by Mary Balogh
They were walking, not along the hard level sand of the beach, but down it. They stopped at the water's edge. If only they were still separated by the ocean's expanse, Lily thought. If only she had stayed in Portugal. It would have been better for both their sakes.
He would have married the other woman.
She would not have known that he had forgotten her so soon, that she had meant so little to him.
"You are alive." He had dropped her hand at last, but he turned to her now, gazed into her face with searching eyes, and lifted one hand. He hesitated before touching his fingertips to her cheek. "Lily. Oh, my dear, you are alive!"
"Yes." She had reached her journey's end. Or perhaps merely the beginning of another. He stood there in all the splendor of the Earl of Kilbourne.
***
Neville realized suddenly that he was standing on the beach, at the water's edge. He had no idea why he had come here of all places. Except that the house would soon be filled with guests again. And this was where he always came to be alone. To think.
But he was not alone now. Lily was with him. He was touching her. She was warm and alive. She was small and thin and pretty and shabby, her long hair blowing wildly in the wind.
She was—oh, God, she was Lily.
"Lily," he asked, and he squinted out to sea, though he did not really see either the water or the infinity beyond it, "what happened?"
He had been carried off unconscious from that pass. Lieutenant Harris had told him in the hospital that Lily and eleven of the men, including the chaplain, the Reverend Parker-Rowe, had died. But the company had been forced to make their escape carrying only their packs and their wounded with them. They had had to leave the dead and their belongings for the returning French to plunder and bury.
Guilt had gnawed at Neville in the year and a half since then. He had failed to protect his men from harm. He had failed Sergeant Doyle. He had failed Lily—his wife.
"They took me to Ciudad Rodrigo," she said, "and a surgeon dug the bullet out of me. It missed my heart by a whisker, he told me—it was the word he used. He spoke English. A few of them did. They were kind to me."
"Were they?" He turned his head and looked sharply down at her. "They found your papers, Lily? They treated you well? With respect?"
"Oh, yes," she said, looking up at him. He remembered then the large, guileless eyes as blue as a summer sky. They had not changed. "They were very kind. They called me 'my lady.' " She smiled fleetingly.
Relief made him feel slightly weak at the knees. The shock was beginning to wear off, he realized. He should be married now and on his way back to the abbey for breakfast—with Lauren, his wife. Instead he was standing on the beach in his wedding finery with—his wife. He felt a renewed wave of dizziness.
"They kept you in captivity and treated you well?" he said. "When and where did they release you, Lily? Why was I not informed? Or did you escape?"
Her gaze lowered to his chin. "They were attacked soon after we left Ciudad Rodrigo," she said. "By Spanish partisans. I was taken captive."
He felt further relief. He even smiled. "Then you were safe," he said. "The partisans are our allies. They escorted you back to the regiment? But that must have been months ago, Lily. Why did no one notify me?"
She was turning, he noticed, to look back up the beach toward the valley. Her hair blew forward over her shoulders, hiding her face from his gaze.
"They knew I was English," she said. "But they would not believe I was a prisoner. I was not confined, you see. And they would not believe that I was an officer's wife. I was not dressed like one. They thought I was with the French as a—as a concubine."
He felt as if his heart had performed a complete somersault in his chest. He opened his mouth to speak, but he could scarcely get the words out.
"But your papers, Lily…"
"The French had taken them and not returned them to me," she said.
He closed his eyes tightly and kept them closed. The Spanish partisans were notorious for the savagery with which they treated their French captives. How would they have treated a French concubine, even if she was English? How had she escaped horrible torture and execution?
He knew how.
He gasped air into his lungs. "You were with them… for a long time?" he asked. He did not wait for her answer. "Lily, did they…"
Had all of Doyle's worst fears been realized? And his own? But he did not need to hear the answer. It was pitifully obvious. There was no other possible answer.
"Yes," she said softly.
Silence stretched before she continued speaking. Somewhere a seagull was crying, and it was easy to imagine that the sound was mournful.
"After many months—seven—an English agent joined them for a few days and convinced them to let me go. I walked back to Lisbon. Nobody there would believe my story until by chance Captain Harris came to Lisbon on some business. He and Mrs. Harris were returning to London. They brought me with them. The captain wanted to write to you, but I would not wait. I came. I had to come. I needed to tell you that I was still alive. I tried last night when there was a p-party at the house, but they thought I was a beggar and wanted to give me sixpence. I am sorry it had to be this morning. I—I will not stay now that I have told you. If you will… pay my way on the stage, I will go… somewhere else. I think there is a way of ending a marriage for what I have done. If you have money and influence, that is, and I daresay you do. You must do it and then you can… continue with your plans."
To marry someone else. Lauren. She suddenly seemed like someone from another lifetime.
Lily was referring to divorce. For adultery. Because she had allowed herself to be raped as an alternative to torture and execution—if she had even been given the choice. Because she had set her face toward survival. And had survived.
Lily raped.
Lily an adulteress.
His sweet, lovely innocent.
