by Mary Balogh
How was he to know? Perhaps she did not know herself. Perhaps her calm acceptance of what had happened, her sensible explanation about its having been war, was merely a small bandage covering a large and gaping wound. Perhaps in a way her manner of coping was not unlike Lauren’s …
He lost his courage suddenly—or what little of it he had found with that first question. Had he asked, she would perhaps have told him the rest. All the atrocious details of what she had suffered and endured and survived. He did not want to know. He could not bear to know. Even though he realized that perhaps she needed to tell.
Ah, Lily, and you spoke of cowardice?
He stroked her cheek and her jaw with the backs of his fingers and then set them beneath her chin to lift it. “You have nothing to be ashamed of, Lily,” he said. Did she feel ashamed? But she had fully expected that he might divorce her for adultery. “You did no wrong. I was the one who did wrong. I am the one who should feel shame. I should have protected you better. I should have guessed that they would attack the center of the line. I should have realized that there was a chance you still lived. I should have moved heaven and earth to find you and ransom you.”
“No!” Her eyes gazed calmly into his. “Sometimes it is easier to find fault and place the blame—even on oneself—than to accept the fact that war just does not make sense. It was war. That is all.”
And yet she blamed herself, as had been apparent the night before last. She blamed herself for cowardice in not fighting for her virtue, in not dying with the French prisoners rather than submit. And he could not accept the excuse of war as absolution for his own guilt.
He had thought himself recovered from his wounds. She looked as if she had none. But perhaps in reality they were two wounded people who must somehow find pardon and peace and healing together.
But to do that they surely needed to have everything in the open between them. Yet he could not bear to know …
He lowered his head and touched his lips to hers. They were soft and warm and yielding. And her eyes, he saw when he drew back his head to look into them, were deep with yearning. He kissed her again, as lightly as before until he felt her lips cling to his own and press back against them—just as they had when he had drawn her beneath his blanket in his tent on their wedding night.
Ah, Lily. He had missed her. Even believing her dead, he had missed her. His life had been empty without her. There had been a void that nothing and no one had filled or would ever have filled. But she was back. Ah, she had come home to him. He set his arms about her and drew her against him. He parted his lips over hers.
And found himself fighting a wild thing, who clawed at him and pushed him away in panic, making mewing noises of distress. She whirled away from him across the room and set a chair between them. When he stared at her in shock, she was staring back, her eyes huge with terror. And then suddenly she shut them tightly, and when he would have spoken, she pressed her hands over her ears and continued with the noises. Shutting him out. Shutting herself in.
He turned to ice inside.
“Lily.” He used the only voice he knew instinctively she would recognize and respond to—his officer’s voice. “Lily, you are quite safe. My honor on it. You are safe.”
She fell silent and after a few moments took her hands from her ears. She opened her eyes, though she did not look at him. They were huge and blank, the terror and everything else erased from them, he saw in some alarm.
“I am sorry,” he told her. “My deepest apologies. I did not intend either to hurt or to frighten you. I will never do anything … physical to you against your will. I swear it. Please believe me.”
“I am afraid,” she said, her voice toneless. “So afraid.”
“I know.” All of his earlier questions had been answered more forcefully than if he had articulated them and she had answered them in words. She was maimed as surely as a soldier who had returned from the wars with missing limbs—more so. He was afraid too—mortally afraid he would never be able to atone. He took a deep breath and used his officer’s voice again. “Look at me, Lily.”
She looked. All the vibrant color she had gained from her escapade on the beach had fled from her face. She was pale and haggard again.
“Take a good look,” he told her. “Whom do you see?”
“You,” she said.
“And who am I?”
“Major Lord Newbury.”
“Do you trust me, Lily?” he asked her.
She nodded. “With my life.”
It was an answer that terrified him—he had betrayed her trust once with appalling, incalculable results—but he could not afford to show his own weakness at the moment. “I will not promise never to kiss you again,” he said, “or never to do more than kiss you. But I will never do either without your full, free consent. Do you believe me?”
She nodded again. “Yes.”
“Look about you,” he commanded her. “Where are you?”
She looked. “In the cottage,” she said. “At Newbury Abbey.”
“And where is that, Lily?” he asked.
“In England.”
“There is no war in England,” he told her. “There is peace here. And this little portion of England is mine. You are safe here with me. Do you believe me?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Let me see you smile again, then,” he said.
Her smile was tremulous. But her terrible fear had gone, he could see, even if his own had not.
“I am sorry,” she said.
“Don’t be,” he told her. He sighed. “We had better not try talking further today. I did not bring you here to upset you. I brought you here because I love this place and instinct told me that you would love it too. It is yours as well as mine, my dear. You are my wife. You must come here whenever you wish. You will always be safe here—even from me. I swear it. And you may be yourself here. You may be exactly the person you choose to be.”
She nodded and reached for her bonnet. He watched her tie the ribbons beneath her chin and turn toward the door. He opened it for her and they stepped outside again to make their way down the valley in the direction of the hill path. He walked beside her, his hands clasped at his back. He was afraid to offer even his arm.
