Spanish Aristocrat, Forced Bride

by India Grey

  And he wasn’t there.

  A baby girl, the doctor had told him. His jaw set like steel and he kept his eyes fixed unblinkingly ahead, refusing to look down at the fragile figure in the bed. Her peacefulness was like a deliberate reproach, because he knew that soon he would have to shatter it when he tried to explain to her just what she had lost. Outside a watery winter dawn was breaking over Barcelona, filtering into the room through the slats of the blind. They seemed to Tristan like bars of a prison.

  A prison of guilt, in which he would serve a life sentence.

  ‘You’re here.’

  Her voice was a whisper—barely more than a breath—but it made Tristan jump just as if she’d shouted. He forced himself to look down at her, but suddenly found that his throat had closed around and he couldn’t speak. Yes, I’m here. Where I should have been all along.

  He nodded.

  ‘I thought I’d dreamed it earlier,’ she said softly.

  ‘No. You didn’t dream it. I’m here.’

  ‘That’s good, but…’ Her eyelashes fluttered down over her cheeks for a moment and her brows drew together in a frown. When she looked back up at him her eyes were clouded with anxiety. ‘But that means I didn’t dream the rest either, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. I’m afraid so.’

  Her face was ashen and she spoke through bloodless lips. ‘What happened?’

  Tristan stood up abruptly, turning his back on her and going over to the window. It was early afternoon, and a pale winter sun had broken through the leaden clouds and was now making the wet city streets gleam like polished silver. Finding the words, speaking them without breaking down, was going to be the hardest thing he had ever done, but he had to be strong for her.

  He had done so little else, after all.

  ‘It was something called a…’ He stopped, ruthlessly slashing back the emotion that threatened to crack his voice. ‘…a placental abruption. That’s what caused the bleeding. By the time I found you, you had lost a lot of blood, and the baby…’

  He squeezed his eyes very tightly shut for a second, as if that could dispel the image of what he had found when he’d finally let himself into the apartment late last night. But there was a part of him that knew already that it would always be there in his head, a lifelong reminder of his culpability. Savagely he thrust his clenched fists into his pockets and turned around. Dios, he had to at least look at her when he said this.

  ‘The baby had died already.’

  The only movement she made was to close her eyes. Apart from two small lines between her fine brows her paper-white face was completely composed, so that for a moment he thought she might have slipped back into her morphine-induced slumber. And then he saw that tears were running down her cheeks and into her hair in a steady, glistening river.

  He stood, stony and utterly helpless in the face of her silent, dignified suffering. Slowly he approached the bed and sat down beside her again, picking up her hand from the sheet. It felt cold, and his chest contracted painfully as he looked down and saw how very pale and fragile her fingers looked against his.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ His voice was a low, hoarse rasp.

  Almost imperceptibly she nodded, but her eyes stayed closed, shutting him out of her private grief. It was hardly surprising, he thought bitterly. It was his fault. How on earth could he expect her to forgive him when he would never be able to forgive himself?

  Especially when she eventually found out the rest, and understood the devastating extent of her loss: that by the time he had found her she had lost too much blood, and they hadn’t been able to stop it coming and had had to operate to remove her womb…

  That she had not only lost this baby, but any chance she might have had of having any more.

  Because he hadn’t been there.

  After a few more minutes he got up and very quietly left the room. She didn’t open her eyes, so she never saw the tears that were running down his face.

  Steadily the room filled up with flowers, exotic fleshy blooms sent by Scarlet and Tom and Maggie and the cosmetics company and all the crew from the perfume advertisement shoot, which made the air turn heavy with their intoxicating hot-house scent. Nurses came and went, some silent and compassionate, some brisk and matter-of-fact. Lily was indifferent to them all.

  She felt hollowed out and as insubstantial as air. All the feelings that had nagged at her before that fateful night at Stowell—of emptiness and futility—came back now; swollen to huge and grotesque proportions, ballooning inside her until there was no space for anything else.

