Slightly Tempted

by Mary Balogh

  His facial bruises had faded. He looked, she thought, quite as handsome as ever. It was hard to believe, though, that once, not so very long ago, she had been slightly infatuated with him.

  “Lady Morgan,” he said, “I do hope you will forgive me.”

  “They were difficult days, Captain,” she said. “I daresay none of us behaved as well as we ought or as we would have done in more normal circumstances. It is best forgotten.”

  “You are most generous.” He was visibly relieved. “I was about to ride into my first battle, you see, and was neither thinking nor speaking rationally.”

  About to ride into battle? She frowned.

  “For what do you beg forgiveness, Lord Gordon?” she asked him.

  He flushed and did not quite meet her eyes when he spoke.

  “I thought that perhaps I had raised expectations where I intended none,” he said. “I thought that perhaps I had aroused hope when I did not mean to suggest anything of a permanent nature.”

  He was not, she realized, talking of their final encounter outside the house on the Rue de Bellevue but of what had happened between them at the Duchess of Richmond’s ball.

  “You thought perhaps, Lord Gordon,” she said, her voice very soft, “that I was under the impression we were betrothed?”

  “I-I . . .” He looked sheepish.

  “I was not under any such impression,” she told him. “Had you asked me outright on that occasion, I would have said no. Any petition for my hand must, of course, be made formally and correctly. I would never, Lord Gordon, so forget myself as to engage in a clandestine betrothal with a man who had not first addressed himself to the Duke of Bewcastle. But even if you had proceeded thus, and even if he had given his approval, I would most certainly have refused you.”

  His flush deepened. “I am perfectly eligible, Lady Morgan,” he said stiffly. “I will be Caddick one day.”

  “I do not care if you were in expectation of becoming the Prince of Wales one day,” Morgan said, lifting her chin and looking along her nose at him as if he were some particularly nasty specimen of humanity. “You are not a gentleman I would deem worthy of my hand, Captain Gordon. I am thankful that it is not your behavior on the morning you left Brussels for which you came to beg my forgiveness. In a moment of weakness I might have granted it.” She stood.

  “Mama is quite right about you,” he said sharply. “So is everyone else.”

  “Indeed?” She regarded him with one of her frostiest looks.

  “You are mighty haughty, my lady,” he said, “for someone whose name is being bandied about every club and drawing room in London like that of the veriest trollop. You do not imagine, do you, that you were not seen all over Brussels on the arm of the Earl of Rosthorn and even embracing him on a public street or alone on the ship with him all the way to Harwich, his arm about your shoulders, his hand in yours? Even for a Bedwyn your behavior has been too shocking for words.” He sounded like a spiteful boy retaliating for an insult.

  “And yet,” she said, her eyes sweeping disdainfully over him, “you have found enough words with which to wax positively eloquent, Captain. I congratulate you.”

  She continued to stare coldly at him for a few moments longer. But inside she was shocked indeed. Could it possibly be true? There was gossip about her? Because she had remained behind in Brussels to tend the wounded and await word of Alleyne, and the Earl of Rosthorn had been kind enough to watch after her and to escort her about Brussels when she had needed relaxation? Because he had been kind enough to escort her to England when she had needed to come? She had had a maid with her.

  When had she been seen embracing him? She could remember only one occasion, outside Mrs. Clark’s when she had been weary from overwork and had slept with her head on his shoulder for a few minutes. She had stood on the step above him afterward and leaned forward and kissed him.

  There were always pedestrians on that street.

  She might have guessed that there would be gossip in London, of course. The Caddicks would have brought plenty with them. And those other things, so supremely unimportant during those days in Brussels, would seem shocking indeed to English people who had not been there to know what it had been like.

  And she was not entirely innocent, was she? Not innocent at all, in fact. There was no point in resorting to righteous indignation.

  Captain Lord Gordon must have been beside himself with fear that somehow he had trapped himself into a commitment to her during the Duchess of Richmond’s ball and that she might be unwilling to release him. He would not enjoy hobbling his way—literally as well as figuratively—through a sordid scandal with her on his arm, this military hero who had almost won the Battle of Waterloo single-handedly. Morgan smiled with arctic contempt at him and turned away without another word.

  Was this why the Earl of Rosthorn had not come to Bedwyn House during the past ten days or to the memorial service today? she wondered. Had he been driven from London by the gossip? Perhaps even from England? That would be grossly unfair.

  But if it were so, she could never expect to see him again. It was a horribly depressing thought. Today of all days she longed to see him, to watch that lazy smile light his eyes again, to listen to his attractive French accent, to hear him call her chérie. She wanted someone of her very own with her—a dear friend. But how abject that sounded now that the thought had verbalized itself in her mind. She did not need him. She did not need anyone. She straightened her shoulders and joined another group of visitors.

  Finally everyone had left. Aunt and Uncle Rochester had gone home. So had Freyja and Joshua, Chastity and Lord Meecham with them. Aidan and Eve, Rannulf and Judith had all gone up to the nursery to see their children. Morgan felt horribly lonely despite all her resolves—and despite the fact that she had refused an invitation from Joshua to go back with them for the evening and from both Eve and Judith to go to the nursery with them. She would go to the library, she decided, and sit with Wulfric. She would not disturb him. She did not expect him to talk to her or entertain her in any way. She just wanted to curl up on one of the leather chairs there and feel the reassurance of his company.

