They both turned their heads to face the front again, the radiant smiles fading as they did so.
“What next?” he asked. “My parents are already planning wedding journeys and drawing up guest lists and wondering which church the wedding is to be in. And my mother is already dreaming of new grandchildren and wondering if there will be time to wash and iron the family christening robes after Claude’s baby and before ours. All while I stand by looking complacent and rather as if a falling star had hit me in the eye.”
“I don’t like to disappoint them,” Sophia said, “but I would not marry you, Francis, if you were the last man on earth.”
“In some ways we are remarkably well suited, Soph,” he said pleasantly. “We think alike. I do not believe I would marry you even under similar but reversed conditions to the ones you mentioned.”
“You are no gentleman,” she said. “You never have been.”
“There is no point in being cross just because I refuse to marry you, Soph,” he said. “I was gentleman enough to allow you to refuse to marry me first. But enough of this quarreling. What happens next? We suddenly find that our love has cooled so that my parents and I can take ourselves off tomorrow and I can get back to the congenial life of raking?”
“You would like that, too, would you not?” she said. “You would like to abandon me just as if I were a hot potato to be dropped at all cost?”
“In short, yes,” he said. “But I gather from your tone that you have further use for me.”
“Of course I have further use for you,” she said indignantly. “If you leave tomorrow or the next day, Francis, Mama will have no further need to stay here and she will go home and never see Papa again. And that will be that. And if that happens, I shall never marry anyone for I will not allow myself to be lured into such a life of misery. What are they doing? And don’t look now!”
Lord Francis looked. “Strolling and talking,” he said.
“Talking?” She looked up at him eagerly. “That is promising. Don’t you think so, Francis?”
“We have been talking, too,” he said. “Quarreling.”
She sighed. “Do you think they are quarreling, too?” she asked.
“No idea,” he said. “But you can depend upon it that they are too well-bred to come to fisticuffs, Soph. So I am to stay in order to keep them together, am I? Do you think they are going to allow us to become betrothed?”
“Not if Papa can help it,” she said. “He says that I am far too young even though I have had my eighteenth birthday already and am older than Mama was when she married. But that would be his meaning, would it not? We are going to have to be distraught, Francis. We are going to have to threaten elopement or suicide.”
“By Jove,” he said. “Quite a choice, is it not? The devil and the deep blue sea, would you say?”
“No,” she said. “But I would fully expect you to do so. I would choose suicide without the slightest hesitation. It will be best if they do consent, though.” She frowned in thought. “We will want to marry without delay, of course. A summer wedding. Mama will have to stay to plan it. There will be a great deal for her and Papa to discuss. And perhaps our wedding will remind them of their own.”
“Ah,” he said, “I hate to interrupt this pleasant train of thought, Soph, but did you say our wedding? What do we do afterward? Neglect to consummate it and go begging for an annulment?”
“Oh,” she said. “You are right. There cannot actually be a wedding, can there? But just the planning of it will remind them. Don’t you think? And how could you say what you just said? It would be just like you to humiliate me by annulling our marriage and having the whole world say that I could not even attract you sufficiently to tempt you on our wedding night.”
“Soph,” he said, “I am glad the moon is not quite full. I might hear some words of real madness from you.”
“But really,” she said, “you could not have said anything more insulting, Francis. I should die of mortification.”
“Good Lord,” he said. “And to think that I gave up a week or two or five of a life of genial civilization in Brighton for this.”
“A life of gambling and carousing and womanizing, you mean,” she said tartly.
“That is what I said, is it not?” he said. “Time to bill and coo again, Soph. A kiss on the hand, I believe?” He raised her hand to his lips and held it there while she smiled radiantly up at him.
3
THERE WAS A CERTAIN FAMILIARITY EVEN AFTER fourteen years. A familiar height, her cheek just above the level of his shoulder. A familiar and distinctive way of holding his arm, with her own linked through it. He held it tight to his body so that the back of her hand was against his side.
She had never minded before, of course. She had always walked close beside him. When they had walked unobserved, he had often set an arm about her shoulders while she had set hers about his waist.
“Your curls make a comfortable pillow for my cheek, Liv,” he had often said. And sometimes he would rest it there and snore loudly while she had giggled and told him how foolish he was.
She minded now. She had hoped to avoid memories and comparisons. She had hoped to avoid all but purely business encounters with him. A foolish hope, of course, when the duration of her stay was indefinite and there were guests at the house looking for amusement. And when it was summertime at Clifton. Summertime at Clifton. She felt a welling of memories and nostalgia.
Marc. Oh, Marc.
“So what do you think?” he asked now, breaking the silence between them.
“About Sophia and Lord Francis?” she asked. “She is too young, Marcus. Only just eighteen. She is still a child.”
“Yes,” he said, and they both remembered an even younger child who nineteen years before had insisted on marrying. Two young children.
“She knows nothing of life,” she said, “and nothing of people. She finished school only a year ago and was with me in the country until after Christmas. How can she possibly be ready for marriage?”
