The Devil's Web

by Mary Balogh

  “Did you notice?” she asked, obeying the pressure of his hands and sitting on the edge of the bed while he stooped down to remove her slippers. “Do you think he is getting better, Edmund?”

  He got to his feet, his task completed, and framed her face with his hands. “We will hope so, my love,” he said. “But we must keep in mind what Doctor Hanson has said.”

  “He is wrong,” she said, bending her head forward as his hands began to remove the pins from her hair. “I know he is wrong, Edmund. Papa is a strong man. And he has recovered from a seizure before.”

  He bent and kissed her lips before disappearing briefly into her dressing room to fetch a brush. He began to pull it through her hair. “Fifty strokes only,” he said, “and then you are going to lie down. And you are going to sleep. I will stay here until you do, and there will be stern words, I promise, if you are not asleep within ten minutes.”

  “You will call me, Edmund, if anything … ?” She looked up at him frantically.

  “I will call you,” he said.

  “And if James comes?” She watched him take her brush back to the dressing room and waited like a child for him to fold back the bedcovers before lying back against the pillows. “He will come, Edmund, won’t he? Your letter will have reached him in time? And he will come?”

  He covered her up, kissed her again, and lay down beside her, on top of the covers, his hands clasped behind his head. “The letter may have been too late,” he said. “The ship may have sailed. We both know that, Alex. We should know for sure tomorrow. Peters should be back then. Go to sleep, love. You have only nine minutes left in which to avoid a severe scolding.”

  She turned her head to look at him. “You have always said I need not be obedient to you,” she said.

  “If women are allowed to change their minds,” he said, “then men are allowed to be horrible liars. Stay awake for eight and a half minutes longer, and you will see just how ferociously I can enforce wifely obedience.”

  She closed her eyes and smiled fleetingly. “I would love to see it,” she said. “But I don’t think I can stay awake long enough. Remind me to defy you some other time, Edmund.”

  He had a reply ready, but he looked at her closely and did not make it. He lay where he was for ten more minutes before removing himself from the bed and the room.

  MADELINE WAS STANDING on the arched stone bridge across the river, leaning on the balustrade and staring down into the waters that flowed beneath. She had wandered a little way from the house, and drew in slow breaths of fresh air.

  She had just seen Sir Perry on his way. An hour before it had been the rector, though Edmund had taken charge of his visit. And a little while before that Anna and Walter had ridden over when she and Sir Cedric were already entertaining Mr. Courtney and Mr. Morton.

  The task of dealing with the almost constant flow of callers fell largely on their shoulders. Lady Beckworth and Alexandra, of course, were spending every waking moment in the sickroom, and Mama was there much of the time. Edmund had the estate business to see to, and he was trying to be both mother and father to the children.

  She did not mind doing her small part. Besides, Sir Cedric was a pillar of strength and comfort, as he always had been during times of crisis. She could remember as far back as the time when her father died, curling up on his lap and crying her heart out because Mama had completely collapsed and Edmund had been walking about in a white-faced daze and Dominic had been swaggering around, refusing to show any emotion because he was twelve years old and a man.

  Madeline smiled down unseeingly at the water below her. Just a week before she had been wondering what she would do with herself during these days between James’s departure from Amberley and his setting sail, how she would keep thought and emotion at bay. None of her carefully laid plans had worked for the first five days.

  The pain had been searing and fraught with panic and desperation. If she left now, she had thought a dozen times a day, without any delay whatsoever, taking time only to saddle a horse, perhaps she would be able to reach him in time, in time to …

  But there her thoughts had always balked. In time to what? Beg him to stay? Beg to be taken with him? Beg that they try what he had murmured almost to himself at the fountain during the ball—try to become friends? How could they be friends with an ocean between them?

  And then on the fifth day Lord Beckworth had collapsed in the drawing room after dinner, and since then the house and all their lives had been in turmoil.

  And what now if he should come back? What if Edmund’s letter had reached him in time and he had decided to come back rather than sail for Canada?

  Madeline glanced up the eastern hillside, up the road that formed the main approach to the house. She realized that she had been doing so every few minutes since she had left the house. Yet even if he came, the earliest they could expect him was the next day.

  And what if he came? She was unprepared for his coming. She did not know how she would cope with it.

  And what if he did not come? She was unprepared for his not coming. She did not know how she would cope with that either.

  There was a lone rider coming down the hillside. But it was not he. He could not be expected until the next day. It would be Mr. Watson or Miles Courtney or someone else. But she straightened up and watched the horseman, and intuition and an accelerated heartbeat told her who it was even before he was close enough for her to see him clearly.

  She stayed where she was, turning as he rode closer so that her back was against the balustrade and her hands gripping its top behind her back. His face was pale and unshaven. His tired dark eyes bored into hers as he drew his horse to a halt on the bridge.

  “He is still alive,” she said.

  “Still?” His voice was harsh. “He was not expected to be, then?”

  He was waiting for an answer, his eyes holding hers. She shook her head briefly. She thought he was about to say something else, but he did not. He loosened the reins and gave his horse the signal to proceed.

