Slightly Dangerous

by Mary Balogh

  “Justin.” Christine had not taken her eyes from his face. “You quite deliberately wrecked my marriage? You drove Oscar out of his mind? You actually drove him to his death?”

  “You cannot believe that, Chrissie!” he cried, his eyes wild. “I am your friend. I am the only one who understands you. I love you!”

  Basil cleared his throat.

  Hermione held the fingertips of one hand against her forehead. Her eyes were closed.

  “This is too much like a nightmare,” she said. “It cannot be true. It surely cannot. And yet I know it is. You were so convincing, Justin. We always felt sorry for you. And we did not believe a word you said.”

  “You!” Justin pointed accusingly at the duke. “You, Bewcastle! You called Chrissie a strumpet this morning.”

  “And then rode on to the stables,” the Duke of Bewcastle said, raising his glass to his eye once more, “so that you could savor your triumph in private.”

  “And then you came and told me,” Christine said, “that his grace would make a horribly jealous and possessive husband since he had been irritated by the fact that the Marquess of Attingsborough had escorted me outside the house and helped me mount. Justin! Oh, Justin. Poor, poor Oscar!”

  She spread her hands over her face and felt a cool hand come against the back of her neck—Hermione’s.

  “Nobody loves you as I do, Chrissie,” Justin said. “But of course, you are always dazzled by looks. First Oscar and now Bewcastle and a whole host of other handsome men in between. And look at me—or rather don’t look. No woman ever does, least of all you. You never took me seriously. I can’t bear to see you with other men who don’t appreciate you properly. Chrissie, I love you.”

  Christine removed her hands in time to see the Duke of Bewcastle lean over Justin’s chair and then straighten up again, without any apparent effort, Justin’s neckcloth in his firm grasp and Justin’s person dangling above the floor so that he could touch it only with his toes.

  “I share your skill in one particular way, Magnus,” his grace said so softly and so coldly that Christine shivered. “I have never been quite sure what love is, but I certainly know what love is not. Love does not destroy the beloved or cause her endless suffering.”

  Christine’s hands were over her face again. But the hot tears oozed between her fingers and dripped onto her lap.

  “I would like to shake you like the rat you are until you are limp and lifeless,” the duke said in the same voice, “but you are a guest in my home, as are other members of your family, including your mother. Your family may deal with you as they see fit later, but for now you will make any reasonable excuse you can invent to leave my house before breakfast tomorrow. And, if you are wise, you will keep yourself for the next decade or two as far away from my sight as you are able.”

  Christine was aware of Basil getting to his feet.

  “But before you leave, Justin,” Basil said, “before you leave both Lindsey Hall and England, that is, I will see you outside the house. Now.”

  “Basil—” Hermione said as Christine looked up.

  “You will remain here, Hermione,” he said. “And you too, Christine. Justin? Outside!”

  Justin stopped before Christine’s chair, his face ashen and distraught. There were tears in his eyes.

  “Chrissie?” he said.

  A truly amazing and shocking thing happened then. The Duke of Bewcastle’s foot came up and caught him in the seat of his breeches, lifting him half off his feet and sending him staggering after Basil, who was stalking from the room.

  There was a moment of silence after they had left. Then the duke bowed to them.

  “I will leave you alone,” he said. “You will not be disturbed.”

  But before he left the room, he paused before Christine’s chair, as Justin had done, and set a large linen handkerchief in her hand.

  Christine and Hermione sat side by side for a few moments.

  “Christine,” Hermione said at last, “how can I ever expect you to forgive us?”

  “I was as deceived as you were,” Christine said. “He was my friend. For those few years before Oscar died, he was the only person I trusted.”

  They were both in tears then, crying their eyes out in each other’s arms, crying for the lost years and the lost friendships, for the unnecessary death of a weak, tormented man, for their own gullibility in falling for a scheme that was so fiendishly simple it had succeeded utterly.

