by Mary Balogh
“It is a waltz,” she said.
His right arm came about her waist and his left hand, raised, awaited hers. His eyes never left her own. She set her hand in his and raised the other to his shoulder, and . . . Ah, and they waltzed again. As they had on the village green in that other lifetime when all had been carefree adventure. They had danced on uneven ground there and in semidarkness. Here they danced on a polished floor among banks of flowers with the light of dozens of candles flickering down upon them from the chandeliers, and with other couples twirling about the floor with them.
But she saw only Marcel, felt only his body heat and the touch of his hands, smelled only his cologne. His eyes never left her face—he had always had that way of making his dancing partner the full focus of his attention. It was part of his masculine appeal. She smiled, though there was a totally unreasonable sort of bitterness inside her. She had nothing of which to complain, except perhaps his announcement of their betrothal outside the cottage—surely one of his rare forays into gallantry.
Music engulfed them.
“I did love you, you know,” he said when the dance was almost at an end.
“Fourteen years ago?” she said.
He did not reply.
“You did not even know me,” she said. “Love cannot exist without knowledge.” She did not know if that was true or not.
“Can it not?” he said. “Then I did not love you, Viola. I was mistaken. It is just as well, is it not?” There was a curious twist to his mouth.
And a thought struck her—was he talking about fourteen years ago? But it did not matter.
The music ended and he led her from the floor in the direction of her mother, who was seated on a love seat with the marchioness, his aunt. But Viola did not stop beside them. She hurried away, trying to slow her footsteps, trying to smile and make some eye contact with people she passed on her way to the door. Once she reached the door, however, she broke into a near run and did not stop until she was inside her room, her back to the closed door, her eyes tightly shut.
Her heart breaking.
Twenty
A party involving dancing and unlimited refreshments and a lavish supper would have gone on until dawn in London. Fortunately, this was not London. Guests began to trickle away soon after midnight and then the trickle became a steady stream. Houseguests began to slip away quietly in the direction of their bedchambers after thanking Marcel for his hospitality and Estelle for the splendid party.
It really had been splendid, even though Marcel had hated every moment of it. Though that was not entirely true. Despite the fact that she was upset about the betrothal, Estelle had been flushed and bright-eyed and exuberant tonight at the success of her party. Bertrand had comported himself with dignity and charm. Marcel had been filled with pride over both of them, though he had done nothing to earn the feeling. And then there had been that waltz . . .
He went down onto the terrace to see the last of the guests on their way. Inevitably neighbors discovered things they absolutely must tell one another even though they had had all evening during which to converse. And everyone wanted to thank him again and again and yet again.
It took a while longer to see the stragglers inside the house off to bed and then to hug Estelle and shake hands with Bertrand and thank them for that most precious of birthday gifts—the party. But finally he was able to retreat to the library alone after favoring André with his most forbidding look when it seemed his brother might follow him. He stood in the middle of the room for a couple of minutes dithering, trying to choose between sitting down to read for a while and going straight up to bed.
So he went to Viola’s room and stood outside her door to dither. He could not be sure, but it seemed to him that there was a thread of candlelight beneath it. Or perhaps she had left the curtains open and it was merely moonlight. It must be half past one at least by now. He had not looked at the clock before leaving the library. But one o’clock, half past one, two o’clock—the actual time was not important. The fact was that it was far too late to be paying a social call, and even if it had been one o’clock in the afternoon it would still be improper to call upon a lady in her bedchamber. Which was a mildly ridiculous thought under the circumstances.
He tapped lightly on the door with one knuckle. He could hardly hear it himself. If she did not come before he counted at medium speed to ten, he would go away. One . . . two . . .
The door handle turned noiselessly and the door opened a crack—and then a wider crack.
It was candlelight. A single candle burned on the dressing table.
She was wearing a nightgown. Her hair waved down her back. She was also wearing her marble expression. The bed behind her had been turned down for the night but did not look as if it had been slept in yet. The candlelight winked off something at the foot of the bed. Some things, rather. A hideous pink drawstring bag was there too.
Someone had better say something soon, and he supposed it ought to be him. “You had better invite me in,” he said softly.
“Why?” Her voice was just as soft.
He tipped his head slightly to one side but said nothing more. She had choices—open the door wider and step to one side, shut it in his face, or stand there for what remained of the night. He left it to her to decide.
She turned and walked away, leaving the door ajar. So she had chosen the fourth option. He stepped inside and closed the door quietly behind him.
“I interrupted you while you were estimating the value of your treasures?” he asked, nodding toward the bed.
She glanced at the cheap jewels spread there and looked mortified.
He strolled over and looked down at them. “I noticed,” he said, “that tonight you wore a string of pearls that were rather small and insignificant in comparison with these.”
“I have no taste at all, do I?” she said.
“And you had no diamonds or emeralds or rubies to add some color and sparkle either,” he said. “You looked almost—”
“Genteel?” she suggested.
