The Temporary Wife/A Promise of Spring (25 page)

“Perhaps he can be persuaded,” she said. “Charles is such a wonderful young man. My guess is that they have been friends all their lives and that they have loved each other for a year or more. Maybe all will turn out well for them.”

“You must be a person who believes implicitly in the
happily-ever-afters at the end of fairy tales,” he said, though there was no censure in his voice.

“No,” she said. “Oh, no, I do not.” She wished she could.

They walked the rest of the way in silence. The library was in darkness when they arrived there. He lit a branch of candles and turned to look at her, his eyebrows raised.

“I will not be long,” she said. “You will wait?”

“I will wait,” he said. His eyes, she saw—oh, his eyes almost frightened her. She could see right into their depths.

The Duke of Withingsby was strolling about the ballroom between sets, being graciously sociable. Charity stepped up to his side while he was speaking with a group of neighbors—there were so few names she remembered, though she had paid careful attention in the receiving line. She slipped an arm through his, smiled at him and at them, and waited for the conversation to be completed.

“Well, my dear,” he said then. “Your success seems assured.”

“Father,” she said, “come to the library with me?”

He raised haughty eyebrows.

“Please?” she said. “It is important.”

“Is it indeed?” he said. “Important enough to take me from my guests, ma’am? But very well. I shall not be sorely missed, I suppose.”

Her heart thumped as they walked from the ballroom to the library. She had always had a tendency to meet problems head-on and to try to maneuver other people to do the same thing. Sometimes she had been successful, sometimes decidedly not. But she did not believe she had ever tackled anything quite as huge as this. What if she was doing entirely the wrong thing? What if she was precipitating disaster? But she did not believe things
could be much more disastrous than they already were. She could hardly make them worse.

Her husband was standing by the window, his back to it. He did not move or say anything when she came in with his father. He merely pursed his lips. The duke also said nothing and showed no sign of surprise beyond coming to a halt for a moment in the doorway.

“Father,” she said, “will you have a seat? This one, by the fireplace? It is more comfortable, I believe, than the one behind the desk. May I fetch you something? A drink?”

He seated himself in the chair she indicated, looked steadily at his son and then at her. “Nothing,” he said. “You may proceed to explain what this matter of importance is.”

She stood by his chair and rested a hand lightly on his shoulder. “Anthony,” she said, “you brought me here two days ago with the sole intention of hurting your father and destroying all his hopes and plans. You deliberately married a woman far beneath you in rank and with the demeaning stigma of having worked for her living.”

“I did not deceive you about my intentions,” he said.

“And, Father,” she said, “you have shown me affection yesterday and today with the sole purpose of annoying Anthony. Your plan culminated this evening in the gift of the topaz necklet, which you gave me to incense your son.”

“The gift is still yours,” he said. “I have not withdrawn it.”

“You have both succeeded admirably,” she said. “I have been hurt too in the process, but it is not my purpose here to complain of that fact. You have both succeeded in what you set out to do. You are both deeply hurt.”

“You have judged the situation from the perspective
of your own tender heart, my love,” the marquess said. “His grace and I do not have tender hearts. I doubt we have hearts at all.”

“Why did you choose your particular method of revenge?” she asked him. “You had alternatives. You could have refused to return to Enfield when summoned. You could have come and refused to marry Lady Marie. Either would have effectively shown Father that he was not to be allowed to control your life. Why did you choose such a drastic method?”

He did not answer for a long time. His eyes moved from her to his father and back again. A curious little half-smile lifted the corners of his mouth.

“Because marrying the right woman has always been the single most important duty of the Dukes of Enfield and their heirs,” he said. “Regardless of the personal inclinations of either the bride or the groom. If his bride has been chosen for him from birth, he marries her even if she feels the strongest aversion to him, even if her feelings are deeply engaged elsewhere. The right marriage, the right lineage for one’s heirs, are everything. And so I married you, my lady, a woman who had answered my advertisement for a governess. Oh, yes, sir. That is exactly the way it happened.”

Charity had felt the duke’s shoulder stiffen beneath her touch even before the end of his son’s speech.

“And you, Father,” she said. “Why did you choose to give me the topaz necklet, of all the jewels that must be in your possession?”

Like his son, he did not answer quickly. There was a lengthy silence. “It was my wedding gift to her,” he said at last. But the silence that succeeded his words was almost as long as the first. “My
love
gift to her. She spurned my love for over twenty years. She offered cold duty, and gave all her warmth, all her weakness, all her unhappiness to her children—most notably to her eldest
son. She gave my gift to him before her death, and I whipped him for it, my lady, because I had never whipped her. Nor would have done so if she had lived as the ice in my veins for another twenty years. I whipped him for it again tonight by giving the gift to the wife with whom he had shown his contempt for me.”

“You never knew the meaning of the word
love
,” the marquess said.

“As you wish,” his father said. “And so, my dear, you have contrived to bring us together here, my son and me, so that we may humbly beg each other’s pardon and live in loving harmony for the few days that remain to me.”

Yes, that had been her hope. It sounded silly expressed in the duke’s cold, haughty voice.

“I told you we could not be expected to kiss and make up,” the marquess said. “You are too tenderhearted, my love.”

“The duchess is at the root of all this,” she said. “You both loved her. And as a consequence you hate each other—or believe you do.”

