by Mary Balogh
Oh, she thought suddenly, he was at work already, was he not? The grand wager- winner? And already he was having some effect upon her. There was a sudden ache in the region of her heart—a fact that, once noticed, made her even more cross.
“Oh, go back to sleep,” she said. “Or back to pretending to sleep.”
But he took her left hand in his instead.
“We are almost there,” he said.
“Home?” She looked through the window beyond his shoulder, but all she could see was fields on the other side of the hedgerows lining the road.
“Cedarhurst,”he said with slight emphasis.
His fingertips were at the base of her little finger and then sliding lightly along it to the tip. Why was she feeling it in her throat?
“Do you still hate it, then?” she asked him. “Is it not home to you? Where is home, then?”
He moved his fingertips to her third finger, and they closed about her wedding ring and turned it slowly. He had pursed his lips, and his eyelids had drooped over his eyes as he watched their hands.
“If you intend always to ask multiple questions, Katherine,” he said, “you must expect my mind to become more and more addled as our marriage progresses. You will end up with the village idiot for a husband.”
She might have laughed, but she did not do so. She wanted answers. A man who hated the home he had always owned but who had nowhere else to call home was someone alien to her. Her husband, in this case. How very little she knew him. Yet she had married him yesterday and shared the intimacy of the marriage bed with him last night. To her, home had always been at the very center of her existence, whether that was the vicarage while her father had still been alive, or the cottage to which they had gone after, or Warren Hall, where they had moved three years ago.
“No, I do not hate Cedarhurst,” he said. “Yes, it is home if it must be labeled at all. The word home is rather like the word love, is it not? Impossible to define and therefore essentially meaningless?”
“Those words are impossible to define precisely because they are words and can only symbolize concepts that are brimful of meaning,” she said. “They symbolize emotions that are too deep for words. But we have to use words because they are one of the primary ways by which we communicate. And so we have to label something vast and fathomless and beyond value with totally inadequate words like home and love. Just as white encompasses all the colors and all the shades of all colors—as you pointed out to me yesterday.”
He drew her ring off over her knuckle and then pressed it back into place before sliding his fingertips along the finger itself and moving on to the middle finger. A smile played over his lips, though his eyes were still hooded.
And now she was feeling it in her breasts.
“I remember telling you once,” he said, “that you are a woman of great and extraordinary passion, Katherine. One day you will learn to direct that passion toward another person instead of to ideas — toward me, I would have to say, since I certainly could not countenance my wife directing it toward any other man, could I?”
He looked up into her eyes, his smile lazy and just a little lopsided. And now her breathingwas suffering.
He looked down at their hands again as his fingertips stroked along her middle finger, causing sensation in her lower abdomen. She firmly ignored it. This was all quite deliberate on his part—to arouse her physically, but very subtly, so that she would fall in love with him. He did not understand at all.
“But to answer your third question,” he said, “there is nowhere else. Nowhere else I call home, I mean. Cedarhurst is it, for better or worse.”
“Like marriage,” she said.
“Like marriage,” he agreed, looking up into her eyes again. “When I spent almost a year at Cedarhurst a while ago, I took the first tentative step toward making it mine.”
“What was that?” she asked him.
“I will show you when we arrive,” he said, his fingertips tracing a path down her forefinger. And her inner thighs were aching.
What was going to happen when he got to her thumb?
It did not happen.
“Ah,” he said suddenly, at the same moment as she became aware of houses appearing beyond the carriage windows.
They were passing through a village. There was a tall church spire a short distance ahead.
He lowered his foot to the floor and straightened up on the seat at last to gaze out. He raised a hand to a few people who stood on the street watching the passing of the carriage. And everyone raised a hand in return, Katherine noticed. A few people smiled too. All looked glad.
An interesting reaction to a landlord who did not spend a great deal of his time here and who even found it difficult to admit that this was home, that he did not actively hate it.
She looked curiously at him as they left the village behind and turned onto what she guessed was the driveway to Cedarhurst. It was broad and tree- lined, though she could see lawns stretching away to either side beyond the trees and water glistening far off to the left.
And then she saw the house up ahead, a grand, solid, square gray stone edifice. The front seemed all windows, the longest on the ground level, slightly smaller ones on the floor above, and smaller ones yet on the top floor below the roof with its stone balustrade decorated with stone statues. There was a massive columned portico in the center of the front facade with wide marble steps leading up beneath it to the front doors.
Below the steps were two wide terraces, one below the other, and below them there was a huge and magnificent square garden sunken below ground level and surrounded by low walls over which spilled banks of yellow and red wallflowers in glorious profusion. The garden itself, Katherine could see as the carriage made its way past it on the left-hand side, was arranged in perfect parterres with graveled walks, low box hedges, beds of flowers and herbs, statues—and a stone sundial at the center.
