by Mary Balogh
She moved at last, turning to face the house. She had really not thought this through carefully enough last night, had she? She had thought only of proposing her bargain in a lucid and dispassionate way. It had seemed a real possibility, a marriage that would be of equal benefit to them both. She had not really considered the personal baggage she brought with her, all of which would deter any sane man from wanting any connection whatsoever with her. And now she had spilled it all out, and she felt drained and humiliated. And appalled at her own temerity.
“I understand,” she said, “that marrying me would be no bargain at all for you, Lord Berwick, even if it would save you the bother of having to choose a bride in London. Please forget that I suggested it.”
“I do not believe I add a poor memory to my other shortcomings, Miss Muirhead,” he said. “And it would have to be very poor.”
Indeed.
Suddenly the sun seemed very hot even though it must still be quite early morning. Her cheeks were burning. He was not going to say anything more, she realized, and she had nothing further to say. If she could have stepped straight into oblivion at that moment, she would gladly have done it. As it was, the house seemed an impossible distance away.
She made her way toward it on legs that felt a bit like stilts without knee joints. She could almost feel his eyes—those cold, blank eyes—on her back.
* * *
Ralph had breakfast with his grandfather. Fortunately there was no one else in the breakfast parlor. It was Her Grace’s habit, he knew from past experience, to rise at eleven after partaking of a cup of chocolate in bed.
The two of them spent the rest of the morning in the duke’s study, talking on a variety of topics until the old gentleman nodded off over a cup of coffee. Ralph sat silently watching him and remembering the vigorous, half-fearsome figure of his grandfather as he had been years ago, full of barks and fury at any sign of misbehavior, but with eyes that twinkled incongruously. One of his waistcoat pockets had always slightly bulged out of shape with the sweetmeats he carried there.
Ralph went riding after luncheon. He went to see his grandfather’s physician and found him just returning from a distant farm, to which he had been summoned to set the broken arm of a laborer who had tumbled from a barn loft.
His Grace was not suffering from any particular malady, Dr. Gregg assured the Earl of Berwick. Except old age, of course. His heart was not as strong as it had once been, as was to be expected, and he had a tendency to fall victim to any chill that happened to be lurking in the neighborhood. He suffered from the rheumatics and a touch of gout and indigestion and many of the other ills age was prey to. He was frail when compared with a younger man. But he might outlive them all for anything the physician could say to the contrary.
Ralph thanked him, shook him by the hand, and took his leave.
His grandmother was unnecessarily fearful, then. Grandpapa was not at death’s door. However, no matter how close the duke was to his end, the fact remained that there was only the one heir. It was that heir’s clear duty to marry and produce sons of his own, preferably while his grandfather was still alive.
Ralph determinedly kept his mind off the peculiar events of the early morning. It was made easier by the fact that Miss Muirhead did not put in an appearance for the rest of the day, and when the duke remarked upon her absence during dinner, Her Grace explained that the poor young lady was feeling under the weather and was keeping to her own room for fear of infecting either of Their Graces.
“She really is kindness itself,” Her Grace remarked.
After that Ralph was more determined than ever to leave in the morning. He spent the evening with both grandparents and ended up reading aloud to them while his grandmother knitted and his grandfather rested his head against the chair back and closed his eyes. The duchess looked speakingly at Ralph when he began to snore softly. Ralph read on.
He took his leave the next morning and drove back to London in his curricle under heavy clouds that again threatened rain at every moment but did not actually shed any. The weather exactly matched Ralph’s mood. His future course had been set for him, and there was no longer any possibility of procrastinating. The days of his freedom—if he ever had been free—were effectively over. What if no one was ever free, though? What if everything was preordained? But only deeper depression could come from thinking thus, and he shrugged off those thoughts and turned to others.
Yesterday morning.
Was she just a fortune hunter? A gold digger? A cold fish?
I am ineligible.
To be fair, perhaps, it had sounded as if none of the disasters that had befallen her was her fault. She was enjoying the pleasures of her first Season when her sister ran off with that stupid ass Freddie Nelson—at least, he assumed that was the playwright she had spoken of—who seemed to believe that a flamboyant lifestyle was a good substitute for brains and talent. She was not the one who had made a prize spectacle of herself during the resulting affair of honor. How exactly like Graham Muirhead, though, to turn up for a duel and then refuse to take up a pistol or make as small a target of himself as he could.
Nor was it her fault that the man who had made her the object of his gallantries—she had not named him beyond starting to call him Lord Somebody-or-other—had turned out to be a cad of the first order. And it was not her fault that her mother had once been shockingly indiscreet with a man with hair of a distinctive shade of red or that he had passed on that feature to the child she had borne less than nine months after her hasty marriage to Muirhead.
Ralph felt little doubt that the gossips—for once—had the right of it. Miss Muirhead probably felt little doubt either, though she denied it.
