by Mary Balogh
It would be so easy to let himself slide all the way back to those early days at Penderris, grief turning to depression turning to self-pity turning to self-hatred turning to despair turning to . . . He had thought himself over the worst of this.
“Turn onto your stomach.”
“What?” he said.
Chloe’s voice had brought him back from the edge of some abyss.
“Turn onto your stomach,” she said again, moving away from him. “I’ll rub your back.”
He almost laughed. I’ll rub your back. That was one cure the physician at Penderris had never thought of. But he rolled obediently over onto his front, pushed his arms beneath the pillow, and turned his head toward Chloe. She was kneeling up on the bed beside him, her hair loose and tousled.
His own wakefulness had kept her awake too. He ought not to have held her. Her days this past week had been every bit as busy as his. Tomorrow would be both busy and stressful for her. She was going to have to meet some of the very highest sticklers of the ton, and she must be anticipating it with dread.
She rubbed his back lightly with one hand at first and then scratched it. Her touch felt exquisite. Then she leaned farther over him and worked both hands over his back, pressing and rubbing and kneading until he could feel knots loosening and muscles relaxing all the way down to his toes.
“Where did you learn to do this?” he asked her.
“I did not,” she admitted. “But I can feel where you are tense. I am trying not to press on any of your old wounds. I hope I am not hurting you.”
“I did not know,” he said, “that a pair of magic hands was being brought into our marriage along with the rest of you. I think I may have got the better half of our bargain.”
“Not so,” she said. “You brought a few titles and enormous wealth with the rest of you.”
He heard himself laugh softly with genuine amusement and felt the strangeness of it. The heels of her hands moved hard over his shoulder blades and for a moment he moved with them. Then her touch softened and he relaxed even more deeply. He did not believe he had ever in his life felt so contented.
He closed his eyes and drifted off to sleep.
When he awoke, it was dawn. He was still lying on his stomach, his arms crossed beneath his pillow, and he was still warm and relaxed and comfortable. He lifted his head. It was almost half past six according to the clock on the mantel.
Chloe was on her side facing him, asleep. She looked very different from usual, without her cap, her hair in a riot all about her head and face and upper body. And now, in the early light of day, he was fully aware of its color. He felt an instant and quite intense desire for her and despised himself for it. It was not the necessary desire of a husband wishing to impregnate his wife. It was the raw desire of a man for a beautiful woman. It was without the respect he had promised her and given for the first week of their marriage.
He wanted her with a ravenous hunger—on the morning of his grandfather’s funeral.
She opened her eyes. After a moment they focused upon him and she smiled.
“You slept,” she said.
“I did.”
He took her each morning before rising. It was necessary to do so, after all. He could see from the expression on her face that she expected it this morning too, that perhaps she would even welcome it. He set a hand on her shoulder, as he usually did, to turn her onto her back. But before she could move, his fingers tightened and then released her.
“It is going to be a busy day,” he said curtly. “Have another hour of sleep. I am going out for a ride.”
And he turned away from her and his own desire for her, swung his legs over the side of the bed, sat up, and reached down for his dressing gown.
He did not look back as he left her bedchamber.
* * *
The comforting thing about difficult days, Chloe had learned from experience, was that the sun rose at the start of them and set at the end just as it did on any other day. And there was always the assurance of better days ahead.
She faced the day of the late Duke of Worthingham’s funeral with a determined courage. For it was not about herself. She was not to be a central player even though she was the wife of the new duke and must welcome an unknown number of members of the ton into her home during the course of the day. It would not be an ordeal impossible to face. She had greeted Ralph’s mother and sisters and other members of his family during the last two days, after all, and in many ways that had been worse. She would get through today, and then everyone would go away again and she would be able to relax at last. She would begin her new life in earnest here at Manville Court.
A large number of outsiders did indeed attend the funeral in the village church during the morning and then followed the somber cortege on its slow procession to the family burial plot beside the chapel where Ralph and Chloe had married just the week before. Everyone then proceeded to the house to partake of refreshments and to express their sympathies.
Chloe did not have to face any of them directly until that last phase of the proceedings. She was introduced then to virtually everyone, including people with whom she had a previous acquaintance. Most nodded graciously but distantly to her. The occasion made that quite acceptable. Some regarded her with frosty, haughty stares and were only as civil as good manners dictated. But at least they were good mannered. A few—a small few—were amiable and even engaged her in conversation and congratulated her on her marriage. No one gave her the cut direct.
And there were, of course, those who had come purely for Chloe’s sake—her father and brother and sister, and also Lord Easterly with Aunt Julia, Papa’s sister. Her aunt and uncle hugged Chloe and congratulated her on her marriage and smiled at her with genuine warmth.
Sarah Toucher, Ralph’s middle sister, and her husband arrived at the church only just in time for the service and had no opportunity to talk to anyone before it was over. Sarah made a point of seeking out Chloe at the graveside after the burial, though, and hugged her briefly.
