by Mary Balogh
Because she did not get her way, he had just said. Was that sufficient motive? Simple spite?
She drew a deep breath and released it slowly.
“Tell me what you know about her,” she said. “About Lady Havell, that is. My mother.”
Neither of them was looking at the sky any longer. They moved off the path into the even-deeper seclusion of the ancient trees, and she stood with her back against the trunk of an oak, while he stood in front of her, one hand braced against the trunk on one side of her head.
“They have been shunned by society ever since their m-marriage, I would guess,” he said. “I believe they are fond of each other but not particularly h-happy.”
“He is definitely not my father?” she asked him.
He shook his head. “I am as sure as I can be that she was faithful to your father until after she left him. You were five years old by then.”
She closed her eyes and lifted one gloved hand to set against his chest. At the same moment they both heard a group of people approaching along the path, talking and laughing until they must have spotted the two of them. There was a self-conscious silence then as the footsteps went past, and some stifled giggling after that until the group had passed out of earshot.
“One can only h-hope,” Flavian said on a sigh, “that we were not r-recognized, Agnes. There is nothing more damaging to a man’s reputation than to be seen in close and clandestine embrace with his own w-wife.”
“What a pity,” she said, “that they misinterpreted what they saw.”
“And that,” he said, “is even more lowering.”
He took a firm step closer, pressing her to the tree along her full length before kissing her openmouthed. She laughed in delighted surprise when he lifted his head a moment later and regarded her lazily. And she wrapped her arms about him as his came about her, and they kissed at far greater length and with warm enthusiasm.
“Mmm,” he said.
“Mmm,” she agreed.
He took a step back and clasped his hands behind his back.
“She admits,” he said, “that you have every right to hate her. She admits that she abandoned you and your s-sister—and your brother too—when she might have stayed. She r-ran away, she told me, after your father had denounced her at an assembly and told her for all to hear he would divorce her for adultery. She had f-flirted rather too incautiously with Havell, she said, but had done nothing more indiscreet than that until she ran away. She might have returned. Apparently your f-father had had too much to d-drink, and everything might have been patched up if she had gone home a few days later. But she d-did not go.”
Agnes closed her eyes again, and there was a long silence, during which he stood where he was, not touching her. It was all so believable. Her father did not drink to excess very often. It was very rare, in fact. But when he did, he could say and do foolish, embarrassing things. Everyone knew it. Everyone made allowances and conveniently forgot his lapses.
And her mother, it seemed, had acted upon the sudden impulse not to return home when she might have done so and had chosen to remain with the man who then became her lover and, later, her husband. A sudden, impulsive decision. She might just as easily have decided the other way. Just as she, Agnes, might just as easily have said no to Flavian the night he returned from London with a special license.
The course of one’s whole life—and the lives of those intertwined with one’s own—could be changed forever on the strength of such abrupt and unconsidered decisions.
“You did not say I would call on her?” she asked him.
“I did not,” he said.
“Maybe one day I will go,” she said. “But not yet. Maybe never. But you are right. It is as well to know. And to know that Dora and Oliver are my full sister and brother. Thank you for going, and for rescuing me from shock and embarrassment last evening. Thank you.”
She opened her eyes and smiled at him.
From a distance they could hear the sound of other people drawing closer.
“Shall we move on?” He offered his arm, and she took it.
They walked in silence until they had passed an older couple, exchanging smiles and nods as they did so. The day was growing warmer.
“Would you like to go to Candlebury, Agnes?” he asked her.
“Now?” she asked in surprise. “But there is the Season, my presentation at court, the ball to introduce me to the ton. Everything else.”
“If you want them,” he said, “we will stay. But everything can wait if we choose—if you choose. It can all wait a month or two months or a year or ten. Or f-forever. Shall we go to Candlebury? Shall we go h-home?”
She stopped walking again and drew him to a halt. She could see the Serpentine in the near distance. Soon they would be among other people walking beside the water.
“But you have been avoiding Candlebury Abbey for years,” she said. “Are you sure you want to go there now? Are you doing this for me?”
“For us,” he said.
She searched his eyes, longing welling up inside her. Shall we go home? he had said. There were memories there for him. Conscious, painful ones of his brother’s last days. And unconscious ones, she suspected. She suspected too that it was both facts that had made him reluctant for so long to return there. Now he wanted to go—for her sake and for theirs.
She smiled slowly at him.
“Let’s go home, then,” she said.
22
My love, he had called her at Marianne’s party, entirely for the ears of all the guests there. My love, he had called her a short time later in the refreshment room, in order to tease away the stress of the past half hour or so.
My love, he thought now, sitting beside her in his carriage, watching her profile as they approached the top of the rise above Candlebury after turning through the gates a short while ago. He wanted to see her expression when she saw the house. It almost always took the breath away, even when one had a lifetime of familiarity with it.