  When their tears were spent Christine blew her nose in the borrowed handkerchief.

  “I do hope Basil will not get hurt,” she said. “How foolish of him to take Justin outside.”

  “Basil is a man,” Hermione said fondly. “How else can a man react to such a revelation? I hope he pounds Justin to a pulp.”

  They both laughed rather nervously and then shed a few more tears.

  20

  SUNDAY—EASTER SUNDAY—PASSED IN RELATIVE PEACE. There was church in the morning, family activities in the afternoon, and a quiet evening of music, conversation, and reading.

  No one remarked a great deal on the sudden disappearance of Justin. He was reputed to have made his apologies to the Duke of Bewcastle over a suddenly remembered engagement in town, and, as his mother said, Justin had come and gone as he pleased all his adult life, so doubtless he had a good reason for leaving now. Everyone accepted Basil’s sheepish explanation that he had hit his right cheekbone and grazed his knuckles when he fell out of the bathtub in his dressing room—or, if some did not believe him, they kept their suspicions to themselves.

  Justin, Basil had assured both Christine and Hermione when he had rejoined them in the library, looked far worse than he. After saying it, he had hugged first Hermione and then Christine—very tightly and for a long while.

  “Oscar loved you, Christine,” Basil had said, his voice sounding rather choked. “He did love you to the end, even if he stopped trusting you.”

  “Yes, I know.” It was all she had been able to say.

  “And so,” he had said, “we had no business not looking after you for him when he was gone. I don’t ask forgiveness—only your permission to make up for lost time.”

  She had sniveled into the duke’s handkerchief again.

  “And if you should choose to marry Bewcastle,” he had said, “then you will have my blessing, and Hermione’s too, I daresay.”

  “Oh, yes,” Hermione had said. “I believe he cares deeply for you, Christine, else why would he have spoken so murderously to Justin tonight?”

  They had left it at that, and Christine had returned to the drawing room, where Mrs. Pritchard was singing a quavering but very sweet rendition of a Welsh ballad. Hermione had gone with Basil to their room to bathe his cheek in cold water.

  Monday dawned cloudy and blustery and chilly. A sizable group rode over from Alvesley and was given a boisterous welcome. It was time for luncheon soon after they left. Lord Aidan announced his intention of launching the boats on the lake afterward despite the weather, and there was a chorus of enthusiastic agreement from around the table and a general exodus from the dining room to the nursery to get the children ready.

  “You must row Amy to the island, Wulfric,” the Marchioness of Rochester said. “There are some pleasant prospects from there.”

  He stood up from his place at the head of the table.

  “I am sure someone else will be pleased to take her there, Aunt,” he said. “I have already arranged to take Mrs. Derrick for a stroll—unless she finds herself unable to come after all, that is.”

  His eyes alighted on Christine for what must surely be the first time since he left the library two evenings before, leaving his handkerchief in her hand. Normally she would have laughed back at him, since they both knew he had just told a barefaced lie. But her heart was pattering in her chest and she felt decidedly breathless again. And she was very aware of the marchioness’s sudden scrutiny.

  “Oh, no, your grace,” she said, “I have been looking forward to i
t.”

  The marchioness made a sound that was very like a harrumph, and Christine got to her feet lest she be stranded in the dining room, alone with the woman.

  “I will go and fetch my bonnet and pelisse,” she said.

  And so a mere ten minutes later she was stepping out of the house, having just met a whole army of Bedwyns on the stairs with their children. They had invited her to join them, and she had been forced to decline and tell them that she was going out with his grace.

  She would swear that they had all greeted her announcement with a collective smirk.

  “I suppose,” she said, taking the duke’s offered arm, “you were hoping for a quiet afternoon in your library?”

  “Do you?” he asked her. “How well you claim to know me, Mrs. Derrick.”

  They walked for a while in silence. It was still cloudy and blowy, more like late winter again than early spring. But at least the wind was behind them.