  She did not knock on the door. She opened it quietly, intending to creep inside without drawing attention to herself.

  He was standing before the empty hearth, staring into the fireplace, his back to her. His shoulders were shaking. One of his hands was balled into a fist on the mantelpiece above his head. He was sobbing, choking on the sounds as Aidan had done days before.

  Morgan gazed in horror for a few paralyzed moments.

  Then she closed the door even more quietly than she had opened it and fled upstairs to her room.

  If Wulf was weeping, the end of the world seemed near indeed.

  She cast herself facedown across her bed and gathered fistfuls of the bedcover on either side of her head.

  Alleyne was dead.

  He was gone forever.

  For the first time since that evening in Brussels she gave in to a storm of grief.

  CHAPTER XII

  THE SUN WAS FINALLY BREAKING THROUGH THE clouds on the afternoon that Gervase arrived home. The gravel of the driveway that wound its way in leisurely meanderings through the woods and over the rolling hills of the park surrounding Windrush Grange was wet but not soggy. Water dripped from the leaves overhead and clung in sparkling drops to the grass. There was a richly verdant smell in the air.

  He was powerfully reminded of how he had always loved Windrush, how thankful he had always been that he was the elder son, that he would be the one to inherit while his brother, Pierre, was the one destined for the church. This lengthy approach to the house had always lifted his spirits.

  But it was nine years since he had last ridden along it. His father had been alive in those days. Both his sisters had still been at home. He had been a carefree young man, eager to enjoy the pleasures of town and the companionship of his peers, but eager too to learn all that he needed to know as his father’s
heir. He had been a basically happy, blameless young man whose life was progressing smoothly along a path that had been mapped out for him since childhood.

  And then disaster had struck in a series of nightmarish events over which he had seemed to have no control whatsoever.

  He felt as if he were riding back into someone else’s life.

  There was a large flower garden to one side of the gabled, red-brick house, complete with a trellised arch, cobbled pathways, and wrought-iron seat beneath an old weeping willow. There were three women there, he could see as he rode closer, two of them bent over the flowers, long baskets over their arms to hold the blooms, the third holding an infant on one hip as she watched. There was a man on the seat.

  One of the women straightened up at the sound of his horse’s hooves and held the floppy brim of her straw hat. And then she cried out, hastily set her basket down, and came running toward him, one hand holding up the hem of her dress. She was petite, still youthfully slender, still dark-haired. Her face was alight with welcome.

  Gervase dismounted, tossed the reins over his horse’s neck, and strode toward her, his arms outstretched.

  “Gervase!” she cried. “Gervase, mon fils.”

  “Maman!” He caught her up in his arms, spun once about with her, and set her on her feet again.

  “You are home.” She stood back and raised one slightly trembling hand to his cheek while her eyes devoured his face. “Ah, my beloved boy, and you are more handsome than ever.”

  “Whereas you have stayed the same age, Maman,” he said with a grin. “You are a mere girl.”

  It was not quite true, of course. There were streaks of gray in her hair and there were lines in her face. But she had aged well in nine years. She was still lovely.

  The man had come hurrying up behind her. He had been still a boy when Gervase saw him last. He was a bespectacled, soberly clad gentleman now, tall and lean and balding.

  “Pierre?”

  For a moment it seemed that the brothers would hug each other. But both hesitated and the moment passed. Gervase held out his right hand, and Pierre clasped it.

  “Gervase,” he said. “It is fitting that you have come home. I am glad. Allow me, if I may, to present my wife. This is Rosthorn, Emma, my dear.”

  She curtsied to him, a brown-haired, unremarkable young woman. Gervase took her hand and bowed over it.

  “Mrs. Ashford,” he said. “My pleasure, ma’am. And this is your son?”

  The child gazed at him with fine gray eyes. There was a halo of blond curls about his chubby face.

  “This is Jonathan, my lord,” she said.

  “Jonathan.” His nephew. He had one other and three nieces, offspring of his sisters. Life had gone on in nine years as if he had never been.

  “And here is Henrietta come to greet you, Gervase,” his mother said.

  She was his second cousin and had lived with them since the death of her parents had made her his father’s ward. She at least looked much as she always had—small and solid, dark-haired, square-faced, by no means ugly but not pretty either. She had never married. She must be seven or eight and twenty by now.

  “Henrietta.” He smiled and bowed to her.

  “Gervase.” She curtsied without smiling.

  It was not a poor welcome, he thought as his mother took his arm and drew him in the direction of the house and a groom led his horse to the stables. There was no sign of hostility or resentment in any of them. But there was a guardedness, a certain awkwardness, as if they were all strangers—as indeed they were.

  He had been robbed of his family, he thought, among other things. Would the closeness that had always characterized their relations with one another ever return? Could it be retrieved? He felt the absence of his father keenly. His father had been his hero.

