Elizabeth Mansfield (21 page)

And it was
she
, Cassie, who stood between them! She was the “despicable creature” who was to blame for their unhappiness. Elinor’s words jumped out from the page and struck at her soul.
I know you cannot love the despicable creature.
The very appearance of those words on the page made her cringe. But it was a final reading of the words,
the knowledge that our love will never die still burns brightly for me
, that utterly undid her, and she dropped her head on her arms and wept as if her heart would break.

The sound of the doorknob being turned froze her in midsob. With her breath caught in her throat, she lifted a terror-stricken face to the opening door. Whoever it was—Loesby or Dickle or any other of the servants—she would not be able to face him ever again. But if it were
Robert
at the door, returning by some ironically hideous quirk of fate to pick up a forgotten item on his desk, she would simply die! She would die on the spot!

But it was Eunice. “I’ve been looking for you all over,” Eunice began cheerfully, but the sight of Cassie’s reddened eyes and terrified expression startled her into alarm. “Good God, Cassie, what—?”

“Eunice,
p-please,”
Cassie begged, stammering in embarrassed misery, “pretend you haven’t f-found m-me, and g-go away!”

But Eunice saw and thought she recognized the letters.
“Cassie!”
she exclaimed in shock. “Are those
Elinor’s?
What’ve you done?”

“Just what you th-think,” Cassie admitted, dropping her head down on her arms and beginning to sob again. “I’m the m-most d-despicable c-creature in the world!”

“Of course you’re not,” Eunice declared loyally, striding into the room and kneeling beside Cassie’s chair. “Despicable, indeed!”

“I read all his l-letters!” Cassie wept.
“Twice!”

“Well, it might not have been an admirable thing to do, my love, but it’s not an offense that warrants a hanging.”

“Yes it is. It was a low, m-mean-spirited, ugly, d-despicable thing to do!”

“Yes, it was.” She stroked Cassie’s bent head. “And very human. I know I’d have done it, too, in your place.”

“No you wouldn’t. You have too much ch-character.”

“Not nearly as much as you, Cassie, and that’s the truth. It was love that weakened you, that’s all. Now, stop that weeping, take this handkerchief and blow your nose. And let’s get these letters back in place before someone else comes in and discovers us.”

Cassie nodded and tried to comply. She sat up and blew her nose, but when she replaced that last, cruel letter in its envelope, the tears began to flow again. “Robert must think I’m d-despicable, even if you don’t,” she wept, dabbing hopelessly at her eyes. “I’m the one who stands between him and the wonderful g-girl of his dreams. Me! The pathetic c-creature who had to p-purchase a husband for f-forty thousand p-pounds!”

For that Eunice had no answer. “My poor Cassie,” she murmured, taking her sister-in-law in her arms and rocking her like a baby, “my poor, poor Cassie.” There was nothing else she could think of to say that would be soothing, for the truth was that even at a thousand times forty thousand pounds, Robert’s love could not be bought. And that one unpurchasable commodity was the only thing in the world the weeping girl wanted.

Chapter Twenty-Six

It did not take Lord Kittridge very long after his return from Woburn Abbey to notice a change in his wife. It was not that she was cooler to him, exactly, but that she was somehow
withdrawn.
She did not meet his eye when he spoke to her, nor did she smile up at him with that tremulous little smile she used to give when he said something kind or amusing. And when he came down to breakfast—the only time of day they were alone together—she quickly finished her tea and scurried out of the room, as if she were purposely trying to avoid any private conversation with him.

He didn’t notice any change in the way she behaved toward anyone else, but to make sure his impression was accurate, he asked Loesby about it. The valet raised his brows at the question. “‘Er ladyship, changed?” he repeated, peering at Kittridge as if he’d dipped too deeply in the brandy. “Not as far as I kin see. It’s just like I been tellin’ ye, Cap’n. She wuz a wonder from the start, an’ she’s a wonder still.”

Unsatisfied, Kittridge applied to Eunice. He caught her on the stairs, on her way up to the nursery. “Have you a minute, Eunice?” he asked. “There’s something I want to ask you.”

“Of course, my dear,” she said, pausing in her climb. “What about?”

