by Mary Balogh
Because they loved her?
“Young man,” the dowager countess said in a voice that was pitched low, for his ears only. “I will be wanting a private word with you before the party your daughter has planned for tomorrow and what I suppose will be the official announcement of your betrothal. I have not seen it in the papers yet. Viola will try to insist that she is not my daughter-in-law and never has been, but that is arrant nonsense. She is as precious to me as any of my three daughters, and they are precious, as daughters always are. You will know the truth of that for yourself, I daresay. I want to hear from your own lips how precious my daughter-in-law is to you.”
Good God! So he was to be interrogated by a frail old dragon, was he? She was the first one to speak up—if one discounted Riverdale and Cunningham, who had spoken up back in Devonshire. But Viola’s mother had given him a long, measured look upon her arrival, and her clergyman son had regarded him gravely, as though he were merely biding his time until he could find a suitable moment during which to unleash a sermon. Lady Matilda had looked sour out there on the terrace when Viola introduced them, and Lady Overfield had twinkled at him as though in sympathy for what was in store for him.
For what we are about to receive . . .
“I shall look forward to a private conversation with you, ma’am,” he assured the dowager countess, lying through his teeth.
Yes, by God, they loved her.
And no, by God, he could not run. Estelle was looking near to bursting with pride and happiness. He was going to have to stay to cope with the opposite when it happened, as it surely would sometime within the next twenty-four hours or so. Not run from it, but stay to deal with it.
Good Lord.
Eighteen
“I hear there is a pretty conservatory here, Lord Dorchester,” the Dowager Countess of Riverdale said the following morning after breakfast. He had been hoping to escape into his steward’s office for a while, but it had always been a forlorn hope when today was going to be frantic with activity before it culminated in an early family dinner and the grand party in the ballroom to follow.
“There is, ma’am,” he said. “Would you care to see it?” He had seen the conservatory a time or two, but he knew nothing about the plants that grew there. He did not suppose she wished to see it in order to have each plant identified, however.
“I shall go and fetch your warm shawl, Mama, and bring it to you there,” Lady Matilda Westcott said.
“You will do no such thing,” her mother said. “When I need a warmer shawl, Matilda, I shall send a maid to fetch it. And I do not need any company but Lord Dorchester’s.”
Lady Matilda, Marcel had observed, was the spinster daughter who had remained at home as a prop and stay to her mother, who needed neither.
The conservatory was full of greenery rather than flowers. It was rather cleverly done, large plants mingled with small, broad-leafed plants mingled with narrow, plants with light green leaves alongside those with dark leaves. And lots of glass—three walls of it as well as a roof. It was a sunny morning, and the conservatory was bright and really quite warm. It would make a wonderfully romantic setting for a tryst. There were window seats with soft cushions, but he seated the dowager on a firm-backed sofa before perching on the window seat across from her.
“You wish to interrogate me, ma’am.” There was no point in launching into a conversation about plants he could not even name. He looked very directly at the dowager without a glimmer of a smile, an expression he knew many people found intimidating on his face, though he was not expecting it to have that effect upon her. It was perhaps a defensive expression, as was his nonchalant posture.
“My son,” she said, “was the greatest disappointment of my life, Lord Dorchester. And that was while he lived. Afterward he was the greatest shame of my life. Because of his misdeeds one of my granddaughters grew up in an orphanage, without the comfort of any family at all. Two other granddaughters and a grandson grew up with a false idea of who they were and suffered the overturning of the world they had known when the truth came out. Because of his misdeeds my daughter-in-law endured unspeakable humiliation and was cut asunder from a whole family of people she had considered her own for almost a quarter of a century. In her own mind she was cut asunder. Not in ours. She is a Westcott as surely as any of the rest of us are, even though she took back her maiden name and has clung to it ever since.”
She stopped and glared at him as though to say—unnecessarily—that she did not find him in any way intimidating.
“Miss Kingsley is fortunate to have such a loving and loyal family, ma’am,” he said. His words sounded lame and fell quite flat.
