Someone To Love

by Mary Balogh

  “Poor boy,” she said, keeping up the illusion that he spoke of someone else. “I wish I had had him in my schoolroom.”

  “You were five years old at the time,” he said. “All new pupils in a boys’ school are vulnerable to bullying. It is not even frowned upon. It is considered part of a boy’s education. School is meant to toughen him, to bring out the brute in him so that he will be able to survive and thrive in a man’s world. Bullying is something boys take from above and give below. It is a system that works beautifully well. Our society is founded upon it. The strong rise to the top and rule our world. The weaker find a useful place in the middle. The weakest are destroyed, but they were useless anyway. The child of my story was the very weakest. He was a timid, puny, pretty, frightened little boy.”

  Anna leaned slightly forward and began to reach out one hand toward him, but she returned it to her lap to clasp the other. His story was only partly told.

  “I refused to be destroyed,” he said. “I discovered a stubbornness in myself even while everything I tried—boxing, fencing, rowing, running—resulted only in failure and ridicule. I tried harder—and harder. And I survived. Perhaps I would have clawed my way up into the lower part of that middle group by the time I left boyhood behind. I was the heir to a wealthy dukedom, after all, and that would command some respect. But then something happened. A life changer. When I was walking back to school alone one day during my second to last year, I saw an elderly Chinese gentleman in a bleak and barren empty space between two buildings. He was dressed as I am now, even down to the bare feet.”

  She raised her eyebrows while he paused and smiled, a distant look in his eyes.

  “I stood and watched him for . . . oh, perhaps half an hour,” he said. “He must have known I was there, but he gave no sign, and I was unaware of anyone or anything except him. I cannot really describe it to you, Anna. I can only show you. Shall I?”

  “Yes.” She slid along the bench to set one shoulder against the wall beside the window, and hugged her elbows with her hands while he got to his feet and went to stand in the middle of the floor. He pressed his palms together prayer-fashion and closed his eyes. She watched him breathe slowly for perhaps a whole minute, and she knew that he was somehow going away from her and into himself. He moved his neck in slow circles, first in one direction, then in the other.

  She was afraid, Anna realized, though that was not quite the right word. It was more awe that she felt. She was in the presence of the unknown, of something strange and exotic, and it was embodied in the man she had married less than a month ago. It occurred to her that he was perhaps forever beyond her understanding. Yet she yearned toward him with a love that was almost physical pain.

  And he moved—in ways so totally beyond anything she had ever experienced that all she could do was watch and hug her elbows.

  He used the whole of the floor area. But the movements were slow, exaggerated, stylized. At first she thought they were simple moves, imposing no great demands upon his body. But then she could see that they made great demands indeed, for no body could be naturally as supple, as graceful, as precise in its movements without a great deal of practice and pain. She could see the stretch of arms and legs and body, the impossible arch of spine, the unwavering balance. His feet never once left the floor at the same time, but he could twist his body, extend the sole of each foot in turn toward the ceiling, his legs a straight line with only a small bend in the knee of the lower one. But in truth she did not observe verbally. It would have been impossible to capture in words the grace, the control, the power, the athleticism, the strength, the sheer beauty of what she watched for endless minutes.

  It was lovelier, more moving than any dance she had ever watched, including the waltz. But it was not a dance. The movements were far too slow, and they were performed to a melody that was all his own—or to a silence that sang with an unbearable sweetness.

  It was not a performance she watched. He was unaware of her presence.

  And then he stopped as he had begun, and after a few moments he came back across the room toward her, moved his cushion, and sat cross-legged before her again, his knees touching the floor.

  “Avery,” she said. She could say no more.

