replied, not looking up.

  ‘It is too much to ask.’ Penny smiled at Will as though he had a share in the compliment. ‘The collar she made for me last month makes me feel as regal as a duchess.’ Fine praise indeed, for it was rare to hear Penny feeling anything other than ordinary.