Elizabeth Mansfield (31 page)

Roger was staring at her in puzzled fascination. “What
is
it you feel about Vauxhall?” he asked, his
breath suspended in his throat.

Her eyes flickered down again. “Oh, Roger,” she said in a very small voice, “how can I say this? Ever since that day at Vauxhall, I’ve known … I’ve known … that I am
not
the girl you all think me.” With a shudder that passed over her whole body, she dropped her hold on him and covered her face with her hands. “I knew then,” she said in a mortified voice, “that I didn’t want to be your wife. That I couldn’t be the dignified, polite, calm, bloodless sort of person that you and my aunt and your mother expect. You see, I would much rather be … much rather be …”

“Yes?”

“I would much rather be your
mistress
!”

There was no sound, no response. When she could stand the silence no longer, she peeped at him through her fingers. He was staring at her, stunned, trying to understand what she’d said. Then a light seemed to spring on in his eyes, and he threw back his head and gave a shout of laughter. As if a dam had given way inside him, he laughed and laughed until he doubled over in helpless merriment. When at last he could catch his breath, he turned to Letty, who was watching him in some dismay, and gathered her in his arms. “Oh, my sweet little
idiot
!” he said, still gasping with laughter. “My poor, foolish, absurd, adorable idiot!” And he tilted her head back and kissed her with such intensity that it reminded her thrillingly of that terrible kiss in the gardens so long ago. When he let her go, she looked up at him with wide, awed eyes. “Does this mean that I
am
to be your mistress?” she asked shyly.

“Of course you are,” he said with a wide grin. “To all the world you will be my well-bred, refined, serene, dignified, and dutiful wife. And when we are alone, you’ll be the most beautiful, the most exciting, the most delightful mistress a man ever had.”

***

From a window above them, Prue watched the activities on the bench shamelessly. “Oh, look, Brandon,” she chortled happily, “they’re kissing!”

Brandon knelt on the window seat beside her and peered out to the garden. “Good!” he said contentedly. “I always thought she should have him. ‘Sweet is a grief well ended.’”

Prue frowned at him in mock-irritation. “Sophocles?” she asked disdainfully.

“Aeschylus,” he retorted promptly.

“Well, I prefer the saying that goes, ‘The learned man quotes well the words of others; the wise man quotes his own.’”

Brandon looked at her with a puzzled frown. “Who said
that
? I don’t think I recognize the style.”

“You’ll learn to recognize it soon enough. It’s only one of the many Witty Thoughts of Prudence Glendenning.” And she stuck out her tongue at him saucily and ran laughing from the room.

Keep reading for a special excerpt from the next eBook by Elizabeth Mansfield

THE COUNTERFEIT HUSBAND

Available March 2012 from InterMix

Camilla stared out of the library window at the sunny lawns and chaste gardens of Wyckfield Park (a vista which had been acclaimed for generations as the most beautiful in the county) and admitted to herself that she hated the very sight of the place. The entire world might admire the grounds—those lawns which were mowed, edged and cultivated until they resembled lush velvet; the hedges which were clipped, trimmed and manicured until there was not a twig that would dare to pop crookedly out of place; the fall flowers which were lined up below her window in rigid neatness, each row bearing blooms of only one color so that the rows of reds could never presume to mix with the pinks—but she found nothing admirable about the view.

The carefully tended, rich and spacious grounds of Wyckfield Park were an anathema to her. To her eyes they seemed a travesty of natural beauty—a place where the Goddess of Nature had been bound, shackled and restricted at every turn. Nowhere on the estate’s vast acreage had any living thing been allowed to develop in its own way. Each hedge and shrub had been made to conform to the Wyckfield’s grand plan, every natural instinct compelled to yield. That was why Camilla hated the grounds—they were a monument to repression. Like my own life, she thought, crossing her black-clad arms over her chest as if to ward off a cold draught.

“What’s the matter, Mama?” came a child’s voice behind her.

Camilla put on a smile and turned to face her ten-year-old daughter who was curled up on the sofa with a copy of Evelina on her lap. “Matter? Nothing at all. What makes you ask?”

The child looked over the spectacles perched on her nose and fixed her blue eyes on her mother’s face with a gaze that was unnervingly mature. “You sighed three times,” she accused.

“Did I?” Camilla’s smile lost its strained insincerity and widened into a grin. “Have you been sitting there counting my sighs?”