"Lily." It was not his imagination that she was thinner. Her slender frame had used to have a lithe grace. Now it looked gaunt. "When did you last eat?"
It took her awhile to answer. "Yesterday," she said. "At noon. I have a little money. Perhaps I can buy a loaf of bread in the village."
"Come." He took her hand in his again. Hers was cold now and limp. "You need a warm bath and a change of clothes and a good meal and a long sleep. Do you have no belongings with you?"
"My bag," she said, looking down as if she expected it to appear suddenly in her empty hand. "I think I must have dropped it somewhere. I had it when I went into the village this morning. I was going to buy breakfast. And then they told me about—about your wedding."
"It will be found," he assured her. "It does not matter. I am going to take you home."
Into complications his mind could not even begin to contemplate.
***
"It is not that I think of you as a servant, Lily," Neville explained—the first words either of them had spoken since they left the beach, "but this way we may avoid the worst of the crowds."
The door through which they entered Newbury Abbey was not at the front. It was, Lily gathered, a servants' entrance. And the bare stone steps they ascended inside must be servants' stairs. They were deserted. The rest of the house certainly was not, if all the carriages that were before the stables and coach house and on the terrace were any indication. And there were people on the terrace too, standing together in small groups—some of those richly clad wedding guests who had been in the church.
Neville opened a door onto a wide corridor. It was carpeted and lined with paintings and sculptures and doors. They were in the main part of the house now, then. And there were three people there in conversation with one another, who stopped talking and gazed curiously at her and looked embarrassed and greeted Neville uncertainly. He nodded curtly to them but said not a word. Neither did Lily, whose hand was still in his firm clasp.
And then he opened one of the doors and released her hand in order to set his at the back of he
r waist to move her into the room beyond the door. It was a large, square, high-ceilinged room. There were gilded moldings all about the edges of the ceiling, she saw in one glance upward, and a painting on the ceiling that included fat, naked little babies with wings. Two long windows showed her that the room faced over the front of the house. It was a bedchamber, richly carpeted and sumptuously furnished. The bed was canopied and draped in heavy silk. The dusky pink and moss-green colors of the room's furnishings and draperies blended pleasingly together.
Lily had never seen anything half so grand in her life—except perhaps the great hall she had glimpsed the evening before.
"I shall have food and drink brought up immediately."
Neville said, striding across the room to pull on a tasseled strip of silk beside the bed, "and then I shall have hot water carried up to the dressing room for a bath. It should be possible to retrieve your bag, but for now I am sure a nightgown and a dressing gown can be found for you. You must sleep then, Lily. You look weary."
Yes, she was tired, she supposed. But weariness had been a condition of her life for so long that she hardly recognized it for what it was. She knew she was hungry, though she was not at all sure she would be able to eat. His tone was brisk and formal. It was not at all the joyful homecoming she had imagined—or the horrified rejection she had feared. He knew what had happened to her, yet he had brought her to the house, to this grand apartment.
"Is this your room?" she asked him. She did not know what to call him. "Neville" seemed too familiar, even though she was his wife. She would have felt comfortable calling him "sir," but he was no longer an officer and she was no longer a part of his regiment. She could not bring herself to call him "my lord." And so she called him nothing.
"It is the countess's room," he said. He nodded toward a door in the room she had not yet seen beyond. "You will find the dressing room through there."
The countess? The countess would be his wife or his mother. He would hardly have put her in his mother's room. That tall lady at the church was to have been his wife, his countess. But he had been unable to marry her because he was already married to herself, to Lily. That made her… the countess. Did it? She really had not thought of it before. She had been startled when her French captors had called her "my lady" and she had realized that she was Viscountess Newbury. But that had been a long, long time ago.
"It is to be my room?" she asked. "I am to stay, then?" She had never really thought beyond the end of the journey.
She had known deep down that an earl would surely rid himself of a sergeant's daughter at the slightest excuse—and the Earl of Kilbourne would have an excuse that was hardly slight. But she had tried to focus on the fact that the Earl of Kilbourne was also Major Lord Newbury. Her Major Newbury, the man she had always admired, trusted, adored. Neville. Her husband. Her lover. Her love. But she knew, standing in the countess's room, that she had never really expected a happily ever after. Only some sort of completion.
"Lily." He stepped toward her, and she could see that he was as uncertain and bewildered as she. More so, perhaps. He had had no warning of what was to happen to him this morning. "Let us not look beyond the moment. You are alive. You are here. And you are in the countess's room. To eat and to rest. Do both before we speak further."
"Yes. All right." Yes, she wanted oblivion more than anything else in this world. She did not know how to stay on her feet any longer, how to keep her eyes open, how to focus her mind on anything more than its need for sleep.
The door opened behind Lily and she turned to see a young girl in crisp black dress and white apron and mob cap, saucer-eyed and curtsying. Neville gave her instructions while Lily walked over to the window and gazed out with heavy-lidded eyes. He was ordering enough food to feed an army. And a hot bath—what an unbelievable luxury!
