“What do you want? Just tell me what you want.”
“If you think this is about marriage, you’re mistaken!”
“Then what is it about?”
She looked incredulous. “How can you ask me that?”
“How can I answer if you won’t—”
“How could you not know?” She raised her voice, as if speaking to a deaf person. “I understand why you won’t have me; you’re a viscount and I’m a convict. But once you said you loved me—were falling in love with me.”
“I—I—” He couldn’t finish.
Disgust turned her eyes a frigid shade of gray. “I feel sorry for you. I do, because you’re a coward. You laughed at me, and I can’t forgive you for that.”
He stared at her. “This is what you can’t forgive me for? This? After everything else I’ve—”
“I gave you credit for decency and human feelings, a heart. But you’ve only been using me in some kind of—experiment. ‘What an extraordinary idea,’ you said. ‘Really, Vicar, you amaze me!’”
“Rachel—”
“You make me feel cheap! You wanted to change me, and you have—but you don’t even have the courage to see it through, or the decency to take responsibility for what you’ve done to me. ‘What an extraordinary idea,’” she said again, mocking him.
“There’s something missing in you, Sebastian! I feel pity for you!
He clenched his jaws, but anger wouldn’t come to his rescue. “I thought you were happy,” he tried in a reasonable voice. “You told me you were. You seemed to be.”
“I am happy,” she said grimly, “and it has nothing to do with you.”
“That’s good. I’m glad.” He was anything but glad. He remembered the day he’d vowed to “resurrect” her, bring her back from the dead. He found it beyond ironic that he’d succeeded so well, she wanted to leave him now. He’d wanted her independent, but not this independent.
“I can’t stay here,” she was saying. “I could fool myself before that you felt something for me, but not anymore.”
“What the hell are you talking about? How could you possibly think I don’t feel something for you!”
At that moment Preest poked his head in the doorway. “The carriage is waiting, my lord,” he said tonelessly, and vanished.
Sebastian closed the gap between himself and Rachel. “I have to go,” he said, reaching for her stiff hand.
“How convenient.”
“Rachel, I have a train to catch.” He put a wounded note in his voice; he felt he’d finally caught her on lower moral ground, and he’d better take advantage of it. “My father’s dead; I’ve got to go to my family.”
“Oh, of course—the family you hold so dear to your heart—the father who meant so much to you. Go, Sebastian, no ones stopping you!”
He ground his teeth. “I don’t have time to talk about this. You can’t leave, and you know it.”
“Why not? I could be someone’s legitimate housekeeper. I’m grateful to you for that, at least—for making respectability mean something to me again.”
“Will you listen? I’m sorry I hurt you. I wish I could take it back.”
“I don’t. You’ve opened my eyes.” But the tears were back, mocking her bravado, and he was torn between compassion for her and gladness, because she didn’t mean what she was saying.
“I’m sorry. We’ll fix it,” he promised, trying to pull her into his arms. “When I come back, we’ll talk about everything. Some of the things you said—I can’t deny them. But we can make it right. At least give me a chance to do better. You’ve taken me unawares—give me a little time to think about the things you’ve said. That’s fair, isn’t it?” She turned her face away. “You can’t leave me. Say you won’t, Rachel. Come, say it.”
She took a deep, quavery breath. “I don’t know,” she said miserably. “I don’t know what I’ll do.”
He closed his eyes in relief, resting his forehead against her temple. She wouldn’t leave him. “I’ll miss you,” he told her, holding her narrow shoulders when she would’ve broken away. “I’ll come back as soon as I can. Sweetheart, won’t you kiss me good-bye?”
“No.”
They sighed in unison. “Let me kiss you, then.” She craned away, but he held her and put his lips on her cheek. Her body was both stiff and yielding, ambivalent. That was the best he could hope for—but God, how he wanted her arms around him now. “You’ll wait for me, won’t you?” he asked again, holding her, pressing a kiss to the corner of her mouth.
“I don’t know.”
