by Mary Balogh
"Why not?" The question was quietly asked, but it demanded an answer.
Lily was quiet for a long time. Because I am already married. Because I love him. Because I have lain with him and given him, not only my body, but all that is myself. Because… Because, because.
"I cannot," she said at last. "You must know the reason."
"Yes, my dear." Elizabeth reached along the seat and squeezed one of her hands. "It would be trite for me to assure you that time will heal. I have never experienced anything nearly as intense as what you have suffered and are suffering, and so I cannot know for sure that such wounds as yours will ever heal. But you are a woman of great fortitude and strength of character, Lily. I am sure I am correct in that judgment. You will live, my dear. You will not merely drag on an existence. I will give you the benefit of my resources and connections, but I will not be doing anything of substance for you. You will do that for yourself. I have every confidence in you."
Lily was not sure it was well placed. Her spirits, which the game-turned-reality had sent soaring with the excitement of new dreams, were flagging again. With every passing hedgerow and milepost more distance was being set between her and him, and it was a distance that could never again be closed. She was not sure at that precise moment that she wanted even to drag on an existence, let alone make the effort to live.
"Thank you," she said.
"Tell me." Elizabeth spoke again after they had traveled some distance in silence. "What happened to you, Lily, during all those months when Neville thought you dead?"
Lily swallowed. "The truth?" she said.
"It has occurred to me," Elizabeth said, "that the French would have informed the British if they had held an officer's wife captive for any length of time. They might have made a very favorable exchange with one or more of their own officers held by the British. That is not what happened, is it?"
"No," Lily said.
"Lily," Elizabeth said before she could say more, "although I believe you are not going to allow me to forget that you are my employee, I would have you know that you will always be at liberty to guard your privacy from me. You are under no compulsion to tell me anything. But you grew up among men, my dear. Perhaps you have not known the joy of having a friend of your own sex, one who can share your perspective on events and experience."
Lily told her everything, all the painful, sordid, humiliating details she had withheld from Neville that day in the cottage, her head back against the cushions, her eyes closed. By the time she had finished, her hand was in Elizabeth's firm clasp again. Her touch was strangely comforting—a woman's touch signifying a woman's sympathy. Elizabeth would understand what it would be like to be a captive, to have one's freedom taken away, and then, as a final indignity, to have one's very body invaded and used for the pleasure of one's captor. Another woman would understand the monumental inner battle that had had to be waged every single day and night to cling to that something at the core of herself that was herself, that gave her identity and dignity. That something that even a rapist—even, perhaps, a murderer—could not take away from her.
"Thank you," they said simultaneously after a short silence. They both laughed, though not with amusement.
"You know, Lily," Elizabeth told her, "men have the ridiculous notion that one must maintain a stiff upper lip through all the worst disasters of their lives. Women are not so foolish. It is quite all right to cry, my dear."
Lily cried. She sobbed until she thought the pain must tear her in two. She wept, her face in Elizabeth's lap while the older woman smoothed a hand over her hair and murmured nonsense that Lily did not even hear.
Finally Lily straightened up, dried her eyes, blew her nose, and apologized for the damp patch on Elizabeth's skirt. She laughed shakily. "You will think twice," she said, "before inviting me to cry again."
"Does Neville know?" Elizabeth asked.
"The basic facts," Lily said. "Not the details."
"Ah," Elizabeth said. "Good girl. Now. Let us look ahead, shall we, and plan? Lily, my dear, we are going to have fun, fun, fun."
They both laughed again.
***
Neville waited for one month.
He tried to resume his normal life. Except that normal life since his return from the Peninsular Wars had included his very close friendship with his sister and his cousin and his gradual, inevitable courtship of Lauren.
The friendship was strained. He did not want to deceive Lauren into believing that he might resume his courtship of her—and she clearly did not wish to give the impression that she expected it. Gwen was just plain uncomfortable. As Lauren herself had said at dinner the evening before Lily's departure, nothing would ever be the same again.
Yet obviously it was expected that he and Lauren would marry. Neighbors who called at the abbey on any flimsy excuse and who issued more than usually frequent invitations to dinners, card parties, informal dances, and picnics were too well bred to mention the subject openly, but there were all sorts of covert and ingenious ways of hinting and of digging for information.
Might they expect the return of Baron Galton, Miss Edgeworth's grandpapa, to Newbury any time soon? Lady Leigh asked one day. Such a distinguished gentleman!
Was the Countess of Kilbourne planning to return her place of residence to the dower house? Miss Amelia Taylor wished to know. She asked only because it would not be at all the thing for her and her sister to call at the abbey one day to find only his lordship in residence. She blushed at the very idea.
Was his lordship still planning a journey to the Lakes this year? Sir Cuthbert Leigh wondered. His cousin's inlaws had just returned from there and pronounced it a remarkably picturesque and genteel destination.
His lordship must be finding Newbury Abbey rather large and lonely with his sister and his cousin no longer living there, Mrs. Cannadine informed him.
Had his lordship quite recovered from his little upset? Mrs. Beckford, the vicar's wife, asked him in the sort of hushed, sympathetic tones her husband used at deathbeds. She and the reverend were hoping—the hope was accompanied by an arch look that ill became her—that everything would soon be put to rights again.
