by Mary Balogh
Considering the fact that she had fallen in love with him last autumn and again this spring, she should be over the moon with happiness that he wished to marry her, especially in light of those words. Why was she not? Why did she hesitate?
I may be dangerous to know.
Yes, she felt that it was so. Not that she feared him physically, despite the violent rages he had admitted to and the leashed energy she sensed lurking beneath the often sleepy-seeming exterior. Those rages had happened at a time when he had been all locked up inside his head as a result of his war injuries. He was past that stage now. A slight stammer, sometimes a little worse than at other times, was not enough to frustrate him to the point of violence. But—she feared the danger that was him.
He represented passion, and she feared that almost more than anything else in life. Violence came from passion. Passion killed. Not the body, perhaps, but certainly the spirit, and all that had most value in life. Passion killed love. They were mutually exclusive things—a strange irony. It would be impossible to separate the two with Viscount Ponsonby, though. She would not be able simply to love him and keep herself intact. She would have to give all and . . .
No!
He got to his feet as she came closer. He had her bonnet in one hand. He looked lazily into her eyes as he fitted it carefully over her hair, and she stood like a child, her arms at her sides, while he tied the ribbon in a bow beneath her left ear. She looked back into his eyes the whole time.
Would you stop me? Would you have stopped me?
He had not insisted that she answer, and she had not done so—which had been cowardly of her. Would she have stopped him? She was not at all sure she would. Indeed she was almost certain she would not have. Her heart had sunk with disappointment when he had stopped. And why had he stopped? A rake would surely not have done so.
Her gloves, drawn from a coat pocket, materialized in one of his hands. He held one out and then fitted it onto her fingers. He did the same with the other glove, and she half smiled.
“You would make an excellent lady’s maid,” she said.
His eyes gazed keenly into hers from beneath heavy eyelids.
“I would indeed,” he said. “This is a mere foretaste of the services I would provide.”
“I could never afford you.” She laughed softly.
“Ah,” he said, “but I would not exact payment in coin. You can afford the payment I would demand, in abundance. In superabundance. Ma’am.”
Her knees almost buckled. And there was surely not as much air on this side of the island as there was on the other.
The corners of his mouth lifted in that wicked half smile of his, and he offered one hand to help her into the boat.
They were on the other shore and he was handing her out of the boat when she became aware that Sophia and Lady Trentham were strolling toward the lake from the direction of the house. Sophia was carrying the baby, bundled up warmly in a blanket.
Whatever would she think?
But whatever she thought, she was smiling as she called out to them.
“You have been to the island,” she said. “It is the perfect morning to be outdoors, is it not?”
She looked more searchingly at Agnes as she came closer with Lady Trentham. The viscount was putting the boat away in the boathouse.
If only one were able to control one’s blushes!
“I have never been there before,” Agnes said. “The little temple is more beautiful than one expects, is it not? The stained glass makes the light inside quite magical. Or perhaps mystical would be a more appropriate word.”
“Sir Benedict rowed Samantha and me over there a couple of weeks ago,” Lady Trentham said. “I agree with you, Mrs. Keeping. And that stained glass window gives me ideas for our park.”
“Dora has gone home?” Agnes asked.
“She praised me and scolded me in equal measure.” Sophia laughed. “By some miracle I played all the notes of last week’s piece correctly, but I played with wooden fingers. It is the very worst censure your sister can possibly deal out to one of her pupils, Agnes, and it is quite devastating when she does it. And thoroughly deserved on this occasion. I have not been practicing as conscientiously as I ought.”
She lifted a corner of the blanket and smiled at her son’s sleeping face.
“She would not stay for a cup of coffee,” she continued, “and Gwen and I decided to come out without stopping for one either. The sunshine was too inviting.”
Viscount Ponsonby came out of the boathouse, and all eyes turned his way.
They had not exchanged a word in the boat on the way across. Agnes did not know whether he was finished with her now or whether he would renew his addresses. There was less than a week remaining. . . .
She had a sudden premonition of how she was going to feel on the day all the guests left Middlebury Park. Her stomach seemed to sink like a leaden weight all the way to the soles of her shoes, leaving nausea and near panic behind in its place.
He smiled.
“I was not in the m-mood for writing letters after all,” he said. “It was too late to g-go with everyone else, and there was no one in sight in the house except for a few f-footmen, who did not look as if they would enjoy being engaged in c-conversation. I took myself off to the v-village to see if Mrs. Keeping would take p-pity on me, and she did.”
“Come up to the house and have coffee with us,” Sophia said, smiling at Agnes.
“But you have just come outside,” Agnes protested.
“Not so,” Lady Trentham told them. “We walked through the formal gardens before coming down here.”
“Come,” Sophia said.
Being sociable was the last thing Agnes felt like doing, but none of the alternatives appealed to her either. Dora would be back home and would expect to know where her sister had been. And even if she could get away from Dora after a brief explanation and retreat to her room, she would have her thoughts to contend with again, and they would not be happy company for a while.
“Thank you,” she said.
“And now I face a dilemma,” Viscount Ponsonby said. “Three l-ladies and only two arms to offer.”
