That Kind of Woman (13 page)

When that piece was over, Miranda pulled out a new sheet of music and sat next to Emma. Together, they worked at it, adding their voices in song from time to time. Miranda’s torso moved sensuously, an extension of the hands and elegant arms that wrought such beauty from the piano keys. When her voice had to reach for a particularly high note, her whole face would open itself, her brown eyes going wide. She was undeniably a gifted and passionate musician—a passionate woman.

It took every ounce of effort she had for Miranda to keep her concentration on the music. If she didn’t know better, she would have thought she saw admiration, even desire on Andrew’s face, and the thought made her pulse quicken. Desire? Well, she had certainly seen often enough that a man’s opinion of a woman’s station seldom influenced his opinion of her desirability. On the one hand, she appreciated the fact that he clearly had too much integrity to approach her for an affair. On the other hand…

On the other hand, she didn’t mind the idea of being desired by a man of integrity, especially not this one.

And then there was Henry, who made no attempt at all to hide his emotions. One look at his adoring face, and she snapped her attention back to the music. He was incorrigible.

Andrew glanced over at Henry and came to the mortifying realization that the look on Henry’s face must surely mirror the look on his own. Dear God, the boy was nearly drooling! He caught his half-brother’s eye and scowled fiercely, but Henry only grinned back like a foolish dolt.

When Miranda and Emma finished playing, Andrew rose. “That was lovely,” he said, careful to keep his overwhelming emotions out of his voice. “But I told George I’d come see him in the morning with a list of questions about the estate. I have a bit of studying to do if I’m to be prepared. Emma, don’t impose too long on your aunt.”

Miranda gave him an unfathomable look, but then she seemed to dismiss him and turned back to Emma, instructing her to repeat one of the more complicated parts of the last piece.

*

Darkness had long since fallen, and dinner was nearly ready by the time Emma and Miranda left off of their music lesson. Randa had even let Emma try her hand at the violin for a while. Now, Emma glanced around the room. The two of them were alone in the candlelight and shadows. “I suppose Uncle Henry is well into the brandy by now,” she commented.

“Emma!” her aunt scolded.

“I’m sorry,” Emma replied. “I know it isn’t seemly to talk about it.”

Miranda’s face melted into sympathy, and Emma let tears fill her eyes, making sure to keep them wide and innocent. “I’m sorry if I took too much of your time. Father won’t be happy with me.”

Her aunt patted her on the head, and Emma noticed she was careful not to muss the neatly arranged curls.

“I’ll make sure he knows I wouldn’t have had it any other way,” Miranda assured her. “I had a lovely time with you this afternoon.”

Emma shook her head sadly. “No, really, I think he doesn’t want us to play together. When he left, didn’t he sound cross to you?”

“Nonsense, Emma. Music is a perfectly acceptable pursuit for a young lady of your station. I’m sure he’s just preoccupied.”

“Will you speak with him?” Emma begged, filling her voice with quivering hopefulness. “Will you make sure it’s all right for us to continue my lessons? Unless—” she bit her lip in a gesture of trepidation.

“Unless what, dear?”

“I don’t mean to be selfish, Randa. I know you have a lot on your mind, as well.”

Miranda wrapped her arms around her, and Emma hugged her back, surprised at how her arms tightened around Miranda’s waist of their own accord. Her aunt was warm and smelled of rose water. For some reason, it made Emma want to sob. Not the kind of sobbing she did for pity or to get what she wanted, but the kind she never did anymore. The kind she had done when her mother had died and her father had left for Portugal.

She had practiced her next words in front of the mirror all day. But when they did spill forth, it wasn’t because she had planned to say them. They just came.

“Don’t leave, Aunt Randa. Promise me you won’t leave.”

Miranda gently disengaged Emma’s arms from around her, and Emma came to her senses. The guarded look in her aunt’s eyes was proof she had spoken too soon. She could have kicked herself for having said that before she had gotten Randa more clearly on her side against Father.

“I can’t make any promises,” Miranda began.

Emma quickly interrupted. “I understand! I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. Of course, you must do as you think best. But if you leave,” she dropped her head and, in what she believed to be a rather dramatic touch, whispered, “I shall miss you very much.”

