“Er, those plans don’t include me by any chance, do they, Soph?” he asked. “I mean, you aren’t expecting me to play the part of radiant bridegroom and happy husband as well as besotted fiancé, are you?”
“Of course not,” she said. “You do not have to worry that I will break my word, Francis.”
“What?” he said. “Nothing to add about snakes and toads and such? You aren’t coming to like me by any chance, are you, Soph? I don’t particularly want any softening of feelings here for a while yet, you know.”
“Oh,” she said indignantly, “how could I possibly like you, Francis? You always go out of your way to be obnoxious.”
“Now that I know the secret of my success with you,” he said, “I shall be sure to continue with it, Soph. A little twirl about the corner here, I think. We have guests to entertain. Ah, our respective mamas and papas have joined us on the floor, I see.”
“Papa does not look at all relaxed,” Sophia said with a frown. “He looks almost as if he is not enjoying himself. But they waltz beautifully together, do they not? And how could he fail to fall in love with Mama all over again, Francis? I think it is happening, don’t you? They have been together far more than they needed to be in the past week. She has even been out with him about estate business.”
“Lord,” her partner said, looking harassed before putting his smile firmly in place again, “my mother is going to weep floods of tears when you jilt me, you know, Soph. She probably will not talk to you for the next ten years or so.”
“I am not going to jilt you,” she said indignantly. “What a horrid word.”
“Oh, yes you are,” he said firmly, “even if the word were ten times more horrid.”
“I am going to end the betrothal,” she said. “That is all.”
“And that is not jilting?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “Is that what people are going to say, Francis? That you have been jilted? It is going to be dreadful for you, is it not? People will wonder what is wrong with you. I am most awfully sorry.”
“I will live with the ignominy, Soph,” he said hastily. “Believe me, I will live with it.”
PERHAPS THE HARDEST thing she had ever had to do, Olivia thought, was come downstairs to dinner. Harder even than alighting from her carriage outside the doors on her arrival at Clifton. Yes, harder even than that. She was more grateful than she could say when Sophia came to accompany her down.
Her mind had refused to stop teeming with a whole host of conflicting thoughts and emotions since earlier that afternoon. She had lain on the grass in the hidden garden for a long time after he had left, reluctant to move, afraid to set her thoughts in motion, to face what she had done, to wonder at his final look and his final words.
She had lain there trying to cling to mere feeling and reaction. She was sore and her breasts felt tender. And it had been wonderful, quite wonderful. It had been such a very long time. She had dreamed of it, ached for it so often over the years, and yet when it had happened it had been so much more wonderful and so much more—physical than she remembered. She knew that she would want it again.
With him. Only with him. Emma had once suggested to her, during one of her dreadfully restless periods, which had mercifully become less frequent over the years, that she go to one of the spas or even to London and take a lover for a month or two. Emma had always prided herself on being enlightened and had quite deliberately chosen the spinster life for herself. Olivia had been horrified. She was a married lady, she had protested. She could not dream of doing that with anyone but her husband.
She would not want to do it with anyone but Marc even if he were not her husband. She had always known that.
Taking a lover had never been an option in her life. And yet her aloneness, her loneliness, her celibacy were her own fault. She had recognized that almost from the start. Refusing to forgive him after one infidelity, which he very clearly had regretted bitterly, was harsh and foolish. She should have forgiven him. She had wanted to forgive him. She had forgiven him in the privacy of her own heart. But she could not live out that forgiveness, she had realized during those first months alone, when his letters were coming almost daily. She could not live with him as before, be intimate with him, be his friend. There would always be that between them.
Olivia had finally left the garden, returned to the house, and sent down for hot water for a bath, recognizing the fact that her thoughts could not, after all, be kept at bay. The real world intruded, even into the hidden garden.
She had been too deeply in love. She knew that. Their marriage had been too perfect. She had not known it at the time, but had only realized it since, looking about her at the marriages of her friends and acquaintances. Her marriage had been unreal. Quite perfect for an unbelievable five years. There had never been a cloud on their horizon.
The storm, when it came, had killed everything. She had not afterward believed she could live with an imperfect marriage. She had believed that she could not be fair to him any longer. She would surely always look on him with suspicion and disappointment. He could never again be her Marc as she had known him. And she was afraid even to try to get to know a new Marc. Perhaps she could not love the new Marc.
The thought of not loving him had filled her with panic. Better never to see him again. Better to live on alone as if he were dead.
And so she had written to him at the end of six months to tell him—untruthfully—that she could not forgive him. She had tried to explain her reasons, but she had been unable to explain.
She had been very young. Very immature. Very ignorant of life.
Making love with him that afternoon had surely been the most wonderful experience of her life. But of course she had given in to the unreality of the hidden garden. She had believed that that one experience could erase all the bitterness of fourteen years. She had believed as she woke up and remembered where she was, and with whom, that it would all be at an end, that he would smile at her, kiss her, and say something that would erase the past just as if it had never been.