A thought occurred to him. “You have to stay—you’re in my legal custody now. That’s how I got Carnock to agree to a postponement of your arrest.” She didn’t answer, and finally he had to let her go. “Damn the train,” he muttered, trying to make her smile; he’d have settled for a rueful smile, even a bitter one, but she wouldn’t even look at him.
At the door, he glanced back. She was staring down at the hand she had gripped around the back of his chair, her eyes narrowed, her beautiful face taut. She seemed to be listening, not to the sound of his leave-taking but to something else. A voice in her own head, perhaps—probably the one telling her to go. A precarious second passed. The words that would have kept her for certain wavered on the tip of his tongue, but he didn’t speak them. Couldn’t. Instead he said, “Wait for me.”
She didn’t look up.
XIX
I OUGHT TO feel something.
But he didn’t, even leaning over the open casket and staring intently into the Earl of Moreton’s lifeless face. The rigid features were sallow, not pale, and too sharp, as if the corpse were a soap-stone carving. Sebastian searched for something of himself in the still countenance, but there was nothing. In death as in life, father and son were strangers to each other.
Nothing? Really? What about that tight, unyielding look about the mouth? That looked familiar. Stubbornness, he supposed. Or maybe just a gritting of the teeth, a habit acquired from a determination to get through this business of life without feeling anything. If that had been the late Lord Moreton’s goal, he’d succeeded admirably. He never knew his son, might be his epitaph. And they both preferred it that way.
Sebastian straightened, stepped back. He hadn’t been that physically close to his father since . . . since ever. Every few years they ran into each other and shook hands. That was all. He had no memories of sitting on Dad’s knee, being carried in Papa’s arms; the idea seemed ludicrous, in fact, almost obscene.
The family chapel at Steyne Court was much grander than the one at Lynton, but exactly as musty and unused. Ashe, the parish priest, sat in a corner of the front pew, either praying or sleeping. What he was doing here at all Sebastian couldn’t imagine, unless he hoped to ingratiate himself with the new earl, a feat he’d never managed with the old one.
Not that that was necessarily Ashe’s fault. The old man lying in the mahogany coffin hadn’t been one to socialize much with parish priests. An unintelligent man, oblivious, chronically unfaithful, Lord Moreton had had few passions in his life, although he’d filled it with desultory vices like gaming, drinking, and whoring. His dull days had occasionally lit up with flashes of spectacular decadence, but not often or brilliantly enough to lift him out of his own overwhelming mediocrity. Sebastian had never felt singled out by his neglect, since he’d neglected his wife and daughter equally, as well as his friends, acquaintances, tenants, and employees. If he’d been born a commoner, he’d have perished early on from the combined effects of stupidity, torpidity, and unimaginativeness.
“So much for you, Father,” Sebastian said softly. He put his hand on the raised coffin lid. “I wish it could have been otherwise.” As soon as he said it, an emotion finally entered his heart. It was grief, of a sort, not for the man but for the love they’d never felt for each other. For the gaping void of indiffe
rence they’d shared in place of friendship or affection. If there was blame to cast, Sebastian kept plenty for himself. “Good-bye,” he whispered, and closed the lid of the casket with a final-sounding thud.
Reverend Ashe must have been listening for it. He sprang from his pew and advanced on the new heir with unseemly haste. He had long, luxuriant, yellow-white hair, a glossy mustache, and a monocle dangling by a silk ribbon on his chest. The ruby glinting on his smallest finger looked incongruous with his clerical collar. Christian Morrell wore simpler clothes, Sebastian reflected, and not only because St. Giles was a poor parish. He was a simpler man.
“Again, allow me to tender my most sincere sympathies, my lord, for your terrible loss. His lordship was a good man, a great man, respected by all who knew him. He will be sorely missed.”
“Do you think so?” Once he’d have tweaked the reverend for this patent nonsense, labeled him a toady and a hypocrite, and done his best to embarrass him. He was an obsequious fool—but there were worse sins, and Sebastian had committed most of them himself.
