“Yes,” she said. “Thank you.”
She had said not one cross or scornful word to him since their arrival. It was as if she had decided that since this was the last day she would have to spend with him, she would be pleasant. She had been scrupulously polite. She seemed to have surrounded herself with an impregnable armor. And there was so little of the day left.
But it was just as well, he thought. It would be as well when the day was over and he could return to normal living again. There was a new actress at the Drury Lane, a tall brunette who played some of the more minor roles. He had heard that Crompton had taken her under his protection already. But he would oust the opposition with no trouble at all—Crompton was nothing but a gauche boy with a fortune too large for his own good—and enjoy the girl for a few days, or a few weeks if she pleased him.
It would be a relief to return to normal life. He would feel safe again.
They were not alone again for the rest of the afternoon. They played croquet in company with several other couples and then had tea on the upper lawn with the same people. They were all very merry. No one in the group noticeably shunned him. He supposed they would not feel it appropriate to do so, considering his relationship to their hostess.
A few people were already taking their leave. He would have to order around the barouche soon, he thought with mingled regret and relief. The day was all but over. And nothing whatsoever had happened in it to make her want to repeat the experience. Quite the contrary, in fact.
They strolled up to the terrace with two couples with whom they had been having tea, and waved their carriage on its way.
“So, Mary,” he said, “the day nears its end.”
“Yes,” she said.
But before either of them could say more, his aunt stepped between them and took an arm of each.
“I do believe the party has been a success,” she said, “for which I have the weather and your growls to be thankful for, Edmond. The servants actually behaved like real servants.”
Actually, Lord Edmond thought, pursing his lips, his aunt’s servants probably found it far easier to perform their duties when she was not constantly hovering in their vicinity giving confusing and contradictory orders. All he had done earlier in the afternoon was stroll up to her butler and say quietly, “Growl. Now I have followed her ladyship’s instructions, Soames, and you may go about your business without further interruption.”
The butler had grinned at him for a moment before remembering that he was a butler and pokering up quite as if he had never in his life been taught to smile. “Yes, my lord,” he said. “Thank you, my lord.”
“But I shan’t be sorry to see everyone on the way and to be quiet again,” Lady Eleanor said. “I have scarcely had a chance to exchange a dozen words with either Lady Mornington or you, dear.”
“I shall summon the barouche without a moment’s delay,” Lord Edmond said. “Never let it be said that I cannot take a hint, Aunt.”
“Oh.” She laughed merrily. “I would not be so rag-mannered, dear. I merely meant that I shall be glad to have the two of you to myself for a few hours. You will, of course, be staying for dinner.”
Sweet, seductive idea. “I invited Lady Mornington for the afternoon,” he said. “Perhaps she has other plans for dinner and the evening.”
“There is one easy way of finding out,” she said, turning to smile at Mary. “Do you have another engagement, my dear? I do hope not, as I have looked forward all afternoon to having a pleasant conversation with you over dinner. Do please stay. Do you have other plans?”
Her eyes met his across his aunt for a moment. She thought he had arranged this, he thought. She thought he was not playing fair.
“I have the barouche with me, Aunt,” he said. “It is not very suitable for night travel.”
“Then you shall take one of my carriages,” she said, “and return it to make the exchange some other day. Do not make difficulties where there are none, Edmond. Lady Mornington?”
“I would be pleased to accept your invitation, ma’am,” she said.
His heart leapt with gladness—at a mere delay of the inevitable. He smiled at her, and then thought that the smile would convince her even more that he had arranged it all.
And so after everyone had left, the three of them strolled again down by the river before Lady Eleanor retired to her room to change for dinner and had Mary directed to a guest room to freshen up. And they sat down to dinner together, a long leisurely meal followed by coffee in the drawing room. Conversation did not flag for a single moment.
“You are remarkably quiet, Edmond,” his aunt said at one point during dinner. “I can remember the time when your papa used to have to frown at you and warn you sotto voce not to monopolize the conversation when it was on topics to your liking.”
He smiled. “I am enjoying listening to you and Mary exchange views, Aunt,” he said. “I like it when people do not always feel obliged to agree with each other.”
“Oh, I believe Lady Mornington and I respect each other’s minds too much to do anything so silly,” she said. “Is that not right, my dear?”
“And how dull conversation would be,” Mary said, “if people always agreed with each other.”
“Beasley and the crowd gathered about him at your salon,” he could not resist saying.
“What was that, dear?” Lady Eleanor asked, and he was obliged to explain to her what had happened at Mary’s house.
“I called the man an ass when I could stand it no longer,” he said. “Mary was forced to take me aside and scold me roundly.”
“Mr. Beasley?” his aunt said. “He is one, dear, but you should never have said so in quite that way. And in the hearing of ladies? I wonder Lady Mornington did not have you thrown out. Edmond hates humbug, my dear, and sometimes is not too careful about how he shows it. It is hard to believe, is it not, that he was in a fair way to becoming one himself once upon a time?”
