But in the afternoon he could no longer avoid being in company with her. His aunt had filled up two carriages with guests interested in the ancient Norman church and churchyard in the village. She had craftily offered Goodrich the seat next to her before the man realized that only those who could fit into the two carriages were to go. Mary was not among them.
For those guests who remained, Lady Eleanor suggested a walk across the pasture and through the trees past several follies to the lake. She was sly, Lord Edmond thought. Not by the merest hint had she suggested that both he and Mary join the walkers. Certainly there was no evidence that she had even dreamed that they walk together. But she had set the scene nicely, he had to admit that. He caught Goodrich’s eye as the viscount escorted his aunt out to the waiting carriages, and inclined his head. He noted with the greatest satisfaction the tightening of Goodrich’s jaw.
And the rest was inevitable. He was one of the first of the walkers to arrive downstairs, and Mary was the first unattached lady to put in an appearance. Perhaps he might have hung back and waited to offer his arm to Miss Wiggins or to the widowed Lady Cathcart, who had been married to his uncle’s cousin. But Mary made the mistake of catching his eye and raising her chin stubbornly. His very self-respect set him to sauntering across the hall to her side.
“Mary?” he said. “You are walking and have reserved no one’s arm on which to lean? Allow me to offer mine.” Which he proceeded to do with a courtly bow.
“Thank you,” she said, her voice chilly. “But I am not sure I will need anyone’s arm.”
He raised one eyebrow and looked at her.
“Very well,” she said, one foot beating a light tattoo on the tiles. “Thank you, my lord.”
Everyone else came downstairs in a large and noisy body.
“Doris and I will lead the way,” Peter Shelbourne said. “This was the route of many a childhood romp. Remember, Andrew? Edmond? I could do it with my eyes closed.”
“A rather pointless though impressive offer,” Lord Edmond said. “Go ahead, then, Peter. Lady Mornington and I will bring up the rear so that we can rescue any stragglers who happen to get lost.”
“Nicely done,” Mary said as they descended the horseshoe steps at the back of the group. “I suppose you intend to lag so far behind that you will have me all to yourself.”
“It is a fine idea,” he said, “though it had not occurred to me until you mentioned it.”
“And I suppose you arranged it that Simon go on the drive,” she said, “so that I would be unprotected.”
“Far from it,” he said. “My knees are still knocking from a certain nocturnal visit I was paid last night.”
She looked at him in inquiry.
“It seems I am to keep my eyes and my hands and every other part of my body off you,” he said, “since you are now someone else’s possession.”
Her jaw tightened. He wondered at whom her anger was directed.
“I gather that my jaw and my nose and several other parts of my anatomy are at risk if I choose to be defiant,” he said. “I believe that even a bullet through the heart or brain would not be considered excessive punishment.”
“Well,” she said, “at least now you know.”
“I do indeed,” he said. “Mary, are you really going to marry him?”
“I am,” she said. “I have been a widow long enough. I want the security and contentment of marriage.”
“Ah,” he said. “And I thought that it was a new lover you were in search of. No wonder you rejected my suit, Mary. I should have offered you marriage.”
“How ridiculous!” She looked at him scornfully. “As if I would have married you. And as if you would have offered marriage. You would be quite incapable of the type of commitment that marriage calls for. Fidelity, for example.”
“Do you think so?” he said. “Though perhaps you are right. I had not the smallest intention of being faithful to Dorothea had I married her. And she was too civilized to have expected it. She would have preferred me to reserve all amorous activities apart from the begetting of an heir for a mistress, I suspect. On the other hand, I did intend to be faithful to Lady Wren. She was the most exquisite creature I have ever seen. Yourself included.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I have never had any illusions about my own beauty.”
“I could have been faithful to you, though,” he said, his eyes roaming her face. “I don’t believe I would have ever wished to stray from you, Mary.”
“Nonsense!” she said. “We have nothing whatsoever in common.”
“Oh, yes,” he said. “There was something.”
She looked about her. “Why are we walking around the formal gardens instead of through them like everyone else?” she asked.
“A question unworthy of you, Mary,” he said, though he had not noticed until that moment that they were not following the others, “when the answer is so obvious. So that we may fall farther behind, of course.”
“If you think to seduce me,” she said, tight-lipped, “you have a fight on your hands, my lord.”
“A tempting thought,” he said. “But let us be civil. Talk to me, Mary. Tell me how you like this house and what you have seen of the park.”
She relaxed somewhat as they rounded the end of the formal gardens and proceeded after the others in the direction of the stile leading to the path across the pasture.
“Oh, I like it very well,” she said. “I cannot imagine why anyone with a country home can bear to leave it in order to live in town.”
“The pursuit of pleasure,” he said, “and company. The escape from self. One does not have to come face-to-face with oneself so often amid the clamor of town entertainments.”
“Is that why you live almost all the time in town?” she asked.
“As usual, Mary,” he said, “you know unerringly how to wound. You think I find facing myself unpleasant?”
“Do you?” she asked.
