Dawn in My Heart (24 page)

G
illian paced her room. She felt an anger and frustration building up within her. When was Lord Skylar going to take her back to London?

She didn't like what she was made to feel here. The more time she spent in Lord Skylar's company—she refused to call him by his given name—the more torn she felt.

Torn was the last thing she wanted to feel. She wanted to pay him back for what he'd done to her and then be free of him, rid of him for good. She wanted to run into Gerrit's embrace and rejoin the man she had given herself to once before.

Why did this have to happen? Why did Lord Skylar have to recuperate and then be so kind, so considerate, so thoughtful? Every time she deliberately baited him or spurned his subtle attentions, or exercised any of the myriad petty cruelties
each day, just to get him to say an unkind word or lose his temper, he only ignored her bad behavior and smiled at her sympathetically as if he understood exactly what she was doing.

She fisted her hands, wanting to smash something. How much she wanted to prove he was the same man who had treated her so vilely her wedding night.

She would have no compunctions leaving such a man for another.

But this man, this new Tertius—the name slipped out unbidden, and she almost bit her tongue in futile fury—had remained the same, day in and day out, since his recuperation. What was she to do? She had only received one letter from Gerrit. She turned to her wardrobe and dug it out where she kept it hidden in its innermost recesses. She unfolded it and reread the contents, which she now knew by heart.

My heart has been true to you all these years…I await the day we will be together again.

Oh, yes, Gerrit, they would be together again. Soon, she promised fervently, hugging the paper to her breast. Nothing would stop them.

A few days later she had a second letter from him. She started when she saw the letter addressed in her friend's handwriting sitting on the salver.

“What is it?” Sky asked her.

“Nothing. Just a letter from my friend, Charlotte. You remember her?”

“Yes. Aren't you going to open the letter?”

“Not just yet,” she replied in what she hoped was a casual tone. “I like the anticipation. I shall savor it later in my
room. She usually fills me in on all the latest on-dits from London.”

He said nothing more but returned to the agricultural digest he had been reading.

Finally, after what seemed hours later but had in fact been only about three-quarters of one, she was able to excuse herself and go to her room.

She undid the wafer and opened the letter. Laying aside her friend's for the moment, she unfolded what she had longed for for so many days.

She let the letter drop. War again. Her one and only love once again at risk. What if he shouldn't return? It had been a miracle he'd been spared during the Peninsular War. It was a miracle she had seen him again and known he still loved her.

How could fate be so cruel as to separate them again after so many years?

That evening as she sat with Tertius at dinner she ventured, “Charlotte writes that Napoleon has left Elba and landed in France. Do you think we shall again be at war?”

“I daresay. But I can't think Napoleon would be able to
muster the kind of troops he had before. I've heard Wellington is leaving for Belgium and marshalling quite a force. Doubtless he counts on Blücher coming from Austria. What remains to be seen is how many French will still be loyal to Napoleon.”

She itched to ask him about their return to London. But he hadn't said anything yet, and pride forbade her to stoop to requesting the information from him. She had promised him she would be patient until he was ready to return.

She eyed him surreptitiously over their meal. He certainly seemed fitter than she'd ever known him. His face had filled out and taken on a healthy color. He looked much better than he had even on his return from the Indies when she'd first met him. In other circumstances she would venture to say he was even handsome. His dark hair and eyes and dusky skin tone would cause many a woman to linger, picturing him as the corsair in Byron's poem.

The women in London would undoubtedly go wild about him, the way his face always broke out in a smile these days. He had become a man of laughter and joy. He was forever praising God for the smallest thing, from the sight of the first violets amidst the grass to the rain falling against the windowpane. And that little Bible—he carried it everywhere and was always flipping it open whenever they sat to rest.

Thankfully, he hadn't taken to quoting it to her yet. She shuddered inwardly, wondering what the London ton would make of the new Lord Skylar.

She hoped the war would be brief enough, and her captain would return unharmed and she would not have to be in London long enough to be known as the wife of the evangelical Lord Skylar.

A villa in Italy, she mused, picturing an old palace covered in sweet-smelling vines, orange groves perfuming the surrounding air, a community of artists and writers nearby.

More than one couple had fled a loveless marriage and run to Italy to make a life for themselves.

She would write to Gerrit immediately and give him Godspeed. If she hurried, she could go down to the village and post the letter. Perhaps Gerrit would even receive it before he left England.

Whatever confusion she was now feeling would end as soon as she returned to London.

 

Tertius went looking for Gillian to invite her to ride with him to a nearby farm, where he knew some lambs had been born. He didn't find her in the sitting room. Her maid was not to be found either. Perhaps the two had gone to the village together.

Finally he stopped outside her bedroom door and knocked, on the chance she might have lain down for a nap. There was no answer.

As he turned to leave, he paused. Slowly, not really thinking what he was about, he turned the knob and pushed open the door.

He swallowed the sense of disappointment he felt when he saw the room was empty. What had he hoped? To find her sleeping and giving him the chance to gaze upon her for a few moments unseen?

He'd never entered her room, he thought with an odd pang. Here he was, her husband, and he'd never had a glimpse of her private world.

How he longed for intimacy with his wife, to wake up see
ing her sleeping face, her hair rumpled by sleep, to watch her at her dressing table…

He stepped inside and shut the door behind him. The room was neatly made up, just another room furnished in the heavy Jacobean style of the rest of the manor. No personal effects except for the few toiletries on the dressing table his gaze took in as it roamed around the empty, silent space. His eyes rested on the few books stacked by a night table. The room was dim and somber, the only light coming from the pair of narrow stone embrasures along one wall.

