by Mary Balogh
“It would be good while it lasted,” he said.
“Like yesterday and last night?” she asked.
“I cannot promise you jewels every day,” he said. “I would be beggared.”
“Not even pearls?” she asked, and . . . smiled.
He might, he thought, fall in love with that smile. Again. He had fallen in love with it fourteen years ago. Strange. Yesterday he could not remember her having ever smiled. But she must have. He had fallen in love with her smile. And with her. There must still have been traces of his old self left when he met her that he had used that phrase in his own mind.
“Perhaps a single pearl every second day,” he said.
“A bracelet to match my necklace and earrings,” she said. “How many pearls, do you suppose? Twelve? Twenty-four days, then. Will we have tired of each other by then?”
“If not,” he said, “we will add a pearl ring. And perhaps that ankle bracelet you resisted yesterday.”
She closed her eyes briefly. “One carriage,” she said. “Hire one.”
“I shall find a better one than this inn has to offer,” he said, getting to his feet.
“I will wait,” she promised.
* * *
• • •
He was gone an hour. An hour during which to change her mind. But she would not do so. She used the time instead to write brief notes, one to Camille and Abigail in Bath and one to Mrs. Sullivan, her housekeeper at Hinsford. She could not after all reconcile it with her conscience to disappear without a word to anyone. She told her daughters that she was going away somewhere private for a while—perhaps for a week or two—and they were not to worry about her. She would write again as soon as she returned. She informed Mrs. Sullivan that her return to Hinsford had been delayed indefinitely and that she would write again before she came home. She apologized for the inconvenience she must have caused when she did not arrive yesterday.
She gave the letters with money to cover the cost of sending them and an additional tip to the maid who had been serving her. The girl put them in the pocket of her apron and promised with a warm smile to set them in the bag for outgoing mail right away.
And so Viola waited to run away. To disappear where no one would find her. To do something just for herself. She was not going to think any longer about whether she was being selfish and self-indulgent. She was not going to think about the moral implications of what she was doing—and had done last night. She had not harmed anyone—except perhaps herself—and was not going to do so by going away for a while. She was not going to think about being hurt or about what would come after. She would think of that when the time came. She had lived a life of the utmost rectitude and propriety and been hurt anyway. And she had no illusions. The affair would come to an end and that would be that. If she ended up unhappy—well, what would be so new about that?
Marcel returned with a black, yellow-trimmed traveling carriage that was smart and shining with newness. And he came with horses that were a definite cut above the quality of the ones available at most posting inns, including this one. He also brought a burly coachman, who was clean shaven and well groomed and smartly dressed and quietly deferential.
“You did not hire this,” Viola said when she stepped out into the innyard. “You purchased it.”
He raised his eyebrows in that arrogant way he had and held out a hand to help her up the steps. Their bags, she could see, were already strapped on behind. What must it be like to have that much money? But she had known once upon a time. It seemed a long time ago. He had stranded himself yesterday by sending his own carriage on its way with his brother—so that he could spend the rest of the day with her. And he had solved his dilemma today by simply buying a new carriage.
“Does the coachman come with it?” she asked as he got in after her and seated himself beside her. “Did you employ him too?”
“It seemed wise,” he said. “If I had hired him merely for the journey, I would have had to pay his stagecoach fare back here, and it might have put a strain upon my purse. Besides, what if we wish to use the carriage while we are in Devonshire? Or run away to Wales or Scotland? Would you ride up on the box with me if I were forced to take the ribbons myself? I might die of loneliness if you would not.”
“Very well,” she said. “It was a foolish question.” A stagecoach ticket might put a strain upon his purse, but a coachman’s salary for an indefinite length of time would not?
The coachman had put up the steps and shut the door. Moments later the carriage rocked into motion on what were obviously excellent springs. There was the pleasant smell of newness inside—wood and leather and fabric. And there was instant luxurious comfort.
He took her hand in his and laced their fingers—as he had done last evening before they returned to the inn. And he dipped his head and kissed her. “The strap beside your head looks far more reliable than the one in the other carriage did,” he said. “But I hope you will not find it necessary to use it. I am the same man I was last night. The same man I will be tonight.”
They were deliberately seductive words, and of course had an immediate effect upon her body. She felt the ache of wanting, as he had known very well she would. His head was still turned toward her, his dark, apparently lazy eyes boring into hers. But she no longer had to fight the seduction. She had surrendered to it. And it was not even seduction, for that implied that she was unaware of what was happening and would be an unwilling victim if she were. She was fully aware, and she was fully complicit.
There was something freeing in the thought.
“What?” she said. “You do not improve with practice?”
She had the satisfaction of seeing a startled, arrested look on his face before he laughed. And, goodness, she did not believe she had ever seen or heard him laugh before. Laughter made him look more youthful, less hard, more human—whatever she meant by that.
