Married to a Stranger

by Louise Allen

  ‘How can I burden you with it?’ Cal demanded.

  ‘Because I am your wife,’ she said simply. ‘And I care for you.’

  You do? He didn’t ask it out loud. The footmen came in with more coffee, covered plates; the moment was lost. But when they had eaten and he sat nursing his third cup of coffee Sophia murmured, ‘Callum?’ So he told her everything, every detail, from the lurch when the anchor began to drag and how Averil’s laughter at one of Dan’s jokes had broken on a gasp of shock to the moment when he had opened his eyes to find himself being nursed by Dita in the Governor’s House on St Mary’s on the Isles of Scilly and had realised that he was, for the first time in his life, alone.

  Sophia was silent for several minutes when he finished and he wondered if he had been too graphic, too frank. How much had he revealed about himself, about his weaknesses? He had to be strong for her, that was what a husband owed his wife. But the relief of speaking, of pouring it all out, was almost shattering.

  ‘When you came to tell me that Daniel was dead you asked me to forgive you for not saving him,’ she said at last. ‘Do you still blame yourself? Do you truly believe there was anything that you could have done that would have saved him?’

  ‘No,’ Cal said and, by some miracle, he believed it. He had told himself over and over again that he had done all he could but, even as he had recovered, some small nagging part of his brain told him that there must have been something. He drew in a deep, ragged breath. ‘For the first time I do not feel guilty.’

  Sophia smiled and he leaned across the table to run the pad of his thumb gently over the dark circles under her eyes. How much sleep had she had last night? ‘You go back to bed and rest. Thank you, Sophia.’

  There was more to the way he felt than that burden of guilt lifting, Cal told himself as he rode eastwards. There was a new anticipation, a new feeling that was not quite pleasure and not quite apprehension that unsettled his mind and was giving him butterflies in the stomach, a sensation he did not recall feeling since the day he stood on the deck of an East Indiaman and watched the English shoreline vanish into the haze.

  ‘Damn it, is this how marriage makes every man feel?’ he demanded under his breath. Would his nights be utterly consumed with dreams of losing her now? The gelding, confused by his tone, sidled and curvetted across the road into the path of a mail coach and Cal jerked his attention back to where he was and what he was doing.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ As Cal entered the office George Pettigrew looked round from the huge wall-map of India that he had been studying.

  ‘Sorry I’m late. Minor domestic crisis,’ Cal said, as he slung his saddlebags on to a chair and hung up his hat.

  Pettigrew’s very silence and the way he turned back to his map had Cal glancing at his reflection in the glass over the mantelshelf. The shadows under his eyes did not help, but he looked grim enough for a man going to his own hanging. Sophia was getting under his skin, into his heart where he had vowed never to allow anyone again. What if something happened to her? What if she grew tired of this marriage she had been forced to make? What if he hurt her?

  Then the memory of her touch, her compassion, the tough way she would not allow him to shy away from talking about Dan, her sweet delight in their lovemaking, all came flooding back and he smiled.

  ‘Confusing state, married life,’ Cal said as he sat down. ‘As complicated as negotiating a contract with a Chinese silk dealer and about as comprehensible.’

  ‘Compromise would be the thing, I suppose,’ George offered. ‘You’ve got the good faith—at least you can take that for granted.’

  ‘Yes,’ Cal agreed and felt better. Good faith and a wife who came into his arms with a generous passion that took his breath away. Whatever else he felt about this marriage of duty, he knew that their lovemaking at least was right and that act, surely, stripped away all pretence. Was he falling in love with Sophia? Was this what it felt like? It must be love. My God.

  ‘Pull yourself together,’ George demanded. ‘I want to have a sensible discussion about tea warehouses, but if you’re going to brood on married life I’ll go and see if I can get some sense out of Jorgenson instead.’

