by Mary Balogh
“No,” she said after a mere moment’s hesitation. “I shall write this morning. And George? May I say your carriage will already be on the way by the time she reads my letter? So that she will know that we mean it? So that she will not say no? So that I will not have to wait too long?”
He laughed softly against the top of her head.
“We had better move,” he said, “or the carriage will be arriving for them even before your letter is written.”
He was very, very good, Dora thought a short while later as they sat in the library together, writing their letters, at persuading other people to solve their problems and be happy. But what of himself? He had told her enough last night to make it seem that he had told her everything. But she knew that was not so.
He was, she feared, fathoms deep in pain and grief, but for some reason preferred to bear them alone. Why would he not share with her? He had encouraged her to share her pain over her mother’s defection, and some good had come of it—oh, perhaps a great deal of good. Pain, even pain from long ago, could heal. But repressing it, refusing to talk about it even with one’s spouse, would not do that. Perhaps the difference was that her mother was still alive, while his wife and son were dead. Perhaps there seemed no way to heal the wounds of the past.
But oh, she wished she knew at least what the wounds were. They were not just grief, were they?
The realization that it was indeed more than grief that burdened her husband and caused his pain was almost more than Dora could bear. But did she really want to know? The answer was surely no. But . . .
She needed to know.
If their marriage was ever to be a truly happy one, then she needed to know.
And yet she also needed to respect his right to privacy.
She shook her head and returned her attention to her letter.
16
Dora was excited by the prospect of being hostess at her very own ball. She also experienced a bit of panic at the realization that she had no experience at organizing such a grand event. Perhaps she ought to have started with a dinner or a small, select party, and expanded from there. But it could not be that difficult, could it? And indeed it could not, she soon discovered, for her own part in planning the ball was to be a very small one.
She made her way to Mr. Briggs’s office that same afternoon after her walk on the beach with George. But almost before she could mention the word ball to her husband’s secretary, he slid across his desk toward her an impressively long guest list he had prepared for her perusal. He also had the tentative draft of an invitation card. A short while after, she summoned Mrs. Lerner to her sitting room, but her announcement of the coming event drew no exclamation of surprise from the housekeeper. Instead, she produced a written list of plans and details that Her Grace might wish to look over.
When Dora went belowstairs the following morning in the hope that she was not interrupting the chef at a particularly busy time, she discovered that indeed she was. But Mr. Humble ushered her over to one end of the long wooden kitchen table, sat her down with a steaming cup of tea and two large oatmeal and raisin biscuits fresh from the oven, and set before her a lengthy list of suggested delicacies for the refreshment room at the ball and a prospective menu for the sit-down supper at eleven. By that time Dora was not even unduly surprised. The servants of a large house, she was learning, knew everything almost before their master and mistress did. Mr. Humble even informed her that he knew of a number of people within five miles of the hall who would be delighted to provide the extra help he and the butler and housekeeper would need from a day or two before the ball until a day or so after. Her Grace must not worry her head about it.
Dora was quite unsurprised to discover when she ran the head gardener to earth in one of the greenhouses beyond the kitchen garden behind the house that he already had ideas about what flowers would be blooming and what greenery would be ready for filling the urns and vases that would decorate the ballroom and the main hall and staircase and other rooms that would be used on the evening of the ball. And she was almost expecting when she went to the stables to consult the head groom that he had plans already well in place for the handling of a large number of carriages and horses. Her expectations proved quite correct—Her Grace need not worry her head over it.
Mr. Briggs had informed her earlier that he was in the process of discovering and engaging the best orchestra available—subject, of course, to Her Grace’s approval. He had also begun to draw up a suggested program of dances suitable for a ball in the country, though he did need to know whether Her Grace wished to include any waltzes. Although the waltz was by now widely danced in London, even at Almack’s, he explained, there were people in the more rural parts of England who still considered it a somewhat scandalous invention. Dora instructed him to include two sets of waltzes, one before supper and one after.
* * *
The invitations had not yet been written when Dora called upon Barbara Newman at the vicarage one morning. Barbara was teaching her youngest daughters, aged eight and nine, to knit. They sat side by side on a sofa, as neat as two pins, wielding fat needles and thick wool, with identical looks of frowning concentration upon their faces. Dora already loved them dearly, as she did their mother. It was difficult sometimes to understand what drew one to some people as friends, above the level of friendly acquaintance. It had not happened often to her, but it had happened twice already at Penderris. She was very well blessed.
“Everyone is as excited as can be about your ball,” Barbara said as soon as the initial greetings had been dispensed with. “There has not been one or indeed any sort of grand entertainment at the hall in living memory. How delightful that it is to happen now when the duke is a happy man at last.”
Dora stared at her in surprise. “But how did you know?” she asked.
Barbara laughed. “Do you really imagine that there is a person left within five miles of here who does not know?” she said.
