The Famous Heroine/The Plumed Bonnet

by Mary Balogh

  “I am not hiding,” she said. “I am cold.” On a night so warm that all the windows had been left wide open in the hope of catching some cooling breeze.

  “Then come out and let me warm you,” he said.

  She felt a stabbing of longing, of desire. But she wished he would go away and never come back.

  “Cora.” He was patting his hand on her derrière. “Come, my dear. We cannot go on like this for the next forty or fifty years.”

  There was laughter in his voice again. Oh, how dare he! She threw back the covers and looked deliberately into his eyes. It was, she thought, as difficult to do as it must be to persuade oneself to jump off a cliff. His blue eyes were twinkling.

  “Well, it was all your fault,” she said, glaring at him. “Turquoise coat, lace everywhere, a work of art at your neck, a sapphire ring on your finger, sapphires all over your quizzing glass, such elegant manners. What was I supposed to think?”

  “That is the spirit,” he said. “Rip up at me if doing so will make you feel better.” He bent his head and kissed her.

  She turned to jelly all the way down to her toes. His lips were not even closed. “And leather pantaloons,” she said when she had her mouth back to herself, “and a dark pink coat.”

  “Quite so.” He had stood up to remove his dressing gown, and then he sat down again and was opening the buttons at the front of her nightgown. With the candles still burning. And he was looking at what he was doing.

  Her insides were performing intricate acrobatic feats.

  “And a blue-and-yellow phaeton,” she said. “What kind of man drives around in a blue-and-yellow phaeton?”

  “This kind, apparently,” he said. He opened back her gown so that she was exposed to below the waist. He looked at her and then he lowered his head to feather kisses over her breasts. He opened his mouth over the peak of one of them, licked at it, and then closed his lips over it and sucked.

  There was such an ache in the place he had been last night that it was indistinguishable from pain. And then his hand was down there, inside her nightgown, and his fingers were doing something that should have been horribly embarrassing. But the ache and the pain and the sharp longing drowned out the embarrassment.

  “You dressed soberly for Papa and Edgar,” she said. “That was not fair. Not fair at all. Ooh!”

  “Life is not always fair,” he said. He had taken her nightgown by the shoulders and was stripping it right off her, down over her feet. And the bedclothes were right off her too. And the candles were still burning.

  “You should have told me,” she said. “You might have guessed what I thought. But you kept quiet. Just so that I would make a thorough cake of myself and you could laugh your head off.”

  He grinned at her as he stood again to pull his nightshirt off over his head. Now if only she had seen him, she thought, gulping, she would surely have known herself. Though she had always known that he had a magnificent body. She had fallen against it, had she not, that very first evening?

  “Francis,” she said, “do not laugh at me. I cannot abide being laughed at when I am feeling so very mortified. Especially when it is all your fault.”

  He was coming on top of her as he had last night. He was pushing her legs wide as he had then. She looked down and marveled anew that there was room enough inside her. It was going to happen again, she thought. Oh, she was so glad it was going to happen again.

  “It is all my fault,” he said. “Let me see if I can do better than last night, dear. Let me see if I can prevent it ending too soon for you.”

  She closed her eyes and bit hard on her lower lip as he came inside. There was no pain tonight. There was all the marvelous stretching and all the deep penetration, but none of the pain.

  Let there be time, she thought as he began to move—slowly, quite unlike the hurried pounding of last night. Please let there be time.

  There was all the time in the world. It was gloriously, deliriously wonderful. She twined herself about him, lifted herself against him, moved with him, experimented with muscles she had not known she had, ached her way toward what must surely be unbearable pain, and then eased her way beyond it to total pleasure and relaxation.

  When she finally relaxed, she felt him quicken as he had at the start last night. And she felt again that increased heat deep within just before he relaxed his weight on top of her.

  Oh, thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

  Thank you, Francis, she told him silently when he had moved off her and was tucking the upper sheet about her.

  Don’t leave. Please don’t leave.

  He had got out of bed, but he was just blowing out the candles. He climbed in beside her again and took her hand in his.

  Good night, Francis. Thank you.

  “You are so very beautiful,” he said softly to her. “Thank you, dear.”

  But she was fast asleep.

  15

  E NEED NOT HAVE WORRIED, AS HE HAD DONE BRIEFLY that first morning in the stables, that she would turn out to be such a managing female that she would try to run the estate for him. She did not.

  She turned out to be an extremely busy and efficient mistress of Sidley. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind after the first two or three days who was in charge of the household. And yet she was surprisingly well-liked. One might have expected that servants who had run the house without any interference for years would resent a mistress who insisted on having a finger in every pie. But they did not.

  His wife had a way about her, Lord Francis discovered. She was never overfamiliar with the servants—there was never any doubt that she was the mistress and they were the employees. And yet she talked with them, smiled with them, joked with them, advised them, listened to their advice. He was amazed one day when he sent his compliments to the cook on the new and delicious dessert that had been served to discover that it had been made from a recipe given Cook by Cora.

