Guilty Series (55 page)

“You don't have to do that. Ring for a maid.”

“Wake up a maid at this hour? For tea?” She shook her head. “Maids work very hard and need their rest. I shall make my own. Would you like a cup?”

He shuddered. “I loathe tea,” he told her and lifted his glass. “Besides, I have claret. I do think I shall take that pause you suggested, though.”

“You don't like tea?” As he stood up, she stared at him, looking baffled. “How can you not like tea? Everybody likes tea.”

“I don't.”

He followed her to the kitchen. While she went into the buttery and searched among Mrs. Blake's kitchen stores for tea, he stoked the boiler of the stove and put a pot of water on for her tea.

“Would you like anything to eat?” she asked from the interior of the buttery. She appeared in the doorway with a cannister of tea in one hand and a smile on her face. “There is a tin of shortbread in here.”

“Bring it out.”

She laughed. “Somehow, I thought that would appeal to you.”

She fetched it from the buttery and set it on the worktable in the center of the kitchen. While she made her tea, he helped himself to shortbread and watched her.

“You don't put anything in your tea,” he commented as she lifted her cup to blow on the steaming beverage.

“I used to, and then—” She stopped and looked away with a little laugh, as if she was embarrassed. “It has been so long since I put milk and sugar in my tea, I cannot remember how it tasted.”

Dylan knew what she meant and why she was embarrassed. He had not thought much about her destitution and desperation, and even when he had, it hadn't been because he had been pondering their effect on
her.
He was angry at himself for that, angry and a bit ashamed.

“Why don't we go down and sit in the garden?” he suggested, picking up his glass of wine and gesturing to the door out of the kitchen.

“Now?”

“Why not? You should know the best time to sit by the sea is at night, and you like gardens, especially roses. Let's sit in the rotunda. If memory serves, there are chairs down there.”

“There are. I noticed them as we walked past the rotunda this afternoon.”

They left the house through the French door in the music room, guided by the moonlight down the winding flagstone steps of the garden until they reached the domed structure, where four iron chairs, painted white, were set around a matching table.

Grace did not sit down. Instead, she took a sip of her tea, set the cup and saucer on the table, and walked to the edge of the rotunda, where the path continued to slope down through more trees and gardens down to the cliff. She looked at the shimmering, moonlit waves in the distance. “I always missed this,” she murmured. “London, Paris, Florence, Vienna—wherever I went, I always missed the sea.”

He moved to stand behind her. “Grace, are you ever going to tell me why you were selling oranges and living in a garret in Bermondsey?”

She hesitated, then she said, “My husband had died, and I had no money.”

“But you come from a gentry family. I knew that from the beginning—it's in the accent of your voice. It's in the way you move, as if you spent a good part of your life carrying books on your head and practicing your curtsies. There is something very…fine about you. You were gently bred.”

“Yes.”

“Then why didn't you return to Cornwall after your husband died? Why didn't you go home?”

She did not answer him, and several minutes passed. Just when he thought she wasn't going to tell him, she spoke. “I did once. It was a mistake. Now I can't go home again.”

She looked at him, pain in her moonlit face that hurt him, too. It reminded him of when he had dragged Isabel home in the carriage a week ago. He had that same tight squeeze in his chest, that same feeling of helplessness, the same outrage. Hurt on another's behalf, something he hadn't felt in years.

“Grace,” he murmured and reached over to touch her face, brush his fingers over the little wet streak on her face that glistened in the moonlight. “When I ask you about your past, it always upsets you. God, love, what happened to you? Did your husband do something to you?” Just asking the question constricted his chest even more. But she shook her head, and he guessed again. “Your family, then. What did they do to you that is so painful you cannot talk about it?”

“They did not do anything to me. I'm the one. It is what I did to them. That is why I can't go home.”

Somehow, the idea of Grace doing anything to hurt anyone was absurd, impossible. She felt guilty if she ate her dessert in the afternoon. Grace, by her own admission, was never naughty. “Stuff,” he said, not believing it. “What could you possibly have done that was so awful?”

“I eloped eight years ago.”

“What?” Given what he knew about her, it was so out of character that he almost laughed, but the look on her face stopped him. “You're serious.”

She nodded and bit her lip, looking for all the world like a guilty child who wasn't going to get any supper. “He was French. I'd known him a week. He was disreputable, poor, and ten years older than I was. I was seventeen and the most serious girl you could ever meet. No one ever dreamed that Grace Anne Lawrence, the most high-minded, sensible, and—yes—virtuous girl in Stillmouth would cause the biggest scandal in Land's End in fifty years.”

“So you eloped. Many girls elope. It's always a scandal, but the brides and grooms are usually forgiven.”

There was a long pause. Then she said, “Not when they don't get around to actually saying vows for nearly two years and go gallivanting across Europe together with no marriage lines. That sort of thing doesn't go down well in my family, or in Stillmouth. Respectability and reputation mean everything for a woman, especially in a small village.”

“You lived with your husband for two years before you married him?” He was getting more surprised by the moment. “Grace, you never even stole sweets from your family cook. You were never naughty, you told me yourself. How did you go from that to eloping with a man you barely knew and not even marrying him for two years?”

“I went mad.”

Startled, he looked over at her. “What?”

“I mean, I fell in love. I fell in love with my husband the first time I saw him.” Her lips tilted up in a wistful sort of smile that twisted his guts in a knot. “He made me laugh. I felt alive for the first time in my life. I never knew how much joy there could be inside one's own heart until I met my husband.”

Dylan looked away. He didn't want to think about her being in love. He didn't want to think about her making love with some other man, especially a Frenchman, especially her husband, a man who had waited two years to marry her. “Did he love you?”

“Yes, he did.”

