by Mary Balogh
He had the distinct feeling that he was being dealt a sharp setdown. But as with many people who argued more from emotion than from reason, she had twisted his words. He directed one of his coolest looks at her.
“You will forgive me if I have forgotten,” he said, “but did I say or imply that you ought to be ashamed, Mrs. Derrick?”
Most ladies would have looked suitably chastised. Not Mrs. Derrick.
“Yes,” she said firmly. “You did imply it. You implied that women are shallow and pretend to love when they do not know the meaning of the word—when, indeed, there is no meaning to the word.”
“Ah,” he said softly, more annoyed than he normally allowed himself to be. “Then perhaps you will forgive me, ma’am.”
He moved back from the parapet and they walked on, in silence now, back among trees, though there was a clear view of the lake, which they circled about in order to return to their starting point. She set a brisk pace back to the house from there.
“Well,” she said, smiling brightly at him when they stepped inside the hall, breaking the lengthy silence in which they had completed their walk, “I must hurry if I am not to be late for dinner.”
He bowed to her and let her run—yes, run—up the stairs and disappear from sight before making his way to his own room. He was surprised to discover when he arrived there that he had been out for well over an hour. It had not seemed so long. It ought to have done. He did not usually enjoy the company of anyone whom he had not chosen with care—and that included all strangers.
THE DUKE OF Bewcastle did not, Christine was relieved to find, feel obliged to escort her up to her box of a room. Doubtless he was sagging with relief that he had survived such a tedious hour, she thought as she ran lightly up the stairs, forgetting all of Hermione’s teaching about running being an ungenteel way of moving from one place to another.
She hurried along to her room. It would not take her long to dress for dinner, but she had left herself precious little time.
She could scarcely believe what she had just done. She had allowed herself to be goaded by a couple of silly girls, that was what. She had dashed out of the house after tea in order to steal some quiet time alone, she had run headlong into the Duke of Bewcastle—ghastly moment—and then, just when she had been about to scurry away from him, she had conceived the grand idea of winning the wager right there and then, almost before it had been made. Just to prove to herself that she could do it. Right from the first moment she had had no intention of dashing back to the house after the hour was over to claim her prize. She did not need the prize or the envy of her fellow-conspirators. It was just that she was at the nasty age of twenty-nine, and all the young ladies, almost without exception, had looked on her with pity and scorn as if she were positively ancient.
She still could not quite believe she had done it—and that he had agreed to accompany her. And that, even on the hill, when she had been assaulted by conscience and had given him a decent chance to escape, he had chosen to continue on the way with her.
She was enormously glad the hour was over. A more toplofty, chilling man she had never known. He had talked of Lindsey Hall and his other properties, and he had talked of his brothers and sisters and nephews and nieces without a single glimmer of emotion. And then he had spoken scathingly of love when she had asked him about it.
If the full truth were told, she would have to admit that she did find him fascinating in a shivery sort of way. And he did have a splendid profile—and a physique that more than matched it. He ought to be cast in marble or bronze, she thought, and set atop a lofty column at the end of some avenue in the park at his principal seat so that future generations of Bedwyns could gaze at him in admiration and awe.
The Duke of Bewcastle was a handsome man and easy on the eyes.
She stopped suddenly in the middle of her small room and frowned. No, that was not his appeal. Oscar had been a handsome man—quite breathtakingly so, in fact. It was his looks that had bowled her right off her feet and right out of her senses. She had been a typically foolish girl nine years ago. Looks had been everything. One glance at him and she had been head over ears in love. Only his looks had mattered. She had been quite unawakened to any other appeal he might or might not have had.
But she was older now. She was awakened, knowledgeable. She was a mature woman.
The Duke of Bewcastle was definitely handsome in his cold, austere way. But he had something else beyond that.
He was sexually appealing.
The very thought, verbalized in her mind, set her breasts to tightening uncomfortably and her inner passage and thighs to aching.
How very embarrassing.
And alarming.
He was a dangerous man indeed, though not perhaps in any obvious way. He had not exactly tried to have his wicked way with her out there in the woods, after all, had he? The very thought was ludicrous. He had not even tried to charm her—even more ridiculous. He had not even cracked a smile the whole time.
But, even so, every cell in her body had pulsed with sexual awareness while she had walked with him.
She must have windmills in her head, she thought, giving herself a firm mental shake as she sat down before her dressing table mirror, to be feeling a sexual attraction to the Duke of Bewcastle, who could be placed bodily atop that lofty column at the end of that avenue in the park at Lindsey Hall and passed off as a marble statue without anyone’s ever knowing any different.
And then she slapped a hand over her mouth to muffle a shriek. Windmills in her head? She looked very much as if windmills had been busy on her head. Her hair was in a wild, tangled bush about her head. And her cheeks were like two shiny, rosy red apples after being exposed to the wind. Her nose was as bright as a cherry.
Heavenly days! The man must be made of marble, all funning aside, if he had been able to look at her like this without breaking out into great guffaws of mirth.
While her cells had been merrily pulsing away with sexual attraction, his must have been cringing with distaste.
