by Mary Balogh
Beauty and the beast. She was more lovely than any woman he had seen or dreamed of. It was a beauty that went beyond the merely physical. There was sunshine in her and warmth and intelligence and laughter.
He did not realize he was drunk until he got to his feet to go up to bed and found himself on his hands and knees, the room spinning wildly about him. He did not know the effects of drunkenness until he was lying on his bed—somehow he had called his valet and that astonished individual had helped him upstairs and undressed him—and found himself in imminent danger of spinning off into space. He clung to the outer edges of the mattress with both hands—even his right. Then he disgraced himself utterly by not making it to the close stool in time before retching up all his insides.
It was late the following day—very late—when he made his decision.
He usually stayed away from London during the height of the Season. This year would be an exception. He was going to London. He was going to see her again even if she did not see him. He did not know why he had not thought of it before. Why not torture himself further? The pain surely could not be any worse anyway. And the Season was about to begin. She had been gone for a whole month.
Yes, he thought, happy now that his life had turned in a definite direction—even if it turned out, as it very likely would, that it was a disastrous direction.
Yes, he was going to London.
6
SHE WAS ENJOYING SPRING IN TOWN. SHE ALWAYS did. Life took on its familiar routine and became busier every week, as more and more of her friends and acquaintances arrived from the country for the new session of Parliament and for the Season.
There were visits to modistes and extended sessions for fittings and viewings of fashion plates and the choosing of fabrics. There were shopping trips for slippers and fans and gloves and bonnets and a dozen and one other things. There were visits to the library and the galleries and walks in the parks and drives. There were calls to be paid and received.
There was her court to receive—she often enjoyed a private smile over Gabriel’s description of her admirers. Lord Francis Kneller, the first to call, informed her that after her seventh Season—she had been rash enough to give him the number—a young lady became officially known as a spinster and had to retire to a country cottage with a trunkful of large white mobcaps.
“You had better avoid the ignominy, Samantha,” he said languidly, fingering a jeweled snuffbox but deciding against opening it, “and marry me.”
“The choice is between a trunkful of mobcaps and you with your lavender and pink evening clothes, Francis?” she said, tapping her cheek thoughtfully with one finger. “What a shockingly difficult choice. I shall think seriously upon the matter during the Season and give you my answer later. Shall I?”
“The choice will be easier,” he said, “once you have seen my new turquoise coat. Satin, you know, with a silver waistcoat and turquoise embroidery. Together, they will bowl you right off your feet.”
She laughed and tapped him affectionately on the arm. She wondered how he would react if she accepted his proposal. He would be deeply shocked. Probably horrified. He played the game with her because he knew it was safe. She doubted that Francis would ever marry, unless it was for dynastic reasons. He was too indolent and too frivolous.
“This I can hardly wait to see,” she said.
The others all came, too, one by one, as they returned to town. Mr. Wishart came for tea, bringing a large bouquet of spring flowers with him. Mr. Carruthers escorted her to the library and appeared surprised when she took home with her the texts of two plays instead of novels. In Mr. Carruthers’s experience ladies read only novels. Sir Robin Talbot took her to the National Gallery and they had a very pleasant afternoon conversing about art. Mr. Nicholson took her driving in the park and made her a marriage offer—again. She refused him—again. He was perhaps the only one of her suitors who seriously wished to marry her, she believed, and yet he always cheerfully accepted defeat. Perhaps he did not really want very badly to marry her. Surely if he did he would have to retire with something of a broken heart after she had refused him so many times.
It was all very pleasant. She was glad to be in London, glad to be busy again, glad to be back in her familiar world. And of course soon the Season would be in full swing, and there would be scarcely a moment in which to wonder if one was happy or sad, enthusiastic or bored, exuberant or exhausted. There would be more invitations to choose among than there were hours in the day.