The child grinned back. “It’s no great task to count to three, you know.”

“True, but I thought you were absorbed in your reading.”

“I was, until your heartrending breathing distracted me.”

“Heartrending?
Really
, Pippa!” Camilla couldn’t prevent a gurgling laugh from welling up into her throat. Her daughter, Philippa, was her joy—the only real joy that life had ever offered her. Small in size but gifted in intellect, the child was the only creature in the household whose development had been miraculously unaffected by the repressive atmosphere. Pippa was perhaps too bookish and precocious, but her nature had a pervasive serenity and self-confidence. She was capable of such outpourings of affection and good cheer that the cold aridity of the Wyckfields seemed unable to penetrate her spirit.

To Camilla, her daughter was a miracle. Pippa’s father, now deceased, had been cold as steel, his sister Ethelyn rigid and forbidding, and Oswald, Ethelyn’s husband, weakly indifferent. Each of them had attempted to control the child’s growth, yet Pippa had developed a clear-eyed optimism, an honest, straightforward way of thinking and an amazingly strong spirit. In this house of gloomy religiosity and fanatical repression, the little girl had learned to laugh.

Best of all, in Camilla’s view, was the combination of precocity and innocence in Pippa’s character. It was a combination so charming that even Ethelyn couldn’t bring herself to scold the child with nearly the animosity with which she scolded the rest of the world. No matter how angry Ethelyn would become at one of Pippa’s blithe infractions of the rules, Pippa could turn the wrath aside with her sturdy, unafraid, logical explanations. Camilla wished that she herself had been gifted with some small part of the child’s courage and ability to adapt to these sterile surroundings.

Camilla sat down beside her daughter on the sofa. She hated to see the little girl clad in the depressing mourning dress, but Ethelyn insisted that they both wear black until the entire year of mourning had passed. Camilla put an arm about the little shoulders and drew Pippa close. “Why are you studying me so speculatively, love?” she asked. “Miss Burney’s tale must be disappointing to you if your attention is so easily diverted by my sighs.”

“I
love
Miss Burney’s story,” Pippa declared earnestly, snuggling into the crook of her mother’s arm, “but I
don’t
love to hear you sighing. You can tell me, you know, Mama, if something’s troubling you. I’m quite good at understanding worldly problems.”

“Are you indeed?” she squeezed Pippa’s shoulders affectionately. “Are you trying to make a romance out of my breathing, my dear? If you’re looking for worldly problems, stick to Miss Burney’s book.”

The bright, spectacled eyes turned up to Camilla’s face with a look of disdain. “You needn’t try to put me off, Mama. I know you’re worrying about something.”

“Perhaps I am, but even if I
did
have ‘worldly problems,’ I shouldn’t wish to burden you with them. I’ve no intention of permitting you to grow old before your time.” She planted a light kiss on the girl’s brow. “You’ve plenty of time to cope with worldly problems when you’re older.”

“If your problem concerns Aunt Ethelyn, I can help, you know,” the child insisted.

“Hush, dear. Do you want Uncle Oswald to hear us?”

Pippa and her mother both turned their eyes instinctively to the huge wing chair near the fireplace across the room. Oswald Falcombe, Lady Ethelyn’s lethargic husband, was slumped upon it, fast asleep, the handkerchief still spread over his face as it had been for the past two hours. “He’s sleeping quite soundly,” Pippa whispered reassuringly. “You can see it in the way the handkerchief pops up and down with his breath.”

“You seem to have made quite a study of breathing,” her mother said drily.

Pippa giggled. “It’s just observation, Mama. Keen observation.” Her smile faded, and she sat up straight and looked at her mother in mild rebuke. “That’s how I know that something is bothering you. Observation.”

“You, my girl, are a persistent little
witch!
I’ve already told you that I don’t intend to discuss my problems—if there
are
any—with you. You are not to worry about me, Pippa! I’m perfectly capable of handling my problems without the advice or assistance of a ten-year-old, even if she
is
a prodigy.”

“I’m not certain you
are
capable of handling them, Mama, if they require facing up to Aunt Ethelyn.”

Camilla drew herself up in mock affront. “Is that so?”

“Yes, it is. You’ve been trying for two months to convince her to let us put off these mourning clothes, and you still haven’t succeeded,” the girl pointed out frankly.

