by Mary Balogh
“Nancy,” he said as she came across the room toward him, all ready to leave, “how lovely you look.” He was not merely flattering her. She was all in primrose yellow from her bonnet to her slippers. And as fashionable as any lady he had seen recently.
“Thank you.” She looked at him rather uncertainly and he smiled. They were to be friends, were they not? Then he would cultivate her friendship and forget about all else. If it were possible to do so.
They talked all the way to Kew. He told her about Portugal and Spain and about crossing the Pyrenees into France. She told him about Penhallow and its wild and lovely scenery and about her friends and activities there. By the time he lifted her down from his curricle and they began to stroll in the gardens toward one of the pagodas, she was relaxed and smiling. She looked almost like the Nancy he had fallen in love with, only more serene, more mature. Several times more lovely.
“I am glad you came to London again,” he said. “Are you?”
“Yes,” she said. “No matter how lovely one place is or how attached one is to it, it is always good to see other places and meet other people. London is an exciting place to be. Especially at the moment.”
“Especially because London is celebrating and preparing to celebrate even more?” he asked. “Or especially because I am here?”
He spoke lightly and he laughed, but her smile faded. “I meant because of the celebrations,” she said.
His little joke had spoiled his mood. He felt suddenly depressed, and for the first time a silence fell between them. He set a hand over the primrose gloved one on his arm.
“I want to see you again, Nancy,” he said. “And again and again. Are you to be at the Clemens’ ball tomorrow? “
“We have accepted our invitation,” she said.
“Good.” He removed his hand. “Will you save two waltzes for me? The first and the last? And will you come to the opera as my guest next week? It is to be a grand occasion. Prinny is to be there with as many of the foreign guests as can be persuaded to go. Doubtless the Hay market will be bursting at the seams. Will you come?”
She hesitated. “I don’t know,” she said.
“We will be members of a party of eight,” he said.
“Will anyone from your f-family be there too?” she asked.
“ With us?” It struck him that she did not want to find herself in a party that included Elizabeth and Poole. “Absolutely not. Will you come?”
“Very well, then,” she said. “If we are still in town. I think we will be.”
“And the waltzes too?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Thank you.”
He was back to boyhood yet again, he thought. He felt rather like shouting for joy. Or like clasping her about the waist and twirling her around. He glanced about them. There were other people in sight.
He grinned just as Nancy looked up at him and raised her eyebrows.
“I was hoping there was no one in sight,” he said. “I wanted to pick you up and twirl you about. Maybe even try to steal a kiss. Be thankful that there are other people here.”
There was naked terror on her face as she snatched her hand from his arm, hesitated, and then continued walking along the path almost at a run. John caught up to her but did not attempt to touch her or even talk to her. There was a wrought-iron seat a little back from the path ahead, surrounded by rhododendron bushes on three sides.
“Come and sit down, Nancy,” he said to her quietly. “We will be in full view of others. And even if we were not, I would not harm you. I promise that on my honor as a gentleman and as an officer of His Majesty’s cavalry.”
If they did not sit down, their path would take them within the next minute or two into a group of people approaching. Nancy hesitated again and then turned without a word to sit close to one side of the seat. John sat at the other side.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I know you were merely joking. Forgive me. It is what comes of living a restricted life for several years.”
“No,” he said. “That is not what it comes from, Nancy.”
She looked straight ahead and they waited until the group approaching along the path had passed after nodding and exchanging greetings with them.
“It happened between the time when I kissed you one evening and the time when I asked you to marry me the next,” John said, “Am I right?”
“No,” she said. But it was a quick reflex answer and lacked conviction.
“Someone hurt you during that time,” he said, “and frightened you. Try as I will to avoid the horror of it, I can think of only one thing that would have frightened you for seven years and made you live the life of a hermit spinster. God, I hope I am wrong. Were you raped, Nancy?”
“No!” she said vehemently, still staring ahead, her body rigid.
“Oh, God!” he said, wishing he had not met her again, wishing he did not have to know. “Who did it to you? It was someone at Kingston. One of the guests?”
“It was no one,” she said. “Nothing happened. I want to go back home, John. The air has turned chilly.”
“No,” he said. “The air is as warm as it was when we left. It is you who have turned chilly. You don’t have to suffer it quite alone, Nancy. Not any longer. Is that what you have done all this time? You have told no one?”
He watched her bite on the inside of her lip and try to keep control of herself.
“Do you think telling anyone would have brought me any comfort?” she said eventually. “I was the one who was violated. It was my body it happened to. No one else’s. There could be no comfort from anyone else.”
“There might have been punishment,” he said. “Justice.”
“I had been violated,” she said. “No amount of vengeance could have changed that. I don’t want to be talking about this, John. I have learned to live with it. I have learned to put the memories behind me. I have learned that it was something done to me, against my will, that I was in no way to blame, and that it has not changed me in any essential way or made me less of a person. I have learned to like myself again. I would rather leave it all in the past, where it belongs.”
“And yet,” he said, “you cannot bear to be touched? At least, not in any way that suggests however remotely the intimacy of a man and a woman.”
