Only a Promise (11 page)

The survivors?
But Chloe did not ask.

“Thank you,” she said, smiling back and then looking from one to the other of the men. “And welcome to Manville Court.”

The Duke of Stanbrook was holding out a hand for hers. “Duchess,” he said, taking it in both his own as he looked directly into her eyes, “I strongly suspected when Ralph left London a few days ago that I would be meeting you soon, though I did
not
suspect it would be under such sad circumstances. I am sorry about that. But I am glad Ralph has you to bring him some comfort.”

“Let me look at you, lass,” Lord Trentham said, his amiable voice at variance with the fierceness of his facial expression. He took her right hand in his large one. “Someone said you had the reddest hair of anyone else they had ever seen, and I can see they did not exaggerate. Ralph has found himself a rare beauty. Have I said something wrong, Gwendoline?”

But his wife merely shook her head slightly and laughed as she linked an arm through his.

Ralph gestured toward the steps and the main doors. “You will, of course, be staying here,” he said. “All the guest rooms have been prepared.”

“We would not dream of imposing,” the duke said. “We will stay in the village or wherever there is room for us.”

“But we would not dream of allowing you to stay anywhere else but here,” Chloe said. “You are my husband’s friends.”

And it was not so much resentment she felt against them, she realized, as jealousy pure and simple, for clearly they
were
his friends while she was not. She was merely his wife, to whom he had promised respect but never affection.

She led the way inside and paused to have a word with Mrs. Loftus before following them upstairs.

And then, less than an hour later, Graham arrived with Lucy and Mr. Nelson. Ralph accompanied her downstairs again to greet them.

Lucy came tumbling out of the carriage first, squealing with a quite inappropriate display of high spirits. She rushed into Chloe’s arms.

“Chlow,” she cried, “you are
married
. To a
duke
. But
why did you not wait to have a grand wedding and invite us to it, you horrid thing? I will never forgive you. You do look fine in black, I must say. But I remember remarking on that fact after Mama died. You have the coloring to carry it. Does she not, Freddie? I look a perfect fright in black myself. I simply fade away behind dark, dreary colors. But I ought not to run on so, ought I? You have suffered a
bereavement,
and I daresay you are quite sad about it even if the duke was an old man.”

“My dear sister,” Frederick Nelson said, making Chloe a flourishing bow as though he were on stage, playing to the highest gallery, “or my dear
duchess,
ought I to say? I suppose you will have to observe a bit of a mourning period, but as soon as you can, before the end of the Season, it is to be hoped, I shall be imploring you to set up your own salon in London and cut a dash entertaining all the best wits and artists and poets and, dare I say,
playwrights
?”

Chloe gave him a speaking glance. These two never changed. They absolutely deserved one other. Mr. Nelson inhabited his own eccentric world, seemingly unaware of the real one, while what had begun as mere youthful, impulsive exuberance in Lucy had become, with the removal of the refining influence of her father and mother, an amiable near vulgarity. But at least she
was
amiable. And family.

“Lucy, Mr. Nelson,” she said, “allow me to introduce you to my husband. My sister and brother-in-law, Ralph.”

“Ah, but the Duke of Worthingham and I have a long-standing acquaintance,” Mr. Nelson said effusively.

Ralph acknowledged him with a polite inclination of the head and bowed over Lucy’s hand. He had been
shaking hands with and exchanging some pleasantries with Graham, though they had both been looking a bit stiff and awkward about it.

Graham hugged her. “Chloe,” he said for her ears only, “whatever have you done? And without a word to anyone?”

“There was no time to let anyone know,” she told him. “The duke was ailing, and the duchess was eager for us to marry without either fuss or delay. I am glad we did, but I am sorry there was no time for our two families to gather here.”

Mr. Nelson was delivering what sounded like a bombastic speech of condolence and Lucy was gazing at Ralph in some awe when someone else descended the steps of the carriage more slowly and hesitantly than the others. He looked at Chloe and raised his eyebrows, as though he was not sure of his welcome.

She looked back at him and felt as though her heart was breaking.

“Papa,” she whispered, and then she hurried forward and was in his arms, held tight to all his comforting bulk and the familiar smell of his snuff. “I am so sorry.”

He held her away from him and looked inquiringly down at her.

“There was no time to ask for your permission,” she explained.

“You are of age, Chloe,” he reminded her.

“For your blessing, then,” she said. “The duke was ill, and the duchess feared the excitement of grand wedding preparations or even the delay for more modest ones would prove too much for him.”