It was no wonder Gillian had contemplated killing herself when she'd first arrived. He was the one who should have been condemned for what he'd subjected her to.

He sighed, prepared to leave the room. He had no right to enter her private quarters. It was the only thing he'd left her. It was as he prepared to retreat that he noticed the folded paper on the floor at his feet.

She must have dropped the letter she'd received from London. He smiled, remembering her anticipation in reading of the news from town.

He stooped to pick it up and replace it on her bedside table.

The paper fell open in his hands, and his eyes fixed on the one word written in a bold black style he wouldn't ascribe to a young woman fresh out of a lady's academy.
Love
.

My dearest love,
his eyes took in the surrounding words.

Even as his mind was formulating some explanation—her friend's girlish expression of affection, a letter from an old beau—his eyes were scanning the rest of the letter. The pounding between his temples hardly let him think as he absorbed the contents of the mercifully short letter.

The first emotion that assailed him was rage—the same blind, all-encompassing rage that had engulfed him on their wedding night. He could hardly see past it. The rage he'd thought forever gone from him rose up with violent intensity, mocking his conversion and new self. He wanted to smash everything in the room from the heavy, high-backed chairs to the porcelain figurine gracing the dressing table.

He'd had many women in his past life, but to only one had he given his name, his promise of fidelity….

Even as he remembered his own broken vows, the rage left him and only the hurt remained.

He looked at the letter again and reread it. It sounded as if…no, it was crystal clear that they'd been corresponding more than once.

How long? The question beat mercilessly at him. All his peace and joy evaporated in the knowledge of the fool she'd been playing him for. All the time she'd agreed to docilely let him have his way, fooling himself that he could prove himself a good and attentive husband, she had known she was never going to remain with him!

Oh, God, how could she?

He staggered forward, the note falling from his lifeless hands, until he collapsed onto a bench set by one of the embrasures, his head falling into his hands.

How long? When? How? Why? The questions tortured him. How could he not have known? How could he not have seen the signs?

His thoughts went at last to the afternoon Captain Hawkes had invited him to the fencing match. The man's knowing look as he'd issued the challenge, his amusement and his determination to beat Tertius, as if he'd had some
thing deeper to prove to him than mere swordsmanship ability.

Sky remembered the way his blood had boiled at the man's familiarity when speaking of Gillian.

The captain had been her lover even then.
Had Gillian known Captain Hawkes—Gerrit, as he signed his name—since her betrothal to Sky? Hadn't the captain just arrived from the Continent?

Sky strove to remember the details of his first encounter with the captain. Slowly, it came into place…it had been at the Regent's fete. Hadn't Gillian been subdued all of a sudden? He'd found it strange for someone so vivacious and at ease in the social events of London to suddenly admit to being tired. She'd even asked to go home early.

What a poor, solicitous fool he'd been.

A new, sicker suspicion rose in his mind and he almost suffocated with the horror of it. Had the captain been the one to whom Gillian had offered her maidenhood?

Tertius moaned aloud then, his head thrown back against the stone wall.

What a fool…what a fool…The phrase beat against his brain.

What a poor, misguided fool he'd been. Willing to do his duty and obey his father's dictates upon his return from the Indies—bow to the wishes of the man he'd always despised, a man he'd sworn would never again run his life…and yet, what had Tertius done in the Indies but strive to succeed—all so he could return in triumph? And then, what had he done immediately upon his return home but meekly comply with his sire's choice of wife for him?

Tertius had justified his acquiescence with a list of rea
sons: the girl was comely, it was true he must wed and produce an heir…but oh, how gullibly he'd fallen into his father's plans.

Was he still nothing more than that little boy trying to please a man who only saw his inability to measure up?

A sudden image flashed into his mind—an image he'd thought forgotten.

A maid's giggles in the grape arbor. Sky, a youngster, following the sounds with the curiosity of a seven-or eight-year-old, only to find the girl in his father's embrace. Even at his young age, Sky knew something was wrong with the tableau. His father shouldn't be holding her so, his hands upon her bottom.

The more Sky stood rooted to the spot, the more revolted he grew. The maid's drawstring chemise was loosened and pulled down. His father's hands touched her as their mutual laughter and murmured words reached Sky in the shrubbery.

The buzzing growing inside his head reached a roar, until young Sky had charged out like a mad bull, head down and forward, ready to do battle. He'd rammed into both of them, shouting at them to stop it, for Mama wouldn't like it.

And the result of his boyish defense of his mother's honor?

His father picking him up until his legs dangled in the air.

“What have we here?” he asked with a chuckle. “A little cavalier?”

“Oh, look at how mad he is,” the young maid had added. “He'll have a fit, he's so red in the face.”

His fists had flailed out, wanting to hurt them both, but his father had only held him at arm's length. “Whoa, there, you young rapscallion. None of that.” The look in his eyes
was amused. “Now, you run along and don't say a word, or I'll see you have a good whipping.”

He let him down then and gave him a good slap on the behind as he shooed his son away. As Tertius ran away, he heard the maid ask, “Do you think he'll say anything?” and again his father laughed.

“No fear. Who would believe the young fellow anyway?”

Would Tertius be fated to live with a spouse constantly untrue to him, just as his dear mother had been forced to put up with his father?

How much he'd loved his poor mother. He hadn't understood until that day why she was such a sad, silent woman. But as he'd grown into a young man, the more clearly he saw how she suffered his father's repeated infidelities in silence, and how his mother's life consisted in living a life retired from London society, poured out into the life of her two sons.

His father had continued on his merry way, living more in town than at home. Edmund and he had been close, but Tertius had done everything he knew as a youth to rebel against the older man, until his father had finally banished him to the Indies, only to call him back the day he'd lost Edmund.