  ‘No, I’m not going to brood,’ Cal said with sudden certainty. ‘I know what I’m going to do about it.’ He was going to woo his wife. If it was possible to make Sophia fall in love with him, he was going to do it. And if he failed? His stomach gave a sudden sickening lurch as though he had stepped off a high cliff. If he failed, he did not know how he was going to live with it; it would be the pain of losing Dan all over again with the added torment of having to live the rest of his life with a woman he desired body, heart and soul and knowing all he could ever have were her caresses and her kindness.

  Sophia did not go back to bed, but it was a long time before she could stir herself to do anything but sit and think. She had known, theoretically, how terrible a shipwreck must be, but she had not felt it, not allowed herself to dwell on the terror and the sheer crushing inevitability of the ocean once it had frail humans in its grasp.

  But Callum had not been frail. He had fought and battled and even when he had known it was hopeless, that he would not find his twin, at the moment when he could just have given up, he had battled on to save the others who he did find, had held them on the upturned boat until help came, even though he was hurt and freezing and in utter despair.

  He was a hero and even now he could not believe it. But he had forgiven himself, that she did believe. And he had spoken about Daniel and his feelings and perhaps now he would not dream that dream again. If he did, she was determined that she would be there. As she finally roused herself and sat brushing out her hair, it occurred to her that perhaps she had finally been able to repay something in return for Callum’s offer of marriage, his payment of their debts, his guarantee of security. And there was the money she had earned from her drawings, the money she had thought to use instead of her dress allowance—she could buy something for Callum.

  What would he like? He wore jewellery sparingly and he had any number of good family pieces—links and pins and fobs. A horse? He seemed content with the gelding he hired, but perhaps he was just too busy to think about buying one. Sporting guns? They would all take quite a lot of money, she knew that. But she could save up and that would give her more time to find just the right gift.

  More content than she had been since Callum had put his ring on her finger, Sophia went to work on another set of drawings for a memorandum book. She would prefer to draw Callum, or try her hand at imitating one of those wicked caricatures, but she was a professional artist now, and this was what Mr Ackermann wanted. If she sold these drawings, then she would tell Callum. He would see it was all harmless and safely anonymous and he would, she hoped, be proud of the standard of her work.

  Chapter Nineteen

  There were no fresh flowers on the breakfast table when Sophia came down the next morning after a night alone in her room. Nor was there any sign of her husband. Callum had sent a note from the office apologising for missing dinner and then had come in late and had gone to his own room, hours after she had retired to bed. Sophia told herself firmly that she could not read anything into it, that Callum was not regretting the intimacy of the night before and his frankness. He had simply been overwhelmed by work at the office, that must be it.

  ‘Has Mr Chatterton gone out early?’ she asked Andrew who was arranging plates on the buffet.

  ‘He said he would be back very shortly, ma’am. He’s gone to the market.’ The footman looked as confused by this as she felt.

  ‘The market?’

  ‘Shepherd’s Market, ma’am. It’s only just round the corner. It’s where I usually get the flowers every morning, ma’am. But the master said not to go today.’

  ‘I will wait breakfast until he returns,’ she said. ‘Please bring me a cup of coffee in the drawing room.’ What on earth had possessed Callum to go to a market of all places? If he wanted early morning exerc
ise after a bad night, surely a walk in the park would be more usual?

  The front door opened just before she reached the drawing room and Callum came through it, obscured behind a large bunch of flowers. Country flowers, late wild flowers and foliage, a riot of shapes and colours all mixed together as though a small child had plucked the contents of a hedgerow and thrust them into his arms.

  ‘Callum?’ Sophia parted the bunch and he smiled at her, petals on the brim of his tall hat.

  ‘I thought these would be a change from roses and give you something else to draw. I realised when I thought about it that there are hardly any wild flowers in Green Park—the park keepers’ scythes and the cows see to that.’

  ‘But they are lovely! Thank you—and you went to fetch them yourself.’ Not many gentlemen would battle through a crowded market to buy flowers and then carry them back through the streets just because they thought their wives would enjoy drawing them.