“It is a brilliant match you have made, Chloe,” he said.
“But will you be happy? It was all so very sudden. Was it because you had persuaded yourself you had no home of your own to which to return?”

But there was no time to answer him. Mr. Nelson had finished his monologue and Lucy for once was speechless. Chloe turned. “This is my husband, Papa. The Duke of Worthingham. My father, Ralph.”

The two men shook hands, sizing each other up. Neither smiled.

“I hope to make amends later, sir,” Ralph said, “for not having consulted you before I married your daughter. I thank you for undertaking such a long journey. It will be a comfort to my wife to have her family with her during the next few days.”

“I was in London when Chloe’s letter to my son was delivered,” her father said. “I was there to spend a couple of weeks or so with him and my younger daughter and grandchildren and my sister. I was glad to be able to avail myself of the opportunity to come here to offer my condolences.”

“Do come inside, sir,” Ralph said.

“I will have you taken up to some guest rooms,” Chloe said, slipping a hand through her father’s arm, “and then you must come back down to the drawing room for tea. I am sure you will wish to pay your respects to Her Grace.”

“
You
are Her Grace, Chlow,” Lucy said. “But I know who you mean. You mean the old duchess. I daresay I shall be awed speechless when I meet her. We are not received by many of the highest sticklers of the
ton,
you know, but everyone will have to be polite to us for the
next few days, will they not? And to you too, Chlow. After last year, I expect—”

“I believe it would be wiser, Lucy,” Graham said, “to hold your tongue.”

“Oh, you are
so
stuffy, Gray,” she said, rolling her eyes.

But mercifully, she obeyed him.

T
he rest of the day proceeded in a bit of a whirl for Ralph. In a way he was thankful. For the past few days he had gone more than once to spend time with his grandfather, laid out in state for those who wished to pay their respects, and more and more each time he felt his loss. For his grandmother had been right on the morning of his death. His body was there, but he was not. Only memories of him remained.

Most of Ralph’s memories of his paternal grandparents were of pure, unconditional love, not unmingled with some pretty firm discipline when it had been necessary. His father had always been bookish and reserved in manner. His mother had always been distracted by her social obligations. Not that either parent had been cruel or unloving or even neglectful. But they had lacked a certain warmth that Ralph had found in his grandparents.

Which fact made him wonder what sort of father he would make to his own children. Chloe, he was almost certain, would be a good mother. She had told him on the morning she suggested her bargain that she would
love any children they might have, and he believed her. The servants loved her. He did not believe that was an exaggeration. Servants had only ever respected him. Though maybe that was not strictly accurate. A number of the older ones had been party to some sort of conspiracy to protect him from his grandparents’ wrath whenever as a boy he had got himself into one of his frequent scrapes.

There were other arrivals later in the day—his eldest sister, Amelia, and her husband, an aunt and uncle, a few cousins, a few particular friends of his grandparents. And then three unexpected guests.

Flavian, Viscount Ponsonby, a fellow Survivor, came with his wife from Candlebury Abbey, their country home some distance away though also in Sussex, where they had been hiding away on their honeymoon. And, very late in the evening, Vincent, Viscount Darleigh, the blind one of their number, arrived, having traveled all the way from Gloucestershire with his valet and his guide dog. They could not have lingered anywhere on the road to have arrived in time. Ralph was more deeply moved than he could say. The only two of their number who had not come were Ben, who lived in the farthest reaches of West Wales, and Imogen, who was in Cornwall.

Ralph was late going up to bed that night. Very late, in fact. Everyone had wanted to sit up and talk, as invariably seemed to happen in the face of a recent death. It was as though the living needed to assert their vitality against the great silencer. But his grandmother and his great-aunt had finally gone to bed, and almost everyone else retired soon after. Chloe, Lady Ponsonby, and Lady
Trentham went up together, Ralph was pleased to see. They seemed all to like one another. Finally only he and his fellow Survivors remained in the drawing room—and Graham Muirhead. It was an annoyance to Ralph at first that Muirhead chose to intrude upon the closeness of their group, but it was unreasonable of him, for this was not a gathering of the Survivors’ Club. Graham was as much a guest in his house as the others were.

