When she could bear it no longer, she lowered her gaze and returned into the safety of the Towers.
That evening a second note arrived.
Three times more Dearborne knocked on her door with a note and three times she told him there would be no reply. She was honest enough with herself to admit why she wouldn’t meet Dominic. She wasn’t sure that she wouldn’t just cast herself into his arms, willing to accept whatever he offered.
The final evening had been declared a family party. Juliana knew Sophia expected the formal announcement of all her wedding plans. She and Rodney had spent interminable afternoons with the duchess hashing out the details.
Sophia confided that Rodney’s patience was wearing as thin as his waistline with the Duchess’s insistence on near perfection. But it was done and only her aunt’s twinkling hints about two dozen turtledoves compelled Juliana to attend the dinner.
A flustered Mary arrived at her bedchamber. “Miss, I’m ever so sorry. Dearborne says they need me in the kitchen.” The little maid tossed her head. “Told old high and mighty that me job was to help you, but he was right nasty, he was. Will you be all right, miss? Here, I’ll lay this turquoise gown out and be back as quick as can be.”
Juliana missed Mary’s continual chatter and sat at her mirror playing idly with her curls. She could easily dress herself, but had fallen into the habit of allowing Mary to do everything. When she heard the door open, expecting Mary, she glanced up smiling, but then blanched, for Dominic stood in the doorway. She couldn’t move even as he closed the door partway and came toward her.
“I know you’re expecting Mary, but she has been unavoidably detained in the kitchens.”
Juliana rose, drawing her muslin wrapper closer. “What do you want, Dominic?”
“We need to talk.” Strong emotion darkened his eyes and roughened his voice.
“If I’d wanted to talk to you, I would have answered your notes. We said all that needed to be said days ago in the meadow.”
Dominic folded his arms across his chest. “No, there is more, much more that you need to know. And I’m not leaving until you hear it.”
“I already know about your father. And your mother. Everything.” Seeing the look of blankness in his eyes, Juliana felt a wave of remorse rush over her. She didn’t want to hurt him! She loved him!
She moved to the window and stood, nervously fingering the fabric. “I understand your father’s feeling about … about widows being soiled goods, but…”
“Never say that again!” he interrupted fiercely, taking her by the arms and turning her to face him. “I would kill anyone for saying that about you. Don’t you know why I came here? I’ve hurt you … I can’t bear that.”
Putting his hands lightly against her cheeks, he tilted her face up and their eyes locked. “You are the most wonderful, the most precious … you are perfect.”
Putting her away from him, he shook his head. “You don’t understand what I am saving you from.”
“I don’t wish to hear any more about my not understanding!” Juliana burst out, drawing herself up proudly. “It is you, who do not understand! I made a promise to Sir Timothy that I would never forget Will. That I would put no one else in his place.” She gave a short laugh. “I kept that promise quite well for five long years, but within hours of meeting you, I could not keep you out of my thoughts.” Juliana’s eyes searched his face. “You see, I love you more than my honor. I have overcome my past … the teachings of a lifetime … to love you.”
Standing quite still, Dominic’s eyes, dark and fathomless, rested upon her. “Do you know what an unsuitable marriage is, Juliana?” His voice hardened slightly when he spoke. “It is when one person is trapped in the net of another’s grand passion. It happened to my mother and father. It destroyed them both … and Jules … and me.”
“I am not your mother!” Juliana, tears finally spilling over her face, said in the only voice left to her, a thin, reedy sound.
“I know,” he said quietly, color coming to mark his cheekbones. “But I am her son. I am the soiled goods. Let me tell you what I am saving you from.”
She stepped back, sudden fear making her tremble.
“Hear what I am. I would have seduced you at Vauxhall, Juliana. I have done it before in that very same temple. I have engaged in excesses you could not even imagine. I ran away to the Peninsula … away from my tainted heritage … only to blacken my name…”
Shaking her head, her eyes clung to his face, which resembled a beautiful polished stone. “Were you hoping to die too, Dominic?”
Amazement that she had understood what no one else had ever guessed shifted in his eyes, but then was gone. “Perhaps at first, but battle suited my needs … for awhile,” forcing as much cruelty in his voice as he could muster. “Then later in Madrid a beguiling contessa taught me much … things a woman like you would not even understand…” He flinched at the shock on her face, knowing for certain that in revealing his sordid past she would finally turn from him in disgust. But looking into her eyes, shimmering with tears, was his undoing. There had been too much pain already for all of them. He couldn’t make himself continue the catalogue of his sins. “I’m not worthy of you. Can never be. I would not degrade you by offering what little I can give, for even that is flawed,” he finished softly.
“And that I see, disposes of our future,” she said, suddenly furious with him, her chest heaving with indignation. “Do you think you know my feelings better than I do? You are not always right!”
With great deliberation she turned her back on him. “Is that all you have to say, Dominic?”
“Yes,” his voice was weary as she had never heard it before. “I wanted you to know that the fault lies with me … not with you, Juliana. You are all any man could ever hope to find.”
She turned to him again. “Yet, you are letting me go.”