  Which was good, she thought distantly, watching a nurse change the bag of fluid that had been dripping into her arm, because at least it stopped her from thinking about Tristan. Longing for him.

  She wondered where he was; if he had gone back to wherever he had been once he had broken the news about the baby. The image of his set, emotionless face as he told her what had happened kept coming back to her, and the carefully controlled way he’d said, ‘I’m sorry.’

  It must have been hard for him, she recognised that. So hard for him to keep his relief from showing, but typical of him to try so dutifully.

  The nurse smiled kindly, folding back the heavy hospital blankets to check the dressing covering Lily’s scar. ‘Your husband rang, señora,’ she said in her cheerful, sing-song Catalan. ‘To ask how you are and to see if he might come back to see you this afternoon?’

  Lily turned her head away, biting her lip as several explanations for Tristan’s desire to see her flashed into her brain; none of them good.

  ‘I…I’m not sure…I…’

  She looked down. The nurse had peeled back the gauze dressing to show the livid scar that cut across her pitifully flat stomach. Lily felt her insides turn cold with horror, everything in her recoiling from the square of torn and deflated flesh and what it meant.

  The nurse seemed pleased.

  ‘Healing nicely,’ she said with a complacent smile, dabbing iodine onto Lily’s skin as if she were glazing pastry. ‘You will be able to go home in no time.’

  Lily moistened her cracked lips with her tongue. ‘But will it happen again? Next time?’

  The nurse seemed to freeze for a moment, and then several different expressions crossed her face in quick succession: shock, pity, fear—and finally, as the doctor appeared in the doorway, relief.

  ‘The doctor will explain everything.’ She patted Lily’s hand, hastily gathered up her tray of equipment and bustled towards the door.

  When she went back later, she found Lily curled up into a foetal position, her face turned to the wall. Thinking she was asleep, the nurse was just about to tiptoe out again when Lily said, ‘I’d like you to telephone Señor Romero and tell him not to come. Today, or any day.’

  ‘Ah, bambino…’ The nurse crossed to the bed in a rustle of starch and compassion and touched Lily’s shoulder. ‘Do not say that…A husband and wife must stick together in such terrible times. That is what marriage is for; for love and support…’

  Slowly Lily turned over, and the expression on her face shocked the cheerful nurse into silence. Later she described it to her colleague on the ward as like an animal who knew it was dying and wanted to be left alone to do it.

  ‘Not my marriage,’ she said dully. ‘My marriage is over now. There is nothing between us any more. Please tell him.’

  There was a primal, ferocious glitter in her eyes as she spoke. Nodding mutely, the nurse bolted from the room.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Stowell, England. August.

  ‘DEARLY beloved, we are gathered here in the sight of God to witness the marriage of Scarlet to Tom…’

  Lily stared fixedly down at her ringless hands, clasped so tightly together on her knee that the knuckles gleamed, opal-white against the flowered silk of her dress.

  ‘God and the world’s media,’ muttered Scarlet’s brother Jamie beside her as the drone of helicopters circling the cloudless blue sky outside threatened to drown ou
t the thin voice of the vicar. Lily managed a smile. The small church at Stowell was packed to the gills, and, while she would much rather have slipped anonymously into a back pew, Scarlet had other ideas.

  ‘I completely understand that you don’t want to be a bridesmaid, honey,’ she had said gently as the hairdresser had teased and smoothed her dark hair around the stunning Montague diamond tiara, ‘but you’re the closest thing I have to a sister and I want you there, right next to Mum and Dad and Jamie. They need all the support they can get against the full force of Tom’s crowd, believe me.’

  But both of them had known that it was Scarlet’s family who would be doing the supporting. The day that Scarlet had been waiting and planning for for a whole year was going to test every ounce of the strength and fragile sense of acceptance that Lily had built up over the six difficult months since she left Barcelona. The fact that Scarlet and Tom had picked the anniversary of their engagement at the Stowell summer ball to get married was just one more blow for Lily to absorb on flesh that was already bruised and bleeding.