He lifted her hand away from his arm so that he could climb over the stile and turn to help her over. He could not resist lifting her down and lowering her close to his own body. She flushed, but she smoothed out her dress calmly enough and took his offered arm again.
“Why should I?” he asked. “I have almost everything a man could ask for in life. I have wealth and property and position. I have had a great deal of pleasure in my life.”
“And peace of mind?” she said. “And self-respect? And a place to call home, and loving people to fill it?”
“Ah, you would be enough for that, Mary,” he said.
“No.” She looked up at him and shook her head. “Absolutely not. For whenever I am with you, my lord, I am doing what you always object to. I am wounding you, if it is possible for you still to feel wounded. I am your conscience. You are a fool if you think you could ever be happy with me.”
He sighed. “My small attempt to keep the conversation light and general has failed, has it not?” he said. “We are back to the wrangling. Tell me, why exactly are you marrying Goodrich? Is it just that you think you are of an age when you ought? Is it just for security and contentment? They are very dull words. Is there no love, no fire, no magic?”
“My reasons are my own concern,” she said, her voice frosty.
“By which words I understand that there are none of those elements in your relationship,” he said. “You are not the sort of woman who can live permanently without any of the three, Mary.”
“Oh,” she said crossly, “how can you pretend to know anything about me? You know nothing beyond the fact that I am terrified of thunderstorms and behave very irrationally when one is happening.”
“I know you, Mary,” he said. “I know you very well, I believe.”
She clucked her tongue. “Everyone else is across the pasture and in the woods already,” she said. “I think it ungentlemanly of you to keep me so far behind, my lord.”
“You will insist,” he said, “on telling me I am no gentleman on the one hand and expecting
me to behave like one on the other. Is he going to take you to live in the country? You will like that, at least.”
“He wants to take me traveling,” she said. “He wants us to spend a year and perhaps longer traveling about Europe after our wedding. He wants to make my happiness the focus of his life, he says.”
“Then you should be ecstatic,” he said. “Why are you not?”
She was looking ahead to the ancient trees that made up the woods surrounding the lake. “I want a home,” she said. “I did nothing but travel during my first marriage. We never had a home at all except for a tent and sometimes some rooms for a billet. And though I have my home in London now, it can sometimes be lonely.”
“So the traveling holds no lure for you,” he said. “If your happiness is indeed his main concern, Mary, then all you will have to do is tell him so.”
“But he seems so set on it,” she said. “And so set on making pleasure the object of our life together. I want a family, but he says he will not burden me with children.”
“He is set on bringing himself pleasure,” he said quietly, “and on not burdening himself, Mary.”
Her eyes flew to his suddenly and she flushed rosily. “Oh,” she said, “how did you do it? How? What on earth could have possessed me to confide such things to you? To you of all people?”
“Sometimes a sympathetic ear can loose even the most tightly knotted tongue,” he said.
“Sympathetic!” She looked at him in distaste. “What use will you make of these confessions, I wonder. You will tell everyone, I suppose. You will make me the laughingstock. And you will anger Simon.”
He swung her around to face him and grasped her by both arms. “When have I ever made public anything I know about you?” he asked. “At least absolve me of that, Mary. And is it so shameful anyway to admit that you want a home and family with the man you are planning to marry?”
She laughed bitterly. “At least,” she said, “you can be thankful that I did not somehow maneuver you into offering for me. Can you imagine a worse hell than living with a woman with such lowly ambitions?”
“I have a country home I might have offered you,” he said. “If it is solitude and domesticity you crave, Mary, you would like it. I have neglected it for years. It needs redecorating and refurnishing from stem to stern. I have just been there for a few weeks. It needs a woman’s touch. But it is cozy. Not as large as Rundle Park or Goodrich’s estate, I will wager. It was the smallest of my father’s properties—a suitable one to which to banish me. I might have offered it to you.”
“So that you might neglect me, too?” she said. “What nonsense you speak. Sometimes I think you almost believe your own words. Do you know yourself so little?”
He released one of her arms to set the backs of his fingers lightly against one of her cheeks. “And you might have had my seed,” he said, “as you did that one night. I might have been able to offer you babies, Mary.”
She opened her mouth to speak, but the muscles of her face worked somewhat out of her control for a moment.
“Only you could possibly say such a very improper thing to a lady who is not even your betrothed,” she said.
“We might have changed that, too,” he said. “If only I had met you fifteen, sixteen years ago. You were a child then, were you not? And I, too, Mary. I was the veriest child until my twenty-first birthday, and a man the next day. What a coming of age it was. The weight of ages.”
“You merely reaped the consequences of drunkenness,” she said.
“Yes.” He dropped his hand from her cheek. “So I did. You are in the right of it there.” He turned to walk on, his hands at his sides.
She hurried to catch up to him. “Why did you not stop,” she asked, “after the accident? Did it not teach you a lesson?”
He wanted to stride away from her suddenly. He wanted to be alone. But he could neither stride nor leave her. They were among the trees and had to wind their way carefully to the site of Apollo’s temple with the circular seat within and the view down to the lake.