As much as none of these crimes was her fault, she was indeed ineligible. She must have been mad—or just desperate—to expect that he would marry her simply to save himself the bother of courting someone else. His grandmother had received her as a guest into her home, it was true, despite her notoriety, but she would surely have forty fits of the vapors if he should suddenly announce his intention of marrying the woman. And he could only imagine the reaction of his mother and sisters.
He shook off the thought of Miss Muirhead. He had other, more pressing and even more dreary things to consider.
He ought to have begun his campaign that evening. He had even found an invitation to a ball that would be attended by all the cream of the ton and its daughters. He went instead, after dining alone at home, to Stanbrook House on Grosvenor Square, to call upon George, Duke of Stanbrook, if by some chance he was at home.
George was both friend and father figure, having opened his home all those years ago to wounded soldiers and given them the time and space in which to heal. And healing, George had recognized, as so few people did, did not consist just in a mending of broken bones and a knitting together of cuts and gashes, but in a restoration of peace and sanity to troubled, shattered minds. True healing was a slow business, perhaps a lifelong one. George had always had the gift of making each of the six of them who had stayed the longest feel that he or she was special to him.
Ralph had often wondered if any of them had lavished nearly as much attention upon George, who had been as deeply wounded as any of them by war even though he had not been on any of the Napoleonic battlefields.
He was at home, and by some miracle had no plans to go out. Ralph found him sitting by the fire in his drawing room, a glass of port at his elbow, an open book in his hand. He closed the latter and set it aside with a welcoming smile, and for the first time it occurred to Ralph that perhaps it had been selfish of him to come thus, unannounced. Perhaps George had been looking forward to a quiet evening at home.
“Ralph.” He got to his feet and stretched out a hand. “Come and warm yourself by the fire while I pour you a drink.”
They talked about inconsequential matters for a few minutes, and Ralph felt himself begin to relax.<
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“I have just come up from Sussex,” he said at last. “I was summoned there by my grandmother. But I was not kept. I was sent scurrying back to choose a bride, soon if not sooner. And to get her with child on our wedding night unless I want to incur Her Grace’s undying wrath.”
George regarded him with quiet sympathy.
“Your grandfather is poorly?” he asked.
“He is well into his eighties,” Ralph said by way of explanation.
“You are not regretting,” George asked, “that you let Miss Courtney go?”
Ralph winced and looked down into the contents of his glass while he twirled it slowly. Miss Courtney was the younger sister of Max Courtney, one of his best friends—one of his dead best friends. Ralph had known her since he was a boy and she was just a child. He had used to tease her whenever he went to stay with Max during a school holiday and, when they were a bit older, flirt just a little with her. After his return to town from his three years in Cornwall, he had run into her more than once at a social entertainment, and she had glowed with happiness and explained that being with him brought her closer again to her beloved brother. She had started to write to him, indiscreet as it was for a single lady to communicate privately with a single gentleman. Ralph had feared that she was developing a tendre for him. He had avoided her whenever he could, and had ignored a few of her letters and written only brief, dispassionate replies to the others. While he was at Middlebury Park this spring, she had written to inform him that she was about to marry a clergyman from the north of England. He had felt guilty then about having offered her so little consolation after Max’s death, about ignoring the affection she had tried to give him. He had shared his feelings with his fellow Survivors.
“I had nothing to offer her, George,” he said. “I would have made her life a misery. I was too fond of her to encourage her to attach herself to me.”
George said nothing. He sipped from his glass and leaned back, crossing one leg over the other and draping his free arm along the arm of his chair. He was the picture of elegant relaxation. His eyes rested upon Ralph without in any way staring at him. It was his gift, that pose, that silence, that attention. Waiting. Inviting. Not in any way threatening or judging.
Ralph set down his own glass, rested his elbows on the arms of his chair, and steepled his fingers beneath his chin. He settled his gaze on the fire.
“I will make any woman’s life a misery,” he said. “I can choose a lady and marry her, George. I can give her all the security of my name and wealth and prospects. I can bed her and impregnate her. That is all, though. And it is not enough.”
“Many women would call it paradise,” George said gently.
“I think not,” Ralph said.
“No,” George agreed softly after the silence had stretched awhile. “It is not.”
Ralph’s eyes moved to his. George agreed that a marriage devoid of all feeling, even affection, would be hell on earth. He had never talked of his own marriage, which had begun at a very young age and ended when his wife committed suicide after the death of their son in the Peninsula.
“There are all those young ladies out there,” Ralph said, “eager to find husbands at the great marriage mart. Eligible husbands. I am as eligible as anyone could possibly be. Any one of them would be ecstatic to net me, even if I do look like this.” He freed one hand in order to gesture toward his scarred cheek.
“Some say the scar makes you more dashing,” George said.
“I have to marry one of those girls,” Ralph said harshly. “Soon. And then I will shatter her dreams and ruin her life.”