“About Cassie. Do you notice any change in her? Does she seem, in the last few days, to be … well, different?”

“How different?”

“I can’t put my finger on it. Distant, somehow.”

“Distant? Not to me.”

“Then you two are still as good friends as when I left for Woburn?”

“Better, I’d say.”

“I don’t understand.” Kittridge’s brow knit in puzzlement. “Then it’s only toward
me
she’s changed. I wonder if I’ve offended her. Did she say anything about it to you?”

“If she did, you wouldn’t expect me to repeat it, would you, Robbie?” She turned away with a toss of her head and proceeded up the stairs. “If you want to know anything concerning your wife, my dear,” she threw over her shoulder, “you’ll have to talk to
her.
Don’t expect
me
to be your intermediary.”

Kittridge glared up at her as she disappeared round the turning of the stairs. “Women!” he muttered in annoyance and took himself off to his study.

As the days passed, his feeling that Cassie had changed toward him persisted. He told himself that it didn’t matter … that, indeed, her coolness suited him perfectly well, under the circumstances. He’d pledged himself to remain faithful to Elinor, and this distance between himself and his wife made it easier for him to keep his pledge. When he found himself becoming snappish and short-tempered, he blamed the mood on the absence of letters from Elinor. Why, he asked himself several times a day, wasn’t his mother forwarding his letters more frequently?

But as many couples learn, the Gods of Love have decreed a terrible irony in the playing out of the games between men and women: when one of the pair draws away, the other almost inevitably wishes to
draw close. Thus, the more Cassie seemed to avoid Kittridge’s company, the more he desired hers. He began to miss her little smiles, her cheerful morning conversation, the adoring glances he used to catch her casting at him when she thought he wasn’t looking. For the first time in the months of his marriage he worked at trying to please her. He told her his plans for the day at breakfast in an attempt to keep her at the table; he brought her a pair of Wedgwood candlesticks that he’d purchased from one of his tenants; and he tried, by all sorts of ruses, to prevail upon her to remain in the sitting room at night after Eunice had gone up to bed. But no matter what he did, Cassie remained politely, unshakably distant.

At last he decided to take the bull by the horns. He tapped on her bedroom door one night after they’d all retired. She opened the door an inch and held a candle aloft to see who it was. “Robert?” she asked in surprise. “Is anything wrong?”

“No, but I’d like to talk to you, Cassie. May I come in for a moment?”

She hesitated. “Well, I … you see I’ve already undressed …”

“Then put on a robe. It’s not so shocking a suggestion, ma’am. I’ve seen you in nightclothes before, if you remember.”

After another moment of hesitation she let him in. In the candlelight it seemed to him she looked as delicious as she did the night they went hunting for the Rossiter ghost, with her ruffled nightgown peeping out at the bottom of her robe and her unruly hair bursting out in rebellion from the control of her spinsterish nightcap. “Thank you, ma’am,” he said with exaggerated formality as he crossed the threshold.

She closed the door gingerly. “Would you … care to sit?” she asked, almost whispering.

“Are you afraid someone will hear us and think we are having a tryst?” He grinned at her as he lowered himself onto her dressing table chair. “I assure you that no one is near enough to hear us. And even if someone were, it wouldn’t matter. We
are
married, after all.”

“Yes, but …”

“But not quite married enough to be having trysts, is that what you’re trying to say?”

She put up her chin. “I was not trying to say anything of the sort. All I intended to do was to excuse my awkwardness by explaining that I am unaccustomed to … to entertaining gentlemen in my bedroom.”

“That much is obvious,” he teased.

She sat down on the edge of her bed and folded her hands primly in her lap. “You said you wished to
talk
to me, my lord, not to twit me about my … er … inexperience.”

“So I did. It’s something that’s been on my mind since I returned from Woburn. I wish to ask you, Cassie, quite bluntly, if I’ve done something to offend or anger you.”

“No, of course not. What makes you think you have?”

“Something in your manner. You’ve changed, you know.”

“I am not aware—”

“You must be aware of it,” he insisted, getting to his feet impatiently. “You’ve been doing all you can to avoid me.”

“That’s silly. Why would I—?”

“I don’t know.” He confronted her boldly, lifting her chin and forcing her to look up at him. “That’s just what I’m trying to determine.”