The wounds were far deeper than had been apparent, then. Would they ever heal? And was he capable of healing them? Here, where she did not belong, where she was unable to be the woman she had grown up to be, vibrant and spontaneous and free?
But he had no choice except to try to help her heal and cope with the present reality of her life. She was his wife. He had loved her deeply before he married her. He had loved her passionately for that one night of their marriage. He had loved her without ceasing since her apparent death.
And he had loved her again from the moment she had stepped into the nave of the church on his wedding day two mornings ago.
11
Lily made her apologies to Aunt Theodora, Viscountess Sterne, and took all the blame upon herself for Miranda’s wayward behavior. She did it publicly, at dinner, so that everyone would know that the fault had been hers. But Aunt Theodora merely flushed and assured Lily that the incident had really been nothing at all. Hal added hotly that indeed it had not been and his father, Sir Samuel Wollston, told him sharply to hold his tongue. Joseph, the marquess of that long place, sounding decidedly bored, muttered again about storms in teacups. Pauline giggled. And Elizabeth changed the subject.
Lily was left with the conviction that yet again she had done the wrong thing.
It was a feeling with which she became increasingly familiar over the coming days. After she had taken a new dress down to the kitchen one morning and insisted upon ironing it herself and had then helped a kitchen maid carry out an enormous basket of laundry to be pegged on the clothesline, she had been told very gently by her mother-in-law that servants were hired to perform such tasks so that ladies might busy themselves with more important work. But the important work involved a daily meeting wi
th the housekeeper and a perusal of accounts that were written in a ledger Lily could not decipher. Soon enough the dowager countess resumed the task alone.
Ladies—and a few gentlemen—came to call at the abbey, and Lily had to face the ordeal of having them presented to her and of then having to make conversation with them while they all sipped tea. One afternoon Mr. Cannadine, who had accompanied his mother, spoke of the war with Neville and the Duke of Anburey and some other gentlemen, and Lily enthusiastically joined in the conversation. But after the visitors had left, Lauren drew her to one side and pointed out to her that it was not quite genteel for ladies to discuss such unpleasant subjects. Lily was not to blame, of course, Lauren had added hastily. Mr. Cannadine ought not to have introduced the subject when it was possible the gentlemen’s conversation might be overheard by the ladies.
The calls had to be returned. It was common courtesy, the dowager explained, to acknowledge those who had shown such civility. But when the barouche was passing through the village one afternoon on its way to Lady Leigh’s, Lily spied Mrs. Fundy and impulsively called to the coachman to stop. She asked Mrs. Fundy how she did, and how her husband and her children did. They were not rhetorical questions. She listened with interest to the answers and reached out her arms for the Fundy baby so that she could hug him and kiss him—even though Mrs. Fundy warned her that he needed his nappy changed and did not smell too sweet. But when the barouche was on its way again and Lily turned a brightly smiling face toward her mother-in-law, she found that she had incurred yet another gentle lecture. One might nod graciously to certain people, but it was quite unnecessary to engage them in conversation.
“Certain people,” Lily understood, were those of the lower classes. Of her own class.
Lily escaped out of doors whenever she could. It was not very difficult to do, especially after the house guests had left Newbuiy. By the end of the week everyone except the Duke and Duchess of Anburey, their daughter, Wilma, Joseph, Elizabeth, and the Duke of Portfrey had returned to their own homes—and the others planned to leave for London within a few days. Lily usually succeeded in leaving the house and returning undetected—she had not forgotten that side door and the servants’ stairs by which she had approached her room on the first day.
She explored the whole park—in sunshine and in rain. There was a great deal of the latter in the second half of the week, but adverse weather conditions never deterred Lily. She loved the beach best—though she developed the habit of approaching it with her head averted from the valley and the cottage. She loved also the cultivated lawns and gardens before the house, the dense woods that lay between them and the village and through which the winding driveway passed, and the hill behind the house with its carefully landscaped walk that formed roughly a horseshoe shape from just beyond the rock garden up over the hill to emerge in the rose arbor behind the stables. It was called the rhododendron walk.
She climbed it late one afternoon after returning from the tedious visit to Lady Leigh’s. She had changed into her old dress and let down her hair, though the chilliness of the day forced her to wear a cloak and shoes. But the climb and the view from the top and the sense of solitude she acquired up there were well worth the discomfort of the weather. She could see the sea and the beach and the cove from where she stood. If she turned, she could see fields and common grazing land stretching away into the distance.
It was not hard, she thought, closing her eyes, to feel a certain sense of belonging. This was England, which her father had so loved, and it was her new home. If only, she thought wistfully, Neville merely owned one of the cottages in the lower village and went out fishing every day with the other men. If only …
But there was no point in if onlys. She looked about her for somewhere to sit so that she could relax and let the beauty of the scene seep into her bones and her soul. And then she spotted the perfect place. It was a good thing Miranda was no longer there to be under her bad influence, she thought ruefully as she climbed the tree, her dress hitched about her knees. A couple of minutes later she was perched on the branch that had looked so perfect from below. Her eyes had not deceived her. It was a broad and sturdy branch. She could wedge her back against the trunk and stretch out her legs and feel perfectly safe.