  “I asked if he would teach me,” he told her, “and he did. But when he understood the depth of my desire and need and commitment, he taught me infinitely more than what you have just seen. He taught me that my body could be all in all to me, but only if my mind was under my own power and control, and only if I laid claim to the soul—he called it my real self—at the core of me. He taught me to impose my will upon my body, to make it do whatever I directed it to do. He taught me to make it into a weapon, a potentially deadly weapon, though I only demonstrated those abilities upon inanimate objects—and one tree. But he taught me, to go hand in hand with that physical power, self-control. For any deadly weapon does not have to be used—ever. It is very much best for everyone if it never is. Nothing is ever gained from violence but the brutalization of those who perpetrate it and those who are provoked into seeking revenge against it.”

  “You could have killed him if you had wished, could you not?” she asked him, hugging her elbows more tightly.

  “Uxbury?” he said. “I was not even tempted, Anna. I merely wanted to put an end to the idiocy as quickly as possible and get away from there. The thing is, you see, that when you know you have power, you do not need to demonstrate it. When you know you have a weapon that is proof against most aggression, you do not need to use it. And you do not have to boast of it or even talk of it. It is a secret I have always kept strictly to myself. I am not sure why. Perhaps at first I feared ridicule or being thought weird. And when people started to treat me differently, I accepted that as good enough, and the secret of how much my life had changed seemed like a precious thing that might only be sullied if I spoke of it.”

  “The bullying stopped?” she asked.

  “Strangely it did,” he said, “though no one knew of the existence of that Chinese gentleman or of the long hours I spent with him. I fought no one except during the regular boxing and fencing sessions, at which I never excelled. I said nothing to anyone. And yet . . . the bullying stopped. People fear me or at least stand in considerable awe of me, but they do not know why—or did not before that lamentably public duel. When you believe in yourself, Anna, when you are in command of yourself, when nothing derogatory anyone says of you or to you has the power to arouse your anger or any desire to retaliate, people seem to sense it and respect you.”

  “But what has been the cost to you of your secret life?” she asked him.

  He gazed at her for several moments before answering. “Everything in life comes at a cost,” he said. “One has to weigh what one gains against what one gives up. I have gained immeasurably more than I have lost, Anna. Freedom from bullying was the most minor benefit of my transformation.”

  “But no one knows you,” she said. “You have deliberately shaped your adult life so that you are unknown and unknowable.”

  “I was unknown before,” he said. “I was not that timid, puny little boy any more than I am now the invincible warrior. Not inside myself. Inside myself I am still me, as I have always been. I do my living in here, Anna.” He patted one lightly clenched fist against his breastbone. “But I am not a hermit.”

  She gazed at him, still hugging herself.

  He leaned to one side and grasped another cushion, which he set down in front of him. “Come,” he said, reaching up a hand for hers.

  “Oh, I cannot sit like that,” she protested.

  “With those skirts? No,” he agreed. “I shall have an outfit like my own made for you to wear here in this room, Anna, if you wish. I have let you in, you see, to this room where no one comes except me. The room is a sort of symbol. What I have really let you into is my life, myself as I am, and at the moment, Anna, I am that little boy again. For I can
not control you or the way you will deal with what I have told you and shown you, and I would not if I could, but I am terrified. Yes, sit thus. I like looking across at you rather than up—or down.”

  She was sitting on the cushion, hugging her knees, which were drawn up in front of her. Her feet were touching one of his ankles. He looked at them and then raised them one at a time to remove her slippers and her silk stockings before tucking her feet beneath his crossed ones.

  “Shoes keep one at a remove from reality,” he said, looking up into her eyes. He smiled and leaned across his folded legs and hers to kiss her. “I am still terrified. I have been since we returned to London and I was faced with the reality that I am a married man and have absolutely no idea how to proceed. I am in deep and out of my depth. And I have not been doing well. The wonder of those two weeks after our wedding has vanished and I fear it has gone forever. I want it back. How do we get it back, Anna? Have you felt its loss too?”

  Was this the all-powerful, self-contained, always-confident aristocrat who had so awed her when she first encountered him? She blinked back tears.

