Lily (33 page)

He didn’t come. For the first time since the night on the
Spider,
Devon didn’t come to her.

The moon climbed halfway across her window, paused, and sank back into the blackness. The silence was absolute: she couldn’t even hear the sea. She rose—to pace her room again, she thought. But before she knew it she was in the hall, bare feet soundless on the cool floor, stealing toward Devon’s room. Without knocking, she opened the door and slipped inside.

He’d heard nothing, but he knew she was there. He sat up. She was only a white blur against the door, pale and insubstantial as a ghost. They watched each other across the dark breadth of the room for endless minutes. The longer it went on, the surer he grew that something irretrievable was slipping through his fingers. But he could not speak. Did not know the words.

“Poor Dev,” she said, and her voice sounded low and disembodied. “You don’t know what to do with me, do you? How awkward this must be for you—your fiancée and your mistress under your roof at the same time. It must make you—” He spat out an oath and leapt from the bed, and the rest of the words stuck in her throat. Some part of her noted that he still had his clothes on, and she took a particle of comfort from it: at least he hadn’t been fast asleep.

“What is it you want from me, Lily?” he demanded, looming over her.

The rawness in his voice made her wonder, incredulously, if he could be in as much pain as she. It gave her the courage to touch him, a light hand on his chest. “I want you to love me.”

All the fight went out of him. He gathered her into his arms and buried his face in her hair. “I do. God help me. As much as I can.”

She hated the qualification, and the reluctance, the agonized unwillingness of his tone, as if uttering the words had cut his throat. She whispered, “Will you marry me?” with no idea where the courage, or the insanity, came from to ask him such a question. She felt his body stiffen, and fought an immediate premonition of defeat. He drew away slowly. She was thankful for the darkness that hid her face. “Just say no. For God’s sake, spare me your kindness.”

“Listen to—”

“No!” She pushed at him violently. “You won’t because I was your housemaid. That’s part of it, isn’t it? What would I have to be before you would marry me? How much money would it take?”

“Lily, for—”

“What if I were a seamstress? What if I made hats? No? It’s a lady or nothing for you, isn’t it?”

He reached for her shoulder and gave her a rough shake, as angry now as she.

“How many thousands of pounds a year, Dev? Twenty, thirty?”

“God damn it, Lily!”

“What if I were a governess?” She was shouting now. “You’d never marry me then, would you? Because even if you loved me, I’d be too much like your dead wife, your beloved
Maura,
the woman who made you this way! But I’m not like her, Devon, I’m me, I’m Lily, and I—”

He shoved her backwards. She hit the door hard with her shoulders. The noise was much worse than the pain, but his violence stunned both of them. He whirled and walked to the window, to put time and distance between them as much as to tell her, without words, that she was safe from him.

“You don’t understand. It’s not that I want to hurt you. Lily, if I could—” The latch clicked and he spun around. She was gone. His breath left his body, as if he’d been punched in the gut. The closing of her bedroom door sounded across the silence, soft and final. He waited interminable seconds, and then he heard it: the turning of the key in the lock.

“No more business this evening,” Lady Elizabeth Darkwell decreed. “Alice and I are leaving early in the morning, and after that you two can talk about ticketings and the price of ore all you like. Until then you have to be sociable.”

“Yes, Mother,” mumbled Clay, flashing a dry smile at his brother.

“Yes, but what
is
a ticketing?” Lady Alice wondered. “Just tell me that, Dev, and then you can go back to being sociable. Or start, rather.”

“It’s an auction. Representatives of the copper companies bid on the parcels of ore that the mine agents come to sell. The man with the biggest parcel for sale acts as the chairman. This time our mine has the most ore, and—”

“And Dev thinks I’m too stupid to be the chairman.”

“Clay, for—”

“Excuse me, too
inexperienced.”

Devon shook his head, exasperated. “Well, you’ve only been to one ticketing in your life, am I right? They’re tricky, that’s all I’m saying, and Francis has been attending them for years. The price of copper is down, it was sixty-one pounds a ton last month, and sometimes there are strategies that can be worked to keep it from plunging deeper. You and Francis—”

“Devon.”

