Meg tried to hold her temper in check. “Don’t talk such nonsense. You know very well that no one could possibly pity you. Least of all me. I am small and poor—and female. What disadvantage of yours could compare?”
“I cannot speak to you here. Come with me, please.” James took her elbow and began to thread his way through the dancers to the doorway and from there back to the drawing room, hoping to find the library next to it unoccupied.
The lively sound of conversation fell into the same uneasy silence that had greeted them in the ballroom between sets. He could feel the glances cast his way. They felt like dirty water washing over him. James drew a deep breath. In silence, Meg led him through the drawing room and into the adjoining library.
“I do not know what to say to you,” James said, turning to face her after the door was shut behind them. “Except that I release you from whatever promises we made. You acted out of haste, and I failed to tell you all you needed to know before you agreed to marry me. You have acted without thought again tonight.”
Meg shook her head, setting the gold and bronze highlights in her hair dancing in the glow of the candles. “No, no. I do not wish to cancel our agreement because of what Mrs. Headley said.”
“She told you that I am the bastard son of the late Duke of Kettering?” His words were slow, as if they were too heavy to be spoken. Every time he had said them or heard them, he had lost something—a home, a friend, some peace of mind that came with anonymity.
“Yes. That is all she said.” Meg looked at him, then moved closer to him. “James, she said nothing about you. Only about your father.”
“And my mother.” Always it came back to his mother.
“No, she said nothing about your mother.”
“Ah, well, she shouldn’t have left that out, you know,” he said acidly. “It’s part of the catechism. ‘His mother was no better than she should be.’ That’s always what sets them to shaking their very moral heads and wondering when the inbred lack of morality will show itself in me.”
Meg flinched from the depth of bitterness in his voice. “James, whatever your parents may have done, you are not responsible. You are a fine and honorable man.”
He stared at her as if he’d never seen her before. Was there to be no judgment on him? No, he couldn’t believe that. “Don’t you want to know if her wanton character showed itself in me? Have I seduced innocent maidens? Gambled away thousands? Run away from battles?” She shook her head, staring at him, her eyes huge. “No?” he said, biting off the word. “Are you sure? Don’t you want the whole story? Every juicy tidbit?”
“Stop it, James. I have told you what I think. You are Captain James Sheridan. If you are the son of a duke or of a chimney sweep, it does not change what you have done and who you are.”
“Don’t be absurd. You think like a child. Ask anyone out there” —he gestured toward the door to the drawing room— “if it does not matter.” He was contemptuous. This offer of unconditional acceptance was too easily won. It wouldn’t last. It never did. He had lost the people who meant something to him, beginning with the duke and later Claire. When would Lady Margaret Enfield join that parade? It was only a question of time.
“James, sit down with me.” Meg took his hand and led him, unresisting, over to an upholstered settee set at right angles to a brisk fire burning in the fireplace.
James sat beside Meg and looked into her face. What was there? A desire for martyrdom? A young woman’s need to stand by her word, even though it meant the ruin of the rest of her life?
“James, my father was an earl.”
“I am well aware of that, my lady.”
“Not ‘my lady.’ Meg, please, as it was before.”
“Very well.” His mouth twisted in an ironic smile. “I am aware of that fact, Meg.”
She took a deep breath. “He was also a gambler and a drunkard. There are children near his other estates who resemble him greatly. The only reason there are none hereabouts is because he never stayed at Hedgemere long enough. When he died, he left debts far greater than his heir could pay.” Looking him in the eyes, she said, “I can only hope that you are willing to overlook the sins of my father in judging me.”
“It is hardly the same thing. You were, to use a crude phrase in keeping with my low birth, born on the right side of the blanket. That makes all the difference.”
“It makes absolutely no difference to anyone who gives the matter any rational consideration at all. It is prejudice and foolishness. And you know it! Why do you not fight it?” Meg reached out a hand and clasped his tightly. “I will fight it with you.”
“Is that what this is all about? A chance for you to play Joan of Arc and feel morally superior to everyone you know?”
“I am not morally superior to anyone. And you are not morally inferior. And there are a number of people around here who feel exactly the same way I do. Gerald, for instance. And Annis.”
“A parson’s daughter? I doubt it.” He withdrew his hand from hers. “All of this is beside the point. Your feelings on the subject of bastard children do you credit. But you do not need to marry me to prove that you are large-hearted and liberal-minded.”
Meg winced. That hard, metallic voice revealed not cynicism but pain and loneliness, laced with pride and stoicism. The harsh planes of his face looked frozen, and even the firelight that danced on his hair somehow made the gold color cold. She could see the little boy he must have been—tough and quiet and wary, always hurting from wounds he kept hidden.
“Tell me about your life, James. Before the navy.”
“I did not have one.” He stared into the fire in silence for so long, Meg thought he wasn’t going to answer her. “My mother was a governess at a home where the duke visited. He seduced her, as he did many others. When the family realized she was pregnant, she was turned out of her employment, and somehow she journeyed to Kettering, where she confronted the duke.”
“She must have been very courageous.”
