The Devil's Web

by Mary Balogh

  But more important than his appearance, he was a serious young man, who looked her very directly in the eye and conversed earnestly on any topic she chose. He was very different from her usual choice of flirt. Indeed, he could not be called a flirt. Usually she liked to engage gentlemen in light bantering conversation and teasing flirtation. She had realized only the year before in Brussels that she did so in an unconscious effort to hold them at arm’s length. Only a few men, like Jason Huxtable, had penetrated beyond the barrier that she had erected around herself.

  But on this occasion she was building no barriers. She asked the captain in all seriousness about his family and home, about his life as an officer and his aspirations for the future. And although she conversed with other people and joined in wholeheartedly with the game of charades and laughed with Perry when their team won handily, her attention was entirely given over to cultivating this new acquaintance, this new hope for her future.

  Not that she had any wish to be an officer’s wife. Although she had once almost eloped with a lieutenant and actually had been betrothed to one the year before, and though she had seriously considered marrying a colonel only a few weeks before, she did not really think the life would suit her. But she was not going to make excuses to remain uninvolved with any man. She was going to give every possible relationship a chance.

  She and the captain walked outside before supper, as several of the other guests did, and they breathed in the fresh air and the scent of the roses together and admired the lanterns and strolled the perimeter of the lawns. The rhododendron bushes were in full bloom and must be appreciated to the full.

  “They are overpowered by the roses,” Madeline said, “but they smell just as sweet.” And she stepped up to one bloom and breathed in its fragrance. “How lovely the summertime is.”

  Captain Hands must have agreed with her. He must have thought she matched the loveliness of her surroundings. He stood beside her with hands clasped behind his back and leaned forward and kissed her.

  She resisted the urge to react in any of the glib ways she normally would have done. And normally she would have been annoyed. She had been taken by surprise. A kiss for Madeline was usually something granted rather than taken. She smiled at the captain when he lifted his head.

  He regarded her gravely. “Do I owe you an apology?” he asked.

  She continued to smile. “Only if you are sorry,” she said. “But I would be sorry if you are.”

  He said no more and Madeline turned to stroll onward. They resumed their conversation as if it had not been interrupted at all.

  It was a thoroughly promising beginning, she thought as they returned inside and were called to supper and her attention was taken by her Aunt Viola. A comfortable friendship had begun, with a hint that it might turn into more than friendship. She liked the captain. There was nothing whatsoever about him that might be considered threatening.

  There was something decidedly threatening about James Purnell. He came to sit beside her as she took supper at a table with Aunt Viola, Mr. Cartwright, and the Watsons. His arrival there was totally inexplicable and disturbing since he might have sat anywhere he pleased. There was an empty chair beside Miss Cameron.

  But he came to sit beside her instead. And spoke not a word to her. He answered a string of the inevitable questions about Canada from Aunt Viola and Mr. Cartwright and then proceeded to draw the very shy Mrs. Watson into conversation. And he did so with a skill and gentleness that soon had her talking freely about the family and home she had left twenty miles away. Mr. Watson smiled with obvious gratification that someone had been able to draw his wife out of her shell.

  Madeline felt only indignation. Why was it that he was capable of so much humanity with other people? Young and shy girls could always provoke compassion in him, it seemed. They reminded him perhaps of Alexandra as she had used to be.

  And that fact would explain why he had never shown either gentleness or compassion to her. She had never been shy.

  “Would you care to walk outside?”

  There was a subtle change in his voice, an almost imperceptible hardening, which made Madeline realize immediately that he was addressing her. When she turned from a contemplation of Anna and Jean, Howard and Lieutenant Cowley at the other side of the room, it was to find his dark eyes on her, as unfathomable as ever in their expression.

  No good whatsoever could come of it. It was strange beyond belief that he would even suggest such a thing. They would be merely punishing themselves and each other by being deliberately alone together. Besides, she had made a satisfactory start to a new life and a new attitude just that evening. She was pleased with herself. She was almost happy.

  “Thank you,” she said, smiling at him, “that would be pleasant.”

  And when he rose to his feet and pulled back her chair for her, she smiled around at the other occupants of the table and turned to the doorway.

  JAMES HAD BEEN WATCHING Jean all evening. And trying, as he had been doing all afternoon up on the cliffs, to make decisions. But he was no nearer settling the course of his life. He had succeeded only in making his brain race along out of all control so that he could not think clearly at all.

  He played cards with the elder Miss Stanhope, Sir Cedric, and Mrs. Courtney. He led one of the teams of charades, a team that lost ignominiously and amid much laughter to the other. He conversed with anyone who happened to be at his side during the evening. And he watched Jean.

  She was very young. She liked to whisper and giggle with Anna Carrington. She was also very sweet and even-tempered and sociable. She even had quiet, plodding, good-natured Howard Courtney taken with her.

  She would be a perfect wife. Pretty and dainty, cheerful, easy to entertain. He could live in Montreal with her and forget his past and this disastrous attempt to come to terms with it. He thought he would possibly be able to arrange it that he stayed in Montreal. And if he could not, then he could leave the company. There were plenty of other ways to earn a living in Montreal or other parts of Upper or Lower Canada.

