by Mary Balogh
“Ma petite. Ma chère,” he said, kissing her temple. And then against her ear, “Mon amour.”
Winnie could not understand French, but she slid into a happy sleep anyway. She had given a gift and had expected nothing in return.
Chapter 22
CHRISTOPHER recognized Winston Rawlings as soon as he spotted him in the Clemens ballroom. They had been at Oxford together. But seeing him now sparked a memory. Of course!
Rawlings had been present on that ghastly night when Edgar Morrison had lost at cards and then gone home and blown his brains out. Christopher had been trying to remember who had been there and had been unable to do so until he set eyes on Rawlings.
Nancy was talking with a group of acquaintances. Christopher was glad for her sake that they had made some in London. Young Lord Priestley had reserved the opening set with her. Christopher strolled across the room.
“Rawlings?” he said. “I thought it was you. How are you?”
“How d’ye do, Trevelyan,” Winston Rawlings said. “I had heard you were back in England. But then, who has not heard that?”
“For some reason I have been thinking a great deal in the past few days about our Oxford years,” Christopher said. “It seems quite coincidental to see you this evening. They seem a long time ago, don’t they?”
“Gad, yes. Don’t they, though?” Rawlings said. “A lifetime ago. They were good years.”
“One incident in particular has been rolling around in my head,” Christopher said. “That time when Parkins stripped Morrison of everything at cards and the poor fellow shot himself the same night. Ghastly, wasn’t it?”
Rawlings grimaced. “Someone should have put a stop to it,” he said. “One of us should have. But Morrison was always such a conceited bastard that we were rather delighted to watch his humiliation.”
“You were the one who took him home eventually,” Christopher said.
“Yes.” Rawlings shook his head ruefully. “When it was too late. He took the only way out. He had a destitute mother and a few sisters to face the next day.”
“You are planning to be in London for a while?” Christopher asked.
Rawlings grimaced again. “Lord, yes,” he said. “M’wife always likes to see the Season to its bitter end. This year especially. If she could be in two or three places at the same time, Trevelyan, she would be.”
“Good to see you again,” Christopher said. Perhaps if he felt before the end of the spring that he had a strong enough case, he would arrange a meeting between Elizabeth and Winston Rawlings.
Rawlings could vouch for the fact that at least one of those charges had been false. In fact, whoever had trumped up the charges had not been very clever about them. This one in particular was very easily disproved by anyone who cared to investigate for himself. But of course Christopher, the only one who would really have wanted to investigate, had already left the country when the charge was made.
Martin? Was it Martin? Christopher wondered yet again. He still found it difficult to believe what Nigel Rhodes had told him. And yet there was Martin’s conversation with him outside the Grosvenor Square house the previous afternoon. Martin had been trying to nudge him into kidnapping Christina. The charm and the friendliness and the desire to help, all of which Christopher had always taken at their face value, had suddenly seemed very false to his newly cautious and suspicious mind.
“Gad,” Winston Rawlings was saying. “I had not thought of poor Morrison for years. The last time I spoke of him was with your brother-in-law years ago. Your former brother-in-law, that is. Though Honywood was not even quite that, was he? He is Chicheley’s stepson?”
All of Christopher’s senses quickened. “You told Martin about Morrison?” he asked.
“Can’t think how the subject came up,” Rawlings said. He thought for a moment and then shook his head. “I know he was very interested in you, Trevelyan. A touch of hero worship, if you ask me. He was just a boy at the time. But things had already gone sour for you. I would have expected that you would have fallen from your pedestal. But Honywood has always been a friendly fellow. I doubt he bears any grudges. He wanted to know all about your life at Oxford. Women and all that.” He chuckled. “I had to tell him the shameful fact that there were none as far as I knew. You were quite unlike the rest of us.”
Christopher could feel his heart beating in his throat. Would Elizabeth believe Rawlings if he could be persuaded to repeat that piece of information to her? Christopher’s mistress and child were supposed to have come from his Oxford days.
“So you told him about that incident with Morrison,” Christopher said.
Winston Rawlings shrugged expressively. “I just can’t remember how it came about,” he said. “It’s not a memory I am proud of or enjoy recounting. He was very sympathetic, though. Agreed that none of us were to blame for the way it turned out. I think he was looking for things that turned to your favor, Trevelyan. I went to Ireland just a few days after talking with Honywood, I remember. Government appointment for five years, you know. Met my wife there. The dreariest five years of my life.”
Probably the only person who might have contradicted the story as it was told to Elizabeth, then, had the story become public, was conveniently far away in Ireland.
No, Christopher thought, Martin had not been a master conspirator. But he had been clever enough. Quite clever enough. He would doubtless have got away with it for a lifetime if Christopher had not returned to England.
“Here comes the music,” Rawlings said, wincing. “I had better find my way to my wife’s side without delay, Trevelyan, or I’ll not hear the end of it for a week. Good to talk to you.”
Christopher drew a deep breath. Elizabeth had just entered the ballroom with Lord Poole. John and Martin would doubtless be there soon. Martin had wrecked his marriage. Quite deliberately and quite viciously. He was a smiling, charming demon.
