Laura Kinsale (14 page)

“Fortune hunters!” Tess said incredulously. “What nonsense! I’m not a newborn babe. I don’t believe Mr. Taylor arranged for any such thing as protecting me from fortune hunters—and if he had, why wouldn’t I have known about it?”

Louisa sniffed. “It was to be a secret. I don’t know why…perhaps Mr. Taylor was afraid it would upset you, or make you feel distrusted. Here, I know you don’t believe me; I have no right to expect it. But for your own sake, Lady Collier—look at this!” She rum
maged again in her reticule, and drew out a single, much-folded piece of paper.

In shocked silence, Tess spread the document flat. It appeared to be a letter, couched in legal prose: “In anticipation of services rendered, including, but not limited to: investigation of the financial and moral attributes of any man who might request the hand in marriage of Lady Terese Elizabeth Collier, sole surviving child of Robert Edwin Collier, the late Earl of Morrow, and encouragement of a relationship of trust between Captain Gryphon Frost and Lady Collier, for the purpose of advising Lady Collier on her prospective marriage; I, Abraham Taylor, agree to disburse to Gryphon Frost the certain sums specified below on the dates specified below. This agreement is accepted on the condition that Lady Collier is unaware of the contracted services throughout the period during which such services may take place, and will terminate at such time as Lady Collier is no longer a
femme seule.
”

Mr. Taylor’s bold signature was familiar to Tess, and Captain Frost’s accurate hand was recognizable, too, from the letters to her father. The amounts specified as payment were enough to make Tess catch her breath. An instant picture flashed into her mind, a vision of Gryf, in the park, willingly discussing with her the merits of her suitors. Her heart sank as she remembered. He had seemed to know all of them quite well for a man who was supposedly new to London, a fact which had escaped her before. And his name was
not
Everett, it was Frost—or was it? Did she really know anything certain about him at all? She looked down at Louisa in confusion.

“I had to see you, Lady Collier!” Louisa sobbed. “He told me not to; he threatened me! I was in fear for my life—you cannot imagine what it is like, to find that a
man who has seemed so kind, so gentle, is a monster! He has ruined me, Lady Collier, with his lying words of love. He
did
declare himself to me, he did! I didn’t lie about that. And now because I believed him, because I was a foolish, stupid maid, I am forever disgraced.”

Tess could only stare helplessly at the other girl. Louisa met the look with brimming eyes, and suddenly slid off the bench, onto her knees in the dirt at Tess’s feet, clutching at the folds of her skirt. “Oh, you don’t understand, do you—poor, innocent lamb! You don’t know to what depths a woman can be brought! I am going to bear his child, Lady Tess.
That
is my shame!” She turned her face aside. “I listened to his words of love and thought to be his wife, and instead, he has made me his whore!”

Tess stepped back in horror at Louisa’s words and at her debased position on her knees. Louisa collapsed into a sobbing heap. “Oh, you despise me now! I knew you would. I hoped to the last that he would marry me—I told you we were childhood sweethearts, that was my only lie, and it was to cover up my sin! But he never meant to marry me—it’s you—your money—that he wants! I did not listen; I never suspected that he was making you fall in love with him as I had! When I found out he was meeting you in the park, I tried to stop him. I begged him to take away my shame and honor me; just this morning I went to him to beg again…” She choked, and pressed the kerchief to her eyes. “He laughed at me. He said that you had consented to have him, and that he would be as big a fool as I if he were to forgo the opportunity. Oh, Lady Tess, forgive me! Forgive me, but I could not let you marry him in innocence!”

All capacity for words deserted Tess. The conservatory suddenly seemed suffocatingly hot. The image of
Gryf that Louisa painted seemed impossible, but there the once-proud lady lay, on the ground at Tess’s feet, in a paroxysm of tears that could not be feigned. And the contract—his friendship, his caring, the time he had spent with her—all for money! Not because he loved her, or even liked her; he must think her the biggest fool alive, the way she had fallen for his act. She had made it easy; she had thrown herself at him, had practically asked him to marry her. And the way he had hesitated—had that been false, too? Tess felt nausea rise in her throat. Oh, God, had it all been a lie? Had he kissed Tess so sweetly, so passionately, knowing that Louisa would bear his child?