“I want you to give me one good reason, Lord Dorchester,” she said, “why we should entrust one of our own into your keeping. One good reason why we should welcome you into the family, as we welcomed Joel Cunningham last year and Wren Heyden earlier this year.”
He looked steadily back at her. “I cannot, ma’am,” he said.
That certainly had its effect. She leaned farther back into the cushions, rather as though he had reached out a hand and shoved her.
“I do not doubt you are aware of my reputation,” he said. “I do not doubt all of you are. It has been hard-won, and I apologize for none of it. If I regret anything in my life, the regrets are mine. They are not the property of a disapproving ton or even of the disapproving family of the woman to whom I am betrothed. That I have the birth and rank and fortune to support your daughter-in-law for the rest of her life is beyond question. But that is not the question, I know. You want her to be happy at last because you love her.”
“And do you love her, Lord Dorchester?” she asked.
It was the inevitable question. He had been hoping even so to avoid it. He could not even answer it for himself. He knew he had been in love with her fourteen years ago, but fourteen years was a long time. He was not the same person now he had been then. Anyway, what did being in love mean? Anything at all? He knew that he had wanted her when he took the madcap risk of sending André away with his carriage, that he had enjoyed her more than he could remember enjoying any woman before her, that he had not been nearly done with her when she was done with him, that he was still not over her. But love? Love was a forever-after thing, was it not? An in-sickness-and-in-death thing—or was that in sickness and in health? It was a steadfast all-or-nothing thing, or rather an all-in-all thing. It was an amputation of everything he had been for almost twenty years and . . . But his mind would not take him further. It did not matter anyway. He was not going to marry her.
“Yes,” he said softly.
There was a lengthy silence.
“I have no control over what any member of my family does,” she said at last. “Least of all with Viola. And you know that, Lord Dorchester. You might have invited me to go to the devil rather than agree to bring me here. Instead, you have listened to me and answered my questions with what seems to me to be blunt honesty. I thank you for that. Whether you can bring Viola happiness remains to be seen, but no couple can ever know that for certain when they marry. I am going to trust you not to break an old lady’s heart as well as hers.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” he said, getting to his feet.
But he was not free even after returning her to the morning room, where a number of other people were gathered to stay out of the way of the servants who were dashing about to prepare the house for the celebrations later. Before he could excuse himself, Mrs. Kingsley discovered an urgent desire to view his library, and her son, the Reverend Michael Kingsley, thought he would rather like to see it too since he had not brought more than one book with him from home.
It was much the same sort of interview as the last one. Mrs. Kingsley told him how delighted her late husband had been when the Earl of Riverdale, a slight acquaintance of his, had broached the possibility of a marriage between his son and Viola. The earl had made no s
ecret of the fact that his son was sowing some wild oats and was impecunious to a fault, but both fathers had agreed that marriage—with a great infusion of money from the deep Kingsley coffers, of course—would be a steadying influence upon the young man. And the young man, she added rather bitterly, had doubtless been pressured into agreeing with the threat that there was no other way to settle his astronomical debts. He had agreed despite the fact that, unknown to his father or anyone else, he was already married to a woman who was dying of consumption and they had a daughter.
“I acquiesced, Lord Dorchester,” Mrs. Kingsley said, “even though Viola fancied herself in love with the son of a friend of mine and he with her. It is easy for parents to brush aside very young love when they can convince themselves that they have the greater good of their child at heart. I have never forgiven myself. My weakness has haunted me even more during the past couple of years.”
“Unfortunately, Mama,” the Reverend Michael Kingsley said, “we can never look ahead to see the consequences of the decisions we make.” And never were truer words spoken, Marcel thought. “We can only make them with the best intentions in mind and with love in our hearts.”