Sophia laughed.
“How a child who is not yet two months old can weigh a ton, I do not know,” she said, “but that is precisely what Thomas does weigh. Here, my lord, you may carry him to the house, and we three will find our way unassisted.”
He looked almost comically alarmed. He took the blanket-wrapped bundle—Sophia gave him no choice—and held it as though terrified he would drop it.
Lady Trentham linked her arm through Agnes’s, and Viscount Ponsonby looked down into the baby’s face.
“Well, my l-lad,” he said, “when the l-ladies do not want us, we men band together and talk about horses and races and boxing mills and . . . well, the interesting stuff. Yes, you may well open your eyes—b-blue like your papa’s, I see. We are about to indulge in a heart-to-heart chat, just the t-two of us, and it would be ill-mannered of you to nod off in the m-middle of it.”
Sophia laughed again, and Agnes could have wept. There was surely nothing more affecting than seeing a man holding a baby and actually talking to it. Even if it was not his own, and he had not chosen to hold it and probably wished himself anywhere else on earth than just here, holding his friend’s infant.
He tucked the child into the crook of his arm and made off across the grass, leaving the path to the three of them.
“Agnes,” Sophia said, her voice low, “does he have a tendre for you? What a sensible man he is, if he does.”
“I have a soft spot for him, I must confess,” Lady Trentham said. “But then, I do for all of them. Hugo is so very fond of them, and they have all suffered dreadfully.”
Agnes wondered about Lady Trentham’s limp, which did not seem to be a temporary thing. Wondering kept her mind off the events of the morning so far. Well, almost, anyway.
He still wanted to marry her—perhaps.
He had kisse
d her again. And more than just kissed her.
But he had not once expressed any fondness for her. Only a desire to bed her, to use his own language.
“I still have not seen any of your paintings, Mrs. Keeping,” Lady Trentham was saying, “even though we have been here longer than two weeks. May I see some of them if I walk into the village one day before we leave? Sophia says you are very talented.”
He had reached the house ahead of them and was sitting on one of the steps outside the front doors, the baby on his lap, head outward, one of his hands spread beneath it. He was still talking.
Agnes swallowed and hoped she had muffled the gurgle of unshed tears in her throat.
10
Agnes sat in the morning room for half an hour with the ladies, enjoying her coffee and the conversation. Viscount Ponsonby had taken the baby up to the nursery, having assured Sophia that he did indeed know the way and that he would not abandon young Tom until he had placed him safely in his nurse’s care.
Agnes thought he was not going to join them, but he did so just as she was getting to her feet to take her leave.
“Ah, well-timed,” he said. “I shall escort you home, Mrs. Keeping.”
“There is really no need,” she assured him. “I come back and forth to Middlebury all the time to call upon Sophia, and it never occurs to me to bring a maid or other escort.”
She needed to be alone to think.
“But if a w-wolf should happen to leap out at you from the woods,” he said, “there really ought to be someone there to f-fight it off with his bare hands. Me, in fact.”
Lady Trentham laughed. “A hero after my own heart,” she said, clapping a hand theatrically to her bosom.
“And the woods are full of them,” Sophia added. “Not to mention the wild boars.”
Agnes looked reproachfully from one to the other of the ladies, and Sophia tipped her head slightly to one side and looked searchingly at her again.
Viscount Ponsonby escorted her home. She clasped her hands determinedly behind her back as soon as they left the house, and he walked a little distance to one side of her and talked agreeably almost the whole way on a series of inconsequential topics.
“No wolves,” he said when they were close to the gates, “or wild b-boars, alas. How is a man expected to impress his l-lady in this civilized age when he may not perform some g-grand deed of heroism in order to pluck her from d-deadly danger and s-sweep her swooning form into his strong, sheltering arms?”
His lady?
He had stopped walking—in almost the exact spot as he had chosen yesterday to inform her that she had better marry him.
She smiled at him.
“You would like to be a knight in shining armor?” she asked him. “You would like to be that cliché of worthy manhood?”
And it struck her that he must have looked quite irresistibly gorgeous clad in his officer’s uniform with his scarlet coat and white pantaloons and red sash and cavalry sword swinging at his side.
“You do not f-fancy being a damsel in distress?” He raised one mocking eyebrow. “What a p-poor sport you are, Mrs. Keeping.”
“A man does not have to slay dragons to be a hero,” she told him.
“Or wolves? Or boars? What must he do, then?”
She had no answer to that. What did make a man a hero?
“Go away?” he offered softly as an answer to his own question. “Is that what he must do?”
She frowned briefly but said nothing.
Silence hung between them for a few moments until he took her upper arm in a firm grip and moved her off the driveway and into the trees for a few paces, before turning her back against a broad tree trunk and setting his hands flat against the bark on either side of her head. His face was a mere few inches from her own.