  Edmund was waiting on the steps, she saw when she turned her head to look toward the house.

  • • •

  IT WAS SOME LATE HOUR of the night. James had no idea what time it was. Indeed, the last few days and nights had so run together in his mind that he was no longer able to say what day of the week it was. He had slept for five hours—at least Edmund had told him it was that long—after his arrival, after he had hugged his mother and Alex and had spent an hour standing by his father’s bedside, gazing down at him.

  He stood there again now—he had not sat down at all in this room. His mother was sitting at the window, her head nodded forward on her chest. Alex had gone to bed, on the combined insistence of himself and Edmund and her mother-in-law.

  His father’s breathing was so labored it was almost a snore. His eyes were half-open. His hands lay on the covers exactly as they had earlier in the day, when James had arrived. He had not moved.

  The doctor had said there was no realistic hope of recovery. His father was going to die.

  James touched the back of one of his father’s hands. It was cold. “Papa,” he said, “can you hear me?”

  He had no memories of playing with his father. None of the sorts of memories that Alex’s children would have. Only memories of standing at his father’s knee, reciting Bible verses and other lessons, feeling those keen eyes on him. And memories of a rare look of pride in those eyes when he got it all right, without faltering.

  He had always wondered, but had never discovered the truth, if his father had sometimes followed him with his eyes when he knew himself unobserved, as he had done occasionally with Alex. Eyes that were softened from their usual coldness and sternness. Eyes that hinted at an affection that was never allowed to show itself more openly.

  “Don’t die,” James said. “Open your eyes and know me.”He could remember his mother hugging and kissing them as very young children, and occasionally covering up some mischief, like the time w
hen she had had his muddy clothes smuggled down the back stairs to the kitchen after he had been on a forbidden jaunt out onto the moors. But she had been taught in time that such displays of affection were weakness and would merely encourage waywardness in her children.

  “Just one look,” he said. “One look of kindness, Papa.”

  He had feared and worshipped his father. He had spent his childhood and a large part of his boyhood striving to live up to his father’s expectations of him. He had not often rebelled, and when he had, he had been consumed with guilt and remorse afterward and a terror of the wrath of both his father and God. He had spent years yearning and striving for his father’s love, feeding himself on those few looks of pride.

  “Give me your blessing before you die,” he said to the comatose man on the bed. “Even if only in a look.”

  And then there had been school and university and the realization that life was not as harsh in all homes. In some homes there were open expressions of love. In some homes weakness and waywardness and disobedience were treated leniently, smoothed over by the power of love.

  And so he had rebelled against his father in the name of love. He had taken Dora, who had grown up on the neighboring estate to theirs with her brother, as wards of the Duke of Peterleigh, and he had loved her and deliberately shown her a free expression of his love. She had not been reluctant. And he had dreamed of a life of love with her.

  He had dreamed of freedom. But even without his father’s terrible interference, he would not have been free. He knew that now. For he carried his chains inside himself. They were part of his upbringing, part of his character. He was incapable of love, incapable of making love the guiding force of his life.

  He could only look at love from the outside and know that he would never be on the inside. Madeline had been right when she had told him years before that he would never be able to run far enough because he would always have to take himself with him.

  “I love you,” he said to his father. “Tell me that you love me, Papa. Set me free.”

  He had destroyed Dora. It was not his father who had done that. He had done it. For if he had not lain with her in a fine gesture of defiance against what he had been taught was right, his father would have had nothing to interfere with. Dora would have been free to grow up and choose her own husband or else have someone far more suitable chosen for her.

  He could not blame his father for what had happened to her. He was to blame. His one real attempt to love had ended in disaster. He had destroyed another human being.

  “Forgive me,” he whispered to his father. “I forced you into that difficult situation. It was all my fault, not yours. Forgive me, Papa.”

  He did not know how much later it was when his father’s breathing changed. He listened to it tensely for a few minutes and then crossed the room and opened the door quietly to send the servant who was sitting outside for his sister and brother-in-law. He walked over to his mother and touched her gently on the shoulder.

  It was a whole hour after that before his father died.

  LADY BECKWORTH DECIDED that it would be madness to try to take her husband’s remains back to Yorkshire for burial. The funeral would take place at Amberley, in the village of Abbotsford. He would at least be close to his daughter.

  She was not capable of much decision making. She went into a state of collapse after her husband’s death and no one was capable of bringing her any comfort, although both her son and her daughter spent much of their time with her, and the earl and his mother attended to her every need.

  The funeral was set as far into the future as possible, five days after the death, and Lord Beckworth’s sister was sent for. A letter was sent too by servant to Lord and Lady Eden.

  And so Madeline had the enormous comfort on the fourth day of seeing her twin’s carriage cross the bridge, skirt the formal gardens, and draw up outside the main doors. Ellen was with him.

  “Dom,” she said an hour later when they had walked outside to take some fresh air. Ellen was sitting inside, holding Alexandra’s hand. The babies had been taken upstairs to the nursery. “You can’t know how glad I am to see you.”

  “A house of death is not a happy place to be,” he said. “And he lingered for several days? That must have put an extra strain on everyone.”