  The organ swelled for the first hymn and the congregation got to their feet. Lily opened her hymn book, relieved to have something to look at. The words to the hymn were familiar enough that she didn’t need to read them, but at least staring down at them offered a temporary respite from the effort of not looking at Tristan.

  He was standing just a few feet away at the front of the church beside Tom, the two of them tall and romantic in their morning suits. Lily had allowed herself a brief glance at him when she had first taken her place in the pew the moment before Scarlet had begun her stately progress down the aisle, but just the sight of his broad shoulders, the tanned hand he laid on Tom’s arm in a brief gesture of support, had impaled her on a shaft of pure, intense pain.

  ‘“Love divine, all loves excelling,”’ sang the congregation. The printed words danced in front of Lily’s eyes and her empty body wrenched with loneliness and misery. With massive effort she averted her thoughts, focusing instead on the enormous arrangement of tumbling flowers just in front of her. In the last six months she had become pretty expert in the art of refocusing, of training her mind to steer away from the danger areas, and she was proud of the progress she’d made. After the first terrible month when she’d returned to London and shut herself into the house in Primrose Hill and cried herself dry, gradually she had felt herself coming back to life.

  Not the life she wanted and not the life she had had before. A new life.

  ‘“Visit us with thy salvation. Enter every trembling heart…”’

  Maggie had continued to try to tempt her with offers of work, but Lily knew that her modelling days were behind her. Externally her scars had healed—the exhausted emergency doctor who had received her from the ambulance in the small hours of the morning had done a great job—and to the outside world she looked almost the same. But inside she had changed.

  She felt blank. Scoured out. Sterile. A clean slate waiting for a new start.

  The hymn ended and the congregation sat down gratefully, fanning themselves with service sheets in the August heat. At the altar, Scarlet and Tom stood shoulder to shoulder preparing to bind their lives together as the sun poured through the magnificent stained glass window above them, raining jewelled drops onto Scarlet’s shimmering satin train. One of the many tiny bridesmaids recruited from the ranks of Tom’s millions of cousins was steadily picking flowers out of her tightly bound bouquet and dropping them on the floor, and Lily closed her eyes as an image of the unknown little girl who had acted as her impromptu bridesmaid in the church in Barcelona came back to her.

  She felt a smile steal across her lips, remembering how cross she’d been at the time at the hurried and unceremonious wedding Tristan had arranged. Now, looking back, all she could think of was how perfect it was. No pageantry, no theatre, just the beautiful church, empty and dark in the autumn evening, a few strangers whose lives had touched hers for a brief, significant moment, the sparse service, stripped back to its simplest form…

  Tom’s ‘I will’ was drowned out by a sudden wail as the small bridesmaid’s bouquet disintegrated entirely, scattering flowers everywhere. Then an audible sigh of pleasure went up from the female members of the congregation as the strikingly handsome best man stepped forward and took her by the hand, bending to scoop up her fallen roses and giving them back to her.

  Lily felt as if nails were being driven into her heart.

  He looked thinner, she thought in anguish, the hollows beneath his cheekbones more pronounced. His brows were pulled down severely, which somehow made the tenderness of his actions all the more affecting.

  It was no use, she thought despairingly. No matter how much she tried to avert her thoughts and her eyes, no matter how much she filled her days with activity or her head with new ideas, the truth was stamped on every cell of her body and in every beat of her heart. She lifted her head and looked to the front of the church, where everything she had ever wanted was symbolised before her.

  Tristan, holding the hand of a little girl.

  It should have been her husband, her child. The empty spaces inside her head seemed to stretch and darken as the grief that still stalked her crept a little closer again, but she gritted her teeth and pushed it back. She had something to hold onto now…a plan to focus on that had come to feel like a sort of lifeline over the past few weeks.

  She just had to hope that he would help her.

  The child’s hand in his felt very small and soft, but her grip was surprisingly strong. Tristan loosened his own fingers in the hope that she would let go. Instead she seemed to hold on even more tightly.

