The Secret Mistress (31 page)

They found the path with no trouble at all once they had wound their way past the band of trees at the foot of the hill. They toiled up it without wasting breath talking. It was steep and rather overgrown with coarse grass. At one time it must have been used frequently—perhaps when Cousin Rosalie’s boys had been younger, before they all went off to school, or perhaps before Lord Palmer went on his diplomatic mission to Vienna. By the time they reached the top Angeline was quite out of breath, and she was sure her face must be horribly flushed and damp with perspiration. But Lord Heyward was panting too.

“Perhaps,” he said, “I ought to have asked myself if the climb would be too much for
me
.”

She smiled at him.
Another
joke.

“At least it will be all downhill on the way back,” she said. And
because she was so warm, she untied the ribbons of her bonnet and let them flutter free. Her chin and neck immediately felt cooler.

But goodness. Oh, goodness. They were surrounded by nothing but view. Angeline turned completely about and saw house or park or village or farmland or countryside wherever she gazed.

“Oh,
look
,” she said unnecessarily, for of course he was already looking. What else could one do up here but stand and marvel?

“I will wager,” he said, “that the view is even more magnificent from up there.”

He was pointing at the tower.

“But no one would wager against you,” she said. “Besides, a lady never wagers. And I am a perfect lady now that I have made my come-out, remember?”

His eyes came to hers, and she could see that he
did
remember. The first time he had almost smiled at her was during the first set of her come-out ball when she had told him that from then on, now that she was
out
, she would be a perfect lady and there would be no more incidents like being alone in an inn taproom or galloping and whooping along Rotten Row during a rain or dashing across an occupied bull’s meadow.

“I’ll race you to the top,” she said, grasping her skirt at the sides and dashing across the short distance to the tower.

It looked far larger and more imposing from up here. Angeline pushed open the studded wooden door and stepped inside—and instantly forgot the race to the battlements. The walls and the floor were a brightly colored, intricate mosaic of colored stones. Slit arrow windows let in sunlight and would at any time of day—they faced in all directions. There was a wooden bench all about the perimeter, made soft with red leather cushions, though the color was marred somewhat by a layer of dust. A wooden ladder staircase in the middle of the room led upward to a trapdoor.

“What a glorious retreat!” she exclaimed. “If I lived at Hallings, I would come up here every day. I would bring my books and my easel, and I would sit here and read and paint and dream.”

She had been alone a great deal at Acton over the years and had
made a friend of the hills and woods where she had played with Tresham and Ferdinand as a child. She would have made a retreat out of Dove Cottage by the far lake in the park, since it was beautifully situated, but it was where her father had housed his mistress—one of them, anyway—and she could never erase the wound of that memory from her mind.

Lord Heyward was climbing the ladder and pushing at the trapdoor until it disappeared into space and fell back somewhere up there with a thud. Angeline climbed up after him and took his offered hand to step out onto the battlements. He closed the trapdoor behind them.

“And what was the prize to be if you raced me to the top?” he asked her.

She turned to smile at him.

“You did not accept the wager,” she said, “just as I did not when you said the view would be even more magnificent from up here. I daresay we can see for
miles
in every direction. Oh, this was worth every moment of the climb, was it not?”

The tower was properly battlemented, of course, though there was some crumbling to one side at the front. It had been constructed that way, for this was a folly and was therefore supposed to look like a ruin, like something that had been here for a thousand years. Angeline rested her hands on the higher projections of the battlements and raised her face to the sky.

“It’s a little gusty up here,” Lord Heyward said, raising a hand to hold on to his hat. “You had better—”

The attempted warning came too late. Even as Angeline lifted both hands to grasp the ribbons of her bonnet and tie them securely beneath her chin again, they whipped free, and her bonnet lifted from her head and sailed off into the sky and down over the slope in the direction of the lake below. All that saved it from a watery grave was the presence of a tree at the foot of the hill that was taller than its fellows. The ribbons caught and tangled in its upper branches and the hat lodged there to end up looking like a particularly exotic bloom.

“Ohhh!” One of Angeline’s hands slapped against her mouth while the other reached out foolishly into empty space and Lord Heyward’s hand clamped about her upper arm like a vise to prevent her from following the path her bonnet had taken.

They watched it all the way down without saying a word. And then Angeline burst into uncontrollable laughter and, after a moment, Lord Heyward joined her, bellowing with mirth at something that really was not funny at all.

“My poor hat,” she wailed between spasms.

Another healthy gust of wind tugged at her hairpins and won the battle with one of them. She turned and slid down the wall until she was sitting against its shelter, her knees drawn up before her. And Lord Heyward slid down beside her, his legs stretched out, and removed his hat.

They were still laughing.

“Did you
s-s-see
it?” she asked when she could catch her breath. “I thought it might fly all the way to America.”

“I thought it might cause heart seizures among all the birds inside the park,” he said. “It looked like a demented parrot. It still does.”

Which was a horrible insult to her bonnet.

Angeline laughed again. So did he.

“Oh, look at me,” she said as she grasped one fallen lock of hair and attempted to twist it up into the rest of her coiffure, which was probably hopelessly flattened anyway. “Just
look
at me.”

He turned his head and did so, and somehow their laughter faded. And they were sitting almost shoulder to shoulder, their faces turned toward each other.

Angeline bit her lip.

That was
Lord Heyward
with whom she had been laughing so merrily?

“You look windblown and wind-flushed and very wholesome,” he said.

“I shall have to think about that,” she said, “to understand whether I have been insulted or not.”

“Not,” he said softly.

There were beads of perspiration clinging to his brow where his hat had been.

“You are kind,” she said. “But goodness, I am not much to look at to begin with.”

