by Mary Balogh
She was wearing her ancient fossil of a dressing gown again, and he marveled at the fact that she had not titivated herself for her lover, as every other woman with whom he had been intimate had always done. Her hair was tied at the neck again, though it was draped loosely over her ears and back tonight. Her lips were slightly parted, the upper one with its engaging lift. Her eyes were . . . open. He still had not thought of a better word than that. Her hands were resting on his shoulders, pushed beneath the capes of his greatcoat.
Deuce take it, but I love you.
He gazed into her eyes, frozen for a moment. He had not spoken aloud, had he? But he heard no echo of the words and saw no shock in her face.
“Are you inviting me in?” he asked.
“Are you not already in?” she said. “But where do you wish to go? Upstairs? The sitting room?”
It ought to have been obvious. It was almost half past midnight and they were new lovers.
“The sitting room,” he said. “But no tea, thank you. I have drunk enough of the stuff since the arrival of my family to sail away on. Even poor Wenzel was plied with it twice this evening.”
She picked up the lamp so that he could set his outdoor things on the chair and led the way into the sitting room. Was he mad? Or going senile? It was the middle of the night, there was a wide, comfortable bed upstairs, she was willing to welcome him into it and into her, she looked as delicious as the cake and the icing and the cream filling all in one despite the fact that she had not titivated herself or perhaps because of it—and he had chosen the sitting room instead?
“I am surprised he did not stay here instead of calling on us,” he said.
“Mr. Wenzel? With Tilly and Elizabeth, you mean?” she asked. “He never does. Nor does Sir Matthew when it is his turn to bring them. We like to discuss our books just among ourselves.”
“A reading club?” he said.
“We have been meeting monthly for the past three years,” she explained as she set down the lamp on the mantel and reached for the poker. But it was already in his hand, and she sat down on the love seat while he stirred the coals and put on a few more. The animals had settled comfortably close to the heat. “We all read the same book or set of poems or essays and then discuss them over tea and biscuits or cake. We enjoy that one evening of the month immensely.”
“And what was it tonight?” he asked as he straightened up.
“Just one poem, though a longish one,” she said. “William Wordsworth’s ‘Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey.’ Have you read it? One of my friends, one of my fellow Survivors, lives in Wales, though his home is on the western side of it rather than in the Wye valley in the east. I went there with George last year for his wedding.”
“George?” That was not jealousy flaring in him, was it?
“Duke of Stanbrook, owner of Penderris Hall,” she explained. “A sort of cousin though a closer relationship than yours and mine. He is another of the Survivors.”
“The one whose wife jumped off a cliff?”
“Yes,” she said.
He wished he had not remembered that particular detail. The man had also lost a son to the wars and must be as old as the hills. Percy tried to remember him from the House of Lords but without any success. Perhaps he would recognize him if he saw him.
He eyed the empty chair beside the fire and went to sit on the love seat. He turned and scooped her up and set her on his lap with her feet on the seat beside them. She was on the tall side, but she wriggled downward—heaven help him—until she was snuggled against him, the side of her head on his shoulder. She inhaled audibly.
“I love the way you smell,” she said. “It is always the same.”
“Mingled liberally with sweat on two recent occasions,” he said.
“Yes.” She laughed softly.
“And I love the sound of your laughter,” he said. And if he had met her for the first time today, he realized, or even yesterday, it would not even have occurred to him to think of her as the marble lady. He wondered if she was falling in love with him, or if it was just the sex.
It was not just the sex, though, was it? If it were, then they would be upstairs now, naked on her bed, going at it.
For a moment he felt almost dizzy with alarm. That was what they really ought to be doing.
“I am not much given to laughing,” she said.
“And that,” he said, “is why your laughter is so precious. No, correct that. It would be just as precious if you laughed frequently. You used to?”
She inhaled and exhaled, but she had not tensed up, he noticed.
“In another lifetime,” she said. “I like your friends.”
“They do not have two brain cells between them to rub together,” he said fondly.
“Oh, but of course they do,” she said. “I might have said that of you if I had seen you only with them. Sometimes we need friends with whom we can simply be silly. Silliness can be . . . healing.”
“Are you ever silly with your friends?” he asked her.
“Yes, sometimes.” He could feel her smiling against the side of his neck. “Friendship is a very, very precious thing, Percy.”
“Are we friends?” Now where the devil had that infantile question come from? He felt foolish.
She raised her head and looked into his face. She was not smiling.
“Oh, I believe we could be.” She sounded almost surprised. “We will not be, though. We will not know each other long enough. It will be enough that we are lovers, will it not? Just for a brief spell. That is all either of us wants. I shall not try to cling to you when it is over, and that is a very firm promise.”
He felt as though someone had dropped a very large iceberg down the chimney and doused the fire and all memory of it.
Yes, that was all either of them wanted. That was all he wanted—a vigorous and pleasurable sexual liaison while he was living out here in a social desert.
Why, then, were they sitting in her sitting room?
He drew her head back to his shoulder. “Would you be surprised to know,” he said, “that smuggling is still active in this area? Even on this land?”