But why? What could his motive have been? There could be only one answer, of course. He was Elizabeth’s stepbrother. He had always been very close to her. And yet despite the fact that there was no blood relationship, his feelings for her had always seemed purely filial. Obviously they were not. Obviously they were a lover’s feelings, but for reasons of his own Martin had always been unwilling to come into the open with them. Or perhaps he had and Elizabeth had rejected him. Obviously no other man was to be allowed to lay permanent claim either to Elizabeth’s heart or to her person.
Martin was in the ballroom and smiling as he watched Elizabeth dance with Lord Poole. To Christopher, the scales fallen from his eyes, he looked like the devil incarnate.
Nancy was enjoying herself. She was aware, from early in the first set, of John, standing with a group of gentlemen, talking with them and watching her at the same time. She felt exhilarated by his presence. I have never stopped loving you, he had said immediately after she had told him everything. I am going to woo you, Nancy.
She had known something then. Oh, she had known it forever, but she had realized it again as a powerful present truth. She had never stopped loving him either. And she wanted to be wooed by him more than she had ever wanted anything in her life. He was going to see that there were no more terrors to shadow her life, he had promised her.
The fifth set was a waltz and finally, after what had seemed an eternity, he was coming to claim his set. He was in his scarlet regimentals, and Nancy despised the thrill of girlish pleasure she felt in the fact that Miss Gustafston next to her was looking at him with open admiration and at her with envy.
“At last,” he said, setting one hand at her waist and taking her hand with the other. He smiled. “In a way I have been dreading tonight. I have feared that perhaps you would regret telling me what you told me at Kew. I thought perhaps you would be tense and uncommunicative.”
“And I thought that perhaps you would have developed a disgust of me after all,” she said. “I thought perhaps you would be stiff and coldly polite.”
“Nancy!” he said softl
y, holding her eyes with his.
“Oh,” she said in a rush. “It is all right? It is all right that I told you?”
She saw him swallow. “If there is a secluded corner anywhere in this building or its garden,” he said, “will you come into it with me, Nancy, and let me kiss you? Or am I rushing you? I will wait for a year to kiss you if I must.”
She shook her head. “I would rather not wait,” she said. “But, John, I cannot come to you untouched.”
“Heavens, Nancy,” he said, “I cannot come to you untouched either. Does it matter? Should there be a difference just because you are a woman and I am a man? Where are we likely to find that corner? Indoors or outdoors, do you suppose?”
They found it in a small rose arbor after they had danced out onto the stone balcony outside the ballroom and descended the steps to the lantern-lit garden. The arbor was not lit. Nancy felt breathless when they stopped walking and he turned her to face him.
“I used to dream about you,” John said, “when I first went to Portugal. Every night until I trained myself not to do so. I pretended that the Portuguese and Spanish women were just as lovely and just as desirable as you.”
He took her hands in his as he spoke, holding them loosely at their sides but in such a way that they had to stand close. She felt the stiffness of his coat against the tips of her breasts, felt the heat of his thighs almost brushing hers. She waited for the expected panic and prepared to fight it. It did not come.
“There is no other woman as lovely as you,” he said. “And only you can satisfy my soul.”
“Oh, John,” she said, closing her eyes. His words were like a soothing ointment, easing away the wounds and the pain of years.
But she could not explain the feeling to him.
He drew her arms about his waist and held them there so that she was forced to take another half step forward until her breasts were resting unmistakably against his chest and her thighs against his. There was no panic, she found, waiting for it again. He was John.
“I’ll worship your body all my life, Nancy,” he said, “and nourish your soul with my love.”
Her arms stayed where they were when he removed his own from them and set them lightly on either side of her waist.
“Kiss me,” he said.
She looked up into his face, startled. She could see it only dimly in the darkness.
“Kiss me, Nancy,” he said.
She hesitated before standing on tiptoe and setting her lips against his. He did not move.
“There,” he said when she went back down on her heels and looked warily into his eyes, which looked very dark in the shadows of the arbor. “The first hurdle is over and you have survived it.”
“But that is not as we kissed before,” she said.
He smiled and lowered his mouth to hers again. And so she rediscovered with a shock of recognition the fact that a kiss between lovers involved mouths more than lips, and tongues and even teeth.
And warm breath and murmured words. And seeking and caressing hands.
“My love.” His breath was warm, arousing, against her ear.
“John.”
“Enough,” he said finally, holding her close but still against him.
“There is a limit to my control, you know, and I am approaching it.”
Nancy could feel his heart thumping against his chest. “But I was not afraid,” she said in some wonder.
“Because I have been touching you with love,” he said. “Love that comes from deep inside me, Nancy, and not just from my lips or my hands. On our wedding night you will find that you are not afraid of the greatest intimacy of all. We will join our bodies and our whole selves too.”
“Our wedding night,” she whispered, and dreams were reborn as she rested her face against his neckcloth.
