Love's Reward (9 page)

Joanna gazed without interest at the woods and park, scattered now with early spring flowers—snowdrops, aconites, celandines—beneath the faintly greening branches.

The house massively dominated its setting. Ornamental stone spires pierced the sky along the entire length of the façade. An imposing portico presided over the sweep of steps. Joanna’s grandfather had torn down the early seventeenth-century house and replaced it with this monument to his conceit.

Joanna hated it, but she had been born here, in the great bedroom with the blue-and-gilt ceiling, which dominated the west wing.

Richard and Helena were waiting in the echoing hallway with its rows of urns in their arched niches. As Richard welcomed his father and mother, Helena swept Joanna into a warm embrace.

“Joanna, you insane creature! Are you quite exhausted?”

Joanna returned the hug, then held Helena at arms’ length and looked into those infinitely wise gray eyes. Her sister-in-law was as blond as her husband, with a deceptive frailty to her slim figure.

“Where’s Elaine? I shan’t even take off my coat until I’ve seen her.”

“Come, then! She’s with her nursemaid. But I have set the household in an uproar by insisting that my baby be allowed to sleep in the room next to ours.” Helena laughed. “That Richard and I share a bedroom is already considered outré enough. All the protocol of King’s Acton is shattered, and in the butler’s eyes I can never be redeemed. But I’m not going to let Elaine be banished to that hideous nursery wing where Richard spent his first years—and you, too, of course. Oh, dear! I hope I don’t offend you?”

“Helena, you could offend no one. Come, let’s go see Elaine! Has she grown much?”

The ladies hurried away through echoing corridors and up sweeping flights of stairs. At last they entered a massive bedroom and made their way across its expanse of carpet to a set of screens in front of the fire. Helena had created a little cocoon of warmth, sheltered from the cold grandeur and resonant, hollow spaces.

A fresh-faced young woman holding a baby on her lap looked up and smiled.

“She’s asleep, my lady. Shall I put her down?”

Joanna gazed for a moment at the small face, the immaculate, tiny curve of nostril and the sweet mouth, the upper lip curled like a rose petal. Elaine’s eyelashes lay in a tan sweep on her flawless cheeks. One small hand clenched into a tiny fist against her chin.

“Oh, Helena. She’s so beautiful.”

“Would you like to hold her?” Helena gently took her daughter from the nurse and set her into Joanna’s arms. “You’ll probably need some practice with babies. They’re the one consolation for having to live with a man.” The nursemaid giggled, and Helena smiled at her. “Thank you, Betty. I’ll put Elaine to bed. You go and find that handsome husband of yours and tell him what I said.”

Still giggling, the girl left the room.

“How can you talk such fustian, Helena? You and Richard are besotted with each other.”

Joanna meant the words to be light and humorous, but her voice cracked.

The baby was surprisingly heavy in her arms. She dropped onto the chair vacated by Betty. Elaine fit perfectly into the curve of her elbow.

With one hand Joanna tugged the shawl away from the tiny chin.

Elaine’s skin was so smooth! She bore that poignant smell that clean babies always had, of milk and soap and lavender water. With a strange sense of awe, Joanna studied the perfect fingernails and the little creases at the chubby wrists, and felt an unexpected start of tears pricking at her eyelids.

To her horror a splash of water fell onto the baby’s cheek.

The little face instantly puckered, but then the baby relaxed again without waking, only her mouth moving a little.

Joanna fiercely brushed away her tears. Her eyes were beginning to burn, and she could tell that her nose was turning red. How humiliating! Oh, dear God, how very humiliating!

She could hear those implacable tones as clearly as if Fitzroy Monteith Mountfitchet stood next to her in the room.

I most particularly don’t want children.

Helena reached forward. Gently taking Elaine, she laid the baby in the cradle waiting beside the fire. Then she put her arms about Joanna and held her close.

“This man of whom Richard refuses to speak, the dastardly Lord Tarrant. If you’re to marry him, he will become my brother. I should like to know something about him. So if you want to talk about it, I’m here.”

Joanna turned her face into Helena’s shoulder and forced herself to laugh.