It was only very occasionally that she literally stopped in her tracks and frowned at a fleeting feeling. She could never quite get her mind around it. It was not a pleasant feeling. It was rather as if the bottom fell out of her stomach—or out of her world—and she was about to fall in after it. And yet she always jolted back to reality before it could happen and before she could even understand what had caused the feeling.
Sometimes if she was walking early in the park, or if she was down by the Serpentine, she would see children tripping along in front of their parents or nurses and the feeling would be there. Was it that she missed Michael and Mary and even Rosalie Boyle’s girls? Perhaps. She was fond of them. She did not want children of her own, of course. She did not want that emotional tie. Or sometimes the park was more deserted than usual, and she felt almost as if she were in the country. With a hill and a lake and rapids close by. She was missing Chalcote? Yes, of course she was. It was a beautiful estate, and it was owned by Gabriel and Jenny, two of the dearest people in her life.
Sometimes there were not even clues that strong. Sometimes she was laughing with her friends over some nonsense—she rarely talked seriously with her friends, especially the gentlemen. Or sometimes she was shopping, involved in the purchase of some quite unnecessary frivolity. Or sometimes she just remembered Francis’s joke about the seven years and what awaited her afterward.
She never knew what brought on the feeling. It always came quite without warning and disappeared so soon afterward that any person who happened to be with her at the time did not even notice that anything had happened.
She thought sometimes of Highmoor and Mr. Wade. Not often. For some reason she did not stop to analyze, she did not like to remember those afternoons. Doing so depressed her. They had been very pleasant and he had been very pleasant and there was an end to the matter. Those afternoons would never be repeated, and she would never see him again. It did not matter. It was a brief, unimportant episode from her past that should be pleasant to remember but was not. Perhaps later. Perhaps at some other time.
She wished—absurdly, she still wished—that she could go back and change just one moment out of those meetings. She wished she had turned back to wave at the end. If her final memory of him was of seeing him standing at the other side of the stream, his hand raised, his face lit by his lovely smile, perhaps she could put the whole memory away. Perhaps she would not feel slightly distressed every time she remembered.
It seemed that warm friendship was not for her any more than love was. That made her a very—shallow person, did it not?
LADY ROCHESTER’S BALL WAS recognized, by all agreement, as the main opening event of the Season. It was bound to be an impossible squeeze and therefore an unqualified success. Samantha looked forward to it. There was always an excitement about beginning the social whirl yet again. And perhaps there would be someone new…. Not that she needed new beaux. It was just that sometimes interest flagged. She felt instantly contrite. Some young ladies of ton would give half their fortunes for even one or two of the gentlemen who paid court to Samantha Newman.
Hyde Park was becoming crowded during the afternoons for what was known as the fashionable hour. And the unusually fine weather that they were being graced with was bringing everyone out in force. Perhaps the biggest crowd of all turned out on the afternoon of the day before the Rochester ball. Samantha rode up beside Mr. Nicholson in his new curricle, twirling a confection of a new parasol above her head, smiling gaily and with genuine enjoy
ment at the people about her. It was a good thing they had not come with serious intentions for a drive, she thought. The press of vehicles and horses about them on the paths was thick, and the intention of most riders was to observe and converse rather than to exercise their horses.
She spoke with friends and acquaintances to whom they could draw close and waved to others who were too far distant.
“How very pleasant this is,” she commented to Mr. Nicholson during a brief respite, while one group of acquaintances drew away and another was still approaching. “I am so happy that the Season is starting again.”
“My only complaint,” he said, “is that I have to share you with the whole world, Miss Newman.”
“But I could think of no more congenial companion with whom to make the drive to and from the park, sir,” she said. She laughed gaily from sheer exuberance and gave her parasol an exceptionally enthusiastic twirl.
It was at that precise moment that her eyes met those of a gentleman some distance farther on in the crowd and she froze. Utterly. To ice. She forgot to breathe.
