Only Beloved

by Mary Balogh

  “I found a whole roll of satin ribbon in just the shade I wanted,” she announced, “and just the right width too. What a miracle!” She paused and looked again into the room. “Whatever are you doing, Aunt Dora? Uncle George would have fits if he saw you moving that table.”

  “I was putting it back where it was originally,” Dora said apologetically. “Sometimes I almost wish our servants were not quite so efficient.”

  “I am off to see if Belinda is up,” Philippa said before disappearing.

  “Oh, Dora,” her mother said as the door closed. “I am so glad to find you alone. When we were coming out of the shop, we ran almost headlong into the Earl of Eastham, who happened to be passing along the street. He insisted upon escorting us to the alehouse and ordering us a glass of lemonade. He had called at Mr. and Mrs. Clark’s, he told us, but when he discovered that they were busy preparing for a ball here this evening, he cut short his visit despite their protests. He had been intending to have a glass of ale alone before returning to his inn and resuming his travels tomorrow.”

  “Oh, dear,” Dora said, “I thought he would have been on his way long before now. George was not willing that he be invited to the ball, but it does seem unmannerly not to have done so. He and George have always had something of an antagonistic relationship, though I do not know why. And then, of course, it grew worse and culminated in the earl’s not only blaming George for not preventing the duchess’s suicide but even suggesting that he had pushed her to her death. It is not surprising that he would not allow me to invite the earl, is it? But it is all very unfortunate that he chose today of all days to come to the village again and so discovered that we are having a ball here but have excluded him. I daresay he may feel hurt.”

  “But he perfectly understands,” her mother assured her. “He said so. He did write to His Grace, you know, directly after he spoke to you at Mrs. Clark’s that afternoon. He felt he ought to so that it would not be thought he had approached you behind your husband’s back. George returned his letter unopened.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  Her mother moved closer and patted her hand. “He does not wish to upset you,” she said. “He is truly sorry that on your wedding day you were caught in the middle of a foolish quarrel that in no way concerned you. He would like to explain a few things to you, however, so that you may conceive a more informed and perhaps a more kindly opinion of him than you have now.”

  “I do not believe George would like me exchanging any correspondence with him, Mother,” Dora said. “And I do not feel so inclined anyway, though it probably was just a foolish quarrel. Most are, are they not? Though they can cause years of unnecessary estrangement and pain.”

  She might have been describing herself and her mother, she thought, except that they had never actually quarreled. Her mother had just disappeared. And what had happened to cause their estrangement had been no foolish squabble.

  “He will be leaving tomorrow morning to continue his travels,” her mother said. “He understands that you must be very busy today. However, he did ask me if I would inform you that he will be walking near the headland above the harbor just beyond the Penderris park limits for the next hour or so and would be honored if you would grant him a few minutes of your time there.”

  It sounded a little clandestine to Dora and really quite unnecessary. She did not wish any harm to the Earl of Eastham, and apparently he wished her none. But George was adamantly opposed to her having anything more to do with him. He even professed to loathe him, an admission that had somewhat startled her as she had not imagined that her husband could hate anyone. And George was not even at home this afternoon to consult. But the Earl of Eastham could hardly know that, could he? And having lived through long years of a separation from her mother and only now having found her again, Dora was saddened to think of all the lost years family quarrels brought about. The earl had reached out to her to apologize for spoiling her wedding day. He had even written to George. And now he was requesting a few minutes of her day in which to explain himself a little more fully. She still felt a bit guilty about not inviting him to the ball. The least she could do, surely, was listen to what he had to say.

  Perhaps there was still a chance that she might persuade George that people often hurt themselves more than anyone else when they cling to old hatreds and resentments even after an olive branch had been extended. Perhaps it was an olive branch the earl was extending today.

  Her mother was looking at her in some concern. “Perhaps I ought not to have said anything,” she said. “He seems a pleasant, sincere man to me, but Everard was not quite so sure after we met him. Stay here, Dora. I do not suppose he is really expecting you anyway.”

  Dora frowned and then laughed. “I suppose,” she said, “that if I do not go, I shall feel guilty all evening and unable to enjoy the ball fully. I shall go.”

  “Then let me come with you,” her mother said.

  “You have just walked all the way to the village and back,” Dora said, “on a warm day. Go and rest, or go to the drawing room and order up a pot of tea. Keep it warm for me. I will not be long.”

  But this was foolishness, she thought a few minutes later as she strode along the driveway in the direction of the eastern gate. The Earl of Eastham ought not to have asked it of her, and George would be annoyed, to say the least. She would, of course, tell him even if the earl had changed his mind and gone back to his inn without waiting for her—which she hoped he had done.

  Before she reached the gate, she had almost made up her mind to turn and go back to the house. But then she saw him off to her right, standing motionless on the headland, gazing out to sea. He looked lonely and rather forlorn, and it struck her that it must be the first time he had been back here since his sister died. And he had been very close to his sister.