“No,” she said, “I cannot. It is one thing that can make me panic. I have learned to live with that too. Some people are terrified of thunderstorms or snakes or fast vehicles. I am terrified of men. One learns to live with one’s terrors.”
“And so,” he said, “this thing that happened to you snatched you away from me and has kept us apart ever since and will keep us apart for the rest of our lives.”
She turned her head to look at him then. “I thought we were to be friends,” she said. “That is what we agreed to.”
“Yes.” He sighed. “Is that what you really want, Nancy? Can you be satisfied with that?”
“It is not possible, is it?” she said sadly. “We had better not meet again, John. I’ll stay away from that ball tomorrow, and you will find someone else to escort to the opera next week.”
“I want to kiss you,” he said. “Here and now. I want to prove to you that a kiss can be pleasant, that it does not always lead to the sort of nightmare you have been carrying around with you for so long. But there is something else more important, and when you have told me, neither of us will be in the mood for kissing. I want to know who it was, Nancy.”
“No,” she said.
“I must know,” he said. “He deprived you of freedom and me of a bride. Was it a member of my family?”
“No,” she said, her voice an agony.
“My father?” He held his breath.
“No!” The shock in her eyes brought him the relief of knowing that she spoke the truth.
“Martin?” He held his breath again.
“No.” She leapt to her feet.
He got up too and possessed himself of her hands, which he held very tightly. “Look at me,
Nancy,” he said, unconsciously using the voice that had commanded men for many years past. She obeyed him. “Was it Martin who raped you?”
“He was only eighteen,” she said. “Always smiling and charming. I thought of him as a boy even though he was only two years younger than I. It did not occur to me to take someone else or a chaperone with me when he asked me to go walking down by the river with him. And when he tried to kiss me, I laughed and was embarrassed. I was furious with him when he started to get rough with me. But it did not occur to me at first to be frightened.”
John could feel the blood draining from his head. He drew her back down onto the seat, keeping his hold of her hands.
“And then he had me facedown on the ground,” she said, “and tied my hands behind me with something. It was only then, when he lifted my clothes and I could not stop him, that I started to get frightened. I was very naive. He beat me at first. I thought that would be all, but then he got on top of me and tried something else. It hurt terribly and then he grew more angry. Why am I telling you this?” She tried to pull her hands free. “I don’t want to be telling you this.”
“Tell me.” It was still his officer’s voice.
“He turned me over onto my back,” she said. “My hands were beneath me and still tied. And then he came onto me and did what he had been trying to do the other way, but this time he succeeded.” She pulled a hand away and set the back of it, shaking, over her mouth. “It was horrible, horrible. I could not stop vomiting afterward and he was laughing and teasing me and being charming and acting as if we had just done something that both of us had found pleasurable. Something of no great significance.”
John pushed very firmly from his mind the fact that it was Martin she was talking about. He could not think of that now. He set his hands on her shoulders, molding them, massaging them, trying to let his strength flow into her.
“And just a short while later,” he said, “I was trying to kiss you and asking you to marry me.”
“Yes.” She looked at him from eyes that had seen years of nightmares. “I had been so wanting it and hoping for it. I loved you so very much.”
“It is pointless for me to say that you should have told me, isn’t it?” he said. “I could have brought you no comfort. Me least of all.”
“It is long in the past,” she said. “It is best left there.”
He cupped a hand very gently to her cheek. She did not jerk back. “I have never stopped loving you,” he said. “I realized that as soon as I saw you again. I am going to woo you, Nancy. I am going to teach you that lovemaking can be beautiful and very pleasurable. No, don’t protest. I’ll take a year doing it, or two or three if necessary. We have all the time in the world—the rest of two lifetimes. I am going to see to it that there are no terrors to shadow your life. That is a promise.”
She set her hand over his and held it to her cheek. “I want you to be happy,” she said, “with someone who is capable of happiness.”
He smiled at her. “Then we are agreed,” he said. “We both have the same goal in mind.” He got to his feet and drew her to hers.
“Shall we stroll back to the curricle?”
She took his arm and they walked in silence for a while.
“John,” she said at last, “will you promise not to say anything or do anything? It was all a long time ago and I don’t want unpleasantness between our families any more than I did then when Christopher and Elizabeth were so happy. I think there is the smallest chance that they may be happy again, though I do not doubt that you will not wish for it. I want them to have that chance. I think they love each other when all else is stripped away except their basic feelings for each other.”
“You do me an injustice,” he said. “I was quite comfortable with Christopher as a brother-in-law and thought the divorce a grand piece of nonsense. I’ll do nothing to jeopardize their chance of a reconciliation, Nancy.”
“Promise?”
“I promise,” he said. But he had not promised that he would not kill Martin or at the very least castrate him.
“Thank you,” Nancy said.
John remembered suddenly Martin’s knowledge of the London brothels that catered to perverted sexual tastes. A knowledge he had found surprising and considered out of character at the time.