  “I have to thank you,” she said at last, “for what you did for me on Saturday evening. I feel foolish for not having ever suspected. It seems so obvious now that I know the truth.”

  “Very often,” he said, “the most fiendish and the most successful schemes are the most simple ones. Why should you have suspected? He offered you friendship and sympathy and support when you needed them. And why should your husband or your brother- and sister-in-law have suspected? He was their relative, and they knew—quite correctly—that he was very fond of you. And so it seemed quite believable to them that he would defend you against all reason and truth. It was perhaps easier for me as an outsider to discover that those two words—flirt and Justin—always seemed to go together with tedious regularity. And yet I have never once seen you flirt. Are you very upset?”

  “Over the loss of Justin?” she asked him. “No. I am only sad that Oscar lost his life before knowing the truth, that he died thinking I had betrayed him. He was not a strong man emotionally. He was, I suppose, the perfect dupe for such a scheme and Justin must have realized that when he concocted it. But he was also a sweet-natured man when I first knew him, and we could have had a good marriage even though he was very different from what I had made him out to be in my girlish romantic dreams after I met him. Yes, I am upset, but I am at peace too. Hermione and Basil know the truth, and I do care about that. There was always a deep affection between us until the trouble started. I have a great deal to thank you for. You had no need to exert yourself as you did on my behalf.”

  “I had every need,” he said quietly.

  He did not explain and she did not ask. They walked on in silence, across the lawn above the lake and the tree line, beneath the wilderness walk, past the hill she had rolled down a few days before, in among the trees where they had quarreled and where she had snatched his quizzing glass—which she had still not returned to him. She realized that they must be on their way to where he had wanted to take her that afternoon—the dovecote north of the lake.

  Silence between two people, she discovered, did not have to be an uncomfortable thing. Not when there was a certain harmony of mind. And there was some harmony. She was, she realized, growing to like him, and though the knowledge partly distressed her—because, of course, the differences between them were still too huge to be bridged—she decided to relax into the liking just for this afternoon. She had, after all, accepted his invitation here. And he had recently done something unimaginably wonderful for her.

  I had every need.

  To exert himself on her behalf, that was.

  She stole a glance at his stern, aristocratic profile. Strangely, though it looked no different from usual, it was coming to seem like a rather dear profile.

  Finally they came to a clearing in the woods, in the middle of which was the old stone building he had pointed out from the tower. It was tall and round, with a pointed, thatched roof and small windows high in the walls. A flight of steps led down to a sunken wooden door.

  “Ah, the dovecote,” she said. “How pretty it is. Is it occupied?”

  “By birds?” he said. “No, it fell out of use and into disrepair in my father’s time. I always liked the look of it, but it was only a couple of years ago that I decided to have work done on it, mostly on the inside. I did not want to draw attention to it by changing the outside, though I did have it reroofed. Let me show you.”

  He went down the steps, turned a key in the lock of the door, and opened it inward before standing aside to allow her to precede him inside.

  She did not know what she had expected. But what she saw caught at her breath and made her stand stock-still and gaze about her in wonder. And she could see perfectly clearly though not in white light. There were six windows in all, she could see, all of them well above the level of her head. They were all made of stained glass in rich, translucent colors.

  She could see upward to the point of the roof. The walls were of plain stone, but they were pigeonholed from floor to roof, as they must have been in the time when hundreds of birds had lived in them. But the pigeonholes were all clean now, and many of them on the lower levels held candles in holders, or books. In one she could see an inkwell, in another a tinderbox.

  In the single round room itself there was a low bed covered with a sheepskin blanket, a plain desk and chair, a large leather armchair, and a fireplace, which had obviously been built recently, together with the chimney that climbed the wall opposite the door. A pile of logs lay in a wooden box beside the hearth, a set of fire irons next to it.

  It was an exquisite little hermitage, made magical by the multicolored light in which it was bathed.