“She cannot,” he said.
“I know how it must have been,” she said. “She got caught up in the whirl and glamour of the Season and met Lord Francis again for the first time since they have both grown up, and fell in love with him. It was inevitable. He is a very handsome and charming boy. But she does not know what a sheltered world she has been living in. She does not know that their love cannot possibly last.”
“No,” he said.
“I know what it is like,” she said. “I know just how she is feeling.”
“Yes,” he said.
Because it happened just like that with me. She did not speak the words aloud, but she did not need to. They hung heavy on the air before them.
“You are agreed with me, then,” he said, “that we must prevent the betrothal from happening?”
“Yes,” she said. “Oh, yes.”
“It will not be easy,” he said. “They are quite besotted with each other and you know how stubborn Sophia can be. I have always avoided confrontations with her whenever possible. I am afraid I have sometimes found her unmanageable. You have always done better than I on that score, Olivia.”
“Yes,” she said. “You have always indulged her, Marcus. Perhaps you were afraid of losing her love. I have always shut my mind to the possibility and refused to allow her her way on every matter.”
“I have seen so little of her,” he said. “I never kept her long because I felt she needed her mother more than her father. And I always thought you would miss her.”
“Yes,” she said. “I always did. Oh, Marcus, look at them. They are totally wrapped up in each other.”
Sophia and Lord Francis were still walking, but their faces were turned to each other, the moonlight catching his expression of tenderness and utter absorption in her. For one shocked moment Olivia thought that he was going to kiss her daughter, but he drew his head back and they strolled on.
“By God,” the earl muttered quite viciously, “he
would have been sorry if he had moved just one inch closer.”
“Oh, Marcus,” the countess said, “is he quite as wild as you suggested? He seems such a pleasant young man.”
“There is nothing vicious about him, as far as I know,” Lord Clifton said. “He has been known to gamble a little too much and he involves himself in too many of the more outrageous and daring exploits in the betting books—things like racing curricles to Brighton and drinking a pint of ale at as many inns in London as possible during one night before becoming insensible. And he spends too much time in the greenrooms of the theaters. Nothing he will not outgrow in time in all probability. He is only twenty-two.”
But you did not outgrow them. She wondered with unwilling curiosity if Lady Mornington was still his mistress or if it was someone else now. She so rarely heard news of his doings. Lady Mornington might be four or five years in his past by now, for all she knew. And probably was. After all, he had remained faithful to his wife for less than five years.
“But why would he suddenly wish to marry Sophia?” she asked. “He is very young and his behavior has suggested that he is not yet ready to settle down. Why the sudden change? She is just an infant.”
“But a very pretty and vivacious infant,” he said. “We are looking at her through parents’ eyes, Olivia. To us she is just a child and probably always will be. You were increasing when you were her age.”
She closed her eyes briefly and remembered. The wonder of it. The sheer joy of it. Life growing in her. Her child and Marc’s, the product of their love. The only cloud—the only one on what had remained of their married life together after Sophia had been born was the fact that it had never happened again, that she had never again been able to conceive despite the fact that they had made love very frequently.
“Yes,” she said. “Marcus, she must be persuaded to give up this foolishness. I shall have to talk with her tomorrow. I have had no chance today. I shall explain to her all the dangers and disadvantages of marrying so young. She will listen to me. She almost always has. And if she will not, then you must exert your authority. You must reject Lord Francis’s suit.”
“Yes.” He sighed. “It will not be easy, Olivia. William and Rose seem to think the betrothal is an accomplished fact already. They are more than delighted. And they have always been such good and such close friends.”
“Then you must speak with them,” she said. “We can do so together if you wish. We must explain that Sophia is too young, that her happiness is very precious to us because she is our only child.”
The only link between us in all these years.
“And everyone else expects it, too,” he said. “That is why they think they have been invited here. And everyone in the neighborhood, doubtless. It is why they think you have come. Sophia has persuaded me to organize a ball for the end of the week, you know. Everyone will be expecting the announcement to be made there.”
“Then they will have to find that they are wrong,” she said. “Marcus, don’t make a scene. There are two other couples out here. And it is just her hand.”
She had felt the tightening of his arm muscles and had looked up to see the hardening of his jaw as he glared ahead at a besotted Lord Francis holding Sophia’s hand to his lips and keeping it there for altogether too long a time.
“Impudent puppy,” the earl muttered. “I shall take a horse whip to his hide and do what Weymouth should have done years ago.”
“His behavior is not so very improper,” she said soothingly. “Now that I am here we can handle this together, Marcus. It will be all over within a few weeks, I daresay, and then we can return to normal living.”
“I hope you are right,” he said.
THE COUNTESS OF Clifton sat in the window seat of her private sitting room the following day waiting for her daughter to come. It was more than an hour past luncheon already and they had still not had their talk. It was very difficult, it seemed, to accomplish anything of a serious or personal nature while a house party was in full swing. There was always too much else to do.