  “Yes,” she said. “You once told me, Avery, that your dearest dream was to have someone to love.”

  His eyes gazed back into hers, wide-open, very blue in the fading evening sunlight and the flickering light of the candles. “Yes,” he said.

  “Can I be that someone?” she asked him.

  His eyes dropped from hers. He set his palms against her ankles and moved them up to her arms clasped about her knees and along them to her shoulders. He raised his eyes to hers again and got to his feet. He gathered up an armful of cushions and tossed them down in a heap beside her, beneath the windowsill. He knelt beside her, turned her, and laid her down on the cushions. He unclothed her with swift, skilled hands and then untied the sash at his waist to shed his jacket and then the loose trousers. The sun was gone suddenly, but candlelight remained, and it seemed to Anna again that this large, mainly empty space was the warmest, coziest, happiest room she had ever been in.

  Her hands moved over him as he kneeled between her thighs. He was a perfectly formed, utterly beautiful, and all-powerful, attractive, potent male.

  “Anna,” he murmured as his hands and his mouth went to work on her. “My duchess.”

  “My love.”

  Dreamy blue eyes gazed down into hers for a moment. “My love?”

  “My love,” she repeated. “Of course. Did you not know? Oh, Avery, did you not know?”

  He smiled then, a look of sweetness so intense that it took her breath away. And he entered her and lowered himself onto her and turned his golden head to rest against her own.

  They made love, and there were no words. Not even thoughts. Only a sweetness and a rightness and a gathering need and a pain so pleasurable that when it crested they could only cry out together and descend into a nothingness that was somehow everything.

  Ah, there were no words. No thoughts. Only love.

  They lay among the cushions, spent, relaxed, still joined, their arms about each other. Candlelight wavered, forming moving patterns on the walls and ceiling, and the world seemed very far away.

  “I wish we could stay here forever,” she said.

  He sighed and withdrew from her and sat up. He reached out for the white trousers and pulled them on and sat cross-legged beside her again, the trousers riding low on his hips.

  “But this is just a room, Anna,” he said, turning his head to look down at her. “You and I, we go beyond the room and beyond time.” He touched a hand first to his own heart and then to hers. “We have only to be aware of it. It is very easy to lose that awareness—when one gets caught up in the busy life of fashionable London during the Season, for example. I learn and relearn my awareness. And I will teach you if you wish.”

  “I do,” she said. “What I really want, though, is the white outfit.”

  He laughed at the unexpectedness of her words, and he was transformed into a warm, relaxed man. Her husband.

  “But we will be leaving here soon,” she said, looking around the room, “and going to Morland Abbey.”

  “You will love it, Anna,” he told her, his face lighting up. “You will adore it. I promise. And I have a room there just like this.”

  She smiled up at him, at his eagerness, his unexpected boyishness, the person he must have been from the start, made whole and happy.

  His smile faded, though it lingered in his eyes.

  “When I left school,” he said, “and said a reluctant farewell to my master—actually it was goodbye. He died in his sleep just one month later. When I went to take my leave of him, he told me I was whole except for one thing. There was still a hollow at the center of my being, he told me, and only love could fill it. But he would not explain. He never would. It was all about finding out for oneself with him. He could be very annoying. He would not tell me if it was love of humanity or love of nature or love of family or romantic love. All he would say was that I would know it when I found it and it would make me whole and finally at peace with myself. I have found it, Anna. It is romantic love.”

  She touched his knee, which was pressing lightly against her stomach.

  “I fell in love with you,” he said, “and married you. And suddenly I was filled to the brim and to the innermost depths with love. Love of you and love of everyone and everything. But then I doubted and I stumbled. I doubted the power of love and happiness to last. I doubted your feelings; I doubted my worthiness to be loved. And then and at last it occurred to me that I had to bring you here, that I had to bring you fully and completely into myself and trust that you would not simply laugh or—worse—not understand at all. Oh, you cannot know how vulnerable I am still feeling, Anna, mouthing such absurdities. But if I do not say them now I never will and I may have lost the missing part of myself forever.”

