by Mary Balogh
He got abruptly to his feet, toppling the desk chair with the backs of his knees, and set out for the far side of the park. She would have left long before now, even if she had gone there rather than somewhere else to paint, he told himself. He tried to convince himself that he hoped she had left, though why the deuce he would walk so far just for the exercise he did not try to explain to himself. It was a long walk.
He would not be good company.
This morning she had been wearing a simple cotton dress and no bonnet. Her hair had been caught back in a plain knot at her neck. Her posture had been prim and self-contained, her expression placid. He had tried to tell himself that she was quite without sexual appeal, that he must be very bored indeed out here in the country if he was weaving fantasies about a plain, prim, virtuous widow.
Except that he was not bored. He had all his closest friends here, and three weeks was never a long enough time to enjoy their company to the fullest. One of those weeks had already gone by while he blinked. This was always his favorite three weeks of the year, and the change of venue had not affected that.
Perhaps he would have convinced himself this morning if he had not noticed the one thing that had betrayed her. Her hands clasped at her waist were white-knuckled, suggesting that she was not as at ease, as unconcerned at seeing him, as she seemed at first glance.
Sometimes sexuality was more compelling when it was not overt.
He had wanted her again at that moment with a quite alarming stab of longing.
And she was not plain. Or prim. And if she was virtuous—and he did not doubt she was—she was also full to the brim of repressed sexuality.
When he arrived at the far side of the park, he found she had not gone elsewhere to paint and she had not left.
She was where she had been five days ago, though she was not flat on her back this time. She was on her knees before her easel, sitting on her heels, painting. He knew why she was so low. She had explained to him that she wanted to see the daffodils as they saw themselves. And though he stopped some distance behind her, one shoulder propped against the trunk of a tree, his arms folded across his chest, he could see that her painting showed mostly sky, with grass below and daffodils reaching up between the two, connecting them. He was not close enough to judge the quality of the painting—not that he was a connoisseur anyway.
She seemed absorbed. Certainly she had neither heard nor sensed his approach, as she had last time.
His eyes moved over the pleasing curve of her spine, over her rounded bottom, over the soles of her shoes, the toes pointing in, the heels out. She was wearing a sun bonnet. He could see nothing of her face.
He should turn and leave, though he knew he would not do so. Not after coming all this way and forfeiting the company of friends and a visit to Gloucester.
He was badly smitten, he thought with some surprise and not a little unease.
And then she dipped her brush in water and paint and slashed it violently across the painting from corner to corner and again from the opposite corner to corner, leaving a large, dark X on the paper. She tore it from the easel, crumpled it, and tossed it to the grass. It was only then that he noticed other similar balls of paper scattered about her.
She was having a bad day.
Surely it was nothing to do with him. Apart from that brief encounter this morning, she had not seen him for four days.
She set her brush in the water and pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes. He heard her sigh.
“Behold the frustrated artist,” he said.
She did not whip her head about as he expected. For a moment she stayed as she was. Then she lowered her hands and turned her head slowly.
“Gloucester must have moved closer,” she said.
“Gloucester and I were not fated to m-meet today, a-alas,” he said. “My horse developed a limp.”
“Did it?” She looked skeptical.
“Perhaps not,” he said, uncrossing his arms, pushing his shoulder away from the tree, and strolling closer to her. “But it might have if I had gone f-farther.”
“It is always best to be cautious,” she said.
“Ah.” He stopped walking. “Double meanings, Mrs. Keeping?”
“If so,” she said, “I do not follow my own advice, do I? I meant to be here for an hour and have probably stayed for three or four. I might have guessed you would find a reason to return early.”
She sounded bitter.
“When you told me you would paint later,” he said softly, “were you inviting me to d-discover something amiss with my h-horse?”
“I do not know,” she said with the ghost of a smile. “Was I? I have no experience with dalliance, Lord Ponsonby. And I have no wish to acquire any.”
“Are you quite s-sure,” he asked her, “that you are not deceiving yourself, Mrs. Keeping?”
She turned her head to look back across the meadow.
“I cannot paint,” she told him. “The daffodils remain out there and I remain in here, and I can find no connection.”
“And I am to b-blame?”
“No.” She looked up at him. “No, you are not. I might have avoided that kiss here almost a week ago. I might have avoided going into the east wing with you the evening I was there with Dora, and, having gone there, I might have avoided dancing with you and kissing you again. You are a flirt, my lord, and probably a libertine, but I cannot pretend that you have forced anything upon me. No, you are not to blame.”
He was rather bowled over by her assessment of him.
A flirt? Was he?
A libertine? Was he?
And he was to blame. He had destroyed her tranquility. He was good at destruction.
He came up beside her, looked at the blank page on her easel, looked about at the discarded paintings, looked at the daffodils.
“Does your p-painting usually give you this much trouble?” he asked.
“No.” She sighed again and got to her feet. “Perhaps because I am usually content to grasp the simple beauty of wildflowers. But there is something about daffodils that demands more. Perhaps because they suggest boldness and sunshine and music, something more than just themselves. Hope, perhaps? I do not pretend to be a great artist with a large vision.”