He was a bit of a pompous man, Viola’s brother. But he had come all the way from Dorsetshire, abandoning his flock there, because his sister was of great immediate concern to him. There was a story somewhere in the Bible, Marcel seemed to remember, about a shepherd who left his whole flock to fend for themselves while he went in search of the one lost sheep. A rash thing to do, that, though the story illustrated a point. Good God, was he about to start quoting Scripture? The mind boggled.
“I understand,” Marcel said, “that you are afraid Viola is about to step into another marriage that will bring her as little happiness as the first one did. That perhaps it will bring her actual misery.”
One thing to be said in Kingsley’s favor was that he did not beat about any bushes. “We are mortally afraid, Dorchester,” he said. “I was a moral coward during my sister’s first marriage. I did not like or approve of Riverdale, and so I avoided him. In doing so, of course, I avoided her too. I am ashamed of that neglect. It will not happen again. If you do any harm to my sister, I will find you and call you to account.”
He ought to have sounded ridiculous. Marcel had a mental image of pacing out the steps of a duel and turning, pistol cocked, to face this man, who had possibly never held a gun in his life. But try as he would, he could not make the clergyman in that mental image into a figure of fun.
“I will not hurt her,” he said.
“Tell me, Lord Dorchester,” Mrs. Kinglsey said before asking the inevitable question, “do you love her?”
He did not even have to think about it this time, though he knew the answer no better than he had an hour ago.
“Yes,” he said curtly.
* * *
• • •
Viola kept out of the way of the busy preparations for the party as much as she could all day. It was not difficult. She spent an hour after breakfast in the nursery with the children. Winifred was in her element playing mother to Annemarie’s two children, who were both younger than she and were quite happy to be organized by someone they looked upon with evident admiration. Sarah was happy to play a clapping game with her grandmother, while Camille and Anna rocked the babies and talked with each other. It was good to see those two grow ever more accepting of the fact that they were half sisters. It had been difficult at first, especially for Camille. And Viola herself was beginning to love Anna, partly because she was determined to do so and partly because she could not help herself.
She drank coffee in the morning room with her former mother-in-law, who informed her that if she must marry a rogue, she could do worse than the Marquess of Dorchester, who was clearly prepared to turn over a new page in his life and who was just as clearly in love. Afterward, Viola went for a walk with Elizabeth and Wren and Annemarie. Viola and Elizabeth walked ahead while Marcel’s sister questioned Wren about the glassworks she had inherited from her uncle and ran herself.
“I was worried about you after Jacob’s christening,” Elizabeth said. “It seemed to me that everything from the past couple of years had come over you all of a sudden and overwhelmed you. We all felt helpless to console you, for of course we were part of the problem. Sometimes people just need to be alone, and the best those who love them can do to help is simply to leave them alone. But it is very hard to do.”
“It is,” Viola agreed. “Watching those we love suffer can be worse in some ways than suffering ourselves.”
“But you found the perfect solution.” Elizabeth laughed. “Oh, I was very prepared to be horrified when I saw who it was you had run away with to that cottage in Devon. I had a slight acquaintance with the Marquess of Dorchester and was fully aware of his reputation. He is, of course, extraordinarily handsome, and that can be a dangerous attribute in a man who is also devastatingly attractive. But it was clear there and has become clearer here that he feels a sincere attachment to you. You should see how he looks at you when he believes you are not looking at him. It makes me quite envious. It is equally clear that you return his feelings. I do love a happy ending.” She sighed theatrically and laughed again. “Your mother and brother are having a word with him.”
“My mother-in-law already has,” Viola said.
“Poor man,” Elizabeth said, and they both laughed.
Annemarie and Wren caught up to them at that point and conversation became general.
Viola spent the early part of the afternoon in the portrait gallery on an upper floor with Camille and Joel and Ellen Morrow and her brother. While Joel studied the family portraits and Ellen identified them, Camille smiled at Viola and strolled with her to the end of the gallery, where there was a window overlooking the park behind the house.
