by Mary Balogh
He was going to stay, then. He was going to take on his responsibilities as head of his family. He was going to settle down. Without her.
"Perhaps I will see you in London next spring, then," she said. "Morgan will be making her come-out."
"I want the first waltz at the first ball," he said. "We have waltzed together only once, Free, and even that was interrupted by the necessity of chasing after the master of ceremonies to announce our betrothal."
They set off across the beach, the wind in their faces.
"The first waltz is reserved, then," she said.
They walked in silence for a while. They were not touching. She had her hands inside her cloak. He had his clasped behind him.
"The tide is on the way in," he said. "But we have plenty of time before we get cut off from the valley."
"Did he commit suicide, do you think?" she asked.
"Albert?" He was silent for a few moments. "He must have realized he was in deep trouble. He also knew that his mother could see no wrong in him and that his father was weak. He did not seem like the sort of man who would take his own life anyway. But who knows? Chass had given him an ultimatum. So had I. I had told him that if he was still within ten miles of Penhallow by nightfall of the next day I would kill him with my bare hands. I don't suppose I would have done it, but I would have pounded him within an inch of his life. He knew it too. My guess is that he was overcome by the cold or by cramps. He was a nasty, villainous creature, Freyja-I always suspected that he was in on that attempted smuggling ring too. But enough on that topic. It is over and done with."
He stopped walking and stood looking out to sea. Freyja stood beside him, feeling all the vast wonder of the universe and the exhilaration of the fact that she was part of it.
"Freyja," he said, "what are you doing for the rest of your life?"
Oh, no! She was alerted by his tone and by the fact that he had called her Freyja rather than Free or sweetheart.
"Whatever it is," she said, lifting her chin, "it will be done without you, Josh. I am not one of your loose ends that must be tied up neatly before you can settle peacefully here. It was never a part of our bargain that you feel obligated to offer for me in earnest."
"What if it is not obligation that I feel?" he asked.
But her throat suddenly felt raw and painful and she realized in some horror that if she allowed him to speak one more word she might make an utter idiot of herself by starting to bawl. How dared he! She did not need this. She turned sharply about and eyed the cliffs. The moonlight was full upon them. They did not look quite so sheer from below.
"I am going up," she said.
He sighed. "Very well, then," he said. "It is probably wise to start back anyway. The tide is coming in fast."
"I am going up there." She pointed to the top of the cliffs, and she felt the familiar weakness of the knees and shortness of breath that had assailed her throughout a life of forcing herself to do dangerous things, preferably those that most terrified her. She had climbed trees when she was a girl only because she had been afraid of heights.
Joshua chuckled. "I will come back in the morning, sweetheart," he said, "and sweep up your remains. No, I won't be able to do that, will I? They will have been washed away by the tide. What the devil are you doing?"
She was striding straight toward the cliffs.
"I am going up the cliffs," she said.
"Why?" He caught up to her. "We are not even close to being cut off by the tide."
"Why?" she said haughtily. "What a stupid question, Josh. Because they are there, of course."
She pushed her cloak behind her back, found her first foothold and handhold, and raised herself clear of the beach. She looked back over her shoulder.
"I'll race you to the top," she said.
CHAPTER XXIII
What he ought to have done, Joshua thought, was to have plucked her off the cliff face and borne her back to the house by the valley route, by force if necessary. It would have been necessary, of course. He would have had to tuck her under one arm or toss her over one shoulder and parry her blows as best he could without retaliating in kind and close his ears to her curses. But at least she would still have been a live body by the time he had set her down safely inside Penhallow.
It would have been the responsible thing to do, and he had drawn responsibility about him like a mantle during the past week or so. He had become a new person, a mature adult, a sober marquess with duty as his guiding light. He had been preparing to fade into stodgy respectability and premature middle age.
But what was he doing instead of hauling Freyja safely back home?
He was climbing the cliffs with her, that was what.
In the middle of the night, with a stiff wind blowing.
And with her hampered by a woman's garments.
He was also doing a good deal of laughing. The utter absurdity of it all! And the undeniable rush of exhilaration at the danger of it all!
Not that it was quite as dangerous as it looked-especially from above. Steep as the cliffs were, they provided any number of perfectly steady holds for feet and hands. Of course, there was no going back down once they had started. For one thing, going down a cliff face was infinitely more difficult than going up. For another, the tide was already in at the river mouth, and there would be no way of reaching the valley except by swimming.
He was not engaging in a race. He was keeping as close to her as he could, and slightly below her, almost as if he believed he could catch her if she should happen to slip and hurtle past him. But perhaps he could offer some assistance if she got stuck. Not that he offered out loud. He did not want anger to distract her. When she stopped, sometimes for a whole minute at a time, he stayed quietly where he was.
He knew that as soon as they reached the top they were going to collapse, their legs turned to jelly and quite useless for many minutes. They were also going to lie flat on the blessedly flat land, clinging to it as if expecting to slide off into space at any moment. And they were going to vow, as he had vowed every time he had done this as a boy, that never again would they be so foolhardy.
