Tangled (42 page)

"Not one little bit," he said. "I love my son and my daughter equally. Gender is of no significance."

"But I would like a son," she said. "Don't drive them away, William, despite what I have said. At least here Rebecca has us."

"Sh," he said. "I am going to take you to bed and I want you to sleep, not worry. Do you understand me?"

"Yes, my lord," she said, her face relaxing into a smile.

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Rebecca and Julian still spent a great deal of their time together, but not all of it as they had done during the first week. They still talked and touched and smiled and kissed. But the total openness between them was no longer there. Rebecca carried around with her always the guilt of knowing herself a poor wife. She was withholding what her husband had most right to, and what she knew he both needed and wanted. Sometimes she resolved to put duty before everything, as she had used to do, and invite him to her bed. But she could not do it.

She could not rid her mind of the thought that had been there from that first night. Her body was David's. She knew it was not so.

And she knew that it never could be his again. But she could not offer it to any other man, even her husband. The time would come, she supposed, when she would have to. She could hardly withhold her

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favors from Julian for the rest of their lives. But she could not contemplate that time. She could do nothing to hasten it on.

Julian's sunny nature sometimes deserted him. She understood the reason and did not blame him. Her heart ached for him. She still loved him dearly—as dearly as ever. The knowledge was confusing.

How could she love him and yet—not? She forgave him his lapses into anger and spite and frustration—they were not many or serious.

Sometimes when they were kissing, he would open her mouth with his and thrust his tongue inside, something he had never done before.

It was the way David kissed her, but with Julian it seemed somehow insulting, as if he did it just to shock her. And once in the carriage he opened her jacket and her blouse and held her shoulders back with his hands, turning her to the light of the window so that he could look at her bared breasts above her stays. Again it was something he seemed to be doing for its shock value more than out of sexual desire.

He released her after a while and watched her button herself back up with hands that began to shake.

Sometimes he would remind her of their childhood and some mischief or cruelty for which David had been punished. Almost as if he wanted to punish her with the memories.

And yet they were small matters compared to the cheerfulness of his normal manner and the affection and tenderness of his usual treatment of her. And she was more grateful than she could say for the patience that kept him from her room at night. She wanted more than anything to be able to give him her undivided love again. If only the correct report had come out of the Crimea! There would have been unimagined agony in knowing that he had been taken prisoner when so grievously wounded and in hearing nothing of or from him for so long. But at least her heart would have remained wholly his and now her joy would have been unalloyed. There would have been no David. No Charles.

She could not imagine a world without Charles.

She could not imagine her life without David. She could not put herself back in time to see him as she had seen him before their marriage.

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She took to going out alone whenever she could. Sometimes she just walked for miles and miles without knowing afterward quite where she had been. Sometimes she went to see Flora Ellis.

Flora was happy. Mr. Chambers, the gentleman who had leased Horace's house and had been paying court to Flora for some time, had proposed to her at Christmastime. They were to wed in the summer. It was good to see her friend happy, Rebecca found. It was good to see that for some people there were happy endings. Mr.

Chambers, it seemed, was fond of Richard and was quite prepared to adopt him as his own son.

Richard was a bright and cheerful little boy with sparkling gray eyes and a sweet, engaging smile.

"He is going to slay the girls one day with that smile and those eyes," she told Flora, laughing. "He is going to be a handsome young man.''

It hurt her to see David's son. To know that he had two sons, not just Charles. But she could see none of Charles in Richard, though she looked closely for some resemblance. Richard had David's hair color and shape of face. Charles had David's eyes and build, and some indefinable facial expressions too.

"You have lost weight," Flora told her one day when they were sitting at the kitchen table drinking tea.

"Every woman's dream," Rebecca said. "I am sure there was weight to be lost.''

"No," Flora said. "You were just right as you were. Are you going to be living at Craybourne permanently?"

"We are going traveling," Rebecca said, "as soon as Julian's affairs are settled. I can hardly wait. I am longing for us to be on our way.''

"Are you?" Flora asked, looking at her penetratingly.

Flora was the only person in whom Rebecca sometimes confided.

Even with Louisa she could not speak the heart's truth these days.

With Louisa it seemed important to keep up appearances. She was, after all, married to David's father and Julian's godfather.

"Perhaps everything will be different once we are away from here,"

Rebecca said. "Perhaps I will be able to forget and focus all my love on Julian again. Perhaps we

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can be as happy as we used to be. I do love him, you know. It is just that—well, David is hard to forget. We have both had to live with that feeling, haven't we?"

Flora looked tight-lipped. "No," she said bluntly.

"I suppose I'll never quite understand what was between you and David," Rebecca said. "I cannot imagine having known him as you and I have known him and not—missing him. Did you not love him even a little?"

She was sorry she had asked the question as soon as it was out. She was not sure she wanted the answer to be yes.

"Oh, Rebecca." Flora sounded exasperated. "I can't stand this. It was always hard. Now it is impossible. I never admitted that Lord Tavistock was Richard's father, you know. Never. To anyone."

"But he is," Rebecca said, wide-eyed. "Richard looks like him."

"Richard looks like
me,"
Flora said. "The dark hair and narrow face come from me."

There was a short silence. "Are you saying that David was not the father?" Rebecca asked.

Flora swirled the dregs of the tea in her cup. "I am saying nothing,"

she said. "And I am sorry for the outburst. I have told my betrothed the truth. I will tell no one else."

"Forgive me," Rebecca said. "It was none of my business."