She was looking at her hands, which were spread, palms down. She sounded on the verge of tears.
He took her hands in his. As he suspected, they were like twin blocks of ice. He placed them flat against his chest and spread his palms over the backs of them. She did not make any protest.
“Why did you t-tell me you were coming here?” he asked her.
Her eyebrows rose. “I did not,” she protested. “You asked if I was not painting today, and I answered that I might later.”
“You were telling me.” He dipped his head closer to hers.
“You think I was asking you to join me here?” Her voice was full of indignation. Her cheeks had turned pink.
“Were you?” He murmured the words, almost against her mouth.
She frowned. “I do not understand dalliance, Lord Ponsonby.”
“But you are d-drawn to it, Mrs. Keeping.”
She drew a deep breath, held it, and looked directly into his eyes. He waited for the denial, mockery in his eyes.
“Yes.”
The whole trouble seemed to be that she did not play by the rules—for the simple reason that she did not know the rules, perhaps. What did one do with a female who admitted to being drawn to dalliance?
Dally with her?
It did not help that he wanted her, that there was a niggling element of need in that wanting.
“If I go away,” he asked her, “will you paint any more today?”
She shook her head. “I am distracted. I was distracted even before you came. Even before I came.”
“Then p-put your things away,” he said, “and leave them here. And w-walk with me.”
7
She did everything with deliberate care, washing her brushes, drying the
m with a threadbare towel, covering her paints, emptying the water onto the grass, stuffing the balled-up sheets of paper into her bag, folding her easel, laying it flat, setting the bag on top of it. Then she stood and looked at him again.
He offered his arm, and she took it. He led her toward the cedar avenue, passing between the trunks of two trees and coming out halfway along the grassy walk. Cedars of Lebanon had none of the erect tidiness of limes or elms. The branches grew in all directions, some close to the ground, some almost meeting overhead. The avenue made one think of Gothic novels—not that he had read many of them. There was a summerhouse positioned centrally at the end of it.
He could smell soap again. Someone should bottle the scent of soap on her skin and make a fortune off it.
“Of what does dalliance consist?” she asked him.
He looked down at the poke of her bonnet and almost laughed. Of this, he almost said. Of precisely this.
“Risqué repartee, s-smoldering glances, kisses, touches,” he said.
“No more than that?”
“Only if the two p-people concerned wish for more,” he said.
“And do we?”
“I c-cannot answer for you, Mrs. Keeping.”
“Do you?”
He laughed softly.
“I suppose that means yes,” she said. “I do not know any risqué repartee. And I believe I would consider it silly if I did.”
He felt almost suffocated with wanting her. No courtesan could ever be half so clever. Except that this was not deliberate on her part.
They moved in and out of sunlight in the avenue. His eyes were slightly dazzled. So was the rest of him. He felt strangely out of his element.
“There are no r-rules, actually,” he said. “Or, if there are, I have not s-seen them.”
“What do you want of me, Lord Ponsonby?” she asked.
“What do you want of me, Mrs. Keeping?”
“No,” she said, “I asked first.”
So she had.
“Your company,” he said. He could not have come up with a lamer answer if he had had an hour to think of it.
“And that is all? You have the company of your friends, do you not?” she asked.
“I do.”
“Then what do you want of me that they cannot give?”
“Does there have to be an answer?” he asked. “Can we not just w-walk here and enjoy the afternoon?”
“Yes.” She sighed. “But I seem to be the last sort of woman a man like you would seek out for company.”
“A flirt?” he said. “A l-libertine?”
“Well.” There was a short silence. “Yes.” And then she laughed. “Are you?”
“I think, Mrs. K-Keeping,” he said, “you had better tell me what you mean by saying you are the last sort of woman I might seek out. And I think we had b-better sit inside the summerhouse while you do it. The air is rather chilly out here. Unless, that is, you are afraid I w-will p-pounce upon you in there and have my wicked way with you.”
“I daresay,” she said, “that if you intended to pounce, the outdoors would not deter you.”
“Quite so,” he agreed, opening the door so that she could precede him inside.
It was a pretty little structure, its walls almost entirely of glass. A leather-cushioned seat ran around the inside perimeter. Trees around the outside would offer shade from the hottest rays of the sun in summer but did not keep out the heat at any other season. It was pleasantly warm today.
“Tell m-me how you come to be living with your sister,” he said after they had seated themselves on opposite sides of the bench, though even so their knees were not far from touching.
“My husband’s entailed property passed to his younger brother,” she told him. “And while he was kind enough to assure me I might continue living there, I did not think it fair since he is unmarried himself and would have felt constrained to live elsewhere. My father remarried the year before I wed, and his wife’s mother and unmarried sister moved in after I left. I did not wish to return there. I went to stay with my brother in Shropshire for a while—he is a clergyman, but he has a family too, and I did not wish to stay forever. When Dora came to visit and suggested that I move here with her, I accepted gladly. She was in need of companionship, and I was in need of a home in which I did not feel I was intruding. And we have always been particularly fond of each other. The arrangement has worked well.”