Foolish woman. Even in fourteen years she had not fully matured. She had looked up at him with anxious eyes to find his own unsmiling and hooded. And then he had got up and dressed himself without a word or a look just as if it had all meant nothing to him. And finally his voice. His cold voice telling her that after all she was his wife.
She had just been one of his women. One of his countless women. But on this occasion, he had been able to excuse his promiscuity with the irrefutable truth that she was his wife.
She had been no more to him than any of his women! And she had been forgetting during the past week—deliberately forgetting, perhaps—that things had changed, that there was now a great deal more wrong with their marriage than just that first regretted infidelity. There had been other women in his life, probably untold numbers of them. There was Lady Mornington.
She had felt sick as she dressed reluctantly for dinner and the ball. Physically sick. And dreaded meeting him again more than she had dreaded anything in her life. Going downstairs, seeing him again, behaving as if nothing had happened between them, was the hardest thing she had ever had to do.
He was dressed in the newest fashion, one she had heard of but never seen before. His evening coat and knee breeches were black, his waistcoat silver, his shirt and stockings white. White lace frothed over his hands. He looked far more handsome than any other man present. And she had to allow Sophia to take her across the drawing room to where he stood, talking with Mrs. Biddeford and Lord Wheatley. She had to smile at them all and accept a glass from his hand.
“Thank you,” she said as he complimented her on her appearance, her eyes on the contents of her glass.
Sophia took a hand of each of them in hers and joined them, her two hands holding them together.
“This is going to be the most wonderful night of my life,” she said. “And you are both here to celebrate it with me. Mama and Papa, how wonderful this all is.”
&nbs
p; He was looking broodingly at their hands, Olivia saw when she glanced up at him and then smiled at their daughter. His face was quite unsmiling.
They sat facing each other at dinner, but such a length of table lay between them that there was no necessity of even looking at each other and no possibility of talking. It was relatively easy. And then there was the receiving line, where they stood shoulder to shoulder for almost an hour, greeting guests, making small talk, and smiling and smiling. And not once glancing at each other or exchanging a single word.
“We must dance, Olivia,” he said to her finally, after Sophia and Lord Francis had been waltzing alone for a few minutes. “It is what is expected.”
It was the hardest moment of all, the necessity of standing face-to-face with him and setting one hand in his and the other on his shoulder, the whole roomful of guests watching. And she had no doubt that they had drawn eyes from Sophia and Lord Francis. All these people, after all, knew that she and her husband had been estranged for many years.
“We must smile,” she said, smiling.
He did not respond. “I suppose I must say I am sorry,” he said after a few moments of silence.
“Why?” she asked. “You are not sorry, are you?” And she looked up into his cold eyes.
“And you are never in the business of forgiving, are you?” he said. “I would be wasting my breath.”
“Do you apologize to all your women?” she said. “It must become tedious.”
His jaw tightened. “All my women,” he said. “No, Olivia, there is never any need. They always enjoy what they get. As you did this afternoon.”
“Yes,” she said. “It would be hard to resist such expertise.”
“Well,” he said, “no great harm has been done, then, has it? We are, when all is said and done, man and wife. And you have looked after yourself over the years, Olivia. You are still beautiful.”
“A crumb thrown to the dogs?” she said. “Thank you, Marcus. I am to feel the thrill of being complimented by my own husband, I gather?”
“You may feel what you wish,” he said. “The caustic tongue is new, Olivia.”
“There is a great deal that is new,” she said. “I am no longer a person you know, Marcus. It is fourteen years since I was your wife. I am not your wife, though in the eyes of church and state we are still married.”
“Ah,” he said. “So fornication comes lightly to you?”
“Not as lightly, perhaps, as adultery came to you once upon a time,” she said.
“Touché.” He watched her from cold, hooded eyes. And then his eyes strayed beyond her. “Sophia is watching us,” he said, “and looking puzzled. This is the most wonderful night of her life, Olivia. That is what she said before dinner, is it not? I think we must defer our quarrel until a more private moment.” He smiled suddenly and looked down into her eyes. “Did you have a glimmering of an understanding of all that it would mean to be a parent, Olivia? Did you know how smitten we both would be with love for our only daughter?”
“Enough that we would do this for her?” she asked, smiling back into his eyes. “No, I did not. Marcus, I would die for her. I know you will say that is pure melodrama, but it is true. I would.”
“And smile at me for her,” he said. “In some ways that is worse than dying, is it not, Olivia?”
“Don’t invite me to quarrel again,” she said.
“It is an art we never learned, is it not?” he said. “Five years and not one harsh word. We were the fairy-tale lovers, Olivia. The happily-ever-after lovers. Two children living in bliss together and together bringing a third into the world.”
“Yes,” she said. “Two children. But there is nothing wrong with childhood, Marcus. It is less painful than adulthood.”
“Yes,” he said. “But in real childhood, there is always someone who will kiss the hurt better and make all well. There was no one to do that for us, was there?”
“No.”