My love. The words sounded silly when spoken in the silence of his own thoughts. Would he ever speak them aloud so that she knew he meant them? And did he mean them? He was a bit afraid of love. Love was painful.
He watched her, he realized, because he did not want to have that first glimpse of Candlebury himself. He really did not want to be where he was, moving ever nearer to it. Yet he would not be anywhere else on earth for all the money in the world. Was there anyone more muddleheaded than he?
She was looking prim and trim and beautiful beside him, clad in a dark blue carriage dress, which was expertly and elegantly cut to hug her figure in all the right places and to fall in soft folds elsewhere. Her chip straw bonnet trimmed with tiny cornflowers had a small enough brim that he could see around it. Her gloved hands were folded neatly in her lap. Her head was half-turned from him, and he knew she was gazing at the half-wild meadowland beyond her window and seeing all the wildflowers growing there and imagining herself tramping among them, an easel under one arm, a bag of painting supplies in the other hand.
And then the carriage topped the rise, and her head turned to look into the great bowl-like depression below. Her hands tightened in her lap, her eyes grew larger, and her mouth formed a silent O.
“Flavian,” she said. “Oh, it is beautiful.”
She turned to smile at him and reached out a hand to squeeze one of his, and if he had been in any doubt before this moment, he doubted no longer. He loved her. Idiot that he was, he could not be content with safety. He had had to go and fall in love with her.
“It is, is it not?” he said, and he looked beyond her shoulder and felt somehow as if the bottom had fallen out of his stomach.
There it was.
The house was built on the far slope of the bowl, a horseshoe-shaped mansion of gray stone that often gleamed almost white when the sun shone on it at a certain angle in the evenings. To one side of it and connected with it were the remains of the old abbey, most of them virtually unrecognizable moss
-covered ruins, though the cloisters were still almost intact, and usable with their walkway and pillars and central garden, which his grandmother had made into a rose arbor.
It was the only really cultivated part of the whole park, apart from the kitchen gardens at the back. The rest was rolling, tree-dotted grassland and wooded copses and graveled walking paths and rides, in the style of Capability Brown, though not designed by him. This inner bowl had been planned to look secluded and rural and peaceful, and it succeeded admirably, Flavian had always thought. There was a river and a deep natural lake and a waterfall out of sight over the rise to the left of the house. And a genuine stone hermitage. Follies had always been unnecessary at Candlebury.
“It is very d-different from Middlebury Park,” he said.
Middlebury was actually rather old-fashioned, with its carefully tended topiary garden and formal floral parterres forming the approach to the house. But it was grand and lovely, nevertheless.
“Yes.” She looked back out through the window, but her hand remained covering his. “I love this.”
And he felt like weeping. Home. His home. But the latter thought served only to remind him of how he had always been quite adamant about thinking of it as David’s home, even though he had known from a relatively young age that it would be his before he had grown far into adulthood. But David had loved it with all the passion of his soul.
“We will p-probably be called upon to inspect the servants,” Flavian said.
They had remained in London for two days after deciding to come here. He had felt obliged to give the servants some notice of his coming. And there was a tea at his aunt Sadie’s that Agnes had promised to attend. Delivery of the rest of her new clothes, as well as a pair of new riding boots for which he had been fitted at Hoby’s, was expected within a day or two. And Agnes wanted to call upon her cousin, who lived in London—or rather the late William Keeping’s cousin, Dennis Fitzharris. He was the man who published Vincent and Lady Darleigh’s children’s stories, so Flavian gladly accompanied her and enjoyed himself greatly.
His mother had been less upset than he had expected by their decision to come to Candlebury. Perhaps it would be as well, she had said, for them to leave town over Easter and even for a few weeks after. By that time the new Lady Ponsonby and her story would be old news and only sufficiently interesting to bring everyone out in force to meet her at the ball they would give at Arnott House. Flavian had let his mother believe they would return in a month or so. And who knew? Perhaps they would.
At least she had not suggested accompanying them.
“Will that be a formidable experience?” Agnes asked, referring to the parade of servants that probably awaited them at the house.
“One must remember that they will be agog with eagerness to see us,” he said. “Both of us. They have not seen me since I inherited the title. And I am returning with a b-bride. This will be a h-happy day of celebration for them, I daresay.”
“And for us too?” she asked him, turning her face back to his.
He raised their hands and kissed the backs of hers.
“I understand,” she said, though he had said nothing, and he believed she probably did.
Magwitch, the butler, and Mrs. Hoffer, the housekeeper, were standing side by side outside the open front doors. Within, Flavian could see a row of starched white aprons on one side and a row of white Vs—shirtfronts, he guessed—on the other. The servants were lined up to receive them.
He was home. As Viscount Ponsonby.
David was gone, a part of family history.
* * *
Agnes really did think the house and park beautiful. Indeed, she thought Candlebury Abbey must be one of the loveliest places on earth. She would be happy if she never had to leave it.