The most handsome man in the world, Jenny had once called him. And she had agreed, though she had called him cold. His hair was more blond than her own—almost silver-blond. His eyes were as blue as her own, but a paler shade. His features and his physique were perfect. A Greek god. The angel Gabriel, she and Jenny had called him before they had known that the other man—the one they had called his counterpart, Lucifer—had been christened Gabriel. A strange, coincidental irony.
Her eyes met his now across the milling crowd of humanity. He was as beautiful and as dazzling as ever, though she had not set eyes on him in six years. He had been out of the country, banished by his father.
Her eyes met his and held. He looked back appreciatively and touched the brim of his hat with his riding whip.
“… trying to rival the sun and succeeding quite admirably. Beautiful ladies ought not to be allowed to wear yellow.” It was the languid voice of Lord Francis Kneller, who was leaning from his horse’s back and draping an arm along the side of the curricle. “I am going to challenge Nicholson to pistols at dawn for luring you into his curricle while the rest of us male mortals must ride alone.”
He had disappeared in the crowd. Breath shuddered back into her. “Nonsense, Francis,” she said without her usual spirit, unable to think of anything witty to say in return.
He sat upright again and grinned at her. “Crawled out at the wrong side of the bed this morning, did you, pet?” he asked. “Nonsense, Francis.” He imitated her sharp tone.
“I say,” Lord Hawthorne, his young cousin, exclaimed. He was a young gentleman who had hovered in the outer circle of Samantha’s court all last Season, though he must be two or three years her junior. “Frank just pointed out Rushford to me—the notorious Rushford. Did anyone know that he was back?”
Samantha swallowed convulsively. Of course. She had heard that his father had died. But she always thought of Lionel—when she could not stop herself from thinking about him—as Viscount Kersey. He was the Earl of Rushford now, and had been for a couple of years.
“He appeared last week,” Mr. Nicholson said. “One would not have thought he would have the nerve. I suppose he is to be admired for having the courage to appear here again after such a shocking scandal. But it must have been years ago.”
Six. It had been six years ago.
“I hear he is being received,” Lord Hawthorne said. “And I hear he has appeared at White’s.” There was faint envy in his voice. Lord Hawthorne was still waiting for his entrée to the hallowed halls of the most prestigious gentlemen’s club in London.
“The ladies will be intrigued,” Mr. Nicholson said. “They always are intrigued by the very gentlemen they should spurn. And, of course, he always was a handsome devil. Oh, do beg pardon, Miss Newman. Did you ever meet the Earl of Rushford? He was Viscount Kersey until a year or so ago.”
Samantha was feeling somewhat dizzy. She had always wondered—with a fascinated sort of dread—how it would feel to see him again. She had hoped that the shame surrounding his departure from England would keep him away for the rest of his life. But he was back. And she had seen him again. She felt—dizzy.
“It was Miss Newman’s cousin—the present Lady Thornhill—who was at the heart of the scandal,” Lord Francis said quietly, without any of the usual bored cynicism in his voice. “I am sure Miss Newman will not wish to be reminded of the gentleman, Ted. Do you suppose that the flowers in Miss Tweedsmuir’s bonnet have denuded someone’s whole garden? Or do they come from a very large garden, perhaps, and have merely emptied out a corner of it. They must weigh half a ton.”
“It is a very modish bonnet, Francis,” Samantha said, twirling her parasol again, “and doubtless the envy of half the ladies in the park. She is, after all, drawing a great deal of attention her way, and what more could any lady ask for?” She was deeply grateful for the deliberate change of topic.
“It is a blatant ploy,” he said, all ennui again, “to have people look at the bonnet and not at the face beneath it. It is a pity she cannot wear it into ballrooms.”
“Francis,” Samantha said sharply, “you are wickedly unkind.”
“Not to you, my sweet,” he said, “except to object to your yellow gown, which makes the sunshine look dim—especially when one looks at the face and figure of the lady inside the gown.”
