by Mary Balogh
“Then one more will be neither here nor there,” Vanessa said. “Let’s go.”
“Oh, Nessie.” Margaret laughed shakily. “Whatever would I do without you?”
“You would have more room in your wardrobe, that is for sure,” Vanessa said, and they both laughed.
With a heavy heart, though, Vanessa arrived home at Moreland House a couple of hours later. The unhappi-ness of one’s loved ones was often harder to bear than one’s own, she thought—and Meg was undoubtedly unhappy.
Not that she was unhappy It was just that…
Well, it was just that she had known delirious happiness during her honeymoon and again for a few days before and after her presentation. And that happiness had made her greedy for more.
She could not force herself to be contented with a marriage that was just workable and agreeable.
She was, of course, almost certain that she was with child. Perhaps that would make a difference. But why should it? She was merely performing the function for which he had married her.
But oh, dear— she was pregnant with Elliott’s child and her own. With their child. She so desperately wanted to be happy again. Not just happy within herself, despite what she had said to Meg earlier. She wanted to be happy with him. She wanted him to be ecstatic with joy when she told him. She wanted …
Well, she wanted the sun, of course.
How very foolish she was.
There were not many free evenings. It seemed like a rare treat when one occasionally presented itself.
On one such evening Cecily had gone to the theater with a group of friends, under the chaperonage of the mother of one of them. Elliott retired to the library after dinner. His mother, who sat drinking tea and conversing with Vanessa in the drawing room, could not hide her yawns and finally excused herself, pleading total exhaustion.
“I feel,” she said as Vanessa kissed her cheek, “as if I could sleep for a week.”
“I daresay one good night of uninterrupted sleep will suffice,” Vanessa said. “But if it does not, then I will chaperone Cecily at the garden party tomorrow and you may have a quiet day. Good night, Mother.”
“You are always so good,” her mother-in-law said. “How very glad I am that Elliott married you. Good night, Vanessa.”
Vanessa sat alone for a while, reading her book. But the growingly familiar feeling of slight depression settled upon her and distracted her attention from the adventures of Odysseus as he tried to return to Ithaca and his Penelope.
Elliott was downstairs in the library and she was up here in the drawing room during a precious evening when they were both at home. Would this be the pattern of their married life?
Would she allow it to be?
Perhaps he would come up here if he knew his mother had gone to bed and she was alone.
Perhaps he would resent her going down there.
And perhaps, she thought finally, getting resolutely to her feet and keeping one finger inside the book to mark her place, she ought to go and find out. This was her home too, after all, and he was her husband. And they were not estranged. They had not quarreled. If they drifted apart into a distant relationship, then it would be at least partly her fault if she had not tried to do something about it.
She tapped on the library door and opened it even as he called to her to come in.
There was a fire burning in the hearth even though it was not a cold evening. He was seated in a deep leather chair to one side of it, a book open in one hand. The library was a room she loved, with its tall bookcases filled with leather-bound books lining three walls and its old oak desk large enough for three people to lie across side by side.
It was far cozier than the drawing room. She did not blame Elliott for choosing to sit here for the evening. Tonight it looked more inviting than ever. So did he. He was slightly slouched in his chair. One of his ankles was resting on the knee of the other leg.
“Your mother is tired,” she said. “She has gone to bed. Do you mind if I join you?”
He scrambled to his feet.
“I hope you will,” he said, indicating the chair opposite his own, on the other side of the fire.
A log crackled in the hearth, sending a shower of sparks upward into the chimney.
She sat and smiled at him and then, because she could not think of anything to say, she opened her book, cleared her throat, and began to read.
He did likewise, without the throat clearing. He no longer slouched. He had both feet on the floor.
Her seat was too deep for her. She either had to sit with straight back against the rest and feet dangling a few inches off the floor or with feet flat on the floor and back arched like a bow against the rest or with feet flat on the floor and back ramrod straight and unsupported.
After a few minutes, during which she tried all three positions and found none of them comfortable, she kicked off her slippers, curled her feet up on the seat beside her, settling her skirt about her as she did so, and nestled the side of her head against the wing of the chair. She gazed into the fire and then glanced at Elliott.
He was looking steadily back at her.
“It is not ladylike, I know,” she said apologetically. “My mother and father were forever telling me to sit properly. But I am short and most chairs are too large for me. Besides, I am comfortable like this.”
“You look comfortable,” he said.
She smiled at him and somehow neither of them resumed reading. They just looked at each other.
“Tell me about your father,” she said softly.
She had kept remembering his mother telling her that she had hoped he would be different from his father. Elliott never spoke of him.
He continued to stare at her for a while. Then he turned his gaze on the fire and set his book down on the table beside him.