Tess looked down at Louisa, a miserable heap, still weeping on the floor. Tess tried to pity the other girl; she tried to summon a Christian forgiveness, but all that came was an overwhelming disgust, a revulsion against that picture of sordid sin and repentance. She could not relate it to Gryf, or herself; there was nothing in common between this horrible moment and those happy mornings in the park. But the contract…he had lied; he had lied to her, not once, but many times. Crushing the document in her hand, she ran to the door of the conservatory, stopping to look back only once. Louisa had raised her head, one hand extended, as if in supplication. The sight sickened Tess. She could not speak: she shook her head and fled into the cooler, thinner, outside air, tearing her sleeve on the thorn of a rose as she stumbled toward the garden gate.

Gryf stood across the street from the Corinthian grandeur of Morrow House, beneath the heavy railings of Hyde Park, while the rattling morning traffic of Park Lane passed unseen and unheard in front of him. It had been two days since he had stood there last, and it
seemed to have been two centuries. He felt that much older; he was dead inside, numb, with a deadness he recognized as shock. It would wear off: the pain would come. He knew it, and he had wandered here, like a wounded animal, like a lost child, to look for comfort where he had no right to find it.

That other morning, he had gone away from this house cursing himself and his own insanity. In a moment of criminal weakness, he had made a promise when he had less than nothing to give, and then he had compounded the disaster by telling Louisa. If the news was not all over Mayfair by now, then Louisa had been kidnapped and gagged by cutthroats.

In the one tiny living part of him, the small space where he still could think and feel, he was glad of that folly. It made the promise irrevocable. It gave him Dutch courage, when his own was locked up somewhere with the rest of his soul. He needed Tess, needed her like a drowning man needs a floating limb. He wanted to see her, to touch her, to feel her body, so strong and graceful, to taste the warm honey of her lips. She was the one focus in an empty world. She was alive, and by some miracle of crazy circumstance, she belonged to him.

He would tell her everything, he had decided. Who he was; what his life had been. She would never believe him; what rational person would believe him? And yet he hoped. She had said that she loved him. Twice.

He crossed the street, dodging an omnibus, and mounted the steps of Morrow House. A butler answered the door: the same skeptical face that had greeted Gryf before. He had been left waiting on the stoop that time; now he was allowed into the hall, a small promotion. Would Lady Collier consent to see him? The butler vanished and returned. She would. If the gentleman would care to wait in the library?

It was a long wait. The living part of his mind paced; his body remained still, heart pounding. When she came finally into the room, he took an involuntary step toward her.

She was beautiful, dressed in a deep-pink gown with a tiny white bow at her creamy throat. Her face was pale, paler than seemed natural. She did not smile. He thought perhaps she was angry with him. He could not bear the thought, and went to her where she stood still by the door. He touched her cheek. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I couldn’t come sooner.”

Her blue-green eyes looked into his for a brief, intense moment, then away. He wanted to kiss her; he would have, but still she did not smile. She did not speak. Her face was strained; white lines marked the corners of her full lips. He waited, at the edge of a precipice, with a dawning awareness that the ground beneath him was crumbling.

“I love you,” he said, a desperate pebble thrown into the silence.

She made a move, a tiny shudder, and stepped around him. Her wide skirt brushed his leg as he turned, then the contact was gone, and she stood on the other side of the room with a look that warned him not to follow.

“I have seen Louisa,” she said.

For a moment he did not understand her. Everything was different. Wrong. The hot blood his heart pumped made him dizzy. He wanted to sit down. Then it hit him, what she meant. What Louisa would have said.

And he blundered out with the worst possible response. “She’s lying,” he said. “She’s lying.”

He saw in an instant it was wrong. Her eyes, those eyes like the sea, became solid ice.

She thrust out a paper. “Is Louisa lying about this?”

He looked at her, silent. The paper shook a little in
her outstretched hand. When she perceived that he would not take the document, she unfolded it jerkily and began to read. “In anticipation of services rendered…”

He listened. Her voice was almost natural; it only trembled when she came to the part about “trust.” He could hear the angry tears, but she did not shed them. She finished, after repeating the promised sums with special emphasis, and raised her chin proudly.