  She spun around to look at him. He was standing just inside the door, his hat in his hand, looking steadily back at her. It was a dreadful moment. It was the moment she would have far preferred to avoid. It was the moment at which she finally and quite consciously knew. She knew that she was deeply entangled with the Duke of Bewcastle with no safe way out—and surely no possible way in.

  But it was already too late to guard or deflect her feelings.

  He moved past her before she could frame any suitable words to say. She took off her bonnet and gloves even though it was cold inside the dovecote, and set them down on the desk while he stooped and lit the fire that was ready laid in the hearth. It sprang to instant life, though she doubted that it ever had the power to heat such a high building completely.

  “Why?” she asked him. “When all of Lindsey Hall is your own and you have other large homes too, why this?”

  But she somehow knew the answer. It was as if she had lived this moment before and knew just what he was going to say. She felt stupidly frightened, as if a whole mountain of snow were about to avalanche down upon her.

  “One can get lost in vastness,” he said. “Sometimes even I forget that I am anything else but the Duke of Bewcastle.”

  She swallowed awkwardly.

  “Here,” he said, “I can remember. Yet curiously I have not been here for a whole year—not until last week anyway, when it occurred to me that I must bring you here.”

  And then she knew—that this had been inevitable, that this was the chance he had asked for, that this visit here to the tiny hermitage on one corner of his vast estate was what he had dreamed of and planned for. All was clean and comfortable, yet no one came here but himself. He had cleaned and tidied the room and set the fire ready to be lit.

  She looked around for somewhere to sit and decided upon the wooden chair before the desk. She sank onto it and clutched the edges of her pelisse.

  “And what is it,” she asked him, “that you remember when you are here?”

  “That I am also Wulfric Bedwyn,” he said.

  The avalanche crashed down onto her head.

  Yes. Ah, yes. Yes, he was. During the few days she had been at Lindsey Hall she had already discovered that there was a real person lurking behind the formidable figure of the Duke of Bewcastle. They were one and the same, of course, the man and the duke. Not for a moment did she suspect that he was someho
w mad, that there were two quite different persons living within the same body. But she was not sure she wanted to see any more of the man or know any more about him. Her life had been so very safe again for almost three years—and now she had Hermione and Basil back as well.

  And yet her heart ached at his words—I am also Wulfric Bedwyn.

  “Tell me about . . . yourself,” she said. She had almost said about him, as if Wulfric Bedwyn were indeed a different person from the man she saw standing before the fire, stern and aloof and apparently very much in command of his world. “No, that is a poor question. There is nothing more calculated to tie the tongue. Tell me about your childhood.”

  If she was to know him—though she shied away from the knowledge—she would have to begin with his childhood. It was so nearly impossible to imagine that he had ever been a baby, a child, a boy. Yet, of course, he had been all three.

  “Move to the armchair,” he said, indicating it with one hand, and when she did so, he brought the sheepskin blanket from the bed and settled it over her lap before going to sit on the desk, one booted foot braced against the dirt floor, the other swinging free. He had removed his greatcoat and thrown it over the back of the desk chair. Blue and purple light played over him.

  “What were you like?” she asked him.

  “I was a bundle of energy and restlessness,” he said. “I was going to travel the world when I grew up. I was going to push back the American frontier. I was going to go beyond it and then sail across the Pacific to China. I was going to penetrate the mysteries of Africa and experience the allure of the Far East. I was going to be a pirate of the Robin Hood variety, or I was going to hunt for pirates. With greater maturity—when I was nine or ten, I suppose—I was going to captain a ship of my own and become the admiral of a fleet or else I was going to be a military officer and become a general and command the British armies wherever they fought and lead them to brilliant victories. But while I waited to grow up to my life of glory, I raised hell at home and about the park here. I was the terror of every gardener and groom and indoor servant, the greatest challenge my father ever faced, and the despair of my mother.”