Only a Promise (18 page)

“I am not
afraid
.”

“What do you call it, then?” he asked her.

She realized something suddenly. Graham had said he was not sure Ralph had changed fundamentally since his days in school. Now, she suddenly realized that in an important way, he was right. She could feel the power of his persuasiveness. Her will was being worn down by it.

“Is this how you did it when you were a boy?” she asked him. “Is this how you gathered other boys about you like slaves? Is this how you persuaded them to do whatever you wanted them to do, even against their will and their better judgment? Is this how you persuaded your friends to go to war with you?”

He shot to his feet as though she had slapped him again, and she realized too late the viciousness of what she had said.

He stood with his back to her for a few moments while her words seemed to hang in the air between them, like a physical presence. Then he went down the steps and across the room and out the door, all so abruptly that she could do nothing to stop him but stretch out one ineffectual arm.

“Ralph,” she said. But the sound of her voice came at the same moment that the door clicked shut behind him.

She could not run after him. She was naked beneath the sheet. She bowed her head and set her forehead against her raised knees as she wrapped her arms about them.

*   *   *

It was full daylight by the time Chloe had pulled on her creased clothes and gone to her own room to wash and
comb her hair and change into a freshly ironed dress. She made her way down to the breakfast parlor on slightly shaky legs. Early as it still was, Ralph had already eaten and was about to leave the room. He was fully, very correctly clothed, she saw.

Before she could say anything, he made her a slight, formal bow.

“I need to spend most of the day in the study with Lloyd and my steward,” he told her. “Forgive me for leaving you to eat alone and to occupy yourself for the rest of the day.”

She had come down with a head crammed full of things to say—apologies, explanations, questions. She had come down prepared to be calm and sensible, prepared to discuss, to come to some sort of agreement that would suit them both. Everything she had planned to say fled without a trace.

“Oh, you must not concern yourself about me,” she assured him with bright cheerfulness. “I need to spend some time with Mrs. Loftus. I have much to learn. And she knows of someone who may be suitable as my lady’s maid. I will need to meet the girl to see if I agree. And I really ought to call upon Mrs. Booth, who was not well enough to attend the funeral. I should make a courtesy call at the vicarage too. And I have my embroidery and . . .”

He was looking cold, remote, impatient to be gone, and her voice trailed away.

She wondered if she had dreamed up the man who had loved her with such hot intensity and such shocking intimacy last night. And the woman who had responded in kind. But of course she had not. It was only the word
loved
that was inaccurate.

Sex. It is just sex. . . .

Yes, it had been. Just sex.

He left the room without another word.

*   *   *

That ill-advised night of uninhibited sex was not repeated during the following week. Nor did Ralph take Chloe to his room again. He went to hers instead and resumed their marital relationship as it had been before.

That one night had been ill-advised for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that he had known even before it happened that he must break the unwelcome news to her that they would be going to London after all. He had been too cowardly to speak up during the evening. He had known she would be upset.

He had known years ago, when he finally abandoned his attempts at suicide, that this time would come. After the sudden death of his father, he had known too that it would come in the foreseeable future. And he had made the decision, reluctant though he had been, that he would do his duty when the time came—and even before the time came in the matter of taking a bride and setting up his nursery. It would perhaps be his penance, he had thought, to accept that for which his life had been saved. To do his best. To do his duty.

He had ignored one fact—or perhaps he could not have expected to know it until now. His acceptance had concerned himself. It had included a wife, but it had not taken into account the fact that his wife would be a person in her own right.

Doing his duty now meant hurting Chloe, breaking the promise he had undeniably made her. It meant forcing her into doing the very last thing on earth she wanted
to do—if, that was, he chose to assert his rights as her husband. He had had to decide between duty and a promise and had chosen duty. Though he had also chosen
not
to enforce obedience.

Had he done just that once before?

Is this how you persuaded your friends to go to war with you?

He had decided that they would leave for London one week after the funeral—or that he would, anyway. There was much to do in the interim. He was a bit sorry he had not spent more time at Manville Court during the past few years, learning something of the formidable task of running the many ducal estates. He had known this day was coming, after all, and ought to have been better prepared for it.

He spent the week consulting with his steward at Manville, studying reports from the other properties, dealing with the considerable amount of correspondence Arthur Lloyd drew to his attention every day, tramping about the home farm talking with foremen and laborers, calling upon tenant farmers and listening to their concerns. On the few occasions when he had some free time, he sat in the book room with a book open before him—it could hardly be said that he
read
—or out riding aimlessly about the countryside or walking down by the lake or up over the falls.

During much of that solitary time he grieved. It was incredibly difficult to be here in all the familiar surroundings, to know that it was all his now, to accept that his grandfather was gone. And he thought of his grandmother in London now with Great-Aunt Mary but surely feeling lost and homesick. He relived scenes from his
boyhood and youth here. Once, when he explored a drawer in the desk in the book room, he found a little twist of paper lodged at the back and discovered three of the familiar sweetmeats welded together inside. Always three. And always twisted up in a piece of paper so that the sweets would not pick up lint in either his grandfather’s pocket or that of the grandchild to whom he gave them. Ralph put the little bundle into his own pocket and left it there.

He would give anything in the world to bring back those days, to have the chance to take a different path into the future than the one he had actually taken. Sometimes he wondered what would have happened if he had not become so consumed with his grand idea of saving the world from tyranny or if his grandfather had put his foot down and refused to purchase his commission.

But such thoughts were pointless. Regrets were pointless. As was guilt.

Sometimes he found himself grieving too for his father, who had died almost unnoticed, by him at least. Ralph had still been very ill at Penderris at the time, too ill to return home for the funeral or even to comprehend fully what had happened. He had never been particularly close to his father, but he
had
loved him. There had been no goodbye, no chance to sit with relatives after his passing to relive half-forgotten memories. No real mourning. Just bruised feelings denied and pushed deep inside.

