At Last Comes Love

by Mary Balogh

  “Oh, you foolish man,” she said. “You must have loved her a great deal. But love ought not to cause dishonor. Or pain.”

  “Can you have lived to the age of thirty and still be so naive?” he asked her.

  Her eyes snapped open.

  “Let me fetch you some lemonade,” he suggested.

  The Earl of Sheringford was taking an empty plate from her hand and returning it to one of the tables before Margaret realized that she must have eaten something—she could not remember what. And her glass was empty. Lemonade? Yes, she could still taste it.

  She was smiling. Lady Carling was coming toward her like a ship in full sail, both hands outstretched in front of her.

  “The Deans invited us to dinner ages ago,” she said, kissing Margaret’s cheek, “long before Agatha set the date for her soiree. We have only now been able to get away and come here. And thus we have missed all the excitement. Margaret, my dear, you must be a saint to have borne it all and still be standing at Duncan’s side. I understand Randolph Turner declined to challenge him to a duel, which is surprising really and even slightly shameful, though I am vastly glad he did. My nerves would never have recovered from the strain. Duncan, my love, you have no choice now but to eat a great deal of humble pie and apologize. You ought to have done it long ago.”

  “He says he will not,” Margaret told her. “He says he is not sorry.”

  His mother clucked her tongue.

  “Laura Turner was a very fortunate woman, then,” she said. “Duncan, you may fetch me some ratafia.”

  Another half hour or so passed, most of it in company with Lady Carling and some of her friends, before Lord Sheringford suggested again that he escort Margaret home. She had never been more glad of anything in her life, though she would have died rather than ask to be taken. She felt exhausted.

  Whatever had she got herself into? But whatever it was, she had no one to blame but herself.

  Ought she to inform him when he took her back to Merton House that she had made a definite decision not to marry him, that she did not wish to see him again? He would still have time to find someone else. And really and realistically—how could she ever agree to marry a man who apparently had no conscience?

  But who else would have him if she did not?

  That was definitely not her concern.

  Stephen was in the drawing room, part of a large group of young people who seemed all to be talking and laughing at once. He detached himself from the group when he saw them come in from the music room.

  “You are leaving, Meg?” he said. “May I escort you?”

  “No, thank you, Stephen,” she said. “Lord Sheringford will do that.”

  “Let me at least call the carriage, then,” he said.

  “No.” She smiled at him. “It is a lovely evening—or was the last time I looked out a window.”

  The earl did not own a carriage, and she had rejected his offer to hire one for the occasion. They had walked the short distance to the soiree.

  They took their leave of Mrs. Henry, who shook her head at her nephew, kissed his cheek, and told him that he had made her so famous that simply everyone would clamor to attend her next entertainment.

  “Everyone who refused an invitation to this one will bitterly regret it,” she said.

  13

  A FEW minutes later they were out on the pavement, Margaret shivering slightly beneath her shawl. The air seemed loud with the silence.

  Lord Sheringford offered his arm and she took it.

  “What are your thoughts?” he asked her after they had walked for a little while without talking.

  “I scarcely know,” she said. “I feel as if my whole life has been turned upside down.”

  “Would you rather,” he said, “that I ceased courting you? Your reputation would recover very quickly and leave you quite unscathed. Gossip soon dies when there is nothing to feed it.”

  “I think,” she said, “that what I would rather, Lord Sheringford, is an explanation of why you are not sorry, or why you refuse to apologize to that poor man. Is it just stubbornness? Or is it really love? Was Mrs. Turner the great passion of your life, worth everything you gave up, including your character and honor? And worth your refusal to do the right thing and admit that you caused irreparable suffering to her husband?”

  She shivered again. Her shawl had slipped off her shoulders and exposed them to the cool air of late evening.

  He stopped walking and lifted her shawl, wrapping it more closely about her and keeping one arm about her shoulders to hold it in place. He was looking very directly into her eyes, though she could scarcely see him in the darkness. She could smell the wine he had been drinking.

  “The great passion of my life?” he said. “It would be a terrible insult to you if I were to continue to woo you and allow you to believe that to be a possibility. I did not love Laura at all, Maggie—not in any romantic sense, anyway.”

  She gazed at him, baffled. They were beneath a straight row of trees that had been planted along the edge of the pavement, she realized suddenly. That was why it was so dark despite the fact that the sky was bright with moon and stars. The street was deserted. There was not even a night watchman in sight.

  “Then it is only stubbornness?” she said. “An un willingness to admit that a fleeting passion ruined lives, including your own? And you think other people, including me, will respect you for your steadfast stubbornness? You believe it to be unmanly to admit that you did something so dreadfully wrong, its effects quite irreversible? Admitting you were wrong, asking pardon, is the only decent, manly course of action remaining to you—surely?”

  He sighed.