The last few yards were the most difficult, where solid stone became intermingled with earth and grass and loose pebbles and the dangers of finding a false foothold and sliding uncontrollably became very real. He remembered clinging motionless for maybe half an hour a body length from the top the first time he made the climb, unable for all that time to persuade himself to move a muscle while telling himself that he must before he disgraced himself by losing control of his bladder.
Freyja did not make the mistake of clinging too long and so becoming paralyzed. He had been trying to decide what to do if she did. He climbed after her over the lip of the very hollow where they had sat a few days ago and lay facedown on the grass, panting, beside her.
She was the first-after perhaps five minutes-to start laughing.
He joined her.
They lay side by side, clinging to the world as if they expected the force of gravity to expend itself at any moment, and shook and snorted with laughter.
"I believe I won," she said-a pronouncement of enormous wit that sent them off into renewed convulsions.
"I suppose," he said, "you are afraid of heights?"
"Always have been," she admitted.
They laughed so hard they wheezed for breath.
He turned onto his side to look at her, and she turned onto hers to look at him.
"You are not finding the night cold, are you?" he asked.
"Cold?" She raised her eyebrows. "Cold?"
They met in the middle of the space between them and were soon having tolerable success at trying to occupy the exact same space. Their arms were about each other, their mouths wide on each other's, kissing with the urgency of two madcaps who knew very well that they had just challenged death itself and won.
They came together soon afterward in a tangle of clothes and arms and legs, heat and wetness and enticing urgency at their sha
red core. They made love with vigor and passion and joy.
"My sweetest heart," he murmured, and other inanities of a like kind, whenever his mouth was free for speech.
"My love. Oh, my dearest love," she murmured back to him.
They exploded into completion together-perhaps all of three minutes after they had begun. As if now, their climb over, they were running a race. Which, appropriately enough, they finished in a dead heat.
They were panting again then, and she was laughing again into his shoulder as he wrapped one arm about her from beneath and both their cloaks about them from above.
"What was this?" he asked, his mouth against her ear. "Has my hearing turned suddenly defective? My love? My dearest love? Passion and lust run wild, sweetheart?"
Her laughter subsided, but she said nothing.
"Speechless?" he suggested.
"Don't spoil it, Josh," she said.
"What will spoil things for me," he said, "is to see you leave here in a few days' time, Free, and to smile cheerfully as if I were happy to see you go off to plan our wedding. And then to wait for your letter officially ending our betrothal. And then to waltz with you next spring, having lived all winter for just that one half hour. And then to spend the rest of my life without you."
He heard her drawing a slow, deep breath.
"There is no need-" she began.
"Dammit!" He cut her off before she could launch into the expected speech. "Let there be some truth between us at least, Freyja. I have had enough of lies and evasions and secrets to last me a lifetime. If all this has been nothing but a lark to you, then so be it. Say so honestly and I will let you go without another word-unless, that is, you have been got with child. But if you are letting me go because you think you ought to honor the temporary clause in our bargain and because you think I am being annoyingly noble in my offer to make our betrothal real, then stuff it, sweetheart. Just stuff it! Give me honesty now. Do you love me?"
Her voice sounded reassuringly normal-it was cold and haughty.
"Well, of course I love you," she said.
"Of course." He was back to laughter then. He held her tightly and could not seem to stop laughing for a while. "Are we going to allow a little bargain to ruin the rest of our lives, then?"
"Whenever we would quarrel," she said, "and we would quarrel, Josh, each of us would wonder if the other had felt coerced into marrying."
"What poppycock!" he said. "Do you not trust me to say the truth to you, Freyja? I say that I love you, that I adore you, that I can imagine no greater happiness than to spend the rest of my life loving you and laughing and quarreling and even fighting with you. I trust you to say what is true to me. You have said that you love me-that of course you love me. Does that include the wish to marry me, to live here with me all your life, to have babies with me and fun with me? To share the sorrows of life with me? And all its joys?"
"Of course it includes that wish," she said. "But, Josh, I am terrified."
"Why?" he asked. Her face was pressed hard against his shoulder.
"I have never done too well with love and betrothals and marriage prospects," she said. "If I give in to happiness now, it may all evaporate before my very eyes."
"Sweetheart, sweetheart," he said. "What happened the other day when you were afraid of the sea?"
"I was not-"
"What happened?"
There was a short silence.
"I persuaded you to take me over to the island," she said.
"And?"
"And I insisted on rowing part of the way back."
"Even though you had to switch places in the boat with me," he said. "What did you do tonight when you were terrified of the height of the cliffs?"
"Climbed them," she said.
"And now," he said, "you are terrified to love me. What are you going to do about it?"
She drew her head back from his shoulder and glared at him.
"Love you anyway," she said. "Don't ask the next question, Josh, if you admire the shape of your nose. You remind me of everything I hated about all my governesses, asking their questions, and trying to extract the correct answers out of me by slow degrees and with infinite patience. You are going to ask me what I plan to do about my terror of a real betrothal with you and a real marriage with you."