He
had
loved his father. He had hurt him too. He had been a disappointment to a man who took duty and responsibility very seriously. And it must have been a huge blow to his pride as a father to have his own father override his refusal to allow Ralph to go off to war.

Three times Ralph sat with Chloe in the evenings. Mostly he kept his eyes on his book when he did so while she just as firmly directed her attention to her embroidery or to her own book. She had not initiated any conversation since the night of their quarrel, but then neither had he.

He did not even know whether she was coming to London with him. And he would
not
assert his right to command her.

On the fifth evening, he set aside his book with more of a thump than he had intended, surged to his feet, and then had little choice but to cross the room to the sideboard to pour himself a drink since he could not think of any other reason to offer for getting up from his chair. Not that she had asked for any explanation. She had not even looked up. When he turned back to the room, glass in hand, however, she
was
looking at him, her needle suspended over her work. She looked down again without saying anything.

And he felt suddenly vicious. This was ridiculous. He wanted to stride toward her, haul her to her feet, and shake her. But good God,
why
? Because he was not comfortable in his own home? Did he imagine
she
was?

He swallowed a mouthful of port.

“I think your brother and I,” he said, “might have been the closest of friends at school if we had not been so similar.”

And where had
that
comment come from? Except that she always somehow reminded him of Graham. She irritated him in the same ways her brother had. As though even her silences—
especially
her silences—were accusatory. He had never thought of Graham and
himself being
similar,
though. Quite the opposite, in fact.

She lifted her head from her work again, and he expected her to look skeptical, incredulous. She seemed exceedingly fond of her brother, after all. Instead she nodded.

“Yes,” she said, “I have noticed.”

What the devil? He frowned, swirled the liquor in his glass, and took another gulp of it.

“Pigheaded, both of us,” he said. “Espousing untenable ideals. Both of us.”

“Pacifism is untenable?” she asked.

“Of course it is,” he said impatiently. “No man is going to stand by and watch his mother and his wife and his daughters raped before his eyes without wreaking murder and mayhem to prevent it.”

“Graham said much the same thing when he was here,” she said.

“Did he?”

“And is the ideal of fighting to end tyranny untenable?” she asked.

“Of course it is,” he said again. “Tyranny will never be ended. Neither will violence nor aggression nor injustice nor cruelty nor any of the other evils humans are prone to.”

“So we do away with soldiers and constables and magistrates and judges?” she asked him as he crossed the room to stand on one side of the hearth, his elbow on the mantel. “We allow tyranny and anarchy to spread unchecked because we can never stamp them out?
But
we lash out at anyone who threatens those nearest and dearest to us?”

He swirled what was left of his drink but did not raise the glass to his lips.

“I was a naïve fool,” he told her. “I thought war in a righteous cause was a glorious thing—
dulce et decorum est pro patria mori
and all that nonsense. It is sweet and right to die for one’s country. There is nothing sweet or right about war. Officers are vain and lazy and corrupt and often cruel. The common soldier is the spawn of the gutters and prisons of England. Battle is madness and chaos and blood and entrails and smoke and screaming. And when it is over, one shares a canteen of water or spirits and pleasantries with an enemy survivor of roughly equal rank while one sorts out one’s own dead and wounded and he sorts out his—as though it had all been a pleasant day’s game, like cricket.”

It struck him that he ought not to be talking to a lady about such things. And why was he talking about them, anyway? Where had this conversation sprung from?

“And yet,” she said, “it was through such chaos and such deadly games and with such frail, often undesirable human beings that the Duke of Wellington drove a wedge into the oppressive empire Napoleon Bonaparte had built and brought it tumbling down. It needed to be brought down.”

“You do not support your brother’s stand, then?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “But I respect him for it. We are all entitled to our ideals. Most beliefs are neither right nor wrong in themselves. None of them ever contains the whole truth.”

However had they got into this? He drained off the rest of his port in one mouthful and swirled it about his
mouth before swallowing. She had lowered her head and was sewing again. It was still a man’s handkerchief, he could see, though a different one from before. The colors were different.

“Graham’s beliefs do not kill anyone,” he said. “Mine do.”

She put her work away after a tap on the door heralded the arrival of the evening tea tray. Ralph waited for the footman to set it down before her and leave. He watched her lift the teapot to pour.

“None for me,” he told her.

“It was not your beliefs that killed men,” she said. “It was not your beliefs that killed your three friends. It was war that did that—a terrible solution to a terrible problem, but perhaps the only one or at least the right one for that particular provocation. You participated because you believed in the cause. Your friends died because
they
believed in it, even if it was you who drew their attention to it.”

And persuaded them into going with him.

Is this how you persuaded your friends to go to war with you?

“And you almost died,” she said. She set the teapot down and looked up at him with troubled eyes. “How do you recover from such experiences, Ralph? How does
anyone
recover? How does anyone carry on with his life after he has been to war? And how does any man go on with life after
not
going to war?”

He frowned. “Graham?”

“In his own way,” she said, “he feels as guilty as you—for the deaths of countless hundreds of men while he remained safely at home wondering how he would react
if his pacifism was ever put to the test. For the deaths of your three friends, who were also his friends.”

“He
told
you this?” he asked her.

“No,” she said. “Not in so many words. And I did not even think about it until the last time I talked with him. We have lived through dreadful times, Ralph, and none of us has been exempt from suffering. But perhaps
everyone
, all down through the ages, lives through dreadful times. Perhaps it is the human condition. I used to think the only suffering war brought was the death of soldiers and the physical pain of the wounds of others. Those things are not even the half of it, are they?”