by Mary Balogh
He spoke before opening the cottage door.
“Lily,” he said, bending his head toward hers, cupping her face with gentle hands, “we will make love before we talk, will we? Even though church and state do not recognize our right to do so?”
“I recognize it,” she told him. “And you do. It is all that matters. I am your wife. You are my husband.” It had always been true, from that moment on the hillside in Portugal, when she had been dazed with shock and grief. Even then she had known that he was everything in the world that she would ever need or want. No one—least of all the impersonal forces of church and state—could destroy the sanctity of that ceremony.
“Yes.” He touched his forehead briefly to hers and closed his eyes. “Yes, you are my wife.”
He lighted two candles inside the cottage. She carried one of them through to the bedchamber while he knelt at the fireplace there, lighting the fire. The air was frigidly cold.
“It will take awhile to warm up in here,” he said, getting to his feet and opening back his cloak before drawing her against him and wrapping it about both of them. He rested his cheek against the top of her head. “Let me hold you and kiss you until it is warm enough to undress and lie down on the bed.”
But she laughed and tipped back her head to look up into his face. “It was cold,” she reminded him, “on our wedding night.”
“Oh, Lord, yes,” he said, grinning. “Only cloaks and blankets and a tent to keep out the December chill.”
“And passion,” she said.
He brushed his lips against hers. “I must have crushed you horribly. It is not the introduction to passion I would have chosen for you if I had had the planning of it.”
“It was one of the two most beautiful nights in my life,” she told him. “The other was here. The air is already warm by the fire.”
“But the floor is hard.”
She smiled dazzlingly at him. “Not harder than the ground inside your tent in Portugal.”
They used the pillows and all the blankets from the bed. They used their cloaks. They did not remove all their clothes. The floor was indeed hard and cold, and the air was not comfortably warm despite the crackling fire that was catching hold in the hearth.
Their passion knew none of the discomforts. For each there was only the other, warm and alive and eager. After a while, after they had caressed each other with hands and mouths and murmured endearments and he had raised her dress and adjusted his own clothing and pressed himself deep inside her, there was not even each other, but the two of them seemed one body, one heart, one being. And, after he had moved in her and with her for long minutes of shared passion and pleasure, there was not even the one left but only a mindless bliss. Oh, yes, they were married.
He was still inside her. He had been sleeping, all his relaxed weight bearing down on her. And her back was to the hard floor of the cottage. He disengaged himself and rolled off her, keeping his arms about her. But she moaned her protest at the loss of him and turned against him with sleepy murmurings.
The fire, he saw over her shoulder, was blazing healthily. He could not have been sleeping for long, then.
“You must have a bodyful of squashed bones,” he said.
“Mmm.” She sighed. Then she moved her head and kissed him with soft languor on the lips. “Are you going to make an honest woman of me?”
“Lily.” He hugged her to him tightly. “Oh, Lily, my love. As if you could ever be dishonest. You are my wife. You can say no a thousand times over, you can say it for the rest of our lives and never make me waver in that conviction.”
“I do not intend to say no a thousand times,” she said. “Or even once. I said yes the first time you asked. I married you an hour later. I have been married to you ever since even though I could not agree to make it legal back in the spring. I am not saying no now. I am married to you and I want the world to acknowledge the fact—Father, your mother, everyone. But only to acknowledge what already is.”
He kissed her.
“Father will want a grand wedding,” she said, “even though the only wedding that will really matter to me is the one in Portugal. He will want us to get married at Rutland Park. We must give him what he wants, Neville. He is very special to me. He is … I love him.”
“Of course. And Mama will expect it too,” he said, kissing her again. “Society will expect it. Of course we will get married again—in the grand manner. When, Lily?”
“Whenever Father and your mother want it,” she said.
“No.” He smiled at her suddenly. “No, Lily. We will decide. How does the second anniversary of our first, our real wedding sound to you? December—at Rutland Park.”
“Oh, yes.” She smiled back with obvious delight. “Yes, that would be perfect.”
Everything was perfect—for the present. It would not remain so throughout the rest of their lives, of course. Life did not work that way. But now, this night, all was well. The future looked bright and the past …
Ah, the past. The past that Lily had endured and he had never found the courage to share completely with her. It did not matter, perhaps. The past was best left just where it was. But then the past could never remain there. It encroached on the present and could blight the future if the issues it had raised were never dealt with. Lily’s past would always be something he tiptoed about, something she deliberately never spoke about to him.
“What are you thinking?” She touched her lips to his. “Why do you look so sad?”
“Lily.” He spoke quietly, looking into her shadowed eyes though he would rather have looked anywhere else in the world. “Tell me about those months. There was more to tell, was there not? But I did not have the courage or fortitude to listen to the whole of it back in the spring. The pain of those we love is always harder to bear than our own, especially when there is guilt involved. But I need to know. I need to share it all so that there are no shadows left between us. And perhaps you need to tell. I need to help you let go of it, if I can. I need—”
“Forgiveness?” she said when he did not complete the thought. Her finger was tracing the line of his facial scar. “You did all you could, Neville, both for me and for the men who died in the pass. It was war. And it was Papa who took me on that scouting mission. I knew the risk; he knew it. You must not blame yourself. You must not. But yes, I will tell you. And then we will both let go of the pain. Together. It will be finally in the past, where it belongs.”