  “I ought to have apologized profusely to you when we collided in Lady Tindell’s ballroom,” he said, “and allowed you to hurry on your way to wherever it was you were going. I ought to have chosen someone with far less firm opinions to save me from penury. Maggie, there are many kinds of decency. Snatching a married lady from her husband and running off with her is sometimes the most decent thing a man can think of to do. Even when he is forced to leave behind a bride of his own, almost literally waiting at the altar for him—though Caroline Turner was not treated quite as shabbily as that.”

  “Then tell me what.” She turned to face him fully and was forced to spread her hands across his chest when he did not take a step back. His one arm was still about her shoulders. “How can such a sin be decent?”

  She gazed up into his face, barely visible even at this distance.

  And then she had a sudden inkling of the truth and wondered that it had not occurred to her before.

  “Randolph Turner is a coward,” he said. “You may have noticed it a short while ago. Any other man in his position would have felt that he had no option but to slap a glove in my face, even if only a figurative one. He found a way of wriggling out of doing so and appearing rather heroic into the bargain—to the ladies, at least.”

  “Perhaps,” she said, “he abhors violence and understands that it is no solution to any problem.”

  “And perhaps,” he said, “any normal husband whose wife had run off with another man would scour heaven and earth to find her and punish her abductor—or else would publicly spurn and divorce her. He would at the very least take firm exception to her abductor’s returning to society after her death and attending the same social functions as he, just as if he had every right to the forgiveness and respect of society.”

  “Perhaps,” she said again very distinctly, “he abhors violence and understands that it is no solution to any problem.”

  He sighed.

  “And perhaps,” he said, “he possesses that quality that so often goes hand in hand with cowardice.”

  She searched his eyes in the darkness. She did not wait for him to explain. Her inkling had been right, then.

  “He was a bully?” She was whispering.

  He released his hold on her and took a few steps away to lean back against a tree trunk. He folded his arms ov
er his chest, and Margaret grasped the ends of her shawl and drew it more closely about her.

  “I promised her that I would never tell a soul,” he said, “and indeed the necessity for secrecy was dire. Her main reason, though, was that she felt guilty. She felt that she had failed as a wife, that she had drawn every bit of censure and violence upon herself. She thought people would blame her if they knew the truth and seemed to prefer being known simply as a faithless wife.”

  “He beat her?” Margaret was gripping the ends of her shawl as if her life depended upon her hanging on.

  “Among other things,” he said. “She really was in the wrong for running away from him, of course. A man has a right to beat his wife or to administer any form of correction he deems necessary to make her obedient and submissive. She is, after all, his possession. A man has a right to beat his dog too.”

  “Oh, poor Mrs. Turner,” Margaret said, looking quickly about. But there was still no one in sight. She had always thought that violence within a family was one of the worst afflictions that could be visited upon any person. One’s family ought to be one’s safest haven. “How did you come to know?”

  “Quite by accident, I suppose,” he said. “I was newly betrothed to Caroline and so was a part of the family. I cannot for the life of me remember why Laura and I were so far separated from the rest of the company one evening that we were able to talk privately with each other for a few minutes. Turner kept her on a very short leash—especially after a beating. Which meant that she was almost always on a short leash. It looked like marital devotion to anyone who did not know differently. I thought it was marital devotion at first—until that evening, in fact.”

  Margaret stared at him in the near darkness. She forgot about the chilliness of the air, though she shivered anyway. Hooves clopped along the street to her left, but the horse and its rider must have turned into another street. The sound grew fainter and then disappeared altogether.

  “However it happened, we were separated from the group,” he said, “and she let her guard down sufficiently to afford me a glimpse of a dark bruise on her upper arm. The sleeves of her gown were somewhat longer than was fashionable, I remember. She appeared frightened when I mentioned it and then turned her head in such a way that her silk shawl fell away from her neck for a moment before she yanked it back in place. The bruise on her jaw was fading but still unmistakable. It was, I realized, the ‘indisposition’ that had kept her in seclusion at home for the past week. There had been numerous such indispositions since I had known Caroline. Laura was known as a woman of delicate health. I can remember being shocked enough to speak bluntly. I believe I can even recall my exact words. ‘Turner is a wife-beater,’ I said, and with one darted glance in the direction of the rest of the company, all of whom were comfortably out of earshot, she settled a smile on her face and told me hurriedly all about it. It had been going on for two out of the three years of her marriage and was becoming both more frequent and more severe.”

  “Oh,” Margaret said. She could think of nothing else to say at the moment. She had always thought wife-beaters surely the most despicable of mortals. “And so you took her away?”

  “Not immediately,” he said. “It was obvious that she had never told anyone before me and that she was extremely frightened as soon as she had unburdened herself. She blamed herself for everything—basically for being a bad wife who could not please her husband. When I offered to speak sternly to Turner on her behalf, I thought she would swoon quite away with terror. She would not speak to me for several weeks afterward—but then she did on the night before my wedding. She came to see me privately, an extremely indiscreet and dangerous thing to do, as you must know. But she was distraught and had no one else to turn to. She spoke of taking her own life, and I believed her. I still believe she would have done it. And if she had not, sooner or later Turner would have done it for her. And so I did the only thing that seemed possible to do. I ran off with her—after promising that I would never disclose any part of her story to another soul. It is a promise that I am breaking tonight. You may never marry me, Maggie. Indeed, you would be well advised not to. I will have to trust to your discretion concerning what I have told you.”