“I adored him,” he said. “He was my great hero, the rock of my existence. He was the model of all I aspired to be when I grew up. Everything I did was done to please him. He used to be away from home for long spells at a time. I lived for his return. When I was very young, I used to camp out at the gates of the park watching for his horse or carriage and on the rare occasion when he came while I was there, I would be taken up beside him and made much of before my mother and sisters could have their turn. When I was older and started getting into scrapes with Con, my behavior was always tempered by the fear of disappointing my father or inciting his wrath. When I began sowing wild oats as a young man, part of me worried that I would never be worthy of him, that I would never measure up to the standard he had set.”
He was silent for a while. Vanessa did not attempt to say anything. She sensed that there was more to come. There was pain in his eyes and his voice, a frown line between his brows.
“There was never a closer, happier family than ours,” he said. “Never a husband more devoted to his wife or a father more devoted to his children. Life was in many ways idyllic despite his long absences. It was filled with love. More than anything else in this world I wanted a marriage and a family like his. I wanted to bask in his approval. I wanted people to be able to say of us, ‘Like father, like son.’”
Vanessa let her book close on her lap without marking her place and clasped her arms with her hands, though she ought not to have been cold when she sat so close to the fire.
“And then a year and a half ago,” he said, “he died suddenly in the bed of his mistress.”
Vanessa stared at him, shocked beyond words.
“They had been together for more than thirty years,” he told her, “a little longer than he had been married to my mother. They had five children, the youngest fifteen, a little younger than Cecily, the eldest thirty, a little older than me.”
“Oh,” Vanessa said.
“He had provided well for his mistress in the event of his death,” he said. “He had placed two of his sons in steady, lucrative employment. The third was still at a good school. He had found respectable, well-to-do husbands for his two daughters. He ha
d spent as much of his time with that family as he had with mine.”
“Oh, Elliott,” she said, so aware of his pain that her eyes filled with tears.
He looked at her.
“The funny thing was,” he said, “that I knew about my grandfather and his other family. His mistress of more than forty years died only ten years ago. There were offspring of that liaison too. I even knew that it was a sort of family tradition—a way in which we Wallace men proved our masculinity and our superiority over our women, I suppose. But it never once occurred to me that perhaps my father had upheld that tradition too.”
“Oh, Elliott.” She could think of nothing else to say.
“I believe,” he said, “the whole world must have known except me. How I could not have known, I do not know. I spent enough time here in town after I came down from Oxford, heaven knows, and I thought I knew everything that was happening among the ton, even the seamier goings-on. But I never heard so much as a whisper about my own father. My mother knew— she had always known. Even Jessica knew”
She tried to imagine how his whole world must have shattered just over a year ago.
“Everything,” he said as if he had read her thoughts. “Everything I knew, everything I had lived and believed—everythingwas an illusion, a lie. I thought we had our father’s undivided love. I thought perhaps I was extra-special because I was the son, the heir, the one who would take his place eventually But he had a son older than I and one almost exactly the same age and three other children. It was hard to grasp that fact. It is still hard. All those years my mother was nothing to him except the legal wife who had provided him with the legal heir. And I was nothing to him except that legal heir.”
“Oh, Elliott.” She unfolded her legs from the chair, got to her feet, not even noticing her book thudding to the floor, and hurried across to him. She sat on his lap, burrowed her arms about his waist, and nestled her head against his shoulder. “You do not know that. You were his son. Your sisters were his daughters. He did not necessarily love you the less because he had other children elsewhere. Love is not a finite commodity that will stretch only so far. It is infinite. Don’t doubt that he loved you. Please don’t.”
“All those lies,” he said, setting his head back against the chair. “About how busy he had to be in London, about how much he hated leaving, and then about how much he had missed us, how lonely he had been without us, how very glad he was to be back home. All lies, doubtless repeated to his other family when he returned to them.”
She lifted her head to look into his face and drew her hands free so that she could smooth her fingers through his hair.
“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t doubt everything, Elliott. If he said he loved you, if you felt he loved you, then no doubt he did.”
“The point is,” he said, “that none of this is rare. I could name a dozen other such instances without even having to think too hard. It comes of living in a society in which birth and position and fortune are everything and strategic marriages are the norm. It is common to seek sensual delights and emotional comfort elsewhere. It is just that I did not know it of my father, did not even suspect it. Suddenly I was Viscount Lyngate with precious little preparation for all the duties and responsibilities that were now mine—my fault, of course. I had been a careless young blade for far too long. And suddenly I was Jonathan’s guardian. All of which I would have handled, suddenly and unexpectedly as they had come to me. I was my father’s son, after all. But just as suddenly and unexpectedly I was—”
“Robbed of your memories?” she suggested when he stopped talking abruptly.
“Yes. Made to realize they were all false, all a mirage,” he said. “I was cut adrift in a world I did not know”
“And,” she said, “all the joy and love and hope fled from your life.”
“All the stupid, naive idealism,” he said. “I became a realist very fast, almost overnight. I learned my lesson quickly and well.”
“Oh, you poor, foolish man,” she said. “Realism does not exclude love or joy. It is made up of those elements.”
