Mary Balogh

by A Counterfeit Betrothal; The Notorious Rake

  “May I go and play, Mama?” Ninian asked impatiently when the adults seemed to be lingering over their meal.

  “As long as you promise to stay away from the water’s edge,” Anne said. “Let Nigel and Laura go with you. I do not trust you otherwise not to get at least your shoes and stockings wet.”

  “I want Grandpapa to come with us,” Laura said.

  “Grandpapa is still eating,” the earl said.

  “I am merely enjoying more of Cook’s good food than is good for me,” the duke said, getting slowly to his feet. “Where do you want to go, little poppet?”

  Lord Edmond had a feeling that his father was relieved at the excuse to get away from the uncomfortable atmosphere on the blankets.

  When after several more minutes and another glass of wine Anne suggested a walk to the pavilion, Lord Edmond got to his feet quickly and stretched out a hand to help Mary up. But he did not quite look at her. He was hoping that the walking arrangements could be as they had been earlier. He did not want to walk with Mary. He turned to Anne.

  “Have you seen the pavilion?” she was asking Mary. “It is supposed to be almost as large and splendid as the house. In which direction is it, Wallace?”

  “Around there,” the earl said, pointing off to the denser trees and the bend in the lake. “But you exaggerate somewhat, Anne. I daresay it is not one tenth the size of the house.”

  “Large enough for the birthday tea and celebrations anyway,” Anne said with a laugh. “Come along, Mary. We will explore.”

  And Lord Edmond found that the situation was much worse than the one he had feared. He was to walk with neither Mary nor Anne, but with his brother. And already the ladies were striding off along the bank of the lake, in the opposite direction from that taken by his father and the children. He clasped his hands behind his back and pursed his lips.

  “Trust Aunt Eleanor not to do anything as uncomplicated as organize a dinner and dance at the house,” his brother said.

  “Her love of the unexpected has always been one of her greatest charms,” Lord Edmond said. “Do you remember the time when she had a group of traveling players performing at the house, and had them stay for several days afterward, mingling with the other guests just as if it were proper for them to do so? Mama almost had a fit of the vapors when she knew we had been subjected to that. I think she thought that perhaps your virtue had been assailed by some of the actresses. Dick and I were too young and too uninterested in such matters to worry about.”

  The earl made no comment.

  “Of course,” Lord Edmond added, hearing his words almost as if they issued from his mouth independently of his brain or his will, “as it turned out, I am the one she should have worried about. Actresses are far more interesting offstage than on, in my experience.”

  He had the dubious satisfaction of seeing his brother’s lips thin. “Hardly a matter for general conversation,” he said.

  “General?” Lord Edmond looked at his brother in surprise. “But I am talking to you, Wally. You used to like to regale us with tales of your exploits at Oxford and all the delights that were in store for us there. Not the intellectual ones, of course.”

  His brother flushed. “For God’s sake, Edmond,” he said. “We were puppies then. We are middle-aged men now. Some of us have taken on responsibilities and have answered the demands of respectability.”

  Lord Edmond winced. “Middle-aged,” he said. “Is that what we are, Wally? And no longer capable of enjoying ourselves? Is that what one gives up with youth?”

  “Obviously you have not,” the earl said, his voice low and furious. “Your excesses seem to grow with your years, Edmond. I just hope that you do not try to corrupt my children.”

  Lord Edmond’s nostrils flared. His voice was icy when he spoke. “Actually,” he said, “on the walk here I was enlightening Nigel on the sensual pleasures that Eton will have to offer him—with not a woman in sight, of course. I shall try to have the same conversation with Ninian on the return walk. As for Laura, I must take her aside within the next day or two and give her some early instructions on how to entice her man away from courtesans. Girls can never learn too early, can they?”

  His words were interrupted when his brother’s hand grabbed him by the cravat and swung him around to face him.

  “It was not enough, was it,” he said through his teeth, “for you to kill poor Dick and Mama? But you must destroy Papa, too, with your wildness and your debaucheries. And now you must attempt to sully my family with the products of your vile mind. Leave here, Edmond. Do something decent in your rotten life and leave today.”