He heaped several more lavish compliments on her during the next minute or so, while Lord Hawthorne looked on in envy and Mr. Nicholson looked impatient to move off. And then they were indeed moving forward, until Lady Penniford and Lord Danton stopped in their barouche to ask Samantha how her aunt and her aunt’s friend did.
Samantha no longer looked about her to any distance. She was afraid to look. It took all the effort of her training and experience to keep smiling and conversing, to give Mr. Nicholson and everyone to whom they talked no inkling of the seething upheaval that was churning inside her.
She was home half an hour later, though it seemed ten times as long as that. She ran lightly upstairs, was relieved to find the drawing room empty, was even more relieved to receive no answer to her tap on the door of her aunt’s sitting room, and rushed on to her own rooms. Aunt Aggy must still be with Lady Sophia, who was making the most of her invalid state now that there were plenty of friends in town to visit her and sit with her.
Samantha kicked off her slippers in her dressing room and tossed her bonnet in the direction of the nearest chair. She peeled off her gloves and sent them flying after the bonnet. Then she hurried into her bedchamber and threw herself facedown across her bed.
He was back. She clutched fistfuls of the bedcover in both hands and held tight. She had seen him again. And he had seen her. And had acknowledged her. He had not been at all aghast. He had looked at her appreciatively. She had seen enough admiration in men’s eyes to have recognized it in his.
How dared he.
After what had happened.
He had been Jenny’s betrothed. Jenny had been besotted with him, ecstatic to be officially betrothed to him after five years of loving him and having an unofficial understanding with him. Samantha had not particularly liked him. She had always thought that there was a coldness behind the undeniably handsome exterior. Until he had solicited her hand for a set at one ball, that was, and led her outside and down into the garden, presumably because he was upset that Jenny had just spent half an hour with Lord Thornhill. And he had kissed her.
She had been eighteen years old. It had been her first kiss. He had been the most handsome man of her experience. It had been an impossibly tempting combination. She had tumbled into love with him. And had been pained by it, and by his tragic claim to love her while he was bound to marry Jenny, and by guilt because Jenny had loved him so dearly and had been so very happy with her dreams of a future with him. He had suggested that she try to do something to end the betrothal, since honor forbade him to do so.
She had been so very naive. S
he had suppressed her uneasiness, her feeling that it was not very honorable to suggest that the woman he claimed to love do something to end his betrothal to her cousin and closest friend. She had been hopelessly in love, though at least she had not consented to do that for him. He had been forced to do it another way, forging an incriminating letter from Gabriel to Jenny and having the letter read publicly to a whole ballroomful of members of the ton. He had brought terrible ruin on Jenny and had forced Gabriel to rush her into a marriage that neither of them wanted—at the time.
Even then, poor, naive girl that she was—though she had not known then of the forgery—Samantha had believed that he would come to claim her. She had maneuvered a brief meeting with him in the hallway outside yet another ballroom—and he had laughed at her and assured her that she must have misunderstood what had been merely gallantry on his part. He had dared to look at her with amused sympathy.
That was the last time she had seen him—until this afternoon. His father had discovered the truth and had forced him to make it publicly known, so that Jenny’s reputation might be restored. And then his father had banished him.
She had hated him from that day to this. Hated him for the terrible thing he had done to Jenny, hated him for ruining her own first Season and for toying with the fragile emotions of an innocent and naive young girl. She had hated him for humiliating her so. And she had hated him as a genuinely evil man.
And yet she knew that there was a thin line between hatred and love. For six years she had hated him and feared—deeply feared—that perhaps she still loved him. For six years she had hoped fiercely that her feelings would never be put to the test, that he would never come home to England, that she would never see him again. For six years she had distrusted love, though she had seen signs about her that it could bring happiness. Jenny and Gabriel loved each other and were happy. Rosalie and Albert loved and were happy. But love for her was something to be dreaded, something to be avoided at all costs.