That morning a riding party had been arranged for the young people, to be chaperoned by Lord and Lady Wheatley, Lady Jennifer’s parents. The earl had joined them. And at luncheon Miss Biddeford had talked of nothing else except the bonnet in the village that she should have bought the day before. Finally Mrs. Biddeford had agreed to take her daughter back into the village.
“Though it will be straight in and out again,” she had said. “I want to play bowls with the others.”
Several of the guests were with the earl on the bowling green at the back of the house. Sophia had been invited to accompany her friend Rachel and Mrs. Biddeford and had looked inquiringly at her mother. The countess had nodded.
But there was no sign yet of the returning carriage. It was really too beautiful a day to be indoors, Olivia thought, looking out beyond the fountain and the formal gardens before the house over the rolling miles of the park in the distance. She had fallen in love with Clifton Court during her very first visit there, though on that occasion her room had been the small Chinese one at the back of the house, overlooking the kitchen gardens, greenhouses, and orchards, and the lawns, bowling green, and woods to the west.
The woods. And the hidden garden. She wondered if it was still there: a small and exquisite flower garden in the middle of the woods, entirely enclosed by an ivy-covered wall and accessible only through an oak door that could be locked from the outside or bolted from within.
It had been designed for and by the crippled sister of Marcus’s grandfather, long deceased by the time Olivia first came to the house. Marcus had taken her there the day after their betrothal became official and one month before their wedding—a time when it was deemed proper for them to be alone for short spells without a chaperon.
It was there that he had kissed her for the first time.…
THE COUNTESS GOT abruptly to her feet and walked restlessly about the room, straightening a picture, shaking a cushion before moving through the open door into her bedchamber and beyond it to her dressing room. She checked her appearance in the mirror, applied more perfume to her wrists. And looked at the closed door opposite the open one leading back into her bedchamber.
She had been curious about it since her arrival the previous afternoon. She was really not sure. Her apartments had been the former countess’s. But perhaps his rooms were elsewhere. She set a light hand on the doorknob and listened. Silence. It was probably locked, anyway.
She turned the handle slowly and felt the slight give of the door. It was not. She pushed it inward, her heart pounding uncomfortably, feeling like a thief. It was probably an unoccupied room.
A shaving cup and brush were on the washstand, brushes and combs and bottles of cologne on the dressing table. A blue brocade dressing gown had been thrown over the back of a chair, a pair of leather slippers pushed carelessly beneath. There was a book on the seat of the chair.
She looked unwillingly beyond the room, through the open door leading to a bedchamber equal in size to her own, though its high bed, richly canopied and curtained, was more elaborate than hers. There was another book on the bed, visible through the side curtains, which were looped back.
The only other part of the room she could see was a side table that held a single, framed picture. It was turned away from her. It was doubtful that she could have seen it clearly, anyway, from the connecting doorway between their dressing rooms.
Would it be her? she wondered. She had been told that Lady Mornington was a lovely woman. But perhaps it was someone different by now. Someone younger. Someone no older than Sophia, perhaps. Either way, she did not want to see. It was one thing to know of his debaucheries, to think of them occasionally when she could not force her thoughts to remain free of him, to imagine the woman with whom he was currently involved. It was another to see. To see the face of the woman—of one of the women—with whom he committed adultery.
She did not want to see. And yet she was already in
the doorway to the bedchamber, looking nervously at the hall door, half expecting it to crash open at any moment. She listened again. Again silence.
The picture was turned so that he would be able to see it from his bed. Was he so little able to live without her, then? Was he longing to have this business with Sophia settled so that he could go back to her? Olivia hoped she would not be very young or very pretty, as she reached out an unwilling hand and turned the picture.
She was indeed very young. And smiling and happy. And pregnant, though the painter had omitted that detail. But she was not in her best looks, she had protested to Marc. She had begged him to wait until after she had given birth. But Marc could be as stubborn as his daughter was now. He wanted her likeness, he had told her, so that he could always have her with him, even when she was busy visiting and gossiping with her friends. She could remember realizing with some shock that he was afraid to wait in case she died in childbed. And so she had consented.
And the painting was now on the table beside his bed, turned so that he could see it from his pillow. Was it always there—from force of habit, perhaps—noticed no more than the rest of the furniture in the room? Or had he placed it there for the occasion, in case she should have reason to look into his room, as she did now?
That smile had been for him. He had never once left her during the tedious hours of the sitting. He had talked and talked and told endless funny stories until the painter had looked reproachfully at him because she had laughed so much.
The smile had been for him.
Marc!
She closed her eyes and drew in a slow breath.
Her eyes flew open at the distant sound of a door opening. She turned the picture back to its original position with hasty fingers and dashed back through both rooms, pausing only for a moment to set his slippers side by side beneath the chair. His valet must have missed them. Marc had never been renowned for tidiness. She closed the door between the two dressing rooms and leaned back against it, breathing with relief.
Mary Balogh Page 4