  Lord Edmond made no move to release himself. He spoke quietly. “Sometimes, Wally,” he said, “when people expect certain behavior of someone, he will oblige them. If you expect the worst of me, then devil take it, the worst you will get. What did you expect, you and Papa—and Mama, too, though she never said it in words—when you called me a murderer? What did you expect when you drove me away? That I would finish my studies, become a clergyman, and spend the rest of my days doing pious penance? Is that what you expected?”

  “That is what anyone with a sensitive conscience would have done,” the earl said.

  Lord Edmond laughed and brushed his brother’s hand away. The ladies had already disappeared among the trees, he saw. “Then perhaps I do not have a sensitive conscience,” he said. “Do you?”

  “I beg your pardon?” The earl’s voice was haughty.

  “How did you absolve your conscience for getting me foxed for the first time in my life and laughing at the spectacle I made of myself?” Lord Edmond asked. “How did you forgive yourself for allowing me to take that ride, and even thinking it a huge joke, and for not stopping Dick from coming after me?”

  The earl was nodding his head. “Oh, yes, I see how it is,” he said. “I might have expected it. It is often the case, I believe, that a guilty man will try to shift the blame onto someone else’s shoulders.”

  “No,” Lord Edmond said. “I was as guilty as sin. I killed them just as surely as if I had taken a gun and shot them. But I was not quite alone in my guilt, Wally. And I certainly do not need you to point out to me how rotten my life has been. I know it better than anyone—I have lived it. But I do not like to mire innocents in my hell, for all that. Your children are safe from me. You may rest easy.”

  The earl seemed uncertain of what to do with his anger. He clasped his hands behind him and swayed on his feet. “We did not drive you away, Edmond,” he said, his voice uneasy. “You went. We searched for you and you were gone. And we wrote to tell you of Mama’s passing. You might have come for the funeral.”

  “When the letter told me that the shock of Dick’s pointless death as a result of my drunkenness had driven her to a premature end?” Lord Edmond said. “It was scarcely an invitation home, Wally.”

  “Neither was it a command to stay away and break Papa’s heart with a rapid decline into dissipation,” the earl said. “You might have come home, Edmond. You might have made your peace with us. You might have found us ready to forgive.”

  Lord Edmond’s laugh was more sneer than laughter. “Perhaps I was not ready to forgive you,” he said.

  “Good God, Edmond!” The earl’s voice was exasperated. “How were we to know that you would be so little able to hold your liquor? You were twenty-one years old. A man, or so we thought. It seems we were wrong. You proved quite unable to control either your liquor or your life.”

  Lord Edmond laughed again. “I was a boy,” he said. “A little bookworm of an innocent and naive boy. It is not easy for a boy to adjust his life to the sudden fact that he is a murderer and has lost his family. I needed you—you and Mama and Papa. I needed you to tell me that all would be well, even though it could not possibly be true with Dick gone. I needed you to tell me that you loved me, even though my part in his death would have made it a strain to do so. I needed you to tell me that we were still a family and that nothing could ever change that, even thou
gh Dick was gone. I needed to cry. I did so finally alone on the day of Mama’s funeral. And if there is a worse misery than crying alone, Wally, I wish you would tell me what it is so that I can direct all my energies to avoiding it for the rest of my life.”

  “If you had just written and told us that,” the earl said, white-faced. “If you had just come, Edmond. Do you believe that we would really have turned you off? Things would have been strained for a long time, but we had always been a family. We would have come through it together. Instead we were left to believe that you did not care at all. First of all getting yourself expelled from Oxford and then all that followed it. And finally humiliating Lady Dorothea and running after a woman who did not even want you, by all accounts. What were we to think, Edmond? The evidence was all against you.”

  Lord Edmond smiled. “I suppose I have always made the mistake of believing that other people have imaginations as acute as mine,” he said. “We had better walk on, Wally. The ladies will be thinking we have both fallen in the lake.”

