by Mary Balogh
But he had put that guilt, finally to rest last night before he lay down to sleep. She had been cheerful and contented all evening. The only time she had shown discomfort was when he had made that ghastly teasing statement about being her tempter. She had been happy with her friends, happy to have him there. But not especially happy to be with him. She would have been as content without him, among her other friends.
He was nothing to her beyond a friend. He was that. There was no doubt about the fact that she was dearly fond of him. But nothing more than that. Despite what had happened between them, his presence did not distress her. He would not be harming her by staying for a few days. If he had had any doubt, her tone of quiet assurance as she had said good night to him the evening before had finally convinced him.
He would be harming no one by staying. Not her and not Cassandra. He was not having any sort of affair with Allie. Once he was married to Cassandra, he would probably never see Allie again. And even if he did, there would be no question of his being unfaithful. If there was one value he believed in more than any other, it was fidelity in marriage. Even his love for Allie would be ruthlessly suppressed once he had vowed to love and cherish Cassandra.
There were just these few days when he would content himself with being a friend. He would feel no guilt. Indeed, doubtless he would be doing Allie good by staying. She would remember him as a friend. The memory of what they had become for one brief night would be displaced by what they had always been to each other.
He was the only one who would suffer. And even that was questionable. How could be suffer from spending a last few days with the woman he loved more dearly than life itself?
And so he allowed himself the great selfishness, and made it greater by not forcing himself to stay away from her the next day. After talking with her and her friends for a few minutes in the Pump Room, he drew her away to stroll about the room with him.
“After all, Allie,” he said, “this is what is done, is it not? One cannot come to Bath and not promenade in the Pump Room. When in Bath, do as the Bathians do, I say. Or is it Bathans? Or Bathonians? “
“I always say the people of Bath,” she said.
“The voice of common sense,” he said. “Do look at that lady’s face, Allie. Do you suppose she is enjoying the water?”
“Absolutely,” she said. “The more horrid it tastes, you know, and the more it makes the drinker contort his face, the more good it is doing.”
“Ah,” he said, “You should have been a man, Allie. You might have been a physician.”
“Perhaps one day,” she said, “there will be women physicians. Now, there is a thought for you.”
“I would be ailing for the rest of my days,” he said. “If she turned out to be as pretty as you, of course.”
“Perhaps we have an interesting theory here,” she said, “for the fact that women tend to suffer poor health far more than men.”
”Ah,” he said. “Philosophy at eight in the morning, Allie? Too heavy, my dear. Now, what do you think of the yellow waistcoat on the rotund gentleman by the window? Rather loud, would you say?”
“Deafening,” she agreed
Chapter 14
PIERS stayed in Bath for three more days, days during which neither he nor Alice thought about their coming separation, days during which they thought of nothing else. They grasped at the moment with a desperate sort of determination, each outwardly calm and cheerful, each content that the other would not suffer at all at the end.
On that first morning when they came out of the Pump Room, each with the intention of returning home for breakfast, Alice invited him into the Abbey, which was right beside the old Roman baths and the Pump Room. It was her favorite place in Bath, and she wanted to have future associations of him with the church.
“My stomach may make noisy objections and get itself evicted by morning worshipers,” he said, “but the spirit is very willing, Allie. It is so many years since I have been inside that I cannot even remember what it looks like.”
It was a splendid stone structure, massive, high and cool, its large stained glass windows saving it gloriously from gloom. It was one of those churches in which one felt instantly the presence of God and in which one instinctively lowered one’s voice to a whisper even when there was no service in progress.
“Ah, yes,” he said, pausing at the end of the nave and gazing down toward the altar, “I remember now. All the power and majesty of God, and man’s insignificance.”
They walked about the Abbey in near silence and sat down finally on two chairs close to the front. Alice remained sitting even when her companion knelt on the kneeler, his arms resting loosely over the back of the chair before him.
She watched him and wondered how many people in his life had thought they knew him, and had taken the wit, the humor, the apparently casual attitude to life as the whole man. How many people thought Piers was a man of surface charm and little depth of character?
She loved the witty, lighthearted Piers. He was a joy to be with. But she was not sure she would have loved him as she did if that had been the whole of him. But there was this side to his character, too, which few people knew. She had seen it for as long as she had known him. Most recently she had seen it in London at the galleries they had visited together. And now here.
It was lovely to talk to Piers, to be entertained by him, to match wits with him. It was just as lovely to be silent with him, when that silence could be a mutually felt and a peaceful thing. She would never have brought him to this particular place if she had for one moment feared that he would joke about it or even talk endlessly about it.
She could happily sit there in silence all morning, all day, she thought. But he sat up beside her again after a while and turned to smile at her. His shoulder touched hers briefly, and his right hand moved across, rested awkwardly for a few moments against the outside of his leg, and then returned to twine fingers with the other hand in his lap. His shoulder moved away from hers.