Dora laughed too. But her friend’s attention was taken by the silent tears of the younger of the two girls, who had dropped a stitch and thought her work had been ruined. Barbara picked up the stitch, worked it through the loops down which it had run, and handed the needles back to the little girl with smiles and words of encouragement.
The ball, then, Dora thought as she made her way home later, would happen of itself, almost without her assistance. There was certainly no going back now, was there?
“I could easily grow accustomed to having an army of servants,” she observed to George when he found her sitting in the flower garden before luncheon with a book open on her lap. She laughed when he raised his eyebrows and looked amused. “Not only do they have every detail of the ball well in hand already, but also they have left me not a single weed in any of the flower beds to pull.”
In one way, she thought as the days passed, it was a pity there was so little for her to do as she waited in an agony of mingled excitement and trepidation for her mother’s arrival—or for the return of the empty carriage. But gradually, during those days, something else happened to nag at her thoughts when she was idle. Or, rather, something did not happen, something that always happened with dependable regularity every month but had failed to materialize two weeks ago or on any of the days since.
She accompanied George on a tour of the farm one day and listened to explanations of crop rotation and drainage and lambing and pasture and shearing. She was able to assure him in perfect truth that she was not bored. On another day she went with him and his steward to look at a few of the laborers’ cottages that the steward thought needed repairs and that George thought needed replacing altogether. While they discussed the matter and circled the buildings and climbed ladders and talked with a few of the men who lived in the houses concerned, Dora called upon their wives and exchanged recipes and knitting patterns with a couple of them while she observed from the inside the dilapidated condition of their cottage
s.
She returned alone the following morning with some baked goods for the families and sweetmeats for the children, all of which she had made herself the evening before after assuring a wary, somewhat shocked Mr. Humble that she would neither burn the kitchen down nor leave a mess behind her. She took her small harp with her and played for some of the elderly and the children. More important, she was able to take the news—with George’s blessing—that the cottages would be replaced before winter came on.
On another day Dora accompanied George on the longish drive to visit Julian and Philippa. She found them as delightful as she had when she met them in London. She had feared they might resent her and even see her, perhaps, as a fortune hunter. But she saw no evidence of any such thing. Of course they did not yet know . . . If there was anything to know, that was.
“Uncle George is so clearly happy,” Philippa told Dora while they were strolling together across a lawn to the lily pond. “Just look at him.”
They both turned to look back to where Julian and George stood talking on the terrace outside the morning room. George held young Belinda on one arm, and the child was bouncing up and down. It felt to Dora as though her stomach performed a somersault.
Was he happy? she wondered as they drove home in the carriage later and she gazed at his profile next to her. Both Philippa and Barbara had used that word to describe him. But if he was, it was surely a fragile thing, easily destroyed. If she— But perhaps it was not so.
He turned his face toward her and took her hand in his.
“What is it?” he asked her.
She shook her head. “Oh, nothing,” she said. “I am anxious about my mother’s coming. And I am fearful that she will not come.”
His eyes searched hers. “That is all?” he asked.
“All?” she said. “I have not known her for twenty-two years, George, a longer time than I knew her. And Sir Everard Havell is the man who took her away from us, though I have come to understand that perhaps it was a sense of honor more than villainy that motivated him. I do not know what to expect of either of them—or of myself. Sometimes it may be wiser to let sleeping dogs lie.”
“But only sometimes?” he asked.
“It is an academic question anyway,” she said with a sigh. “They have been invited and the carriage has been sent.”
He was content to leave it at that. Perhaps she ought to have answered his original questions truthfully since she had not actually been thinking of her mother at the time. But she had not done so, and it was too late now.
They rode the rest of the way home in what might have been a companionable silence if she had not been trying to convince herself with every passing mile that it was the uneven surface of the road and the resulting jolting of the carriage that was making her feel slightly bilious.
* * *
It had been good to have a lovely summer’s day on which to visit his nephew, George thought, but it was a shame much of it had had to be spent cooped up inside the carriage. And Dora looked slightly peaked, though she claimed it was only nervousness over her mother’s anticipated visit that was causing it.
The evening was as lovely as the day had been, only cooler. It was perfect for a stroll. He suggested one after dinner, and took her walking along a country lane behind the house instead of along the headland or down on the beach. Ripening crops waved in the slight breeze to either side of them, sheep baaed in the distance, a lone gull called overhead. The sky was turning pink in the west. The air was warm and slightly salty.
“Perfect,” he said, drawing a deep breath of it into his lungs.
“And this is all your land,” she said, gesturing to left and right. “What a dizzying thought.”
“I try not to take it for granted,” he said, “even though it has been either my father’s or mine all my life. I have always tried to count my blessings, even at the darkest moments of my life—and we all have those. I have always tried to see to it that those who live and work on my land share some of its bounty. I am rather ashamed that those cottages grew so dilapidated before I realized that repairs upon repairs were no longer either feasible or fair.”