“You are out of my reach, my darling.”
“Only because you make it so…”
“No. Because you are too fine.” Unexpectedly he took her hand and led her to sit on the bed. “Perhaps if I had told you this from the beginning you would understand.” He paced the length of the chamber considering his words.
“Will and I became friends on the Peninsula. I was with him at Badajoz.” Ignoring her gasp, he continued, “I held him in my arms when he called for his Juliana as he lay dying. There in the midst of those bloody battlefields he had spoken often of his young bride. She was so fine, with glorious copper hair, soft and loving, fierce and protective. There, dying in the mud, horror all around him, his vision of you brought him peace. Somehow thoughts of you also brought me peace. And you became my guardian angel. Everything I did in that war, every risk I took, every battle I fought, was for you.”
He turned away. “I used to imagine you. Safe in the countryside, the dogs gamboling at your skirts as you strolled through fields of flowers. Or dancing, turning to the strains of a waltz, with hundreds of candles reflected in your eyes.”
It brought her happiness to know Will had loved her so. But that was the past. Now she must fight for her future and her love for Dominic.
“Instead, I was nursing a bitter old man who tried to bind me to the past with promises.” She stood and faced him. “As you are trying to do.”
He shook his head, rejecting her words.
“Yes,” she insisted. “Your vision was just a dream. My life has been far from the perfection you imagined. It’s been filled with pain and anger and responsibility. But now, it’s filled again with love. And a chance to start over. You must give us that chance, Dominic.”
“There is no second chance for me.”
Clenching her fists, she rose and stared at him, trying with all the love in her heart to reach out to him. “Why are you doing this? Why are you denying both of us?”
There was
a short silence and then, “I am not the right man for you, Juliana.”
“You are wrong, you know,” she returned quietly. “Nothing you have told me, nothing I have learned, has made me love you less. Dear God, I do not care what you have done. Yesterday belongs to the past. Tomorrow is ours.”
He stopped on his way out, turning to face her. That slight hesitation caused hope to flicker in her heart and a new determination to take root in her mind. She would find a way to break through his barriers.
He did not speak, but only lifted her hand and turning her palm up, pressed his lips there before leaving her.
She had been wrong and Jules right. Dominic did love her, and she would not allow him to throw their happiness away. Mrs. Forbes, granddaughter of a gypsy princess, had told her to follow her heart and that she fully intended to do. She had little time left. Tonight she would seek Jules out and discover what she needed to know to reach Dominic. Nothing else mattered.
Chapter 13
Jules had conquered his nightmares. To reaffirm that, he had requested his old rooms during his stay at the Towers. That the duke and duchess had taken great pains to open the rooms again and make them comfortable for him was evident in the faint scent of paint and beeswax.
Dinner had been nearly impossible. Without George, Charlotte was almost silent, except to deflect one or two of her mother’s most tiring observations. The duke and duchess tried, with help from Sophia and Rodney, to keep the conversation lively with wedding plans. Even the duchess’s grand idea of allowing a dozen pairs of turtledoves to fly overhead in the church during the nuptials, quickly and firmly squelched by the duke, failed to divert. And any chance look at Dominic or Juliana was enough to dampen the evening. Dominic, grim and determined, replied to any observation in a monosyllable; Juliana, eyes brightened with unshed tears, merely smiled and heard nothing. The entire company was relieved when the duchess dismissed them all early to seek their own amusements.
After a brandy by himself in the study, Jules pushed open the door to his sitting room. His valet, holding a thick candle, came out of a doorway at the far end of the corridor.
“I shan’t need you. Go to bed,” Jules called to him softly.
Alone, Jules passed through the sitting room, entered and closed the door to his chamber behind him.
Inside, waiting for him, was Juliana.
He stopped as if he had walked into an invisible wall. Juliana stood in a gown of softest spring green dimity, her rich auburn hair cascading over her shoulders and down her back, looking for all the world as if she had begun preparing for bed, and then changed her mind.
He came several steps into the room and stood looking at her guardedly.
Her eyes, wide and open in the beauty of her face, rested upon him. “I can’t go on like this, Jules. I have come to help you.”
She walked toward him, her hands outspread in entreaty. “But first I must know it all, Jules. All of the ghosts that haunt you and Dominic.”
“I see,” he said. In that moment he paled. He had not expected this and for a moment was set adrift. Finally he moved to stare down into the fire, his fingers resting lightly against the mantelpiece. “Why have you decided to help me?”
“Because I love Dominic. And it seems … what I feel for him … he also feels for me. But there is something keeping us apart. Something besides his rakehell past which makes him feel unworthy of me.”
Jules turned from the fire and sank into the depths of the deep crewel wing chair beside it. He knew Juliana could not clearly see his face in the dimly lit chamber.
“I’m sorry, Juliana. But I was wrong and you were right. We cannot help Dominic. Only he has the key.”
Juliana’s face muscles trembled, but she stilled them. “I cannot let him throw away this gift we have been given.”
“There is only one person who can finally put a stop to the legacy of pain our parents left us. And it is not me. Or you,” Jules said, not unkindly, after a short silence.