“It is beautiful here, Mama,” Camille said, “and you are going to be happy. I came determined to dislike the Marquess of Dorchester, you know, for he was always so fearfully handsome and . . . well . . .” She smiled again. “I have changed my mind. Not that that matters anyway. You have chosen your happiness just as I did last year with Joel. And I am happy, Mama. Happier than I ever dreamed of being. I can only wish the same for you. And for Abby. And Harry.”
They caught at each other’s hands at the mention of his name and squeezed tightly. They both blinked back tears.
Viola went for another walk later with Michael and Mary, and her brother told her gravely that she had his blessing, but only if she promised him that she would be happy this time. He said it with an uncharacteristic twinkle in his eye.
“Michael still feels guilty about not voicing his concern over your first marriage, Viola,” Mary explained. “He wanted to come here so that he could speak up this time if he felt he ought.”
Viola looked inquiringly at her brother.
“I feel that I ought to object,” he said, frowning, “both as a man of the cloth and as your brother. The Marquess of Dorchester did not endear himself to me by reputation. But I have the curious feeling that I might be making an unpardonable mistake if I did so. Mama agrees with me.”
And her mother did indeed pat her daughter’s hand when Viola joined her and the marchioness and Isabelle for a cup of tea in the morning room and heard yet again all about the plans for Margaret’s wedding.
“I admire your energy, Lady Ortt,” her mother said. “I feel I should be similarly busy over Viola’s wedding to Lord Dorchester. However, I am content to leave it all in younger hands, and the Countess of Riverdale is eager to organize the wedding at Brambledean over Christmas.” She smiled at her daughter.
Viola’s three former sisters-in-law bore her off to look at the conservatory during the afternoon.
“I will envy you this, Viola,” Mildred, Lady Molenor said. “I wonder if I can persuade Thomas to build on to our house.” She laughed. “Perhaps it would be easier to come and visit yo
u often.”
“I cannot tell you in all honesty, Viola,” Matilda said, “that I approve of what you did after leaving Bath so abruptly. However, we all understood that the family celebration of young Jacob’s christening somehow opened up old wounds for you. So I am willing to grant that your meeting the Marquess of Dorchester when you did was fortuitous, and I wish you happy. You are still and always will be our sister, you know, so you must expect plain speaking from us. Your marrying again will not change that.” She looked severely at Viola.
“And since it was Humphrey, our brother, who caused you all your distress,” Louise, Dowager Duchess of Netherby, added, “then we can only be happy that you are having your revenge, Viola. We still wish fervently that he were still alive so that we could throttle him ourselves.”
“Indeed,” Mildred agreed. “Oh, just look at these cushioned window seats. I could spend hours here just gazing out.”
Nobody urged Viola to end her betrothal before it was too late. Nobody. It was quite incredible.
But what of herself? She could not marry Marcel, of course. No one but the two of them knew the whole story of why they had run away together and what their intentions had been. No one knew that it had been a regular sort of sexual fling for him and an impulsive self-indulgence for her. No one knew that there was not and never had been any declaration of love between them or any intention of prolonging their liaison beyond its natural end. It had reached that end. She had yearned to return to her life, and he would surely have tired of her very soon if she had not spoken up when she had. Indeed, his words on the beach had been a clear indication that he was close to that point. He had already begun speaking of her as just one of his women.
That still stung.
Everyone was mistaken. Her relatives, who loved her and wanted her to be happy, were seeing in Marcel what they wanted to see, and he, as a gallant gentleman, was playing up to their expectations. After all, if she did not put an end to their betrothal, he would be compelled to marry her. But he could not possibly be happy about being so trapped—trapped by his own outrageous announcement, it might be added. He did not love her. He could not possibly settle down with her in a marriage that would bring her or himself any lasting contentment. She was not even young or youthfully pretty. She was older than he. And even if he did settle down to a certain degree, how could she settle for less than love? And she did not need to marry. She had been essentially alone all her adult life. She could continue alone. The only thing—the only one—that might induce her to marry was love. She could not even define it. But she did not need to. She knew love even if she could not describe it.