“I don’t understand.”
“This marriage of hers.”
“What of it?”
“Mr. Stewart is a fine man. We all adore him.” She fisted a hand on the table and looked so distressed he wasn’t certain if he should hand her his handkerchief or call for a servant to bring a vinaigrette. “Even if Portia were as madly in love with Mr. Stewart as I am with Mr. Temple, the fact is, her marriage does nothing to secure Magnus’s future.
A chill went down his spine, and his heart skipped a beat. “She’s not in love with him?”
“Oh, I’m quite sure she has tender feelings for him, my lord.” She smiled sadly. “Who would not? He is delightful. But she is not a woman of such pure emotion as I am. Surely, you have noticed this small defect in her.”
“I have not.”
“She does not feel as I do. Nor love so deeply. I have observed that few people do.” She waved a hand. “A marriage between her and Mr. Stewart is of no advantage to Magnus at all.”
He floundered, torn in too many directions to make sense of this. He’d come downstairs convinced he would be pressured to marry Portia, that it was only a matter of time before Magnus confronted him, and instead, unless he was badly mistaken, he was being asked to interfere in Portia’s engagement. “What is it you would have me do?”
No artist in the world could resist the temptation to paint her smile onto a Madonna. “Convince her to come to London before she ties herself irrevocably to a man who does not suit her. Put the full weight of your approval behind our appearance there with her. Any number of gentlemen of good family would be pleased to marry an attractive woman. You’ve not noticed that Portia is quite a lovely woman, but I assure you it’s so. With the proper gowns and only a little more attention to her appearance, why, she cannot help but make an impression.”
As it turned out, he did not need to concoct a reply to that, for she continued talking.
“A pretty woman whose family has the friendship of Lord Northword? Any of them would be men who could do Magnus more good, and suit her much better than Mr. Stewart.”
“Have you someone in mind?”
She brightened. “Several candidates, as a matter of fact.” She counted off on her fingers, but the names went by in a blur.
“So many?”
“Naturally, there are one or two at the top of my list, my lord. I understand it is a great favor to ask you to introduce suitable men to her, but consider that Magnus might one day be a bishop. Why, he might aspire to York or even to Canterbury. It’s not beyond his abilities.” She leaned in, intent. “If his sister makes a marriage of no advantage? All I ask is that you make known your approval of her when we are in London. What could be happier for us all?”
Chapter Eight
Ten past midnight
PORTIA DIDN’T MOVE FROM HER CHAIR when someone tapped on her door. With Crispin here, they were keeping later hours and, after all, she wasn’t in bed yet. She pulled her shawl tighter around her shoulders, but kept her legs drawn up on the chair. She wore only her chemise and the night wrapper she’d had since she was thirteen. Her hair was still loose even though by now it was dry. One had to expect that a woman who’d taken refuge in her room might not be dressed.
Whoever it was tapped again. In the best case, her visitor was Eleanor. In the worst case, Magnus himself had come to confront her. Either way, the visit could only be about her and Crispin. “Come in.”
The curtains weren’t drawn. Portia, seated in an armchair halfway between her dresser and the fireplace, continued to stare at the glass. On this clear, cold night with the stars shining bright in the sky, she could just see the moonlit branches of the rowan tree she’d planted. Already, the slender branches looked stronger. Decades from now, her tree would provide shade for whoever lived here. The door opened and cast a slice of light on the windows. Instead of the rowan tree or the stars, she saw a reflection of the door.
With a click, the door closed. She had no need to look, she knew who it was. A moment later, the key turned in the lock. Her skin rippled with awareness during the brief silence that followed that sound. He put his lantern on the table beside the door. “The walls aren’t blue any more.”
“I decided I liked this better.” She stood, but stayed beside her chair, her back to the window now, one hand resting along the top curve of the chair. Out of habit, she thought of all the times Crispin had been here. At night. When he ought not to have been and when the walls had been a pale blue. With them breathless and giddy. She gestured. “Moss. This green is called moss. Darker than the parlor, but green nevertheless and very much underappreciated, I do assure you. Except by me. It seems I overappreciate the color.”
He laughed and looked around the room, taking it in. “I like it.”
Her fingers dug into the chair. He took up all the space. All the air. “I was expecting Magnus or Eleanor.”
“To take you to task, I presume.”
She nodded.
“I am the hero of this tale, you know. The knight in shining armor facing down the dragon. Did you not hear your sister-in-law praise me for rescuing you from a storm you were obstinate enough to be out in?” He wandered into the middle of the room and took up even more space. She turned with his progress. “I’ve already been thanked, so you needn’t add yours.”
“I was not in need of rescue.”
“No?” He looked around again. “Other than the walls, everything’s the same.”
She made a fist of her hand. “What are you doing here?”
His smile vanished. “She wishes me to join in her efforts to get you to London before you are married.”
“Oh. Oh, dear. My apologies for that.”
“Shall I?”
She looked down and scratched an eyebrow. “It’s awful the way she gets what she wants, isn’t it?”
“Thoroughly unsettling.”
“Don’t abet her in this or any other scheme.”