Ralph had always had a complicated relationship with Graham Muirhead, if it could be called by that name. At school Graham had always hovered on the edge of Ralph’s inner circle of four friends, but he had never become part of it. Ralph had liked him. Sometimes he had believed he would enjoy a closer, meaningful friendship with him, for Graham was intelligent and sensible and well read. At other times Ralph had found him so irritating that even his worst enemy would be a preferable companion, for Graham had a mind of his own and did not scruple to disagree with any idea or scheme that ran contrary to his beliefs. To be fair, Ralph had the feeling that Graham had felt the same way about him. Perhaps it was because they were both strong willed. But while Ralph’s strong will had made him a leader, someone other boys emulated and followed, Graham’s had shown itself in a quiet stubbornness, a total disregard for popularity or the approval of others. They had often clashed heads, even if only metaphorically. They had never recovered from the last time it had happened.

Graham was a clergyman now, but not just
any
clergyman. Not for him the quiet, respectable living he might have found in a country parish, with a wife to make the parsonage cozy and children about his knees, a wealthy
patron to offer him security until he inherited his father’s title and modest fortune. And not for him the sort of ambition that would have sent him clawing his way up the ladder of the church hierarchy until he became a bishop or even an archbishop. Oh, no. Graham Muirhead had attached himself, by personal choice, to a poor parish in the very least desirable area of London, his parishioners being the slum dwellers, pickpockets, whores, drunks, moneylenders, ragged orphans, and other undesirables who filled its confines to overflowing. Not to mention the filth and stench of the streets.

And he had done it, he explained to an avidly interested George, Hugo, Flavian, and Vincent, not from any saintly sort of notion that he was going to bring the masses to the church pews, where they would fall to their knees in tearful penitence, but from his conviction that if his Lord had been born in early-nineteenth-century London instead of in Roman Palestine, then it was in that precise part of London he would have been found most often, consorting with the lowest of the low, healing them, eating with them, accepting them as they were, treating them with dignity, and rarely if ever preaching at them. Simply
loving
them, in other words.

“For that is what my religion is,” he explained without any suggestion of pious pomposity, “and what it impels me to do with my life. Simply to love and accept without judgment.”

Faradiddle,
Ralph had wanted to say with great irritability at the same time as there was an ache of something—
tears?
—in his throat. For the words were not self-righteously spoken or designed to impress. They were merely Graham being Graham.

“Damnation!” Hugo exclaimed, slapping one large hand on his knee. “But you are right, Muirhead.”

“I would rather you than me,” Flavian said. “But you have my d-deepest admiration.”

“Is love enough, though?” George asked. “Love does not find homes for those orphans or respectable employment for those whores or comfort for those who are robbed.”

“No man can do everything,” Graham explained. “Each of us can do only what is within his power. If we dwell upon our inability to solve the world’s problems, our only possible recourse is to despair. Despair accomplishes nothing.”

A spirited debate followed, in which Ralph did not participate, though he listened and watched with interest—and with something he recognized as resentment. For these men all liked one another. Graham Muirhead fit right in as though he were one of them.

What was Ralph’s problem, then? Did he want to keep his friends to himself, unwilling to share? The possibility that that might be the case was embarrassing, to say the least. And childish.

“Ralph.” George’s eyes were resting upon him, and the others turned to look at him too, even Vincent. “We are keeping you up. And you need rest. One has only to look at your face to see that. You were very deeply attached to your grandfather. Tomorrow will be difficult for you.”

“I actually find it rather soothing,” Ralph said, “just to sit here and listen to you all talk. Thank you for coming. I really did not expect it. You too, Graham. It means a great deal to Chloe to have her family here with her.”

Hugo got to his feet, rubbing his hands together.

“Well, I am for my bed,” he said, a signal to them all, including Vince’s dog.

It was well past midnight when Ralph let himself into his wife’s room without tapping on the door, as he usually did. He expected that she would be asleep. He had even considered staying in his own bed tonight, but he found the prospect cheerless. He would not wake her, though, he had decided. Tomorrow was going to be busy for her too.

There was a small coal fire burning in the fireplace. That was unusual. But then he saw she was seated in an armchair beside it, her arms wrapped about her legs, her bare heels resting on the edge of the seat. Her nightgown covered her to the ankles and to the wrists. Her nightcap allowed a mere glimpse of her hair. Even so, she looked more inviting than any courtesan he had ever encountered—a rather absurd thought, surely. Firelight flickered warmly off her person and off one side of her face when she turned it toward him.

He set his back against the door and crossed his arms over his chest. He had a strange, and strangely disturbing, sense of homecoming.

*   *   *

Chloe turned to look at him. She had not been sure he would come. She ought not to have waited up. But she had been unable to go to bed. If she had, she would not have slept.

“I thought you would be sleeping,” he said.