He gazed back into her eyes and said nothing.
"We are betrothed," she said firmly. "There-that is what I am going to do. We are really betrothed. But if you should die before our marriage, Josh, I shall pursue you through all of heaven and hell after my own death and throttle you. Do you hear me?"
"Yes, sweetheart," he said meekly, and grinned at her. "I want to hear myself say this, Free. And I want to hear your answer."
He sat up, checked his distance from the edge, and ar-ranged himself in a picturesque kneeling posture. He took one of her hands in his and smiled his most charming smile at her.
"Lady Freyja Bedwyn," he said, "will you do me the great honor of accepting my hand in marriage? On the understanding that it is to be purely a love match on both sides?"
"You look remarkably silly," she said.
"I know, sweetheart," he said, making a kissing gesture with his lips. "But I want you to be able to boast about this to our grandchildren one day-that their grandpapa went down on bended knee and begged you to marry him."
"They will never believe it," she said, "when they look at the old lady I will have grown into and then look at the handsome old gentleman you will have become." She sat up and sighed. "But I will remember this moment all my life, and I daresay it will bring tears to my eyes when I know no one is looking. Yes, I will, my love. I will marry you-but only on the understanding that it is to be a mutual love match."
She sat and he knelt, and they grinned at each other like a couple of self-satisfied fools while her hair blew wild about her face and he was very aware of the long, almost sheer drop less than a yard behind his heels.
"I keep expecting to feel the weight of the shackle close about my leg," he said, "but it is simply not happening. I am a betrothed man and have never felt so free. Free with Free! Shall we go back to the house and wake everyone up with the news?"
"It would not be news to them, though, would it?" she said.
"Lord, no," he said, grinning at her. "We have to celebrate somehow, though sweetheart. Any suggestions?"
"Oh, Josh," she said, opening her arms, "do stop talking nonsense and come here."
"Brilliant idea," he said.
Joshua had gone out on business by the time Freyja asked for him the next morning. She was bubbling with unaccustomed excitement, but though she was surrounded by family and friends, there was no one to confide in. What would she say?
I am in love?
I am betrothed?
I am going to be married?
To Joshua?
Apart from the fact that they would look at her as if she had finally taken leave of her senses, it was all very lowering. She was not a person given to an exuberant outpouring of sentimental drivel.
She went for a walk instead-all the way to the village. This was something she needed to do anyway-and it had to be done alone. No one must know about it. Even the thought that someone might find out gave her the shivers.
"Good morning," she said when Anne Jewell opened the door of her cottage to her knock. "No!" She held up a staying hand when the woman gestured as if to ask her to step inside. "I'll not come in or disturb you longer than I need."
"But-" Anne Jewell began.
"No, thank you." Freyja kept her hand raised. "Correct me if I am wrong, but I do not believe you are entirely happy living here in this village, are you?"
The woman's welcoming smile faded somewhat.
"Everyone has been most kind," she said, "especially Joshua-Lord Hallmere. But you must not fear. I will not continue to accept his support. I am in hope of acquiring some new pupils soon."
Freyja clucked her tongue. "Do you think I care about a little support payment?" sh
e asked. "I have looked at you and seen an intelligent woman who has never complained about her lot even though it was brought on by noble self-sacrifice and injustice-and a woman whose pride has not been broken. Is it your wish to teach?"
Miss Jewell looked wary.
"It was always my wish," she said. "My family was never wealthy, though I was fortunate enough to be educated. I always wanted to teach."
"There is a position for you if you wish for it," Freyja said, "at a girls' school in Bath. It is a quite respectable establishment and pays a salary that will support both you and your son in some comfort. You will be allowed to take him with you, by the way. My solicitor reported to me a week or so ago that there is need of another teacher-of geography, I believe."
Anne Jewell stared at her.
"I have some influence at the school," Freyja explained.
Anne Jewell licked her lips. "I would like it of all things," she said, her voice barely above a whisper. "Do they know that David was born out of wedlock?"
"Yes," Freyja said. "It will not be held against you provided you give good service as a teacher."
"I will." She set one hand flat against her throat and closed her eyes tightly. "Oh, dear God, I will. At a school! In Bath! How will I ever be able to thank you, Lady Freyja?"
"In just this way," Freyja said firmly. "It is the solicitor, Mr. Hatchard, who has found this position for you and checked your references. You know of no one else, only him. He is the one who answered your letter of inquiry and then wrote to offer you the position. My name is never to be mentioned to anyone, do you understand me? Especially not within the walls of Miss Martin's school. And least of all to Miss Martin herself."
Miss Jewell was regarding her with wide eyes.
"Of course," she said. "Yes, of course."
"Mr. Hatchard will write to you within the next week or two, then, with a formal offer and details and coach tickets for you and your son," Freyja said. "Good day to you, Miss Jewell."
It was at that moment that the half-closed house door opened and the child stepped out-with Joshua right behind him.