“A humbug?” he said. “Surely someone would have done me the kindness to shoot me. Instead I did myself the favor of having myself tossed out of Oxford on my ear. Did you know that unsavory fact about me, Mary?”
“There were extenuating circumstances,” his aunt said, but he was smiling at Mary. One more nail in the coffin of his faded hopes.
“No, I did not,” she said.
But his aunt did not pursue the topic, he was thankful to find. The conversation resumed where it had left off, in a discussion of Wordworth’s poetry, which Mary loved and his aunt considered sentimental drivel.
It was late dusk already when they finally took their leave. Too late and too chill for the barouche. Lady Eleanor’s traveling carriage was brought around, and she insisted on lending Mary a warm woolen shawl and on having some heavy rugs put inside the carriage to cover her lap.
“Nights can be quite chilly after such warm days,” she said, “when there is no cloud cover to keep in the heat. I have enjoyed the latter part of the day more than I can say, dears. You must have Edmond bring you again, Lady Mornington. This has been too pleasant an evening not to be repeated.”
“I have enjoyed it, too,” Mary said, submitting to having her cheek kissed by Lady Eleanor.
“I did not know you had enough sense left to escort someone of Lady Mornington’s caliber, dear,” his aunt said, turning to Lord Edmond to give him a matching kiss. “I am so glad. It is time my favorite nephew came back from the unpromised land where he has exiled himself altogether too long.”
“It was a mere garden party, Aunt,” he said.
But she patted one of his cheeks and smiled at him.
The carriage was plushly upholstered inside with green and gold velvet.
“You are warm enough?” he asked Mary as he took a seat beside her. “Do you want one of the rugs over you?”
“No,” she said. “The shawl is enough, thank you.”
The carriage jolted into motion and they both turned to wave to his aunt, who had come out onto the terrace with
them.
And suddenly the interior of the carriage seemed very confined. And very quiet.
SHE HAD NOT bargained on the intimacy of a return home in darkness and inside a closed carriage. She was embarrassed and not at all sure that there was anything else left to talk about.
“Was this all your idea?” she asked.
“No, it was not,” he said. “It might have been, I must confess. I have been known to maneuver as deviously. But it was not.”
“Oh,” she said.
They lapsed into silence.
Just the long drive back into town, she thought. It was almost at an end. And surely he would keep his word. Surely he would. He must have realized during the course of the afternoon that they had nothing in common. And he had been quite unable to participate in the conversation at dinner and in the drawing room afterward. Indeed, much as she had liked Lady Eleanor, she had thought that perhaps their hostess had been rather ill-mannered to choose topics of conversation about which he seemed to know nothing.
She wished it were at an end already. She wished they had not stayed for dinner. By now she would have been at home, all her associations with Lord Edmond Waite just a bad dream.
And then his hand reached across and took hers in a warm clasp.
“A penny for them, Mary,” he said.
“Nothing,” she said. “I was thinking back over the day, that was all. I like your aunt.”
“And she you,” he said. “She will wish to continue the acquaintance.”
“She will be welcome to attend one of my literary evenings,” she said quickly. “I believe I will send her an invitation.”
“She wants me to take you there again,” he said, and she could see in the near-darkness that he looked at her and smiled.
Oh, no, she thought. She had not seriously considered what she would do if he turned out to be a totally dishonorable man. What if, after all, he continued to pursue her? She turned her head away and dared not ask him. How would she know if he spoke the truth anyway?
They rode for some minutes in silence, until he released her hand and put his arm about her shoulders.
“Please don’t,” she said, keeping her head turned away from him.
“The day is almost at an end,” he said. “Perhaps there is half an hour or a little more left. It is almost over.”
“Yes,” she said.
“You will be glad?”
“Yes.”
His free hand came beneath her chin and turned her face toward him. She could hardly see him in the darkness. Except that his face was very close to hers.
“Don’t.” She could hear that her voice was trembling.
“So little time, Mary,” he said. “Half an hour. How many years do I have left, do you suppose? Twenty? Thirty? Forty? Even if it is only ten or five—or one—half an hour is such a little time to have left before all the emptiness.”
“Don’t talk like that,” she said crossly. “Am I to believe that you have conceived a grand passion for me? Am I to feel sorry for you? You want to bed me. That is all. And I will not be bedded.”
“Mary.” His hand pulled loose the ribbons of her bonnet and tossed it aside before she realized what he was about. “Give me that half-hour of your time. That is all I ask. I will not bed you here, though the conditions are tempting. I promise. Just give me that half-hour.”
Sometimes she tired of fighting. It would be such a relief not to have to fight any longer—after the next half-hour was over. But first there was the half-hour. She let her head relax sideways against his arm and closed her eyes as his hand lightly caressed her cheek and her ear. His thumb feathered across her closed eye, across her eyebrow. Across her mouth.
“Mary.”
There was a lump in her throat. She tried to swallow it. She wanted to fight when his mouth took the place of his thumb, first against her eyelid, and then lightly, and closed, against her own mouth.
“Mary.”