Flora drew breath as if to say more but shrugged instead and set her cup down. "Do you want to hear about my trousseau?" she asked.

"Bruce is insisting that I have one and that he pay for it. Aren't I the luckiest woman in the world?"

Rebecca smiled. "Tell me about it," she said, "down to the last flounce and bow."

Richard Ellis was not David's, she thought as she admired patterns and sketches and small remnants of materials and laces. Flora had been telling her that as clearly as if she had put it into words. He was not David's.

The relief was enormous. She wanted to laugh for joy. He was not David's. David had not done that dreadful thing.

But there was puzzlement too. Why had Flora let her
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believe for so long that it was David? Why had David himself not denied it? Why had he told her that he and his father were supporting Flora? And that was undoubtedly true. Why would they support her if her child was not David's?

Charles had her golden hair and David's blue eyes. Richard had Flora's dark hair and—gray eyes. Flora's were dark. Charles had some of David's facial expressions. Richard had that sunny smile and the beginnings of a charm that was going to set many a female heart to fluttering when he was older.

Rebecca concentrated on what Flora was saying. It was only as she was walking home later that the thoughts returned. If Richard was not David's son, whose was he? The earl's? The idea was preposterous. But it made sense that they would support Flora only if David or the earl were the father.

Or . . .

Her footsteps quickened. That idea was just as preposterous. It had happened only a few months before her wedding. She and Julian had been head over heels in love. Richard had been born about six months after her marriage and just after her first miscarriage.

No, the idea was preposterous. And yet it brought on a wave of dizziness and nausea that almost forced her to sit down on the damp grass for a few moments. Standing still instead with her head hung low while she took a few deep breaths enabled her to steady herself enough to go on.

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Flora Ellis, had Rebecca but known it, stood at the door of her cottage gazing after her for many minutes after she had disappeared from sight. Flora had promised never to tell. She had broken that promise to tell Bruce, of course. She had volunteered the information before he had asked for it. But no one else. She had just come perilously close to telling the one person she had been most meant to withhold the information from.

But Rebecca should know.

Flora's jaw hardened in sudden anger. To think that he had come back. That very morning. Smiling and charming and handsome as ever and setting her stomach to

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churning just as if she did not know what he was and just as if she had never met and grown to love Bruce. But then Julian had always had that effect on her.

Without a word of apology for the past, without a word of inquiry about his son—Richard had been out riding with Bruce—he had held her and kissed her and made it very clear that he was ready to pick up their affair where it had ended—and started—just months before his marriage to Rebecca.

She was shamed—deeply shamed—to realize that for one brief moment she had been held thrall to the old love for him. But love could not thrive where there was contempt. And she had felt mostly contempt for Julian Cardwell since he had broken his promise to end his betrothal to Rebecca and marry her.

Poor Rebecca. Flora had almost hated her at the time. And she had mourned his loss for many long months while she carried and bore his son. But how fortunate she had been. She could see that now with blinding clarity. What a great escape she had had.

Poor Rebecca.

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The weekly letter had come from Charles's nanny. Rebecca had always read them alone since that first one she had read with Julian sitting beside her. She went upstairs to her sitting room to read it, though she knew it would be short and unsatisfactory like all the others.

He had had the measles. He had recovered now but it had been a nasty bout. The doctor had called daily and ordered him kept quiet in a darkened room. He had been very ill when the last letter had been written, but she had not wanted to worry Lady Cardwell so had kept quiet about the illness until it was on the mend. There was nothing further to worry about.

Rebecca let the letter fall to her lap. How much else had been kept from her—so that she would not worry? Charles had been very sick in a darkened room at Sted-well, visited daily by the doctor. She looked back on what she had been doing a week before and during the days before and after. All that time Charles had been lying sick.

Perhaps he had been crying for his mama.

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Or perhaps he had forgotten her already. Did young children forget so soon?

There was not a single mention of David. There never had been.

Almost as if he was not even there. And perhaps he was not. Perhaps he had gone away, to London maybe. There was never a mention of him in connection with Charles. Did he spend time with him now as he had always used to do? Did he play with him? Take him outside?

Had he worried during Charles's illness? Had he held him? Soothed him to sleep? Was he even there?

When a knock sounded at her door, she wanted to call out to tell whoever it was to go away. But there was too much soreness in her chest. The door opened and closed again.

"Bad news?" Julian's voice broke the silence. He was standing behind her.

She spread her hands over her face and did what she rarely did. She lost control. She cried and cried until she thought her heart would break. Until she wished it could and she would die.

“Becka.'' He was down on his haunches in front of her, massaging her shoulders with his hands. She leaned forward to rest her forehead on his shoulder and wept on.

"Ch-Charles had the measles," she wailed, "and they did not t-tell me. He m-might have died and I wouldn't even have been there. I d-don't even know if D-David was there."

"Sh." His arms were about her, warm and comforting. "He didn't die, did he, Becka? And he is better now? You have nothing more to worry about, you see. Wasn't it better not to know until it was all over?"

She fumbled for a handkerchief, drew back from him, and dried her eyes and blew her nose. "What did Father want this morning?"

she asked. "He kept you a long time."

"Oh, nothing much," he said vaguely. "He reminded me that even before everything is settled I have the money from the army. And spring is the best time to begin travels, he said, with the whole of the summer ahead. I think he thought it would be better for you if I took you away from here soon. Fresh scenes and new people and all that."

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"Can we go soon?" she asked. "Please, Julian? Can we? I can't bear to be here any longer. I want to be away— away from all the memories. I want to be alone with you. I want to love you again.''