Tempting the Bride (27 page)

The true significance of Mrs. Martin’s words was beginning to make itself felt. Helena felt as if she were suspended above a void.

“So this is what I’d like to ask on behalf of Mr. Martin and myself, Lady Hastings: Have you truly married Lord
Hastings? For if you have not, Mr. Martin and I will both be thrilled: I for the inducement it will give him to let the divorce go through uncontested; he for the opportunity to finally marry you, once we are divorced.”

This was what Helena had wanted all these years, wasn’t it? That somehow, someday, Andrew would again be free to marry her?

She said nothing.

Mrs. Martin leaned forward in her seat. “I know what you are thinking—the scandal will dwarf anything we’ve seen in a while. It will be punishing for all of us, no doubt. But new scandals will come and old ones will be forgotten. After a while, no one will remember you were ever married to anyone other than Mr. Martin.”

But did this mean that someday Hastings would also marry someone else? The thought was a burn mark upon Helena’s heart.

“Think about it, will you, Lady Hastings? You have risked everything for the love of Mr. Martin. Now you can have him without any of the risks—love
and
respectability.” Mrs. Martin rose. “You needn’t give me an answer immediately. If you’d like to speak to Mr. Martin, you can reach him at the house in London. I will show myself out.”

H
elena stopped before Hastings’s study. The door was ajar. He was at his desk, an unlit tobacco pipe by his elbow.

“Would you like to come in?” he said without looking up.

Her heart flipped. It was another few seconds before she could cross the threshold.

As she approached the desk, she saw that he was working on the revisions she’d requested in one of the
Old Toad Pond
tales, changing an instance of Mrs. Bunny to Mrs. Porcupine, to avoid having the same character being sunny in one story and sullen in another.

Now he did glance up and smiled faintly. “I am ashamed to admit this, but until you’d pointed it out, I’d had no idea I’d called two different characters by the same name.”

She didn’t know whether she wanted to throw him out of the window or yank him to her by his hair. She tilted her chin at the tobacco pipe. “Is that Tobias’s?”

“I suppose it is. The pipe belonged to my father. I don’t much care for pipe smoking, but I like to pack it with fresh tobacco from time to time.”

So that was why his clothes sometimes smelled of pipe tobacco. She was suddenly possessed by the desire to roll in a pile of his country tweeds, perhaps naked.

He clasped his hands together on the desk. “I understand Mrs. Martin was here.”

The sensation of being suspended above a void returned with a vengeance. “She wants me to marry Mr. Martin.”

He came out of his chair. “What?”

He’d been so composed, so serene—it almost comforted her to see a stronger reaction. “She wants a divorce and he hesitates. She hopes the thought of marrying me will make him more cooperative.”

He said nothing for a long time; her heart began to beat to the rhythm of his agitated breaths. “You still want to marry him?”

“I only stopped wanting to marry him when I could no longer remember who he was.”

He shook his head and went on shaking it. “No.
No.
Stop this madness.”

A part of her nodded vigorously in agreement. She tried not to pay any attention. “You can’t ask me to change one of my most deeply held wishes simply because we’ve spent a few weeks together.”

He rounded the table and set his hands on her arms. “I can and I do. Don’t make this mistake, Helena. Don’t confuse what you once wanted with what you now need.”

The warmth of his hands through her sleeves—she stepped back. “I’m going to see Mr. Martin.”

“Yes,” he said slowly. “I suppose you’ll need to do that. Would you like me to hold dinner until you return?”

No, what she wanted was…histrionics. She wanted him to throw his inkwell across the room, then overturn his entire desk. To not let her go so easily, so gallantly. “If I decide to marry him, then I will not return. The longer I live with you, the bigger the scandal will be.”

“You will return to at least say a proper good-bye to Bea. She asked about you just now. Do you know how seldom she asks about people?”

At least his beautiful voice rose a little. She supposed she’d have to satisfy herself with that. “I’d better go now.”

He yanked her to him and kissed her, a hard, brief kiss that left her short of breath and light of head.

“Go,” he said brusquely. “I’ll order your carriage.”