“Oh, undoubtedly. I’m certain the funeral tomorrow will be well attended by your father’s innumerable friends and loved ones.”
“I suppose anything is possible,” Sebastian conceded gravely. “Now, I won’t keep you any longer; I’m sure you’d like to be at home, Reverend, working on your eulogy.”
Reverend Ashe looked as though that thought hadn’t occurred to him. But he recovered quickly and said, “Yes, of course, how kind of you, my lord, I will be running along. That is, unless you require my services, as it were, in a personal way before I go?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“If you would like to pray with me, or if you were moved to speak of your feelings on your father’s passing—”
“Ah! No, no, thank you very much indeed.” He turned away rather than grin in the minister’s face.
They walked to the chapel door together and shook hands on the small porch. Reverend Ashe climbed into a smart green landau while his driver held the door for him. Sebastian thought of Christy again, and the chestnut gelding he rode in all weathers to visit the sheep in his humbler flock.
Across the park and the fountain pond, the massive stone pile of Steyne Court rose, its two mammoth wings spread out from the noble center more in the manner of barriers than welcoming arms. The house had been a sturdy, sensible Georgian mansion—he knew this from pictures—until his mother, newly married and flush with the power of sudden riches, had decided to have it rebuilt in the style of a French chateau. Now it boasted turrets and towers, battlements and balustrades, and fourteen separate chimneys vying for air space among the dormers, buttresses, corbels and cornices. It looked like a Parisian due’s summer residence, or Cardinal Richelieu’s, and it was as out of place in rural Sussex as a tiara in a root barn, and about as useful. It had embarrassed him in his youth; later it amused him; now it irritated him, because the cost of maintaining the aberrant monstrosity had just shifted from his father to himself.
Inside, he found his mother in her second favorite place, supine on a Louis Quinze chaise longue in the tower drawing room. (Her favorite was in bed in her lavish boudoir, from which she rarely rose before three or four in the afternoon.) She was, as always, impeccably coifed, her stunning silver hair upswept and gleaming. And why not? She employed a hairdresser full-time; a Mrs. Peabody—she lived on the premises in a private suite, and traveled with her ladyship wherever she went.
At present her ladyship was either dozing or writing a letter, or possibly both at once, and the recipient of the letter would undoubtedly be one of her lovers. Sebastian wondered sometimes why his parents hadn’t been happier together or liked each other better; they ought to have, considering how much they had in common. Lady Moreton was just as faithless as her husband, and only differed from him in that regard because she incorporated a soupcon of discretion into the conduct of her numerous love affairs. Sebastian had been fifteen when he’d discovered for certain that she was promiscuous, on the morning he’d walked into the stables and found her in a compromising attitude with not one but two undergrooms on the straw floor of a loose-box stall. He’d countered the shock by immediately seducing the housemaid, and after that, as many women as time and circumstances allowed, a habit he’d maintained steadfastly ever since.
Until Rachel.
“Is it dinnertime?”
The languid inquiry came from the window seat, where his sister was slumped, drowsy-eyed, over a game of solitaire. That was industrious for her; normally she did nothing at all in her idle hours—which was most of them; the notion of Irene mending, sketching, or—ha—reading a book was quite unthinkable.
“Not that I know of,” Sebastian drawled, whereupon his sister instantly lost interest in him and went back to her game.
He walked to the drinks table and poured a small glass of neat whiskey. Sipping it, he regarded his mother and sister, neither of whom seemed aware of his presence any longer, or indeed, of each other’s. It was easy to imagine them sitting in this room for hours without exchanging a word. Sebastian had been home for half a day, and so far his mother had exchanged about five sentences with him. What an odd family they were—he supposed; since he’d known no other, he could only take it on faith that in other people’s families people talked and listened to each other, laughed, cried, shouted, made up. Loved. He thought of the evenings he’d spent in Rachel’s company—the public hours, not the ones in his bedroom. She liked to listen to him play the piano, and he liked to look at her face when she did. She would put her head back against the sofa and close her eyes, and presently a sweet smile would soften her straight, solemn mouth. Other times, she would read to him from her current book, and the rich, low, expressive sound of her voice was as sensually satisfying to him as piano music was to her. He’d taken those quiet, contented hours for granted, and now he missed them. Missed her.
