Once and Always (41 page)

“She’s been a sad lady these last days, poor thing,” Mrs. Craddock said, still looking a little worried. “She scarcely eats when he isn’t here, and I’ve made all her favorites. She always thanks me so politely, too. It’s enough to make a body weep. I can’t think why he isn’t in her bed at night where he belongs. . . .”

O’Malley shook his head glumly. “He hasn’t been there since their weddin‘ night. Ruth says she’s certain-sure of it. And her ladyship ain’t sleeping in
his
bed neither, because the upstairs maids are keeping an eye on his chambers, and there’s never more than one pillow on his bed with a crease in it.” In morose silence, he finished his apple and reached for another, but this time Mrs. Craddock whacked his hand with her towel. “Snop snitching my apples, Daniel, they’re for a pie I’m makin’ for dessert.” A sudden smile flickered across her kindly features. “No, go ahead and take the apples. I’ve decided to make something else for them tonight. Something more festive than a pie.”

The youngest scullery maid, a homely, buxom girl of about sixteen, piped up, “One of the laundry maids was tellin‘ me about a certain powder you can put in a man’s wine that gets him into the mood for having a woman, if his manhood’s what’s causin’ the problem. The laundry maids all think mebbe his lordship ought to have a little speck o‘ that powder—just to help things along.”

The kitchen servants all murmured agreement, but O’Malley exclaimed derisively, “Lord, girl! Where do you get such ideas? His lordship don’t need them powders, and you can tell everyone in the laundry I said so! Why, John coachman’s nose runs year-round from a permanent chill he got while spendin‘ nearly every night last winter waitin’ atop the coach, out in the elements, for his lordship to leave Miss Hawthorne’s bed. Miss Hawthorne,” he finished informatively, “was his ladybird afore Miss Sybil.”

“Was he with Miss Sybil last night?” Mrs. Craddock asked, already measuring out flour for her “festive” dessert. “Or was that just newspaper talk?”

O’Malley’s cheerful face sobered. “He was there, right enough. I heerd it from one of the grooms. Course, we don’t know fer shure that anythin‘ happened whilst he was there. Mebbe he was payin’ her off.”

Mrs. Craddock sent him a weak, unconvinced smile. “Well, at least he’s stayin‘ home for supper with his wife tonight. That’s a good start.”

O’Malley nodded agreement and headed off to share his latest news with the groom who’d provided him with the master’s exact whereabouts last night.

Which was why, of the 140 people at Wakefield Park, only Victoria was surprised when Jason strolled into the dining room that night to join her for supper.

“You’re staying home tonight?” she burst out in amazed relief as he sat down at the head of the table.

He sent her a measuring look. “I was under the distinct impression that was what you wanted me to do.”

“Well, I did,” Victoria admitted, wondering if she looked her best in the emerald green gown she was wearing and wishing he wasn’t so far away from her at the opposite end of the long table. “Only I didn’t really expect you to do it. That is—” She broke off as O’Malley turned from the sideboard, carrying a tray with two sparkling crystal glasses filled with wine. It was nearly impossible to carry on a conversation with Jason so far away, both emotionally and physically.

She sighed as O’Malley headed straight toward her, an odd, determined gleam in his eye. “Your wine, my lady,” he said and swept a glass from the tray, plunking it on the table with a queer, exaggerated flourish that inevitably tipped the glass and spilled wine all over the linen tablecloth in front of her place.

“O’Malley—!” Northrup bit out from his station near the sideboard where he routinely supervised the serving of meals.

O’Malley sent him a look of ignorant innocence and made a great fuss of pulling back Lady Victoria’s chair, helping her to stand, and guiding her down to Jason’s end of the table. “There now, my lady,” he said, positively emanating anxious contrition as he pulled out the chair on Jason’s immediate right. “I’ll have more wine for ye in a trice. Then I’ll clean up that mess down there. Smells awful, it does, spilled wine. Best to stay far away from it. Can’t think how I came to spill yer wine thataway,” he added, whisking up a linen napkin and placing it across Victoria’s lap. “Me arm’s been painin‘ me of late and that’s prob’ly what did it. Nothin’ serious fer ye to worry ‘bout—just an old bone what was broken years ago.”

