One Night for Love (14 page)

“Who was your father, Lily?” he asked.

“Sergeant Thomas Doyle of the Ninety-fifth, sir,” she told him.

“And where did he live before he took the king’s shilling?” he asked.

“I think Leicestershire, sir.”

“Ah,” he said. “And where exactly in Leicestershire?”

“I do not know, sir.” Papa had never talked a great deal about his past. Something he had once said, though, had led Lily to believe that he had left home and joined the army because he had been unhappy.

“And his family?” the duke asked. “What do you know of them?”

“Very little, sir,” she replied. “Papa had a father and a brother, I believe.”

“But you never visited them?”

“No, sir.” She shook her head.

“And your mother,” he asked her. “Who was she?”

“Her name was Beatrice, sir,” she said. “She died in India when I was seven years old. She had a fever.”

“And her maiden name, Lily?”

Elizabeth laughed. “Are you planning to write a biography, Lyndon?” she asked. “Pray do not feel obliged to answer, Lily. We are all curious about you because you have suddenly been presented to us as Neville’s wife and your life has been so fascinatingly different from our own. You must forgive us if we seem almost ill-bred in our inquisitiveness.”

The duke asked no more questions, Lily was relieved to discover. She found his blue eyes rather disconcerting. He gave the impression of being able to see right into another person’s mind.

“Do you know the names of all these flowers?” she asked Elizabeth. “They are very lovely. But they are different from flowers I know.”

They sat on one of the seats while Elizabeth named every flower and tree and Lily set herself to memorizing their names—lupins, hollyhocks, wallflowers, lilies, irises, sweet briar, lilacs, cherry trees, pear trees. Would she ever remember them all? The Duke of Portfrey strolled along the paths while they talked, though he did pause for a while at the lower end of the rock garden to gaze back at Lily.

Lady Elizabeth stood beside the fountain watching Lily return to the house. She looked small and rather lost, but she had declined Elizabeth’s offer to accompany her to her room. She thought she could remember the way, she had said.

“She has courage,” Elizabeth said more to herself than to the Duke of Portfrey, who was standing behind her.

“I must thank you, Elizabeth,” he said stiffly, “for pointing out how ill-bred and excessively inquisitive my questions were.”

She swung around to face him. “Oh, dear,” she said, smiling ruefully, “I have offended you.”

“Not at all.” He made her a slight bow. “I am sure you were quite right”

“Poor child,” she said. “One feels she is a child, though if Neville married her well over a year ago she cannot be so very young, can she? She is so small and looks so fragile, yet she has lived in India and Portugal and Spain with the
armies
. That cannot have been easy. And she was a captive of the French for almost a year. What is your particular interest in her?”

The duke lifted his brows. “Have you not just stated it?” he asked her. “She is a curiosity. And she has appeared at a moment that could not have been better chosen if it had been done for deliberate effect.”

“But you surely do not believe that it was?” she said, laughing.

“Not at all.” He was gazing broodingly at the door through which Lily had disappeared. “She is very beautiful. Even now. When Kilbourne has spent money on clothes and jewels for her and has brought her into fashion …” He did not complete the thought—he did not need to do so.

Elizabeth said nothing. She was never able to explain even to herself the nature of her relationship with the Duke of Portfrey. They had been friends for several years. There was an ease and a closeness between them that was rare for a single man and a single woman. And yet there was a distance too. Perhaps it was a distance that was inevitable when they were of different genders but were not also lovers.

Elizabeth had sometimes asked herself whether she would become his lover if he ever suggested it. But he never had. Neither had he asked her to be his wife. She was glad of that fact. Although she had lived through her youth and her twenties in the hope that she would meet a man for whom she could care enough to marry him she
was
no longer sure she was willing to give up the independence she prized.

But sometimes she thought she would like the experience of being loved—physically loved—by the handsome Duke of Portfrey.

He had been married as a very young man—briefly and tragically. He had been a military officer at the time and a younger son who had not expected ever to succeed to his father’s ducal title. He had married secretly before going off with his regiment, first to the Netherlands and then to the West Indies, leaving his bride behind and his marriage undisclosed. She had died before his return. Although it had been years and years ago, Elizabeth often felt that he
had never quite recovered from the experience—never forgiven himself, perhaps, for leaving her, for not being with her when she died in a carriage accident, for not being there for her funeral.

It was almost, Elizabeth felt, as if he had never quite accepted her death or let her go—though he never spoke of her. He was a moody man whom she never felt she fully understood. Perhaps, she admitted, that was his fascination.

And now he seemed fascinated with Lily, a young woman whom he had just described—quite accurately—as beautiful. And Elizabeth herself was six-and-thirty. Well. She smiled ruefully.

“Shall we go indoors too?” she suggested. “The breeze is becoming chilly.”

He offered her his arm.

