“Belle,” he grunted, his knee throbbing with each bounce of the mattress. “I insist that you . . .”
He broke off as he realized that a light snore was his only reply. Belle had collapsed and her piquant little face was blissfully relaxed in drunken sleep, her mouth open a little, her breathing deep and even. He shook his head. He could only be glad that she had passed out. He had not made love to her since coming back to England, and he did not intend to.
Blowing out the candles, he lay back down, trying to ignore the pulsing ache that sent sharp needles of pain through his ankle. Facing toward the open curtains and the black star-studded sky, he settled himself to go back to sleep, if he could. That was it; he had to solve this dilemma. What was he going to do with Belle Gallant?
• • •
Sylvester Lessington stared out the open curtains at that same star-spangled sky. He had been thinking all night of his friends Baxter and Emily. It grieved him that a man and wife so well suited could not seem to find a way back to each other, past the anger and recriminations that had embittered them both. He believed they still loved each other. He hoped that if only he could get them to spend enough time in each other’s company, they would come to realize it themselves.
They were so lucky, and they didn’t even know it. Their love problems were solvable, not impossible like his own. If they only knew what it felt like to love in secret, not allowed to acknowledge openly the sweet gift of love given with an open heart. The knowledge that the world would condemn what it did not understand destroyed every peaceful, beautiful moment and colored his days with sadness and a dread certainty that his time of loving and being loved was limited and precious. He turned over on his side and stroked the smooth skin of his bed companion, who murmured an incoherent question.
“Go back to sleep, my love,” Lessington said, kissing one bony shoulder. “Go back to sleep.”
He sighed and wondered what danger Baxter was in and why he wouldn’t tell either his best friend or his wife about it. He feared for him, but had done all he could do by bringing the two of them back together. He curled up by his lover and slowly drifted off to sleep.
• • •
Emily sat in her window seat, thinking over the evening and wondering if she had done the right thing. On the impulse of the moment she had sent definite signals to Marchant, signals that she was ready and willing for an affair. The young man had understood, she was sure, but his response was subtle. He had become just a shade more proprietary toward her, solicitous about the small things, like obtaining her a seat when the music was about to start again, letting his warm fingers linger on the soft skin of her upper arm, above her silk glove.
It had felt like a lover’s touch, though, that much she understood. He was claiming her with every movement and every caress. Dodo had stated that Frenchmen were renowned as wonderful lovers. Was Emily destined to find out? Would she even recognize skill, with only one man to judge against? During the intimate moments of her marriage to Baxter he had seemed supremely able to her. He had certainly never left her unsatisfied, but then she had loved him. Was sexual intercourse without love different? Did it satisfy down to the soul the way the mating of a man and woman who loved each other did?
Or, as she suspected, was it different for men anyway?
That raised other painful questions in her mind, but for once she did not flinch from them. Did Baxter love his mistress? She was an attractive little thing, slimmer than Emily had ever been and well-proportioned, graceful of feature and light of step. Word had quickly spread in London of the new actress and opera dancer, and Emily had even seen her and admired her performance before she knew the girl was Baxter’s mistress.
Emily gazed out at the dark sky, the pinpoints of light that were stars a dim reminder of the starlit skies out in the country, where she and Baxter would occasionally walk in the evening. He had not seemed to enjoy the country as she did, one of the first of many differences that had become sources of argument for them. Not that they had fought often; if they had they might have been able to resolve the things that really were killing their marriage.
In surprise, she realized for the first time that she was angry with Baxter, angry that he had taken a lover, angry that she was such a young and lovely girl, but most of all angry that he had deserted her without fighting to keep their relationship alive, as she had been willing to do.
Or had she? There had come a time when she was so unsure of herself and her relationship with her husband that she had been afraid to ask for anything, and even more afraid to argue about anything, so she had backed away from confrontation. The fury had not gone away, but it had been sublimated into sullen silence instead. What had made her even more enraged was that Baxter never seemed to notice when she was upset. How could he not know what was bothering her?
She had given up a little of that anger when she held his foot on her lap and soothed his pain, but there was still a core of it somewhere, burning deep in the pit of her stomach. Was that why she was considering taking a lover, and that the lover she was considering was the very man who had saved Baxter’s life?
She knew him well enough to know that he must hate his own helplessness, and his gratitude toward young Marchant would be mixed with anger over the younger man’s vigorous health and youth. If Emily took the vicomte as a lover and Baxter ever found out about their affair, he would consider it a deliberate insult. Was that what she wanted?
With a deep sigh, she slipped down from the window seat and retreated to bed. Even the mindless act of taking a lover, which other people did without thought, she had to complicate with introspection. However, she could not go further without thinking it out; that much was clear.
Would she or would she not take Etienne to bed? That was her dilemma.
Chapter Eight
Baxter glanced across the table, still nonplused by a sight he had never expected to see. Belle, far from being hungover from the previous night, had recovered with the elasticity that only comes from youth. Worse, she had insisted on accompanying him down to the breakfast table and fussing over him as if he were some kind of doddering invalid in his dotage. She had even stirred his coffee and had to be forcibly stopped from cutting up his ham.
