A Chance Encounter (8 page)

And she discovered that she had been right in thinking that Mr. Mainwaring was not as taciturn or as top-lofty as he had at first appeared. He began to tell her about himself. He had been brought up, after the death of his parents when he was an infant, by his maternal grandfather in Scotland. The old gentleman had been stern and something of a hermit. The place had been lonely. The boy had been brought up almost entirely by his grandfather and a crusty old housekeeper. He had been educated at home. It was not until his grandfather died when William Mainwaring was nineteen years old, that the boy fully realized that he had an estate and wealth awaiting him in England. But he had no training for the sort of life he would face. He knew no one in England and, in fact, very few in Scotland.

He explained to Elizabeth that, although he was now thirty years old, he had never quite recovered from the strangeness of his upbringing. He found it difficult to relax and behave with the ease of manner he so admired in other men. He found it difficult to make friends, but found himself firmly attached to those he had made.

Elizabeth could not help allowing curiosity to get the better of her. “How comes it that you are friendly with the Marquess of Hetherington?” she asked. “You and he seem so different from each other.”

“Robert?” he said, looking at her solemnly. “Yes, he is the sort of man I should like to be. He has an ease of manner and a charm that come naturally to him. People invariably warm to his personality. However, there is great depth to his character that you may not know on such short acquaintance, Miss Rossiter. Strangely enough, his upbringing was similar to mine in many ways. And I believe he has suffered in his life. He has a sensitivity to the hurts of others that can have come only from personal experience.”

Elizabeth hid her skepticism in silence. “Around this next bend we should find ourselves close to the horses and the luncheon,” she said.

“Ah,” he remarked, “I had forgotten the others. You are an easy person to talk to, Miss Rossiter. Is it part of your profession to set people to talking so much at their ease?”

Elizabeth smiled. “Not at all, sir,” she replied cheerfully. “Perhaps it is my plain gray dress that gives you confidence. Maybe you allow a lady's grand appearance to awe you into believing that she is a threat to you.”

They had rounded the bend and were now in full view of the others. He looked down at her and laughed. “What a novel idea,” he said. “And I only now noticed that you are dressed plainly. Do you always dress so? You must have a powerful personality, ma'am. One tends not to notice.”

Elizabeth too laughed, but could not hide a blush at the unexpectedness of his words. “Why, sir, I do believe I have been complimented,” she said, looking up into his face, and across into the tight-lipped, glowering face of the Marquess of Hetherington, who had paused in the process of pouring wine for the company. Elizabeth had enjoyed the walk and the conversation with William Mainwaring, and refused to have her mood spoiled. Joining the group, she placed a meat pasty and a buttered bread roll on a plate, and moved over to join Mrs. Prosser and Anne Claridge, who were exchanging views on the latest fashions.

As she ate and listened, Elizabeth let her eyes rove around the company. Lucy Worthing and Mr. Dowling, she was amused to see, were sitting together and conversing—or, at least, Lucy was listening to Mr. Dowling talk. The girl was looking almost pretty today with her sky-blue muslin dress that did not make her hair look too yellow or her complexion too pasty. Ferdie, Cecily, and Amelia Norris formed a group with Hetherington, but Elizabeth noticed that Cecily, flushed and slightly disheveled, was talking animatedly to Ferdie, while Hetherington, looking quite genial again, was entertaining his betrothed. He must have been angry to remember that he had invited her, Elizabeth thought, and that was why he had looked so out of sorts a short while before.

When everyone had eaten his fill and the food was packed away again, Mrs. Prosser got to her feet. “Come, Miss Claridge,” she said, “show me this church of yours on top of the hill. Is it worth looking at?”

“Oh, not really,” Anne said, standing up and shaking out her skirts, “but there is a splendid view from the top.”

“Is there? Come, Henry, I need your arm,” his wife called cheerfully.

“May I come too?” Mr. Mainwaring asked, and offered his arm to Anne Claridge.

“Miss Rossiter, I should like to discover the walk you were just showing to William,” Hetherington's voice said from close to her shoulder.

Elizabeth turned, startled. She was even more surprised to see that he had put the church group between himself and those who were still sitting on the blankets, so that it was almost a private moment that they shared. He obviously meant that she was to go with him alone, not with a group.

She looked into his face for a clue to his motive. But his expression was polite, impassive. She smoothed her skirt and turned quietly to walk along the bank of the stream again toward the bend that would take them out of sight of the group. They walked in silence until they were unobserved. Then he began.

“What is your game, Elizabeth?” he asked quietly. “Is it Mainwaring you are out to captivate now?”

She looked across at him blankly. “What?” she said.

“Because if it is,” he said, his voice now revealing an underlying fury, “I am here to tell you that you will not be allowed to succeed.”

“What are you talking about?” Elizabeth stopped and turned to him, a puzzled frown on her face.

“Do you think I have forgotten what you are like?” he sneered. “He is wealthy and he is vulnerable, is he not? And it seems that you need money again. So you have set to work. And your plan is succeeding already, damn you. I have never seen Mainwaring so taken with a lady.”

“I believe I have walked into a conversation not meant for me, my lord,” Elizabeth said, breathing rather fast. “I have not the faintest idea what you are talking about, except that I realize you are being insulting. I wish you would explain yourself more clearly.”

He turned fully to her now, his fury showing in his heightened color and in his flashing eyes. “You wish me to put the matter plainly to you?” he snapped. “I shall do so. If your position does not offer you enough in the way of luxuries, and if you need more money, you may apply to me for it. I shall give it to you. But you will not ruin a friend of mine who has had a hard life and deserves some happiness. You will leave him alone, ma'am.”