She lifted her hand and grazed her lips with her knuckles. He watched her. After a moment, his gaze softened. “Remember Lake Sahara, my dear.”

H
astings’s day only went downhill. One of his grooms broke his arm while exercising a horse. The roof of the mushroom house fell in. And then the coup de grâce: Sir Hardshell gave up the ghost.

By the time Hastings learned the news, Bea was already in her trunk, so upset that when he tried to give her a biscuit and a cup of milk tea, she kept pushing the little tray back out the door at the bottom of the trunk.

After a while he gave up, ate the biscuit himself, and sat down with his back against Bea’s trunk, wishing he had a trunk of his own for sanctuary, where he could remain until the world changed.

He didn’t know how long he sat there, staring at the wall; he was startled out of his preoccupation only when he heard a small sob. Bea often became tense and distressed, but she rarely cried.

He turned around and tried to peer inside through one of the airholes, seeing nothing but darkness. “Bea, poppet, I know Sir Hardshell isn’t coming back, but we can invite his cousin to come and stay with you. I hear his cousin has been looking for a place to stay. Maybe he wouldn’t mind inheriting Sir Hardshell’s glass tank.”

She sniffed but did not answer.

“The cousin’s name is Mr. Stoutback. He has a very nice, even temperament. And he is much younger than Sir Hardshell, so he’ll be able to live with us for a long, long time.”

Bea sobbed again. Hastings wished for fairy godmothers—one for Bea and one for him. “Or we can invite a different one of Sir Hardshell’s cousins. What do you think of Miss Carapace? I’ll bet she wouldn’t mind if you tied a pretty bow around her shell.”

“Does lady have cousins?” Bea’s question came all of a sudden.

Hastings started. “Lady?”

“Our lady,” she said dejectedly.

He was astounded. “You mean Lady Hastings?
She
is the reason you are in there?”

“Does she have cousins?”

If only Helena were as easy to replace as tortoises. “She does have cousins, but none of them can come live with us.”

Bea hiccuped. “Is she coming back?”

The all-important question. Hastings sat back down again and resumed his staring at the wall. “I hope so, poppet. I hope so.”

A
s she rang the doorbell of Andrew’s town house, Helena came to a disconcerting realization:
Since she left Easton Grange, she had not once thought of Andrew. Half the time she’d been rubbing her lips, as if she were still trying to feel Hastings’s kiss. The rest of the time she kept reliving her last glimpse of him, standing before the window of the study, shadowy except for his face and his bright, lovely hair.

He had not waved, but only watched as her carriage pulled away.

Andrew himself opened the door. “Come in, Helena, please come in. I’m so glad you are here.”

How different it was to see him when she was firmly in possession of all her memories. When he smiled shyly, she was instantly transported to the small library at Fitz’s estate where they’d first run into each other and immediately started discussing the Venerable Bede’s works—how his face had glowed with pleasure that afternoon.

She blinked. Was this what Hastings had meant when he said that she saw Andrew not as the man he was, but the one he had been?

Andrew showed her into a parlor and lit a spirit lamp for tea. “It’s the servants’ half day, so if you don’t mind, we will make do with my rusty tea-making skills.”

He bustled about, retrieving tea and sugar, then bringing her a plate of toast sandwiches. She was reminded of her first—and only—visit to his house on the beautiful Norfolk coast as part of a group of young people. At her arrival, he’d carried her luggage up the stairs himself. In the course of the high tea later that afternoon, he’d made innumerable trips to bring her everything from lobster salad to cream cake.

Helena frowned: again the throes of nostalgia.

“Is something the matter?” asked Andrew.

“No, everything is fine. Did Mrs. Martin inform you I might be coming?”

Andrew sat down and measured tea leaves into the pot. “Yes, she cabled. I didn’t believe her, but I am so glad to be proven wrong.”

The stickpin at the center of his necktie—she’d given him one quite like it, with a Roman eagle emblem on the head. It had been the first Christmas party Fitz and Millie had thrown at Henley Park. Mulled wine had flowed freely. She’d pulled him into an alcove to kiss him, and he’d tasted of nutmeg and cloves.