Even now he wished he had left it alone. He wished he had held on to their perfect night without allowing the intrusion of the one piece of ugliness they had never confronted together.
“His name was Manuel,” he said quietly.
She drew a slow and audible breath. “Yes. His name was Manuel,” she said. “He was small and wiry of build and handsome and charismatic. He was the leader of the band of partisans and a fanatical nationalist. He was fiercely loyal to his countrymen, terrifyingly cruel to his enemies. I was his woman for seven months. I believe he grew fond of me. He wept when he let me go.”
He held her while she continued. And after she had finished talking. She had cried at the end. She was crying now. So was he.
“It does not need to be said,” he murmured against one of her ears when he had control of his voice, “because there was no guilt, Lily. But I know you blame yourself for living when those French captives died. And for allowing that man to use your body instead of fighting to the death.
So I will say it, my love, and you must believe me. You are forgiven. I forgive you.”
Her tears stopped eventually, and she blew her nose on the handkerchief he had somehow found in the pocket of his cloak.
“Thank you,” she said. She smiled tremulously. “It does not need to be said, because there was no guilt, Neville. But I know you need to hear it. I forgive you for failing to protect me, for neglecting to come in search of me, for coming home to England and proceeding with your life. You are forgiven.”
He drew her head ben
eath his chin and massaged her scalp through her hair with light fingers. He gazed into the fire.
Strange night, he thought. Almost like the first night they spent together, ugliness and grief on the one hand, love and bliss of physical passion on the other, weaving themselves into some fabric called life. Something that despite everything was worth living and fighting for. As long as there was love—that indefinable element that gave it all a meaning and a value deeper than words.
It had been strangely right to confront the final painful barrier tonight of all nights. To recognize openly together that the path to this night and this cottage had been a long and a difficult one. But to understand that together they could ease each other’s burdens and offer each other pardon and peace as well as love and passion.
“Lily.” He kissed her on the mouth. “Lily—”
She pressed herself to him and clung tightly.
It was a fierce loving, without foreplay, without any great gentleness. It was the yearning of two bodies to reach beyond desire, beyond pleasure, beyond simple sexual passion to the very core of love. And blessedly they found it there in the cottage beside the pool and the waterfall, their final cries wordless, their sated bodies tangled together on the hard floor among blankets and cloaks and other garments. They slept.
Neville was still fast asleep and awkwardly tangled up in the blankets after Lily had risen to her feet, straightened her clothes, fluffed up her hair as best she could, and drawn on her cloak. She was tempted to leave him there, but the fire had died down and soon enough the cold would wake him anyway. She nudged him with one foot.
He grunted.
“Neville,” she said, and watched, unsurprised, as he came fully awake and sat up all in one moment—he had been an army officer, after all. “Neville, in another few hours we are going to have to go back to the house and look fresh and tidy and innocent enough to face Father and your mother and everyone else. We are going to have to tell them our news and allow them to take everything else out of our hands. Are we going to waste these precious few hours?”
He grinned and reached out an arm for her. “Now that you mention it—” he began.
But she clucked her tongue. “I did think of bathing,” she admitted, “but I suppose the water would be rather chilly.”
He grimaced.
“So we will go walking on the beach instead,” she told him. “No, running.”
“We will?” He stretched. “When we could be making love instead?”
“We will go running on the beach,” she said firmly. “In fact”—she grinned cheekily at him—“the last one to the rock and up to the very top of it is a shameful slug-a-bed.”
“A what?” he said, shouting with laughter.
But she was gone, into the other room, out through the door, leaving it wide open, leaving behind her only an echo of answering laughter.
Neville grimaced again, sighed, cast one longing look at the dying fire, chuckled, jumped to his feet, gathering his clothes about him as he did so, and went in pursuit.
27
Lily had not judged the Duke of Portfrey quite correctly. He wanted a wedding for her at Rutland Park, it was true. She was his daughter, and he had finally found her and brought her home where she belonged. It was from home that he would give her away to the man who had won his blessing to be her husband.
But he left the choice to the size of wedding to Lily herself. If she wanted the whole ton there, then he would coerce every last member to come. If, on the other hand, she preferred something more intimate, with only family and friends in attendance, then so be it.
“The whole ton would not fit into the church,” she told him. It was an ancient Norman church, set on a hill above the village, a narrow path winding upward through the churchyard to its arched doorway. It was not a large church.
“They will be squeezed in,” he assured her, “if it is what you wish.”
“Are you sure you would not mind,” she asked him, “if I were to choose a wedding with just relatives and some friends?”
“Not at all.” He shook his head. “I know, Lily, that this wedding will take second place to your first. But I want it to be a precious second place. Something you will remember fondly for the rest of your life.”