“Vanessa,” he said, lifting a hand and setting the backs of his fingers against her cheek for a moment, “we should all be as innocent and optimistic as you. I was until a year and a half ago.”
“We should all be as realistic as I,” she said. “Why is realism always seen as such a negative thing? Why do we find it so difficult to trust anything but disaster and violence and betrayal? Life is good. Even when good people die far too young and older people betray us, life is good. Life is what we make of it. We get to choose how we see it.”
She kissed him softly on the lips. But she would not belittle a pain he had still not come to terms with even after well over a year.
“And then you lost your closest friend too?” she said softly “You lost Constantine?”
“The final straw, yes,” he admitted. “I suppose I was partly to blame. I marched over there, to Warren Hall, with crusading zeal to do my duty by Jonathan, quite prepared to ride roughshod over everyone involved with him if necessary. Perhaps I would soon have learned to be less obnoxiously zealous if all had been as it ought. But it was not. It quickly became apparent to me that my father had trusted everything to Con and that Con had taken advantage of that trust.”
“In what way?” she asked him, her hands framing his face.
He sighed.
“He stole from Jonathan,” he said. “There were jewels. Heirlooms. Almost priceless ones, though I daresay they did bring a handsome price. Most of them had disappeared. Jonathan knew nothing of them when asked, though he remembered his father showing them to him at one time. Con would not admit to taking them, but he would not deny it either. He had a look on his face when I spoke to him about them, a look with which I was long familiar—half mockery, half contempt. It was a look that told me as clearly as words that he had indeed taken them. But I had no proof. I did not tell anyone. It was a family shame that I felt obliged to hide from the world. You are the first one to know. He was not a worthy friend. I had been as deceived by him all my life as I had been by my father. He is not a pleasant character, Vanessa.”
“No,” she agreed sadly.
He closed his eyes. His hand fell to his side again.
“Lord,” he said, “why have I burdened you with all this sordid family history?”
“Because I am your wife,” she said. “Elliott, you must not give up on love even though it seems as if everyone you loved betrayed you. Actually it was only two people out of everyone you have known, precious as those two were to you. And you must not give up on happiness even if all your happy memories seem to be hollow ones. Love and joy are waiting for you.”
“Are they?” He looked wearily into her eyes.
“And hope,” she said. “There must always be hope, Elliott.”
“Must there? Why?”
And then, as she watched, her palms still cupping the sides of his face, she saw tears well into his eyes and spill over onto his cheeks.
He jerked his head away from her hands and uttered an oath that ought to have brought color to her cheeks.
“Damn it,” he said, following up the first oath with a milder one. He was feeling around for a handkerchief and found one. “Dash it all, Vanessa. You must excuse me.”
He was trying to lift her off his lap, push her away, exclude her. But she would have none of it. She wrapped both arms about his neck, drawing his face down to her bosom.
“Don’t shut me out,” she said against his hair. “Don’t keep on shutting me out, Elliott. I am not your father or Constantine. I am your wife. And I will never betray you.”
She turned her face to rest one cheek against the top of his head as he wept with deep, obviously painful sobs and gasps.
He was going to be terribly embarrassed when he stopped, she thought. He had probably not shed a tear for years. Men were foolish about such things. It was a slur on their manhood to weep.
She kissed his head and
one temple. She smoothed her hands through his hair.
“My love,” she murmured to him. “Ah, my love.”
22
ELLIOTT had reserved a box at Vauxhall Gardens. An evening at the famous pleasure gardens just south of the River Thames was something not to be missed when one was in town during the Season, and Vanessa’s face had lit up with anticipated pleasure as soon as he asked her if she would like to go there.
Pleasing his wife had become of great importance to him. So had the certain kind of love he felt for her. He could not—or would not—put a name to it. He was surely not in love with her—it was too trivial a term. And as for simply loving—well, he had come to distrust love and did not want to put his feelings for Vanessa into that fragile category.
He trusted her. It seemed to him that her life must always have been characterized by the unconditional love she gave freely to all who were close to her, whether they deserved it or not.
He did not deserve her love, heaven knew.
And yet he knew that in her own way she loved him.
She had left him on that evening in the library as soon as he had finally got himself under control, and she had never alluded to the horribly embarrassing incident since. She had given him time and space in which to recover himself and heal.
And heal he did. He came to understand that love— if he dared use that word—did not reside in any one person. His father had let him down. So had Con. But love had not.
Love remained to him both as something other people gave him and, more important, as something he was capable of giving.
He was going to love his own children with a steadiness upon which they could rely for as long as he lived. And their mother would teach them, by example if not in words—though there doubtless would be words in plenty—that love was something that lived deep inside everyone, a bottomless well, something that could give a happy bent to their lives even during dark and difficult days.
And those children—or the first, at least—would not be too far in the future. Vanessa, he realized, must be with child even though she had not chosen to tell him yet. She had not had her courses since their marriage.