by Mary Balogh
“Oh, yes,” she said, and she moved closer to it.
“In a fit of desperate boredom a few years ago,” he said, “after it had rained steadily for days on end, I made a foray into the attic storage rooms and discovered this, its face to the wall. It is a view from the house a century or more ago. Before the parterres were destroyed in the name of modernity and the artfully natural look. I fell in love.”
She whisked around, her eyes alight with merriment.
“Did you, indeed?” she said.
He shrugged.
“As you so eloquently explained earlier,” he said, “many words merely symbolize what cannot be expressed verbally. Clichés do the same thing when one is too lazy even to try to find original words. I knew immediately when I looked at this painting that if I were ever going to live at Cedarhurst, this is what I must look out upon from the drawing room or from the front steps of the house. And so I gave the necessary orders. Sometimes it is a great advantage to have both power and wealth.”
She was looking at the painting again.
“But here,” she said, “there is only one terrace with the parterres below it. And they are not sunken. They are not surrounded by a wall and banks of flowers.”
“For very pride’s sake,” he said, “I could not just make a slavish copy I had to add something of my own.”
“Or something of yourself,” she said, more to herself than to him. “Adding a lower terrace and sinking the garden below ground level are brilliant adaptations.”
“Are they?” he said. He felt absurdly pleased. “How kind you are, Katherine.”
She clucked her tongue and turned to face him again.
“I thought so from the sound of your voice,” she said. “You have retreated behind your usual disguise to deceive me into thinking that you do not care. This garden was not just one small, tentative step, was it? It was a bold stride to assert your personhood.”
He grinned at her—though he actually felt as far from being amused as he had ever felt. He felt rather exposed, actually And slightly foolish. Perhaps he ought not to have brought her here.
“There must be a wonderful feeling of seclusion and peace in that garden,” she said.
“It is my hope,” he said, “that you will find both there in the coming years, Katherine. Though I hope too that your desire for seclusion will not always exclude me.” He raised his eyebrows.
She gazed at him without speaking for a few moments.
“I realize,” she said, “that I dug a deep hole for myself last night when I made that wager with you. For the next month I will not know when you speak sincerely or when you speak merely to win the wager.”
He almost fell in love with her then. Her eyes looked sad.
He smiled slowly, deliberately drooping his eyelids again just because he knew it would annoy her and make her forget to be sad.
“That,” he said, possessing himself of her right hand, “is the challenge of the game, Katherine. The fun of the game, if you will. And there is a third alternative, you know. Perhaps I speak from both sincerity and a determination to win my bet.”
“Hmm,” she said, a quirk to her lips.
He raised her hand to his lips and kissed her palm. Then he folded her fingers one at a time over the spot he had kissed.
“Keep it safe,” he said. “It is a small token from someone who adores you.”
She laughed softly.
“You are a rogue,” she said. “You really are.”
“Come,” he said. “I will show you your own apartments.”
She liked the parterre gardens. No, she loved them. And she got the point of them. Beauty and peace. He had never assigned those actual words to what he had done to his home, but they were perfect.
That was exactly what he had tried to impose upon a place that had always belonged to him yet had never been quite his.
17
“T H E housekeeper—Mrs. Siddon,” Katherine said at breakfast the following morning, determined to use names from the start so that she would not forget them, “sent word to my room that she is willing to show me the house this morning if you need to be busy with your steward—Mr. Knowles, I believe?”
“Hang Knowles,” Jasper said. “Or rather, since I cannot think the man guilty of any capital offense, hang the idea of my spending my first morning at home with him and the account ledgers. I would rather spend it with you. I will show you the house myself.”
And they spent the bulk of the morning wandering from room to room while Katherine became aware of just how grand a mansion Cedarhurst Park was —and of how surprisingly knowledgeable he was about it.
She was awed by the state apartments on the ground floor, where he took her first, and their gilded splendor. She gazed at carved friezes and elaborately painted coved ceilings, at heavy velvet draperies and brocaded bed hangings and wooden floors so shiny that she could almost see her face in them when she leaned forward, at elegant, ornate furnishings. She was amazed at the size of each room, particularly the ballroom, which was vast.
“Is it ever used?” she asked as they stepped inside the double doors. “Are there ever enough people to fill it?”
French windows stretched along much of the wall opposite. There was a small balcony beyond them, she could see. The wall on either side of the doors was all mirrors. If one stood in the middle of the room, Katherine thought, one would have the impression of doors and light and openness stretching in both directions.
“Not by London standards,” he said. “Nothing that could be called by that flattering term a great squeeze. But there used to be a Christmas ball to impress all the local gentry for miles around. There was even once a tradition, I have been told, of inviting everyone to Cedarhurst—not just the gentry but everyone —for a summer fete and ball in the gardens and the ballroom.”
“You have been told,” she said. “You do not remember those fetes, then?”
“Oh, goodness me, no,” he said. “We were of far too great a consequence to continue that vulgar tradition. Besides, worse than being vulgar, it was sinful. Evil. The work of the devil.”
