Mary Balogh

by A Counterfeit Betrothal; The Notorious Rake

  “But only if you will come with me,” he said. “My feet will not know how to set themselves one before the other across that lawn if you are not there to hold my hand, Mary. You must come with me. Will you?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Holding my hand?” He chuckled. “The leech’s face will turn purple at the sight, I would not wonder.”

  “Don’t,” she said. “He is my betrothed.”

  He sobered instantly. “Yes, he is,” he said. “But no more worthy of you than I, Mary. At least my crimes are all open ones. Promise me that you will look more closely into his background and history before you marry him.”

  “Let’s go back,” she said, trying at last to pull herself upright and away from his body.

  But he caught at her waist and held her to him. “Promise me,” he said.

  “If there is something about him that I need to know,” she said, “then perhaps you should tell me. But not mere spite, please.”

  “Promise me,” he said.

  “Very well, then,” she said. “I promise. Let’s go back.”

  He released his hold on her and she moved away from him, brushing the creases from her dress and bending to pick up her bonnet. He was still leaning against the tree as she tied the ribbons beneath her chin. His smile was somewhat twisted.

  “Do you have any inkling of how hard this is for me, Mary?” he asked. “I feel paralyzed in every limb. I don’t believe it can be done.”

  She held out her hands to him and he looked at them, surprised, and set his own in them.

  “Yes, it can be,” she said, “because there is nothing else to be done.” She tightened the pressure of her hands in his.

  “Well.” He squeezed her hands before releasing them and finally straightening up away from the tree. “Perhaps you are right. And perhaps at some future time, when I have your back to a bed and I am between you and the nearest door, I shall say the same words and you will admit the truth of them as meekly as I have just done.”

  “I would not count on it,” she said.

  “Let us go and face this unfaceable situation, then,” he said. But when she would have taken his arm, he took her hand in his, laced his fingers with hers, and tightened his hold. “After which I may well throttle my aunt.”

  They stepped out from the cover of the trees and began the walk back across the lawn to the house.

  THE DRAWING-ROOM DOORS were open and a buzz of sound issued from inside. The guests were partaking of refreshments, though it was far too late for tea, yet too early for dinner.

  Lord Edmond Waite fixed a footman standing outside the doors with a steely eye. “Her ladyship is inside?” he asked.

  “Yes, m’lord.” The servant bowed.

  “Then ask her to step outside, if you please.” His fingers were still laced with Mary’s.

  Lady Eleanor appeared no more than a minute later. “Edmond, Mary,” she said brightly. “Where on earth did you disappear to after such a long journey?”

  “They are inside there?” Lord Edmond asked curtly, nodding in the direction of the drawing room.

  The brightness disappeared from Lady Eleanor’s face. “No,” she said. “They are upstairs. It was as much as I could do to prevent them from calling out their carriage and loading up their unpacked trunks again.” She smiled fleetingly.

  “And you have Mary to thank that I am not twenty miles off by now,” he said. There was no softening in his expression. “Why did you do it, Aunt?”

  She looked helplessly at Mary and then back at her nephew. “Because I will be sixty years old,” she said, “in two days’ time. Because I have one brother and two nephews. Does that make sense to you, Edmond? Probably not.”

  He looked stonily at her. “Well,” he said, “there is no avoiding the matter now, is there? Let us have it over with, then. Will they see me?”

  “They are in my sitting room,” Lady Eleanor said without really answering the question. “Will you come up now, then, Edmond?”

  “Now or never,” he said. “This is not easy, you know, Aunt. Did you expect it to be?”

  “Nor for me, dear,” she said. “And no, I did not expect it to be easy for anyone. Even for myself. I did not know—I do not know—if I am perhaps bringing even worse disaster on anyone. But there is no worse, is there?” She looked at Mary, smiled at her briefly, and turned to lead the way up the stairs.

  Mary stood where she was and tried to free her hand, but Lord Edmond’s tightened about it.