“I know.”

“After all, it’s been almost a year since Papa died—”

“Passed to his reward,” Camilla corrected in perfect imitation of Ethelyn’s words and manner.

Pippa laughed. “Passed to his
just
reward,” she amended with an almost equal talent for mimicry. “Aunt Ethelyn is a great stickler for rules, isn’t she? Everything must always be exactly proper …proper dress, proper demeanor, proper wording. I wonder why she thinks the longer phrase ‘passed to his just reward’ is better than just saying ‘he died’?”

“I don’t know, love. Perhaps she thinks ‘died’ is too blunt … or too disrespectful to God.”

“You mean ‘Our Blessed Lord,’” Pippa quipped, using her aunt’s tone again. “
Is
it disrespectful, Mama, to speak bluntly? To say ’God’ or ‘died’ straight out?”

“I don’t think so, dear. It’s just that your aunt is … well, a stickler as you said.”

Pippa made a face. “A
real
stickler. That’s why we’ve had to wear black for so long. I wish she’d change her mind and let us put off full mourning. I don’t think wearing black helps one to remember Papa any more than one would if one were wearing
pink.
To tell the truth, I barely remember his face any more.”

“
That
, Philippa Wyckfield,” came an ominous voice from the doorway, “is a
sinful
thing to say!” And Lady Ethelyn Falcombe, her large frame draped in a round-gown of heavy black bombazine, her wiry grey hair rolled up in a knot at the back of her head and looking like a twenty-gun frigate ready for battle, sailed into the room.

“Eh? What’s that?” muttered Oswald, shaken awake by his wife’s booming voice and pulling the handkerchief from his face.

“Come now, Ethelyn,” Camilla said placatingly, “what Pippa said was only natural—”

“As if that excuses it! If we all were permitted to give in to our natural instincts, we’d still be
savages.
How
dare
she say she’s permitted herself to forget her father!”

“I’m sorry, Aunt Ethelyn,” Pippa said, calmly cheerful. “I didn’t say I’d forgotten Papa. I said I’d forgotten his
face.
” She got up from the sofa and took her aunt’s hand affectionately. “It’s quite the truth, you know. I’ve tried to remember his face, but I can’t seem to bring it to mind. Can you?”

“Can I what? Remember my beloved brother’s face? What an absurd question.”

“I mean actually
see
him in your mind whenever you wish to. Can you do it now, this moment? Close your eyes, Aunt Ethelyn, right now, and try to remember him. Tell me if you see him clearly, just as he was.”

“But of
course
I …” Ethelyn stared at the child looking innocently up at her. Then she shut her eyes tightly. After a moment she blinked her eyes open and glanced down at her niece who still held her hand and was watching her closely. “Well, I
think
I …” She shut her eyes again. Her heavy cheeks quivered, and her brow wrinkled as her effort intensified. “Isn’t that strange?” she murmured. “I see the
portrait
of him that we’ve hung on the drawing room wall, but …”

“I remember his nose,” Oswald put in reflectively. “Had a slight hook in it, from having been tossed from a horse during that hunt—”

“Oswald, don’t speak like a fool!” Ethelyn barked, her eyes still shut. “Desmond’s nose was perfect.”

“Remembering that his nose had a hook doesn’t count, Uncle Oswald,” Pippa explained reasonably. “You’re remembering a fact, not seeing a face.”

“Ummm,” he nodded, shutting his eyes to try again.

Camilla sank back against the sofa cushions and looked at the others in wonder. There they were, the three of them, trying to conjure up the face of the deceased Desmond in their minds merely at the behest of the little girl. Her ingenious daughter had managed to turn what could have been an unpleasant scene into a little game. Pippa was truly an amazing child.

Of course, Camilla herself could see Desmond’s face all too clearly in her mind. She didn’t even need to close her eyes to conjure up a vision of those steely eyes, that thin-lipped mouth, that wiry, grey hair that had been steadily receding from his forehead in recent years. Even after almost a year, the memory of his face could make her blood run cold. In her dreams she still heard the cutting sarcasm of his voice and the sound of his icy scoldings. At unexpected times of the day she still found herself stiffening when she heard a certain sort of footstep on the stairs. And sometimes at night, when she blew out her bedside lamp, she had to remind herself to relax …to will herself to recall that he could no longer pay his devastating fortnightly visits to her bed.