Lily tried to re-create in her mind the dream she had held there for longer than a year. How very foolish it seemed now in retrospect. She had pictured herself arriving at that large cottage set in its pretty English garden—her father had always said that English gardens were prettier than any other gardens on earth—and seeing the delight in Neville’s face as he opened the door and found her standing on his doorsill. He would enfold her in his arms and squeeze all the breath out of her, and then she would tell him her story and he would forgive her the part that needed forgiveness and they would live happily ever after. She would have a
home
, a permanent place where she belonged and that: she could make her own. In her dream there had been no other people—just Neville and herself.

Lily sighed as she opened one of the long windows of her bedchamber and breathed in the cool night air. Had she ever really believed in the dream? Probably not. She was
not so naive as to imagine that life could ever be that simple. All her life she had been aware of the insurmountable social gap between the officers and the men—and their women. And her marriage to Neville had been so very sudden and so very brief. But the dream had sustained her through many hardships. And it was better sometimes to have an unrealistic dream, she thought, than to have only the cold truth of reality.

She was the Countess of Kilbourne, mistress of all this—unless he decided after all to divorce her, though she did not think he would. The whole situation was absurd. It was impossible. Teatime had been a nightmare. Dinner had been worse. She had not known what food or drink to accept from the footmen, which knives and forks and spoons to use with which courses. If Neville had not touched her hand almost at the start and murmured to her that she should copy what he did, and if Elizabeth had not caught her eye from across the table, winked, and picked up the utensils that would be needed for the course then being served, she would have disgraced herself utterly.

And in the drawing room afterward there had been all that conversation again. It might have been wonderful indeed to have listened to it if she could have been been invisible, if other people for one reason or another had not tried to draw her in. She had revealed more and more of her ignorance every time she opened her mouth.

She had worn her green muslin again though Dolly had done new things to her hair. Everyone else had changed and made her feel plainer and dowdier than ever. She hated being made aware of such things. What she wore had never particularly mattered before. Clothes had simply been for warmth or coolness or basic decency. But here clothes said something about status.

This was to be her life, she thought, moving from the window toward the bed. She reached down to pull up the
sides of her nightgown so that she would not trip over the hem. But she stopped and smiled at her bare toes. Dolly had sat in her dressing room for much of the evening, removing the frill from the bottom, shortening the gown, and sewing the frill back on. How very kind she was when Lily was perfectly capable of doing it for herself. But when she had said so, Dolly had laughed and called her funny again and they had both laughed for no reason at all. The maid had unpacked her bag, she had explained, and noticed that there was no nightgown within. She could not have her ladyship tripping over the frill and breaking her neck.

There was a knock on the dressing room door. Was Dolly
still
up? Did that girl take no time for herself?

“Come in,” Lily called.

But it was not Dolly. It was Neville, looking very handsome in a long brocaded blue dressing gown. Lily remembered him saying that he had looked in on her earlier in the day while she was sleeping. She caught her lower lip between her teeth, remembering her wedding night. But almost simultaneously she recalled with a stabbing of pain that this was to have been his wedding night with someone else.

“Lily,” he asked her, “do you have everything you need?”

She nodded.

“Are you … all right?” He looked searchingly at her.

She nodded again.

“It has been a difficult day for you,” he said. “Perhaps tomorrow will be easier.”

“Do you love her?” she couldn’t help but blurt out. She stared at him, wishing she could recall the words, wishing she could stop herself from feeling hurt that the answer might be yes. All the time she had been with Manuel and the partisans, clinging to the hope of one day returning to
the man who had married her, he had been courting another woman, perhaps falling in love with her. All the time she had been making her difficult journey, with only the thought of reaching him sustaining her, he had been planning a marriage with someone else.

He clasped his hands at his back and regarded her gravely. “We grew up together,” he said. “She lived here at the abbey with us. Her mother is married to my uncle, my father’s brother, but Lauren was the child of a previous marriage. We were intended for each other from infancy. I have always been very fond of her. After my return from the Peninsula a marriage between us seemed the logical step to take.”

“You were promised to someone else when you married me?” she asked him.

“No,” he said. “Not really. I was rebelling against my lot in life. Even we privileged aristocrats do that, Lily. I had advised her not to wait for me.”

“Was I part of your rebellion, then?” she asked him, realizing that there could surely not be a more magnificent snub to his former life, to his parents, than marrying a sergeant’s daughter.

“No, Lily.” He was frowning at her. “No, you were not. I married you because there was a need to do so, because I had made a promise to your father. And because I wanted to.”

Yes. It was true. She must not start to believe that there had been any cynicism in his choice of her. He had married her because he was a kind and honorable man. And because he had wanted to. What did that mean?

“But all the time you remained fond of her,” she said.

“Yes, Lily.”

It had not escaped her notice that he had not really answered her original question. Did he
love
the woman
called Lauren’? Did he realize now what a dreadful mistake he had made in marrying
her
even though he had wanted to in a moment of impulse?

“And today you would have married her,” she said.

“Yes.” He had not looked away from her. “I have known her all my life, Lily. She waited for me. My father died and I returned to my responsibilities here. One of my duties was to marry so that the abbey would have a countess. And to beget children, in particular an heir. My life of rebellion was over. And you were dead.”