She said not a word because he did not. He sat beside her, looking out, and he had changed completely. She sensed a tension in him.
But this was home. Not just his, but hers too. She was Baroness Montford of Cedarhurst Park. The reality of it had still not quite sunk in despite yesterday, despite last night, despite now.
And yet she felt a tugging at her heart while seeing her new home for the first time—something she could not remember feeling on her arrival at Warren Hall more than three years ago. A sense that her life, all her future hopes lay here. And the house was beautiful. The sunken garden was so lovely that it brought the ache of tears to her throat.
Of course, she was seeing it all at its best. The sun was shining. There was not a cloud in the sky And it was summertime.
“Ah,” he said, breaking a lengthy silence, and he sounded more himself again. “You see how one’s every actions have repercussions, Katherine? I thought it wise to send word to the housekeeper that I would be bringing a new baroness home with me today as well as a houseful of birthday guests within the next two weeks. And the servants have contrived a way of catching an early glimpse of you without having to peep from forbidden windows or about forbidden screens or doorways.”
The upper terrace had come into full view The carriage was about to turn onto it. In neat rows, looking more like clothed statues than real people, Cedarhurst’s large staff was lined up on the steps, the menservants on one side all in crisp black, the maidservants on the other side, also in black, with white mobcaps and white aprons that fluttered in the breeze.
“A welcoming reception,” Jasper said, sounding half exasperated, half amused. “I hope you are up to it.”
Katherine remembered that the same thing had happened at Warren Hall when she and her sisters arrived there with Stephen. They had all enjoyed it enormously. Stephen had stopped to have a word with everyone.
“Of course I am up to it,” she said, nevertheless feeling her stomach flutter rather uncomfortably. “I am your wife, am I not? The new mistress of Cedarhurst?”
Unbidden, there was a
stirring of excitement at the realization that that was precisely who she was.
“My love.” He was still holding her hand in one of his, she realized as the carriage drew level with the house steps and one of the men, presumably the butler, stepped forward to open the door and set down the steps. “I never did reply to your and one other thing, did I? I agree to your every demand. How could I not when I became your lifelong slave yesterday—entirely from inclination, I must add. And what could be more to my inclination today and every day for the foreseeable future than displaying to my servants, my family and yours, and my friends and yours that I adore you?”
She turned a look of reproach on him, but his head was bent over her hand as he raised it to his lips, the picture of the devoted and besotted bridegroom while every servant from the butler on down to the boot- boy gawked through the open door at them.
She laughed instead.
Trust him to make a joke of it all.
And to look impossibly handsome and—ah, yes—romantic as he did so. She probably imagined the sigh that passed through the ranks of the maids, but it would not be surprising if she had not.
He would give her a tour of the house later, Jasper decided, perhaps tomorrow. She had shown no eagerness to see everything at once. She had shown no eagerness at all, in fact. Not about the house or park, anyway She had said nothing as they approached and he had sat tensely beside her.
What had he expected? Enthusiasm for the home that had been forced upon her?
And did it matter to him what she thought?
Did Cedarhurst matter to him?
He had brought her up to the drawing room after they had inspected the servants. They had walked up the house steps on one side and then back down them on the other—greeting first the maids and then the menservants.
She had smiled warmly at each of them in turn, repeated their names when his housekeeper or his butler presented them to her, and had a word with each.
So had he, actually. It had rather surprised him to see so many old faces —not necessarily old in years, but old in service at Cedarhurst. Did they like working here? Were they well paid? But had he not given the order to raise their wages after the death of his mother’s second husband? And again after his mother’s death?
He had remembered with some surprise as he greeted them all that he had liked most of these people when he lived here—even loved a few of them. They had fed him in the kitchens and washed and bandaged his scrapes and sometimes washed him and his clothes and polished his shoes before his mother’s second husband could see the mud or lake water on them. They had even mended rents in his clothes. They had listened to his stories, some of them extremely tall tales. The gardeners and grooms had sometimes disciplined him themselves rather than complain at the house about his transgressions, sometimes setting him to work with a brush or hoe, occasionally even giving him a swift walloping when he really deserved it. Sometimes they had lied for him, claiming not to know where he was rather than have any of his favorite haunts and hiding places discovered.
It was strange how one could forget huge chunks of one’s life. Those haunts…
The tea tray and a plate of cakes had followed them into the drawing room. Katherine poured their tea but did not take any of the cakes.
“I do hope,” she said, “I will remember at least some of their names and that I will learn them all soon. There are so many of them.”
“There is no need,” he said. “They will not expect it of you.”
And yet, he thought, he knew almost all the servants by name without ever having made a determined effort to do so. And he believed he might remember the names of those who were new—but only because there were not many of them and most of them bore a family resemblance to former or current servants.
“But I expect it of myself” she said. “Servants are people.”
He was always amused rather than irritated by her occasional lapses into primness —a product of her upbringing in a country vicarage, he suspected.