  She noticed then that he was actually on Penderris land, not beyond its limits as he had said he would be. However, he was not trespassing by very much, and he was outside the cultivated part of the park.

  Dora hesitated only briefly before turning off the path and making her way toward him. He turned when she approached closer, and he watched her come with a warm and welcoming smile. He bowed when she was close, took her right hand in his, and raised it to his lips, a curiously courtly gesture for such surroundings.

  “You came despite the fact that you must be very busy today,” he said. “I did not really expect it, Duchess. I am touched by your kindness.”

  She repossessed herself of her hand. “I am expecting guests soon,” she said, “and must not be from home very long. My mother informed me that you had something particular to say to me, and I came. It was kind of you to take her and Mrs. Crabbe for a glass of lemonade. I know they appreciated it on such a warm afternoon.”

  “It was my pleasure,” he said. “Lady Havell is a charming lady. So is young Julian’s wife.”

  But she had not come here to exchange pleasantries with him. She looked questioningly at him and waited.

  “I wish you to understand,” he said, gazing earnestly into her face, “that I have no quarrel whatsoever with you, Duchess. I wonder how much your husband has explained to you.”

  Dora hesitated. “I do not pry into my husband’s affairs, Lord Eastham,” she said, “any more than he does into mine. I have always understood that your disruption of our wedding had nothing to do with me. You do not even know me, after all, or I you. I bear no lingering grudge, if that is what concerns you. You doubtless had your reasons for feeling deeply offended when you heard that your late sister’s husband was about to marry again. I do not fully understand why, though I can make some guesses. It does not matter, though. What was between you and my husband concerns the two of you, not me. I do appreciate the fact, though, that you made the effort to apologize to me in person at the home of people who were your sister’s friends and even in the presence of my mother.”

  He nodde
d, his expression serious.

  “Shall we walk?” he suggested, gesturing to the path that ran parallel to the headland and led farther onto Penderris property. “You are quite right, Duchess—you do not understand, though it makes perfect sense to me that Stanbrook would say nothing to enlighten you.”

  “As is his right,” she said firmly as she fell into step beside him. “I really do not need to know anything about the past, Lord Eastham, that he chooses not to tell me.”

  “You are too good, Duchess,” he said. “He was always cold toward the boy, and in the end, cruel.”

  “To his son?” She turned her head toward him, startled. His face was grave now and looked lined with age.

  “He desperately wanted to send the boy off to school,” he said, “even though Brendan was a sensitive child of delicate health and his mother doted on him and would have been brokenhearted if he had been sent away. Stanbrook gave in to her pleadings, but he hired tutors who were harsh and humorless and frequently chastised the boy and kept him from his mother for long hours of every day. And then, finally, when he was little more than a child, Stanbrook forced a military commission upon him and sent him off to his death in the Peninsula.”

  Dora really did not want to be hearing this. It felt deceitful, as though she were deliberately going behind George’s back to gather more information than he was willing to give her himself.

  “I believe it is usual for boys of his class to be sent to boarding school at a certain age,” she said. “If there was a disagreement between your nephew’s parents over the matter, then it would appear that the duke deferred to the duchess’s wishes. The hiring of tutors as an alternative plan was surely understandable. One would hardly wish the heir to a dukedom to grow up without any sort of education. Sometimes it is a tutor’s job to be strict and even to impose punishment. And a commission was what your nephew actually did want after growing up at home, presumably without much experience of the outside world.”

  And with what sounded like an overprotective mother. But, Dora thought, she did not want to involve herself in a conversation like this. She would not have come if she had known this was what he wanted to talk to her about.

  “Really, Lord Eastham,” she said, “I must be—”

  “It was done to punish my sister,” he said as they walked past the gap in the cliff face where it had collapsed at some time in the distant past and provided a steep way down over stones and pebbles to the beach below. They would be in sight of the house soon. Dora really did not want to be seen with the earl before she could tell George about this meeting. At the next gap in the gorse bushes she really must be firm and make her way through it and back to the house. Clearly he had nothing to share with her except stories that reflected badly upon George.

  “With respect, I really do not wish to listen to any of this, Lord Eastham,” she said, stopping a little farther along the path, just where it curved outward to follow the contour of the cliff top. The house was in sight from here. “I can understand the concern you must have felt for your sister and nephew if you believed them unhappy, but I would suggest that perhaps you did not know all the facts, or, if you did, you knew them only from your sister’s point of view and not also from your brother-in-law’s. What went into the decisions that were made within that family group really concerned them alone, not you, and certainly not me.”

  He had stopped beside her and regarded her with a peculiar half smile on his lips. The path was narrow here, she noticed, and it was impossible to put more of an acceptable distance between them. Prickly gorse would be snagging the muslin of her dress if she took so much as a half step back.

  “One essential fact was indisputable, Duchess,” he said. “Brendan was not Stanbrook’s son.”

  She stared at him in incomprehension.

  “He was mine,” he added.

  Her confusion grew. “But the duchess was your sister.”

