More than a Mistress/No Man's Mistress

by Mary Balogh

  He bade the butler a curt good morning and strode off down the street, noticing with some satisfaction that the twinge of stiffness in his right leg was becoming less pronounced each day.

  You are lovely to sleep with.

  Jocelyn chuckled despite himself. She was right, goddammit. It had been a lovely night, and he felt more refreshed by his sleep than he had in a long while.

  He would go home to bathe and change, he decided, and then go shopping—for a small pianoforte and for sketching and painting supplies. Perhaps the best thing to do about this whole extraordinary situation was to go along with it, let it happen, let it proceed in its own way and at its own pace to its inevitable conclusion. Sooner or later he would grow weary of Jane Ingleby. He had of every woman he had ever known or bedded. He would of her too—perhaps in a month, perhaps in two, perhaps in a year.

  In the meantime, why not just enjoy the novel feeling of being—ah, yes, the fateful words that hovered in the background of his thoughts and threatened to verbalize themselves.

  Why not?

  Why not enjoy the feeling of being in love?

  Why not revel in the ultimate foolishness for once in his life?

  WORKING IN THE GARDEN later that same morning, enjoying the exercise, loving the brightness and heat of the sun on her back, Jane came to a decision.

  She was in love with him, of course. Worse than that, she thought she was also growing to love him. There was no point in trying to deny her feelings and no use whatsoever in trying to fight them.

  She loved him.

  But it would not do, of course. She was not foolish enough to imagine that he would ever love her in return, though she knew that he was in the grip of a serious obsession with her. Besides, even if he ever did love her, there could be no happily-ever-after to expect. She was his mistress. And she was who she was.

  But she could not live forever as a fugitive. She should never have given in to the cowardly impulse that had sent her scurrying into hiding in the first place. It had been so unlike her normal self. She was going to have to come out of hiding and do what she ought to have done as soon as she discovered that Lady Webb was not in London to help her.

  She was going to find the Earl of Durbury if he was still in town. If he was not, she was going to find out where the Bow Street Runners had their headquarters and go there. She was going to write to Charles. She was going to tell her story to anyone who would listen. She was going to embrace her fate. Perhaps she would be arrested and tried and convicted of murder. Perhaps that would mean a hanging or at the very least transportation or lifelong imprisonment. But she would not give in meekly. She would fight like the very devil to the last moment—but not by running away and hiding.

  She was going to come out into the open at last and fight.

  But not just yet. That was the agreement she made with herself as she pulled weeds from about the rosebushes and turned the soil until it was a richer brown. A definite time limit must be set so that she would not continue to procrastinate week after week, month after month. She was going to give herself one month, one calendar month, starting today. One month to be Jocelyn’s mistress, his love, though he would not be aware of the latter, of course. One month to spend with him as a person, as a friend in the den, if he ever returned there, as a lover in the bed upstairs.

  One month.

  And then she was going to give herself up. Without telling him. There might be scandal for him, of course, when it became known that he had harbored her at Dudley House for three weeks, or if anyone knew that she had been his mistress here. But she would not worry about that. His life had been one scandal after another. He appeared to thrive on them. She thought he would probably be rather amused by this particular one.

  One month.

  Jane leaned back on her heels to inspect her work, but Phillip was approaching from the direction of the house.

  “Mr. Jacobs sent me, ma’am,” he said, “to tell you that a new pianoforte just arrived and an easel and other parcels too. He wants to know where you want them put.”

  Jane got to her feet, her heart soaring, and followed him back to the house.

  One glorious month, in which she would not even try to guard her feelings.

  One month of love.

  THERE FOLLOWED A WEEK during which Jocelyn almost totally ignored his family, the Olivers, the Forbeses, and all topics of gossip with which the ton continued to entertain itself. A week during which he rode in the park most mornings and spent an hour or two afterward breakfasting at White’s and reading the papers and conversing with his friends, but during which he attended few social functions.

  Kimble and Brougham were highly diverted, of course, and very inclined to ribaldry. Until, that was, the three of them were walking along a fortunately deserted street on the way from White’s one morning and Kimble opened his mouth.

  “All I can say, Tresh,” he said, pretending to sound bored, “is that when the delectable Miss Ingleby has finally exhausted you, you may pass her on to me, if you please, and I will see if I can exhaust her. I daresay I know a trick or two she will not have learned from you. And if—”

  His monologue was rudely interrupted when a fist collided with the left side of his jaw and with a look of blank astonishment he crashed to the pavement. Jocelyn looked with scarcely less astonishment at his own still-clenched fist.

  “Oh, I say!” Conan Brougham protested.

  Jocelyn spoke curtly to his friend, who was gingerly fingering his jaw. “Do you want satisfaction?”

  “Oh, I say,” Brougham said again. “I cannot be second to both of you.”

  “You should have told me, old chap,” Kimble said ruefully, shaking his head to clear it before scrambling to his feet and brushing at his clothes, “and I would not have flapped my jaws. By Jove, you are in love with the wench. In which case the punch was understandable. But you might have been more sporting and warned me, Tresh. It is not the most comfortable of experiences to walk into one of your fists. No, of course I am not about to slap a glove in your face, so you need not look so damned grim. I meant no disrespect to the lady’s honor.”