  She dodged round the flowers as Callum handed them to Andrew. ‘That was so thoughtful, Callum.’ He turned his head so their lips met and, with his hands free now, pulled her against him. The kiss was slow, thorough and possessive, his lips open over hers, his tongue taking possession of her mouth until the heat flooded into her and she moaned, wanting him, wanting what he had not given her last night.

  Then he set her back on her unsteady feet and smiled, quite as though nothing had happened. She stared at him, breathless. ‘I’ve kept you from your breakfast. I’m sorry. I had no idea the market would be so busy and colourful—I thought I was back in India! You must come with me one morning, I think you would find it amusing—it made me want to paint.’

  ‘I would love to come.’ Bemused, Sophia preceded Callum into the dining room. ‘I thought perhaps you had not had a good night last night and had gone out to take the air.’

  ‘Because I was so late back? I wanted to clear my desk for a day or two and there were things I needed to plan. There are meetings I must attend today, but I am going down to look at the ship again tomorrow—would you like to come?’

  Time with Callum, entering into his world, sharing with him—and he wondered if she would enjoy it? ‘There is nothing I would like better,’ she admitted. ‘But don’t be late back tonight; it is your cousin Mrs Hickson’s party this evening.’

  Callum’s parting kiss was lingering too, so much so that Sophia was in a considerable flutter by the time he left for Leadenhall Street. She tried to concentrate on sketching some of the flowers he had brought her, but she found she was drifting into happy daydreams. Was he coming to care for her? Might he, one day, come to love her?

  *

  Cal found he was in no danger of becoming so absorbed in his work that he did not leave in time. In fact, he was hard put to concentrate and kept drifting off into thoughts of Sophia.

  He had a nagging suspicion that he had always placed rather too high a value on controlling his feelings, controlling everything around him, in the past. He was overdue an emotional storm, he supposed, and falling for Sophia had hit him so hard that he had no idea how to deal with it. How do you tell your wife you love her? Propose to a woman and if she turns you down, you can walk away and lick your wounds, get over it in privacy. Reveal your innermost vulnerability in marriage and then find she does not share your feelings—that would be hell.

  He had entered this marriage confident that he could provide for his wife, his future family, and give them position and security. And he had suffered no doubts that he could make Sophia happy in bed. But he had not given a thought to love and now he knew that all his confidence, all his certainties, were nothing in the face of this emotion. He wanted the one thing he knew he could not demand: her love.

  The ride home through the crowded streets gave him something else to think about, but when he walked into the house, looked in the drawing room and found his flowers all over the room and her drawings with them, he was shaken and disarmed all over again.

  Charmed, he tucked a sprig of something he could not identify into his buttonhole and subsided on to the sofa to study the drawings.

  ‘Mr Chatterton has arrived, ma’am,’ Hawksley said. ‘Shall I send tea to the drawing room?’

  With a murmured word of thanks Sophia ran downstairs. Callum looked up from the sheaf of flower drawings in his hand and smiled and her pulse stuttered. ‘These are very good,’ he said. ‘Very accomplished. You have made art, not simply a good representation of nature.’

  ‘I—thank you.’

  ‘Your work should be displayed,’ Callum said, his eyes still on the images. ‘Printed.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said again, feeling slightly dizzy. Callum thought her work should be printed? She had been trying to summon up the courage to tell him what she had done and it seemed he would have approved in any case. But what he would not approve, she feared, was that she had done it without discussing it first. Admitting to that was going to take courage and the right moment, and just now, with the intimacy they seemed to be achieving so new and so fragile, she could not risk shattering it. Not yet.

  Hawksley brought in the tea tray and she began to pour. ‘Tell me who to expect to meet at Mrs Hickson’s party,’ she said. ‘I am so looking forward to it.’

  Three hours later Sophia recalled those words and winced. Mrs Hickson, it appeared, did not approve of Callum’s marriage to ‘some country nobody without even youth to commend her.’ Neither did her friends.