And she wanted just to stay still and let it happen. It was hard to believe that she had allowed so much at Vauxhall and afterward. She could no longer remember quite why she had done so or quite how pleasurable it had been. When it was dark, as it was now, and when she closed her eyes and her mind to the identity of her companion, when she allowed herself only to feel and not to think at all, she could feel the urge to give in to his caresses.
His tongue was tracing the outline of her lips, sending sensation sizzling through her. It was too raw a feeling. She parted her lips to imprison his tongue between, and opened her mouth to suck it inside. He moaned.
It was so good sometimes just to feel, not to think or to reason. So very good to feel a man’s strong arm about her, to feel his other hand stroking over the side of her head and down over her shoulder to her breast, lifting to slide inside her dress, warm and slightly rough over her soft skin. To feel his thumb rubbing over her nipple until that raw ache began again. It was good to feel a man’s mouth wide on hers, his tongue exploring and caressing inside.
It felt good to want and know oneself wanted. Good to feel totally and merely woman.
“Mary,” he was saying into her ear. “Oh, my God, Mary.”
And she knew again who he was. It was impossible to block thought for more than a few brief minutes. But she did not much care, she thought, lifting her hand from his shoulder and running her fingers lightly through his hair.
“I will not bed you against your will,” he said. He was running one hand hard up and down her arm. Her shawl seemed to have disappeared. “Tell me you do not want it.”
“I do not want it,” she lied.
He pressed her head into his shoulder and held it there with one firm hand. His arm about her held her like a vise. They rode thus the rest of the way home. And he held her so for a few moments after the carriage had come to a halt, while the coachman opened the door, set down the steps, and discreetly withdrew.
She did not know whether he had had her conveyed to her own home or to his love nest. She did not much care.
“Mary.” He released his hold on her head so that she tipped it back to look up at him. She could see his face dimly in the light from the street—her street. “I must ask you now, though I know the answer. Will you see me again?”
She swallowed and heard an embarrassing gurgle in her throat. She shook her head and watched his jaw harden.
“There is nothing else but this,” she said. “I cannot explain this, my lord, but it is all there is. There is nothing else. This is not enough.”
“No, it is not,” he said unexpectedly. “If you can find nothing else in me to want but my lovemaking, Mary, then I do not want to see you again, either. I have a life to get on with.”
She looked at him rather uncertainly and made to move away from him, but the arm about her shoulders tightened.
“I wanted you to want me,” he said fiercely. “Me, Mary, despite everything. But it was a foolish wish, was it not? And now I reap the final harvest of that night of drunkenness. The final punishment. The final hell. If I could go back and change things, I would do it, you know. Do you think I would not change things if I could? For Dick, Mary? And for you. I would change the last fifteen years for you if I could, relive them, put something of some worth into them. But I cannot. And so I have nothing whatsoever to offer you except the ability to give you pleasure, learned appropriately enough in the beds of countless whores. I want to offer you all the precious things the world has to offer, and all I can give you is that.” He laughed harshly.
She stared at him, dumbfounded.
“You did not suspect that a man like me was capable of love, did you?” he said. “It will work to your advantage, though, Mary. I will stay away from you. I will keep my promise to you because I love you. You have nothing more to fear from me, you see.”
He lifted his arm clumsily away from her and jumped out of the carriage. He turned to lift her down, not waiting for her to set her feet on the steps. The front door of the house was already open.
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“Go, then,” he said, sliding his hands hard down her arms and gripping both hands hard enough to hurt. “And be happy, Mary. That is all I want for you. Please, be happy.”
He squeezed her hands even more tightly and raised one of them rather jerkily to his lips before releasing both and jumping back inside the carriage without even waiting for her to disappear into the house.
THE CARRIAGE TOOK him to Watier’s, as instructed. He sat inside, still and silent, for five whole minutes after the coachman had opened the door and stood politely to one side, waiting for him to descend.
“Take me home,” he said at last.
He did not want to be alone. But he certainly did not want to be in company. And it seemed there were no other choices.
“Bring the brandy decanter to my dressing room,” he told his butler as he passed him in the hallway of his home and began to ascend the stairs. “No.” He stopped. “Bring two.”
He filled a glass to the brim when the decanters arrived, and took a large gulp of brandy, which burned its way down his throat and into his stomach. And then he stared down into the liquid for a long while. His worst enemy. He had proved it before. It had helped him kill Dick. It had made a terrifying hell out of the months that had followed. He had used it since then only in public, as part of the image he had chosen to give the world of a man who really did not give a damn.
Was he to use it again now in private—his worst enemy in the guise of a friend? Always in the guise of a friend, but in reality nothing but the archenemy. Nothing but the devil himself.
His glass shattered against the washstand a little distance away from him. The two decanters would have followed, but at the last moment he had mercy on the poor maids who would have to clean up the mess. Already it was bad enough.
He got to his feet and wandered through into his bedchamber. So what really had happened? He had been rejected by an unlovely and unattractive bluestocking, and one of not quite impeccable virtue, either. She was no great loss. If he could just force his mind back to three weeks ago, before Vauxhall, he would realize that she was no great loss.
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