  Margaret was biting hard into her bottom lip, she realized.

  “People ought to know,” she said. “They ought to be told that you are not the villain you are depicted as being.”

  “But I am,” he said. “A man has the power of life and death over his wife, Maggie. He has the right—some would say even the obligation—to correct and discipline her in any way he sees fit. No man who is not her husband, even her father or brother, has any right to interfere. Both church and state will tell you that. I am exactly the villain everyone thinks me—just a slightly different sort of villain, perhaps.”

  Margaret drew a deep breath.

  “Why,” she asked him, “did he not pursue you?”

  “Because he is a coward,” he said, “as bullies usually are. And also perhaps because we hid very carefully indeed—for almost five years, until her death. He could have taken her back if he had found her. Both the law and the church would have been on his side. I could have done nothing to prevent it. He would have killed her, Maggie. I feel no doubt about that. Sadly, she did it for him. She did not literally take her own life, but she put up no fight for it either. He had taken away her belief in her own inherent goodness. And when one does not believe oneself in any way good, there is very little for which to live—and one feels unworthy of even what little there is. I will not apologize to a man who effectively murdered a woman whose only fault was a certain mental and emotional inability to fight back against cruelty and injustice.”

  Margaret sighed and took a couple of steps forward until she stood against him. He uncrossed his arms, and she laid her forehead against one of his shoulders. She felt instant warmth.

  And she had acted purely from instinct, she realized too late to act with greater propriety. She had felt the overwhelming need to seek out his human warmth and had acted upon that need—just as Laura Turner had done five years ago.

  “Now I understand,” she said, “why I could not spurn you even when all the evidence and the opinion of everyone I know said that I ought. Sometimes one’s intuition is to be trusted above all else. I could not convince myself that you were an evil man.”

  “But I am,” he told her. “There is no law, either temporal or ecclesiastical—or moral—that would support what I did, Maggie. A woman is her husband’s property, to be dealt with as he sees fit.”

  “That is utter nonsense,” she said, still without lifting her head.

  “The law often is,” he said. “But it is the only glue that holds society together and prevents utter chaos. We can only hope, I suppose, to reform the law gradually until it represents true morality and the rights of all—including women and the poor and even animals. I will not hold my breath waiting for that day, though. It could be a long time coming—if it ever does. What I did was wrong, Maggie. Evil.”

  “Then thank heaven,” she said, lifting her head, “for a little bit of evil in the world. Morality is not a black-and-white thing, is it? And what a profound statement that is. As if no one had ever noticed before.”

  He could not be totally absolved of all he had done, though, she remembered suddenly.

  “But what about Miss Turner?” she said. “She was left behind on her wedding day, an innocent victim of both humiliation and heartbreak.”

  “She was the only one to whom I confided some of what I had been told,” he said, “before I promised not to do so, that was. I can remember feeling afraid that perhaps Caroline had suffered similar treatment at her brother’s hands. I was quite prepared to pummel him within an inch of his life if she had. But she had not. She knew about Laura, though, and defended Turner quite vigorously. If Laura did not push him to it, she told me, he would not be forced to punish her. It was all Laura’s fault. The day after that Laura went into seclusion again and remai
ned out of public sight for well over a week, even longer than usual. I believe I caused her one of the worst beatings of her life by speaking with Caroline. She had good reason to swear me to secrecy.”

  “Miss Turner told him?” Margaret asked unnecessarily.

  “Do you wonder,” he asked in return, “that I fell rather hastily out of love with her, Maggie?”

  No, she did not.

  She kept her forehead against his shoulder and closed her eyes as a carriage drawn by four horses made its rather noisy way past them and continued on.

  “I think,” she said when they were alone again, “I had better marry you.”

  His hands came to rest lightly on her hips.

  “Because you find me pathetic?” he asked.

  “Because I find you anything but,” she said. “You need some peace in your life, Lord Sheringford. So do I.”

  “Peace,” he said. “That is a word from a long-ago past. And you think marriage to you will bring me that, Maggie?”

  “Life at Woodbine Park will,” she said. “And unfortunately for you, that can be achieved only at the expense of marriage to me—or to someone else you may be able to find in the next week or so. I would be better for you than anyone else, though. I know the truth about you and can respect you, even admire you.”

  His arms circled her waist as he sighed.

  “Don’t make the mistake of believing that you know me now any more fully than you did before,” he said. “You merely know a few more facts.”

  “Oh, there you are wrong,” she told him, sliding her own arms as far about him as the tree at his back would allow. “I know more than facts now. I know you. Or at least I am on the way to knowing you.”

  “And you believe I can bring you peace?” For a moment she felt his cheek against the top of her head. “Or that Woodbine can?”

  “I have no real way of knowing,” she said. “We can never know the future. We can only take calculated risks.”

  She lifted her forehead from his shoulder and looked into his eyes.