They spent three days together, she and Flavian, wandering about the park together, hand in hand—yes, indeed. She made no remark upon it when he first took her hand in his as they walked, and laced their fingers. She almost held her breath, in fact. It seemed so much more . . . tender than walking with her arm drawn through his. But it was no momentary thing. It seemed to be his preferred way of walking with her when they were alone.
The park was larger than she had thought at first. It extended beyond the bowl-like depression in which the house was situated. But all of it—lawns and meadows and wooded hills, paths and rides, all of it—was designed to look natural rather than artificially picturesque. The lake and the waterfall too were natural, and the stone hermitage to one side of the falls was not a folly but had at one time been inhabited by monks for whom the abbey was too crowded and busy a place.
“I always l-liked to think,” Flavian said, “that they all left behind them something of the p-peace they must have found as they meditated here.”
She knew what he meant. It seemed to her that they found peace together at Candlebury during those days—almost. Except that there was a depth of brooding in him just beyond where she could penetrate with her companionship. It was understandable, of course. She had expected it.
He had shown her about the house and about the ruins of the old abbey. But there was one set of rooms he avoided, and he pretended not to notice when she stopped outside the door, waiting expectantly for him to open it. He walked on past, and she had to hurry to catch up to him.
They had a few callers, among them the rector of the village church. But although the rector expressed the hope that he would see them at church on Sunday, Flavian returned a vague answer that sounded like a resounding no to Agnes.
“We will not go to church on Sunday?” she asked after the rector had left.
“No,” he said curtly. “You may go if you wish.”
She looked closely at him and understood in a flash. The churchyard must be where the family graves were. And his brother’s grave. The set of rooms they had not entered while exploring the rest of the house must have been his brother’s.
The loss of parents, siblings, spouses, even children was something all too many people experienced. The death of loved ones was all too common an occurrence. It was almost always sad, painful, difficult to recover from, especially when the deceased had been young. But it was not rare. She had lost a husband. His brother had been dead for eight or nine years. But Flavian had never let him go. He had come home from the Peninsula because his brother was dying, but he had left before David actually died. Flavian had been on his way to rejoin his regiment when it happened and had not returned until after he was wounded.
Those details at least were not among his missing memories. She knew he felt deep shame and unresolved grief.
“I will not go to church without you,” she said. “Is there a way to get to the top of the waterfall?”
“It is a b-bit of a scramble,” he said. “We used to make d-dens up there as boys and hold them against trolls and pirates and Vikings.”
“I can scramble,” she told him.
“Now?”
“Is there a better time?” she asked.
And off they went, hand in hand again, and she might almost imagine that he was happy and relaxed and at peace.
They shared a bedchamber, the one that had been his as a boy, without any pretense of having a room each. A small room next door had been made into her dressing room. They slept together each night, always touching, usually with their arms about each other. They made love, often multiple times in the course of the night.
Life seemed idyllic.
And then, one night, Agnes awoke to find herself alone in bed. She listened, but there was no sound of him in his dressing room. His dressing gown was gone from the floor beside the bed. She donned her nightgown and fetched a shawl from next door. And she lit a single candle.
She looked in the drawing room, in the morning room, in the study. She even looked in the dining room. But there was no sign of him. And when she peered out of the drawing room window, she realized that she would not see him even if he was out there. It must be a cloudy night. All was pitch-dark.
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And then she thought of somewhere else to look.
She picked up her candle, went back upstairs, and made her way to the door she had never seen open. There was no light beneath it. Perhaps she was wrong. But part of her knew she was not.
She rested a hand on the doorknob for a long time before turning it slowly and silently. She pushed the door a little way open.
The room was in darkness. But her candle, even though she held it behind her, gave sufficient light that she could see an empty bed in the middle of the room, with a still figure seated on a chair beside it, one hand resting on the bedspread.
He must surely have seen the light, even if he had not heard the door opening. But he did not turn.
She stepped inside and set the candle down upon a small table beside the door.
* * *
It had felt amazingly good to be back, to be home. It always had. Even though he had quite enjoyed school, he had always longed for the holidays, and on the few occasions when Len had tried to persuade Flavian to go with him to Northumberland for the long summer holiday, he had always found an excuse not to go. This was where he had belonged, where he had wanted always to belong.
His very love for Candlebury had been his pain too. Why did that pair always go hand in hand? The eternal pull of opposites? For the only way Candlebury could belong to him for the rest of his life was through the death of David without male issue. And though he had known it would happen, he had not wanted it to happen. His love of home had made him feel guilty, as though he resented the fact that his brother stood in the way of his happiness. It was not like that.
Ah, it was never like that, he was telling his brother when he awoke with a start. It never was, David.
Fortunately he had not been speaking aloud. But he was fully awake and rattled. And feeling guilty again. He had not been to see his brother. Idiot thought, of course. But he had been avoiding David since his return, avoiding his rooms, avoiding the churchyard, avoiding all mention of him or thought of him.