It was not just the neighbors. The countess too urged a return to the original plan.
"I liked Lily, Neville," she assured him when they were breakfasting together a week after Lily had left. "Despite myself I liked her. She has a sweet, unaffected charm. I was prepared to give her my affection and support for the rest of my life. And I know you were fond of her and have found the past week difficult. You are my son and I know that about you—and my heart has ached for you."
"But?" He smiled at her rather ruefully.
"But she is not your wife," she reminded him, "and does not wish to be. Lauren has been intended for you from infancy. You know each other well; you have a real fondness for each other; you have an equality of mind and education. She would fit into my role here without any painful period of adjustment. She would give stability to your life and children to the nursery. I long for grandchildren, Neville. You would not understand, perhaps, the disappointment I felt when Gwendoline miscarried as a result of her accident—as well as grief for her. But I stray from the main point. You had decided to marry Lauren. You were happy with the decision. You were literally at the altar awaiting her. Put the turmoil of the past few weeks behind you and pick up the threads of your life where you left them off. For everyone's sake."
He reached across the table and took one of her hands in both his own. "I am truly sorry, Mama," he said. "But no." He tried to think of an explanation that would make sense to her, but he knew that none would. And he could not bare his heart even to his mother. "Let us all give it time," he added lamely.
It seemed that his life these days was made up of waiting, giving himself time. He waited longer than a week for an answer to the letter he had written to regimental headquarters the morning of Lily's departure. But at last it came—he had half expected the problem to be far more difficu
lt, if not impossible, to solve. He had not posted the letter but had sent it, with specific verbal instructions, with his valet, who had once been his batman, a burly, rather morose man who had always served his master's interests well by refusing to budge an inch in the course of duty. The answer gave Neville something to do—and an excuse for leaving the abbey, which had become oppressive to him.
He might have sent another messenger to make further inquiries. But he chose instead to go in person to Leavenscourt in Leicestershire, where Thomas Doyle's belongings had been sent after their return to England. Doyle's father was a groom at the manor of Leavenscourt.
It was a long journey through weather that had turned wet and blustery and chilly. Neville was forced to travel in a closed carriage, something he always found tedious in the extreme. And he expected to find nothing at the end of the journey. But at least, he thought as he kicked his heels in the taproom of the rickety apology for an inn the weather had forced him to put up at one night—at least he was doing something. Newbury had become abhorrent to him, and so much there reminded him of Lily. He had even made the mistake of spending one night at the cottage, lying where they had lain on the bed, filled with such a vast emptiness that he had not even been able to force himself to move, to get out of there.
Leavenscourt was a small but prosperous-looking property. He looked about him with some curiosity as he approached the house. This was where Doyle had grown up? The family was not in residence and his appearance threw the housekeeper into consternation. She stared at him when he explained that he had come to speak with Mr. Doyle, one of the grooms, father of the late Sergeant Thomas Doyle of the Ninety-fifth. She even forgot to keep bobbing curtsies.
Henry Doyle, it seemed, had been dead these four years and more.
Neville felt a door slamming in his face. "I understand," he said, "that the regiment returned Sergeant Doyle's belongings here after his death more than eighteen months ago. Would you know anything about those, ma'am?"
"Oh." She curtsied. "I daresay they were given to William Doyle, my lord. Henry Doyle's son, that is."
Ah. "And where may I find William Doyle?" he asked.
"He is dead, my lord," she told him. "He died about a year ago in a nasty accident, my lord."
"I am sorry to hear it," Neville said. And he was too. Two men who would have been perhaps Lily's only surviving relatives were both dead. "Would you know, ma'am, what happened to his belongings?"
"I daresay Bessie Doyle has them, my lord," she said. "She is William's widow. She still lives in the cottage. She has two growing lads and the master was too kind of heart to turn them out. She takes in laundry."
Lily's aunt—and her cousins.
"Perhaps," he said, "you would direct me to the cottage, ma'am."
The housekeeper, considerably flustered again, assured his lordship that she could have Bessie summoned to the house, but he declined her offer and was given the directions he needed.
Bessie Doyle was a stout, florid-faced woman of middle years. She kept an untidy home, though it looked clean enough. She greeted the sight of a fashionably dressed earl on her doorstep with an assessing head-to-toe glance and hands firmly planted on ample hips.
"If it is laundry you has for me," she told him, "you have come to the right place. Though I do not answer for fancy boots like them there after they have tramped through the mud. You had better wipe your feet if you intends to come inside."
Neville grinned at her. The tail of the army was full of Bessie Doyles, strong, capable, practical women who would have greeted the whole of Napoleon Bonaparte's army with hands on hips and some tart remark on their lips.
Yes, Bessie remembered the letter that had come to tell them about Thomas's getting killed—Will had taken it to the vicar to read. And yes, this was where his stuff had been sent—useless junk all of it. It had been in a heap over there—she pointed to a corner of the room in which they stood—when she came back from nursing her old mum, who had not died after all, as it happened, though Will had. She had been called back from her mother's a few miles away with the news that he had fallen from his horse and knocked his brains out on a stone when he landed.