  Cook had allowed his wife to supply her with a recipe? And had used it?

  His wife never trespassed on his domain—with the possible exception of that morning in the stables. But she took charge of her own with a competence that could only have come from training and long experience.

  Lord Francis began to feel very comfortable in his home.

  She spent almost all of every afternoon visiting or being visited. She visited laborers’ cottages and tenants’ homes alone. He usually accompanied her when she called upon the neighboring gentry and attended her in the drawing room when she was entertaining them. She was at ease and friendly without being in any way vulgar. Not that he looked for vulgarity in her. He had never seen any.

  In the evenings they often visited or entertained. Sometimes they stayed home alone and whiled away the time with music or with reading. She liked to have him read aloud to her while she stitched away at her embroidery. She was not a particularly skilled needlewoman, but as she herself said, she could hardly sit and twiddle her thumbs when she was at leisure, could she?

  At night they made love. Only once each night. It seemed somehow distasteful to him to think of doing it more frequently. Perhaps if his appetite for her had been less voracious, he would have allowed himself to have her more often. Or if he had loved her. As it was, he did not wish to use her as he would use a mistress, merely to satisfy his lust. He had too great a respect for her.

  Not that she showed any distaste for what they did together in her bed each night, despite his fears that first morning. Quite the contrary. She was a willing and eager participant in what happened. She never spoke her satisfaction, but her actions spoke it for her as well as the little sigh of completion with which her own participation always ended—the signal for him finally to let go of the control he had never lost involuntarily since their wedding night.

  They had a good marriage, he decided after three weeks. Far better than he could possibly have expected. They had settled into a comfortable routine at Sidley. They were firm friends. They laughed together frequently. They were good to
gether in bed.

  It was a good marriage. What more could a man ask for?

  Unfortunately, it was a question he kept asking himself. A question he could not stop asking himself. For there was something—an indefinable something—that prevented them from relaxing into true happiness. Both of them.

  From the beginning he had been startlingly aware of Cora’s openness and candor. He could remember thinking that it would be impossible for her to call a spade anything but a spade. And it was still true. She still looked him more directly in the eye when she spoke to him than anyone else he had ever known. And she still spoke to him freely on any topic he cared to introduce. There was no evidence whatsoever that she kept anything from him or harbored any dark secrets.

  And yet …

  And yet there was something. He could not put a finger on it or even begin to grasp it with his mind. It was nothing he felt he could ask her about. It was nothing.

  But he knew it was something. There was something.

  Just as there was with him, of course. He could not help sometimes looking at her—often at moments of deepest contentment—and remembering that she was not the woman of his choice. He could not help remembering the dream he had had of love and the sort of marriage that would grow out of a mutual love. The dream had gone and he was settling for contentment, it seemed. Was that what happened to most people, if not all? Did dreams always give place to reality?

  And yet he was content. He had a good life, one about which it would be wicked to complain. But he felt as if he were waiting. As if there were a completion that had not yet come.

  This could not be all, he sometimes thought. And it saddened him to know that he could not be thoroughly happy with contentment. Or with a wife who was good to him.

  He kept remembering the dream and wondering if even that was illusory. Had it been so very wonderful? Had he loved Samantha as deeply as he had thought? Was she as beautiful and as perfect as he remembered her? Would he have lived happily ever after with her if she had only returned his love, or if she had not met Carew?

  He did not want to think of her or of his love for her. He did not want to be disloyal to Cora even in his thoughts. She deserved better. She was a very likable person and she was a very good wife to him.

  Contentment could have kept him at home for the rest of their lives. Sidley had never been a more pleasant place to live. And yet contentment itself became suspect. Was he going to settle for this for the rest of his life? Was there nothing more?

  And so he stared at his letter at the breakfast table one morning long after he had finished reading it, feeling tempted.

  “What is it?” she asked. Her hand came across the table to touch his arm. “Bad news, Francis?”

  And he knew that he had hoped she would ask just such questions, and was ashamed of himself.

  “No, not at all.” He smiled at her. He always thought her most beautiful in the mornings—if he discounted the nights—when her hair was looped loosely over her ears and knotted simply at her neck. “It is from Gabe.”

  “The Earl of Thornhill?” she said. “Your friend from Yorkshire?”

  “They want us to come for a few weeks,” he said. “I have been a regular visitor there since their marriage six years ago. They were expecting me this summer.”

  She did not respond as he knew he hoped she would. She said nothing at all, but merely looked at him.

  “What do you think?” he asked.

  He had seen that pale, trapped look a few times before and knew what it meant. “Francis,” she said almost in a whisper, “he is an earl.”

  “And so he is.” He could not resist teasing her. “You would be in illustrious company, dear. Going to visit an earl and a countess in company with a duke’s son and brother. As the wife of the said duke’s son and brother.” It always amused him that she had never been terrified of his own title.