  “Anne set this up,” the earl said. “I know her quite well enough to be certain of that, Edmond. And you may be sure that before you leave here there will be a similar confrontation arranged with Papa. Anne does not realize that after fifteen years the rift is beyond healing.”

  “Women,” Lord Edmond said, “are incurable romantics. They believe that if only two people can be made to talk, all their problems will be solved. Mary is the same.”

  “What in the name of all that is wonderful is she doing in your life?” the earl asked. “She is an intelligent and a decent lady, Edmond.”

  “Thank you,” his brother said dryly. “And I will not wait for you to add hastily that you did not mean the words exactly as they sounded, because you did. She is too good for me, you think? Far too good? On that we are agreed. The lady will not be long in my life. I meant it when I said that I do not like to corrupt innocence. And if you think the renunciation will be easy, let me add this. I love her. Do you understand me? I do not mean that I lust after her, want to bed her. I mean that I love her.”

  He instantly regretted the anger that had made him speak the words aloud. His love for Mary was to have been a private matter, locked deep within the most secret recesses of his heart.

  His brother sighed. “I thought you were gone completely, Edmond,” he said. “Apart from your looks, which tell me unmistakably that you are my baby brother fifteen years after I saw you last, I have found nothing to recognize in you. Almost as if someone else were in possession of your body. But there spoke Edmond for the first time. Ever the idealist, ever the romantic.”

  “Romantic?” Lord Edmond frowned in puzzlement.

  “Loving,” his brother said, “and renouncing that love from the noblest of motives. You did it with Sukey Thompson once upon a time. Do you remember?”

  “Sukey?” For the first time Lord Edmond’s laugh had a tinge of amusement in it. “With the blond ringlets and the big blue eyes and the pout?”

  “You were deeply, painfully in love with her,” the earl said. “You were seventeen, if I remember correctly, and she was nineteen. You renounced your love for her because you had nothing to offer her of greater value than the life of a country parson, and even that quite far in the future. You were heartbroken for days, perhaps even weeks. You wrote reams of poems.”

  Lord Edmond snorted. “And she did not know I existed,” he said. “Did she not have a tendre for you, Wally? Do you know, I had not thought of that girl for years and years.”

  Both brothers laughed. Then they looked at each other rather self-consciously.

  “Perhaps it was partly my fault,” the earl said quickly. “Do you think I have not always been plagued by the thought? Only the way you turned out reassured me, Edmond. You must have been heading for bad ways, I have always thought, and we had just not seen it. But perhaps part of the guilt was mine. No.” He passed a hand over his eyes. “There is no perhaps about it, is there? I wanted to see you foxed—grave, serious Edmond making an idiot of himself. It was great fun. Perhaps it was all my fault.”

  “I did not have to drink,” Lord Edmond said. “Neither you nor Papa nor anyone else at that infernal party ever held me down and poured liquor down my throat. I drank because I wanted everyone to see that I was now a man. I wanted to be like you—grown-up and self-assured and popular with the ladies. You were always my hero—everything I could not seem to be. All I could do was hide behind my books and pretend that life perfectly suited me that way.”

  “Oh, God!” The earl closed his eyes and passed a hand over them again.

  “I am afraid I was not nearly a man,” Lord Edmond said. “I was still a child despite my twenty-one years. A child who played with fire and got burned.”

  “Edmond,” his brother said wearily, “how is it possible to go back? It has been so long and the damage has been so great. And not only to you. We all lost a family on that dreadful day. You more than Papa and I, it is true. But we all lost. At least that is what Anne has been telling me for years. But how can we go back?”

  “I think we just have,” Lord Edmond said. “Perhaps you will never know, Wally, what it means to hear you admit that you were a part of the whole guilt surrounding Dick’s death. What it means to hear you say that I was not the only loser. It makes me feel that I have been missed, that perhaps I was of some importance in your lives.”

  “Of some …?” The earl looked at his brother with mingled incredulity and exasperation. “What the devil are you talking about?”