He was very glad he was not a woman. There were so few options.
“Does your stammer result from your war wounds?” she asked him.
He looked at her and half smiled. She sat with a straight back and her hands arranged neatly in her lap. Her feet were side by side together on the floor between them. Prim virtue could sometimes look inexplicably enticing.
“I am sorry,” she said. “That was a very personal question. Please do not feel obliged to answer.”
“It was a h-head wound,” he told her. “Doubly so. I got shot through it and then f-fell off my horse on it before being r-ridden over. I should have been dead thrice over. For a long while I d-did not know where I was or who I was or w-what had happened. And when I did, I could not c-communicate with anyone outside my h-head. Sometimes everyone’s words were a j-jumble, or it t-took overlong to work out what they m-meant. And then the w-words to r-reply to them would not come out, and when they did, they were not always the w-words I was thinking. And I had forgotten about s-sentences.”
He did not mention the crashing headaches or the great memory gaps.
“Oh.” She frowned in concern.
“Sometimes when the w-words would not come out,” he said, “other things came out of me instead.”
She raised her eyebrows.
“I was d-dangerous, Mrs. Keeping,” he told her. “I did with my fists what I could not d-do with my mind or my voice. I was soon p-packed off to Cornwall and k-kept there for three years. Sometimes I still have what my family call t-tantrums.”
She opened her mouth to speak, thought better of it, and closed it again.
“You would be well advised to stay away from me.” He mocked her with his eyes, with his smile.
“Your friends do not fear you,” she said.
“But I do not w-wish to bed any of my friends,” he said. “Even Imogen.”
Her cheeks turned a deeper pink.
“Someone cannot be both a friend and a lover?” she asked.
“Only in a m-marital relationship where there is love,” he said.
“Is this why you warn me away from you, Lord Ponsonby?” she asked. “Not because you may turn violent but because you do not have either love or marriage in mind?”
“I w-will never have either of those to offer any woman,” he told her.
“Never?”
“Happy endings can t-turn without warning to v-very b-bad endings,” he said.
She paused at his words and looked steadily into his eyes, as if she saw something there. “Did you once believe in happy endings?” Her voice was very soft.
He felt suddenly as though he were looking at her down a long tunnel. Had he? It was strange that he could not remember. He must have believed in them, though, on that glittering night of the betrothal ball in London. He had abandoned his dying brother for it. For Velma.
His hands curled into tight fists on either side of him on the seat, and he saw her glance down at them.
“There is no such thing, Mrs. Keeping,” he said, spreading his fingers to curl lightly over the edge of the seat. “You know that as w-well as I.”
“I ought not to have married William, then,” she said, “because he would die? But we had five years of companionship. I do not regret marrying him.”
“Companionship.” He mocked her again. “But no p-passion.”
“I believe passion is much overrated,” she told him. “And perhaps companionship and contentment are much underrated by people who have not known them.”
“People l-like me?”
“I th
ink,” she said, “you have known much unhappiness, Lord Ponsonby, and that it has made you cynical. Personal unhappiness unconnected with your injuries. And now you have persuaded yourself that passion is of greater importance than quiet contentment and committed love, because passion requires no real commitment but makes you feel alive when much has died in you since your life changed irrevocably.”
Good Lord! He sucked in air that did not seem to be there in any abundance and forced his hands to remain relaxed. But his temper was suddenly close to snapping.
“And I think, m-ma’am,” he retorted, “you are indulging in s-speculation upon s-something you know n-nothing of.”
“I have made you angry,” she said. “I am sorry. And you are quite right. I do not know you at all.”
It would not snap. It took a great deal to make him lose control these days. He did not enjoy watching that madman who was himself destroy his outer world because he could not sort out his inner world. It was strange how there was always an inner watcher when the madman burst into action. Who was that man?
“Well, Mrs. Keeping,” he said, looking lazily at her and lowering his voice, “we might set that r-right anytime you w-want.”
“By . . . being together?” she asked.
He folded his arms. “You have only to say the w-word.”
She looked down at the hands in her lap and took her time about answering. She laughed softly.
“I keep expecting to wake up,” she said, “to find this is all a bizarre dream. I do not have conversations like this. I do not spend time alone with gentlemen. I do not listen to propositions so improper that I really ought to crumple to the floor in a dead swoon.”
“But it is all happening.”
“I am twenty-six years old,” she said, “and almost three years a widow. Perhaps at some time in the future, if too much time does not pass in the meanwhile, someone else will offer for me, though I do not know who in this neighborhood. Perhaps there is marriage, even motherhood, in my future. Or perhaps not. Perhaps my life will remain as it is now until I die. Perhaps I will never know . . . passion, as you call it. And perhaps I will regret that when I am older. Or perhaps, if I give in to temptation, I will regret that. We can never know, can we? We can never benefit today from the wisdom we will have gained tomorrow.”