Someone To Love

by Mary Balogh

  Avery was unhappy.

  * * *

  Archer House on Hanover Square, so intimidating the first time she stepped inside it, was now Anna’s home. All her belongings had been moved during her absence. John and a few of the other servants had been brought over too.

  “Your duke made a special request for me,” John explained to Anna with a beaming smile. “That must mean I am doing my job well, don’t you think? The butler over at the other house would have me believe I ought not to speak to people unless I was spoken to, but it seemed rude and unfriendly to me. I like this new livery better than the other one—no offense to you, Miss Snow. Actually I am happy just to be wearing livery. I might easily have ended up at a bootmaker’s like poor Oliver Jamieson.”

  “I think, John,” Anna explained, “his apprenticeship has been a dream come true for Oliver.”

  “Well,” he said cheerfully while Avery’s butler came into the hall and looked taken aback to see the new footman chatting with the duchess, “it takes all sorts, doesn’t it, Miss Snow? Which is just as well, I suppose. It would be a bit odd if everyone in the world was a footman.”

  Besides the fact that she was married and in a different house, life resumed much as it had been before Anna left London. Her grandmother and the two aunts who were still in London were as concerned about her as ever. There was potentially great damage to be repaired, it seemed. Just when she had been presented to society with great success and some acclaim, she had committed the huge social error of not pressing onward but of marrying in indecent haste and then disappearing for two whole weeks. It would be amazing indeed if the highest sticklers at the very least did not frown upon her, even shun her. It would be amazing if she was not struck off the guest lists of some of the more prestigious events of the Season and if her vouchers for Almack’s were not revoked. Only her new title and Avery’s enormous consequence might save her. But a great deal of work was needed.

  There were conferences at Archer House and at the dowager countess’s house. Aunt Mildred and Uncle Thomas were no longer in London, of course, and the second cousins did not involve themselves this time. A round of visits was planned with Anna’s grandmother or Aunt Louise to accompany her. She was advised over which parties and which balls it would be most to her advantage to attend.

  Avery accompanied her to some of the evening entertainments. He informed her with a sigh one morning when they were looking through the invitations the post had brought that she did not have to attend anything if she preferred not to but could let the ton go hang, but it did not sound like very helpful advice to Anna. She had made the decision soon after her arrival in London to stay and learn the role of Lady Anna Westcott, and it was no longer possible to go back on that, for she was now the Duchess of Netherby, and it was necessary to perform the duties expected of a duchess. It was all very well for Avery to consign the ton to the hangman, but he had always been an aristocrat. His eccentricities were accepted because he was indisputably the duke. Any eccentricity in her would be dubbed gaucherie or vulgarity.

  She was conscious of a certain dissatisfaction with her life as it proceeded and tried to deny it. The honeymoon could not have lasted, after all, and this was the real part of her marriage. But she missed the days of long conversations upon everything under the sun and the walks with joined hands and laced fingers and the laughter and kisses. There was nothing wrong with their marriage except that their busy lives kept them apart through most of each day, and even when they were together they seemed to be with other people most of the time. It was the way of life in the ton, she came to realize. Her marriage was no worse than any other—which was a horribly negative way of reassuring herself. She wanted better.

  Perhaps everything would be better during the summer when they went to live in their country home. Or perhaps not. Perhaps she must simply get used to the new reality.

  Finally she rebelled.

  She was at her grandmother’s house while the rest of her Season was being planned in some detail. Aunt Matilda had raised the point that though Anastasia had been presented to the queen, she had not been presented as a married lady—as a duchess. Grandmama and Aunt Louise looked identically shocked and agreed with her. The presentation must be made.

  “No!” Anna was as surprised as they by the firmness with which she had spoken the single word. But she continued after crossing the room to sit on the stool by her grandmother’s chair. “This must stop. I believe I have become an obsession with you all. You were kind enough to put your own lives to one side in order to prepare me for the life that ought to be mine as my father’s daughter. You did that, and I appreciate your efforts more than I can say, for I would have been all at sea without your help and influence.”

  “We do not need your thanks, Anastasia,” her grandmother said. “We have done only what had to be done for one of our own, and we will continue as long as is needed.”

  “Grandmama,” Anna said, taking her hand, “I understand how much you must still be grieving for the loss of my father despite what he did, and for Camille and Harry and Abigail and their mother. I know that you have seen it as your duty to take me into the family and prepare me for my rightful place. I think you have done it out of love as well as duty. And that is all I want from you and from my aunts and my cousins. It is what I have craved all my life. I need your love. And all I need is to be able to love you. You cannot imagine what it is like to have nobody of my own and then to have a whole family devoted to taking me in and helping me make my way forward. Please. Be done now. I have been introduced to society, and I have a husband with whom to make my own way forward. Just love me.”

  “Anastasia!” Aunt Matilda exclaimed. “Of course we love you. I have even begun to think of you as the daughter I never had. Here, there is no need to shed tears. Let me hold my vinaigrette beneath your nose.”

  Her grandmother was merely patting her hand.