“Or very naive. At any rate, the duke was about to marry a very wealthy and well-connected lady, so he gave my mother enough money to sustain her until she was delivered and sent her away. I’m sure he thought he’d seen the last of her.” James still stared at the dancing flames, as if they held some secret he must decipher. Again the silence was so long that Meg thought he was not going to tell her any more. She kept quiet, willing him to tell her the rest of the story.
“After my birth, my mother left me in a basket on the steps of a church. I know nothing of her life for the next few years, but I can imagine it.” He felt an unfamiliar sting in the back of his eyes and blinked rapidly once or twice. Those couldn’t be tears. He never cried. He hadn’t cried even as a cold and hungry child.
“She must have searched for me after that, for she found me later, in an orphanage. I was five, or perhaps six, when she came to see me. I don’t remember much about the place, except that everything and everyone there was gray and cold.”
Meg swallowed hard. She was absolutely not going to cry. When James suddenly looked at her, she smiled at him but said nothing. He gazed at her in silence for a moment, then once again turned his eyes away from her and continued his story.
“She came twice and promised she would come again, but she never did. The duke said the matron sent her away and told her not to come back, because she was ill and because I cried after she left and it upset the other children.” He shook his head, and when he spoke again, his voice was lower and rougher. “I don’t remember her, except that in the cold grayness I had for a short time a feeling of warmth. That must have been her. That was why I cried.
“When she was sent away, she went to the duke and told him about me. She was dying. Consumption. She couldn’t work any longer. She told him that she had found work as a seamstress. Perhaps she had. All she asked was that he see to it that I was fed and educated enough so that I wouldn’t have to be sent out as a climbing boy, which is what the orphanage planned for me.”
>
Meg took his hand again. She wanted to put her arms around him, but something in his eyes told her that he would not welcome her warmth. To him, it was a sign of pity and, therefore, intolerable.
“The duke did as she asked and took me in. I was raised more or less with his other children—all of them legitimate. As long as I kept out of sight of the duchess, I was allowed to take part in the other children’s lessons and games. They were not always happy about it, but the duke’s word was law. At twelve, the duchess finally got her way and I was sent into the navy.” He looked at her and gave her a travesty of a smile. “And the rest you know.”
“James, nothing you have said changes anything. I still think we should marry.”
“You are incredibly stubborn.”
Meg nodded her head. “Yes, I know. It is what has kept Hedgemere afloat these last years, when everyone told me it could not be done. I was too stubborn to let it fail.”
“I do not want to be a job or a charity you think you should undertake, Meg.”
“You are not a job! I do not look at you that way. I simply think that we could come to understand and—and care for each other.” Meg squeezed his hand and James felt his heart begin to thaw.
It was not a comfortable feeling. For years, almost as long as he could remember, he had refused to allow himself to feel. Every time he had broken that vow, he had been hurt. He knew this woman scarcely better than his mother, whom he could not remember. He did not think he could bear to marry Meg, knowing that sooner or later she would tire of being ostracized by the society that formed her world.
“I understand the world better than you, my dear,” he said, brushing a wayward curl from her forehead. Damn, why had he done that? Her hair felt so soft and so alive, like Meg herself.
“James,” she said softly, “perhaps you do not need my help. But I do need yours.”
“As to that,” he replied, a hard glint in his eyes, “all you need is my money. And, as I believe you are a good investment, I will lend you the sum you need to put Hedgemere back in good order. You do not need to take me to your bed in order to get it. I have often thought that kind of bargain smacks of the unsavory kind my mother may have been forced to engage in.” His blue eyes were diamond bright and his mouth a thin, sarcastic line.
Meg took a deep breath and tried to calm the instinctive anger his words had aroused. She could not have done it if she hadn’t seen the faint remorse in his eyes when he saw her wince. She would not respond to the bitter tone but to the words. And to what she thought she read in his eyes.
“I am not ashamed to be classed with your mother, James. She was a very brave and loving woman to have put your welfare ahead of her pride.” There was an arrested look on his face at her words, as if he had never thought of his mother that way. “If she was anything at all like her son, swallowing her pride was the most difficult thing she ever did.”
For a moment James said nothing, and Meg could only hope he would not respond out of anger. “Tell me one thing, Meg,” he said at last. “If you did not feel that your neighbors were behaving badly and that you must keep your word or be a coward in your own eyes, would you marry me? Remember, you can have your money without it.”
Meg did him the honor of thinking about her answer. To a degree he was right about her motives. She hated injustice, and Mrs. Headley had aroused an instinctive protest in her. But beyond that, and if the captain really meant to lend her the money she needed, did she want to marry him? Indeed, under those conditions, did she want to marry anyone? She stared into his harsh face, with those implacable blue eyes, and asked herself if she could trust him to be kind and to try to make their marriage work. Without those guarantees, she knew it was doomed. She tried to picture life with him and found that the idea excited her. James was like no one she had ever known. He excited new emotions in her—something akin to the feeling she’d had at a wedding last year when she had drunk three glasses of champagne. Her skin tingled, but she was apprehensive at facing a situation she’d never encountered. As at the wedding, it quickened her pulse and heated her cheeks.