She threw her arms about his neck and hugged him tightly. “It will be,” she said. “It will be, Father. You will be there this time, and Elizabeth will be there, and all of Neville’s family. Oh, it will not take second place, I promise you, but an equal place.”
“A smaller, more intimate wedding it will be then,” he told her. “It is what I hoped you would choose, anyway.”
It was not as small or as intimate as his own wedding to Elizabeth, though, which took place at Rutland at the beginning of November, with only Lily and the duke’s steward in attendance. And yet nothing, he said afterward, could possibly have made the day happier for him or his bride.
Elizabeth, always beautiful, elegant, dignified, serene, glowed with a new happiness that put the bloom of youth back into her cheeks. She threw herself with eager energy into the plans for the wedding of her stepdaughter and her favorite nephew.
And so on a crisp, frosty, sunny morning in December, Neville waited before the altar of the church in Rutland for his bride to make her appearance. The church was not quite full, but everyone who was important in his life and Lily’s was there, with the exception of Lauren, who had insisted despite all their protests on staying at home. His mother was there, sitting in the front pew with his uncle and aunt, the Duke and Duchess of Anburey. Elizabeth, the Duchess of Portfrey, was there in the pew across the aisle from them. All the uncles and aunts and cousins were there. Captain and Mrs. Harris had come as well as a number of Portfrey’s relatives. Baron Onslow had got up from his sickbed in Leicestershire in order to attend his granddaughter’s wedding.
And Joseph, Marquess of Attingsborough, was at Neville’s side as his best man.
There was a stirring of movement at the back of the church and a brief glimpse of Gwen as she stooped to straighten the hem of the bride’s gown. The bride herself stayed tantalizingly out of sight.
But not for long. Portfrey stepped into view, immaculate in black and silver and white, and then the bride herself stepped up beside him and took his arm. The bride, in a white gown of classically simple design that shimmered in the dim light of the church interior, her short blond curls entwined with tiny white flowers and green leaves.
There was a sigh of satisfaction from those gathered in the pews.
But Neville did not see a bride dressed with elegance and taste and at vast expense. He saw Lily. Lily in her faded blue cotton dress, draped in on old army cloak that was still voluminous even though she had cut it down to size. Lily with bare feet despite the December chill, and unfettered hair in a wild mane down her back to her waist.
His bride.
His love.
His life.
He watched her coming toward him, her blue eyes steady on his and looking deep into him. And he knew in that moment that she was not seeing a bridegroom in wine velvet coat with silver brocaded waistcoat and gray knee breeches and crisp white linen. He knew she was seeing on officer of the Ninety-fifth, shabby and dusty in his green and black regimentals, his boots unpolished, his hair cropped short.
She smiled at him and he realized that he was smiling back. Portfrey was placing her hand in his and turning to take his seat beside Elizabeth.
Neville was back in the church at Rutland Park with his elegantly, expensively dressed bride. His beautiful Lily. Beautiful in her wildness, beautiful in her elegance.
“Dearly beloved, we are gathered …”
He turned his attention to the service that would join them together in the eyes of church and state, just as that service in the hills of central Portugal had joined them forever in their own hearts.
Cold air met them when they stepped out of the church. But it was the coldness of a perfect winter’s day, the sort of coldness that whipped
color into cheeks and a sparkle into eyes and energy into muscles.
Lily laughed. “Oh, dear,” she said.
She really had not noticed as they had walked up the aisle after signing the church register, smiling to right and to left at relatives and friends, who beamed back at them, that a significant number of the congregation, especially its younger members, had disappeared. It was obvious now. There they were on either side of the winding churchyard path, their hands loaded with ammunition.
Neville was laughing too. “Where the devil,” he asked irreverently, “did they come by all those live flowers in December?”
“Father’s hothouses,” Lily guessed. “But they are no longer flowers. They are petals.”
Hundreds of them. Thousands of them. All in the clutches of cousins who waited gleefully to pelt the bride and groom with them.
“Well,” Neville said, eyeing the open carriage that was to take them back to the house for the wedding breakfast, “we must not disappoint them and walk sedately as if we did not mind being covered with debris, Lily. We had better run for it.”
He grasped her hand tightly, and laughing gaily they ran the gauntlet down the winding path while the cousins cheered and whooped and had the air raining multicolored petals on their hair and their bridal clothes.
“Sanctuary,” Neville said, still laughing when they reached the carriage. He handed Lily inside and reached out to wrap about her shoulders the white, fur-trimmed cloak that awaited her there. “Uh-oh.”
Lily snuggled into her petal-lined cloak while Neville stood up in the carriage and shook one fist at the merry wedding guests. They were all there now, sober adults as well as riotous youngsters. The countess had been weeping, Lily saw, and she stretched out a hand to her mother-in-law and kissed her when she came closer. She kissed Elizabeth, who was also dewy-eyed, and hugged her father, who was pretending that the cold had set his eyes to watering.
Neville, still standing in the carriage, was hurling a shower of coins in the direction of a large group of villagers gathered to observe the spectacle. The children among them shrieked and scampered to pick up the treasure.