  “You do not want to meet the queen again as the Duchess of Netherby, Anastasia?” Aunt Louise asked. “Or go to Almack’s on Wednesday or attend the balls and concerts we have marked out for you?”

  “I do not wish to be a hermit,” Anna said. “But I want to decide for myself or with Avery where and how I will spend my days and evenings. When I visit Grandmama and Aunt Matilda or Cousin Althea and Elizabeth, I want to do so because I love them and want to spend time with them. I want you to be my family, not my secretaries and teachers. Oh, please, I do not want to hurt any of you. I love you.”

  “There.” Her grandmother leaned over her and hugged her. “Oh, do put that vinaigrette away, Matilda. Neither of us needs it. It will be as you say, Anastasia. And indeed, it seems that despite all our fears of impending disaster, you are still the sensation of the Season. You and Avery both. Do you love him, child?”

  “Oh, I do, Grandmama,” Anna said.

  And she did. But, oh, sometimes she was unhappy.

  * * *

  Avery’s stepmother was dining with her mother and sister and had taken Jessica with her. He and Anna dined alone together for the first time since their return to London. It seemed like a rare treat, and he relaxed into it, especially when she told him she was not going to attend the concert her relatives had thought important for her.

  “Will you be going out?” she asked him with what he hoped was a note of wistfulness.

  He had intended going with her even though the main performer was to be a soprano whose voice did not agree with his ears.

  “No,” he said. “I will be remaining home with my wife. Sometimes one feels constrained to behave like a staid married man.”

  “I think,” she said as their soup was placed before them, “Aunt Louise went back to Grandmama’s tonight because of what happened this afternoon. I believe I may have hurt them. I do hope I have not.”

  He looked at her in inquiry.

  “I told them,” she said, “that I do not want them
to manage my life any longer. I know I am not quite the polished lady they would like me to be, and I know there may be people who frown upon me for all sorts of reasons. I know that at any moment the whole of the ton may turn its back upon me—”

  “Anna,” he said, “you are the Duchess of Netherby. You are my duchess.”

  “Well, yes.” She chose to smile. “And I know that you would have merely to raise your quizzing glass and everyone would rush to receive me again. But I am tired of leaning upon other people, Avery, of feeling inadequate and incomplete. I begged them simply to love me and allow me to love them. I do love them, you know.”

  “Ah.” He sat back in his chair, his soup forgotten. “And what would you beg of me?”

  “Oh,” she said, “that you would pass the salt, please.”

  They conversed upon inconsequential topics through most of the rest of the meal while Avery wondered what his wife’s new spirit of independence would mean to him, to them, if anything. But the conversation changed course again after their dessert plates had been removed and replaced with fruit and cheese and he had given the signal for the servants to leave.

  “Avery,” she said abruptly, “I need to make plans for Westcott House and Hinsford Manor and my fortune.”

  “Do you?” He looked lazily at her before continuing to peel his apple.

  “Mr. Brumford told me—oh, a long time ago,” she said, “that I did not need to worry my head over any of it, and I took him at his word because my head was so full of other things there was no room for more. But both houses are empty. I thought perhaps Cousin Alexander should live at Westcott House when he is in London. He is, after all, the earl. Do you think he would? And I wish Camille and Abigail and their mother would return to Hinsford. It was their main home. Is there any way I can persuade them, do you suppose? And all my money and investments—I cannot like being the sole possessor of it all. Oh.” She looked suddenly arrested and gazed at him. “Is it all yours now? Do you own me and my fortune because you are my husband?”

  “You pain me, my love,” he said. “I own you in exactly the way you own me. We are married to each other—until death do us part, which might sound alarming if we were ever to regret the fact. I made very sure with my solicitor that what was yours before our marriage remains yours—to do with as you wish. Riverdale may be persuaded to lease Westcott House when he is in town, though I am willing to wager he will not accept it as a favor. You are quite at liberty to try to persuade him, of course. My guess is you will not persuade Cousin Viola or your half sisters to return to Hinsford, but again you are free to try. What do you wish to do with your fortune, apart from watch it grow?”

  “I want to divide it into four parts,” she said, “as ought to have been done by my father in a new will before he died. Can it be done now? Even without the permission of my brother and sisters?”

  “I will place all these questions before Edwin Goddard,” he said, cutting his apple into four and helping himself to a slice of cheese. “He will know some answers and have some sage advice, I do not doubt. And I shall summon my solicitor. He will attend to all legal matters according to your wishes and what is legally possible.”

  Her own apple was sitting untouched in the middle of her plate, and he reached over to peel it for her.

  “No,” she said. But she was not talking about the apple. “No, that would not be fair to Mr. Goddard. He works hard enough as it is. And it would not be fair to dismiss Mr. Brumford just because he is prosy and a little pompous. I shall entrust any instructions to him. And I will employ my own secretary. I know someone—”

  “—from the orphanage,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  They both watched as he peeled her apple in one strip and then cut it in four and cored it.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  He sat back in his chair and bit into one piece of his own apple. “Are you angry about something?” he asked her.