He drew her to a halt a few steps farther on.
“Stand just here, Dora,” he said, “where these lanes cross, and look back. It has always been one of my favorite spots on the estate or anywhere else for that matter.”
They had been walking slightly uphill, though the slope was not really apparent until one stopped and turned to look back. There were the fields, separated by stone walls and hedgerows bordering the narrow lanes. Below them was the house, square and solid, and the cultivated lawns and gardens surrounding it. Beyond them, and in total contrast to them, were the cliffs and the sea stretching to infinity, it seemed. The water was deep blue this evening, with the sky above it a slightly lighter shade blending into pink and red-orange and gold on the western horizon. It was the best of all times for this view—though actually almost any time of day and any weather was the best of all times to be standing just here.
“Sometimes beauty goes deeper than words, does it not?” she said after a lengthy silence.
Ah, she understood. She felt it too—the heart of home pulsing here.
He set one hand on her shoulder and squeezed slightly. Miriam had hated the sea. She had hated Penderris. God help him, she had hated him. He moved his hand to the nape of Dora’s neck and moved his fingers in a circle over the soft flesh there.
“You come here often?” she asked him. “Alone?”
“Not always alone,” he said. “I believe each of my friends came here with me at least once while they were convalescent at Penderris. There is something soothing about the lanes and fields and about the sheep and lambs. Even Ben managed to walk this far with his canes, though I remember his temper becoming frayed on the way back when it was obvious he was exhausted and in pain. But of course he would not allow Hugo and Ralph to make a chair of their hands for him.” He chuckled softly at the memory. “Most of my walks here—and elsewhere—have been solitary ones, though. I suppose I am a solitary sort of man. Or perhaps it is that I just did not find the perfect walking companion until very recently.”
“Me?” She leaned slightly back into his hand.
“I am entirely comfortable with you, Dora,” he told her, “and I still marvel at the lovely surprise of it. You are all I need—all I have ever needed or will ever need. Just you.”
He was very close, he realized, to using the word love. And he might have done so in full truth, for of course he loved her. But the word was so polluted by youthful connotations of heavy-breathing passion and starry-eyed romance that it seemed an inappropriate word for him to use, for he was a forty-eight-year-old man and the love he felt for his wife was a quiet thing of contentment and adoration.
Yes, adoration. It was a better word than love to describe his feelings for her. But perhaps no specific word needed to be uttered aloud. That was the truly comfortable thing about Dora. Words were not always necessary.
He became suddenly aware, however, that the silence between them now had taken on a different quality and that there was a certain tension in the neck muscles beneath his hand.
“Are you not comfortable?” he asked her.
Her hesitation took him by surprise and alarmed him.
“Not at this precise moment,” she said.
He stepped around her to stand between her and the view. The evening light slanted across her face and made it look pale and unhappy. Her gaze had come to rest somewhere in the region of his neckcloth.
The seagull above them sounded suddenly mournful. The slight breeze felt chilly.
“We have been married longer than a month,” she said.
About six weeks, he believed. He dipped his head a little closer to hers.
“Nothing has happened,” she said. When he said nothing, she cleared her throat and conti
nued. “Something ought to have happened by now. More than two weeks ago, in fact. I have been hoping, but . . . Well, two weeks is a long time. I am so dreadfully sorry.” She was looking at her hands now, spread palms-up between them.
Comprehension dawned like a club to the back of his head. “Are you speaking of your courses?” he asked her.
“Yes,” she said. “I have never— I thought it might be because of the . . . the change in the circumstances of my life, but I do not believe it can be that. And it is possible that it is the . . . the change of life. I do not know. But I very much fear . . . I have been feeling—oh, not exactly bilious, but a little unsteady of digestion. I hope it is the change. I very much hope it. But . . . well, I do not think it is. I am so very, very sorry. I know it will ruin everything if I am right. I ought to have been more careful, though I really would not know how except not to— I ought—” She stopped altogether and spread her hands over her face.
By that time he had her shoulders gripped in his hands.
“Dora?” he said. “You are increasing?”
“I fear I must be,” she said. “I think it is too much to hope it is the change of life.”
He tried to look into her face, but her head was lowered and in the shade of his arm. His forehead almost touched hers.
“You are going to have a baby?” he said. “We are going to have a child? Dora?” Something strange had happened to his voice. He scarcely recognized it.
“I fear so,” she said. “Indeed, in my heart I know so.”
“I am going to be a father?” He was still speaking oddly. And then, still gripping her by the shoulders, he threw back his head, his eyes tightly closed. “I am going to be a father?”
“I am so sorry.”
And finally he heard the terrible misery in her voice. He opened his eyes and lowered his head.
“Why?” His eyes met hers as she raised her own head. “Are you afraid, Dora? Because of your age, perhaps? Is this something you really did not want? Then I am the one who ought to be apologizing. But . . . Do you not want to be a mother? At long last?”