He halted sheepishly. “Right. Sorry, Mother. I’ll ring for the tea.” He did so, then applied himself to the task of being sociable. Clay’s antipathy to Francis Morgan went deeper than petty jealousy, he knew, and he still didn’t understand its source. Devon had known Francis for ten years; they’d been at Oxford together and had stayed in touch afterward when Devon had gone back to Cornwall, Francis to Lancashire. When Devon decided to reopen the mine and needed someone to manage it for him, he’d though of Francis because he was talented and competent. He was also poor, and not succeeding very quickly with his tiny law practice in Manchester. It had seemed to be the perfect solution for both of them. And Francis had done well, justified Devon’s faith in him; lately there had even been vague, preliminary talk of a partnership in the mine. But now, with Clay in the picture, such plans no longer seemed appropriate.

Alice was speaking to him, showing him two serpentine rings she’d bought in Mullion. Where was Lily now? Devon wondered. She would be in her room, no doubt, probably hunched over some damnable piece of mending. He hadn’t seen her since last night, but she’d rarely been out of his thoughts. “Poor Dev” she’d called him. Alice put one of the rings in his hand and pointed out the long red striations. They bent over the stone together, faces almost touching, and he caught a faint breath of her rose-scented perfume. Lily never wore perfume. But sometimes she smelled like flowers. Her hair was so many subtle shades of red, alive and luminous. Magical. He loved her mouth. The delicate, self-conscious shapes it made when she spoke fascinated him. She had a way of looking at him through her lashes when she smiled, lips curving up at the fragile corners, sweet, not coy, and completely charming. And when she cried, her nose got red and her gray-green eyes swam, and it always broke his heart. Had he made her cry last night? He’d listened, lying in his bed, afraid that he might hear her. But the sleepless night passed, and he’d heard nothing but the creaking of the house.
Lily,
he thought.
What am I going to do with you?
He felt a prickling sensation on the back of his neck. When he looked up, she was standing in front of him, handing Alice a cup of tea.

The ring dropped from his fingers and fell to the carpet with a soft thud. He was too stunned to move. Silent and graceful, Lily stooped to pick it up. For an instant she seemed to examine it in her hand. Then she offered it to him. His fingers went out automatically and she dropped the ring in his palm, careful not to touch him. Their eyes met. But her expression was shuttered; he couldn’t read it.

“I say, are you taking tea, Devon?” his mother repeated.

“No,” he got out.

“Clay?”

“Yes, please.”

Devon watched, impotent anger blossoming slowly, as Lily took another cup and saucer from his mother and carried them across the drawing room to Clay. She wore her old gray dimity dress and tired apron, her hair tucked up into her dingy cap. Clay looked uncomfortable; he tried to catch her eye as she handed him his tea, but she curtsied prettily—mockingly, Devon thought—and turned away immediately. Alice was in the middle of some animated story; Devon barely heard Lily murmur to his mother, “Will there be anything else, m’lady?” Elizabeth said no, Lily made another shallow curtsey, and a second later she was gone from the room.

“Jimmy was flabbergasted and said to Justine—in front of
all
of us, Devon, even your mother—that he hoped never to hear such talk from his own wife ever again, and if he did he’d feel no remorse in beating her for it. As if he ever would. Jimmy
Lynch,
can you imagine? And her such a perfect lamb! Wasn’t it droll?” she asked Elizabeth, chuckling in her easy, good-humored way.

“Very droll,” murmured her ladyship. But she was distracted as she gazed back and forth between her sons, her eyes speculative. Clay was scowling down into his teacup; Devon had never taken his eyes from the door since the pretty, pale-cheeked parlormaid had glided through it. “Justine sends her regards to both of you, by the way,” she mentioned. “You remember her, don’t you, Dev? Clay, I
know
you do. A pretty girl, yellow hair; we all though she’d marry Tom Wren, and then Jimmy—

“Excuse me.” Without looking at any of them, Devon strode toward the door.

“Dev? Is something wrong?”

He paused in the threshold. “No, Mother, I—” What? “I’ve remembered something I have to tell Cobb. I’ll only be a moment.” Three pairs of startled eyes watched him go.

She wasn’t in the kitchen. The scullery maid looked terrified but swore she hadn’t seen her. An instinct sent him sprinting down the L-shaped corridor, past the new housekeeper’s room, and up the sagging stone steps to the empty courtyard at the side of the house. He spied her beside the garden shed, leaning against the wall, facing away from him. His boots were silent on the spongy ground; she didn’t hear him until he was a dozen feet away. Even then she didn’t turn. He reached her in four more strides. His fury had propelled him this far; he hung onto it as he made a grab for her shoulder and spun her around.