After going back down the steps outside the house while talking with the menservants, she had stood on the terrace, looking up at them all and laughing. The breeze had been wafting the brim of her hat, and the sunlight had caught the gold highlights in her hair. And she had addressed them all with similar words to the ones she had just spoken to him.
“Please forgive me,” she had said, “if I do not remember all your names the next time I see you. But if I still cannot remember one month from now, then I will neither deserve nor expect your forgiveness.”
There had been a ripple of laughter, and Jasper’s guess was that his whole large staff had fallen instantly in love with the new baroness.
He had been rather charmed himself.
She did not sit down in the drawing room. She walked over to one of the long windows and stood looking out, sipping her tea as she did so.
He went to stand a little way behind her.
“I think,” she said, “that is the loveliest garden I have ever seen.”
She was looking down at the parterres.
He closed his eyes briefly, and some of the tension that had been tightening his shoulders and neck since they had turned onto Cedarhurst property eased out of him.
“Is it?” he said.
For a moment he thought she had nothing else to say about it, that she had just been making a polite observation couched in rather lavish praise.
“It is so perfectly constructed,” she said, “with such geometrical precision. Is it exactly square? Do you know? It must be.”
“Down to the last quarter of an inch,” he said.
She laughed softly, thinking that he joked.
“Something so very man- made ought not to be beautiful too, ought it?” she said. “Such a ruthless taming of nature? But it is. Perhaps it says much about human kind’s place in the world. We can impose order and precision upon nature, but we cannot destroy any of its loveliness or enthusiasm.”
“Enthusiasm?” he said.
“Look at the banks of wallflowers spilling down over the walls,” she said. “They are exuberant even though they have been confined to the perimeter of the garden. They give notice that they can be tamed but not destroyed, that they are in no way less powerful than the men who put them there and who see to it that they remain there without encroaching upon the parterres.”
He laughed softly, and she turned her head to look at him.
“Oh, very well,” she said. “Laugh at me. I do not mind.”
“The rest of the park,” he said, “has been laid out according to the theories of Capability Brown and his ilk. There are rolling, tree- dotted lawns and a lake, and a wilderness walk winding through the trees on the far side of it and up through the wooded hills behind the house. All carefully constructed to look artfully natural or naturally artful—I am not sure which is more appropriate. The object, of course, is to make the park look like a piece of wild, unspoiled nature when in reality it is no such thing. The lawns came almost to the very doors until a few years ago.”
“Just a few years?” She turned her head to look back outside.
“The terraces are newly constructed,” he said. “So is the parterre garden. Last year it looked better than the year before, and this year it looks better than last year.”
She was looking at him again, and this time he felt that all her attention was on him.
“Is this that first tentative step you spoke of in the carriage earlier?” she said. “The first step to making Cedarhurst your own?”
“It is one very tiny step, is it not?” he said, raising one eyebrow. “And it took so much energy that I doubt I will ever take another.”
“This is your work,” she said.
“I did not heft a shovel,” he said. “At least, I did, but my contribution to the actual manual labor was minuscule, Katherine. I might have damaged my manicure.”
“And I suppose,” she said, “the design was yours too.”
“Not at all,” he
said. “I lay no claim to artistic vision—or mathematical genius for that matter.”
Though he had insisted that the square be exact, even down to the final quarter of an inch.
“Come,” he said, “I will show you something—if you have finished your tea, that is.”
She drained off the last mouthful and crossed the room to set her cup and saucer on the tray—to save a servant from having to retrieve it from the window ledge, he supposed. Another relic of the vicarage, where presumably there were no servants, or very few?
He led her from the room and into the east wing of the house, where their apartments were—the two east- facing bedchambers, large and square, the dressing rooms on the far side of each, and the private sitting room between.
He ought perhaps to have taken her to her own bedchamber first since she had not even seen it yet. Or at least to the sitting room, where she could be comfortable and quiet during the morning hours whenever she wished. But he took her straight into his own bed chamber.
He had had it completely redecorated and refurnished after his mother’s death—though it had not been used for years before that. He would have gutted the room with fire if he could, but actually the changes he had made had obliterated the presence of his mother’s second husband. Everything was dark blue and gray and silver now
“This is my room,” he said. “Not yours too, you will be relieved to know And there is a whole spacious sitting room between us and probably a lock on your bedchamber door to keep out the wolf.”
“You have made a wager with me,” she said. “I will trust to your honor. Even if there is a key, I will not turn it.”
“Something,” he said, “you may live to regret.”
It was going to be devilishly difficult living up to that condition of celibacy she had added to the wager last night and he had agreed to in a moment of madness — just because it had added another element of the seemingly impossible to the challenge.
“This is what I brought you here to see,” he said, indicating the large painting that hung over the mantel in its gilded, old- fashioned frame.