Only Beloved

by Mary Balogh

  “I suppose,” Agnes said, “you loved Sir Everard. I can understand that sometimes a new romance might seem more enticing than the marriage one already has. But more enticing than the love of one’s children? Maybe I am being unjust to you, however, for perhaps, even probably, you would not have chosen Sir Everard over us if Papa had not pushed you into doing so. It was especially heinous of him to do so if indeed you were innocent, as you assured Flavian you were when he called here last year. Yet we speak to Papa and treat him with honor and respect. Perhaps it is wrong of us to have such a . . . double standard.”

  Their mother spoke at last.

  “I did write to you, Dora,” she said. “I sent you both gifts for your birthdays until the silence convinced me that your father must be withholding them from you. Besides, letters and gifts were no proper atonement for abandonment. I could not take you with me when I left. Your father would have pursued me and taken you back, and that would have been more distressing for you than my leaving you behind. Besides, at the time I had nowhere to go, nowhere to take you. Not that I even thought of it until later, I must confess. I ran away upon impulse, and when my heart began to ache for you with a terrible pain, I chose to stay away rather than return to you and your father too. But being forever separated from my children broke my heart in two. It has never quite mended.”

  “I do assure you, Dora, Agnes—” Sir Everard began.

  Dora whipped her head about and looked incredulously at him. He faltered, and the color in his face deepened.

  He started again. “I do assure you, Your Grace, my lady, that your mother had done nothing whatsoever to deserve the humiliation she suffered at your father’s hand that night, any more than I had. A little flirtation . . . Well, everyone flirts, you know. It was entirely harmless. We had no more idea of eloping than . . . well, than of flying to the moon. But when your father said what he did, I was forced, as an honorable gentleman, to make one of two choices—either slap a glove in his face and call him out or take Rosamond away and wait patiently until I could offer her the protection of my name for the rest of her life.”

  “But as a chivalrous gentleman,” Flavian said, his voice heavy with irony, “you were not honor-bound to consider Lady Debbins’s ch-children.” It was not a question.

  The manservant chose that moment to bring in the tea tray, laden with drinks and dainties none of them wanted. Lady Havell made no move to pour or make any reference to the refreshments. By the time the servant left the room, the silence was loud and heavy.

  “I beg your pardon for coming here uninvited to disturb your peace,” Dora said, getting to her feet. “I did not intend to speak so harshly. I thought, I suppose, to extend some sort of olive branch. We all make choices in life and must then live with the consequences. And some choices are not easy to make. I have lived long enough to understand that as well as the fact that we can almost never go back if we regret a certain path we took. But thank you for your kindness in receiving us.”

  “I do not remember you,” Agnes said, addressing their mother, “except for a few flashing images that are never complete episodes. But I do know that you did something very right. Dora was a wonderful mother to me during my growing years. She was warm and loving and nurturing. She could have learned to be that way only from you, for Papa was always a remote, humorless figure who saw to our material needs but never gave us much of either his attention or his love. It must have been difficult being married to him.”

  William Keeping had been another such man, Dora thought, though admittedly he had not been either a drinker or an openly jealous man.

  The others had risen too. George had still not spoken a word. He did now, however. He reached out a hand to her mother, who was just getting to her feet.

  “I am pleased to have made your acquaintance, ma’am,” he said. “I promise you that I will cherish your daughter for the rest of my days.”

  Dora watched her mother bite her lip as her eyes grew suspiciously bright.

  “I never wanted anything but her happiness,” she said, “though my behavior suggested otherwise, I suppose. Thank you, Your Grace. I would say that Dora is a fortunate lady, but I do believe you are an equally fortunate man.”

  He smiled at her.

  “Ma’am,” Dora said before pausing and lowering her head to look at her hands. She began again. “Mother, perhaps you would care to start writing to me again at Penderris Hall in Cornwall. I will receive those letters, and I will reply.”

  “I will do that, Dora,” her mother said.

  “I am going to have a child in the autumn,” Agnes blurted.

  “Oh.” Her mother turned wistful eyes upon her. “I am so glad, Agnes.” It was probable, though, that she had already noticed.

  “I shall . . . let you know,” Agnes said.

  “Thank you.”

  And then they were back in the carriage, less than half an hour after they had left it. Or was it an eternity? Dora and Agnes no longer sat together. Agnes had her back to the horses, Flavian’s arm about her shoulders, her face hidden in the hollow between his shoulder and neck. Dora sat beside George, not quite touching him.

  “I am sorry I brought you, my love,” Flavian said.

  That made Agnes’s head come up. “You did no such thing,” she informed him. “I told George I was coming and you said you would accompany me.”

  “I have always had a b-bit of d-difficulty with my m-memory,” he said meekly, deliberately exaggerating his stammer.

  “I am not sorry I came,” she said, resting her head on his shoulder again. “I will write to her after my confinement. Why should I write to Papa, after all, and not to her?”

  “Quite so,” he said.

  Dora ached to lean against George, to feel the reassurance of his warmth and strength. Perhaps he knew. He took her hand in his, laced their fingers, and raised it to his lips. He leaned slightly sideways until her head tipped very naturally against his shoulder.