"I am very sorry," Neville told her.
"Well," she said philosophically, "at least it proved that he did have brains, didn't it? Sometimes I wondered."
Bessie Doyle, Neville gathered, was not an inconsolably grieving widow.
"I burned the stuff," she told him before he could ask. "The whole bloody lot."
Neville closed his eyes briefly. "Did you look through it carefully first?" he asked her. "Was there no letter, no package, no—no money, perhaps?"
The very idea of money drew a short bark of laughter from Mrs. Doyle. Will, in her wifely opinion, would have drunk it up in a hurry if there had been.
"P'raps that was what made him fall off," she said, but it was not a serious suggestion. "No, course there weren't no money. Tom wouldn't have kept no money for the likes of Will to get his hands on after he croaked, would he now?"
"Thomas Doyle had a daughter," Neville told her.
Well, Bessie Doyle did not know about that and showed no burning desire to learn anything about her long-lost niece. Her lads were going to be home from the stables soon, she told his lordship. They worked there. And they were going to be hungry enough to eat an ox apiece.
Neville took the remark as a hint to be on his way. But something caught his eye as he turned to leave—a military pack hanging from a nail beside the door.
"Was that Thomas Doyle's?" he asked, pointing at it.
"I daresay it was," she said. "It was the only useful thing out of the whole lot. But filthy? Had to scrub it to a thread, I did, before I could use it." It was stuffed full of rags.
"May I have it?" Neville asked her. "May I buy it from you?" He took his purse out of his pocket and withdrew a ten-pound note from it. He held it out to her.
She eyed it askance. "Are you daft?" she asked his lordship. "That is more than I and the lads earn in a year between us. For that old bag?"
"Please." Neville smiled. "If ten pounds are not enough, I will double the amount."
But Bessie Doyle had her pride. His lordship of the expensive muddy boots might be daft, but she was no robber. She emptied the contents of the pack onto the floor, handed it over with one hand, and took the ten pounds with the other.
The clean, misshapen pack that had been his sergeant's lay on the carriage seat opposite the one on which Neville sat all the way back to Newbury. It would be Lily's one memento of her father. He would have paid a hundred pounds for it—a thousand. But he felt disappointment too. Had Mrs. Doyle inadvertently burned a letter or some sort of package that had contained something more personal for Lily?
Neville had given himself a month to remain at Newbury before removing to his town house in London. Two weeks had passed by the time he returned from Leicestershire. Only half of a month with half still to go! And even then, the faint hope that had sustained him might well prove to have been illusory. Lily, he suspected, would not easily be persuaded to change her mind.
But just before the month was over, before he had decided upon an actual date for his departure, a small package arrived from Elizabeth.
"I have procured you this," she had written in a short note, "having let it be known that you are planning to come to town soon. You may wish to be in attendance, Neville."
The accompanying invitation was to a ball at Lady Ashton's on
Cavendish Square
.
Neville nodded his head to the emptiness of the library. "Yes," he said aloud. "Oh yes, Elizabeth. I'll be there."
Chapter 18
Lady Ashton's annual ball on
Cavendish Square
was always one of the Season's great squeezes. It was the ball at which Lady Elizabeth Wyatt had decided to introduce her companion to society.
Elizabeth had many friends and acquaintances. A number of them had called upon her during the month sin
ce her return to town, and she had done a great deal of visiting herself. She had also attended a number of evening entertainments. But no one had met her new companion, Miss Doyle, or shown any great curiosity about her until Elizabeth let drop, as if by accident, at a dinner one evening shortly before the Ashton ball the information that Lily Doyle and the woman who had caused such a stir at the Earl of Kilborne's wedding at Newbury earlier in the spring were one and the same person.
Everyone knew about Lily. She was perhaps the most famous, or the most notorious, woman in England during that particular spring—among members of the beau monde, at least. Even her appearance in the church at Newbury, completely disrupting one of the greatest ton weddings of the year, was surely enough to have fed conversations for the whole Season and beyond. But long before that sensation had begun to die, the rest of the deliciously bizarre story was revealed—Lily was not after all the Countess of Kilbourne because her marriage to the earl had never been properly registered.
Lily's story had been told and discussed in every fashionable drawing room and dining room in London. There were so many unanswered questions that there were unending issues for debate: Who was she? Why had Kilbourne married her? Why had he never told anyone? Where exactly had she been during all the time Kilbourne had thought her dead? What had happened when Kilbourne had discovered the truth about the legality of the marriage? Had she begged on bended knee that he marry her again? Was it true that she had threatened to throw herself off a cliff to be dashed on the rocks below? Had anyone heard for sure how large a settlement Kilbourne had been forced to make on her? Was she really as vulgar as everyone said she was? Where had she gone? Was it true that she had run off with half the earl's fortune and one of his grooms to boot? When was Kilbourne to marry Miss Edgeworth? Would they decide upon a quiet wedding this time? Was it true that Miss Edgeworth had spurned the earl's offer? And who was this Lily? Was she really just the daughter of a common soldier?