Marrying the Mistress (12 page)

‘Oh,' she said, looking dubious. ‘You actually have French relatives, do you? I thought perhaps you used the name Follet only for professional purposes.' She
glanced up at Winterson, who stepped in with an unexpected contribution.

‘Miss Follet has no need of an assumed name. We met Monsieur Pierre Follet in York only a week ago, a generous man of about my own years, good looking, good breeding, still unattached and wealthy. Shall we introduce him to you, Veronique?'

Before she could hide it, a look passed across her eyes like a cloud that casts shadows across a hillside and moves on, and I sensed a desperation and a kind of loneliness that stems from having everything except the thing she most wants. Winterson's glib offer had hurt her, as did the patronising smiles of the group and, for once, she was stuck for an answer.

I put on my school-ma'am voice. ‘If anyone offered to present such a paragon to me on the assumption that I would drop my handkerchief at any niffy-naffy fellow still on the shelf, and a Frenchman too, I would say he had maggots in his head, my lord. I'm sure Veronique would say the same. We're both more than capable of finding our own beaux, are we not?' I said, turning to her and placing my fingertips upon her arm.

‘Yes,' she whispered. ‘Indeed we are.' Her colour had heightened, and I felt she was close to tears.

I could not leave it at that. ‘Shall we leave these coxcombs to their racing talk and repair to the supper room?' I said. ‘I have an appetite.'

She nodded and turned away, missing my frown at Winterson and the hand I laid on his arm to prevent him from following.

Looking back over the past days, I could see how his recent account of Veronique's circumstances had
affected the way I was beginning to respond to her, for I accepted his word that they had never been lovers, despite her wanting it to be so. Indeed, he had confirmed what his feelings were only a moment ago in that insensitive remark as he rushed to my defence with an unnecessary put-down. Perhaps, I thought, Veronique's intention had been merely to keep me on my toes with a few needling comments but, whatever the truth of the matter, she had revealed to me that there was more to her than the shallow golden-dolly. Here was a rather sad young woman searching for something that life was not providing her with. My theory, such as it was, was further strengthened in the supper room where we met Medworth and Cynthia Monkton still eating and socialising.

Standing sideways on to a lady dressed in violet and silver, Cynthia's profile accentuated her newly rounded shape clearly. Unlike others, she would never have attempted to disguise it. There was no need for introductions for they had met Veronique on many occasions at Abbots Mere, but her astonished glance at Cynthia's bulge brought back the cloud of discontent to her eyes that disappeared almost as quickly as before and, instead of the usual congratulations, she dithered as I myself had done only a few days earlier. Quickly averting her eyes, she stuttered something about the warmth, accepted a glass of punch from Medworth and gulped it down rather too quickly, pressing one hand beneath her bosom.

After some chatter, I drew Veronique aside in the hope that we might sit and talk together as friends, for once. But it was not to be, for we were joined by Winterson, who seemed determined to sit us down at a table
and to share the food he had brought as if to make amends for his earlier tactlessness. If he saw anything unusual in our being together, he gave no sign of it.

Other things had begun to make more sense to me concerning Veronique's spite, her unconcealed jealousy of my position, especially while I'd been pregnant with Jamie. Did she share with me that yearning for a child? Had it become almost a sickness with her, as I well knew it could? Did she need some real friends? And would she accept me as one?

‘I think,' I said to Winterson when she had been invited to dance, ‘you might try a little more kindness. It wouldn't hurt, surely?'

Sitting back into the gilded chair, he crossed his long legs and treated me to one of those superior looks that tell a woman he'll humour her at the price of a brief skirmish. His eyes narrowed, cynical, amused, as if he enjoyed having to defend himself. ‘Hurt whom?' he said.

‘You. A gentle answer turneth away wrath, you know.'

Heads turned in our direction as he laughed out loud. ‘Oh, don't go all biblical on me, Miss Follet,' he grinned. ‘But to answer your question, yes, it
would
hurt, eventually. Give some people an inch and they'll take a yard. You be kind to the lady if you wish. It's in your nature. But if I did the same, she'd get the wrong end of the stick all over again, just when I think she's started to see that it's you I want, not her.'