She sat to his left, humming a little tune, eating buttered muffins while she beat out time with a knife on the edge of the polished oak table. A footman, stiff and disapproving, stood behind her chair glaring down at the top of her head. Baxter attempted to read his paper, but the tang tang tang of the knife was driving him to distraction.
“Belle, do you think you could desist from giving me the rhythm to your humming? Just for a bit, my dear?”
“Certainly Baxter.” She stopped.
He went back to reading the paper.
“Baxter?”
With a sigh he put it down. He should have known that if he stopped her from one thing she would need to do something else. Silence was unbearable, it seemed. “What is it, Belle?”
“That tutor you hired me in Italy, he taught me the proper way to talk and walk and all, but did he miss something?” Her narrow, clever face was turned to one side and her small lips were pursed.
“Whatever do you mean?” Baxter smiled over at her, amused in spite of his annoyance. She looked, at that moment, like a clever little monkey. She was swathed in one of his figured silk dressing gowns, which was absolutely voluminous on her tiny frame, and she sat cross-legged on the chair.
She looked pensive and stared down at her hands. “Did he miss something? I mean, there is something different about me and, say, your wife.”
Baxter sighed and sat back in his chair. He took a deep swallow of his coffee. Yes, there was much that was different, but some of it was innate, a part of Emily from birth, and the rest was the result of youthful training, rigid strictures in the school for young ladies she had attended and unalterable rules and expectations she was raised to observe. How could he explain to Belle that there was no way to replace that kind of
background with a few lessons?
“My dear, you are perfect just as you are. Don’t start thinking there is something wrong with you.”
“But there is something different, isn’t there?” Her gaze was stiletto-sharp.
“Yes, my dear.”
“What is it?”
Baxter shook his head. How could he describe something that was indefinable?
“Well? I’m trying to better myself, Baxter!”
Her voice, usually so well-modulated, thanks to the voice teacher he had hired her, sometimes reverted to its natural whininess when she was perturbed.
He gazed at her with fondness and irritation. How could he say that the same things that made her so delightful were also her downfalls? That her cheerful aggressiveness had gone from a novelty to a wearing fault? That he longed for the quiet elegance of a real lady in his bed and across from him at his table.
If that was true, then he was in for a lifetime of disappointment, because he was married, and always would be married. Therefore he could have no other lady across from him at his table, other than a mistress. He could, he supposed, take for a mistress a widow or dissatisfied wife from his own class, but his sense of what was due his position would not allow him to set up housekeeping with her as if they were married. Others may do that, he thought, but not him. Even this morning’s tête à tête was highly irregular and would not be repeated. If Belle would just confine herself to the house he had hired for her instead of invading his own . . .
What was he going to do with Belle Gallant?
She moved agitatedly. “Baxter, you are not helping me! What makes me different from your wife? I saw how the veecompt treated me, like I was no better than I should be. But your wife, he knew right away what she was. Why?”
Baxter felt a swell of compassion and exasperation. He had raised her from brutality and squalor to the heights someone like little Annabelle Gudge could expect. But now she was peering over the wall. Some few rare birds of her species had made it and married into the aristocracy, or at least the ranks of the gentility. But Belle was not destined to do that, he feared.
He laid one long-fingered hand over Belle’s smaller one. “My dear, don’t distress yourself . . .”
A commotion broke out in the hall, and Baxter could hear Cromby’s voice raise above its usual well-bred moderation.
“Ma’am, my lady, please, let me announce you . . .”
“I don’t need to be announced in my own son’s house,” came a strident, familiar trumpet, and then the double doors to the dining room burst open and the dowager marchioness stalked in.
Wonderful, thought Baxter. His mother had impeccable timing. But he refused to be cowed by her and jerk his hand away from Belle like some naughty schoolboy. He was the Marquess of Sedgely, and he would do as he pleased. The dowager stalked around the room, surveying her son and his mistress.
Then, in pointed rudeness, she turned to her son, completely ignoring Belle, and said, “How are you, Baxter? I must say, it would have been a kindness if my son had had the decency to come to Bath to see his aging mother after gallivanting the Continent for years, and only a monthly letter to show for it, but what can I expect? The current generation has no consideration for their elders. And now you have forgotten your manners?”
“I am sorry for not rising, mother, but I have had a mishap and have sprained my ankle. Pardon me. And of course my next order of business was to visit you in Bath, but I see that you have forestalled that, er, pleasure.” He glanced at Belle and steeled himself. Under normal circumstances he would have thrown himself from a cliff rather than introduce his mother to his mistress, but since he was plagued by women who insisted on invading his home at inopportune moments . . . “Mother, this is Belle Gallant, a friend.”
The dowager turned her frosty stare on the girl, who shrank down in her chair, for once intimidated. Her basilisk glare froze the poor girl in her seat, and Belle made no sound for the rest of her visit, but a faint squeak that sounded like, “Good morning, my lady.”