He came to stand behind her after the maid had left. "I will stay until the tray arrives," he said. "I shall leave you alone then while you eat. There will be water and night clothes awaiting you in the dressing room by the time you have finished. Then you must lie down and sleep. I shall come back for you later. We will talk then."
"Thank you, sir," she said, and immediately felt foolish.
She wondered suddenly if she had merely imagined that once upon a time, for one brief night, there had been a glorious flowering of love—strangely mingled with deep grief for her father. Both emotions had been shared with this man, this stranger who was her husband. Love—or what sometimes went by the name of love—had been so very ugly since that night that it was hard to believe it ever could be beautiful. But it had been. Once. Once in her life. With him—with Major Lord Newbury. With Neville.
It had been the most beautiful experience of her life. All the love she had stored secretly in her heart since she first knew him had culminated in that night of carnal passion. And she had believed—she had felt—that it was a shared love, though she had learned since that men were capable of passion without feeling one iota of love. They could even murmur endearments.
Had she imagined that Neville had felt both that night? In her naivete had she imagined it—or in the need she had felt during the months following that night to believe that once, for one short night, she had loved a man who had loved her in return?
The tray arrived while she was lost in memory and was set down on an elegant little table. Neville drew back a chair, and when Lily went toward it, he seated her and pushed the chair closer. There really was enough food for an army. She looked hungrily at a couple of boiled eggs while he poured her a cup of tea.
"I will leave you in privacy now," he said then, taking her right hand in both of his. "I can't express to you how glad I am that you did not die, Lily. I am glad you survived everything else." He raised her hand to his lips and kissed the backs of her fingers before turning and leaving the room and closing the door quietly behind him.
Was he glad? she wondered, staring after him. Apart from the fact that he was not a cruel man and would not wish for her death, was he glad! That she had survived, yes, perhaps. But that she had come back into his life to complicate it? Was he glad that it had happened through some ghastly coincidence on his wedding day to another woman?
How could he possibly be glad? Especially knowing the truth of what had happened to her.
Who was his intended bride? Lily wondered. She was beautiful. Lily had not had a good look at her, and her face had been covered by the veil of her bonnet, but she had given an impression of grace and elegance and beauty. Did he love her? Did she love him? Were they perfect for each other? Had they been minutes away from a happily ever after?
But such thoughts were pointless. And it was impossible to think when every thought was like a leaden weight pressing down on her eyelids. Lily picked up the cup of tea and sipped the warm liquid. She closed her eyes in sheer bliss.
If only, she thought, she had been able to recover her father's pack after she had returned to Lisbon. But far too much time had elapsed. It had probably been sent back to England, she was told eventually, to some surviving relative, unless it had been simply lost or destroyed. Papa had had a father and brother living somewhere—was it in Leicestershire? Lily did not know for sure, and she had never met them. Her father had been estranged from them. But he had told her over and over again as she grew up that if he were to die suddenly she must take his pack to a senior officer and have him look at the package inside. It was her key to a secure future, he had always said, just as the gold locket she had always worn was her talisman.
She supposed her father had been saving some of his wages for her all his life. She had no idea how much money there might have been in the packet. It probably would not have been enough to last long, but it might at least have got her back to England and into some decent employment. If she had been able to find it, she need not have come here to Newbury Abbey. Though she would have done so anyway. The only thought that had sustained her through her two captivities had been the thought of him and the hope of seeing hi
m again. She had not really thought of the impossibility of it all until recently, after her arrival in England. And especially last evening, when she had seen and then entered his home and his world.
She was his wife—but she was also by strict definition an adulteress.
If she had found the pack and the money, she would have had an alternative now…
But just as she had finished eating one of the eggs and was biting into her second piece of toast, Lily closed her eyes tightly and fought a wave of panic. Her locket! It was in her missing bag. She had not worn it for a long time, as the chain had broken when Manuel ripped it from her neck. But by some miracle he had returned it to her when he released her. She had not let it out of her possession since—until this morning.
Would Neville find her bag? She would have rushed out herself in search of it, but she did not know that she would be able to find her way out of the house. And she might meet people on her way. No, she would have to trust him to find it for her.
But the thought of losing the last link with her father brought on a wave of nausea, and she could eat no more.
She got to her feet and crossed to the dressing room door, swaying with exhaustion as she did so. She turned the ornate handle gingerly.
Chapter 5
The Countess of Kilbourne had taken charge of a very embarrassing situation, having recovered somewhat from her shock at the church. The house guests would be coming for breakfast. She had given directions that it was to be served in the ballroom, as planned. As many obvious signs as possible that it had been intended as a wedding breakfast were to be removed—the white bows and the wedding cake, for example.
The ballroom was by no means full, but it was full enough for all that. Several of the guests, the countess included, had changed out of their wedding finery and wore clothes more suited to early afternoon. Despite what they might have talked about in and outside the church and during their return to the abbey, good manners prevailed at breakfast. Polite conversation was the order of the day. Any stranger wandering into the ballroom would scarcely have guessed that the meal in progress was to have been a wedding breakfast but the wedding itself had met with catastrophic disaster—or that both family members and guests were close to bursting with curiosity to know more.