He nodded once and into the growing tension he said, “We should talk. About what happened at Wordless.” His voice was so brisk he hardly sounded like the man she knew. His voice turned him into a stranger, into the Viscount Northword, not a man she’d known nearly her entire life. Not the man who’d been her first lover and her most recent one, but a stranger of terrible consequence.
She stared at her hand on the top of the chair and forced herself to uncurl her fingers. “I’m not sure there’s much to say.”
He walked to her dresser so that she had to turn around to face him. He’d stood exactly there dozens of times before. There was no mistaking him for the seventeen-year-old he’d been. He’d grown into all the promise of his maleness and gained an air of command. Both things suited him. “I think we ought to talk, don’t you? Clear the air.” He scratched his head. “Of all that.”
“Why? I don’t regret it.”
“Nor I.”
She couldn’t tell if Crispin was pleased or not and so said nothing.
He continued. “Please be perfectly clear on that point. I don’t regret what happened either. Even though it ought not to have happened.”
“I don’t think men regret such encounters.” Force of habit put a lilt in her voice. She wasn’t used to being on edge with Crispin, and here, in her room, their old familiarity seemed especially close.
“Is that all it was to you?” Of all the items on her dresser, he picked up one of the few new ones to be found. The porcelain pot no bigger than her fist contained as many crocuses as she could fit in it. A crease appeared between his eyebrows. “An encounter.”
“I’m sorry if that’s inaccurate.” Briefly, she closed her eyes. Her memories of him took on weight, the nights he’d walked here from Wordless under a starlit sky like tonight’s. “I don’t know what it was to you.”
“We’ll leave it at that, then.” He turned and tilted the pot, watching the play of light over it. He wore a thick gold ring on his first finger, and that, too, was something she did not recognize. In ten years, she’d a
cquired only two pieces of jewelry: a necklace and a pair of earrings, both a gift from Magnus when she turned twenty-one. Since she’d almost immediately lost one of the earrings, she almost never wore the necklace that matched. “You were not your usual self,” he said in his stranger’s voice. He looked up. “It would not be absurd to suggest I took advantage. I’ll apologize if you need that from me.”
“No.”
He leaned against the dresser, still holding the pot of crocuses. “Your favorite flower, are they?”
“They’ve always reminded me of you.” Too late, she realized how much that gave away. “They bloom every spring in the field between Northword Hill and the Grange. Every spring when Magnus and I were little, I tried to count them whenever we walked up the hill.”
He gave her a sideways look. “I remember.”
“There weren’t as many then as there are now. The first spring after you left, the hill was covered with crocuses as far as the eye could see.” She waved a hand. “Not just a few, but a carpet of them. People came all the way from Aubry Sock to see them. I told Magnus to paint it for you. Did he not send it on?”
“He did. My wife saw it and thought it lovely.” He let out a short breath. “I didn’t know it was from you. I had it framed and gave it to her as a gift.”
“Did you?”
“You know Magnus. He’s a gift for choosing an interesting perspective in whatever he paints or draws. She particularly liked that you could see a part of Wordless. I suppose it’s still hanging in her room.” Crispin, slouched against her dresser, set the pot back in its place. He watched her under half-lidded eyes. A lock of his hair, that lovely shade that was not quite blond yet not quite brown either, fell in a crescent slash across his forehead. “It’s a wonder you don’t curse them the way she does.”
He meant Eleanor. “Never.” She brought her shawl closer around her shoulders and caught the edge of his frown. “Why would I?”
“I don’t know.” He shrugged and avoided looking directly at her by focusing his gaze just past her ear. “Because I took your virginity on a night like this?”
“Turn about is fair play. After all, I took yours.”
That frown of his flashed again. He ought to have smiled at her joke, but he didn’t. And this time, he looked her full in the face. “For whatever offense I gave that made you leave me.”
She sat on the armchair, just on the edge of the seat, and clutched the padded arm. Her heart turned to ash in her chest while she searched for the words to explain what had happened. “I didn’t leave you.”
“You didn’t come with me.” He made a sharp, dismissive gesture. “It was ten years ago. We were practically children. Young and foolish, the both of us, but I have always, always, wanted to tell you that I never wavered.” He set his palm on his head and looked away in a gesture she’d seen a thousand times from him. When he did that, he was gathering his words, assembling thoughts, so that when he spoke he said precisely what he meant to say. “It’s done. You and I. Over.”
“I know.” She wanted to go to him, but that would be worse than presumptuous. She wanted so badly to touch him, to tell him she understood his anger and that he should let old hurts go.
“I ought not blame you for youth and inexperience of life, and yet I do.” He let out a frustrated breath. “It’s nonsense, my doing that. But seeing you again— Sometimes I think we were only yesterday and all my old habits with you come back.”
“It’s been difficult for me, too.”
He pushed away from the dresser and walked to the fireplace. For a while, he stood with his back to her, staring at the line of chimney ornaments on the mantle. He touched a bird’s nest he’d given to her when she was eleven. “You still have this.”