* * *
• • •
At the inn they had just left, the maid who had taken Viola’s letters and her generous tip was called to some busy work in the kitchen before she could go to the office and the post bag. And as bad luck would have it, the elbow of the cook’s helper standing next to her sent a bowl of gravy spilling down the front of her frock and apron. She was sent off to change in a hurry since she was still needed urgently in the kitchen. She dropped the dirty garments into the laundry basket on her way back to work and forgot the letters until a couple of hours later, when it was too late to save them. They came out of the laundry tub still inside the apron pocket but reduced to a soggy clump.
It was impossible to smooth out the clump into anything resembling paper, much less individual pages. And even if it had been possible, there were no words left to be read. The ink had turned the inside of the pocket and some of the outside too a mottled gray and black and ruined one perfectly good apron.
The poor girl felt quite sick, not least because the cost of a new apron would be taken out of her wages. But she did not confess to the soggy clump’s having once been letters entrusted to her by a lady customer who had already departed. She claimed instead that it had been a letter she had written to her sister, who worked at a private home twelve miles away.
The letters had probably not been important anyway. Letters rarely were. Or so she consoled her conscience.
Seven
They took their time. There was no hurry, after all. They were running away, not to anything in particular. The journey was as much a part of it all as was the destination. They stopped for practical purposes—to change horses, to partake of meals. The latter they did at their leisure, and sometimes they went walking afterward if the place where they had stopped seemed of interest. They explored a castle, descending to the dungeons down long, spiraling stone steps and then climbing to the battlements in the same manner to gaze out over the surrounding countryside, the wind threatening to blow his tall hat into the next co
unty. They looked about churches and churchyards. She liked to read all the old monuments and gravestones to discover what age those buried there had been when they died and how they were related to one another. She liked to work out how they had been related to others in the graveyard.
“You have a morbid mind,” he told her.
“I do not,” she protested. “Graveyards remind me of the continuity of life and family and community. In this cemetery the same four or five last names keep recurring. Have you noticed? I am sure if we were to ask in the village we would find that the same names predominate even now. Is that not fascinating?”
“Wondrously so.” He favored her with a deliberately blank look. “It would certainly seem to indicate that people on the whole do not do much running away.”
“Or else they run but then return,” she said, “as we will do after a while.”
“A good long while, it is to be hoped,” he said.
He was in no hurry to think about returning. After a few days and nights in her company, he was still enchanted by her. It was a strange word to pop into his head—enchanted—but no other more appropriate word presented itself. Lusted after was too earthy and did not quite capture how he felt.
Sometimes they wandered through markets and often bought cheap frivolities that would have repelled him, and probably her too, in a more rational frame of mind. He bought her a pea green string bag to hold their purchases like the ones other women were carrying and a sky blue cotton sunbonnet with a wide, floppy brim and a neck flap. He suggested that they look for a three-legged stool to go with it and a pail and a milking cow, but she called him silly and pointed out that they would be unable to squeeze the cow into the carriage and it would be unreasonable to expect it to trot behind and still be ready to fill the pail with milk whenever they stopped. He conceded the point.
She bought him a black umbrella with hideous gold tassels all around the edge that dripped water everywhere, mainly down the neck of the holder when he tried to keep it over himself and his companion on a rainy day. She suggested that he keep it for future use as a sunshade. He suggested that he cut the tassels off but did not do so. He bought himself a gnarled and sturdy wooden staff with which to trudge about the hills of Devon like a seasoned countryman. It snapped in two with a loud crack when he put the smallest amount of weight upon it in their inn room later that evening. Fortunately for his dignity, he maintained his balance, but she collapsed into giggles anyway on the side of their bed and he shook the jagged stump at her and would perhaps have fallen in love if he had been twenty years younger and twenty times more foolish.
“I paid good money for this, madam,” he told her.
“You paid almost nothing for it,” she reminded him. “Even so, you did not get your money’s worth, and I sympathize.”
“A great deal of good your sympathy does me,” he grumbled.
“You poor dear,” she said, opening her arms wide. “Let me show you.”
Poor dear?
He cast aside the remnants of his rustic staff and let her show him.
When they were on the road, they were sometimes silent, but it was a companionable silence. They often sat hand in hand, their shoulders touching. Occasionally she dozed, her head on his shoulder. He had never been able to sleep in a moving carriage. Once he suggested they pull down the leather curtains and make love, but there were limits to what he could expect from the former Countess of Riverdale. She said a firm no and was not to be budged.
“Prude,” he said.
“Agreed,” she retorted.
There was no answer to that. Clever woman not to try besting him on the exchange of insults. He pointedly admired the countryside instead of making love to her.
“Annoyed?” she asked after some time had elapsed.
“Very,” he said.