“Where’s Harry? Where are the children?”
Irene lifted her dark, sleek head and blinked at him. “Harry? He’s at home, of course. With the children. Why would they be here?”
Sebastian shrugged. Why indeed? Irene was no more motherly than her own mother. If he asked her quickly and caught her off guard, he doubted if she could tell him how many children she had. Four, he thought, but possibly it was five by now. She was three years older than he. When he was twenty, he’d brought an Oxford chum home for Christmas holiday, and found him in bed with Irene on Boxing Day morning. “Join us?” she’d asked, stroking a bare breast to entice him. He’d declined the invitation politely. But from then on he’d had her measure.
Clearly, sexual licentiousness ran in the family, and Sebastian had spent the last decade or so trying to live up to his heritage. It occurred to him, not for the first time but more forcefully than ever before, that they might all fly to the arms of their illicit lovers in search of warmth, some human touch, a little companionship, commodities not noticeably abundant at home. Or was that only a rationale for cupidity?
The sun was setting over the Doric columns of the summer house at the edge of the deer park. He walked to the window to watch its slow descent. Lynton Hall had a derelict pavilion east of the house, no match for Steyne’s pretentious “belvedere.” Rachel had found the new dairymaid there one night, shed told him, sleeping outside instead of in the house because she hated enclosed spaces. Sidony, her name was; her father had beaten and abused her. Here at Steyne, servants were faceless, nameless, interchangeable; if they had stories to tell, no one above-stairs ever heard them.
A sudden and unexpected wave of longing washed over him. In its wake he realized what it was: homesickness.
“Mother, what’s your purpose in life?”
Lady Moreton turned her head in slow, increasingly incredulous degrees, while the pen in her hand made a spreading ink blot on her love letter. “My what?”
“You know, your reason for existing. You
r raison d’être. You’ve heard of the concept, I’m sure.”
Her handsome eyebrows arched disdainfully. “What an unpleasant person you’ve grown into, Sebastian.”
“Yes, quite. But back to the question.”
“Don’t be impudent.”
“Impudent?”
“Don’t be an ass,” Irene clarified, rousing herself to a sitting position.
He turned to her interestedly. “What’s your purpose, Irene?”
She looked at him for a full ten seconds, her brows drawn together in ferocious thought. He saw the emptiness in her eyes before they could skitter away in pique. “What’s yours?” she retaliated unkindly.
“I think its to use the few talents I’ve been given to try to do something good in my small corner of the cosmos. And to be happy without hurting any more people than absolutely necessary.”
Modest, even banal goals, but it was as if he’d said he wanted to become a vegetarian Buddhist monk. The family resemblance was remarkable when mother and daughter lifted identically elegant top lips and sneered at him, unanimous in their contempt. They might be in league against him for the moment, but only because it was convenient; usually they couldn’t stand each other.
No question about it, his family was peculiar. Beyond eccentric; perverse. “Motherly love” was a given in other people’s houses, but’ not this one, where her ladyship loved no one but herself, and had passed the proclivity on to her daughter. To her son, too, although lately he’d risen above it. There was someone now he cared for more than himself.
The butler came in then to announce dinner. During the brief, largely silent meal, no more was said about life goals, his or anyone else’s.
Lord Moreton’s funeral the next morning wasn’t nearly as well attended as Reverend Ashe had prophesied, and all the mourners were dry-eyed. The widow couldn’t be bothered to extend any hospitality to them afterward; they dispersed from the church (no one except Sebastian stayed for the interment) like aimless sheep, probably asking themselves why they’d come, since they hadn’t gotten so much as a glass of sherry for their trouble.
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