  “But you are always mouthing absurdities,” she said.

  He looked down into her eyes and laughed again. He leaned sideways over her and scooped her up and deposited her, naked, on his lap. And he closed his arms tightly about her, as hers closed about him, and they clung to each other for endless minutes.

  “Yes,” he said eventually, “to return to your question. You can be and may be and already are, Anna. My someone to love. My everything.”

  They smiled at each other before their mouths met.

  TURN THE PAGE FOR A SNEAK PEEK AT THE NEXT BOOK IN MARY BALOGH’S WESTCOTT SERIES,

  Someone to Hold

  AVAILABLE FROM JOVE IN MARCH 2017.

  After several months of hiding away, wallowing in misery and denial, anger and shame, and any other negative emotion anyone cared to name, Camille Westcott finally took charge of her life on a sunny, blustery morning in July. At the grand age of twenty-two. She had not needed to take charge before the great catastrophe a few months ago because she had been a lady, Lady Camille Westcott to be exact, eldest child of the Earl and Countess of Riverdale, and ladies did not have, or need to have, control over their own lives. Other people had that instead: parents, maids, nurses, governesses, chaperones, husbands, society at large—especially society at large, with its myriad rules and expectations, most of them unwritten but nonetheless real on that account.

  But she needed to assert herself now. She was no longer a lady. She was now simply Miss Westcott, and she was not even sure about the name. Was a bastard entitled to her father’s name? Life yawned ahead of her as a frightening unknown. She had no idea what to expect of it. There were no more rules, no more expectations. There was no more society, no more place of belonging. If she did not take charge and do something, who would?

  It was a rhetorical question, of course. She had not asked it aloud in anyone’s hearing, but no one would have had a satisfactory answer to give her even if she had. So she was doing something about it herself. It was either that or cower in a dark corner somewhere for the
rest of her natural-born days. She was no longer a lady, but she was, by God, a person. She was alive—she was breathing. She was someone.

  Camille and Abigail, her younger sister, lived with their maternal grandmother in one of the imposing houses on the prestigious Royal Crescent in Bath. It stood atop a hill above the city, splendidly visible from miles around with its great sweeping inward curve of massive Georgian houses all joined into one, open parkland sloping downward before it. But the view worked both ways. From any front-facing window, the inhabitants of the Crescent could gaze downward over the city and across the river to the buildings beyond and on out to the countryside and hills in the distance. It was surely one of the loveliest views in all England, and Camille had delighted in it as a child whenever her mother had brought her with her brother and sister on extended visits to their grandparents. It had lost much of its appeal, however, now that she was forced to live here in what felt very like exile and disgrace, though neither she nor Abigail had done anything to deserve either fate.

  She waited on that sunny morning until her grandmother and sister had gone out, as they often did, to the Pump Room down near Bath Abbey to join the promenade of the fashionable world. Not that the fashionable world was as impressive as it had once been in Bath’s heyday. A large number of the inhabitants now were seniors who liked the quiet gentility of life here in stately surroundings. Even the visitors tended to be older people who came to take the waters and imagine, rightly or wrongly, that their health was the better for imposing such a foul-tasting ordeal upon themselves. Some even submerged themselves to the neck in it, though that was now considered a little extreme and old-fashioned.

  Abigail liked going to the Pump Room, for at the age of eighteen she craved outings and company, and apparently her exquisite, youthful beauty was much admired, though she did not receive many invitations to private parties or even to more public entertainments. She was not, after all, quite respectable despite the fact that Grandmama was eminently so. Camille had always steadfastly refused to accompany them anywhere they might meet other people in a social setting. On the rare occasions when she did step out—usually with Abby—she did so with stealth, a veil draped over the brim of her bonnet and pulled down over her face, for more than anything else, she feared being recognized.