  “They must disapprove of me,” she said. “They must have been disappointed for you, Francis. They must have thought, as your brother and sisters did, that you married far beneath yourself. And they were right. We should never have married. I would not have done so if I had known …”

  He smiled at her confusion and covered her hand with his on the table. “I doubt they think any such thing, Cora,” he said. “And if they do, the problem is theirs. You are my wife and I am not sorry I married you. You are in no way my inferior. In no way that matters even one iota.”

  “That is all very well to say as long as we stay here,” she said, drawing her hand from his and getting to her feet. “But as soon as we leave here, you will realize that in everyone else’s eyes I am inferior, Francis. I want to stay here, please. I am happy here.”

  And yet she looked anything but happy as she hurried from the breakfast parlor, muttering something about an appointment with Cook. Was that the problem? Was that what was between them on her part? She felt that the social differences between them would cause only problems for them as the future unfolded?

  They would stay home, he thought with both regret and relief. She had saved him from temptation. He would stay home and carefully build on the contentment they had found in three weeks of marriage and residence at Sidley.

  It was Cora, after all, who came first in his life. Before even himself.

  SHE HURRIED INTO the scenic walk, the one Francis had introduced her to on the first morning. She pulled her shawl more tightly about her. It had rained during the night and the clouds were still low and threatening. There was a chill breeze. Summer seemed temporarily to have deserted them.

  She had just been very selfish.

  She had vowed to herself when she married him to devote herself wholly to his contentment, to forget about herself. To deny herself, as the Bible would have it. It was a horridly difficult thing to do.

  And now she had disappointed him. The Earl of Thornhill, she understood, was his closest friend but they lived far apart. He must have been very happy to read that invitation this morning. He must have expected that she would be delighted by the prospect of traveling into Yorkshire.

  Instead of which she had been peevish and self-pitying and selfish. If truth were known, she did not care the snap of two fingers what people said of her. But she did care what they said of him. She did not want his closest friend to censure or pity him because he had married her. He was probably doing so anyway, but if he saw her it would be worse. She was such a large lump.

  She sat down on a wrought-iron bench beneath a beech tree after first making sure that the seat was not wet. She drew her shawl close.

  She wished she could be attractive for him. It had not mattered so very much when she had believed—she still grew hot and uncomfortable when she remembered that she had believed it—that he was not attracted to women. But it had mattered very much since. If only she could be a little smaller. If only her breasts were not so embarrassingly large. If only her face were pretty. If only her hair were fine and wavy. If only …

  She wanted desperately to be beautiful for Francis.

  She tried to compensate for her ugliness and her ungainliness by making his life comfortable. When she was busy making his home more cozy and livable, when she was visiting his people, seeing to their contentment, when she was visiting his neighbors or entertaining them, then she was almost happy. She convinced herself that she was being a good wife to him.

  She tried to be a good wife in bed. Sometimes—most times—she lost herself in her own pleasure. It was difficult not to. He was so very—beautiful, so very masculine and virile. But she always determined not to lose herself but to lie still and passive for his pleasure. She had never yet succeeded.

  She thought he enjoyed being in bed with her. But that was no occasion for pride. Men always enjoyed being in bed with a woman. She had heard that somewhere, though she could not for the life of her remember where—it was not a typical drawing room conversational topic. She had heard that sentiment did not matter to men as it did to women, that physical satisfaction was
everything. She satisfied Francis physically, she believed.

  But oh, she wished she could be beautiful for him. How he must wish he had a beautiful woman with whom to do that each night.

  At first, once she had recovered from her embarrassment at discovering her error—not that she would ever fully recover—she had been overjoyed. It was to be a real marriage. She had physical closeness and intimacy to look forward to for a lifetime, or at least until they grew old. She could look forward to having children. She might be a mother. But her elation had not lasted long.

  All too soon she had realized with cruel clarity exactly what she had done. She had married him and forever deprived him of the chance to marry a woman of his choice. She could not even comfort herself with the realization that he had done the same to her. There was a difference. He had been honor-bound to offer for her. As a gentleman—there was no truer gentleman than Francis—he had had no choice whatsoever. She had. Papa and Edgar had not thought it so imperative for her to marry him. It was unlikely that the scandal would have followed her so ruthlessly into her own world that it would have ruined her life.

  He had had to offer for her. She had not had to accept. But she had.

  And now he was trapped in a marriage that would never bring him true happiness. Or her either. If she had not loved him so painfully, perhaps she could have concentrated on making him comfortable and could have found contentment for herself. But she did love him.

  And she had remembered something she would sooner not have remembered at all. That horrid woman in London—the Honorable Miss Pamela Fletcher—had said that he had loved some other woman who had married earlier in the Season. She had said that he was thought to be nursing a broken heart. Cora had dismissed the idea at the time as rather hilarious. But now …

  Was it true? Had Francis loved another woman such a short while ago? Had she broken his heart? Was it still broken? Cora frowned and bit the inside of her cheek and thought and thought, but she could not remember the woman’s name or the name of the man she had married. Perhaps it was as well. She would always dread meeting the woman and seeing a confirmation in Francis’s eyes that it was all true.