But she was not going to fight shy, even though this fence was higher than any other she’d ever taken, and she was not sure whether the ground on the other side was solid.
She took a deep breath. “I think I would very much like to marry you, James. Since you have told me about those elements in your life that you thought rendered you ineligible, I should tell you that I am afraid I lack any kind of polish. I never made my come-out. It would have been useless.” She gave him an ironic half smile. “I would simply have had to go right back ‘in’ again and return to Hedgemere and the crops and the cows.”
She shrugged and James could see that she was embarrassed. “I—I never had a beau, and yours is the first, and probably last, offer of marriage I will receive.” She turned away, as he had, to make her most difficult confession. “I do not know much about men or love or—anything like that.”
He should have left her then, taking his leave with a bow, as if he read rejection in her words. But something in the way she turned her face to the fire, and the defensive hunch of her slender shoulders under the simple green silk, told James clearly what her words had cost her. There was a further erosion of the ice around his heart. Maybe she could help him.
Maybe with her in his life he could trust and belong to someone.
To Meg.
Without counting the consequences, he reached out and turned her into his arms. “You are very beautiful,” he murmured as he kissed her temple, “and very loving.” He feathered a kiss across her cheek. “And very honest. So much more than any other woman I have ever known.”
Speechless, Meg gazed at him as if she could read some wonderful secret in his eyes. He looked at her softly parted lips and bent his head. If he were damned for this, it would be worth it. His lips closed over hers. He could feel Meg give a little sigh of surrender, and he was lost. Her arms folded around his neck, and she pressed closer to him. She was heaven in his arms, and he would not—could not—let her go now.
He pulled away from the kiss at last. Softly stroking her cheek, he said, “I want to marry you more than I’ve wanted anything in my life. So, speak now if you wish to cry off, because once we walk out that door it will be too late.”
Meg grinned at him, stood up, and held out her hand. “Shall we go?”
Chapter Ten
Thank God the navy had taught him to face the unexpected with coolness and a quick mind, James thought as he went with Meg into the drawing room. He considered himself lucky to have been under fire from French guns. It was as close as life had brought him to the sensations evoked by that walk.
Conversation stopped, then started again with a rush. People either met his eyes with a bold stare—the kind, James thought, that they would use to face a dangerous animal, or they looked away. Only Lady Mattingly came up and smiled as she held out her hands to them.
“Meg, my dear. And James. I haven’t seen you at all this evening. I hope we will have an opportunity to talk.” She patted James’s cheek and kissed Meg’s before moving aside to allow them to pass.
James could see that Meg’s eyes were bright with unshed tears. “I always wanted her to be my mother,” Meg murmured. She turned to him. “I never knew mine, you see, so I always envied Gerald his.”
“I do, too,” James said, smiling down at her. As she returned his gaze, he was struck by the way her eyes changed color with her emotions. Now they were almost pure green, whereas before their hazel color had been flecked with gold.
“Did you know your eyes change color?” he said.
“No. They’re always plain hazel when I look at them in the mirror.” Meg tugged at his arm. “You know, James, they’re awaiting our announcement.”
“I think the only announcement they’re waiting for is that you’re going to send me packing. Then they can breathe easy again.”
“I guess we’re going to disappoint them, aren’t we?” Meg sw
ept on, her hand still firmly holding his. They went out into the hall and down to the ballroom, where the string trio Mrs. Headley had engaged for the evening was valiantly attempting a waltz.
“Would you care to dance, Lady Margaret? I’m not sure that any of Almack’s patronesses would recommend me, but that doesn’t signify tonight, does it?”
“Oh, no, but—but—” Meg’s uncharacteristic confusion caused a tide of warm color to sweep into her cheeks.
James couldn’t resist teasing her a little. “But nothing,” he replied with a grin, his blue eyes dancing. “Come along. Surely an almost-engaged couple can waltz without shocking the neighborhood tabbies. At least,” he said, and the thought wiped the smile from his face, “it won’t shock them half as much as the fact of the engagement will.”
But Meg still held back. She gazed at him, the corners of her lips trembling a little. “James, I—I—
Realizing that she was truly upset, he stopped at the edge of the dance floor and tucked her hand in the crook of his arm. “Come and walk with me a moment. You look flushed. Here, we will just slip out of these French doors.” He suited the action to the words, and before Meg could say anything, they were standing on the terrace, in the shadow of one of the stone pillars lining it.
It was chilly. Meg shivered a bit and began to chafe her bare arms with her hands. James pulled her gently to him and wrapped his warm arms around her. After a moment Meg sank gratefully against him.
Then she spoke, her words muffled by his coat.
He stepped back a half step and said, “I’m sorry, my dear. I didn’t understand you.”
She lifted her head, and James could see the proud tilt of her chin. “I said, ‘I can’t waltz,’ ” she enunciated clearly. “Gerald promised to teach me the last time he was home, but we never seemed to have the time.” She took a deep breath. “I told you I haven’t any polish. If you have to go to London, to the Admiralty or on business—or whatever, you will have to go alone.”
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