Dylan scowled. “Then why didn't he marry you up front and do the honorable thing? He was a bastard. A French bastard,” he added for good measure.

“Listen to the man!” She began to laugh through her tears, wiping them off her face with the backs of her hands. “How many women have you lived with?”

“Seven.”

“Did you marry any of them?”

“That is not the same thing. I did not love any of them. They did not love me.”

“Are you sure they did not?”

He thought of each mistress with whom he had lived. He could not really imagine that they had felt any love for him, but he could not be sure. “Can anyone really be sure of another person's true feelings? In my case, there was never a question of marriage. Surely you expected marriage?”

“Of course, and I knew we would get married when he was ready. He was not a settling-down sort of man. It took him awhile.”

“I'm not a settling-down sort of man, and even I wouldn't live with a respectable girl of good family without marrying her. He should have married you.”

“He did,” she reminded him. “One day, he just said it over breakfast. ‘We should get married.' Just like that. And we did.”

“And six years after your wedding, your family will not forgive you?” he asked.

“Forgive?” She choked on the word and bent her head. “Dylan, I have five sisters. None of them have married, nor even had suitors. We never had a great deal of money. Enough from the estate to live comfortably, but there was never much in the way of dowry. All of my sisters live at home, and they shall probably die spinsters because of my disgrace. My brother married a respectable girl, but not the one he loved, who broke their engagement because of me. James gave me money when I asked for it, but I am too proud and ashamed and I—” She stopped and gave a deep sigh. “Oh, it was such a scandal. The consequences of my choice ruined so many lives, consequences I never thought about when I ran off. Both my parents died in the shadow of my disgrace. Their shock and grief, my brother told me. I was the apple of their eye, and I broke their hearts. My brother and my sisters just want to forget me and forget any of it ever happened. I don't blame them.”

“I do.” He was outraged, and he didn't bother to hide it. “Your parents died because we are all food for worms some time. Your sisters need to stop being bitter about their lot in life and find men of backbone, men who won't give a damn what society has to say. Your brother sounds like most of the high-principled, noble-minded men I know. They accept only the distinguished invitations, go to the club to get away from their wives, and go to the brothels because they married respectable girls instead of girls who actually loved them. And if his fiancée left him because of you, she wasn't worth marrying in the first place. As for you—” He stopped to draw breath. “Grace, I think you are the kindest, most compassionate person I have ever known. You're far too good for the lot of them.”

She stared at him, blinking back tears, utterly astonished by his long, furious speech. “Thank you,” she managed to say after a moment.

“You're welcome.” He looked at her, and all he wanted was to get that awful pain off her face and out of her mind. In an attempt to divert her, he grinned. “I'm rather glad you told me about this.”

She drew her brows together with suspicion at that grin. “Why?”

“Until now I was beginning to think I should write to the Archbishop of Canterbury and nominate you for sainthood. It's quite a relief to know I don't have to. Writing to bishops makes me queasy.”

She laughed, a series of giggles mixed with hiccoughs.

He reached into the pocket of her robe. Sure enough, there was a handkerchief in there. He pulled it out. “Here.”

“How did you know there was a handkerchief in my pocket?”

“Good girls always have a handkerchief. Blow your nose, and don't shed one more tear over doing what you truly wanted to do and enjoying some happiness. And for God's sake, stop wearing a hair shirt and lashing yourself because you fell in love with somebody your family and your neighbors didn't like. A girl can't help who she falls in love with, I suppose.”

She smiled at him, an unexpected smile. “And shall you still feel the same when Isabel falls in love with a man you loathe?”

Nonplused, he stared back at her and felt as if he'd been kicked in the stomach. Hells bells, he'd never thought of that. “She wouldn't.”

“Oh, wouldn't she?”

“No. I'll lock her in her room. Will twenty years be enough?”

“I doubt it. Besides, what makes you think locks would stop her?” She wrapped her arms around herself and shivered. “I'm getting cold. Let's go in.”

Instead of answering, he pulled off his dressing gown and wrapped her in its heavy silk folds. Then he put his hands on her shoulders, turned her toward the ocean, and slid his arms around her. She stiffened at once and tried to pull away, but he did not let her go. “Take a bit of your own advice and relax. I know I'm the greatest scapegrace England's ever had. Except for Byron, of course. But I won't try anything dishonorable. I promise.”

She curved her hand around his wrist at her waist. “Like I said once, you could be a very nice friend.”

“No, I couldn't. I would always want a peek under your petticoats.” He pulled her back against his chest and held her for a long time, keeping her warm in the circle of his arms. His cheek against her hair, he listened to the sea in front of them and the nightingales in the trees above their heads, inhaling the scents of the garden and the ocean, and feeling the rise and fall of her breathing beneath his arms. He couldn't remember the last time he'd held a woman just for the sheer pleasure of it. A long time ago.

It wasn't until they were walking back to the house that he realized he hadn't noticed the whine in his head for the entire time they had been out here. It was only a dim hum in his brain right now, and he knew that had something to do with Grace, who made him feel a peace he hadn't felt in years. If only she could keep the noise in his head hushed all the time, but he knew she couldn't. It would come screeching back, again and again, probably for the rest of his life.

When they went back inside the house, she returned to bed, and Dylan went back to the piano. The moment he sat down and looked at the sheet music, he knew what was wrong.

It's too much,
he realized, all his earlier frustration vanishing in sudden clarity. Chords were too heavy for this bit. He needed something lighter. Without conscious thought, he tapped a minor key—gently, not pushing it all the way down, but instead making the delicate sound of a grace note. That was right, exactly right.

He seized his quill and dipped it in the inkwell, then scribbled down a series of notes, alternating main ones with the shorter, lighter ones of an adjoining tone. After a few moments, he paused to study what he had just written. It was exactly right.
Grace notes,
he thought.
How fitting.