  It was what he should do. And he should settle the matter now, as soon as possible, so that his mind could be at peace, his future assured. He should make his offer for Jean now, while they were at Amberley, though he would not be able to speak with her father until they returned to London. But they could make an unofficial announcement. And then he would be safe.

  But of course nothing was ever as simple as that. His mother’s words haunted him. He had not been able to shake his mind free of them all day. Years ago he had decided that he must take himself right away from his parents. It was impossible to please them, impossible to penetrate the armor of religion and morality they had put on. And he had gone—all the way across the Atlantic Ocean and thousands of miles beyond that.

  But he had come back. And the decision was there to make all over again. For despite everything, despite the fact that they were impossible to please, they were his parents and he loved them. And he could not shut from his mind the possibility that somewhere deep inside they had feelings for him too. Indeed, his mother had shown them just that morning.

  He had shamed them by going into business. That accusation he could shake off quite easily. He would shame them further by marrying Jean, who was not socially acceptable according to their standards. That too he could shake off. He had broken their hearts by leaving home and going so far away. But there was no living with them. They must have known more peace of mind since he had left, just as he had. He had never publicly begged their pardon or God’s for the way he had behaved over the whole ugly affair of Dora. But then he had not wronged them nearly as much as they had wronged him. And his relationship with God was a private matter between the two of them, and not his parents’ concern at all. Besides, he did not know their God and was not sure that he had one of his own.

  And if his father died—when his father died—he would have the burden on his conscience of knowing that he had been responsible for precipitating his death.r />
  He did not believe it. He would not believe it. But the thought had weighed on him and bowed him down all through a nightmare of a day.

  So he watched Jean. And contemplated defiance. Though defiance was for schoolboys, not for thirty-year-old men who had set the course of their lives years before. Returning to Canada was not defiance. Marrying Jean would not be defiance. If such actions killed his father, the responsibility, the guilt, would not be his.

  He watched Jean and saw Madeline. She was in his every waking moment and in every cycle of his dreams. She was in his blood. And his mother wanted him to marry her. He would be showing filial duty and love by marrying Madeline and remaining in England.

  His mind grappled with decisions; his conscience throbbed with denied guilt; his blood pulsed with Madeline. And during a short stroll outside with the Lampmans he looked off into the darkness beyond the lawns and the lanterns and saw her share a brief kiss with Captain Hands of the regiment stationed nearby.

  When he entered the supper room, one of the last guests to do so because Miss Stanhope had engaged him and the Lampmans in the telling of a particularly lengthy anecdote about her brother Bertie, there were several empty seats. There was one across the table from Alexandra. There was one next to Jean. And one next to Madeline. He would sit beside Jean, he decided, and ask her to take a walk with him afterward. Perhaps the time would seem right for his offer. He would wait and see.

  But his steps took him to Madeline’s side, and he sat by her through supper without once looking at her or talking to her. And every pulse in his body was beating with awareness of her by the time they had finished eating. Conversation throughout the room was animated. No one showed any inclination to rise and return to the drawing room.

  “Would you care to walk outside?” he asked Madeline, without any conscious decision to do so.

  And she smiled at him, accepted, and rose from her chair.

  “It is a beautiful evening,” she said, taking his arm as they stepped beyond the French windows. “And there is something particularly enchanting about lanterns in the trees, is there not?”

  “Yes,” he said, strolling with her across the grass.

  “Mrs. Morton has outdone herself,” she said. “She always likes to feel that she has put on the most memorable entertainment of the summer.”

  “Yes,” he said. And when he turned his head a few silent moments later to look down at her, it was to find her glaring ahead with fixed eyes, her jaw set in a hard and stubborn line.

  He kept on walking when they came to the edge of the lawn, following a path through the bushes, not knowing where it led. There was an orchard beyond, lit only by the light of the moon and stars.

  “Hands is to be the lucky recipient of your favors for the summer?” he asked, hating himself even as he heard the words he had spoken.

  Her head turned sharply in his direction. “Oh, definitely,” she said. “You cannot expect me to resist the lure of a young and unattached gentleman, can you? It would be as impossible for me to avoid flirting with him as it would to stop breathing.”

  He wanted to apologize to her. But all the frustrations of the day converted into irritability against her. “Yes,” he said, “I know that quite well.”

  “Then your question was redundant,” she said. “I made a careful assessment of Sir Gordon Clark, Lieutenant Cowley, and the captain, and decided that the last gentleman was the handsomest of the three. So I began my flirtation without further delay. Over the next few days, of course, I will have to make careful and discreet inquiries as to the relative wealth and prospects of the three. My victim may change identity as a result. But only under extreme circumstances. On the whole, it is a handsome face and physique that hold most sway with me.”

  “Understandable,” he said. “I wonder you even give thought to wealth and prospects since matrimony is always the last thing on your mind anyway. Flirtation is the breath of life to you. I wonder if you write down the names of all your conquests. You must have a bookful already.”