‘I shall pay no attention to that last remark.'

‘Do as you please. It's true. I only dole out kindness as I do to my horses, as an inducement for something I want or as a reward for something I'm given, not as
largesse to those who'd take advantage, as she most certainly would. So there you have it.'

It was not so much the sentiment alone that shocked me, for that was a typical response from the wealthy land-owning aristocracy who rarely saw the need to part with anything unless there was a sound reason for it. But to apply that to friendship did strike me as odd. ‘Well,' I said, ‘I never heard anything quite as cynical as that in all my born days, my lord. So am I to take it that the only reason you've ever had to offer
me
kindness is because you expected something in return? Never kindness for its own sake?'

‘For both reasons I've just stated. You have what I want, and you've given me something too.'

‘So if that were not the case, I take it you would have no other reason to offer me kindness.'

‘But it
is
the case, Miss Follet. I cannot imagine seeing you without wanting you, nor can I forget what you once gave me.'

‘This conversation is shocking,' I whispered, pushing it to its limits. ‘And what happens when…if… you get what you want? You revert to unkindness, do you? Thank you for the warning.'

‘No. When I've got what I want, I shall want more. I shall never stop wanting more.'

‘How do you know that?'

‘How do I know, woman? Do you need to ask? We—'

‘Shh! No, don't say it. I
don't
need to ask. Nor do I need to ask you about charity, or compassion, or pity. Clearly you don't deal in those, either.'

‘If we're talking about our mutual friend again,
charity she gets from her father by the cartload, compassion is for women to give, and pity she'd not thank you for. Or me. I know what she needs, and she's looking in the wrong direction for it. I offered to help, just now.'

‘Yes, by stepping on her pride, before her friends. By being facetious at my expense. That was not well done, my lord,' I said, angrily. ‘She was hurt by it. You understand little of women's needs, in spite of what you say.'

His reply came after a long silence during which he watched my anger simmer and my eyes avoid his. ‘I understand your needs,' he said, softly. ‘But I was taken once before in a direction I didn't want to go, and I'll be damned if I'll do it again. Yes, I have grown cynical, and perhaps unkind too. And I could have taken her at any time these last six years, Miss Follet, and landed myself high and dry for my kindness. For that's all it would've been.'

‘I didn't mean that sort of kindness,' I said. ‘And what do you mean about a direction you didn't want to go?'

‘Remind me to tell you one day. It's a long story.'

I knew that it concerned me, but I would probe no further. ‘I think,' I said, ‘that we are talking about two different things. A woman's view of kindness has other connotations. Men calculate the cost beforehand. Women calculate afterwards, if at all.'

‘By which time it's usually too late.'

‘Yes. That's the nature of it.'

The strains of a gavotte from the ballroom signalled the end of the interval and our eyes held, in remembrance of another time when we had lost ourselves in our own and each other's needs as if differences did not
exist. He had become hardened, unsympathetic, and I had grown wary and resentful, and now we needed to find a way of moving on without causing more pain.

‘Dance with me,' he whispered.

My eyes must have reflected my doubts, but he did not accept my refusal. Standing abruptly, he held out a hand and raised me to my feet, leading me like a sleepwalker into the ballroom where we joined the end of the line, moving into the steps as we went, turning, parting, closing, balancing.

If there were stares of disapproval, neither of us noticed, only the slow and stately steps that moved us apart and together again, our bodies and hands just touching, like those six years condensed into six minutes. His eyes were brazen with desire, and mine were speaking of I know not what, except too much of my feelings. He was a superb dancer, bending and graceful, concentrating totally on his partner as if she were the only one, while other dancers glanced through their eyelashes and turned pinkish after being held by him. I knew then that I was losing control, that I was showing him what was in my secret heart because, with his outspoken talk of wanting me, he had found a way in.