Elizabeth's eyes had widened. Her body was rigid, fists clenched at her side. For a moment she could not speak. “How dare you!”, she whispered at last. “By what possible right could you so insult me?” Her hand rose of its own volition and cracked across his face.

She watched in fascination as the white marks left by her fingers darkened almost immediately to an angry red. Then she met his eyes, which still blazed.

“By God, Elizabeth, you forget yourself,” he said through clenched teeth, and then his hands clamped painfully on her shoulders and crushed her against his body. His mouth came down on hers, hard and bruising.

Elizabeth reacted in panic. This could not happen, her mind screamed. It must not happen. Her only defense against him was distance. If she did not get away immediately, she would be lost, in the same state of raw pain she had suffered for months six years before. So she fought. She clawed at his chest with her fingernails, kicked at his shins, twisted her head from side to side, and moaned her protest. His answer was to haul her harder against him so that hands and breasts were crushed against his coat, and to open his mouth over hers so that she could not pull away.

Elizabeth continued to moan, but gradually collapsed against him and angled her head so that his seeking tongue could slip past the barrier of her teeth. And he was Robert, the man she had always loved, the only man who had ever touched her, the only man she had ever wanted. And wanted now with a searing passion.

But suddenly she was alone again, cold, back beside the stream close to her place of employment, only two hands holding her shoulders in a bruising grip, a pair of cold blue eyes looking at her cynically.

“You could have had it all, could you not, Elizabeth, had you only waited a little while?” he said. “You must have felt that fate had dealt you a treacherous blow. But you have made your choice, ma'am, and you must live by it. You will stay away from William Mainwaring. Do I make myself understood?”

His words had thawed some of the numbness that seemed to grip Elizabeth's heart. “Remove your hands from me, my lord,” she said calmly. “I have nothing to say to you, now or ever. I had never thought to hate anyone. But I believe I do hate you.”

They stared at each other for a long moment, each cold and unyielding. Finally his hands dropped and she turned to go back the way they had come.

“Let us continue with our walk,” he said stiffly. “You are flushed and breathless. I do not doubt that I still have the mark of your hand on my face. It would not do for us to be seen in the near future.”

They walked side by side, coming around at the back of the hill, and climbed the slope to join the other group, which was still at the top, sitting on the grass admiring the view.

S
he was listening to her father again, her father without his usual gruff manner, hesitant, troubled, almost apologetic, telling her. After all the agony and uncertainty that had gone before, she finally knew the worst.

“No!” she was saying. “Please, no!”

“I'm sorry, Lizzie,” he said. “I can think of no way to soften the blow. Eventually you will realize that you are well out of it, of course, but...”

His voice trailed away when he realized that she was not listening. She rocked back and forth on the chair, her hands spread over her face, trying desperately to shut out the truth, to blot out reality, life.

“No!” she moaned over and over. “Please, no. It can't be true. No! Oh, God, no!”

John was there, though she had a feeling suddenly that it was a few days later.

“Elizabeth,” he pleaded, kneeling on the floor in front of her and trying to look into her face, “You must pull out of it, love. You have not eaten for days.”

“No,” she moaned.

“He is a scoundrel, Elizabeth,” he said angrily. “You must tell yourself that over and over again. Let me hear you.”

“No,” she replied, her hands before her weary face again. “No. No. No.
Robert!”

She screamed the name and clawed at the arms of the chair as she pulled herself upright, gasping for air. John had disappeared. Everything had disappeared. She stared wildly into the darkness, heart thumping loudly, hands gripping bunches of the bedcovers. It took her several seconds to realize that she was in her bedroom at the Rowes'.

Elizabeth slumped back against the pillows and closed her eyes. She put her hands, palm downward, on the bed beside her and concentrated on breathing slowly and evenly. The old nightmare! She had thought she was over them. But, of course, the reappearance of Robert in her life was bound to revive some of the old pain. It would pass again, she told herself soothingly, unconsciously assuming for herself the role that John had played for several weeks six years before.

She would not think about it anymore tonight. She must think of something more pleasant. Elizabeth knew from experience that if she tried to divert her thoughts entirely from that episode in her life, she would fail utterly. She must relive some pleasant memory, before things went bad. She set herself deliberately to recalling the evening when Robert had first told her about his grandmother, his mother's mother.

“She lives in Devonshire most of the time,” he had explained. “We used to see her once a year when Papa would send us down there for a duty visit. At least, Tom used to come for the first few years. Then I suppose he felt himself too old, so I used to go alone, with a nurse, of course. I used to be terrified of Gram. A crusty old bird, Papa always called her, and I always felt the description fit.”

He had gone on to explain how his grandmother, Lady Bothwell, had never treated him like a child, but always conversed with him as if he were a sensible adult. She had demanded a great deal of him and had occasionally referred to “that young fool, your father.” She suffered from rheumatism. Her slow, stiff movements, her constantly tapping cane had frightened the child. It was only as he grew older that he came to appreciate the keen intelligence and blunt good sense of his grandmother. He had learned that the bad feeling between her and his father had been caused by her refusal on more than one occasion to help him out of debt.

Robert had always continued the annual visits to his grandmother, from choice once he was old enough to make the decision himself. He had developed a deep, if undemonstrative affection for her.

And now she was making one of her very infrequent, always unannounced visits to London. She had taken a house for the duration of the Season, refusing as she always did on such occasions to stay with her son-in-law.

“I want you to meet her, Elizabeth,” Robert had said, smiling eagerly into her eyes. They were waltzing at Almack's. He always chose waltzes with her, because the dance gave them some time to be together and to talk. It was hard to steal time together otherwise.