“And yet,” George said, “the very fact that you know it and pity the young lady you will choose demonstrates that you care. You do care. You just have not fully understood that yet.”
Ralph gazed broodingly at him.
“I should hate you,” he said.
George raised his eyebrows.
“For saving my life,” Ralph told him. “More than once.”
It was something they had not spoken of for a long time—those occasions when Ralph had tried to take his own life, the further occasions when he had wanted to do it but had talked about it instead until he had been persuaded out of it.
“And do you?” George asked. “Hate me?”
Ralph did not answer him. He transferred his gaze back to the fire.
“There is one woman,” he said, and stopped.
He did not want to think about that one woman.
George was silent again.
“Did you ever meet Lady Angela Allandale last year?” Ralph asked.
“The Incomparable?” George asked. “She had an army of young bucks and a few older ones dangling after her, but would settle for none of them. Is she back this year? Is she this one woman?”
“And did you hear,” Ralph asked, “any scandal about a young lady who looked exactly like her and was almost certainly a by-blow of the Marquess of Hitching?”
“I did, yes,” George said, “and thought how unfortunate it was that the poor lady had inherited his very distinctive coloring and looked so exactly like his legitimate daughter that she was almost bound to arouse gossip. She was not strictly illegitimate though, if I remember correctly. She was the acknowledged daughter of some baronet. Hmm. Muirhead, I believe?”
“Yes,” Ralph said.
“Is she the one woman?” George asked.
“She is staying with my grandmother at Manville Court,” Ralph explained. “Her mother, now deceased, was Her Grace’s goddaughter. Miss Muirhead is there, I believe, because she feels uncomfortable at home with her father, who insists that the gossip is so much nonsense yet almost came to public blows with someone who brought that gossip into his neighborhood. She suggested a mutually beneficial bargain to me yesterday. She wants a husband but no emotional tie. She knows that I need a wife but have no emotional tie to offer.”
“A match made in heaven, then,” George said softly.
“Perhaps,” Ralph agreed.
There was a lengthy, rather heavy silence during which a log shifted and crackled in the fire, sending a shower of sparks up the chimney.
“Tell me why you are considering making what would appear to be an unwise connection with this unfortunate lady,” George said. “Is it perhaps because you believe you will end up hurting her less than you would one of the innocents just out of the schoolroom? Be careful if that is so, Ralph. We can all be hurt. Even ladies who have become social pariahs. Even you. But tell me.”
Ralph gazed broodingly into the fire before he spoke again.
We can all be hurt.
4
It was her last chance, Chloe had thought yesterday when she made her proposition to the Earl of Berwick. Her last chance. Well, if that was what it had been, then it was gone today. Just as he was.
The excuse she had made for the rest of yesterday of feeling under the weather had hardly been a lie. The thought of having to face him again had made her stomach churn with threatened nausea. So had the thought of facing anyone else. Or even herself for that matter. She felt she had somehow abused the duchess’s hospitality. Her Grace would be horrified if she knew what Chloe had suggested to her precious grandson.
Chloe had sat cross-legged on her bed for hours on end staring straight ahead, the curtains pulled across her window, her shawl hugged about her shoulders and across her bosom. If she got to her feet, she had thought once or twice when she had been tempted, she might see herself in the dressing table mirror. And if she got to her feet, she would have to admit that life went on and that she had no choice but to go on with it, day after dreary day until the end, which doubtless would be far distant just to spite her. She would probably live to the age of ninety.
Her life since the age of eighteen had been one disappointment and disaster after another, culminating in last year’s ghastly suggestion tha
t everything in her life so far had been based on a lie. For of course she had suspected—and still did—that perhaps her papa was not her real father. The Marquess of Hitching! The very name could turn her cold to the very core. Yet she had still dared to hope this morning that the future might yet hold something for her. The dashing of that hope had caused her to hit the rock bottom of despair.
Again.
It was beginning to feel like an almost familiar place to be. But perhaps hitting this new low had something to be said for it, she thought now, this morning, after she had awoken and realized in some surprise that she had slept for several hours. At least now there was no further down to go. And at least she would not have to fear coming face-to-face with the Earl of Berwick again, not for a long while, anyway. The maid who had brought up her pitcher of hot water when she rang for it was able to assure her that his lordship had already left Manville, taking his curricle and his baggage coach and his valet with him.
And so, because she had little choice in the matter anyway, Chloe went downstairs. She deliberately counted off all her many blessings as she made her way to the breakfast parlor despite a total lack of appetite. There was much for which to be grateful, not least of which was the fact that she was not an employee at Manville Court but a guest, and Her Grace was invariably kind to her. She had the freedom to wander where she would, the park about the house being extensive and beautifully landscaped. And summer was coming. Everything looked better in the sunshine and heat. Oh, yes, there were many blessings. There were thousands of women who would give a right arm for her life.