Victoria straightened her skirts and looked at him with a sympathetic smile. “I’m sorry your arm pains you, Mr. O’Malley.”

O’Malley then turned to Lord Fielding, intending to utter more false excuses, but his mouth went dry when he met Jason’s piercing, relentless gaze and saw him rubbing his finger meaningfully along the edge of his knife as if he were testing its sharpness.

O’Malley ran his forefinger between his collar and neck, cleared his throat, and hastily mumbled to Victoria, “I-I’ll get yer ladyship another glass of wine.”

“Lady Fielding doesn’t drink wine with dinner,” Jason drawled, stopping him in his tracks. He glanced at her as an afterthought. “Or have you changed your habits, Victoria?”

Victoria shook her head, puzzled by the unspoken communication that seemed to be flying back and forth between Jason and poor O’Malley. “But I think I’d like some tonight,” she added, trying to soothe over a situation she didn’t understand.

The servants withdrew, leaving them to dine in the oppressive splendor of the ninety-foot-long dining room. Heavy silence hung over the entire meal, punctuated only by the occasional clink of gold flatware against Limoges porcelain as they ate—a silence that was made more awful for Victoria because she was acutely aware of the dazzling gaiety that would be surrounding Jason right now if he’d gone to London, rather than remaining here with her.

By the time the plates were being cleared away and dessert brought in, her misery had turned to desperation. Twice she had tried to break through the barrier of silence by commenting on such nonabrasive topics as the weather and the excellence of their ten-course meal. Jason’s replies to these conversational gambits were polite but unencouragingly brief.

Victoria fidgeted with her spoon, knowing she had to do something, and quickly, because the gap between them was widening with every moment, growing deeper with every day, until soon there would be no way to bridge it.

Her dismal anxiety was temporarily forgotten when O’Malley marched in with dessert and, with an ill-concealed smile, set before them a small, beautiful cake, decorated with two intertwined, colorful flags—one British, the other bearing the stars and stripes of America.

Jason glanced at the cake and lifted his sardonic gaze to the meddlesome footman. “Am I to assume Mrs. Craddock was in a patriotic mood today?” O’Malley’s face fell, his eyes taking on a wary look as his master regarded him with cold displeasure. “Or is this supposed to remind me, symbolically, that I’m married?”

The footman blanched. “Never, milord.” He waited, impaled on Jason’s gaze, until Jason finally dismissed him with a curt nod.

“If this was supposed to represent our marriage,” Victoria said with unintentional humor, “Mrs. Craddock should have decorated the cake with two crossed swords, not two flags.”

“You’re right,” Jason agreed blandly, ignoring the beautiful little cake and reaching for his wineglass.

He sounded so infuriatingly uninterested in the terrible state of their marriage that Victoria panicked and plunged into the topic she’d been trying to bring up all evening. “I don’t want to be right!” She dragged her gaze to his unreadable face. “Jason, please—I want things to be different between us.”

He looked mildly surprised as he leaned back in his chair and studied her impassively. “Exactly what sort of arrangement do you have in mind?”

His manner was so distant and unconcerned that Victoria’s nervousness doubled. “Well, I’d like us to be friends, for one thing. We used to laugh together and talk about things.”

“Talk away,” he invited.

“Is there anything in particular you’d like to talk about?” she asked earnestly.

Jason’s eyes moved over her intoxicating features. He thought,
I want to talk about why you need to drink yourself into oblivion before you can face going to bed with me. I want to talk about why my touch makes you sick.
He said, “Nothing in particular.”

“Very well, then, I’ll start.” She hesitated, and then said, “How do you like my gown? It is one you had Madame Dumosse make for me.”

Jason’s gaze dropped to the creamy flesh swelling invitingly above the low green bodice of the gown. She looked ravishing in green, he thought, but she should have had emeralds to wear around her slim throat to complement the gown. If things were different, he would have dismissed the servants and pulled her onto his lap, and then he would have unfastened the back of her gown, exposing her intoxicating breasts to his lips and hands. He would have kissed each one, then carried her upstairs and made love to her until they were both too weak to move. “The gown is fine. It needs emeralds,” he said.