The slow seductive ritual ended and, after that, we seemed to be marking time until we could catch a mutual signal to end the charade and go home. We talked again with friends, we drank more punch and ate more apple pie and cream, we laughed at poor jokes and came together again with Medworth and his fecund wife, and the desire to be like her in that one respect burgeoned within me again, as I believe it had with
Veronique too. Inside me, I quivered and sobbed with the effort of constraint while outwardly I displayed the ice-cool front that deceived everyone. Everyone, I think, except him.

Finally, when my almost frantic glance connected with his lazy blink, he made our excuses, found my cloak and his hat, and carried me over the muddy cobbles to my home, ignoring the smiles and stares of those who passed by. His taciturn silence warned me of what was on his mind, but it was on mine too, and past the stage of discussion.

* * *

‘Lock the door and go to bed,' I told the astonished footman.

‘Yes, ma'am.'

Thinking I would be late, I had told Debbie not to wait up, but she had left a single candle burning in my room where chocolate-brown shadows wrapped us in a blanket as dark as the lust that spilled over, even before we had pressed the door closed with our bodies, our mouths and hands already seeking. The room was warmed by a low fire, but neither of us noticed it in the heat of our desire, in the relief of being alone with our craving where no polite preliminaries were expected.

I have no notion how long before we paused, but by then his hands were slipping softly over my gown, his mouth lifting from my bare shoulder to whisper commands against my face, and I knew by his tone not to expect the same restraint this time from one who had waited over-long for what he wanted. I would not plead for either gentleness or consideration after my own enforced celibacy, for I was no inexperienced girl with
unrealistic dreams of tenderly sighing lovers. The desires of my heart owed nothing to all that.

My expectations were not far wrong.

‘Take it off,' he growled.

‘Help me.' I was breathless, trembling.

‘Where…how?'

‘At the back. Hooks and eyes. And a tape inside.'

Turning me round, he snapped the fastenings apart like the rattle of a drum, sliding it off my shoulders and over my feet, flinging aside my work of one week while shaking off his own tailcoat to keep it company. I have never in my life seen a man remove his own tailcoat so quickly.

I stood with my palms pressed to my breasts, a natural reaction, in the circumstances. But he took my wrists and slowly eased them apart, holding them wide against the door panel, and I could not help but turn my head aside as he leaned away to scrutinise my body, as a sculptor would. My eyes closed, and his lips awakened my breasts to his warm hungry wanderings until they closed over the nipples, engorging them, forcing a cry from deep in my throat.

‘Untie my cravat,' he whispered.

‘Let me go, then.'

His hands needed that excuse to explore my waist and hips, caressing while I struggled blindly with the knot at his throat. Eventually, my fumblings produced an end, which he pulled, throwing the long thing on to the growing heap with a laugh before taking my mouth in a kiss that made me reel, reminding me again of his words earlier that evening, uncompromising, almost vengeful. ‘Look at me, Helene,' he whispered to my closed eyes.

High up on the chest the candle flame wavered beside us, illuminating his face like the setting sun on coastal rocks, deep shadows and rugged surfaces sloping to granite throat and shoulders. His eyes were more intense than ever I'd seen them, but when had he ever allowed me to see what he was thinking, until now?

‘Don't hate me for this, as you did before,' he said. ‘You were willing then, and you are willing now. But don't reward me with your hate.'

‘I don't hate you,' I replied, taking his face between my hands. ‘I'm being given the choice, this time. That's all I ask, to be given the right to choose. This night, I've chosen to take whatever you have to give, kindly or not, and to give as much in return. I shall not hate you for that.'

‘Then that's all I dare hope for, sweetheart,' he said, blending the last word seamlessly into a searing kiss that sent me spinning into another kind of darkness. I felt myself being carried and laid upon the cool sheets of my bed where the long curtains blocked out the wavering light, but not the sight of a broad torso being revealed, like the muscle-bound marble of a Greek god. He was more perfect than my imagination had drawn him, more gracefully vigorous in movement, his bared legs more robust, his back rippling with manly strength, his deep chest just as my fingers remembered it, wide and downy in the centre. Half-intoxicated, I watched him blow out the candle flame, heard his soft movements, felt the mattress dip and then the wonderful soft warmth of him, setting me on fire with his first touch.