  “Mary comes, too,” he said firmly. “I will not do this without her.”

  Lady Eleanor looked back, her expression interested. “Very well, dear,” she said. “If Mary wishes it.”

  “She has talked me into it,” he said, his voice grim. “She had better wish it.”

  “Such a gentlemanly way to ask, dear,” Lady Eleanor said, clucking her tongue, but Mary had moved up beside Lord Edmond again, drawn by the pressure of his hand, and was accompanying him up the stairs.

  “I will come,” she said quietly.

  His aunt preceded them along the upper hallway to her suite of rooms. Lord Edmond did not look at Mary. Indeed, he was almost unaware of her presence at that moment. But he did know that if she once released her hand from his, he would lose all courage. His aunt opened the door into her sitting room and stepped inside. He drew Mary to his side and entered with her.

  It was rather like a carefully arranged tableau, he thought irrelevantly. His father stood with his back to the room, looking out of a window, down onto the formal gardens. His brother stood behind and to one side of an easy chair, his hand on the shoulder of the lady who must be his wife. No one was moving or smiling or talking.

  “Well,” Lady Eleanor said brightly. “Here is Edmond returned at last, Martin.”

  His father turned to look at him. He was so very much the same, even after fifteen years, except that his hair, which had been partly dark, partly silver then, was now completely white. People had always said that Edmond looked like his father—tall, inclined to thinness, the face long and austere, the nose prominent, the lips thin. His father looked the picture of elderly respectability.

  Edmond had a sudden image of his father standing straight and immobile beside the bed on which Dick had been laid out the morning after his death. His father’s face had been stern, more like a mask than a face. He had looked across to the doorway where his youngest son had appeared.

  “Get out!” he had hissed so low that the words had seemed to reach Edmond by a medium other than sound. “Murderer! Get out of my son’s room.”

  The last time he had seen his father. The last words he had heard him utter.

  “Sir?” he said now, and he was aware with one part of his mind of Mary flinching beside him. He eased the pressure of his fingers against hers. He inclined his head into what was not quite a bow.

  “Edmond?” His father’s mouth scarcely moved. There seemed to be as little sound as on that morning in Dick’s bedchamber.

  “And Wallace is here, too,” Lady Eleanor said heartily. “And Anne. You will not have met your sister-in-law, Edmond.”

  They had married almost thirteen years before. Although they had had a big wedding, he had not been invited, of course.

  “He called me murderer.” Edmond had staggered to his eldest brother’s room and thrown the door open without knocking. “He called me murderer, Wally.”

  “And what would you call yourself?” Wallace had been standing at the window, his hands braced on the sill, his shoulders shaking with the sobs that had racked him.

  Edmond had stood there for a few moments, cold and aghast. And then he had left. His mother had been too sick to see him. Or so her maid had told him. But he had heard his mother’s voice tell the maid not to admit him. She never wanted to set eyes on him again.

  So he had left, taking nothing with him but his horse and his purse and the clothes he had stood in.

  “Wallace?” he said now. “Ma’am?”

 
“Edmond?” his brother said.

  There was something farcical about the conversation, that part of his mind that had learned to look on the world with scorn and amusement told him. But he felt no amusement.

  “Edmond?” his sister-in-law said, getting to her feet and coming across the room toward him. She was a little overweight, he noticed, elegantly dressed, rather plain. She held out a hand to him. Her chin was up and she looked very directly into his eyes. “I am delighted to make your acquaintance at last.”

  And finally he had to relinquish Mary’s hand in order to take his sister-in-law’s.

  “And I yours,” he said. “Anne.”

  Anne smiled and looked a little uncertainly at Mary. Lord Edmond set an arm about her waist and drew her closer to his side. “May I present Mary, Lady Mornington?” he said. “My friend.” He looked at his father belligerently. “And that is not a euphemism for any other kind of relationship.”

  His father’s elegant eyebrows rose. “I would not dream of suggesting otherwise, Edmond,” he said. “How do you do, Lady Mornington?”