But her face defeated him. All the bitter words died on his lips when she threw up her hands—too late—to cover her tear-wet cheeks and swimming, anguished eyes. When she tried to turn away again, he held on. “A mistake,” she sobbed, “I should never—” But she broke off because she was crying too hard, and put her face in her hands. What could he do but hold her?

She tried again. “I’m sorry, I don’t know why I did it, I was angry, hurt, I though if I—”

“Hush, it doesn’t matter.” It didn’t anymore.

“She’s so perfect—I’ve only made it worse—now that I’ve seen her—” She dissolved again into helpless weeping. Her fists were clenched against his shirtfront, to hold herself away from his comfort.

It took him a minute to realize she meant Alice. She’d spoken of her last night too. “Lily, Alice is not my fiancée. She never was.”

“No,” she choked, “but she will be.”

“No, she—”

“Or someone like her. Someone; someday. It’s true, you know it.” She beat against his chest once and twisted out of his grasp. I have to go away, Dev. I can t bear this.”

He grabbed her back, acting on reflex, his hands no longer gentle. “No, you’re not leaving. Don’t make me angry, Lily, don’t say stupid things.”

He pulled her close, his hard arms circling her completely. She let him. This pain was excruciating, but to go away would be a hundred times worse. How could she give him up? Never to hold him again—how could she relinquish such terrible sweetness? Cowardly, maybe, but she couldn’t leave him—not yet. It would be like cutting out her own heart.

She couldn’t say “I love you” again; it hurt them both too much. He couldn’t give her any hope. They clung to each other for a long time, not speaking, offering their bodies for comfort. Wondering what in the world they were going to do.

E
LIZABETH AND
A
LICE WERE
gone. Lily had heard them leave in the morning, but this time she hadn’t gotten up to watch from the window. Afterward, she’d stayed in her room all day, brooding. Devon had not come.

It was a wild night. The southern wind blew in from the sea, buffeting the shore in violent gusts that tore at her hair and twisted her skirts around her legs. A good night for making decisions, Lily thought as she stood at the bottom of the winding cliff steps and watched the incoming tide inundate the last foot of dry sand at her feet. She was alone, solid rock behind her, nothing but the vast sea and sky in front. She already knew what she was going to do, but she wanted to think it out one last time. Impulsive behavior had only brought her trouble in the past; a few hard lessons had taught her she could no longer afford to indulge in it.

She was going to tell Devon who she was, and what she would and would not do, and then be prepared to take the consequences. The first two would be bad enough, but it was the last she wasn’t sure she had the strength to face. For although he would be relieved to know she wasn’t really a housemaid, she doubted that that knowledge would be enough to change his mind about marrying her. And she had made up her own mind that she would not be his mistress. “Mistress,” as she had always known but lately had chosen to ignore, was only a euphemism for choosy whore.

What would she do, then? Where would she go? She’d thought she would have heard from Soames by now; it had been over a month since she’d written to him. If he would not take her in, she must find another place. A place where she could live cheaply while she waited out the nine months until her twenty-first birthday, when she would come into her tiny inheritance. Would Devon lend her money? she wondered. If he did, could she take it from him, even on the basis of a loan? Perhaps, but she would much rather make a clean break.

The wind blew a gust of salt spray into her face; she had to hang on to the rail with both hands to keep her balance. What a liar she was, she thought, despairing. If Devon offered her a living in return for her body, did she really think she could say no? However distasteful and humiliating it might be, did she truly believe she could decline and then leave him? She loved him enough to be his whore, and she would not care what the world thought.

She was weary of thinking. It was pointless to agonize over every eventuality before she’d even done anything. First she would tell him who she was and why she had run away from Lyme. Then she would worry about his answer. At least she was certain—certain enough to take the risk—that he wouldn’t have her arrested. Magistrate or not, he’d once flouted the authorities himself to protect his brother; surely he of all people would understand that sometimes, when appearances were wrong and observing the law perpetrated a greater injustice than violating it, it was the better part of wisdom to ignore the law’s absolute letter and act instead on principles of common sense. The worst that could happen was that he would send her away—in which case, except for the condition of her heart, she would be no worse off than the day she’d arrived.