Victoria’s hand flew self-consciously to her bare throat. She did not have any emeralds. “I think you look very nice, too,” she said, admiring the way his expensively tailored dark blue jacket clung to his splendid shoulders. His face was so tanned, his hair so dark, that his white shirt and neckcloth stood out in dazzling contrast. “You’re very handsome,” she said wistfully.

A glimmer of a startled smile appeared at his lips. “Thank you,” he said, visibly taken aback.

“You’re welcome,” Victoria replied and, because she thought he seemed pleased by her compliment to his looks, she seized on that as an acceptable topic of conversation. “When I first saw you, I thought you were frightening-looking, did you know that? Of course, it was nearly dark and I was nervous, but—well—you’re so huge that it was frightening.”

Jason choked on his wine. “To what are you referring?”

“To our first meeting,” Victoria clarified innocently. “Remember—I was outside in the sunlight, holding that piglet, which I gave to the farmer, and then you dragged me inside the house and it was dark compared to outdoors—”

Jason stood up abruptly. “I’m sorry I treated you uncivilly. Now, if you don’t mind, I think I’ll spend the evening doing some work.”

“No,” Victoria said hastily, also standing up, “please don’t work. Let’s do something else—something we can do together. Something you’d like.”

Jason’s heart slammed into his ribs. He gazed down at her flushed cheeks and saw the invitation in her imploring blue eyes. Hope and disbelief collided in his chest, exploding, as he laid his hand tenderly against her flushed cheek, slowly running it back, smoothing her heavy silken hair.

Victoria trembled with pleasure because he was finally treating her with warmth. She should have tried to draw him out days ago, rather than suffering in silence. “We could play chess if you like,” she said happily. “I’m not very good at it, but if you have cards—”

His hand jerked away from her, and his face became a closed mask. “Excuse me, Victoria. I have work to do.” He moved around her and disappeared into his study, where he remained for the rest of the evening.

Victoria’s heart sank with bewildered disappointment, and she spent the evening trying to read. By bedtime, she was absolutely resolved not to let him fall back into their former pattern of being polite strangers, no matter what it took to change things. She remembered the way he had looked at her just before she suggested playing chess—it was the same way he looked at her before he kissed her. Her body had recognized it instantly, turning warm and shaky in that unexplainable way it always did when Jason touched her. He may have wanted to kiss her, rather than play chess. Dear God, he may have wanted to do that awful thing to her again—

Victoria shuddered at the thought, but she was willing to do even that if harmony could be restored. Her stomach turned over at the thought of Jason fondling her when she was naked, studying her body in that awful, detached way as he’d done on their wedding night. Perhaps it wouldn’t have been so terrible if he’d been nice to her while be did it—nice in the way he was when he kissed her.

She waited in her room until she heard Jason moving about in his, then put on a turquoise satin dressing robe trimmed with wide strips of beige lace at the hem and full sleeves. She opened the connecting door to Jason’s suite, which had been rehung—minus its lock—and walked in. “My lor—Jason,” she said abruptly.

He was shrugging out of his shirt, his chest almost completely exposed, and his head snapped up.

“I’d like to talk to you,” she began firmly.

“Get out of here, Victoria,” he said with icy annoyance.

“But—”

“I do not want to talk,” he bit out sarcastically. “I do not want to play chess. I do not want to play cards.”

“Then what
do
you want?”

“I want you out of here. Is that clear enough?”

“I’d say it’s very clear,” she replied with unbending dignity. “I won’t bother you again.” She walked back into her room and closed the door, but she was still angrily determined to make her marriage happy and solid. She didn’t understand what he expected from her. Most particularly she did not understand
him.
But she knew someone who did. Jason was thirty, much older and more worldly than she, but Captain Farrell was older than Jason, and he would be able to advise her about what to do next.

Victoria walked determinedly down to the stables the next morning and waited while a horse was saddled for her. Her new black riding habit was beautifully cut, with a tight, fitted jacket that accentuated her full breasts and tiny waist. The snowy white stock of her shirt set off her vivid coloring and high cheekbones, and her titian hair was caught up at the nape in an elegant chignon. The chignon made her feel older and more sophisticated; it bolstered her flagging confidence.

She waited at the stables, idly tapping her riding crop against her leg; then she smiled brightly at the groom who led out a prancing gelding, its ebony coat shimmering like satin.