“I don’t know anything about him. And it won’t matter. We’re to lead separate lives. So there won’t be any children. He made that very clear.”

“My dear! What on earth?”

She wrenched away from the comfort of Helena’s arms.

“It’s nothing! It’s exactly what I want, too. It’s just that I don’t think I realized till now quite how much I will be giving up.”

* * *

As a girl, once she had left the confines of the echoing nursery wing, Joanna had been given a suite of rooms of her own, as had her brothers and sisters. She hadn’t spent much time there. Along with Eleanor and Milly, she had been sent away to school. Childhood summers had been spent with their grandmother at Acton Mead—the house that the dowager countess had left to Richard in her will—and Christmas had usually seen them as guests of some other household.

Until Joanna had spent Christmas two years earlier with Richard and Helena at Acton Mead she had never taken part in any of the things that Helena considered normal Yuletide experiences, gathering holly and ivy, making a kissing bough.

The last two years, while she had still been at school, she had spent other holidays with friends, often enough at Fenton Stacey with Lucinda Sail, where on her last visit she had also met Quentin and Mrs. Barton-Smith.

Nevertheless, this formal suite of rooms had been her only fixed base. She turned the brass knob and walked in with a certain sense of homecoming.

Weak spring sunshine filtered through the windows and cast pale shadows over the gilt-and-white trim and the cerulean walls.

The room was immaculate. The chairs, the writing desk, the brass fender, everything gleamed from the constant care and attention of the King’s Acton staff.

Joanna did not notice any of it. She took the key that she had hidden in the corner of the mantelpiece, and crossed the room to a large chest that sat in one of the window bays.

It was filled to the brim with paper. She began to pull out the sheets, glancing briefly at them as she spread them across the floor.

Pencil sketches of trees and flowers. Watercolors of the weed pooled up against the edge of the lake. A violent charcoal rendering of a storm-wracked sky, which she had witnessed from the window of this very room when she was fourteen.

Then there were the portraits.

Richard frowning over a book. Harry in the orchard, bold and laughing, shooting down a row of clay jugs, one after another. Little Milly with her sunshade. Eleanor with an embroidery frame.

The sheets showed a progression from the passionate, clumsy drawings of a child to the fast, accurate portrayals of an artist.

She picked up a drawing she had made when she was almost fifteen. A pair of old boots that had been tossed aside in the stable.

It marked the turning point. The first day she had known that she had really learned to
see
, and had felt the truth and essence of her subject—the very history and soul of the cracked leather—flow unhindered from her eye through her hand and onto the paper.

Any woman could have a baby. Only she could do this.

Kneeling on the carpet she was completely absorbed, looking critically at her work.

This one of the horses needed a more marked definition of shading, but she liked the overall composition of it. The head of Richard’s black gelding was excellent—that rolling eye, so full of pride and intelligence.

This watercolor of the cabbages had a wild, intricate feeling that she loved—the leaves curling back on each other, layer upon layer—but she had spoiled it by working on it too long and muddying the colors.

Now, this one, this sketch of Richard doubled over with laughter, was superb. She couldn’t fault it.

Someone knocked at the door. One of the maids, presumably, to make up the fire.

Without lifting her head from an impassioned sketch of a dead bird, Joanna called out permission to enter.

The robin lay tossed and abandoned in a bank of snow, the feathers of one wing spread like the hand of a priest raised in benediction. But the head of the bird was twisted on its body, the beak a little agape, the eyes mere slits of black. The snow was melting into bright, sparkling shards of crystal.

Joanna closed her eyes for a moment, remembering her rush of feeling when she had found it. Poor robin, never to sing again, never to see the sun or build a nest again, lying frozen and stiff in the cruel hand of winter.

She thrust aside the drawing and took up another.

“I had no idea,” a man’s voice said, completely without sarcasm or mockery.

Joanna looked up. A pair of boots had materialized next to her. Very black, very shiny boots, marked with small splashes of mud.

Her gaze swept up over taut buckskin breeches and a dark jacket to a handsome face beneath carelessly curling dark hair.

Fitzroy Mountfitchet stood over her in her sitting room with one of her drawings in his hands.