Mortified—and far too late—she grabbed her brush.
BY THE TIME Christine went to bed that first night, she felt a great deal better about the house party than she had before it began and until just after tea. She had not wanted to come in the first place, and of course it had begun disastrously. But her success in luring the Duke of Bewcastle into spending an hour with her had amused her and lifted her spirits, even if she had decided not to share her triumph with the other ladies.
She did share it with Justin, however, when she sat with him in the drawing room after dinner while the tea tray was still in the room. She told him about the whole absurd wager and about the ease with which she had won it, though no one else would ever know.
“Of course,” she explained, “it was not an easy hour. I can understand why the Duke of Bewcastle has such a reputation for coldness. He did not once smile, Justin, and when I told him that I had been invited here only after Melanie had been cast into hysterics by Hector’s inviting him, he neither laughed nor looked chagrined.”
“Chagrined?” he said. “Bewcastle? I doubt he knows what the word means, Chrissie. He probably thinks it is his divine right to attend any house party that takes his fancy.”
“Though I cannot imagine that many parties do,” she said. “Take his fancy, that is. But we must not be nasty, must we? I am very glad that I have won that foolish wager to my satisfaction. Now I can happily avoid the man for the next thirteen days.”
“His loss, my gain,” Justin said, grinning at her. “I would love to have seen his face when you crashed into him.”
But there was something else that had made Christine more cheerful by the end of the evening. She had faced something she had been dreading for two years—the moment when she must come face-to-face with Hermione and Basil again—and she had survived it. And, having done so, she had realized that there was really nothing else to fear and nothing else to inhibit her from being herself.
&
nbsp; She had come here to Schofield determined to blend into the background, to be an observer rather than a participant, to avoid all incidents and encounters that might make her the subject of gossip. She had come here, in fact, determined to behave as she had tried to behave during the last few years of her marriage before Oscar died. It had never worked then, much as she had tried, and it had not worked now during the first few hours of the party.
She was glad her plan had failed so soon.
For her failure had made her ask the question—why would she behave in a manner that went so much against her nature? If the villagers knew that Christine Derrick was planning to spend two weeks at a house party sitting in a corner observing the activity around her, they would surely collapse in a heap of mirth—if they believed such an apparent bouncer.
Why should she behave so—or try to behave so—just because her brother- and sister-in-law were at the party too? They believed the worst of her anyway. They still hated her—that had been clear since the afternoon. But she was free of them now and had been for two years. Oscar was long dead.
She could be herself again.
It was a wonderfully freeing thought, even if the memories of Oscar—brought alive again with particular poignancy out at the stone bridge by the lake—and the sight of Hermione and Basil had caused a certain tight soreness of grief in her chest.
She would be herself.
And so she spent the rest of the evening playing charades even though at first she was not chosen for either team on the assumption, she supposed, that she was to be identified with the older generation. She was picked finally only because one team was one player short and Penelope Chisholm refused to fill the place, declaring that she was so poor at the game that soon every member of her team would be begging her to resign.
Christine was not poor at charades. It was, in fact, one of her favorite indoor games. She had always loved the challenge of acting out an idea without words and of guessing the meaning of someone else’s efforts. She threw herself into the game with unbridled enthusiasm, and was soon flushed and laughing and everyone’s favorite—among her own team members, anyway.
Her team won handily. Rowena Siddings and Audrey, infected by her enthusiasm, soon elevated the quality of their own performances, though Harriet King, who was quite hopeless at the game, pretended to be bored and to consider the whole thing quite beneath her dignity. Mr. George Buchan and Sir Wendell Snapes were soon looking upon Christine with admiration as well as approval. So were the Earl of Kitredge and Sir Clive Chisholm, who were watching from the sidelines and calling out encouragement.
The Duke of Bewcastle was also watching, a look of supercilious weariness on his face. But Christine took no notice of him—beyond noticing that expression anyway. He might have a reputation for lowering the temperature of any room that he occupied, but he was not going to chill her spirits.
By the time she went to bed, she was feeling quite reconciled to the idea of simply enjoying herself for the next two weeks and forgetting about all the duties with which she normally filled her days.
5
MRS. DERRICK, WULFRIC CONCLUDED OVER THE NEXT few days, did not know how to behave.
When the company played charades on the first evening, she became flushed and animated and laughed right out instead of tittering delicately as the other ladies did and shouted out guesses without any fear that she might outguess the men. She did not mind making a spectacle of herself when it was her turn to act.
Wulfric, who had not intended subjecting himself to the tedium of watching the game, found that he could not take his eyes off her. She was the sort of woman who was pretty even in repose, but she was quite extraordinarily lovely when animated. And animation seemed to come naturally to her.
“One cannot help admiring her, can one?” Justin Magnus said with a chuckle, having come up beside Wulfric unannounced. “Of course she does not possess the refinement many members of the ton expect of well-bred ladies. She often embarrassed my cousin Oscar, and Elrick and Hermione too. But if you want my opinion, Oscar was fortunate to have her for a wife. I always defended her staunchly and always will. She is a regular out-and-outer—unless one happens to be excessively high in the instep, of course.”