His hand at her waist increased its pressure a little. “Let us separate that absurdly happy pair of children,” he said. “Dance with your future son-in-law, Olivia. I want to dance with my daughter.”
“Yes,” she said, relieved and sorry. Relieved because they would no longer have to touch and look into each other’s eyes and make conversation. Sorry for the same reasons.
“THIS BALLROOM IS deuced hot,” Lord Francis said to Sophia when they came together again later in the evening. “Hathaway was just saying how warm it still is outside. Warm, Soph, not stifling hot as it is in here. Shall we take a turn about the garden? I daresay we are expected to go slinking off together sometime during the evening, anyway.”
“Like thieves in the night?” she said. “How foolish.”
“Like lovers in the night,” he said. “Those older ladies in a row over there—the ones who have not stopped nodding and simpering since they arrived—will be thrilled beyond words.”
“The Misses Girten and Mrs. and Miss Macdonald?” she said. “They will more likely have a collective fit of the vapors, Francis.”
“Fit of imagined ecstasy,” he said. “Shall we go?”
“It is hot in here,” she said. “I wish Mama and Papa would dance together again.”
“It would not be right,” he said. “They are the host and hostess, you know. And there is a prodigious number of unattached ladies that your papa must feel obliged to lead out.”
“Do you think that is all?” she said, allowing him to take her out through the French windows onto the terrace at the west side of the house. “I could have sworn that they were quarreling just before they came to separate us during the first dance.”
“I would say that is a promising sign, Soph,” he said. “If they are quarreling, they are probably airing out their differences.”
“Do you think so?” She looked doubtful. She followed his lead out onto the lawn, which led to the distant stable block. “But we always quarrel, Francis, yet we are not ironing out differences. We are merely quarreling.”
“True enough,” he said. “The terrace is black with people, Soph. I wonder they don’t all run into one another at every turn. They have probably all poured out to catch a glimpse of me stealing a kiss from you.”
“How absurd,” she said. “As if people have nothing better to do with their time.”
“There is nothing more romantic than a newly betrothed pair, though,” he said. “Shall we satisfy them?”
“But Mama and Papa are not out here,” she said. “And they are the only ones we are really trying to convince, Francis.”
“True enough,” he said. “But rumor will soon get back to them if we appear cool, and then they may never settle their own differences.”
“Do you think so?” she said doubtfully. “Very well, then. We had better kiss. But don’t do that with your tongue.”
He sighed. “Your next beau or your next fiancé is going to think you a dreadful innocent if you don’t know how to kiss, Soph,” he said.
“I know how to kiss,” she said indignantly.
“You know how to pucker your lips,” he said. “That is child’s stuff, Soph.”
“Well!” she said, offended. “If you do not like my kisses, Francis, you do not have to kiss me, you know. It is all the same to me.”
“Perhaps you had better learn while you have the chance,” he said.
“From you?” she said. “From a rake?”
“Who better to learn from?” he asked.
Sophia could think of no suitable answer.
“You have to relax your mouth,” he said, “and let me do the leading.”
“Just as in dancing,” she said.
“Just as in dancing,” he agreed. “And never mind the puckers. They are not part of good kissing.”
“Oh,” she said.
He set a hand beneath her chin and raised it. “I have the feeling that it is a good thing it is dark out here,” he said. “What color are you, Soph?”
“Is there a color brighter than s
carlet?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said. “The color of your face right now. Relax your mouth. And your teeth.”
“But they are chattering,” she said.
“Let me worry about that,” he said and set his mouth to hers.
Sophia gripped his shoulders as if trying to inflict bruises as his lips teased hers apart and his tongue began to explore with exquisite lightness the soft flesh behind her lips and the warm cavity of her mouth beyond her teeth. He touched the tip of her tongue with his and circled her tongue slowly. Then he lifted his head away.
“You are a reasonably apt pupil,” he said as her eyes fluttered open. “You can release your grip, Soph. I shall catch you if you fall.”
“You flatter yourself,” she said, her voice shaking. “You think I will fall merely because I have allowed myself to be kissed as a rake would kiss his …? Well, as a rake would kiss?”
“I think there is a distinct possibility, Soph,” he said. “Your knees are shaking.”
“That is because it is cool out here,” she said scornfully. “And I don’t think that was proper kissing after all, Francis. I think it was improper. Oh, it is so hot out here.”
“Somewhere in that last speech,” he said, “there was a minor contradiction. But no matter. You will have some experience now to take to your next beau, Soph.”
“I would never allow anyone to do that to me ever again,” she said. “It was disgusting.”
“Good enough to make the temperature soar, though, was it not?” he said. “We had better go back inside, Soph, before you decide you want more, and before you decide that perhaps you want a lifetime of it.”
“Ohhh!” Sophia’s bosom expanded with her indignation. “The very idea. Do you think yourself quite irresistible to women, Francis, just because you know how to kiss? Yes, obviously you do. I have never in my life known anyone so conceited. Why, I would rather …”
Mary Balogh Page 11