“Have you seen this contract before?” she asked, in a voice like a high court judge. Like a hangman.

“Yes.” It came out a hoarse whisper.

“Is this your signature?”

“Yes.”

“Your name is not Everett?”

He had a wild thought of telling her the truth. It vanished into the abyss where it belonged. He said, “No.”

“You are not Louisa’s cousin?”

“Please…” he began, but her white face stopped him. He dropped the hand that he had raised. “No. You must know that I’m not.”

“I know it now.” He saw her lower lip quiver dangerously. She looked down quickly and back up, the ice lady again. “Can you still say that it is Louisa who has lied?”

He hesitated, afraid. He was not thinking well; it seemed that half his mind was still shrouded in the coffin where they had laid Grady. He would make a mistake. He would say the wrong thing, and so he said nothing.

“You cannot,” she said, when the silence had stretched to unbearable proportions. “It is you who have lied to me. And you have ruined Louisa.”

A dull ache spread over him. “No.”

“What proof do you have?” she cried. “Can you tell me anything—anything that I can believe?”

He spread his hands helplessly. “What do you want?”

“I want you to tell me that this paper is false! I want you to say that you didn’t act my friend for money—that you haven’t pursued me for my fortune! I want you to say—to say—Oh, God, say anything—but don’t stand there as if your only friend has just died!”

The sound that came out of his throat had no meaning. It might have been a laugh, if it had been made by a corpse. She chose to interpret it that way, consigning him to the dead with her wide, accusing eyes.

“I hate you,” she said. “I despise you.”

He hated himself. He despised himself. There was some fault, some fatal flaw in him that made her believe those things. He could not prove to her that the money meant nothing, that he had signed that contract almost against his own will, because he could not refuse it, because it was a way to be near her when he had no other hope. Proof…what proof could there be? Only trust, only love, and for the lack of it he stood there with the last flame of life dwindling away inside of him. He would have gone down on his knees—he felt he must, but some vestige of pride held him up. It would make no difference. She had made her decision.

“Have you nothing more to say?” she asked, very cold.

I love you, his mind answered.

His lips did not move.

She waited. To give her credit, she waited a very long time. At last, she said, “I have accepted Mr. Eliot’s proposal. Whatever was said between you and me is—forgotten. I hope that is understood?”

It did not hurt him. He was already dead inside. “I understand.”

“Then you will go now.” She bit her lower lip. “I wish never to see you again.”

There was a peculiar little catch in her voice on the
last word. Gryf gazed at her. He had a terrible premonition that he was going to cry. He swallowed, tried to speak, and found that he could not. Instead he turned and left her, walked across the carpet, noting its greens and blues and faded gray with a dreamlike clarity. He came to the closed door and stopped. The carved wood was dark; it blurred a little in front of his eyes, becoming a black pit instead of a door. He reached out and opened it, stepped into nothing, and closed the barrier very gently and carefully behind him.

Midnight. It was that, at least, or later. The ship was not visible through the riverfront darkness. Gryf had moved her off the dock and out onto the river itself, to a cheaper mooring in Blackwall Reach. She was loaded, ready for sea again, with another of the cargoes that Taylor had arranged.

On the stinking shore, the overturned dinghy Gryf had left in the charge of a tavern potboy was slimy with dew and river scum. He staggered a little as he heaved the boat upright on the slick stones of the causeway: he was extremely drunk, in body if not in mind. He launched the small craft by reflex alone. The flickering lights of the tavern receded swiftly; the tide had just turned, and current ruled the river. In the clear, moonless darkness, everything appeared to rush past. Gryf pulled at one of the sculls, turning himself in a dizzy panorama, searching in the murk to orient himself.

The dark river was alive with tiny lights, lanterns at the bows and mastheads of bulky shadows. The wind blew against the current and ruffled the reflections, bringing the creak of wooden blocks, the rhythmic squeaking groan of anchor chains. Nothing seemed familiar. Up and down the river, the lights and the sounds were the same, without form or distinction.