At that Juliana turned to the fire and sank down before it as if seeking its small warmth. “Then you have decided not to entrust me with the truth that will enable me to reach him.”
“I find that I, like Dominic, cannot easily lay open that wound to others,” he said evenly.
“I see. Then you, like Dominic, choose to continue wallowing in self-pity,” Juliana said contemptuously.
He moved swiftly, pulling her up and around to confront him. The he saw the ceaseless tears pouring unheeded down her lovely face. Jules found that he could not turn away from the appeal in Juliana’s wide, tear-filled eyes.
“My mother and Charles were an unsuitable match from the moment they met,” Jules began slowly. “They were two people trapped in the net of a grand passion. Leticia’s for my late father, and Charles’s for my mother. It was a tragedy that grew until it affected everyone and everything around them. For as Charles tried to possess my mother, she became more possessive of my father’s memory … while taking lover after lover. She told Charles she was searching for someone who made her feel as my father had.” Jules took a deep breath trying to calm his pulse. Even after all these years it still was not easy.
“After she began to drink, she sometimes imagined me to be my late father, for I greatly resemble him. Charles became so bitter, so disillusioned, that his grand passion turned to hatred. He called her the black widow … soiled by her marriage to my father. Soiled by her lovers.” He hesitated, then the words came swiftly. “Dominic and I were caught in the net with them—pawns in their game of tragedy. Although I tried to keep most of it from Dominic. He was so young then and often away at school, and Leticia spent so little time with him I thought he had been spared the worst. I was wrong. Maybe I made a mistake. It might have been better to acknowledge it, to help him understand.”
Jules stopped when he saw the color rise in Juliana’s cheeks and her soft mouth begin to tremble.
“Please, I must know how it ended,” she whispered.
“That night … my mother and I fought because I could no longer support her possessiveness. I thought if I went away it would somehow help, make her more receptive to Charles. She … she became overwrought. She came to my chamber as I was preparing for bed. She had been drinking deeply. She … she knelt before me, begging me not to leave her … I think she believed me to be my father.” Jules found that he had to turn away from the expression on Juliana’s face to be able to continue.
“That is how Charles and Dominic found us … like lovers.” Forcing himself, he once again looked at Juliana. “It wasn’t true. Juliana! You must believe me—and make Dominic believe me! Charles went mad and shot Leticia and me. He died believing that Leticia and I were lovers. Cursing us. Cursing Dominic. For in his madness he accused Dominic of being tainted like me. That is why he has become what he is. And this is why he feels unworthy of your love.”
Jules’s breathing stopped for a heartbeat at the pity in Juliana’s eyes.
“There is no guilt for either of you, Jules. Somehow we will make him understand.”
Then, for the first time in Jules’s life, a woman embraced him in compassion and friendship, and he rested his wet cheek against the fragrance of her hair.
Dominic could wait no longer. His brother had said to come to him for the truth. If there was to be any hope for him and Juliana, it lay in the truth. He knew what that was, but found he couldn’t resist taking the chance to change his life. Juliana loved him—any risk was worth taking for that precious gift. He had only to walk to Jules’s chamber.
He touched the paneled wooden door to the west wing and found it was not locked. For a moment he heard his father whisper over his shoulder, but he did not look around. Instead, quite softly and steadily he pushed the door open and entered the west wing for the first time since he was eighteen years old.
The quiet and da
rkness of the corridor was absolute. Dominic Crawford stood in the doorway listening, and allowing his eyes, like a cat’s, to enlarge. Slowly, windows grew into his sight, gray against the blackness. Little flares of light in the sky showed him a chest and a large chair placed neatly against the wall. This time he was quite alone. But not then…
His father’s grip on his shoulder was sending a hot ache down his arm, but he did not pull away. Instead he quickened his steps to match his father’s strides. “Come along, boy. Time we found out how the black widow and her son are spending the evening!” His father’s breath reeked of gin and the scent hung about his clothes.
The scent of the corridor was pleasant now. As if the servants had aired it recently and used beeswax on the wainscoting. In the silence his own fitful breathing echoed. It was not how he wanted to sound, but if he could hold back all of the memories, this show of weakness would not matter.
He walked through the dark empty passage and, at last, reached the apartment doors. They were closed, but not locked, he found, and he pushed them open. They had been locked that night…
“Damn her … damn her to hell!” His father raged, beating against the heavy doors with his fist.
“Father, don’t, please!” The young Dominic pleaded and was rewarded with a shove that sent him hurling painfully against the stone wall.
“Leave me be, boy!” His father shouted “I’ll be damned if she is ever again going to lock a door against me.” With that he began kicking at the latch, gripping the dueling pistols, one in each hand Kicking and kicking until, at last, the lock had surrendered to him. The doors swung open to reveal his wife’s sitting room.
Inside it was warm. The flames in the fireplace had sunk to embers giving a rosy glimmer to the room. That night the fire had blazed, lighting the room so that Dominic and his father had immediately seen that the doors to Leticia’s bedchamber were open and there were no candles lit within, but the entrance to Jules’s room was closed to them.
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