Now … If she could just let go of everything, even thought, and become a part of the beauty and peace of her surroundings. She drew several deep breaths, smelling leaves and bark and earth and the salt of the sea air. But the old skills would just not work for her this afternoon. She felt lonely. Neville had been very gentle with her since that dreadful scene at the cottage. Very gentle and courteous—and very remote. He seemed to go out of his way to avoid being alone with her. Perhaps he did not want to frighten her again.
He had misunderstood what had happened. He had thought she was afraid of him, afraid that he would force himself on her against her will. It had not been that at all. She had been afraid that there would be more than just the kiss, and she had been afraid to find out what it would be like. She had been afraid that the one sustaining dream of the last year and a half would be destroyed for all time and there would be nothing with which to replace it. What it had proved no different with him than it had been with Manuel? What if it had left her feeling like a thing, an inanimate object, which had been used to bring him physical relief? She knew it would have been different. Memory told her so. And he had been warm and gentle and had smelled clean and musky. She had felt a surge of intense longing.
But what if it had turned out to be ugly?
There were birds singing, dozens of them, perhaps hundreds. Yet almost all of them were invisible among the branches of the trees—as perhaps she was. But she was not singing. She set her head back against the trunk of the tree and closed her eyes.
There had been another element to her fear, one she did not want to admit. She had been afraid that it would be ugly for him—that she would be ugly for him. She had been afraid that he would find her spoiled, contaminated. She had been with Manuel for seven months. By some miracle she had never conceived—maybe she was barren. But perhaps Neville would have remembered if she had allowed him inside her body that she had belonged, however unwillingly, to another man. And perhaps it would have made a difference. Perhaps despite himself he would have felt disgust.
She would have known. And she would have found the knowledge unbearable.
She would have found herself unbearable. She could remember after her release, during the long walk back to Lisbon, bathing in a stream and finding suddenly that she could not bring herself to climb out of the water or to stop scrubbing at herself with her folded chemise—scrubbing and scrubbing until she became hysterical. She had felt dirtier than she had ever felt, but she had been unable to wash away the dirt because it had been beneath her skin.
It had not happened again, but she had understood after she’d finally coaxed herself out of the water and lay shivering and frightened on the bank that perhaps she would never feel clean again. It was a secret fear she had learned to live with. But if he should ever come to share the feeling, she would no longer be able to do so.
She should have spoken her fears in the cottage, she thought. She should have told him exactly how she felt. She should have told him about Manuel, about her long trek to Lisbon, about her dreams, her fears, her nightmares—no, there was only one of those. She should have told him. But she had been unable to.
That, perhaps, had been the worst thing of all. How could they ever grow close again if they did not share everything that was themselves?
Lily, opening her eyes to gaze sightlessly out over the roof of the abbey to the sea in the distance, became aware suddenly of a slight movement to her left. Someone was coming up the path from the direction of the rock garden. Or rather someone was standing off there in the distance close to a tree trunk, scanning the path ahead with one hand shading his eyes. Or hers. It was impossible to tell who it was, but it was someone tallish, wearing a dark cloak. Perhaps it was Neville, c
ome looking for her. Her heart leapt with gladness. Perhaps they could talk after all in a secluded place like this. And he would not care that she had climbed a tree. She waved an arm even as she realized that it was not he. There was something about the way the figure stood that was unfamiliar.
The man—or woman—disappeared. Or ducked out of sight. Embarrassed, perhaps, to see her perched in a tree branch? Or perhaps whoever it was had not seen her at all.
Lily was disappointed. Being alone was obviously not the best idea this afternoon. She would go back home, she decided as she climbed carefully back to the ground and made her way down the path toward the rock garden. Perhaps Elizabeth would care to take a stroll with her.
As she rounded a bend halfway down she walked almost headlong into the Duke of Portfrey, who was coming in the opposite direction—wearing a dark cloak.
“Oh,” Lily said, “it was you.”
“I was in the stables when you passed awhile ago,” he told her, “and guessed you were on the rhododendron walk. I just now decided to come to meet you.” He offered her his arm.
“That was kind of you,” she said, taking it. But why had he stood there so furtively, searching for her, or for someone, and then doubled back only to come onward again and pretend that he was just now coming to meet her?
“Not at all,” he said. “You were telling me about your mother some time ago, Lily, when we were interrupted.”
They had been interrupted by Elizabeth, who had told him he was being too inquisitive.
“Yes, sir,” Lily said.
“Tell me,” he asked her. “Was she from Leicestershire too?”
“I believe so, sir,” she said.
“And her maiden name?”
Lily had no idea and told him so. But the probing nature of his questions was making her uneasy.
“What did she look like?” he asked. “Like you?”
No. Her mother had been plump and round-faced and rosy-cheeked and dark-eyed. She had been tall—or so she had appeared to a child who was only seven when she died. She had had an ample and comfortable bosom on which to pillow one’s head—though Lily did not add that detail to the description she gave the duke.