“No.”

“I am sorry,” he said, “that my mother and Nora and Amelia are still virtually ignoring you. They will come
around if you are willing to give them time. It is just that my sudden marriage took them completely by surprise and they are quite unjustly punishing
you
. I should perhaps have told my mother about you before I left London.”

She had not expected his mother and sisters to welcome her with open arms. At least they had not been openly unkind. But she did not want to think about them tonight.

“At least Lucy has been unusually quiet,” she said. “She is awestruck, and long may she remain so. She is speechless with admiration of your great-aunt. Have you noticed how she seats herself as close to her as possible and takes note of her every word and gesture? I suspect she will be begging Mr. Nelson to buy her a lorgnette when they return to London.”

“She is fond of you,” he said. “So are your father and your brother.”

“Yes.”

She did not want to think of Papa either tonight.

“Come to bed?” he suggested, but she did not move.

“Tell me about the survivors,” she said. “It is a word Lady Trentham used this afternoon regarding your friends, and she sounded as though it ought perhaps to be written with a capital
S
. They were all with you in Cornwall? They were all wounded? I did not realize, you know, when you introduced Viscount Darleigh to me that he was blind. As soon as I spoke to him, he looked so directly at me that I assumed he could
see
me. I wondered why he had brought the dog, but then I suddenly understood when he did not take my outstretched hand. Were you all in Cornwall for three years? It is an awfully long time.”

She could almost sense him sighing inwardly as he uncrossed his arms and came closer. She ought not to have asked. They had agreed to show no real interest in each other’s lives, had they not? They had agreed to no emotional involvement. But surely they needed to know some things about each other?

He sat down on the low ottoman beside her chair.

“Penderris Hall in Cornwall is George’s home—the Duke of Stanbrook’s,” he told her. “He set it up as a hospital for wounded officers toward the end of the wars. He persuaded an excellent doctor of his acquaintance to work there and hired extra staff. A number of wounded men were there for a while and then left. A few died, one at Penderris and two after they had returned home. But there were six of us who stayed for all of three years. I suppose we were the ones whose wounds were not just physical, or in some cases not physical at all. We stayed to heal and then to convalesce, to put ourselves as well as our bodies back together. The doctor was very skilled at that former aspect of his work. He believed that war often wounds the soul as deeply as it does the body, sometimes more so. And we formed a deep bond, the six of us, seven counting George. He had not been to war himself, but his only son died in the Peninsula, and a few months later his wife threw herself to her death over the cliffs that border their estate.”

“Oh,” she said on a gasp of horror.

“He was as broken as the rest of us,” he said. “One day one of us—I believe it was Flavian, though it might have been me—called our group the Survivors’ Club as a sort of joke. And the name stuck. The two who are not here now are Ben—Sir Benedict Harper—who lives in
West Wales with his wife, and Imogen, Lady Barclay, who lives in Cornwall. Ben’s legs were crushed in a cavalry charge and he has never recovered the full use of them despite Herculean efforts on his part. Imogen’s husband died under torture in the Peninsula, and she was made to watch some of it as well as his death. We all left Penderris at the same time four years ago. It was probably the hardest thing any of us has ever had to do, though it was absolutely necessary, of course. We could not live out our lives in an artificial bubble. Now we get together for three weeks each year in the early spring, usually at Penderris, though this year we went to Middlebury Park in Gloucestershire, Vincent’s home, instead. He did not want to leave his wife so soon after her confinement.”

“He speaks with great pride and affection of his son,” she said. “How sad it is that he cannot see the baby.”

“It would be a mistake to pity Vince,” he said. “He very rarely pities himself. He considers himself well blessed and happy.”

“They mean more to you than anyone else in the world,” she said, “your fellow Survivors.”

“Yes, in a way.” He looked up at her and reached for her hand. She wondered if he had intended to do so, but he did not release it. “It is a special bond that we share, but it does not preclude other bonds. Five of us have married, all within the past year, incredible as that sounds. Three of the wives came to Middlebury Park this year. Flavian married while we were there. And now I have had my turn. Marriage creates a different sort of bond, Chloe. It is not necessarily inferior to what I have with the Survivors. Indeed, it is
not
.”

He set one of his hands palm to palm against hers and spread his fingers along her own.

“Do you feel threatened by them?” he asked her.

“No.” She shook her head, not sure she spoke the truth. “I have seen evidence of your physical hurts, Ralph, and I realize they were dreadful indeed. What were your other hurts? Why were you at Penderris for three years?”