Wulfric turned his quizzing glass upon the young man, unsure whether he was being subtly reprimanded for being high in the instep or whether he was being treated as some sort of comrade who was expected to agree that out-and-outers made more desirable companions than ladies with refined manners. Either way he did not appreciate the familiarity with which he was being treated. Despite the fact that Magnus was Mowbury’s brother, Wulfric had only the slightest acquaintance with him.
“One would assume,” he said in the voice he invariably used to depress pretension, “that you are talking about Mrs. Derrick. I was observing the game.”
But no true lady had any business being so bright-eyed and vivacious and . . . rumpled when in genteel company. Her short, dark curls bounced about her head when she moved and quickly lost all semblance of refined elegance. The fact that she looked twice as pretty at the end of the game as she had before it began said nothing to the issue at all.
She ought not to have behaved so. If this was the way she had behaved during her marriage, Derrick and the Elricks had had every right to be offended.
She reminded Wulfric a little of his sisters, he was forced to admit, but she lacked the air of breeding that had always saved them from vulgarity. Not that Mrs. Derrick was vulgar exactly. She was just not good ton. But then, she was not, by birth, a member of the beau monde at all.
She did conduct herself with more decorum during the next few days, it was true. She spent a great deal of time in company with Justin Magnus, with whom she appeared to enjoy a close friendship. But whenever Wulfric looked directly at her—and it happened far more than it ought—he saw the same intelligence and laughter in her face that he had observed that first afternoon in the drawing room. But never again was she to be found alone in any corner of a room. She was becoming popular with the young people—a strange thing in itself. She was not a young woman. She ought not to be romping with the infantry.
Then there was the afternoon when they were all to go on an excursion to the ruins of a Norman castle some miles away and the carriages had been drawn up on the terrace and they were all out there ready to take their appointed places as directed by Lady Renable—except that it turned out when a head count was made that they were one lady short and thus the plan to pair them neatly for the journey threatened to fall into chaos. It was Mrs. Derrick who was missing—Lady Elrick was the one to point it out, her chilly tone suggesting that they all might have suspected it from the start. It took fifteen minutes of searching, during which time Lady Renable looked as if she might collapse into a fit of the vapors, before Mrs. Derrick put in an appearance.
Actually, she came dashing up from the direction of the lake, two children—a girl and a boy—at her heels, and another in her arms.
“I am so terribly sorry!” she cried gaily as she came, her voice breathless. “We were skipping stones on the water and I forgot the time. I shall be ready to go the moment I have returned your children to the nursery, Melanie.”
But Lady Renable put her offspring, of whose very existence Wulfric had been unaware until that moment, firmly into the keeping of a footman, and Mrs. Derrick, looking less than pristine but really very pretty nevertheless, was handed into one of the carriages by Gerard Hilliers, her appointed partner. Within five minutes they were all on their way, and she behaved herself for the rest of the day, though she did climb up to the battlements of the castle with the gentlemen when all the other ladies remained in the grassy courtyard admiring the ruins from below—and the group of young gentlemen with whom she climbed seemed very merry indeed. It would have been decidedly unseemly if she had been a young girl, but she was not, and she was, moreover, a widow, and so Wulfric conceded that her behavior was not quite improper.
It was only a
little irregular—perhaps a little indiscreet. Not quite good ton.
And then on the fifth day she went beyond indiscreet. They had had one day of rain and one day of indifferent weather after the expedition to the castle, but at last the sun shone once more. Someone suggested a walk into the village to see the church and take refreshments at the inn, and a sizable number of them set out.
Wulfric went with them. He was interested in old churches. And since he could never seem to deter the very young ladies from hanging upon his coattails, even if only figuratively, he walked deliberately with two of them—Miss King and Miss Beryl Chisholm—and wondered when the world had turned mad. Young ladies—and most older ones too—had been giving him a wide berth for years past, but these two chattered away in a manner that could only be called flirtatious. Mrs. Derrick walked between the Culver twins, Renable’s nephews, and took the offered arm of each. There was a great deal of merry conversation and laughter coming from their group, though Wulfric was not close enough to hear anything that was said. She was wearing her usual bonnet—a straw one with a brim made floppy from age, though he had to admit that it looked very becoming on her. She also had a tendency to stride along as if she had energy to spare—and as if she had never heard of ladylike deportment.
They all went first into the church and were given a lengthy tour by the vicar, who was well informed on the history and architecture of the building and was able to answer every question posed to him—most of them by Wulfric himself. Then they all moved out to the churchyard, a picturesque, tranquil area centered about two ancient yew trees. The vicar proceeded to point out some of the more historic gravestones, though several of the young ladies were restless and impatient to move on to the inn. Lady Sarah Buchan even suggested, as she came to stand beside Wulfric, that she was quite sure she would swoon from the heat if she did not remove to somewhere shady within the next few minutes. But her brother called her a silly goose as he drew her arm firmly through his own and pointed out to her that they were standing directly in the shade of one of the yews, besides which it was not that hot a day.