  She looked up at him all amazement, eyebrows raised. “Oh, sir,” she said, “if you had ever been inside my bedchamber, you would have seen that one wall beside my bed is pockmarked with small gouges in the wallpaper. So much more permanent and impressive a record than a mere list of names in a book, don’t you agree?”

  “You kissed him,” he said. “Almost in public. Have you no shame?”

  She laughed suddenly, still looking up at him. “Pardon the rudeness,” she said, “but you sounded remarkably like your father at that moment, James. ‘Have you no shame?’ ”

  The small vestiges of his control snapped. He whirled on her, grabbed her by the upper arms, and shook her roughly. “You will leave my father out of this,” he said through his teeth. “I will not permit you to insult him.”

  She spread her hands defensively on his chest. She was breathless. But she tipped her head back and continued to laugh up at him. “No,” she said, “I am not ashamed. I like to be kissed. I like to be appreciated. And I don’t care the snap of my fingers for your contempt or disapproval, James Purnell. I will kiss and flirt with whom I like, and you may go to the devil with my blessing.”

  Some of his rage had receded. The hopelessness, the frustration, remained. He looked down into her laughing, scornful face.

  “I think I am the devil where you are concerned, aren’t I?” he said, and took her mouth with his.

  He would have let her go when she struggled. He would have released her completely and turned from her so that she could find her way back to the house and safety. But her struggles were not to free herself but merely to release her arms from imprisonment against his chest. She wrapped them about his neck and pressed herself against him and opened her mouth so that his tongue plunged unimpeded into the soft heat beyond her teeth.

  And her temperature soared with his. She moved against him, at first with taut desperation, and then with slower, more knowing movements, feeling him with her breasts and her hips and thighs, rubbing intimately against him, moving her shoulders back from him so that he could fondle her breasts, so that his hand could slide down between them.

  And he wanted her with every pounding beat of the blood coursing through him. He wanted her with a physical agony that only their standing position and the barrier of their clothing held in check. But he lifted his head away from her eventually and stepped back with her to lean against the narrow trunk of a fruit tree. He held her head firmly against his chest and waited for sanity to return.

  She was drawing audible and deep breaths and letting them out with shuddering difficulty.

  “Madeline,” he said finally, “what are we going to do?”

  It took her a while to answer. Her voice was breathless and shaking when she did so, though the words were light. “Straighten our hair and our clothing and go back to the house, naturally,” she said, pushing away from him and concentrating her attention on brushing at the skirt of her gown.

  He stayed back against the tree. “There is no way it could work, is there?” he said, gazing at her bent head, willing her for the first time in all his acquaintance with her to contradict him.

  She did not look up. She must be finding many creases in her gown. “No,” she said, “absolutely none. I hate you, James. I think I really do. But you see how incorrigible I am? I cannot resist kissing and flirting even with you.”

  “You were not flirting,” he said.

  She lifted her head and smiled dazzlingly at him. “Ah,” she said, “but the essence of really expert flirting is that one’s victim thinks one to be in true earnest. Did you think I was serious? Poor James. I am sorry, you know, if I raised hopes where there cannot be any. I am quite heartless, you see. A worthy adversary for the devil, wouldn’t you agree?”

  He stayed where he was when she began to walk in the direction of the house. But she turned back to him and smiled. “It might be the occasion of dreadful gossip,” she said, “if we arrive back separately when everyo
ne saw us leave the dining room together. Let us walk back sedately together, my arm in yours. What shall we converse about? Canada again? I fear the topic must be becoming tedious to you. The weather, perhaps?”

  “The weather seems a safe enough topic,” he said through his teeth. “We have been having an unusually long spell of heat, even for July. When do you think it is likely to break?”

  “Oh, not until you have sailed in August,” she said airily. “It would not be cruel enough to break before then, surely. Edmund’s ball would be quite spoiled.”

  “There are more people on the lawn again,” he said. “How fortunate, since that topic was in danger of playing itself out. Shall we join your aunt and uncle?”

  “You may do so,” she said, withdrawing her arm from his. “I am rather chilly. I am going indoors.”

  He watched her wave a hand at the Carringtons and walk in leisurely fashion in the direction of the house. She stopped along the way to talk with the captain and the lieutenant and Anna.

  THE EARL OF AMBERLEY sat in his dressing gown on the side of the bed he shared with his wife. He had just straightened up after kissing her.

  “Witch!” he said, smiling ruefully at her. “It is the wrong time, is it not? The dangerous time?”

  “Yes,” she said, folding the blankets neatly beneath her arms. “I just wish my need for you would move in cycles as my body does, Edmund. Though that would not help you at all, would it?”

  “Is this house party working?” he asked, deliberately changing the subject. “Is James happy, do you think? And is he associating with your father at all?”

  “No and no,” she said with a sigh. “But there are a few weeks left, Edmund. I have great faith in the atmosphere of Amberley. It brought you and me together when we were all ready to go our separate ways. And it brought Dominic and Ellen together when things had gone dreadfully wrong between them. Maybe James will straighten himself out here too.”