An Affair Before Christmas (18 page)

P.S. I am truly sorry to hear that you are still unwell.

He strolled along the Serpentine and watched gray water drops dimple the surface of the water. The rain was cold on his cheeks.

Poppy didn’t love him.

She had never loved him. Her dragonish mother had coerced her into the marriage. The emotion at their wedding had been all his, which laid painfully bare the reasons for their pitiful intimacies. She didn’t love him; of course she didn’t desire him.

The rain was suddenly hot on his face, a hot drop here, a cold drizzle there.

“But I loved her.” Fletch said it out loud, into the silence of the gray rain. “I was in love with her.” That Christmas years ago in Paris was emblazoned in his memory. “I loved her. I—I—” But he stopped before he said that he still loved her.

She didn’t want him in the most fundamental way. She told him to find a mistress.

He walked until his heart was as dreary as the sky, until some sort of truth came to him.

He must be cursed, because he still loved her. He loved his wife. Even so.

And that meant that he couldn’t survive alone for five years as Poppy suggested. He couldn’t lie awake in the middle of the night and wonder what she was doing, with whom was she dancing. Naturalists, for God’s sake. Out of all the things her mother said, that stung the most.

Poppy was infatuated with that Dr. Loudan, for example. A skinny, weedy thing with a propensity for cutting up dead rodents for examination.

He’d spent years fashioning himself into someone he wasn’t, all to catch her eye. But she wanted spectacles. He pulled off his hat, raised his head and the rain sluiced over his face, over his carefully tumbled locks, spotting his shirt, chilling his fingers.

He had to do something with his life, make himself into the kind of man whom she would admire. She would never desire him; he accepted that. The scorn he saw in her eyes as she compared him to the professor…that was a scorn he felt for himself.

Their awkward couplings would surely improve slightly with further practice, but they had little to do with the fierce desire he felt, with the way his body longed to make love to her.

Yet he wasn’t the sort of man to be unfaithful. He couldn’t take a courtesan, or even a lady, to bed. The truth was that he didn’t want a mistress. He started walking again, letting the rain beat into the back of his neck.

He could survive without Poppy in his bed.

But he couldn’t survive without her in his life. She had to come home. He would promise that he’d never visit her room until they decided to have children. And he would promise to stop sulking.

He’d spent the last few years sulking. He had to give Lady Flora credit for that observation. He’d sulked because life hadn’t turned out the way he thought it should. Enough. Enough thinking about French women, and women’s desire in general. In fact, the hell with desire.

Monks did it, didn’t they? He didn’t need sex in order to be a man. What he needed—what he needed was Poppy. Because for some strange, stupid reason, she felt like the coffee he drank in the morning.

He needed her.

He turned around and started back for the carriage. He would make himself into someone she would be proud of, someone who wasn’t interested only in the cut of his coat and the sheen of his hair.

If he admitted the truth to himself, he wanted to be one of the most important men in the House of Lords. He wanted to make a difference to the country, to be a man whose words were feared and welcomed, like his father’s had been.

Then he would dispense with Lady Flora, which would be his gift to Poppy.

And finally he would lure her back to the house, before Christmas came again.

And then somehow, someday, he would woo his wife into loving him the way she used to. The way she loved him that Christmas in Paris, when she looked at him as if he were the world to her.

When she loved him.

“I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t enjoy being with you. But the truth is that I don’t want to go all the way to Oxford. I really don’t. Mrs. Patton is taking me to the London Chess Club tomorrow and I have every intention of joining, if they’ll have me.”

“Oh, you should. Then you can shame the men by beating them.”

“You are turning into a bloodthirsty little thing.”

“I have always been a bloodthirsty little thing,” Poppy retorted. “I have a perfect model in my mother. That’s why Fletch wants to accompany me to Oxford. So he can get away from my mother.”