  Sophia slid deeper into the cover of a display of potted palms and listened as one of Mrs Hickson’s cronies passed on this judgment to another matron.

  ‘It was deeply regrettable that young men so close to the earldom should have gone into trade in the first place,’ Mrs Dunbar opined.

  ‘Quite, although the East India Company is somewhat different—it has great influence and he will doubtless emerge a very rich man.’

  ‘The earl is betrothed, most suitably, to Lady Julia Gray, so there is probably no risk that the inheritance might go in that direction, my dear Lady Piercebridge. That is one mercy.’

  ‘Oh, quite. Not that I have anything against Callum Chatterton myself. And he does not mix with cits. The house is perfectly au fait.’

  ‘Such a pity your hopes that he would attach himself to your Daphne did not succeed. So very suitable for him; this gangling nobody can only pull him down.’

  ‘And I can see no excuse for it. He cannot even plead the momentary insanity of a love match, I believe. Georgia Hickson said he seems to have done it out of a sense of duty because she was betrothed to poor dear Daniel.’

  Sophia got out of the other side of the palms, the jabs from their sharp fronds a perfect counterpoint to the unpleasant pecks from the sharp beaks of the gossips.

  They thought she would pull Callum down, that she was unsuitable as the match for the heir presumptive to an earldom. Did he share those thoughts? Had he put them to one side because of his duty to Daniel’s betrothed?

  ‘There you are. I thought you had run off to flirt with one of my handsome young cousins.’

  Sophia looked up to find Callum smiling down at her. No, he was not that good an actor, surely? If he had thought like that about her at first, she was certain he no longer did. ‘Are there any?’ she asked. ‘If there are gentlemen as handsome as my husband here I must have missed them.’

  ‘Now you are flirting,’ he said and his smile warmed and held promises of all kinds of things that almost banished the sting of what she had just overheard.

  Almost. ‘Only with my husband.’

  ‘I would like to lurk here all evening to do just that, but duty calls. Can you bear some more introductions? Great-Uncle Sylvester has just arrived. He’s as mad as a trunk full of Barbary apes, but he’s an entertaining old devil.’

  ‘Yes, of course. An eccentric great-uncle sounds delightful.’

  And so Sylvester proved to be. And she liked the younger set she was introduced to and perhaps, if she had not overheard Mesdames Dunbar and Piercebridge she w
ould not have noticed how haughty Mrs Hickson was to her and the pursed lips of some of the older women.

  That sort of snobbery had never occurred to her when she’d agreed to marry Callum, perhaps because there were so many other objections to worry about. Sophia smiled and chatted, sipped Mr Hickson’s rather inferior champagne and fumed inwardly. She might be a country nobody, but her family was perfectly respectable. Her father had been a gentleman, she had connections to a number of noble families—distant, it was true. The wretched women had no business to speak as though Callum had married the scullery maid.

  She recalled how the inquisitive ladies had reminded her of a flock of starlings at the dinner party when she had first met some of Callum’s family. These old witches were just the same, snapping at their prey with no concern whether it might be hurt by their spite. Sophia eyed Mrs Hickson’s profile across the room and thought of the prints she had bought. How satisfying to draw the whole flock of them as starlings, pecking some unfortunate creature to death.

  ‘Would you like to come into the City this morning?’ Cal stood at the foot of the stairs and watched Sophia coming down. She had the faint air of the cat who had stolen the cream and he rather suspected he was looking a trifle smug himself. He had stayed in her bed last night, dreamlessly, and when he had woken at dawn the candles had guttered out and Sophia was sleeping like the dead beside him.

  But under the physical satisfaction that still warmed him from last night, and again early that morning, was the lurking knowledge that a marriage consisted of more than compatibility in bed. Shakespeare had written something about the marriage of true minds, hadn’t he? That was what he had to find with Sophia in order to make her happy. A marriage of true minds. He had to trust enough to let down his guard with her and pray that she would do the same with him.

  ‘I don’t want to come with you if you frown like that,’ she said, reaching the lowest step.