“Cromby, set a place for my mother. Mother, you will stay and breakfast?”
“Just tea,” she said regally and took a seat opposite Belle, on her son’s right hand. “And so you are injured?”
“Just a twist, Mother. I am recovering apace.”
“I see that,” she muttered, glaring at Belle.
“What brings you all the way from Bath? Besides me, of course?”
Cromby and the footman poured tea, offered muffins, and then tactfully vacated the room, closing the big double doors behind them.
The dowager loaded marmalade on a warm muffin and took a huge bite, chewing thoroughly and swallowing before answering. “Your wife brings me to town.”
“Emily asked you?” Baxter’s eyebrows shot up. If he had expected anything, it wasn’t that. Emily and his mother had never gotten on, even in the first rosy glow of their new marriage. He had always supposed it was some kind of natural animosity between women vying for the affections of a man. As long as it had not troubled him, he had paid it scant attention.
“No, you fool, of course I meant . . .”
Baxter glared at her, and for once she stopped in mid-sentence. It was too much to be called a fool by his mother in his own house in front of his mistress. This was taking on all the qualities of the farce at the end of the play, and the farce was the part he never stayed to see.
“You are looking quite like your father,” she said more quietly. She took a long sip of tea, making a bit of a face. “Your cook needs a word about the proper steeping of tea. Or the proper purchase. Probably rubbishy smouch from a disreputable tea merchant. You need a wife. Which brings me back to my subject. You have a wife, Baxter, and she is fast getting past any hope of childbearing.”
“Madam, we are separated. Unless you have forgotten the workings of the human body since your own childbearing, I will remind you that we cannot conceive a child if we do not have sexual relations and we cannot have sexual relations when we are seldom in the same room, and when we are, only with other people! They would talk if we did the deed in public.”
The dowager’s face turned frosty again. “If you think to shock me by plain speaking, you are talking to the wrong woman. When I was fourteen, I caught my father mounting the upstairs maid. He only stopped for a moment to tell me to leave the room before resuming his humping. I have had no illusions about men ever since, including your father. Men will always have other women . . . a certain type of other women.” She gave a disdainful look at Belle. “Get your wife with child, as is your duty. I know she is fat and unattractive but she is your wife and you need an heir. Then afterward you can go back to your little pieces on the side. But right now you should not be wasting your seed by spilling it in the wrong vessel.”
Baxter glared at his mother. He remembered the acrimony between Emily and her. At the time he was wont to ascribe it to Emily’s impertinence toward her, something his mother was always complaining about, but now he wondered. While his father was alive, things were, if not wonderful, at least tolerable. It was after Baxter ascended to the title when they had been married about five years that things started to fall apart. His mother should have moved to the dower house but she delayed endlessly, ordering a long, drawn-out series of renovations that made her stay at Brockwith Manor a necessity.
“I have seen my wife since being back and although she has gained a little weight, she is not unattractive.” He felt compelled to defend Emily, he knew not why.
“I do not know how she can have let herself go like that after disappearing in the wilds of Yorkshire for years, but she always was inclined to it, it seems to me. It won’t matter so much once she is with child, though—”
“She is not going to be with child!” Baxter shouted.
Belle, still and silent in her chair, glanced at him with eyes wide.
“I thought I raised a son who knew his duty,” the dowager said with a trembling voice. “You must get her with child. It
is your duty, and I will not let you forget it!”
A pit of anger flared in his bowels, but it was ingrained in him to never be rude to his mother, no matter what the provocation. A memory came back to him just then of Emily, tears welling up in her beautiful eyes at something his mother had said to her, something intolerably rude and hurtful. His mother had said to his wife that even the dumbest beast in the field could conceive offspring, so why couldn’t she?
Emily had looked over to him and he had said nothing. What was there to say? He could not be rude to his mother. And there was no answer that did not entail rudeness. But shouldn’t his duty to his wife have superseded the one to his parents? Once he married, was he not supposed to leave his parents and cleave only unto his wife, or something like that?
That was about when Emily’s melancholy had begun, making worse what was already beginning to go bad between them. It seemed to him that his mother had never approved of his choice for a wife, and she made certain that everyone knew it. His father had liked Emily after his first disapproval—had called her a pretty, comfortable wife for a man, after which he glared at his own wife—but after he died and his mother still lived with Emily and Baxter in the title house, that was when things got bad.
Perhaps if she had not gone off to Yorkshire they might have made another attempt to live as man and wife again. Or maybe not. He remembered with a stab of something like regret the way he had handled his mother’s request that she be sent away. At least he had not been so summary, but he had made it clear that his mother could not continue to live at Brockwith with Emily in any peaceful manner. And he had suggested she might like the house in Yorkshire deeded to her outright.
What was it she had said?
Ah, yes. He remembered. Her eyes cast down at her folded hands, she had said, “Is that what you want, Baxter?”
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