“Look at this,” Jemma said, holding up a piece of foolscap. “I’ve had a letter from Roberta, my sister-in-law; she says that a bear went amok on her father’s estate and ate a couple of rare ducks. I must answer this. Darling, you will be all right without me, won’t you?”

“It’s just that it’s
Fletch!
”

“Your husband,” Jemma prompted. “You’ve been married for years, remember?”

“It’s all different now. I don’t feel in the least comfortable with him. We may well argue. And what—what if he—”

“He won’t,” Jemma said comfortably. “And if he does, you can boot him out of the carriage. You’re a bloodthirsty woman, remember? Think of your mother.”

Poppy thought of her mother. If Fletch misbehaved in her presence, her mother would likely toss him from the carriage and send a chamber pot flying after him. “True.”

“Men are very useful on these little trips,” Jemma said, drifting out the door with a final blown kiss. “In case a wheel breaks or some such.”

He peered at her. “Are you all right, Poppy? You look stiff as a poker.”

“I just want to say again that you needn’t accompany me, Fletch. I’m sure you have a lot to do.”

“Actually, I do.”

“Well, then, I’ll just drop you off at the house,” she said.

“With your mother? Not on your life. I brought my work with me.” He rustled his documents.

Poppy subsided onto the opposite seat and eyed Fletch. He was already deep into the sheaf of papers. It was infuriating that he was so appealing. Deliberately, she made herself think about Dr. Loudan. Loudan listened to her. He thought she was intelligent. She thought about the letter she’d written Loudan that very morning, suggesting that his claim about the so-called muskrat found in Ceylon might have been incorrect, if one took into account the study published three years ago by Dr. Farthing. The animal couldn’t be a muskrat, as Loudan maintained. Her mouth curved up.

Fletch didn’t look up, but he said, “So what are you grinning about, then?”

“Nothing.”

“What are you thinking about?”

“Dr. Loudan.”

He grunted but didn’t say anything to that. Still, it gave Poppy a little jolt of satisfaction. His Grace Beautiful Fletcher had to understand that there were men in the world who cared more about muskrats than they did about gorgeous clothing.

“What are you reading?” she asked. “I can’t read in the carriage as I grow quite nauseated.”

“An excruciatingly foolish treatise on the trade bill with France. The off-repeated point of twelve pages is that French brandy costs too much.”

“What does the author intend to do about that?”

“Whine and complain,” Fletch said. “It’s a shock to see how much paper is wasted by fellows in Lords, nattering on and on about inconsequentials. Now if I was going to argue this bill, I’d focus on the situation of English farmers. I have to give extra payments every year to the men working around my estate; it’s impossible to survive with the price of wheat being what it is. This trade bill should ignore the brandy and bar French wheat from our shores.”

“Why don’t you do so?” Poppy said.

He didn’t answer, just flipped to the next page.

“Well?” Poppy asked. “Didn’t you hear me?” It felt good to ask a belligerent question. It was so un-Poppy-like.

“I made a fool of myself in the House in case you don’t remember.” He didn’t look at her.

Poppy laughed. She couldn’t help it. He looked so adorably disgruntled. “But you turned the speech around, didn’t you?”

“No one understood my speech. My party, that is, Fox’s party, thinks I did a fine job. They seemed to have no idea that I changed my mind halfway through.”

“Oh.”

“My language was a bit convoluted. Only Beaumont seems to have grasped it.”

“Jemma’s husband? Yes, he’s very smart, isn’t he?”

“He thanked me for striking a blow for his side,” Fletch said morosely. “What’s the point if people don’t listen?”

“It’s hard to follow long speeches. I find that they’re much more intelligible if someone makes a fairly simple point and repeats it at least twice, like the author of your paper on brandy. I don’t suppose your speech was simple, Fletch?”

“How could it be simple? It’s a complicated topic. This idiot”—he shook the papers in his lap—“boiled the trade bill down to one idea.”

“Yes, but you understood it immediately, didn’t you?”

“Well—”

“I rest my case,” Poppy said.