  “And I did not mean to endanger our friendship.” Jocelyn extended his right hand, which his friend took rather warily. “It is all very well for you and Conan to tease, Kimble. I would do no less to you. But no one else is to be drawn into this. I will not have Jane publicly dishonored.”

  “I say!” Brougham sounded suddenly indignant. “You do not believe we have been spreading the word, Tresham? The very idea! I did not believe I would live to see the day when you would be in love, though.” He laughed suddenly.

  “Love be damned!” Jocelyn said gruffly.

  But apart from that one incident, almost the whole of his attention for the week was taken up by the house where Jane lived and where he spent most of his time—in two separate but strangely complementary capacities. He spent his afternoons and several of his evenings in their den with her, almost never touching her. He spent his nights in the bedchamber with her, making love to her and sleeping with her.

  It was a magical week.

  A week to remember.

  A week of such intense delight that it could not possibly last. It did not, of course.

  But before it ended, there was that week.…

  17

  NCE OR TWICE THEY STROLLED IN THE GARDEN, and Jane showed him what she had already done with it and explained what she still intended to do. But most of the time they spent indoors. It was a misty, wet week anyway.

  Jane had simply abandoned herself to sheer pleasure. She spent hours stitching by the fire, necessary because of the damp chill, the autumn woods spreading in glorious profusion across one corner of the linen cloth, then another. Sometimes he read to her—they had reached almost the halfway point of Mansfield Park. More often in the evenings he played the pianoforte. The music was almost all his own composition. Sometimes it was halting, uncertain at the start, as if he did not know where the music came fr
om or where it was going. But she came to recognize the point at which it went beyond an activity of the mind and hands and became one simply of the heart and soul. Then the music flowed.

  Sometimes she stood behind him or sat beside him and sang—mostly folk songs and ballads with which they were both acquainted. Even, surprisingly, a few hymns, which he sang with her in a good baritone voice.

  “We were paraded to church every Sunday,” he told her, “to cushion our superior backsides on the plush family pew—though never, at our peril, to squirm on it—while lesser mortals sat on hard wood and gawked in awe. And you, Jane? Were you orphans marched in a neat crocodile, two by two, to sit on backless benches and thank God for the many blessings He had showered on you?” His hands played a flourishing arpeggio.

  “I always enjoyed church,” she said quietly. “And there are always blessings for which to be thankful.”

  He laughed softly.

  Most often during the afternoons he painted. He did not want after all, he decided, to paint just her face. He wanted to paint her, as she was. Jane had looked sharply at him when he said that, and he had raised his eyebrows.

  “You think I am going to drape you in a lascivious pose on the floor, Jane, dressed only in your hair?” he asked. “I would put you to better use than to paint you if I did that, believe me. As I will show you tonight. Yes, definitely. Tonight we will have candles and nakedness and hair, and I will show you how to pose for me like the Siren you could be if you set your mind to it. I will paint you at your embroidery. That is when you are most yourself.” He gazed narrow-eyed at her. “Quiet, industrious, elegant, engaged in creating a work of art.”

  And so he painted as she stitched, both of them silent. He always stripped off his coat and waistcoat before he began and donned a large, loose shirt over his good one. As the days passed it became smudged and streaked with paint.

  He would not let her see the painting until it was finished.

  “I let you see my embroidery,” she reminded him.

  “I asked and you said yes,” he replied. “You asked and I said no.”

  To which logic there was no further argument.

  She worked at her embroidery, but she watched him too. Covertly, of course. If she looked too directly or stopped work too long, he frowned and looked distracted and grumbled at her. It was hard sometimes to realize that this man who shared her most intimate space with such mutual ease was the same man who had once told her he would make her wonder if starvation would not be better than working for him. The infamous, heartless Duke of Tresham.

  He had the soul of an artist. Music had been trapped within him most of his life. She had not yet seen any product of his brush, but she recognized the total absorption in his work of the true artist. Much of the harshness and cynicism disappeared from his face. He looked younger, more conventionally handsome.

  And entirely lovable.

  But it was not until the fourth evening that he really began to talk, to let out in words the person who had lurked behind the haughty, confident, restless, wicked facade he had shown the world all his adult life.

  HE WAS ENJOYING THE novelty of being in love, though he kept reminding himself that it was just novelty, that soon it would be over and he would be on safe, familiar ground again. But it saddened him, at the same time as it reassured him, that Jane would ever look to him just like any other beautiful woman he had once enjoyed and tired of, that the time would come when the thought of her, of being with her, both in bed and out, would not fill him with such a welling of gladness that it seemed he must have taken all the sunshine inside himself.

  His sexual passion for her grew lustier as the week advanced. He could not be satisfied with the almost chaste encounters of their first two times together, but set out to teach her—and himself—different, more carnal, more prolonged delights. The previous week he might have exulted in the bed sport with his new mistress and proceeded with the rest of his life as usual. But it was not the previous week. It was this week. And this week there was so much more than just bed sport. Indeed, he suspected that bed was good between them just because there was so much else.