Christopher had spoken the truth to Elizabeth. He was very ready for a fight with the Duke of Chicheley, having avoided it seven years before. He had not been unhappy early that morning to receive the duke’s terse note. He had arranged to pick up Elizabeth and his daughter from Grosvenor Square in the hope of provoking such a confrontation. He was not intending to sneak around London, seeing them behind the duke’s back.
The duke received him in the library, a room of heavy splendor.
He sat behind a huge desk, a cane propped against his chair. He did not invite his guest to sit down. Christopher pursed his lips and wondered how long it would take his former father-in-law to realize that he was no longer easily cowed.
“Trevelyan?” the duke said stiffly. “I did not think to see you again.”
“Sir?” Christopher inclined his head.
“And I cannot pretend that it is a pleasure,” the duke said.
Christopher raised his eyebrows.
“That you would take up residence in London at all is impertinence enough,” the duke said. “That you would communicate with my daughter and my granddaughter shows an appalling lack of decency and principle. I demand an explanation.”’
“It it very simple and I would have thought obvious,” Christopher said. “Christina is my daughter. It would seem indecent and unprincipled to me not to want to see her and get to know her.”
“My granddaughter,” the duke said, “is well cared for, Trevelyan, and will be for the rest of her life. However, I did not summon you here to argue with you. I wish to make one thing perfectly plain. You are not welcome in this house, and you are to keep away from my daughter and granddaughter. Do I make myself clear?”
“Abundantly so,” Christopher said. “Your house I will stay away from, sir. I am inside it now only because you have invited me here. My daughter and yours I will see as often as it can be arranged. This afternoon, for example, we will be driving in Hyde Park.”
“I forbid it,” the duke said.
“I believe King Canute said something similar to the incoming tide,” Christopher said. “But his feet got wet nonetheless. May I ask why you feel it necessary to say this to me? Is it not enough to say it to Elizabeth? If she refuses to see me, there is not much I can do about it, is there?”
“My daughter,” the duke said, “is easily intimidated and needs a great deal of protection by the men who care for her. I care for her.”
“I see,” Christopher said. “But you have not been able to intimidate her enough to get her to agree not to see me. I was foolish seven years ago. Or perhaps just young. I was quite sure that I would never be able to persuade anyone to believe that my wife was the only woman I had ever known, that I had never had either a mistress or a whore. How was I to prove my innocence when my wife caught me in the arms of a half-naked woman? It seemed impossible to me. So I did the one thing that made me seem undoubtedly guilty. I ran away.”
“And showed how much you cared for your wife by staying away for years until there was a title and property and a fortune to come back to,” the duke said, his voice vicious with sarcasm.
“Yes,” Christopher said. “When one discovers, after one’s passage home has been purchased and one’s bags packed, that one has been divorced, one can very quickly change one’s plans. I stayed in Canada. But I am back now, sir, and I find that the past is not a closed book after all. I have a daughter I did not know about until very recently.”
“She has lived very well without you all these years,” the duke said.
“As Elizabeth told me,” Christopher said, “she has had a great deal of love to give the child. I do not doubt the truth of what she says. But a child needs a father too, p
referably a real father rather than a stepfather. I have asked Elizabeth to marry me.”
The duke was speechless for a moment. “You have what?” he said eventually. “This is preposterous, Trevelyan. My daughter is betrothed. She would have been married if some scoundrel had not ruined her wedding day by kidnapping her and then proving too inept to demand his ransom.”
“I heard of it,” Christopher said. “I bless the man. He saved my wife from becoming a bigamist.”
The Duke of Chicheley looked at him keenly. “Maybe I should have your whereabouts on the day of the wedding investigated,” he said.
“If I had kidnapped her,” Christopher said, “I would not have lost her on the road to some kindly philanthropist, you may be certain. I want Elizabeth to marry me. I want us to be a family again.”
The duke’s hand was opening and closing on the desktop. “I shall do everything in my power to prevent such a disaster,” he said.
“You found out once before that it is not wise to cross me, Trevelyan.”
“I think it would have been the wisest thing I could have done,” Christopher said. “You did not oppose our marriage, sir. I believe you thought the heir to an earldom was a good enough catch for Elizabeth, especially when I was her personal choice. I believe you would have remained pleased with me if you had not so readily accepted the lies that were told about me. And then pride got in the way. You could not bear to think that you had so misjudged your daughter’s husband. And so it must be arranged that I no longer be her husband. And now, of course, pride will get in the way of your admitting that perhaps you acted hastily. Or maybe quite unjustly.”
“Get out of my house,” the duke said. “And stay away from my daughter if you know what is good for you, Trevelyan.”
“Perhaps by the time I marry her,” Christopher said, “you will have no choice but to admit that you were wrong. Good day, sir.”
He turned and left the room and sent a servant upstairs to inform Lady Elizabeth that he was waiting below. She came down almost immediately, Christina holding her hand, shy again, half hiding against her skirt, eyeing him warily. He smiled at her and winked and watched her face disappear entirely. His heart leaped with joy at the sight of her, dainty in pink today.