Miranda took Emma’s chin in her hand and lifted her face to look long and hard into her niece’s eyes. She smiled a little and shook her head. “You’re very good at this, you know. For a moment there, you had me. Do you know what I think? I think the only reason you are suddenly so very interested in music is because you sense that it annoys your father in some way.”

Emma could only stare at her in stunned silence. Her first instinct was to deny it, but there was something all too knowing in her aunt’s worldly brown eyes. Dropping all pretense, she said, “Well, I really do rather like you.”

Miranda laughed, and this time, when she patted Emma’s head, she didn’t seem to give a fig for her hairstyle. “I rather like you, too, Emma.”

Almost a week of George’s relatives had nearly been the end of Reggie Toller. Every one of George’s precious few good moments was monopolized by them, and on the rare occasions Reggie had tried to be included in those moments, he felt like an intruder. Andrew gave him curt, cold politeness; Henry, thinly masked hostility. Letitia looked at him like he was a bug she’d like to squash.

Emma seemed to like him, and once she had recognized his eye for fashion, she petitioned him nonstop for his assistance regarding her wardrobe. It was growing tiresome. God bless her, Randa tried hard to provide him with solace, but the Carringtons ate up much of her time, as well.

He sighed into the darkness of the bedchamber, where the coal glowing dimly in the hearth revealed only vague shadows. It was two in the morning, and sleep eluded him. Of course, lying atop the bedclothes next to George in a high-collared shirt and snug trousers didn’t help. George had been particularly restless all day, and after dinner, Reggie had insisted upon staying with him, ostensibly so that Miranda could get some rest.

The Carrington clan even intruded upon these moments. Lying this way, if Andrew or Henry were to check on their brother in the night, Reggie would look the part of the vigilant family friend. What he really wanted to do was undress and climb beneath the covers. Time was ticking away, and he could not even hold the man he loved as his life slipped away.

Taking a chance, he rolled toward George and tenderly traced the side of his sleeping face. Try as he might, Reggie could not imagine George gone. The thought opened an abyss so deep inside him that he could never stay long at its edge. Instead, he would retreat from what lay ahead and try to will George to stay just a little longer, and then a little longer more.

George opened his eyes and spoke, his voice rough and fragile. “Reggie?”

Reggie reached down and took George’s hand, raising it to his lips. “Yes, George, I’m here. I didn’t mean to wake you. Do you need more laudanum?”

“Not yet,” George answered groggily. “Give it to me before Lettie comes in the morning.”

Reggie smiled. “I didn’t think you’d need it with Lettie around. Her idea of conversation is the best opiate there is.”

A wheezing chuckle sounded next to him, but it was borne on breath that smelled bitter from the drug they spoke of. “She is a perfect sleep elixir,” George agreed, “but she gives no relief from the pain. In fact, she only adds to it, being one in the neck herself.”

With a chuckle of his own, Reggie rose and put a taper to the coals. He chose to avoid the harsh glare of lamplight and kept only the single candle on the bedside table to quell the blackness.

George studied him in the semidark. “Now I know beyond all doubt that you love me, Reginald. You’re a perfect mess. Almost as bad as I am.”

Reggie cast a rueful look at his rumpled shirt and ran a hand through his tangled hair. “It is the middle of the night. Even Beau Brummell must be a bit mussed at two in the morning, and to me, you are always handsome.”

“That’s the height of the social hour in London,” George reminded him.

“Well then, I should hate to arrive at Brummell’s house unannounced at two in the afternoon. Actually, I should rather like it, after all. That arrogant dandy can’t always look perfect.”

“There are circles under your eyes,” George observed.

Reggie lay down again and turned his back to the candle, letting his face fall in shadow. “Nonsense. A trick of the light is all.”

George lifted a frail hand and smoothed the hair away from Reggie’s face. “We have too little time for lies, my love.”

Gritting his teeth against his own turbulent emotions, Reggie said, “It is so damned hard, George. Sometimes…”

“Sometimes?”

Reggie whispered softly, “Sometimes I am actually angry with you for leaving me. Isn’t that absurd?”

George shook his head. “Sometimes I’m angry at myself. I wish I were stronger. I wish I weren’t losing this fight. And I worry for you. I don’t want to leave you.”