  “No.” She sighed. “No, Avery. But I have been drifting with the tide, it seems, ever since I opened Mr. Brumford’s letter in the schoolroom and decided to come here. I have let life happen to me. Oh, I have exercised control in small, unimportant ways, like the design of my new clothes, but . . .” She shrugged.

  “Did you drift into marrying me?” he asked, and then wished he had not. He did not particularly want to hear her answer.

  She had been arranging the four pieces of her apple in a neat row across her plate. She looked up at him then.

  “I think I married you,” she said, “because I wanted to.”

  Well, that was a huge relief. “I am flattered,” he said. “Honored. Your apple is starting to turn brown.”

  His relief was short-lived. Her hands disappeared into her lap and she continued to stare at him. “Avery,” she asked softly, “where did you learn to do that?”

  Strangely, he knew exactly what she was talking about, though he hoped he was wrong. “That?”

  “Fighting a far larger man the way you did and defeating him without allowing him to lay a hand upon you—apart from the fact that a door ran into you soon after,” she said. “Leaping into the air higher than your own height and still having the power to render him unconscious with the soles of your bare feet.”

  He gazed back at her for a few moments, his body absolutely still. That damned Riverdale had told her, he thought for a moment. But no. “Where were you?” he asked.

  “Up in a tree,” she said. “Elizabeth was hidden behind it.”

  “A few dozen men would have been severely displeased if they had caught you,” he said. “Including Riverdale. And Uxbury. Me.”

  “Where did you learn it?” she asked again.

  He set an elbow on the table, passed a hand over his eyes, and leaned back in his chair. “The short answer to your question,” he said, “is from an elderly Chinese gentleman. But the short answer will not do, will it? You are my wife, and I am fast realizing that my life has been turned upside down and inside out as a result of those brief nuptials of ours and has become a terrifying unknown.”

  “Terrifying?” Her eyes widened.

  He closed his eyes and took several slow, deep breaths. “I married the wrong woman,” he murmured, his eyes still closed, “or else the only right woman. You will not remain on the surface of my life, will you, Anna Archer? You will not be content to bring me comfort and delight, though there has not been much of either, has there, since we returned to London. Is it because this question has needed asking and answering? Is it because you will not be content until you have seen to the very core of me? And perhaps because I will not be content until I have allowed you there?”

  He opened his eyes and looked at her. Her own were still wide. Her face had lost color. He smiled ruefully at her. “There should be someone to warn a man what he is facing when he marries.”

  He tossed his napkin onto the table, got to his feet, and reached out a hand for hers. “Come,” he said.

  She frowned for a moment, eyed his hand with obvious unease, and then placed her own in it.

  Twenty-four

  He took her upstairs, past the drawing room floor, past the bedchambers on the next floor, and on up to the attics. He turned left and into a large room. He had been holding her hand tightly, but let it go after shutting the door and strode about the room to light all the many candles that were placed about it, in wall sconces, on the floor, on the windowsill. He lit them despite the fact that the evening sunlight was still slanting in a bright band through the window.

  The room was bare apart from two wooden benches along one side of it and lots of cushions—and all the candles. The floor was of polished wood. There was no carpet. There was something about it all that Anna would not have been able to explain in words if she tried. It was alien, strange, yet she felt instantly and thoroughly at home there and at peace. There was the faint scent of incense.

&n
bsp; “Wait there,” he said without looking back at her, and he disappeared through a door across from the benches. Anna was still standing just inside the door when he came out again a few minutes later, wearing loose white trousers and a loose white jacket that wrapped across the front and was belted at the waist. He was barefoot. He strode toward her, his hand outstretched for hers.

  “Come,” he said, and led her to the wooden bench closer to the window. When she had sat down, he moved a cushion and sat on it facing her, his legs crossed, his hands on his knees. “No one comes in here except me. I even clean it myself.”

  Yes, she could sense that about the room. It felt a bit like a sanctuary or a hermitage despite its size. “And now me?”

  “You are my wife,” he said, and for a moment there was a look in his eyes that was almost bleak, almost fearful, almost pleading. But it was gone before she could quite grasp it. It was a look of vulnerability, she thought. He was afraid.

  “Avery,” she said, her voice almost a whisper, as though they were in church, in a sacred place, “I do not know you at all, do I?”

  “I have made myself unknowable,” he said. “It is a comfortable way to live.”

  “But why?” she asked.

  He sighed. “I will tell you a story,” he said, “about a little boy everyone thought ought to have been a girl because he was small and delicate and pretty—and timid.”

  It was of himself he spoke—in the third person, setting himself even now at a distance from his own story.

  “His mother adored him and coddled him,” he said. “She devoted almost all her time to him and admitted only her old nurse into the inner circle. She taught him his lessons because she refused to allow a tutor near him and could find no governess who suited her exacting standards. She kept him from his father as much as possible—not a difficult thing to do, as it happened, because his father looked upon him with a sort of puzzled disfavor. And then, when he was nine years old, the child’s mother sickened and died. The nurse stayed on to care for him, but after another couple of years his father decided it was time to toughen him up and sent him off to school.”