  Lord Edmond shrugged. “You were as I have described you,” he said. “Dick was more like me, but gentle and sweet—everyone’s favorite. And then there was me, with nothing but my proficiency in Latin to commend me.”

  The earl stared at him. “Did you not know how much we were all in awe of your learning?” he said. “How Mama and Papa almost burst with pride every time they could boast of you to someone new? We all basked in the glory of your accomplishments.”

  Lord Edmond laughed rather shakily. “Well,” he said. “Well.”

  “I think we had better go and find the ladies,” his brother said, “before we do something that would embarrass us both, like falling into each other’s arms or something.”

  “Quite right,” Lord Edmond said. “And I have to go through something like this with Papa, too, you say?”

  “I will wager that Anne will arrange it somehow,” the earl said.

  Lord Edmond grimaced and looked down at the hand his brother stretched out to him.

  “Shall we at least shake hands?” the earl asked. “Will you at least do that, Edmond, to show that you forgive me for my cowardice through the years? I have let you bear it all alone.”

  Lord Edmond stared at the hand for a long moment before placing his own in it. And then, after all, they were in each other’s arms, slapping each other’s backs, wordlessly choking back the tears that would have made their humiliation complete.

  “Nigel is keen on the classics,” the earl said, frowning as they drew apart and each tried to pretend that nothing out of the ordinary had happened. “I have always boasted to him about how his uncle was such a Latin scholar. He has not begun to pester you about it yet, has he?”

  Lord Edmond laughed. “All the way here,” he said. “Though I would not describe his behavior as pestering. Actually I have been tickled pink to think that anyone would consult me as a Latin expert. My intimates in town would roar with laughter and not stop for a week. I would never live it down.”

  “Edmond—” his brother began.

  “I am not going back,” Lord Edmond said quickly. “Not for a long time, anyway. I am going home after this party, Wally. I was there for a few weeks before coming, and rather fancied myself as the country squire. I am thinking of taking to striding about my property with a stout staff in my hand, a foul-smelling pipe in my mouth, and a faithful shaggy hound at my heels.”

  His brother chuckled.

  “Besides,” Lord Edmond sai
d, “Mary lives in town.”

  “IT IS TRULY magnificent,” Anne said, “and a total folly to have it built out here in the middle of nowhere, glorious and wondrous as that nowhere is. We are agreed, Mary?”

  “Oh, yes,” Mary said. “And a wonderful if improbable setting for a birthday party.”

  “And having said as much to each other in a dozen different ways during the past fifteen minutes or so,” Anne said with a smile, “shall we confess to what is really on both our minds?”

  “Are they not coming here?” Mary asked. “Have they turned back?”

  “Either way,” Anne said, “I can only read hope into their absence. If they had continued embarrassed and tongue-tied in each other’s company, they would have hurried along on our heels, would they not, for fear of being left alone together?”

  “You think they have talked?” Mary asked. “And come to some sort of an understanding?”

  “Or bloodied each other’s noses,” Anne said with a laugh that sounded a little nervous. “I have wished for this for so long, Mary, that I hardly dare hope. Wallace has never been quite happy. Always, even at our most joyous moments—our wedding, the birth of the children, their christenings, a few other occasions—always I have been aware of something. And I have known him long enough to be quite aware by now of what that something is. It is guilt and grief. Grief fades when a person is dead, Mary. You would know that as a widow. But it does not go away when the person grieved for is still alive.”

  “I have not known Lord Edmond long,” Mary said, “and cannot pretend to know him or understand him well. But I am sure that it is guilt and this family rift that have … oh, that have kept him from being the person he might have been.”

  “You love him, do you not?” Anne asked quickly.

  Mary stared at her. “I am betrothed to—” she said.

  Anne waved a dismissive hand. “Oh, yes,” she said. “But you are not serious about that, Mary. You will not make the mistake of marrying him, I think. And I must confess to some guilt of my own. I maneuvered this situation—him going to the abbey and you coming here. Am I not dreadful? You love him, do you not?”