He eyed her. “You know, you never used to disagree with me.”

“We were married then.”

“We are still married!”

There was a flash of real anger in his eyes that she enjoyed. But she shrugged. “It’s different now.”

He waited until they were at supper at the Fox and Hummingbird, and Poppy had stated her intention to retire to her chamber.

Then he just blurted it out, with no preparation. “The truth of it is that whether your mother arranged our marriage, or whether it was all an illusion, I must be horribly obtuse, because I can’t talk myself out of being in love with you.”

Poppy had risen; she plumped back into her seat knowing that the look of surprise on her face must be almost comic.

“I know this sounds stupid, given the way you feel.” He looked grumpy, the way men do when they’re talking about emotions. “But I can’t have you thinking that I don’t love you. Because I do.”

“Ump,” she said.

He raised his hand. “I need to finish. I love you and so I want you to know that I understand. I don’t think you’re ever going to like physical intimacy, at least not with me, Poppy. I can accept that.”

“Oh,” she whispered. Her heart felt as if it had fallen into a black well. Her whole life she’d tried not to disappoint people. And now she’d disappointed Fletch. It made her want to fling herself from the window.

He reached out and pried her fingers apart. “It’s not your fault. And it’s not my fault. It’s just the hand of cards we were dealt. Don’t you see, Poppy?”

“I see that I should—I should have tried harder,” she said in a little wooden voice that disguised how much she wanted to cry.

“You did try, didn’t you?” His eyes were so kind that she felt tears swell up in hers.

“Yes.”

He shrugged. “So we give that up.”

“You can’t give it up!”

“Why not?”

“Men just can’t.”

“You think that men can’t give it up, but women can?” He was smiling at her a little now, tugging at her hand to make her smile at him.

“It’s so kind of you to say so, Fletch. But I think we would really do better if you just went off by yourself for a while. Then when we decide to have an heir we’ll come back together and do that.”

He sighed. “You didn’t hear me.”

“Yes, I did.”

“I’m in love with you, Poppy.”

She swallowed.

“I don’t want to go off with some light-heeled woman who would pretend to like me and pretend to desire me. And I don’t want to have an
affaire
with a woman like your friend Louise either.”

“Yes you do.”

“I did think of it. But if I imagine myself in bed with her—or any other woman—it doesn’t work for me. Damn it, Poppy, don’t you think it would be easier for me if it did work? I could skip out to Fonthill for the Christmas season and frolic with half the trollops in the kingdom.”

“Yes, it would be easier for you,” she said baldly. “And easier for me as well. Why don’t you?”

His eyes darkened and for a moment she thought she’d hurt him, but then he just turned her hand over and said, “We’re both spoiled goods. Because unfortunately when I asked you to marry me, it seems to have been a long-term proposition.”

Poppy’s mind reeled. Part of her was screaming silently with the joy of it, dancing a hornpipe at the back of her brain. But part of her was terrified. Now they were back where they were before, back in the bed where she would just disappoint him again because she couldn’t be—

He looked at her eyes and he must have seen exactly what she was thinking, because he shook his head. “I’m not asking for that, Poppy. We’ll do it exactly as you wish. No bed. None of that. I don’t need it and you don’t want it.”

“You don’t need it?” This went against everything her mother had ever told her.

“I’m discovering that bedroom activity isn’t terribly important to me. You’ve been gone for months and I haven’t broken my wedding vows.”

His eyes looked as if he were serious. Could it be? She herself was fine without marital intimacies. Why shouldn’t Fletch be the same?

“We’ll just skip that aspect until we decide that we want children,” he added.

“I’m not sure we can have children, Fletch. We tried for four years.”

He shrugged. “My father and mother were married for ten years before they had me. And then it was another eight before my brother happened along, and then finally the twins followed. So in the end they had four.”

“Would it bother you if we don’t have children?”

“Not particularly. One of my brothers will do the deed. So: I’ve thought it out, Poppy, and the only thing we can do is just pretend that all this bedding business doesn’t exist. We haven’t made love for months now and I’ve been doing just fine.”