  “James arrived here in time at least,” she said. “For that I will always be thankful. Imagine how dreadful it would have been for him, Dom, to have got here the next day to find his father dead already.”

  Dominic shrugged his arm free of hers and put it about her shoulders. “He looks as if he is turned to stone,” he said. “Quite as he used to look when we first knew him. He looks as if he does not feel a thing.”

  “But he does,” she said. “I can look at him now and know that there is a great deal going on behind the granite exterior.”

  “You are privy to Purnell’s feelings, then, Mad?” he asked. “He speaks to you? Things are better between you?”

  “He has not spoken to me since the afternoon when he arrived back here,” she said. “And as far as I know, he has not once looked at me or shown any awareness of my existence. No, things ended when he left here after Edmund’s ball, Dom—if they had ever begun, that is. I thought it would be difficult having him back here again. But it is not so. We are like strangers who are not even aware of each other any longer.”

  “Except that you know he is suffering,” he said.

  “Except that I know he is suffering,” she agreed.

  “Well,” he said, squeezing her shoulder, “I daresay he and his mother will leave here soon after the funeral. And even if they don’t, Ellen and I have come for only a week. You will come back with us and stay for as long as you wish. We are finding that Amberley is not the only place that has friendly neighbors. We will be able to offer you an almost active social life. And a few eligible bachelors too.”

  She rested her head briefly against his shoulder. “The poor gentlemen,” she said. “Do they know that you have designs on their freedom, I wonder? I will come. And I warn you that I have vowed to marry within the year. I don’t at all relish my present situation as everyone’s spinster aunt. Four times already. You don’t have another set of twins on the way yet, by any chance?”

  “After only four months?” he said. “Poor Ellen. No, I thought perhaps you would want to take a turn next.”

  “Then for sure,” she said, “I must find a husband. I cannot keep you and Ellen waiting indefinitely. Are any of those neighbors of yours tall and blond, Dom? And below five and thirty years of age? And charming? With at least ten thousand a year?”

  “I can think of three without even trying,” he said. “Wiltshire breeds them handsome, Mad.”

  “Ah,” she said, “now you tell me. Oh, Dom, I am so happy, happy, happy to have you home again.”

  Mrs. Deirdre Harding-Smythe arrived later the same evening with her son, Albert. She hugged and cried over Alexandra and her sister-in-law while Albert shook hands with his cousin and congratulated him on his newly acquired title.

  James looked at him coldly and blankly.

  “You are Beckworth now,” Albert said. “Your life’s dream has been fulfilled, James, and you no longer have need to go back to the new world to seek adventure.”

  “So I am,” his cousin said with a stiff inclination of the head, “and so it has and so I don’t.”

  Albert looked a little confused and turned away to take Alexandra’s hand and raise it to his lips. “My dear cousin,” he said. “How very well you look in black. It complements your dark coloring.”

  Alexandra frowned and said nothing.

  Albert looked up into James’s stern and immobile face, flashed him a foolish smile, and turned to Lady Beckworth.

  “Aunty!” he said, his voice vibrant with soft sympathy. “It is really for the best, you know. This world was not good enough for Uncle. I always did say so, as I am sure you will recall, and I have been consoling Mama with the same sentiment all th
e way from London.”

  Lord Eden spoke into his sister’s ear. “Are you quite sure he has to be blond and tall with ten thousand a year?”he murmured. “Perhaps I can find you someone closer to home.”

  She gave him a speaking glance. “I always did say he was a toad,” she whispered to him, “as I am sure you will recall. And I will regale your ears with the same sentiment all the way to Wiltshire.”

  “Ah, Lord Eden, Lady Madeline,” Albert said graciously. “So pleased to renew our acquaintance and so sad that it has to be in such very sad circumstances. My uncle was a saint, you know. But then, of course, you had the pleasure of his company here for a month before his tragic demise.”

  He sat down beside them and favored them with his superior conversation for half an hour. Both Madeline and Dominic found themselves envying Ellen. She was upstairs in the nursery consoling her son, who had not taken kindly to the journey.

  JAMES SAT CLOSE to one of the windows in the drawing room, occasionally looking out at the darkness. The curtains had not been drawn even though it was quite late in the evening already. And he looked down at his black clothes and across the room at his mother’s and his aunt’s.

  He was dead, then, and buried. It was all over. Alex’s neighbors, who had filled the church and come back to the house, many of them, at Amberley’s bidding, had all returned home. They had been unstinting with their sympathy. They were kind people. He wished he had been able to respond better to them.

  Lord and Lady Eden were sitting on either side of his mother. Lady Eden had an arm linked through hers and was talking earnestly to her. She was a gracious lady. But then, of course, she knew all about the loss of a husband. She had lost her own only the previous year.

  Amberley had taken Alex upstairs just a short while before. She was close to exhaustion after all the tensions of the past several days.

  He had hardly spoken with her since his return from London. What was there to say? That she was taking it hard was clear to him, and she doubtless knew that he was not unmoved either by the death of their father. But what could he say to her when even the thoughts inside him were leaden?