There was a lengthy silence. “I would not be terribly shocked,” she said eventually, “though I know nothing of it.”
“Nothing of the involvement of any of the servants here?” he asked her. “Or whether their involvement is voluntary or forced? Nothing of the use of the cellar at the hall for the stowing of contraband?”
“Oh.” She paused. “Definitely not that. With Aunt Lavinia and Cousin Adelaide in the house? Is it true?”
“Both the inside and the outside doors leading into one half of the cellar are locked, and both keys are missing,” he told her. “No one is trying hard to find them, for apparently that area was shut off to keep the damp from the rest of the cellar.”
“Oh,” she said again. “I thought—I hoped—it had all ended with my father-in-law’s passing and even before that when I moved here.”
“I have been advised,” he said, “by everyone to whom I have spoken, to leave well enough alone, to turn a blind eye, to let sleeping dogs lie and so on. The trade will go on, I am told, and no one is really hurt by it.”
She was silent. What the devil had induced him to raise this topic of conversation to a lady, and at something close to one in the morning? He glanced at the clock. It was five to.
“Who is harmed by it, Imogen?”
“Colin Bains was,” she said.
“Yes.”
“He was such a bright, eager boy,” she told him. “He worshiped Dicky. He so much wanted to come to the Peninsula with us.”
“Your husband was quite vocally opposed to the smuggling?” he asked.
“He was,” she said. “But he could not persuade his father that there was anything so very wrong with it. On the surface t
here was not and is not. There is a little loss of revenue to the government and a lot of enjoyment of superior luxury goods—particularly brandy by the gentlemen, of course. But I think what we see and know is the veriest tip of the iceberg, and what we do not see is ugly and vicious. Even the visible tip can be nasty. He received threats before we went away.”
“Bains?”
“No, Dicky,” she said. “There were two letters, one threatening his life, one mine. They were written in a childish, nearly illiterate hand, and his father laughed at them. But Dicky was already in the process of purchasing his commission. We never knew if the threats were serious or not.”
Good God. What if they had been? What if they had been very serious indeed?
Good God.
“Oh,” she said, “I have been such a coward. I have known nothing lately because I have chosen to ask no questions and not to look out my windows late on dark nights.”
He lifted her chin with the hand that was about her shoulders. “I beg your pardon, Imogen,” he said. “I do beg your pardon for raising this topic with you. Forget I did. Keep on knowing nothing. Promise me? Promise.”
She nodded after a moment. “I promise,” she said, and he kissed her.
“I am feeling too lazy even to come upstairs with you tonight,” he said, laying his head back against a cushion. “Have you ever made love on a love seat? It sounds like a logical place to do it, does it not?”
“It would not be long enough,” she said, “unless we were uncommonly short.”
“Shall I show you?”
“It sounds . . . uncomfortable,” she said, but she was half smiling back at him.
“Not at all,” he said. “What are you wearing beneath your dressing gown and nightgown?”
“Nothing.” Her cheeks turned a little pink.
“Perfect,” he said. “I, on the other hand, need to make a few adjustments. I could hardly leave the main hall clad only in my nightshirt.”
He lifted her off his lap and set her down beside him while he undid the buttons at his waist and lowered the flap of his breeches and parted the folds of his drawers. And he reached for her again, his hands going beneath her garments to lift them out of the way. She came astride him, braced herself on her knees, and set her hands on his shoulders while she leaned slightly back and looked down. She watched—they both did—while he put himself inside her and drew her downward with his hands on her hips until he was fully embedded. Her muscles slowly clenched about him.
“Oh,” she said.
Oh, indeed. He was enveloped in wet heat and the agony of full desire.
He kept a firm grasp on her hips and lifted her partly away from him so that he could work her with firm upward strokes. And she rode him with a bold rhythm that matched his own, and he wanted it never to end, and he needed to end it now, and he would continue with it forever because it was the most exquisite feeling in the world and she felt it too and they must end now but they must prolong the pleasure just a little longer.
He did not know for how many minutes they made love. He did not know which of them broke rhythm first. It did not matter. They finished together, and it was like—ah, that old cliché, though it had never had any meaning for him before now—it was like a little death.
It was . . . exquisite. He was going to have to invent a vocabulary all his own, since the English language was often totally inadequate to his needs.
When he came more or less to himself, she was relaxed on him, her knees hugging his sides, her head on his shoulder, her face turned away from his, and she was sleeping. He was still buried in her, still slightly throbbing. The cat was on the love seat beside them. Hector was draped across one of his shoes.
He had never felt more relaxed in his life, Percy thought.
And never so happy.
He was too relaxed even to be alarmed at the thought.
19
“All the servants?” Paul Knorr said. “Inside and out?”
“The butler, the head steward, the cook, the bootboy, the head groom, and lowliest gardener and stable hand, Lady Lavinia’s maid, the scullery maids,” Percy said. “All except those brought by my visitors.”
“The cook is sure to have something in the oven at ten o’clock in the morning,” Knorr said with a cheerful grin. “And she is a tyrant. I quake and tremble.”
“If she comes at you with a rolling pin,” Percy said, “run fast.”