“If you had killed your brother, Mary,” he said, “would you slap yourself on the hand and promise that you would never be bad again? Would you promise to be a good little girl for the rest of your life? With your brother dead at the age of twenty-three? No life left at all? No second chances? And for you one mistake and a lifetime of hell to face before death brought the real thing for the rest of eternity.”
“One mistake,” she said. “Was it the only time you drank? Or was it the only time that you brought nasty consequences?”
He felt inexplicably like crying. His nose and his throat and his chest ached with the need. He clasped his hands tightly at his back.
“It was the only time,” he said. “The first. You would not believe what I was like, Mary. An innocent. A prude. A bookworm. A moralizer. I lived with my head in the clouds. And so they set themselves to get me foxed for my birthday. Not Dick, but the others—Wallace, my father, my friends. They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. I was still foxed the morning after, when I lifted him up from the ground with his broken neck and stroked his hair and told him all would be well and scolded him for doing anything as foolhardy as to attempt that gate.”
She had stopped walking. She was looking at him, her eyes wide.
“You look as though you had seen a ghost,” he said. “Do you want to take my arm again?”
“Oh,” she said. “I did not know. Though I might have begun to guess. Is it true, then? Were you different before the accident? You were at university? You were going to be a clergyman?”
He laughed. “The joke of the century, is it not?” he said.
He watched her swallow. “And you have never been able to forgive yourself?” she asked.
“For murder?” He shrugged. “It was all a long time ago, Mary, and I am what I am. Perhaps it is as well that you despise me so. If you liked me just a little, you would be trying to reform me. Women are famous for that, are they not? I am thirty-six years old. Beyond reform.”
“It was not murder,” she said. “There were others equally to blame, including your brother himself. Your aunt was right when she explained a few things to me—it was just a terrible accident.”
His smile was twisted. “Pat me on the head, Mary,” he said, “and I will feel all better. Where the devil is everyone else?”
They had reached the temple, only to find it deserted, though there was the sound of distant voices.
“Ahead of us,” she said. “You deliberately planned it so that we would lag behind.”
“Did I?” he said. “Was I planning to steal a kiss from you?”
“Probably,” she said.
He indicated the stone seat inside the folly and sat down on it himself. “I have probably incurred the undying wrath of your betrothed already anyway,” he said. “I suppose I might as well try to deserve it to the full. If you would care to move a little closer, Mary, I will attempt that kiss.”
“I was right, was I not?” she said. “You do hate yourself.”
“Devil take it,” he said, reaching out and taking her hand in a firm clasp. “Do we have to have this conversation? What does it matter if I am not overfond of myself? At least I thereby make the opinion of the world unanimous.”
She took him completely by surprise suddenly by sliding along the seat until she was close beside him. She had not pulled her hand from his. “I am sorry about Dick,” she said, “and sorry about the hell you have carried within you ever since. I truly am sorry about the nasty and unfeeling things I have said concerning that incident. But hell need not be eternal unless one chooses to make it so. Did your brother love you?”
“Dick?” he said. “He was deservedly everyone’s favorite. There was not a mean bone in his body. Why do you think he came galloping after me? No one else did. They all watched me on my way with laughter. Dick came to save me, the fool.”
“He came to save you,” she said. “Would he have condemned you to fifteen
years of hell and perhaps a whole eternity?”
He got abruptly to his feet. “Enough, Mary,” he said. “Who mentioned hell anyway? Me? I tend to overdramatize sometimes. Had you not noticed that about me? There are many men who would give a right arm for a share in my particular type of hell, you know.” He reached out a hand to draw her to her feet.
“Yes,” she said. “The more fool they.”
“Does he kiss you?” he asked. “Do you respond to him as you have always responded to me?”
She shook her head. “Don’t,” she said. “Please don’t.”
“Don’t what?” he asked. “Ask those questions? Or kiss you?”
“Both,” she said.
But she did not fight him as he drew her against him. Her breasts pressed against his coat, and her hands, lightly clenched into fists, rested against his shoulders. She lifted her face to his and closed her eyes.
He kissed first her eyes, feathering his mouth across them before lowering it to brush her lips lightly. He deepened the kiss, savoring the softness and warmth of her, parting his lips only slightly.
And he hated himself anew and ached with his love for her.
She opened her eyes and looked up into his. It was a look of naked vulnerability. She was his in that moment, he knew. And the temptation was almost overwhelming.
“So, Mary,” he said, “what is the answer to my question? Does he kiss you? Does he arouse passion in you? Does he bed you?”
“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t look at me like that.”
He did not know how he was looking at her. Only that he was steeling himself against temptation.
“Don’t sneer,” she said. “Sometimes I think I glimpse someone—someone I might like, someone wonderful—behind your eyes. But I am mistaken. There is no one, is there? Perhaps there was, once upon a time. But no longer. I wish there was not this.”
“This?” he said.
“This attraction,” she said. “This longing for you to kiss me properly, not with the restraint you just showed.” She pushed herself away from him suddenly and straightened the ribbons on her bonnet. “Where are the others? Shall we follow them?”
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