  He dared do things he had craved as a boy—play the pianoforte, paint, dream, let his mind drift into realms beyond the merely practical. He was frustrated by his painting and exhilarated by it. He could not capture the essence of her, perhaps because he looked too hard for it and thought too much about it, he realized at last. And so he relearned what had once been instinctive with him—to observe not so much with his senses or even his mind but with the mindless, wordless aspect of himself that was itself part of the essence it sought. He learned to stop forcing his art to his will. He learned that to create, he somehow had to allow creation to proceed through him.

  He would not have understood the concept if he had ever verbalized it. But he had learned that words were not always adequate to what he yearned to express. He had learned to move beyond words.

  Gradually the woman who had become the grand obsession of his life took form on the canvas.

  But it was words that finally took him into a new dimension of his relationship with his mistress on the fourth evening. He had been playing the pianoforte; she had been singing. Then she had sent for the tea tray and they had drunk their tea in companionable silence. They were both sitting idle and relaxed, one on each side of the hearth, she gazing into the fire, he gazing at her.

  “There were woods in Acton Park,” he said suddenly, apropos of nothing. “Wooded hills all down the eastern border of the park. Wild, uncultivated, inhabited by woodland creatures and birds. I used to escape there for long hours of solitude until I learned better. It was when I came to realize that I could never paint a tree or a flower or even a blade of grass.”

  She smiled rather lazily. For once, he noticed, she was leaning back in her chair, her head against the headrest.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “I used to run my hands over the trunks of trees,” he explained, “and even stand against them, my arms about them. I used to hold wildflowers in the palm of my hand and run grass blades between my fingers. There was too much there, Jane. Too many dimensions. I am talking nonsense, am I not?”

  She shook her head, and he knew she understood.

  “I could not even begin to grasp all there was to grasp,” he said. “I used to feel—how does one describe the feeling? Breathless? No, totally inadequate. But there was a feeling, as if I were in the presence of some quite unfathomable mystery. And the strange thing was, I never wanted to fathom it. How is that for lack of human curiosity?”

  But she would not let him mock himself. “You were a contemplative,” she said.

  “A what?”

  “Some people—most people, in fact,” she said, “are content with a relationship with God in which they have Him pinned down with words and in which they address Him in words. It is inevitable that all of us do it to a certain extent, of course. Words are what humans work with. But a few people discover that God is far vaster than all the words in every language and religion of the world combined. They discover tantalizing near glimpses of God only in silence—in total nothingness. They communicate with God only by giving up all effort to do so.”

  “Damn it, Jane,” he said, “I do not even believe in God.”

  “Most contemplatives do not,” she said. “Or not at least in any God who can be named or described in words or pictured in the imagination.”

  He chuckled. “I used to think it blasphemous,” he said, “to believe that I was more like to find God in the hills than at church. I used to delight in the blasphemy.”

  “Tell me about Acton,” she said quietly.

  And he did. He talked at length about the house and park, about his brother and sister, about the servants with whom he had had daily contact as a child, including his nurse, about his play, his mischief, his dreams, his fears. He resurrected a life he had long ago relegated to a dim recess of memory, where he had hoped it would fade away altoge
ther.

  There was silence at last.

  “Jocelyn,” she said after a few minutes, “let it all become part of you again. It is whether you wish it to be or not. And you love Acton far more than you realize.”

  “Skeletons, Jane,” he told her. “Skeletons. I should not have allowed any of them out. You should not be such a restful companion.”

  “None of them seem very threatening,” she commented.

  “Ah,” he said, “but you do not know what is crowding behind them, Jane.” He got to his feet and held out a hand for hers. “Time to put you to work upstairs.” But he grinned at her when her eyes sparked. “And time for you to put me to work. Will you, Jane? Hard, physical labor? I’ll show you how to ride me, and you can use me for your pleasure as long as you choose. Come and ride me to exhaustion, Jane. Make me beg for mercy. Make me your slave.”

  “What nonsense!” She got to her feet and set her hand in his. “I have no wish to enslave you.”

  “But you already have, Jane,” he said meekly, his eyes laughing at her. “And never tell me my words have not aroused you. There is a certain telltale flush in your cheeks and breathlessness in your voice that I am coming to recognize.”

  “I have never pretended,” she told him primly, “that duty is not also pleasure.”

  “Come and let me show you, then,” he said, “how very pleasurable it will be to do the riding rather than always to be ridden, Jane. Let me show you how to master me.”

  “I have no wish—” But she laughed suddenly, a sound of delight he enjoyed coaxing from her. “You are not my master, Jocelyn. Why should I wish to be yours? But very well. Show me how to ride. Is it like a horse? I ride horses rather well. And of course they have to be taught who is in charge, wonderful creatures.”

  He laughed with her as he led her from the room.

  HE FINISHED THE PORTRAIT on the last day of the first week, late in the afternoon. He had a dinner engagement during the evening, which fact was a disappointment to Jane, but she expected that he would come back for the night. One week of her precious month was already over, though. There were only three left. She coveted every day, every hour.