She
was
always thinking of Andrew as he’d been years ago. How, then, would she judge the man he was today? “I’ll admit I haven’t always been fond of Mrs. Martin,” she said. “But after our chat today I’ve come to quite admire her. I like that she has taken her happiness into her own hands.”

“So you will leave Lord Hastings?” Andrew gazed at her. “Assuming, that is, you two have not yet married.”

“If I do leave him—”

“Then we can be married,” he said breathlessly.

“But what do you plan to do if I can’t leave him?”

Andrew fidgeted, rubbing a corner of the tablecloth between his fingers. “I don’t know.”

“Will you still grant your wife the divorce?”

“I suppose not, then.”

This was not the kind of answer she would have liked to hear from him. She kept her face blank and her voice uninflected. “What do you know of her situation?”

“According to her, she has an American chap she fancies. He has promised to marry her if she can obtain a divorce.”

“Why not let her go?”

Andrew took the kettle off the spirit lamp and poured hot water into the teapot. “Well, it’s a nuisance, isn’t it, a divorce?”

She watched him closely. “If you let her go now, she can marry the man of her choice and build a family with him.”

He shrugged. “She and I were all right as we were. I know I’m used to it. We’ll just carry on as we’ve always done.”

When Helena had awakened from her coma and found herself married to a stranger, she’d administered a test of character. Hastings had refused to put his own happiness above his daughter’s welfare and passed the test with flying colors.

Andrew did not. They’d already established that he had no particular objection to a divorce—if Helena would marry him afterward, he was more than willing to go through with it. But without the prospect of personal gain, he would keep his wife in their utterly unprofitable marriage, denying her everything for which she’d striven with such purpose and dedication, simply because he didn’t care for the “nuisance” of the process.

“Do one thing for me, Andrew.”

“Anything.”

“Grant your wife the divorce. Don’t keep her tethered to you just because it doesn’t matter to you. It matters intensely to her. She is no more at fault in this marriage than you are, and I’d like to see you treat her fairly, the way you yourself would have liked to be treated.”

He blinked, confused. “But what will I do then?”

“Anything you like. Your life will hardly change, since you and she haven’t been in the same house for years. You
will go on writing your histories and I will go on publishing them.”

He bit his lower lip. “But you won’t marry me?”

“I can’t leave Lord Hastings—we are already married.”

“Oh,” said Andrew.

“Promise me you’ll let Mrs. Martin go?”

He nodded dejectedly. She kissed him on the forehead and left the table. “Be sure to send volume three of your history to me as soon as it is finished. And don’t dawdle, Andrew—I will not tolerate a manuscript of yours being six months late again.”

H
elena climbed into her train compartment, despondent. She might have known, even before she left Easton Grange, that she would not choose Andrew, but it was still disappointing to have him turn out to be a lesser man than she’d believed.

The train began to move. The last time she’d been on the same train, going toward Kent, the sudden return of four years of memory had completely staggered her. This time it was unlikely anything particularly earth-shattering would happen, since she’d already regained the vast majority of her—

So many different voices. She recognized Venetia’s and Fitz’s, but none of the rest. They were all talking about her. Why hadn’t she woken up yet? Shouldn’t she be conscious by now?

What did they mean, she was unconscious? She tried to let them know that she was perfectly aware of what was happening around her. But to her horror, she couldn’t
move her lips, her eyelids, or a single fingertip—she’d been imprisoned inside her own body.

The voices gradually died away. No one spoke anymore. The silence was excruciating, as if they’d already forgotten her existence. She shouted. She screamed. She might as well have been at the bottom of the Atlantic, for all the notice they took of her.

Then came his sensationally beautiful voice.
Would anyone mind if I read to her?
At last, someone still remembered her.

He read her a fascinating primer on the inner workings of publishing. Helena loved books: the sight of them, the feel of them, the smell of them. She adored tracing her fingers over embossed titles and gilded edges. She cherished the almost inaudible creak a new book’s spine made when it was opened for the first time. And were it at all possible, she’d like to capture in a vial the scent of a room full of books antique and new, the redolence of vellum and parchment commingled with the perfume of fresh ink.