  “Half sister,” he said. “Do you think a man and a woman cannot love in that way just because there is a forbidden degree of relationship between them, Duchess? You would be wrong if you do. I had been away from home a number of years, doing what a young man does while sowing wild oats. When I returned, I saw the changes those years had wrought in the daughter of my father’s second wife. She had grown up, and she was breathtakingly lovely. Did you know that of her? She blushed and smiled when she saw me for the first time in almost five years, and—we fell in love. It was entirely mutual and quite total. We never fell out of love. Never. Ours was that rare sort of passion that holds firm and immovable for a lifetime and beyond. Our father tried to tear us asunder by marrying her off to an insipid young pup of a duke’s son, but he succeeded only in the sense that he gave my love into the hands of a coldhearted boy—he could hardly be described as a man—and my son into the hands of a man who eventually found a way of killing him without having to wield the weapon himself. And in so doing he found a way too of ridding himself of the wife he had finished punishing.”

  They had been standing still too long, Dora thought, and her body had been held at an unnatural angle, bent back slightly from the waist to gain some distance from him. She thought she might well faint. There was a sort of buzzing in her ears. Full comprehension had not quite caught up yet to what she was hearing.

  “This has nothing to do with me. I do not even wish to hear it.” Her voice sounded fuzzy to her ears, as though it were coming from a long way off. But it was too late not to hear it.

  “But, Duchess,” he said, and he was frowning now, “it has everything to do with you.”

  She had had enough—more than enough. She would listen to no more. She turned sharply about and took a step forward, desperately hoping she could forge a way through the gorse bushes without proceeding even another step along the path with him. But two things happened simultaneously. The earl caught hold of her arm above the elbow, none too gently. And in the distance, close to the house, she saw three men, one of them George. It was obvious too in that brief moment that he saw her. But she was spun back to face the Earl of Eastham before she could see more.

  “Release me, sir,” she said indignantly, and was almost surprised when he did so.

  “Why, Duchess,” the earl asked her, his face close to hers, “should Stanbrook be allowed to have a child of his own when he took mine away from me? And why should he be allowed to have a woman to comfort him when he deprived me of mine?”

  Her head turned cold. He knew of her pregnancy?

  “If all you have told me is true, Lord Eastham,” she said, “the Duke of Stanbrook was tricked into taking a child who was not his own and the woman who was bearing him. If you are telling the truth, it was your father who did the tricking, though perhaps he did not know there was to be a child or even that the two of you were lovers. In either case, my husband was a victim at least as much as the two of you were. But however it was, it is none of my concern. I came at your request and I have listened to you against my will. Now I must bid you farewell. I have business to attend to at the house.”

  She tried to turn from him again—but with even less success this time. He caught both her arms so that she could not turn at all. And it suddenly occurred to her that perhaps she had something to fear. She heard his last words like an echo in her brain—Why, Duchess, should Stanbrook be allowed to have a child of his own when he took mine away from me? And why should he be allowed to have a woman to comfort him when he deprived me of mine?

  She looked at him, coldness in her eyes and in her body. “Unhand me,” she said.

  This time he did not comply with her demand. “Has anyone ever pointed out to you, Duchess,” he asked her, “where exactly on the cliff top my sister was standing when she was pushed to her death?”

  No one had. But she could guess the answer.

  He pointed downward with one finger.

  “Here,” he said. “Or actually a little close
r to the edge. Let me show you.”

  “No, thank you,” she said.

  But he still had her by one arm, and he was moving her off the path onto the coarse grass, which ended suddenly no more than seven or eight feet away.

  But even as she saw that distance closing, she heard a distant voice. It was George’s. “Eastham!”

  “Keep your distance, Stanbrook. You have no business here,” the earl shouted back without taking his eyes off Dora. He lowered his voice again. “It is in the nature of an eye for an eye, you see, Duchess. A woman and a child for a woman and a child—and in almost the exact same manner, though I cannot, alas, arrange for the child to become fodder for enemy guns.”

  “And you cannot arrange for me to jump unassisted as your sister did,” Dora said, amazed to hear the calmness of her voice. She seemed suddenly to have turned to icy calmness all over, in fact, a strange thing when she ought to be incoherent with panic and terror.

  “He has you hoodwinked, Duchess,” he said. “But I daresay that as an aging spinster you were ripe for the picking and did not much care what sort of a man you married. However, I do not mean to insult you. I do not dislike you. I meant what I said when I told you I have no grudge whatsoever against you. It is just unfortunate for you that you have become the perfect instrument of revenge.”

  Poor George, a dispassionate part of Dora’s mind thought. He was going to have to go through this nightmare for the second time in his life.

  “My husband can see everything,” she said. “So, presumably, can the two gentlemen with him. It would be more than foolish for you to do what it is in your mind to do, Lord Eastham. Do you imagine that you will feel better after you have taken the life of an innocent woman and her unborn child? Do you imagine that you will be able to escape and to continue living as a free man?”