  Typical female, he thought with a sardonic twitch of his lips. He had stepped forward and taken hold of her hand completely instinctively, thinking only of heading off the storm of weeping that he could see had been just about to disrupt the whole service. Now he was beginning to regret the impulse. It appeared to be programmed into all women’s DNA to cling on more tightly when they sensed you wanted to distance yourself from them.

  No. Not all women…

  A great weariness descended on him as the persistent whisper in his head tauntingly reminded him of the woman who had proved to be the exception to that and every other rule. Lily had never clung to him, in any way. Not throughout the brief weeks of their doomed marriage, when she had conducted herself with nothing but dignity in the face of his appalling coldness. Not at any stage of her pregnancy, when she had been tired or sick or worried, and not even at the end, when he had so badly wanted her to.

  Dios, she hadn’t even bothered with goodbye—not personally anyway, although he expected the one he had got via the kindly nurse was a lot more gentle and sympathetic than hers would have been.

  ‘To have and to hold from this day forward…’

  From across the aisle he was aware of Tatiana, one of Scarlet’s modelling friends who was filling Lily’s role of chief bridesmaid, eyeing him seductively from under her coronet of flowers. Deliberately he looked away, focusing his attention on the bride and groom. Tom was holding Scarlet’s hand, looking straight into her eyes as he made his vows. His voice cracked with emotion, and Tristan gave a twisted smile. Tom had always been way too sensitive and sentimental—which had been why Tristan was constantly having to stop people beating him up at school.

  ‘For better, for worse…in sickness and in health…’

  The smile vanished and he couldn’t stop the memory of another church, another wedding from stealing into the back of his mind. Another bride, in jeans and boots, her face bare of make-up and her hair tumbling down about her shoulders like a veil of spun gold.

  The little bridesmaid’s small hand felt as if it were burning his, and suddenly he wanted to walk away from it all—from the palpable love between the man and woman standing in front of him, from the child holding his hand, from the mass of people grouped behind him, amongst which was Lily…

  Tom said that since she’d come back to London she was doi
ng OK. She was coping, beginning to pick up the pieces and move on. He had also added with uncharacteristic vehemence that if Tristan did or said anything to upset her today he would never forgive him. Scarlet had suggested he just stayed well out of her way.

  ‘As long as we both shall live.’

  She was probably right. Wouldn’t anything he could say just sound insultingly inadequate? Grinding his teeth together, Tristan stared straight ahead, concentrating on a memorial stone set into the wall right in front of him. Edmund Montague, fourth Earl of Cotebrook, he read quickly, as if by filling his brain with facts he could hold back the tide of emotion that he could sense rising all around him, threatening to breach the defences of a lifetime, Officer in the King’s Regiment…Loving husband and devoted father…

  And as Tom drew back the veil from his bride’s face and kissed her lingeringly, and the congregation—mainly on Scarlet’s side—burst into a round of spontaneous applause, Tristan extricated himself from the warm grasp of the small girl beside him and stood alone.

  Alone with his failings.

  In all of its seven-hundred-year history, surely Stowell Castle had never looked lovelier than it did that afternoon, reclining gently in its rolling fields of yellow and green, the flags flying from the turrets almost motionless against a sky of flawless blue.

  Jamie appeared at Lily’s side with two glasses of champagne. ‘It’s far too hot for this ridiculous get-up,’ he complained, looking at Lily’s bare arms with envy. ‘How soon can I take off my jacket and this tie thing, do you think?’

  Lily gave him a sympathetic look. ‘I think etiquette would say not until Tom does.’

  Jamie groaned, and gave his cravat a vicious tug. ‘Do you think blue blood is a bit colder than normal blood? Like reptiles?’

  Lily had just leaned forward to straighten Jamie’s tie when a shadow fell across them and the bright afternoon seemed to darken. She looked up and felt the breath stop in her throat. This was the moment she’d been dreading, the moment she’d been hoping and wishing and waiting for for the last three months. Her fingers froze, clutching the silk of Jamie’s cravat, and her heart hammered crazily against her ribs as she looked up into Tristan’s face.