  “Bravo, Dora,” he said softly.

  She had to concentrate very hard upon not weeping.

  How had she ever found comfort in her life, she wondered, before there was George’s calm voice and kind eyes and firm shoulder and sheltering arms?

  She might have been a little alarmed at the loss of her spirit of independence if she had spared it a thought.

  Her heart ached for the mother she had lost twenty-two years ago and found again today and . . .

  And what?

  12

  Agnes and Flavian set off for their home in Sussex, late as the hour was when they all arrived back on Grosvenor Square. Dora and George walked over to see them on their way.

  “I am glad I went with you,” Agnes said, “though I think I will be upset over it for a few days. She is a stranger, yet she is our mother. Oh, I do not know what to think. How are you feeling, Dora?”

  “She is not a stranger to me,” Dora told her, “and yet she is. If she writes to me, I will write back. Oh, it was so wicked of Papa, Agnes, to withhold her letters and gifts. Though perhaps he thought it was for the best. I am tired of blaming and resenting and hating.”

  They hugged each other, both with tears in their eyes.

  “At least we have each other,” Agnes said. “I love you more than I can ever say, Dora.”

  After they returned to Stanbrook House, Dora went upstairs to lie down in the duchess’s bedchamber. She could not fall asleep, though, weary as she was. She kept remembering her mother’s saying that she had dressed for visitors every day after seeing the announcement of Dora’s upcoming wedding, and the memory made her throat ache with unshed tears. But how could she feel sorry for her mother? Agnes had waited day after day, week after week when she was a child. She used to prop up one of her dolls in her window each night when she went to bed herself, to keep watch while she slept, and every night she told the doll all she would have to show
Mama when she came home. But sometimes she would shut the doll up inside a cupboard and hide beneath her bedcovers and refuse even to give Dora a good night kiss.

  Oh, how one’s heart ached sometimes, even with memories of events long past and best forgotten.

  How happy she had been last week when Papa had come to London and agreed to give her away at her wedding. How his words on her wedding morning had warmed her heart. Yet Papa had driven her mother away and had then kept back her letters and gifts to her daughters. How could he have withheld gifts for a five-year-old?

  Oh, but she really was tired, tired, tired of apportioning blame.

  She must have dozed. She awoke when something warm covered her hand, which was outside the bedcovers. It was George’s hand. He was sitting on the side of the bed, looking down at her with concern. Her cheeks were wet, she realized when with his other hand he dried them gently with a large linen handkerchief. She smiled at him and turned her hand beneath his to clasp it.

  “You are so very good at that,” she said.

  “At . . . ?” He raised his eyebrows.

  “At giving comfort,” she said. “But who comforts you, George?”

  She could have sworn for a moment that it was deep pain she saw in his eyes, but then they smiled with a kindness that was almost like a shield.

  “I draw my comfort from giving it,” he said.

  She believed him. She had heard much about him from his friends and their wives and from Agnes, and she had experienced his kindness for herself. But the question remained. Who did comfort him? She was aware of a huge dark pool of loneliness in him. He had admitted it to her in Inglebrook when he had come to ask her to marry him, but at the time she had thought of it only as an absence of close friends, and the lack of a wife. She suspected now, though—more than suspected—that his loneliness went far deeper than that.

  “Give comfort to me, then.” She turned onto her back and opened her arms to him. But she had got beneath the covers when she came here. She drew them back with one hand and opened her arms to him again. “And let me comfort you.”

  He gazed back into her eyes for a moment and then about the room. “In the duchess’s bedchamber?” he said.

  “I am the duchess,” she told him.

  “Well,” he said softly, “and so you are.”

  They were both fully clothed. He was even still wearing his Hessian boots. He pushed the covers back farther and climbed onto the bed without removing them or anything else, which might simply mean that he was weary and intended to lie down beside her and sleep.

  He intended no such thing—or not yet, anyway. And she had started it. Goodness, she had actually invited him into her own bed. In broad daylight. What sort of a hussy would he think her?

  But there was no evidence that he was thinking at all, and very soon rational thought fled Dora’s mind too. She had thought last night’s embraces impossibly, wonderfully intimate after he had stripped off her nightgown and they were both naked. But today when they were both fully clothed . . . Well, today he fondled her with hard, seeking hands and a demanding, urgent mouth, and she explored him just as boldly despite the barrier of several layers of various garments. And today he lifted her skirts just high enough and knelt between her thighs after spreading them wide with his knees and unbuttoned the fall of his pantaloons at the waist and slid his hands beneath her buttocks and came plunging deep inside her—all within moments, it seemed, and all fully visible to them both.

  Dora’s breath caught in her throat, and her hands went to his fully clothed shoulders as he leaned over her, and her silk-stockinged legs twined about his and her feet came to rest on the warm, supple leather of his boots.

  “Am I hurting you?” His eyes were heavy-lidded with desire.

  “No.”