The lock of hair, pushed firmly and quite securely beneath another, promptly fell down over her ear again as soon as she let go of it.

“Why do you say that?” he asked.

“Well,” she said, looking down at her lap, “just consider my mother.”

“I knew her,” he said. “Not personally, but I saw her more than once. She was extremely beautiful. You look nothing like her.”

“You noticed?” She laughed softly.

“Do you wish you did?” he asked.

It was funny. She had never really asked herself that question before. She had lamented the fact that she was not as beautiful as her mother had been, but—did she really wish she looked like her? It would change everything, would it not?

“When I first saw you,” he said, “when you turned from the window at the Rose and Crown, I thought you were the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. I thought so again when I saw you at Dudley House.”

She laughed.

“I am so
tall
,” she said. “A beanpole.”

“Perhaps you were at the age of thirteen or so,” he said, “but certainly not now.”

“And I am so dark.”

“
Vividly
dark,” he said.

“I cannot even arch my eyebrows properly,” she said.

“What?” He looked baffled.

“When I try it,” she said, “I look like a startled hare.”

“Show me,” he said.

And she turned her face obediently toward his again and showed him.

His eyes filled with laughter once more.

“By Jove,” he said, “you are quite right. A startled hare. Who was the first to warn you about it?”

“My mother,” she said.

The laughter faded.

“She was disappointed in me,” she said. “She loved Ferdie. She took him to London with her a number of times, but never me. I daresay she hoped my looks would improve before she had to show me to anyone beyond the neighborhood of Acton. And she had lovers, you know. Of course you know.
Everyone
knew. But it is quite unexceptionable for a married lady, is it not, once she has presented her husband with an heir and a spare,
and
a daughter in her case. And why should she
not
take lovers when Papa had mistresses and even kept one in a cottage on the corner of the estate, saying she was an indigent relative. But she was not. I always knew she was not even before I knew what a
mistress
was. She never
looked
poor, and she never came to the house for a meal, which she would have done at least once in a while if she had been a poor relative, would she not? And of course Tresham has mistresses, even married ones. He has fought two duels I have heard of and perhaps more that I have not. I daresay Ferdie has mistresses too, even though he is only twenty-one. I have sworn and sworn that I will not marry a rake, even if it means marrying a dull man instead. Better to be dull than to be so unhappy that one is forced to take
lovers
. She
was
unhappy, you know, my mother. If she had lived, perhaps she would have thought me improved, and she could have brought me out and helped me find a husband, and we could have become friends and she would have been happy and proud.”

She grasped her knees and turned her face from his and shut her eyes tightly.

“I am babbling,” she said.

Oh,
where
had all that come from? How absolutely
mortifying
.

“And then Tresham left home abruptly when he was sixteen and never came back,” she added for good measure, “and Ferdinand went off to school and sometimes did not even come home during the holidays but went to stay with school friends instead, and Papa
died a year after Tresham left, and Mama stayed most of the time in London after that, even more than before, it seemed, and all I had left was my governesses. They did not like me, and I do not blame them. I made myself unlikable.”

There. Oh,
there
. She wished she really had cast herself over the battlements in pursuit of her hat. She brought her forehead down to rest on her knees, and felt after a few moments his hand come to rest against the exposed back of her neck—and then stroke lightly back and forth.

“You were a totally innocent bystander in your family dramas, you know,” he said. “Whatever made your parents’ marriage an unhappy one had nothing whatsoever to do with you. They had their lives to live and they lived them as they saw fit. Whatever drove your elder brother away so suddenly and kept him away had nothing to do with you—or you would have known it. And your younger brother was a boy learning to spread his wings. He sought out friends of his own, no doubt heedless of the fact that his sister was lonely for his company. As for your governesses, women like them have a hard lot in life. They are often impoverished gentlewomen unable for whatever reason to marry and so have homes and families of their own. They often take out their unhappiness upon their pupils, especially if those pupils are rebelling against life for some reason or other. You are
not
unlovable.”

His hand on the back of her neck was hypnotic. She felt
so
embarrassed and
so
close to tears. And if she was so lovable, why did
he
not love her?

“If your mother had lived,” he said, “perhaps you would have come to discover that she did not have to grow to love your adult self. Perhaps she always loved you. I never really doubted that I was loved, but I always felt I had to earn love, that I had to work extra hard for it because my brother was so much more easily loved than I was. He was always a charming rogue. Everyone adored him despite all his faults—sometimes even
because
of them, it seemed. And he was selfish. He did not really care when he hurt people’s feelings, or even if he did care, gratifying his own desires was more important.
It always seemed unfair to me that I tried so hard and yet was loved less. I discovered two things after he died.”

“What?” she asked into her knees.

“One was that I
was
loved,” he said. “More than I had known, I mean. I never had been loved less, in fact, only differently. And I learned that I tried to do what was right by my family and friends and even strangers because I
wanted
to, that I tried not to hurt other people because I did not
want
to hurt them. I was as selfish in my own way as Maurice was in his, for even if I had had the choice I would not have lived his life.”

Angeline swallowed.

“I tried to talk him out of that curricle race,” he said. “I reminded him that there was Lorraine to consider. And at the time Susan was ill. She had a fever. Lorraine was beside herself with worry. She needed Maurice to be there with her. He called me a pompous ass. And then I said something that will forever haunt me.”

Angeline lifted her head and looked at him. He was staring off across the top of the tower with unseeing eyes. His hand fell away from her neck.

“I told him to go ahead,” Lord Heyward said. “I told him to break his neck if he wished. I told him I had everything to gain if he died, that I would be Heyward in his stead.”

She set a hand on his thigh and patted it.

“And what you said was provoked,” she said. “It had nothing
whatsoever
to do with the accident. Did you
want
him to die?”