Who were we? She did not ask. But she could guess that he spoke of his stepfather.
“And are you of too great a consequence?” she asked him.
“To revive the tradition?” he asked her. “It sounds like a great deal of hard work, Katherine. I am not sure I am up to it.”
“You do not need to be,” she said. “You have a wife now.”
He grimaced.
“Thank you for reminding me,” he said. “That fact caused me a rather restless night, you know. I suppose you slept like the proverbial baby?”
“I slept very well after the long journey, thank you,” she lied. She had actually been terribly aware that it was the second night of her marriage but that her bridegroom was sleeping—or not sleeping—alone just two rooms removed from hers when just the night before …
“As I thought,” he said, “cruel heart.”
And he looked soulfully at her and then grinned.
“Perhaps,” she said, “we could revive it for Charlotte’s birthday and give her a party that will be grander and more memorable than anything she has imagined.”
“The fete?” he said, raising both eyebrows. “The ball? This year? In less than one month’s time?”
“Why not?” she said, suddenly caught up in the excitement of such a wildly impossible scheme. “It would be a wonderful way to involve the whole neighborhood and countryside in a joint celebration of Charlotte’s growing up and our marriage.”
He looked at her and cocked one eyebrow
“I have an alarming suspicion,” he said, “that I have married an enthusiastic wife. Do tell me I am wrong.”
She laughed.
“I think it would be a splendid idea,” she said. “If you will agree, that is.”
He raised both eyebrows.
“IfI agree?” he said. “I am merely the master here, am I not—as I always have been
? Y ou are the mistress, Katherine. You will do as you please.”
Oh, she would indeed. But although he had spoken with the sort of lazy irony that was characteristic of him, there was something about the words themselves that caught her attention and made her look more closely at him—you will do as you please rather than you may do as you please.
“You are not merely the master here,” she said. “You are the master. It must be what you wish too.”
“To run three- legged races and egg- and- spoon races all afternoon and taste two dozen fruit tarts and view twice that many embroidered cloths and handkerchiefs before naming a winner and have my ears murdered by the shrieking of children at play?” he said with an elaborate shudder. “And then to trip the light fantastic all evening in a succession of vigorous country dances? Katherine, you know how much I love to dance.”
And yet she had the curious impression that he was pleased, that he wanted the fete to be revived. It was his stepfather who had put an end to a tradition that had been upheld by his father and grandfather and perhaps even generations before that. Now he could restore it.
“We might allow one waltz,” she said. “I might even be persuaded to reserve it for you.”
He raised one eyebrow
“Ah. Well, in that case,” he said, “I capitulate on everything. Organize this fete and ball by all means. I will waltz with you at the latter so that you will not be a wallflower—a dreadful fate for a lady, or so I have heard. You will doubtless call upon me if you need my assistance with anything else.”
“Oh, I will,” she assured him, smiling. “Are we going to call upon your… upon our neighbors soon?”
“We?” He grimaced.
“Of course,” she said. “You must introduce me. It is surely expected, though I suppose some people will think it more appropriate to come here to pay their respects to us. That is what happened after Stephen went to Warren Hall. Let us forestall them and go call on them. It will give you a chance to show everyone how much you love me, how much we love each other. It will help us to begin our life here on the right footing.”
She had woken this morning full of energy and full of hope, though hope for exactly what she did not know Perhaps their marriage need not be the dreadful thing she had imagined during the month before their wedding, when she had seen very little of her betrothed and had never been alone with him.
“And so it will,” he said, his eyes suddenly amused. “It will be done, then. But why are we standing here in the ballroom doorway when there is far more to see? The gallery is at the far side of the state rooms, but it is full of ancient family portraits which can be of no interest whatsoever to you. I will show you some of the family apartments you have not yet seen.”
“But I would like to see the gallery,” she said.
“Would you?” He looked surprised.
It was long and high- ceilinged, a companion piece to the ballroom at the other side of the main floor, though narrower. It ran the full width of the house with windows at both ends to provide light. There were marble busts in every second alcove, cushioned benches in the others. The floor gleamed. The walls were hung with portraits. It would be the perfect place for exercise in rainy weather.
Katherine walked from one to the other of the paintings while Jasper explained who the subjects were and what relationship they bore to him. She had not realized how ancient a family the Finleys were. There were portraits reaching back to the fifteenth century
“You know everything about all these paintings and the history of your family,” she said. “I am surprised— and impressed.”
“Are you?” he said. “But they are exclusively mine, you see. And I spent a great deal of time up here as a boy”
She wondered if he realized how much he had revealed to her in those few words.
They moved on until they came to the final two portraits.
“My mother,” he said of the first. “And my father.”
His mother, brown- haired and dressed in the fashion of twenty years or more ago, was plump and pretty and placidly smiling as she sat at an embroidery frame, a small dog like a bundle of fur at her feet. Katherine could see no resemblance to either Jasper or Charlotte— or Rachel.