  Mary curtsied. “I am well, thank you, Your Grace,” she said.

  “My father, Mary,” Lord Edmond said. “The Duke of Brookfield. And my brother, Wallace, Earl of Welwyn. And my sister-in-law, Anne.”

  “Well,” Lady Eleanor said when the civilities had been exchanged, “now that the first awkwardness is past, shall we all sit down while I order up refreshments? I am sure my guests downstairs can entertain themselves for an hour or so.”

  And incredibly, Lord Edmond thought, they did sit down. And they conversed on a variety of safe general topics. A little stiltedly, it was true, but nevertheless they talked—all of them. Perhaps the ladies were most to be thanked. Anne talked about her three children, two sons and a daughter, and Mary talked about Canterbury Cathedral, and his aunt talked about mutual acquaintances and the weather. He asked his father about his health and Wallace about their journey. And they asked him about Willow Court.

  It seemed unreal. How could they be sitting there, the three of them, conversing together politely about nothing of any importance when they had parted fifteen years before with a bitterness that had completely broken close family ties? And yet that was exactly what they were doing.

  Was that that, then? he thought when his aunt rose to announce that it was time to retire to their rooms to change for dinner. Had Dick’s death and his mother’s and the fifteen years since been of so little significance that the past half-hour had erased all the unpleasantness, all the suffering, all the guilt? Was there nothing of any more importance to be said and settled? There was a feeling of anticlimax to succeed the utter panic that had seized him on his return from Canterbury, when he had looked to the top of the steps and seen them standing there with his aunt.

  And then, too, there was another strange feeling of emptiness, of something not quite completed, when Anne left the room with Mary and both disappeared in the direction of their bedchambers. He stood looking after them for a moment before hurrying off to his own room to avoid having to walk there with his father and brother, who were coming out of the room after him.

  Nothing was finished at all. Nothing was settled. He and his father and brother were polite strangers. And Mary? What had been happening with Mary in the past couple of hours? He had worked hard in two days to give her enough of a disgust of him that she would quell any attraction that she felt toward him. And yet as soon as he had seen that danger to all the protective armor he had built up around himself in fifteen years, that threat, he had forgotten everything except his selfish and overpowering need of her.

  Even his love for her could not redeem him, then. Selfishness, it seemed, was ingrained in him, and he had just put her in a difficult situation indeed. “My friend,” he had told his father, setting an arm about her waist.

  And he did not believe that he had the heart to spend another evening and another day tomorrow making her hate him all over again.

  He just did not have the heart. He was too selfish. His love for her obviously was not a great enough force.

  15

  SO WHERE WAS SHE NOW? MARY WONDERED. HER hatred for Lord Edmond had wavered, as had her resolve to leave Rundle Park without further delay. Far worse, she was somehow deeply involved with him now, aware not only of the fact that she loved him but also of the fact that he needed her.

  She could not forget the way in which he had dragged her off with him, not even aware of what he was doing, and of how he had held her as if she had been the only firm and solid thing left in his world. And of how he had kissed her, not with the coarse suggestiveness of his embrace in Canterbury Cathedral, but with warm need. And of how he had clung to her hand for a long, long time, even taking her in to the momentous first meeting with his father and brother. And of how he had introduced her as his friend.

  His friend! Surely she was anything and everything but that. And yet somehow, in the course of just a few hours, they had become friends. Mary frowned at the thought. Was it possible? Was there any way in which she and Lord Edmond Waite could be friends? And yet they were.

  And now Simon was angry with her—and justifiably so, she had to admit. She was his betrothed. They were in the drawing room, with several of the other guests, awaiting the call to dinner.

  “I was shamed, Mary,” he said, “left standing there like that while you rushed off for a walk with Waite. How must it have looked to everyone else?”

  “No one knows we are betrothed,” she reminded him.

  “But everyone must realize that we have an understanding,” he said. “It is in the poorest taste to give another man your private time. And what on earth could you have been doing to have been gone so long?”