“Where shall we marry?” he asked. “Penhallow or here? Not Kingston, I think. And when? This summer after I have sold out of the army? Or sooner? How many children do you want? Will you like being a duchess one day, my love, and mother to a future duke?”
Nancy laughed—and found for several moments that she could not stop laughing, softly, but with amusement and happiness bubbling out of her. It was wonderful healing laughter.
“It is time to return to the ballroom,” he said. “I shall call on you tomorrow afternoon if I can wait that long and we will make definite and rational plans. Happy?” He kissed the top of her head.
She nodded. “Do I take it that an offer has been made and accepted?”
He chuckled. “It seems to me that that was what this conversation was all about,” he said.
“John,” she said softly. She wondered as she smiled up into his eyes if there could be any happier moment in life.
Lord Poole stood watching Elizabeth dance the supper waltz with Christopher, and made a conscious effort not to scowl. He was quite thankful when Martin came to stand by him. The necessity of making conversation would distract his mind. He wished heartily that he had not got somehow trapped into this betrothal. Especially to a woman who had been involved in scandal once in her life. He might have known that she would be nothing but trouble to him even if her father was a duke and her fortune enormous.
“One would think,” he said to Martin, nodding in Christopher’s direction, “that he would have the decency to leave town now that he has satisfied himself by seeing his daughter.”
Martin smiled apologetically. “I’m not sure matters are as simple as that,” he said.
Lord Poole forgot not to frown. “What the devil is that supposed to mean?” he asked.
“I thought it was just Christina too,” Martin said. “Maybe it is. Probably it is. There must be some decency in him after all, mustn’t there? I used to like him. I still do in a way.”
“Honywood,” Lord Poole said irritably, “if you would just stop this constantly trying to make excuses for everyone and get to the point, I would appreciate it. What are you saying? That he has his eye on Elizabeth again? I have been having the same thought.”
“She was his wife once,” Martin said. “And then, of course . . .”He shrugged and sighed.
“And then of course what?” Lord Poole looked at him keenly.
“No,” Martin said. “It is really not my place to interfere. Anyway, I have promised faithfully not to breathe a word to anyone. Besides, you know I would never say or do anything knowingly to hurt Lizzie or to show her in a bad light.”
Lord Poole’s nostrils flared. “And so you would keep some secret, which is obviously devilish incriminating, from her future husband,” he said, “just because of a misplaced promise. What is between them, Hony-wood?”
Martin bit his lips. “I have a great deal of liking and respect for you, Poole,” he said. “I was delighted when Lizzie told me she was to marry you. I have hoped that after all everything else would blow over and you and she could live happily ever after. But I am afraid that much as I love her I can’t avoid seeing that Lizzie is sometimes headstrong and not always straight in her dealings with others. It is a trait that pains me and that I hate to have to admit to others. But you are her fiance.”
“Yes, Goddamn it,” Lord Poole said. “I am. Out with it, Honywood.”
“Not here,” Martin said, his face troubled. “Maybe not at all. I’ll have to think about it, Poole, and call on you tomorrow. I am not sure if I can reconcile it with my conscience to break a confidence. But then I am not sure I can live with myself if I have to watch you deliberately deceived. I’ll call tomorrow.”
Lord Poole looked anything but satisfied. But he did become suddenly aware of his surroundings again and smoothed out his frown.
“The devil!” he said. “All Europe will be here the day after tomorrow and the sky is about to fall on my head. Your precious sister had better keep away from Trevelyan from this night on if she knows what is good for her, Honywood. I shall tell her so myself later, and you may tell her from me too. I’ll not stand being made a laughingstock.”
“N
o,” Martin said. “Even I can see that. It would be grossly unfair. We will have to see that it does not happen, Poole. Perhaps we can make some plan tomorrow.”
Lord Poole nodded curtly and went in search of a drink.
Chapter 23
THEY waltzed in silence for five whole minutes. She was supple in his arms and moved lightly on her feet. The apricot color of her gown suited the honey blond of her hair and gave her a delicate femininity, Christopher thought.
“Did Christina get sick from the ices?” he asked, breaking the silence between them at last.
“No.” She looked up into his eyes. “But she was terribly excited, Christopher, and does not know how she will live through until the day after tomorrow. Is it known exactly when the foreign heads of state will be arriving from Dover and by what route they will enter London? I would hate to see her disappointed when her heart is so set on seeing them.”
“Educated guesses can be made,” he said. “And everyone will converge on St. James’s Palace eventually.”
“You have been very kind to her, Christopher,” she said. “I must thank you.”
“She is my daughter,” he said.
“She likes you,” she said, “because you like her. Not because you take her out and give her treats, but because you like her. I am afraid that children are frequently only nuisances to the adults in their lives. And children can sense that.”
“Especially when those adults are only uncles or grandfathers or prospective stepfathers,” he said. “She needs the father who begot her, Elizabeth. How could she ever be a nuisance to me?”
“I don’t want to talk about this,” she said.
“We are going to have to tell her soon,” he said. “I hope we can tell her together. I hope I will not have to do it alone.”