  And then his father had rejected him. Utterly. He had preferred to listen to the lies and fabrications of others rather than to the protestations of innocence of the son he had always claimed to love.

  That had been a terrible betrayal.

  Worse than Marianne’s.

  Worse than Bewcastle’s.

  It had been devastating.

  DURING THE COMING DAYS THERE WERE THE servants to meet and the steward to consult with—almost all strangers to him. There was the home farm to be inspected and the park to be explored—all familiar yet somehow irrevocably different. There were tenants to call upon and neighbors to receive since word of his return home spread quickly in the countryside and people came to pay their respects. If they had ever known the reason for his hasty departure to the Continent years ago and his lengthy stay there, nothing was said of it now. Indeed, one or two seemed to assume that he had gone in order to live for a time with his mother’s relatives. Almost all these people were familiar to him, and yet all felt like strangers.

  Gervase felt uncomfortable and uneasy in his own home. Whenever he had thought of coming, he supposed he had thought of returning to everything and everyone exactly as he had left them. He had thought of returning to himself as he had been.

  But everything had changed, himself most of all.

  He resented it. He deeply resented it. But after a few days he realized that he could not simply return to the Continent and continue with the life of wandering dissipation that he had lived for the past number of years. Because he had come home, he could not go back. He was a man caught in limbo, belonging nowhere and to no one.

  Not that he had any tangible reason to complain. His mother in particular doted on him.

  He asked her one morning at breakfast about his absent neighbors. Several families were away in London for the Season. Indeed, Gervase had only just escaped coming home to an empty house. His mother and Henrietta had been planning to leave for London themselves within a few days, to do some shopping and to attend the theater and perhaps a few select ton entertainments.

  His mother prattled on with stories about the neighbors, filling him in on much that he had missed in his years away. There had been very few changes of any significance, he gathered—very few losses of families, very few new ones.

  “And the Marquess of Paysley?” he asked her. “Has he been much to Winchholme Park lately, Maman?”

  He hoped the man was not there now. There would be all the dilemma of deciding whether he ought to be called upon. But Winchholme was one of the smaller of the marquess’s properties. He never had been in residence there a great deal.

  “Ah, but the marquess you remember died some time ago, Gervase,” his mother told him, leaning slightly sideways so that the butler could pour her a second cup of coffee. “Did I not tell you so in one of my letters, mon fils?” She darted him a quick smile but then concentrated upon stirring sugar into her drink.

  “No,” he said. She knew she had not, of course. It was not something she would have mentioned.

  “The new marquess does not own Winchholme,” she said. “It was unentailed, if you will remember. The old marquess left it to his daughter in his will.”

  Gervase looked sharply at her. The marquess had had only the one daughter.

  “To Marianne?” he said. “And does she live there?”

  “Yes, she does,” his mother said. “You should perhaps see her and talk with her. It would be very distressing for you to be avoiding each other for the rest of your lives when you live a mere four miles apart, would it not? All that happened was a long time ago.”

  He stared mutely at her. Yes, a long time ago indeed—all of which time he had spent in exile. Did she seriously expect that he could forgive and forget and simply let bygones be bygones? He had known Marianne since childhood. His sisters and Henrietta had played with her. So had he on occasion. And then she had betrayed him so horribly.

  “Henrietta and she are still friends,” his mother continued when it became obvious that he would not reply. “You cannot ignore her existence entirely.”

  “Who is her husband?” Gervase asked.

  “But she never married,” his mother s
aid. “Beautiful as she is, she has never found the man who will please her. Promise me you will call upon her.”

  “No!” he exclaimed more sharply than he intended. “No, I will not do that, Maman. I cannot think kindly of her.”

  Indeed, it hurt that his mother accepted her as a neighbor with such complacency and had not discouraged the friendship between Henrietta and Marianne. It hurt that Henrietta had not spurned her erstwhile friend. Had it mattered to no one that he had been cut off from his life almost as effectively as if someone had put a bullet through his heart? Had they imagined that he was enjoying himself on the Continent?

  But even within the confines of his own head his complaints were beginning to sound annoyingly self-pitying. He got to his feet, kissed his mother’s hand, and excused himself to go about his day’s business.

  The old life was gone, never to be retrieved. His years of wandering and debauchery were over. It was time he carved a new life for himself. And that new life, of course, was to involve a journey to London in the near future. He was just not sure exactly when he would go.

  He had been home for a week when Horace Blake came to call on him. Blake was one of the neighbors who had been absent in London—he had arrived home just the day before. He was a few years older than Gervase, but they had nevertheless shared an easy camaraderie in the past. They shook hands amiably now and settled in the library, one on each side of the fireplace, each with a drink in his hand.

  “Well, Rosthorn,” Blake said with a grin after they had exchanged pleasantries and some idle chitchat, “you are still the devil you always were, I hear.”

  Gervase raised his eyebrows. He never had been much of a devil.

  “You are the talk of town,” Blake said. “There are even wagers in the betting books in all the clubs on whether you will offer for the chit or not—and on whether Bewcastle will accept even if you do offer. There was some sort of altercation with him, was there not, before you went away?”

  Ah. It had happened, then, had it? They had not escaped the gossiping tongues of the ton.