His father, on the other hand, looked very much like Jasper even down to the mockingly raised right eyebrow He was slender and dark and handsome. And he was about the same age in the portrait as Jasper was now.
“It was painted only a few months before his death,” Jasper said. “A few months before my birth.”
“How did he die?” she asked.
“He broke his neck,” he told her, “jumping a hedge on a wet, muddy day He was in his cups —a not unusual state with him, apparently.”
“I am sorry,” she said.
“Why?” he asked. “Did you cause him to drink? Or to jump that hedge when apparently there was an open gate not twenty yards away?”
“Sorry for you,” she explained.
“Why?” he said again. “He was no loss to me. I never knew him. Though I resemble him to an uncanny degree—or so I have always been told. In looks and every other imaginable way”
She turned away from the portrait to look at him. There was, she realized with sudden shock, a world of pain locked up in this mocking, careless, rakish man she had married. Perhaps it had not been such a good idea to have insisted that they come in here. Or perhaps it had. He had spoken with unaccustomed bitterness. Was it worth trying to penetrate his defenses?
“Ah, those eyes,” he said, cupping her chin with one hand. “They are what first drew me to you, you know, in those long- ago days when I dared not admire any respectable lady lest her mama snare me in her net and whisk me off to the altar. But I would not have been able to resist your eyes, Katherine, even if you had been surrounded by half a dozen mothers. Do you know how deep, how fathomless, they are, how they draw in the beholder to… Ah. To what? To your soul? To rest there in peace?”
With the pad of his thumb he traced the seam of her lips, sending shivers downward into her breasts and her womb and her inner thighs.
His voice was soft, warm with sincerity So were his eyes.
He was a very dangerous man indeed.
Not that she must resist loving him. It had occurred to her that if she was bound to him for life she must try to feel a deeper fondness for him than she did. But she would resist dancing to his tune. She would love if and when she chose to love, not when he had tricked her into a mindless infatuation.
“I suppose,” she said, smiling against his thumb, “you took one look at me—or at my eyes—and fell instantly and irrevocably in love with me. And this was before the Vauxhall evening, I take it?”
“Ah, Katherine,” he said, his voice and eyes openly mournful now, “I was not wise enough to fall in love with you then and so prevent the disaster of Vauxhall. What is it about your eyes, though? Is it that they reveal or hint at a person well worth knowing? Someone whose love is well worth courting? Someone who is well worth loving?”
She felt more like crying than thinking of a suitably spirited retort.
“You are going to have to do considerably better than that, you know,” she said. “A Cheltenham tragedy will not do it.”
“Ah. Will it not, cruel heart?”
He removed his hand and grinned at her.
“And you are not your father, Jasper,” she said. “You are yourself.”
For a moment his eyes looked curiously bleak despite the grin. Then he took her hand in his and raised it so that he could kiss the inside of her wrist.
“I am, as you say, myself,” he said. “A fact for which I am remarkably thankful, especially at this moment.”
He raised her hand and set it on his shoulder. He took a half step forward and slid his other arm about her waist, so that they were lightly touching along their full length.
He was, she supposed, going to kiss her. Their wager had not forbidden kisses, had it? But she could not bear to be kissed at this precise
moment. Her emotions were feeling rather raw.
“It would be desirable,” she said, “for us to concentrate upon becoming friends before we even think of love.”
“Friends?” He chuckled. “After this month is over, Katherine, I intend to take you to bed every night and all night—and often during the days too. I would find it inordinately embarrassing to take my friend‘to bed. Con is my friend, and Charlie Field and Hal Blackstone and half a dozen other fellows. All male. I believe you might find me a mite impotent if I got into bed with you and then discovered that I had got in with my friend.”
She could not help laughing.
“Is it easier, then,” she asked him, “to make love to your enemy?”
“Enemy be damned,” he said. “Pardon my language. I would rather make love to my lover, Katherine. To you, since you are my wife and sex is one of the definite advantages of being married, provided one can tolerate one’s wife.”
“And provided she can tolerate her husband,” she said.
“Neither of which provideds poses any problem in this particular marriage,” he said. “Do they?”
He waited for her answer. And there was no witty response to that particular question, was there?
“No,” she said.
He smiled slowly, his eyelids drooping over his eyes, which focused on her lips.
“I do not suppose,” he said, “I can persuade you to forget the one condition of our wager, can I?”
“That it will take you one month to win my love?” she said. “Oh, very well, then. We will make it five weeks if you feel you need more time.”
He threw back his head and laughed, startling her.
“You minx, Katherine,” he said. “I adore you. Do you know that?”
“You would have to define the word adore,” she said.
He leaned forward again and kissed her—on the tip of her nose.
“The wager will remain as it is, then,” he said. “We will make up for lost time when the month is over. But we are wasting a lovely day standing here. Come and sit in the parterre garden. You have not even smelled it yet—all those herbs.”