“I’m sentimental about such things. Magnus is always on about how I won’t discard anything. I’ve collected a box of buttons I’ll surely never use. Old grammars and the like. Sketches Magnus did when he was a boy. I kept them all, you know.”
He turned, and his eyes were hard as stone. “What happened today should not have. I’m sorry. I hope you’ll forgive me.”
“There’s nothing for me to forgive.”
He said, softly, after far too long, “I think about him all the time.”
She closed her eyes.
“He’d be nearly ten, if you’d had a boy. I imagine him with your beautiful eyes. My mouth.” His voice rasped over her, killing her. “Or a girl with your hair and my smile. She might have had your brother’s gifts.”
“Don’t.”
“I don’t think I ever told you how I felt, and I ought to have.”
She turned her head toward him. “It’s not the men who suffer. It’s the women who are turned out of the house. Women bear all that burden.”
“How could you not trust me? The day you told me you were with child, that night, I lay in my bed at Wordless, and I was glad and at the same time I was afraid of what my father would say when I told him. Afraid of Magnus and what he’d think of me for what I’d done to you. And afraid for you. Terrified for what might happen to you.”
She didn’t dare open her eyes. She couldn’t, didn’t, and still the tears came. In those days when she’d been trapped and desperate and unable to tell anyone for fear Magnus would find out, she’d felt as if the poison of Lord Northword’s hatred had given the man the power to twist the world into any shape he wished. Crispin’s father did not wish for a world where his son married a woman like her, and he had transformed the world until he had what he wanted.
“I knew you were afraid and distraught and that you blamed yourself, as if you’d gotten with child without any help from me. I knew you blamed yourself, but I never told you how much I wanted to marry you and hold our baby in my arms. I thought you understood that. I thought you knew I loved you too much to let that happen to you or our child.”
She rested her head on her arm, face down so that she could not see him. “Don’t do this to me.”
He moved closer. “What, Portia? Do what?” The ice was back in his voice. “You went to that woman without giving me a chance to convince you I would do anything you needed. Anything. My father could threaten me all he liked, and I would not have refused to marry you. You didn’t need to save yourself from that fate.”
The enormity of her loss hit her again. What might have been, the life they might have had. Words came on the heels of a short, low breath, fast and propelled by the force of all the years she’d kept those words back. She lifted her head and stared at him through a blur of tears.
“Your father told me if I married you, he’d have Magnus expelled from school. He said if you were still a minor he’d have the marriage annulled. He told me if I thought we could wait until Magnus was graduated, that if we did that, Magnus would never have a living anywhere, not for as long as he lived. He told me he’d already personally seen to it that the Royal Academy would never admit him, and he had. He did that to punish me, to make sure I knew he’d stop at nothing. That’s why Magnus was rejected. If it weren’t for me, he would have been admitted. He ought to have been.”
He set both hands to his head this time and stared past her.
“Your father was right about me. And so are you. I didn’t love you enough to bring more harm to my brother. I couldn’t do that to him when I’d already cost him his dream.”
Crispin dropped his hands to his side. She didn’t move. The silence ripened. At last, he said, “You ought to have told me.”
She leaned sideways against the chair and stared at the window frame past Crispin’s shoulders. She didn’t want to know if he was looking at her. It would kill her to know. “What difference does it make what I should have done or wish I had? There’s only the choice I made. And I am sorry. So sorry to have hurt you. I never wanted that.”
“I married someone else, and by the time I understood what an awful mistake I’d made marrying in anger and resentment, it was too late.” His voice was bleak, and if there had been a way to blot tha
t out, she would have. “My wife deserved better. She was a good and decent woman, and she deserved more from her husband than the man she got.”
That took her aback enough to look at him. She had always imagined they were happy. Crispin would never have married a woman who wasn’t worthy of him. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.”
He made a face when she reacted by reaching to him. Her hand fell back to her lap. “Don’t you be either, Crispin Hope. You never wrote of her except in the most tender and respectful ways. I always thought it was plain as anything that you loved her very much indeed.”
“Not the way I loved you.”
“Of course you didn’t.” She clenched her hand on her lap. “There isn’t only one way to love someone.”
He strode to her and did not stop moving until she was trapped between him and the chair. Her heart headed toward her toes. His every look recalled what they’d done today, and though she still felt the aches of their encounter, her body wanted him again. She wanted all the marks of their passion, the imprint of him on her soul rising up and taking shape once again. “Then why do I feel as if nothing’s changed with us?”
“The past hasn’t changed. It’s there in our memories. It won’t ever go away.”
The silence was uncomfortably long.
“I loved you.”
“We can’t go back.” She wiped at her tears. “My God, can you imagine if we tried? We aren’t that couple anymore. I don’t know you any more than you do me. Please, let’s be friends. Let’s keep that.”
He stepped back.
Her heart broke again.
Chapter Nine
Two days later
AFTER BREAKFAST THEY WERE ALL sitting in the parlor as near to the fire as they dared now that Hob had brought in the morning post. There were letters for everyone. Crispin had several, most of which he put in his pocket, but he read aloud from one in which a friend of his, a man whose name she recognized from reading the Times, described with lively detail his days spent hiking in Northumberland.
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