Her head stayed facing toward him for a few moments, presumably to discover if he meant it. Then she turned and admired the countryside on her side of the carriage.
“It would be decidedly uncomfortable,” she said after a while.
“And undignified,” he added.
“And that too.”
A moment later she laughed softly and settled for sleep against his shoulder. But they never did make love in his new carriage.
Sometimes they talked. He was wary of conversation at first. He did not converse with women. Not really converse, that was. Frankly, he was not interested in women as people, though to be fair to himself, he did not expect them to be interested in him as a person either. His dealings with women were to fulfill a very specific need in their lives and his own. It was not that he disliked them or did not respect them any more than he believed they disliked or did not respect him. It was just that . . . Well, he had no interest in relationships. Again to be fair to himself, he avoided close friendships with men too. He had numerous friendly acquaintances, but no one to whom he bared his soul. The very thought was anathema to him.
They talked about their families. Or she did, anyway. She obviously felt a deep attachment to her family, though he wondered if they knew how deep her feelings ran. She could be very reserved, very cool, in manner. He had often wondered how much feeling there was behind that reserve. He had already discovered the passion. But there were genuine emotions too.
Her heart was torn in shreds with worry over her son, who was a captain with a rifle regiment in the Peninsula. She did not put her feelings into quite those words, but it was not difficult to interpret what she said that way. She spoke with hope of her elder daughter, who had been stripped of her title and place in society and robbed of her betrothal after her illegitimacy had been exposed. She had apparently taught at an orphanage school and then married a schoolmaster and artist who had just inherited a modest fortune and a home outside Bath. It all sounded very complicated to him. They had adopted two of the children from the orphanage and recently had one of their own—her reason for having been in Bath. They had opened their home as a sort of retreat/conference/concert/gallery venue that was always buzzing with activity and teeming with people. Artist types, Marcel guessed. It all sounded quite ghastly, but apparently the daughter was happy, one indication being that she went about barefoot more often than she was shod.
“I suppose,” he said, “her former self would have shuddered with horror at the mere thought of anyone except her maid seeing her feet.”
“Yes,” she said, apparently having taken his question seriously.
She was worried about her younger daughter, who had been deprived, with her title and social status, of any chance of making her come-out at a Season in London and of all hope of contracting the sort of marriage she had grown up to expect. The girl was apparently sweet and gentle and quite accepting of her lot in life—a fact that deeply worried her mother.
“Perhaps she really is,” he said. “Accepting, that is.” Were not women raised to accept whatever life cared to throw their way? The devil but he was glad all over again that he had not been born female.
She gave him a speaking glance, and he kissed her hard so that he would not have to look into her deeply wounded eyes. Good God, he did not need this. He had run away with her so that they could put all their cares behind them for a while, forget everything but each other and the pleasure they could derive from each other and their immediate surroundings. So that they could enjoy a week or three of stress-free living and lusty sex.
Yet when he had finished kissing her and had sat back beside her again, he took her hand in his and settled it on his thigh, turned his head to look into her face, and so tacitly encouraged her to go on talking. He sensed that she needed to talk, and it struck him that no one ever seemed eager to talk to him—unless they were peppering him with complaints, that is, and pleas that he do something to put matters right.
She had gone to London earlier in the year to attend the wedding of the new Earl of Riverdale. He had not heard of h
er being in town. She had gone at the specific invitation of the earl himself—the very one who had usurped her son’s title, though that had not been his fault—and of his mother and sister. The bride had also written to urge her to go, though the woman was about to assume the title that had been Viola’s for more than twenty years.
Had she been taunting Viola? He had not met the new countess, but he was instantly biased against her. Why had Viola gone? Duty? Dignity? Pride? Good God.
“That must have been painful for you,” he said.
“Sometimes,” she said, “doing what is most painful is the only thing to do.”
“Is it?” he asked, looking at her in some astonishment. “I have always thought it is the very last thing to do. Surely pain is to be avoided at all costs.”
“I tried that for a while,” she said. “I fled. I fled London and then Hinsford Manor, which was no longer either mine or Harry’s. I even fled my daughters, with the explanation that it was for their own good that they live with my mother in Bath rather than with me. I fled to Dorset to stay with my brother. He is a clergyman and was still a widower at the time. But fleeing was not enough, for I took myself and my pain with me. Finally I had to go back and face at least some of it. I still sometimes find it difficult to look into the eyes of my daughters—and my son. He was home for a few months this year recovering from serious injuries.”
“I suppose,” he said, “you felt guilty. Correction: I suppose you feel guilty.”
“I suppose I do occasionally,” she admitted. “As though I ought to have known. But mainly I felt . . . mainly I feel helpless. I would die for them if by doing so I could ensure their happiness. But even that would not be enough. There is really nothing I can do for them.”