“I saw something enchanting,” he said. “In a ballroom and in a daffodil meadow. And I became obsessed—with b-bedding you, I assumed. It is what one does assume when one finds a woman enchanting. But I have not bedded you, though the desire is there on both our parts and the opportunity has presented itself on m-more than one occasion. I am on unfamiliar territory, Agnes Keeping, and you must help me. Or not. I cannot command your help. I want you in my life, and there is only one way I c-can have you there since you are not the sort of woman to whom one offers c-carte blanche, and I would not offer that to you even if you w-were. I offer m-marriage instead with a title, a large ancestral home and estate p-plus a house in London, wealth, p-position in society, security for a lifetime. But these m-material things mean n-nothing to you, I know. I do not know what else to offer except passion. I can give you that. I can bring you alive as you have never been alive before. I can g-give you children, or I suppose I can. And yet . . . and yet you would be well-advised to r-refuse me. I am d-dangerously unstable. I must be. I told you just recently that I would never offer m-marriage to anyone, yet now I offer it to you, and I do not even know how I could have m-meant what I said then, yet mean what I say n-now. You would not have an easy life with me, Agnes.”
“Or you with me,” she said through lips that felt too tight to obey her will. “I cannot give you what you want, my lord. And you cannot give me what I want. You want someone you can sweep away on a grand tide of passion so that you can forget, so that you can ignore all that still needs to be settled in your life, whatever that might be. I need someone quiet and steady and dependable.”
“So that you can ignore all that needs to be s-settled in your life?” he asked her. “Whatever that might be?”
She licked lips turned suddenly dry.
He gazed at her, his eyes very green in the double shade of the tree and the brim of his hat.
“You are wrong about me,” he said, “and you are wrong about yourself. Don’t say n-no. If you cannot say yes, at least do not say no. It is such a final word. Once it is said, it cannot be argued against without the appearance of harassment. After I have left here, I will not come b-back. You will be free of me f-forever. But I have not left yet. Say no when I am leaving if you must, but not before then. P-Promise me?”
She did not want to say no. She desperately did not want to. But she could not say yes either. How could the answer to a simple question be neither yes nor no?
After I have left here, I will not come back. You will be free of me forever.
Forever suddenly seemed like an awfully long time. Panic coiled inside her.
“I promise,” she whispered.
He lowered his hands to his sides, turned away from her for a moment, and then turned back to offer her his arm. He led her onto the driveway again, and they walked in silence to the cottage.
Dora was pulling weeds from one of the flower beds.
Viscount Ponsonby was immediately at his most charming. He complimented her on the garden, and he thanked her profusely for making Lord Darleigh tolerable to listen to on the violin and harp.
“I am a lover of animals, Miss Debbins,” he explained. “It would break my h-heart to hear Tab and all the neighborhood cats howl in pain.”
He had Dora laughing in no time at all. And when he took his leave, he bowed elegantly to them both and sauntered away as if he had never in his life entertained a serious thought.
Dora was looking at Agnes with raised eyebrows.
“He let everyone else go off with Viscount Darleigh to look at the farms this morning,” she explained, “while he wrote some letters. But then he got bored and came down here to persuade me to go walking with him.”
“And?” Dora said.
“He rowed me over to the island,” Agnes told her. “The temple is beautiful inside, Dora. I had no idea. There is a stained glass window facing south, and it catches all the light and disperses it in a kaleidoscope of colors. And then, when we were coming back across the lake, Sophia was walking down from the house with Lady Trentham and invited me for coffee. She said you would not stay.”
“The weeds awaited,” Dora said. “Did he ask again, Agnes?”
“They will be here for less than a week longer,” Agnes said. “He says that once he has gone, he will not return. Ever. But forever is a long time, and Viscount Darleigh is his friend.”
“He asked again,” Dora said quietly, answering her own question. She turned to gather up her gardening tools. “Why do you hesitate, Agnes? You are in love with him, and it would be a hugely advantageous match for you. And for him.”
“I would have to leave you,” Agnes said.
Dora looked over her shoulder at her.
“I am a big girl,” she said. “And I was alone here for a number of years before you came. Why do you hesitate? Does it have anything to do with Mother?”
Agnes’s knees almost gave way beneath her—for the second time in one day. They never spoke of their mother.
“Of course not,” she said. “Why should it?”
Dora continued to look at her without turning fully to face her.
“You must not consider me, Agnes,” she said. “I chose my course in life. It is my life. I have done with it what I have wanted to do, and I am happy with it. I was happy before you came, I have been happy since you came, and I will be happy if you should ever choose to leave. You have your life to live. You cannot live mine too—and you do not need to live Mother’s. If you love him . . .”
But she stopped without completing the thought, shook her head, and turned back to what she had been doing. Agnes suspected there might be tears in her eyes.
“I should have come back here instead of going for coffee,” Agnes said. “You have not left any weeds for me.”
“Oh, look again tomorrow,” Dora said, “or even later this afternoon. One thing this world is never short of is weeds.”
* * *
It was Imogen’s turn that night. It did not happen often. She was always very well in control of her thoughts and emotions. Almost always, anyway. People who did not know her as well as her fellow Survivors did might assume that her marble exterior went right through to her heart. And even to them she did not reveal much of herself these days except an undying affection for the six of them and an unwavering readiness to support them in any way she could. It would have been easy to assume she was healed, except that none of them ever made that mistake. Of all of their wounds, hers went deepest and were the least likely to heal. Ever.