“That is it,” he said, turning to look at her in her nightgown and slippers. “The very word for which my mind was searching. Ever and always genteel.”
“Not always,” she said softly, and stepped up beside him, gathered the jewelry as though it was precious indeed, put it away inside the bag, and tightened the drawstrings.
He had the Hideous Handkerchief—he always thought of it as though the two words began with capital letters—in an inside pocket of his evening coat. He had put it there to lend himself the courage to speak up at dinner.
“You will stay for a few days?” he asked her.
“No,” she said. “My things are packed. So are Abigail’s. We will leave tomorrow—or today, I suppose I mean. Our leaving will make life very awkward for my family, but I cannot cope with everything.”
“They will be made welcome here,” he said.
“Thank you.” She set down the pink bag. “You will be able to leave here soon and resume your life where you left it off a couple of months ago. That will make you happy.”
He felt a spurt of anger and . . . hurt? “That will be pleasant for me,” he said. “And you will return home and be respectable and genteel.”
“Yes.”
It was the very thing she had been fleeing when she left Bath in that sad apology for a hired carriage. She had come full circle after an aborted adventure courtesy of himself and a lot of embarrassment courtesy of himself and his daughter. Now she was content to crawl back to safety. But why be angry? He had just had a very fortunate escape from an entanglement that would have adversely affected the whole of the rest of his life. And that was courtesy of her. She had made her feelings quite clear on that windswept beach. She wanted to go home. The affair had served its function, but she had tired of it—and of him. She had never told him anything different in all the times t
hey had talked since then.
He took a step closer to her. He could still smell the subtle perfume she had been wearing earlier—the perfume she always wore. He could feel her body heat, the pull of her femininity.
“The answer to the question you asked earlier is yes,” he said. “I loved you fourteen years ago, Viola. If I had not, I would not have left when you told me to go.” A strange paradox, that. But true. He had not thought of it before.
She did not raise her eyes to his as she lifted a hand and set it against his chest. She looked at her hand instead. He could feel its warmth through his waistcoat and shirt. “I loved you too,” she said. “If I had not, perhaps I would not have told you to go away.” Ah, a matching paradox.
“And I loved you again this year,” he said while her eyes came to his for a moment. “It was very good while it lasted, was it not? That absurd village fair and the night that followed it in the saddest apology for an inn it has ever been my misfortune to encounter. Though in this case it proved to be good fortune. And the unhurried, meandering journey, which would have driven me mad under any other circumstances. And the cottage and the valley and all that ghastly fresh air and exercise and nature appreciation. And what happened inside the cottage at night and occasionally by day. It was very good, Viola, was it not?”
“Yes,” she agreed. “It was very pleasurable. While it lasted.”
He gazed down at her in silence for several long moments while the candle cast shifting shadows on the wall behind her. “It could not have been expected to last, of course,” he said. “It never does. You grew tired of me, and I was in the process of growing tired of you. It was time to go home. We would have done so and parted on the most amicable of terms if our families had not come in pursuit of us. I am still not sure how they found us or why they went to all that trouble. However it was, it was unfortunate, and I am sorry I made matters worse.”
It could not . . . last. It never does. I was in the process of growing tired of you. What he said was surely true. Why, then, did it feel like the most barefaced of lies?
“You have made amends by setting them to rights,” she said.
“Thank you,” he said, “for attending the party. You must have wished yourself a thousand miles away.”
“I did it for Estelle’s sake,” she said, looking up into his eyes. “And for Bertrand’s, since he is exceedingly fond of his twin. And because it was the genteel thing to do.”
“Thank you anyway,” he said. “And I will endure being reminded by all my neighbors that I am forty years old.”
There was nothing more to say. There had been nothing even before he came here. They gazed at each other, her palm still against his chest. He raised a hand to hook a fallen lock of hair behind her ear and left his hand there, cupping one side of her face. She did not jerk away.
“Sometimes,” he said, “it is a curse to know that one is beneath the same roof as one’s children and grandchildren and parents and aunts and cousins and siblings.”
“And sometimes,” she said, “it is a great blessing.”
She was quite right. Without that knowledge he would probably try to entice her into bed, and that would be enormously wrong. It would be quite in keeping, of course, with the way he had lived and conducted himself for many long years. But now? The earth had shifted on its axis when Adeline died. Recently and for reasons he had still not fully fathomed, it had shifted again.
“You are not a romantic, Viola,” he said.
“It is not romance you have in mind,” she told him.
“No.” He rubbed the pad of his thumb along her lips. “But, regardless, you are safe. My children are beneath this roof. So are yours. And your grandchildren, one of whom I met in an upstairs corridor this morning. An extraordinary child. She introduced herself as Winifred Cunningham, introduced me to herself as the Marquess of Dorchester, shook my hand with the dignity of a dowager, and informed me that she was praying for her grandmama’s happiness and my own.”