“So this is what Richard looked like before he became a soldier. He’s always been a damned irritating fellow, hasn’t he? Do you realize, my dear affianced wife, that these are quite extraordinary?”

“What on earth are you doing in here?” Joanna inquired frostily. “Couldn’t you wait until tomorrow to inflict your presence? That’s our wedding day, isn’t it?”

Struggling with her skirts, she tried to get to her feet.

He reached down a hand to help her.

Without treading on her drawings she could not move away, so she found herself standing far too close to him, with her hand still imprisoned in his.

Lord Tarrant gazed down at her, his eyes unreadable. A faint smile curved the corners of his mouth.

“I came to offer a truce. I’ve been unnecessarily harsh. Perhaps you would forgive me? I also came because your sister-in-law confronted me, before I could even change my clothes.”

“Helena spoke to you about me?”

“Lady Lenwood intends to dispatch me to hell and the devil for my brutal treatment of you. She also, quite correctly, sees that I am to blame for the towering argument that her husband is about to have with his father. Richard Acton would still stop our imprudent wedding if he could.”

She wrenched her hand away and stepped back. “Please, leave me alone!”

“This is what it’s all been about, isn’t it?” He waved a hand to indicate her sketches and paintings. “There was no way I could have known. For God’s sake! Every schoolgirl paints. Every parlor has its share of insipid, washed-out watercolors and cameo portraits done with blunt scissors. My sister Mary does the most frightful scenes of shepherdesses in pastures of viridian and cadmium yellow, scattered about with daisies like sheep’s eyes. I had no idea you were anything else.”

“Why should you?”

He glanced back at her. Something she had never seen before in his expression darkened his eyes.

“You’ve been crying? I’m sorry. Is there anything I can do about it?”

Joanna was horrified to feel her eyelids turn hot and dry. Oh, dear God! She would
not
weep in front of him.

“You? No, of course not!”

His expression hardened. “Devil take it, Joanna! I’m not a monster of iniquity. I’m damned if I want this marriage, but I shan’t torment you. I don’t hold you to blame for the way events have turned out. Indeed, I hope you’ll be happy. For God’s sake, please don’t weep about it.”

She hated him with a clear, passionate flare of loathing at that moment, without knowing why. Joanna only knew that she had been caught out somehow, defenseless and exposed, as if she were discovered in the center of a ballroom without clothes, and that he had witnessed it.

She twisted away, but he caught her hand in his and stopped her.

“Pray, don’t! You’re gaining everything you want. Not only a studio, but also the full backing of my purse. I shall strip the wallpaper. You shall have supplies, models, absolute freedom of action about this. Become the artist that you want to be. I shall do nothing to prevent it. Marriage to me is what’s providing the opportunity. It’s not a cursed three-act tragedy.”

The tears spilled over, hot and humiliating, to burn down her cheeks. Her hatred flared, consuming any other emotion. Before she could escape and unwittingly crush her artwork underfoot, he caught her head in both hands and kissed her eyelids. Bleak desperation threatened to choke her as his lips touched lightly, seeking and tender, moving down over her cheeks to caress the corners of her mouth.

Joanna seized his arms and kissed him back with the full force of her fury, because she couldn’t help it and because she didn’t know what else to do—anything else would be a defeat, a desertion of pride.

His solicitation disappeared. His lips etched into hers, opening her mouth, until he ruthlessly explored her warmth and moisture as he bent her body in his arms. Yet at last his lips roved over her face again—back to her sore eyelids and the sensitive place at the temple with an exquisite gentleness that ravaged her and left her shaking and defenseless—before releasing her.

“You said,” Joanna gasped, breathing hard. “You said you would never do that again.”

“I’m sorry.” His eyes were wide and bleak. “It was meant to be something else. For a moment I thought I could . . . but it can never be undone.” He stood looking down for a moment at her drawing of the dead bird. “‘
Who killed Cock Robin?’ ‘I,’ said the Sparrow, ‘with my bow and arrow
—’”

Turning abruptly, he stalked from the room.

Her paintings and sketches lifted and settled again like leaves in November as he slammed the door behind him.

* * *