  And oh, my—oh, my!—he withdrew and plunged again and she tightened her hold on his legs and braced her feet and lifted her hips and they rode hard—there were no other words to describe what happened even if her mind had been searching for words. She did not know how long it lasted and would not have known even if there had been a clock within her line of vision, for there was no such thing as time. Her eyes were upon his and his upon hers, yet there was no embarrassment, not even any real awareness that they gazed into each other as they coupled. It might have gone on forever as far as Dora was concerned. But the wonderful, wonderful pleasure turned eventually to a need that was almost painful and yet more pleasurable than pleasure and finally so urgent that everything in her tightened and strained against him and his hands came beneath her again and held her hard while he drove inward and stayed there.

  The universe broke apart—which was the silliest thought imaginable, Dora decided seconds or minutes later after she had felt deep within again that lovely gush of his release and he had uncoupled them and lain down beside her, his arm beneath her head. They were warm and rumpled and breathless and—oh, goodness me!—was this how married people behaved? Was this normal?

  If it was not, she did not care. Oh, she did not care.

  “Thank you, Dora,” he murmured against her ear after a long time. “You are indeed an enormous comfort to me.”

  And sadness returned. For even giving herself to him as she had just done could not really comfort that pain she was sure she had seen in his eyes for one unguarded moment a little while ago. Perhaps, ah, perhaps he would share it when they went to Penderris. Perhaps he would tell her just exactly what the Earl of Eastham’s appearance at the church during their wedding had been all about.

  It meant more than it had appeared to mean, she was perfectly sure.

  “We will go home tomorrow?” she asked him.

  “I think I am at home now,” he said. “Not here in Stanbrook House necessarily, but here with you in my arms.”

  For someone who had said there would be no romance in their marriage, he really was not doing badly at all.

  “But yes,” he said. “We will go home, Dora. Home to Cornwall. Tomorrow.”

  * * *

  The journey between Penderris Hall and London was always a long one. The hours spent inside the carriage were tedious, and George had always found that it was almost impossible to read—the book moved too much in his hand despite the fact that his carriage was well sprung. And the passing scenery had ceased to charm a long time ago. Toll booths, the need to change horses, the need to eat and sleep at posting inns, the weather, sometimes in the form of torrential rain or, occasionally, even snow that made the roads impassable—all made the journey seem longer each time he made it.

  But this time he did not find the return home either long or tedious. He saw everything through fresh eyes as Dora commented upon passing scenes and people. He enjoyed aspects of the journey that he had always taken for granted. It amused her, for example, that they were bowed and scraped to wherever they went, that there was always a private parlor available to them even when they stopped unexpectedly for a meal, that the best chambers were always ready for them and the best food was served in a timely fashion.

  “I could grow accustomed to being a duchess,” she said on the first evening as they finished their dinner.

  “I hope you can,” he said, “since you are stuck with being a duchess for the rest of your life.”

  She looked at him blankly for a moment and then dissolved into laughter.

  He loved hearing her laugh.

  She was not quite laughing one morning after they had been traveling for an hour or so in companionable silence. But she was smiling, and her eyes were bright with merriment.

  “What is amusing you?” he asked.

  “Oh,” she said and looked mortified that he had noticed. “Perhaps it is just that I am happy.”

  “Happiness makes you smirk?” he asked. But he found that he was smiling now too.

  She laughed outright then. “I was feeling dizzy at the realization that I am o
n my way home with my husband,” she said. “I was thinking that perhaps I was dreaming, that I had fallen into a trance while trying not to listen to Miranda Corley plod her painful way through a set piece on the pianoforte and had concocted this lovely imaginary life for myself.”

  “Miranda Corley was not your star pupil?” he asked.

  “Poor Miranda,” she said. “I do not doubt she has a dozen sterling qualities. A musical talent is not among them.”

  “It was a lovely dream?” he asked.

  “Well, consider it, George.” She turned to look at him, every inch the Miss Debbins he had met last year. “Just a little over a month ago I was sitting in my humble cottage, taking tea and minding my own business, when along came a handsome, wealthy duke to beg for my hand in marriage. It was the stuff of fairy tales. But it does seem that it is real, for I am not waking up to Miranda’s sorry efforts to produce music, am I?”

  “Wealthy?” he asked her. “Are you sure?”

  That gave her pause, and she blushed. “Are you?”

  “I am.” He took her hand in his and laced their fingers. “And handsome, Dora? The stuff of fairy tales?”

  “Well, you are,” she said, settling back in her seat. “And it is. Not to you, perhaps. But to me? Yes.”

  They lapsed into silence again while he thought about what she had said. He was Prince Charming to her Cinderella, was he? She could not know how close to a fairy tale their union seemed to him, though he had spoken of it before their marriage in practical, mundane terms. To have her beside him thus, his companion and lover, his wife, was lovely beyond words. He had said there would be no romance, but he had been thinking of the word in terms of hot, youthful passion. There was a romance of middle age too, he was discovering—quieter and less demonstrative, but nevertheless . . . well, romantic.

  “George,” she asked him, “why did you marry me? I mean, why me?”