“Amelia and Nora both wrote long letters to tell me all about you,” she said. “I am so pleased Ralph had the good sense to marry you. I was very much afraid he would choose some insipid miss straight from the schoolroom, someone of whom my sisters would have approved with unqualified delight. If no one has yet told you, I am the rebel of the family and proved it when I rejected the very flattering offer of an earl three times my age during my first Season and married Andy instead. He was as rich as Croesus and I loved him to distraction, but to my family those details did not make up for the fact that he was a mere mister and that his maternal grandfather, the one from whom most of the money came, had been in trade.” With that she hugged Chloe briefly again and then turned to leave. “Now, I must go to poor Grandmama. She will be feeling more than desolate today. She and Grandpapa adored each other, you know. Oh, you probably do know. You were living here, were you not, when Ralph met you?”
And she was gone in a whirl of black crepe and dark facial veil. But it was touches like her unexpectedly friendly greeting that sustained Chloe through the day. She did not dwell upon her own discomfort at being surrounded once more by members of the ton, however. Much of her attention was focused upon the dowager duchess, who bore herself with stoic dignity throughout the long day, but who must be inwardly reeling from grief and exhaustion. And most of the rest of her attention was upon Ralph, who wore his new ducal mantle with dignity and looked like a marble statue.
She tried not to remember the early morning. What was it that had sent him away from her bed so abruptly? His abandonment had felt like a slap across the face. Yet his words had suggested kindness. It is going to be a busy day. Have another hour of sleep.
There had been a fleeting expression on his face before he turned away and got up from the bed, but she had not been able to explain to herself what it had been. Disgust? But it had not been that definite. Revulsio
n? No, that was basically the same thing as disgust. Disapproval? But he was the one who had unpinned her hair last night and made her look like a wanton.
There had been something in that expression, something to explain why he had avoided the usual morning intimacy. He had said last night that he desired her, but this morning he had turned away even from what he normally considered his duty.
Her hair?
She did not have any time during the day to dwell upon the disturbing shifts in their relationship that had happened through the night, but the puzzle of it was there in the back of her mind all day, like a dull, heavy ache. Something had shifted. She knew him better, yes, understood him more fully after listening to at least part of his story last night. She had heard enough to understand that the three years he had spent in Cornwall had not really healed him at all. His physical hurts had been dealt with and perhaps the worst of his suicidal tendencies. But the blackness weighing upon his soul was still there and perhaps always would be.
For a while last night, with the telling and what had followed, they had seemed to grow closer. He had held her after they made love, and when she had felt his inability to relax and sleep, he had allowed her to rub his back and work upon his knotted muscles with untrained, instinctive hands and fingers to the extent that she had soothed herself as well as him. She had put him to sleep and had lain gazing at him for a while afterward before her own eyelids drooped and she slept too. It had felt as though they had crossed a barrier and drawn closer to being . . . married.
But she was no doctor for the soul, she realized today. Something had definitely changed and then changed again, but the changes were not necessarily for the better. Perhaps he resented her for forcing him to talk and remember. Perhaps he regretted allowing himself to relax and lower his guard under her ministrations. He had even laughed with her. But early this morning he had looked at her with her hair down and had seen someone different from the quiet, unemotional, undemanding wife he had bargained upon getting.
But it was not she who had let down her hair. It was not she who had been tense and unable to sleep.
The day drew to its inevitable end after all the outside guests had taken their leave. The worst of the ordeal was over. The houseguests drifted off to bed until Chloe felt herself able to withdraw too. She went up with Lady Ponsonby and Lady Trentham again, both of whom she liked. Ralph stayed downstairs with his fellow Survivors. It felt just like last night, except that the funeral was over and a certain emptiness had settled over the company during the evening.
She was not going to wait up tonight, she decided. She was so weary she hardly knew what to do with herself. And she did not want to see what look Ralph would have in his eyes when he came to her room—if he came and if there was any expression there at all. But she found herself lingering at her dressing table and gazing into the mirror, trying to decide whether to don her cap or not, whether to coil her braid about her head or leave it hanging down her back, whether to braid her hair at all. It was such a foolish indecision. Was she trying to decide which choice would better please her husband? What she ought to be asking herself instead was what she wanted to do. But she was too weary to think.
No, she did know what she wanted. She wanted hair as dark as Lucy’s and her mother’s and Graham’s and her fath—
Which father?
She hated more than anything else these moments when such doubts got past her guard. Papa was her father.
Papa was her father.
Oh, her hair was to blame for everything.
And finally she decided.
She had nothing very large in the room with her. The best she could come up with was her sewing scissors, whose blades were not very long. But they were long enough. And they were sharp enough. She had sharpened them herself just before coming to Manville Court.