Poppy didn’t really think he was fine. There was a tightness about him, the sense of a taut wire singing in the wind…but she didn’t want to think about that. What she wanted more than anything was to believe him.

“Unless, of course, you just don’t like having me around,” he said, rather awkwardly, as the silence grew.

She let it grow some more. She didn’t want him to think that she was going to be his willing little acolyte, slavishly grateful for his every glance. He was staring at the floor, looking rather miserable. Good.

“I wouldn’t want you to do this just because of my mother’s presence in your house,” she said. “Though I know well that my mother has a great deal to do with your plea for my return.”

“Your mother has no part in my request.”

She didn’t believe that for a moment, but she let it go. There was something more important that had to be said.

“You’d have to understand that I don’t feel the same way as you do. I’m not in love, though I am very fond of you, Fletch.”

He nodded. A lock of hair fell over his eyes and he looked so delicious that she almost jumped up to put her arms around him and make him foolish promises. Maybe she
could
try harder…

No.

She had felt free in the last months, living at Jemma’s, not worrying about her dress, and how she looked, and whether her husband would think she was stupid for buying curiosities, or whether he was coming to her bedchamber that night.

“I’m not moving back home,” she added. “Not yet.”

He looked stunned. “Why not?”

“Because I don’t want to.”

“Is this because of that Loudan fellow?” When Fletch frowned he looked thrillingly pirate-like, Poppy thought.

“In a way it is. I always thought it would be improper of me to go to the meetings of the Royal Society. I hid my books. I tried so hard to be a proper duchess and make you happy. I’ve acquired a cabinet for my curiosities. I might as well warn you, Fletch, that it was quite expensive, as it’s modeled on the cabinet owned by the King of Sweden. The other day I bought an ancient Greek coin for it. And I saw an advertisement for a string of Virginia wampum.”

“But I never said you couldn’t buy anything! You can have all the wampum you want, what ever that is.”

“I don’t feel like being a duchess at the moment.”

“You
are
a duchess,” he said stubbornly. “I’m your duke and you should be at home with me.”

“This is about my mother, isn’t it?”

“No. It’s about you. And me. I don’t like finding you’re not there for breakfast. And I don’t like going to parties without you. I miss talking to you.”

“I can’t imagine why. We haven’t talked about anything particularly interesting in years.”

“I thought it was interesting. Perhaps I like talking about boring things with you.”

“I don’t want to go back to your house.”

“It’s your mother’s house,” he said gloomily. “Wait until you see how she’s changed the drapery.”

“Very formal?”

“I feel as if I’m living in Versailles.”

“How could I take the plea sure away from her?” Poppy said, grinning. “She always wanted to be a duchess.”

He groaned. “Then can I live with you and Jemma?”

“You’re not invited.”

“Even for Christmas? What about Jemma’s house party? Half of London is discussing it. You wouldn’t leave me with your mother for the holiday, would you?”

“I’ll see how I feel,” Poppy said loftily. “It’s to be a very intimate party. Surely you’d be happier retiring to the country with Pitt, or some friend from the government?”

“No,” he said. “I’d be happier with you. Christmas always reminds me of being on the tower of Saint Germain des Près with you, Poppy. Do you remember that?”

“Yes,” she said. “Of course I do.” Her heart was beating very quickly.

“Now I think about it, I should have known from that absurd pin you were wearing that I’d find myself talking to you about river otters. I was so fevered with love that I couldn’t think straight.”

“We were dazed by the season,” she said firmly. “Christmas can be like that.”

He met her eyes. “The season had nothing to do with it, Poppy. Not for me.”

She couldn’t think what to say, and somehow the moment was lost. So she pretended he had said nothing. He looked at her, eyes serious, brow furrowed.

She didn’t want him to be alone on Christmas.

“I’ll ask Jemma,” she said.

“What?”