“I know, George. I know.”

“Will you go to the Continent?” Reggie nodded, and George added, “That’s just as well. You have friends there. At least you won’t be all alone.”

“Randa’s going with me.”

George’s eyes went wide, and he tried to sit up, only to collapse with a groan, his hands clenched over his swollen stomach. “No, Reggie,” he gasped. “You can’t take Randa.”

Reggie sat up and tenderly pressed George back against the pillows, lest he try to sit again. “Lie back, George. Calm down. Are you sure you don’t want more laudanum?”

“No, no laudanum. Listen to me, Reggie, it would be a mistake.”

“She doesn’t want to return to London, and she’s not welcome here.”

George frowned at that. “That may be my fault. Maybe I should have let nature take its own course rather than trying to push things along.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Randa. She can’t travel with you, Reggie.”

“She wants us to be married.”

George tried to sit again, and Reggie held him down. The look of excruciating agony on his lover’s face made Reggie wince. “Lie still, George. You’re hurting yourself!”

“Don’t you see, Reggie? She feels safe with you.”

“She is safe with me. I’ll go right on taking care of her, loving her as a brother, just as you and I both have all this time.”

“Oh, God,” George moaned. “It is the worst possible thing. We hurt her, you know. She was already such a fragile, wounded thing when I met her, and we hurt her all the more.”

The old sting of guilt stabbed at Reggie. It was a feeling he had buried under all of the kindness and affection that he had heaped upon his lover’s wife over the past year or more. “We never meant to. God knows, we’ve done everything we can to make up for it.”

“Give me the name of one other woman on earth who would have allowed us to ‘make up for it.’ Randa came to us so starved for appreciation she would have taken anything she could get. But we both know that she deserves far more than we ever gave her.”

Defensively, Reggie replied, “We don’t know that she would ever have found more. You and I weren’t responsible for the stigma of her parentage! Maybe we saved her from even more pain.”

George shook his head and touched Reggie’s cheek with the back of his hand. “It was easier to think so. I needed her, but I wanted you so badly.”

Reggie leaned forward and pressed his lips to George’s. “Fate was cruel to all of us,” he murmured.

“Tell me, Reggie, if you had known, all those years ago, that it would end like this, that you would watch me waste away before you, would you still have chosen to love me?”

Hot tears scalded Reggie’s eyes, and he carefully slipped his arm under George to gather him close. “There was never a choice, George. You are my life. I am not whole without you. I would rather have had these thirty years of wholeness and lose them than spend my entire life incomplete.”

George blinked against the moisture in his own eyes as he lay in the warmth of Reggie’s embrace. “Don’t you see? We nearly robbed Randa of any chance to have what we’ve had. One good thing can come of our pain. Give her a chance. Don’t let her stay safely with you. Push her away. Make her take that chance.”

“Hurt her again?” Reggie asked.

“Save her,” George replied. “And kiss me one more time. God, how I hate to leave you.”

*

At breakfast, Reggie reported that George was sleeping quietly, doubtless exhausted by his restlessness the previous day. Andrew eyed him suspiciously. His brother’s friend looked exhausted himself, and he couldn’t help but wonder what had kept Reggie up all night. Had he been consoling the future widow?

Andrew turned his attention to Miranda, who toyed listlessly with the food on her plate but hardly looked like a woman who had been trysting with a lover. Her face was haggard and pale.

Rather than drive himself out of his mind with thoughts of Miranda and Reggie, Andrew excused himself from the table and went upstairs to check on George. The room was dark and smelled of a sickening combination of roses and carbolic acid. The sound of George’s breathing seemed to rattle the air around him. Worried, Andrew drew aside a curtain to let in the light.

God knew, Andrew had seen death, had seen it up close and as brutal as it could be. Some soldiers considered it an old friend, someone whose presence one must grow comfortable with, but he had never made friends with it. Death was an unwelcome intruder. A dreadful relative too powerful to scorn, and it settled itself around his brother like cannon smoke on a battlefield.

George had fallen into a slumber that was impenetrably deep and yet uneasy. His breathing was labored and growing sporadic, and Andrew knew beyond a doubt the time had come to fetch George’s wife. He was reaching for the doorknob when she opened the door herself and nearly collided with him.