“You are imagining things, my lord,” she said stiffly.

“There! You see? It’s that stiffening. You did not, before, stiffen up whenever I approached.”

She turned her face away, wresting her chin from his hold. “You did not, before, approach me in my bedroom, my lord.”

“And that’s another thing. For months you’ve been calling me Robert with perfect ease, but tonight you’ve ‘my lorded’ me at least twice.”

“If that’s the source of your discontent, my lor—Robert, I shall try to remember not to do so again.”

“Damnation, ma’am, that’s
not
the source!” he burst out, pulling her to her feet. “Please, Cassie, don’t be afraid to be open with me. I’d hoped that by this time we’d be dealing better with each other. What’s happened to our intention to bring about some intimacy into this marriage?”

“I am n-not aware that we had such an intention,” she murmured, lowering her head to avoid his eyes.

“Not aware? How can you say that? Didn’t we discuss it from the first?”

“You only said, then, that you wouldn’t f-force intimacy upon me.”

He groaned in frustration. “Come now, Cassie, I was speaking of a later conversation, as well you know! It was when we admitted to each other that we were still behaving as strangers.” He pulled her into his arms, determined to have an honest confrontation that would, he hoped, bring them to a more comfortable closeness. With one arm holding her tightly to him, he tilted her face up to his, as if to force her to remember their former embrace. “I had the distinct impression, that day, that you were
encouraging
the development of that intimacy.”

“Let me go, Robert,” she said, quietly firm. “That impression was false.”

Her words enraged him. He was not such a coxcomb that he could have mistaken her response to his kiss. Why was she denying it now? “It was
not
false!” he declared furiously. And to prove it, he lifted her up against his chest so that he could kiss her again and evoke the remembered response.

“Robert!” she gasped, startled.
“No!”

His eyes glittered with angry but unmistakable desire, a desire fanned by her stiff resistance. “Let me remind you of how it was,” he said roughly, pushing away his awareness that the situation and the sensations he felt now were very different from the last time. Heedless of his own internal warnings and the look of utter fear in her eyes, he crushed her against him and kissed her in a way that was too urgent and too angry to be husbandly.

She struggled to free herself in spite of the sudden surging of the blood through her veins and the astonishing waves of warmth that flowed all through her. Even though she pushed with all her might against his shoulders, she could feel her body, free of the constrictions of stays and undergarments, bend back under his pressure like a slim, green tree in a storm. Her body seemed to be pursuing desires of its own, trying to mold itself to him as if it wanted nothing more than to cling to him forever. But her mind, pinpricking her with reminders that the man holding her in this most intimate of embraces did not love her, kept some inner kernel of her spirit stiff, cold and unyielding.

At first, Robert responded only to the signals of her body. Soft and pliant in her unrestricting nightclothes, she was at this moment more desirable than any woman he’d ever held. He could feel the racing beat of her heart, the heat of her skin, the sweet taste of her lips. He could have her now, he told himself, oh so easily. It was his husbandly right. He could lower her gently on the bed that stood waiting right there at his side and teach her the secrets of marital bliss. Every lovely, lissome, warmly shivering inch of her seemed ripe for it. But his mind, too, kept nagging at him to hold back. It warned him to recognize the firm core of resistance that was keeping her, despite the passion that enveloped them both, from surrendering. He couldn’t force himself on her. So after an inner struggle of what he considered herculean dimensions, he let her wrench her mouth from his. Then he set her on her feet and, feeling like a fool, released his hold on her.

Breathless and confused, they stared at each other until he could no longer bear to see the look of
shocked accusation in her eyes. He turned away and leaned weakly on the bedpost. “So you see,” he muttered in a lame attempt at irony, “the impression was not false.”

She sank down upon the bed. “I think, my lord,” she said, her voice trembling, “that you’d better go.”

He turned to look at her. “Now I
have
offended you,” he said, shamefaced.

She would not meet his eyes. “Yes,” she said.

Her stubborn intransigence, one of her qualities with which he had no previous familiarity, brought his earlier anger sweeping over him again. “When one considers the usual husbandly privileges,” he said in cold, tight-jawed self-defense, “what happened just now was a mere trifle.”