“Has Mr. Ratchett ever ventured beyond the steward’s room?” Knorr asked.
“He will today,” Percy told him. “You will see to it, Knorr, by being your usual deeply deferential self. You do it very well. Go.”
Knorr departed to fulfill his task of rounding up everyone who worked within the boundaries of the park, even Imogen’s housekeeper, even Watkins and Mimms and Percy’s coachman.
Everyone had dispersed after breakfast, except Mrs. Ferby, who kept guard over the fire in the drawing room. Percy’s mother had gone with Aunt Nora, Lady Lavinia, and Imogen the Lord knew where to make arrangements about flowers and music for the ball. Aunt Edna and Beth and the twins were out in the stables with Geoffrey, kitten gazing. Meredith had gone off in Percy’s own curricle, driven by Sidney, to call upon Miss Wenzel and her brother—Percy thought there had been a bit of mutual attraction between his widowed cousin and Imogen’s would-be suitor last evening. Arnold was exploring the cliff walk with Uncle Ernest and his two boys—they intended to take a look at the fishing village too. Uncles Roderick and Ted had gone riding up the valley in the opposite direction. Everyone was accounted for.
“You are staying home on estate business, Perce?” Arnie had asked with a look of incredulity when Percy had explained why he would not join in the cliff walk. “That is more than a bit alarming, I must say.”
“You are staying in order to confer with your steward, Percy?” Uncle Ted had said when his nephew declined the request to go riding. “I am impressed, my boy. Turning thirty has done wonders for you. Your father would be proud.”
“I hope so,” Percy had said meekly.
He had steeled every nerve. He was probably about to do entirely the wrong thing. But for once he was determined to do something that needed doing, even if like an idiot he must stand alone against the whole world and even if nothing of any significance could possibly be accomplished. Even if he was going to be merely tilting at windmills.
He had been raised, after all, to stand alone and always to do what he believed to be right. He had not fully realized that before now. He had not gone away to school, where, at an impressionable age, he would have learned to become just like every other boy of his social class. He had remained at home to be educated and trained—and loved—by a number of straight-thinking adults. He had remained under the influence of that upbringing through his university years and had stuck out from his fellows like a sore thumb while acquiring an excellent education in his chosen field. He had spent the past ten years more or less repudiating his past and making up for lost time—with interest. He was now like every other idle gentleman of his generation, but even more so.
But one’s upbringing could never be quite erased. If his could be, he would cheerfully do it, for then perhaps he would not be feeling this sudden dissatisfaction with his life, this onslaught of conscience, this urge to go crusading.
It was idiotic. It was nonsensical. He might—and probably would—regret it. But it was perhaps better to act from conscience and be sorry than to bury his head in the sand and sidle by his own life because he could not be bothered to live it.
Someone had organized the staff, Percy saw as soon as he entered the seldom-used visitors’ salon on the ground floor. They were standing to rigid attention in such straight lines that someone had surely used a long ruler. And they were arranged strictly according to rank. All eyes faced forward. Percy felt a bit like a general about to inspect his troops—the Du
ke of Wellington, perhaps.
“At ease,” he said, standing just inside the door with his hands clasped behind him.
There was an infinitesimal relaxing of posture. Very infinitesimal.
“I am declaring war,” he said, and at least twenty pairs of eyes swiveled his way though the heads belonging to the eyes did not follow suit, “against smuggling.”
The eyes went forward again. Every face remained blank. Ratchett, Percy saw, was having a hard time keeping his spine straight. In fact, he looked like a bow just waiting to be strung.
“Mr. Knorr,” Percy said, “will you set a chair for your superior, if you please. You may sit, Mr. Ratchett.”
The head steward’s head turned and he squinted at Percy’s left ear, but he made no protest when Paul Knorr set a chair behind him. He sat.
“I am not intending to gather together an army to sally forth for a fight against the forces of evil, you will no doubt be relieved to know,” Percy continued. “What goes on beyond the borders of my own land is, at least for the present, not my concern. And I am aware that it would take a very large army indeed to rid the land entirely of smuggling. But it will end within the borders of what is mine. That includes the house, the park, and the farm, and even the beach below my land, since the only landward route away from the beach is the path up the cliff face and across the park. Anyone who takes exception to my decision is welcome to collect what wages he is owed from Mr. Ratchett or Mr. Knorr, without any penalty, and leave here with his belongings. Everyone who stays is my employee and will live and work here according to my rules, whether he or she is on duty or off. Are there any questions?”
The pause that followed reminded Percy of the one in the nuptial service when the members of the congregation were invited to report any impediment to the marriage of which they were aware. He did not expect the silence to be broken, and it was not.
“If,” he said, “there are any smuggled goods anywhere on my land at present—in the cellar of this house, for example—I will allow two days, today and tomorrow, for them to be removed. After that, there will be no more, and I will expect Mr. Ratchett or Mr. Crutchley or Mrs. Attlee to be in possession of both keys to the locked room in the cellar—the inside and the outside keys. If they remain lost after the two days, then the locks will be forced and new locks installed—and I will myself retain one set of the new keys.”