Ah, he had grown self-conscious, she thought sadly. He had held her hand several times in London and twice the evening before, always as a spontaneous and casual gesture of affection. But he had become aware that any physical touch might be misconstrued and could be potentially dangerous. He would not touch her again.
It was something she regretted. She would have liked to rest her shoulder against his, to have her hand in his warm clasp. Not for any sensual reason. It was neither the time nor the place for that sort of craving. But merely because they were sharing the wonder and the majesty of the Abbey, and it would have felt lovely to have done so with more than just their minds. She kept her own hands clasped loosely in her lap and closed her eyes.
And Piers beside her ached for the same closeness and turned his head to smile at her again. But she was in her own world, her chin lifted, her eyes closed. Beautiful, serene, unattainable Allie.
He looked upward to the huge window above the altar and refused to let go of the sense of peace that was in him. She was unattainable, not just because she was Allie, but because he was promised to someone else. Simple facts of life both of them, unchangeable and therefore not worth fretting over.
She was with him now. That was all that mattered. And they were sharing this experience, something he could not imagine himself sharing with any other woman. Other women would prattle. She had said scarcely a word since they had entered the Abbey. She was his friend.
His soul mate. But he suppressed the thought. It could bring no peace at all, but only shatter it.
Her head was turned to him, and she was smiling when he looked at her next.
“I knew you would love it,” she said, “even without your breakfast.”
“And talking of breakfast,” he said, reaching across and squeezing her clasped hands.
“There has been no internal orchestra to disturb other worshipers, after all,” she said.
“Allie,” he said as they got to their feet and made their way down the center aisle, �
��what an unladylike topic of conversation. I believe my stomach has been feeling the same sort of awe as the rest of me. Would you care to take breakfast at York House with me?”
“No,” she said. “I have promised to go shopping with Andrea later this morning. And I fear it’s already getting close to later this morning.”
“Bonnets and slippers and feathers and such?!” he said. “I would not dream of trying to interfere with such important feminine business. What does one do in the afternoons? Walk up to the Crescent? I am afraid these hills may be the end of me before I return to civilization. Though how I can look about me at these buildings and imply that I think Bath uncivilized escapes my understanding at present. What can I tempt you into doing this afternoon, Allie?” He closed his eyes briefly at his choice of words.
“How about Sidney Gardens?” she said. “It is very lovely, very fashionable, and very much at the bottom of the hill.”
“Perfect,” he said. “And so is the weather. I shall call for you after luncheon?”
“Yes,” she said. “You do not need to escort me all the way home, you know, Piers. This is Bath and I am almost thirty years old.”
“Are you really?” he said. “You are remarkably well preserved for one of such advanced years, I must say, Allie. Found the fountain of eternal youth have you? And since when do you think I have lost all sense of chivalry and propriety that I would abandon you in the middle of a public street merely to scurry in pursuit of my breakfast?”
“It was just a thought” she said with a laugh. “I am used to being alone, Piers. I do not drag a maid about with me wherever I go.”
“I am not a maid,” he said. “Though the idea sets up a vastly amusing mental picture, does it not? Piers the plowman I have heard of and used my fists to defend myself against on more than one occasion at school. But Piers the maid? Would you force me to wear a mobcap?”
“With ribbons streaming down the back,” she said. “I wish I had not tried to be kind and send you home for your breakfast. You are in one of your absurd moods, I see.”
“And a feather duster?” he asked, “I could think of all sorts of interesting uses for a feather duster.”
“But maids have to be demure,” she said.
“The devil!” he said. “Do they? I have lost interest, then.”
***
An afternoon strolling in Sidney Gardens, stopping several times—to exchange civilities with Colonel and Mrs. Smithers, with Mr. Horvath and Miss Druce, with other acquaintances. An evening taking tea at the Upper Assembly Rooms with the Wainwrights and the Potters. A morning at the Pump Room again, both of them tasting the waters merely to say they had done so, and grimacing at each other, and drinking valiantly on so that neither would be put to shame by the other. A stroll up to the Crescent in the afternoon, Piers pulling at Alice’s arm and panting in great, wheezing gasps and declaring that he was sure he would not make it alive both there and back.
“But it will be all downhill on the way back,” she said soothingly. “You can run all the way, Piers.”
“And trip over my own feet very like and roll to the bottom with a broken crown like Jack,” he said.
“But think of the view from the top,” she said, laughing as he dragged more heavily than ever at her arm. “And the magnificence of the houses on the Crescent, Piers. And think of how fashionable a place it is to take a stroll and what a feather in one’s cap to be seen walking there.”
“I don’t possess a cap,” he said. “But if you say it is fashionable, Allie, then all that is important has been said. One would climb a hill twice as long and twice as steep in such a good cause.”