  “I told you,” she said. “He was shocked to see his family after such a long period of separation. He needed to recover himself before meeting them. And then he wished to present me to them.”

  “Why?” He frowned. “They are staying, are they not? We will all be presented to His Grace and the earl and countess in time. Why did you need a special introduction? Is there something you are not telling me, Mary?”

  She felt annoyed until she remembered again that he had a right to ask such questions.

  “I am sorry, Simon,” she said. “I suppose that in some way Lord Edmond thinks of me as a friend.”

  “A friend?” he said, his brows drawing together. “A friend, Mary? He has strange notions of friendship. I don’t like it. I want you to stay away from him, do you hear me? And I want no more of this calling me off when I am dealing with him, just because you fear there will be a scene. Sooner or later there is going to have to be a scene, or the people here will believe that I do not know how to protect my own.”

  “Simon,” she said, setting a hand on his arm, but Doris Shelbourne and Mr. Bigsby-Gore approached them at that moment.

  “A wonderful day,” Mr. Bigsby-Gore said. “A most impressive cathedral, would you not agree, Lady Mornington? I had not seen it before, strange as it may seem.”

  Mary took gratefully to the new topic of conversation.

  A few minutes later Lady Eleanor entered the room on the arm of her brother, the Earl and Countess of Welwyn behind them. There was a buzz of renewed animation as the other guests were presented to the new arrivals.

  “Lord Edmond resembles his father,” Doris said quietly to Mary. “Is it true that they have not met since Lord Edmond killed his brother? The meeting today must be very awkward for His Grace. Have they met yet, do you think?”

  “I would have to say that it is very decent of His Grace to be willing to stay at the same house as Lord Edmond,” the viscount said, “considering the life of dissipation he has led since the killing.”

  “Perhaps we should not judge without knowing the whole of the inside story,” Mary said, and won for herself a cold stare from her betrothed.

  Lady Welwyn smiled when she saw Mary, and slipped her hand from her husband’s arm. “Lady Mornington,” she said, “
how pleasant to see a familiar face, though I met you only an hour or so ago. I am afraid that we have kept so much to the north of England since my marriage that I know almost no one from the south. This is something of an ordeal.”

  Mary smiled. “But I am so glad that you have come,” she said.

  “For Edmond’s sake?” Anne said. “It is high time that old matter was cleared up, as I am sure you would agree. Are you the Lady Mornington who is famous for her literary salons in London?”

  “Am I famous?” Mary said. “But, yes, my habit of inviting literary or political figures to my weekly entertainments has attracted many regular visitors.”

  “My friend Lydia Grainger has spoken of you,” Anne said. “How fortunate you are to live in town. Sometimes I pine for it, though I must not complain. The country is wonderful for the children, and we have many close friendships with our neighbors. And Wallace takes me to Harrogate for several weeks almost every year.”

  Mary warmed to Lord Edmond’s sister-in-law.

  Lord Edmond was late for dinner. He came wandering into the dining room when everyone was already seated and the footmen were bringing on the first course.

  “So sorry, Aunt,” he said, waving a careless, lace-bedecked hand in the direction of Lady Eleanor. “My valet could not seem to get my hair to look quite disheveled enough. It was looking too unfashionably tidy.”

  His words won a titter from Stephanie and some laughter from the gentlemen. The duke’s lips thinned, Mary noticed, glancing hastily in his direction, and the earl frowned and looked down at his plate. She could have shaken Lord Edmond. If he wished to make a good impression on his father and brother, could he not at least have been on time for the first meal he was to share with them? And did he have to make such a foolishly foppish excuse for being late?

  But of course, she thought, forcing herself to relax and turning to make conversation with the gentleman on her left, it had all been quite deliberate on his part. Just as so much of his behavior was deliberately designed to give people an unfavorable impression of him.

  He was, she realized fully at last, a man who wore a mask. And she realized, too, perhaps, why she loved him against all reason. She had seen behind the mask.