“Winifred is given to the occasional flight of piety,” she said. “She is a very dear child.”
“She asked if she might use my library,” he said. “When I informed her that to my knowledge and regret there were no children’s books there, she told me that was quite all right. She had recently read A Pilgrim’s Progress and now felt ready to tackle anything in the literary realm. She might have been my grandchild too if I had married you.”
He wished he had not said that. Good God, why had he? And why did he feel a sudden yearning for . . . for what? It had been a mistake to come here. But of course it had. He had never thought otherwise. That was the whole trouble actually. He had not thought.
“I had better be going,” he said.
“Yes.”
So of course he did not move. He sighed instead. “Viola,” he said. “I wish to God this had not happened.” He did not specify what he meant by this. He did not know himself. His fingers slid through her hair to the back of her head and his other hand went about her waist while her own arms came about him. And he kissed her. Or she kissed him.
They kissed.
For long, timeless moments. Deeply, their mouths open, their arms like tight bands about each other. As though they were trying to be each other or some third entity that was neither and both and something uniquely one. When he drew back, she looked as he felt, as though she were rising to the surface of some element from fathoms deep.
“It is a sad contrariness of the human race,” he said, “that desire often remains even after love is gone. And yes, it is an enormous blessing that innumerable relatives are beneath this roof with us.”
. . . after love is gone. Had he ever spoken more asinine words? And would he believe it if he said it often enough?
He took her hand and raised it to his lips, making her a deep bow as he did so. “Good night, Viola,” he said. “You have only a few hours to endure until it is goodbye.”
He turned and left the room, holding the door closed behind him as though some force were trying to open it and tempt him beyond his endurance.
You have only a few hours to endure until it is goodbye. Good God, those hours could not pass quickly enough for him.
It was, he supposed, poetic justice that he had fallen in love with a woman who would have none of him. He was sure he thoroughly deserved every moment of misery he was about to endure. However, he would push past it. He had a great deal to do, much with which to distract himself.
To start, he had two children . . .
He would go, then, and start getting on with it. So of course he turned about, opened her door again, stepped inside, and closed it behind him.
* * *
• • •
Viola was holding the pink bag of cheap jewelry against her mouth, her eyes tightly closed, fighting a bleakness so powerful it felt actually like a physical pain. And then she opened her eyes abruptly and turned her head. She felt a welling of fury. Oh no, he could not do this to her. Surely . . .
“We were hideously, horribly, dangerously young,” he said. “We were in love and swinging from stars half the time and squabbling the other half like a couple of—” He sawed the air with one hand. “Like a couple of . . . what? Help me out here.”
“Marcel,” she said, “what are you talking about?” She knew, though. But why now?
He strode across the room, thrust back the curtains, and stood gazing out the window—into total darkness.
“You wanted to know,” he said. “I came to tell you. She was eighteen when we married. I was twenty. There ought to be a law. We were no more ready for marriage than . . . than . . . I am having trouble with analogies tonight. We were children, wild, undisciplined children. Would we have settled into a mature relationship given time? I will never know. She died when she was twenty. I killed her. Adeline.”
She set down the bag on the edge of the bed and sat b
eside it. She folded her hands in her lap. He was right. She had wanted to know. Now it seemed she was going to.
“I adored my children from the moment of their conception,” he said, “or from the moment she told me she was expecting them, I suppose would be more accurate. Not that we knew at the time there would be two. We did not suspect that until almost half an hour after Estelle was born. I had a daughter and a son all within one hour and they were red and wrinkled and ugly and bawling and I thought I was in heaven. We both adored them. We cuddled them and played with them and taught them to squeal with laughter. We even changed a few soggy garments. But we were restless, irresponsible children. We were soon back to our busy social life, dancing, drinking, attending parties until late into the night. It did not matter, of course. We had hired a competent nurse and could safely leave the children to her care whenever we had better things to do than be their parents.”
He braced his hands on the windowsill and rested his forehead against the glass. Viola’s hands tightened in her lap.
“They had been teething for some time,” he said, “but usually one or the other of them would be crying from it but not both together. But this particular time it was both of them and their nurse had been up most of several nights in a row with them. When we got back late from an assembly, Adeline went to bed while I looked in at the nursery. I was supposed to follow her immediately. We were feeling . . . amorous. But the poor little things were in distress, and the nurse was pale and heavy eyed and admitted when I pressed her that she had a splitting headache. I daresay it had been brought on by exhaustion. I sent her to bed. When Adeline came to find me, I sent her away too. She was furious with me—and with the nurse for going. She returned at dawn when I was still in the nursery. I had just got the two of them to sleep, one on each shoulder, and was wondering if I dared try putting them down.”
Viola spread her fingers in her lap and looked down at them when he stopped. He did not resume his story for some time.