There was no more pulling at her arm. Indeed, she was soon laughing at the necessity of keeping up to his pace.
An evening at the theater with the Potters, and supper at Sidney Place afterward. And talking until midnight.
“Quite a shocking hour to be up in Bath,” Mr. Potter said as they rose to leave. “Even the balls here must end at eleven, Westhaven. Would you believe it? The focus of the whole city is on the waters, which must be taken early in the morning.”
“Barbarous,” Piers commented. “Do these people not know that civilized living ought not to start before noon or end before four in the morning? Good night, Allie. I will see you in the Pump Room in the morning?”
“Yes,” she said. “Good night, Piers.” And she turned to bid good night to her other friends.
Time was going altogether too fast. Too wonderfully and too fast. They neither of them cared what construction Alice’s friends and acquaintances put on the fact that they spent so much of their days together. There was so little time left. Certainly no time to worry about what others would think.
Andrea was intrigued. She broached the subject when she and Alice were at the library together on the morning of the second day.
“Mr. Westhaven’s betrothal is a recent event?” she asked.
“Yes,” Alice said. “Since my own return from London.”
Andrea frowned. “And was it an arranged thing?” she asked. “One of those matches planned from the girl’s cradle on?”
“No,” Alice said. “He met her just recently.”
“But why?” Andrea asked. “Why, when you and he are so obviously head over ears in love, Alice?”
“Oh, that is not so.” Alice was shaken from her calm. “You do not understand, Andrea. We have known each other all our lives, and very well since Web started to court me. We have shared each other’s joys and sufferings—our marriages, my son’s death and his wife’s and child’s, Web’s passing. Friends grow very close under such circumstances. More like brother and sister than friends.”
“A very incestuous relationship for brother and sister, I would say,” Andrea said with a smile.
Alice flushed.
“And I am not being much of a friend, am I?” Andrea said. “Goading you like this when you so clearly want to keep it all to yourself. It is just that I am fond of you, Alice. And you are far too young and far too pretty to have settled to this life you are living. I hoped when you went to London, even though you went merely to nurse your nephew and niece through the measles, that you would meet some gentleman more worthy of you than Sir Clayton. When Mr. Westhaven walked into your drawing room and almost into your arms, I thought it had happened.”
“Well, it had not,” Alice said with a smile. “And I do not need another marriage, Andrea. I have had the best one anyone could wish for in this life. I wish you had known Web. He was a wonderful person. And that is not just the opinion of a partial wife. Everyone who knew him loved him.”
“I know,” Andrea said. “I try to imagine how I would feel if I lost Clifford. I am sure I would feel as you do. But I am thirty-seven, Alice. You were twenty-seven when your husband died. So very young. Well, enjoy the rest of your friend’s visit, my dear. I will not pry any further. Not until I can resist the temptation no longer, that is.”
They both laughed.
But Alice refused to allow her mind to be disturbed by the knowledge that her friends were indeed misconstruing the situation and imagining that she and Piers were in love. Let them think it. It was the simple truth in her case, and she could not feel shame at loving another woman’s betrothed. She did not care. For these few days she did not care.
But the morning after the visit to the theater she did not keep her appointment to meet Piers in the Pump Room. That was the morning when the sun was shining through the curtains in her room again, and full of the joys of spring and the anticipation of another day with him, she threw back the bedclothes and jumped out of bed. And immediately had to clutch the bedpost. And made it to the washstand only just in time to save herself from vomiting all over the floor.
She stood holding firmly to the marble top of the washstand, her head bowed forward, her eyes closed, concentrating on not fainting away. Her face felt cold and clammy. The air was cold in her nostrils.
She felt strangely calm. She had suspected it fo
r a few days, of course. She was never later than two or three days at the most. It had already been five days.
She had known. Her subconscious mind had already started to grapple with the truth and all its implications.
She had not begun to suspect with Nicholas. The morning vomiting had been the first sign then. It had continued unabated for two months, until poor Web had been distraught and miserable with remorse for having impregnated her.
She was with child again. There was no doubt in her mind. And no panic. There was no definite thought at all, except the sure knowledge.
She was with child. There was the beginnings of a child inside her. Hers. And Piers’. She was going to have Piers’ child. A part of him. It had not after all been an isolated experience in the past, over and done with and to be relived only in memory. It was continuing into the present and the future. She would carry that experience with her for nine months, and then she would have his child. Perhaps his son.
The panic would begin soon. The dreadful knowledge that what they had done would be evident for all to see. The knowledge that she would bear a child out of wedlock. The guilt. The remorse. The terror. They would all begin soon.
This strange gladness, this elation, would not outlive the return of common sense and cold reality.
She was not going to faint. And she did not think she would vomit again. She groped her way back to the bed and lay on her side. She pulled the covers up over her ears. She lay there shivering and frightened. And buried her face in the pillow, smiling with the joy of it all.