She cut off her hair to the bottom of her ears. She considered cutting it even shorter, hacking it off all over her head, but by that time her breathing was ragged with panic, and her hands were shaking and tingling with pins and needles. She turned on the stool and looked at the hair scattered along its length and heaped on the floor all about her. There was far more of it than she had expected. She felt suddenly sick to her stomach. She dared not lift her hands to feel the remaining hair. But she did not need hands. She could feel its absence. There was a lightness about her head, and the air felt cool on the back of her neck.
She was sitting facing out to the room, surrounded by hair, her scissors still dangling from the fingers of one hand, when a light tap on the door heralded the appearance of Ralph.
* * *
Good God!
Ralph came to an abrupt stop inside the door, looked at Chloe, looked at her scattered hair, and shut the door softly behind his back.
“Chloe?” he said.
She burst into noisy, gulping tears.
“I am not sorry,” she gasped out. “I hated it. I hated it. I am not sorry.”
All that glorious hair.
Gone.
He could do nothing but stare blankly for a few moments and gaze upon his wife’s distress with incomprehension.
He had almost not come tonight—because he had been thinking of this moment all day. Despite all that had been going on, despite his genuine grief over seeing his grandfather finally carried out of the house, making the end of an era final, and despite the necessity of holding together his dignity in the face of all those who had come to pay their respects to one dead duke and to look with critical curiosity upon the successor, despite his concern for his grandmother and, to a lesser degree, for his sisters, despite his realization that this was a difficult day for his wife—despite everything, he had wanted only for the night to fall so that he could come to her again, bed her again, be with her again.
And his very longing for the night, for her body, for her, had almost kept him away. For frankly he was a bit bewildered and more than a bit alarmed by his eagerness. He had to tell himself sternly that it was all because of the turmoil the death of his grandfather had caused in the past week, that soon now they would be able to settle into the routine of the marriage they had both bargained for.
More than anything else he wanted himself back to himself. He would share himself in marriage for all the essentials—the creation of children, the joint running of a home, though that would not be difficult since presumably she would run the house and he would run the estate. He did not want to share anything else of himself. Or of her. Such was not part of their bargain.
They must share a social life, of course.
He hated this confusion of mind, and the sooner he shook it off, the better he would like it. He had convinced himself finally that he was coming tonight because he had missed bedding her this morning and hoped very much to have her pregnant before her next courses were due. And, no, he had not asked her when that was.
And now this.
He had walked in on a crisis of monumental proportions. He understood that after those first few seconds. This was no simple matter with a simple explanation. And this was not the sensible, disciplined, dispassionate wife he had married.
What the devil? he thought. But even in those first moments he knew that thundering at her would achieve nothing. Neither would standing here and murmuring her name. It occurred to him briefly that he was in no way equipped to deal with female hysterics, but the thing was that she was not just any female. She was his wife.
She was Chloe.
Her hands had gone up to cover her face. She was still wailing. Her hair stuck out on either side of her head, coming to an abrupt end just above the tips of her earlobes. She was surrounded by a sea of red. A small pair of scissors had just clattered to the floor.
“Come, come, this will not do,” he said, striding toward her, grasping her by both elbows, and lifting her onto her feet and clear of the hair before he wrapped one arm about her waist and held
her face to his shoulder with the other hand spread over the back of her head. He crooned something unintelligible even to himself against her ear and rocked her, rather as if she were a child who had fallen and scraped her knee.
“I . . . hated . . . it,” she said once more, gulping and gasping between words.
Presumably she was talking about her hair.
“Then you did the sensible thing,” he told her. Though she might have waited until an accredited hairdresser could do the job for her.
“I l-look a f-fright,” she gasped.
She probably did. He had not had a chance to properly assess the damages.
“Probably,” he agreed.
The hysteria stopped, rather as if he had tipped a bucket of icy water over her. She drew back her head and looked up at him with her wet, reddened face, her shorn hair standing out to the sides, the right side slightly shorter than the left.
“Oh,” she said, “there is no probably about it.”
“No,” he agreed. “I can see that.”
Her teeth sank into her lower lip.
“I cannot stick it back on,” she said.
“No,” he agreed again, “you cannot. And I will not even add a probably this time.”
And what now? He could hardly just take her to bed and extinguish the candles and proceed to business.
“We will go to my bedchamber,” he said. “Come.”
And he set an arm about her shoulders and led her there. Fortunately, they did not meet anyone on the way. He pulled on the bell rope in his room and went to the doorway of his dressing room when he heard his valet enter.
“Have someone sent up to clean Her Grace’s room, Burroughs,” he said. “She has been cutting her hair. And refrain from entering my bedchamber in the morning. I will summon you when I am ready to dress and be shaved.”
“Yes, Your Grace.” The valet disappeared.
“It is dreadfully late,” Chloe said. “The cleanup could have waited until the morning.”
He raised his eyebrows. “No,” he said. “It could not.”