The marquess laughed. “He did not love her,” he said. “All he did was keep her here when she would have enjoyed visits to London and the spas. All he did was burden her with yearly confinements, though she would cry to me in her anguish. She was nothing to him but a woman of the right rank and lineage to be bred until she could breed no more. My apologies, ma’am, for such plain speaking.”

The duke’s chin had lifted and his eyes had half closed. “She took your childhood and your youth away from you,” he said. “She made a millstone of her own unwillingness or inability to adjust to a dynastic marriage and hung it about the neck of her eldest son. Her marriage and what happened within it were her concern—and mine. They should not have been the concern of any of
her children, but she made them your concern. Your life has been shadowed by the demands she made on your love.”

“It is a sad state of affairs,” the marquess said, “when a woman can turn for love and understanding only to her children.”

“It is sad for her children,” the duke agreed. “But I have never spoken one word of criticism of her grace until tonight and will never utter another. She was my duchess, my wife—and there is no more private relationship than that, Staunton. If you ever again speak critically of your own wife—as you did tonight in your description of the way you obtained her hand—then you are not only a fool, but also a man without honor.”

They gazed at each other, stiff, cold, unyielding.

“I think,” Charity said, “that we must return to the ball. I can see that nothing more can be achieved here. I am sorry for it. And your lives are the poorer for it. But perhaps you will each remember the other’s pain and the other’s love.”

“I believe, sir,” the marquess said, “that you should withdraw to your bed rather than to the ballroom. My wife and I will see to the duties of host and hostess there. May I take you up myself?”

His father looked coldly at him. “You may ring for my valet,” he said.

The marquess did so and they all waited in silence until the servant arrived to bear his master off to bed. The duke looked drawn and weary, leaning heavily on his man’s shoulder. Charity kissed his cheek before he left.

“Sleep well, Father,” she said.

Her husband did not immediately escort her back to the ballroom. When she turned to him after his father had left, he surprised her by catching her up in a fierce hug that squeezed all the air out of her. And then he
found her mouth with his and kissed her with some of the passion she had expected at the lake.

“A crusading little mouse,” he said, relaxing his hold on her. “With her head in the clouds and her feet in quicksand.”

His face was stern and pale, but there was a certain tenderness in his voice. She had half expected a furious tirade.

“We have guests to entertain,” she said.

“Yes, we do.” He offered his arm and made her a courtly bow that had no discernible element of mockery in it.

N
OW MORE THAN
ever he had to get away from Enfield. Tomorrow. Early. It was already early tomorrow. Yet he had not directed either his valet or his wife’s maid to pack their things. It had just been too late after the ball to make such a cruel demand on his servants. Anyway, he supposed a very early start was out of the question. He would want to take his leave—of Charles and Marianne and Augusta, of Will. He would not run away this time without a word. He would want to take his leave of his father too.

He had been pacing the floor of his bedchamber. He stopped and closed his eyes. Perhaps they would remember each other’s pain and each other’s love, she had said.
My love gift to her
, his father had said of the topaz necklet. His mother had always claimed that his grace was cold through to the center of his heart. She had spoken openly of her husband thus to her son. Had she been mistaken? Had she
known
she was mistaken?

He had decided to spend the night alone. But his need for his wife gnawed at him. He did not believe he would be able to get through the night without her. Once they were back in London, once he had her settled in a new
life, he would have to do without her for the rest of a lifetime. But tonight was different. After tonight, once he was away from Enfield, he would be able to cope alone again.

He could feel his resolution slip. Perhaps he would have held to it, he thought, if the need had been a sexual one. But it was not.

He tapped very gently on the door of her bedchamber and eased it open carefully. If she was asleep, he decided, he would leave her be. There was a long journey ahead. She needed to sleep.

At first he did not see her. He could see only that the bedcovers were thrown back from her bed and she was not there. She was over by the window, the shawl about her shoulders obscuring the white of her nightgown. She was looking back over her shoulder at him.

“You cannot sleep?” he asked, walking toward her.

She shook her head. “Did I do the wrong thing?” she asked him.

“No.” He took her hands in his and warmed them with his own. They were like blocks of ice. “And you must not blame yourself for your lack of success. It was no simple or single quarrel, as you have discovered. Our differences have been a lifetime in the making. You tried. You had no obligation to feel gentle emotions for anyone in this family, least of all for my father and me, who have both used you ill. But you tried anyway. I thank you. I will always remember your gentleness. I believe his grace will too.”

“He is so very ill,” she said.

“Yes.”

“You love him.”

“Leave it,” he said. “You are cold. Come to bed with me?”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, please.” And she moved against him, turned her head to rest on his shoulder, and relaxed
with a sigh. She was weary beyond the ability to sleep, he could tell.

If he had not felt her weariness, he would have made love to her when he had taken her to his bed. It would not have occurred to him not to do so even though he had admitted to himself that his need for her tonight was not sexual. But he had felt her tiredness, and suddenly he was overwhelmed by the need to give her something in return for what she had tried to do for him this evening.

He drew her into his arms and against his body, wrapped the bedclothes snugly about her, and kissed the side of her face.

“Sleep,” he said. “I will have you warm in a moment. Just sleep. I forbid you to so much as think of sheep or their legs.”

“Sheep,” she murmured sleepily. “Who are they?”

She was asleep almost instantly—and so was he, he realized only a couple of hours later when his father’s butler awoke him by appearing unannounced in his room.

He came awake with a start, and by sheer instinct pulled the covers up over his wife’s shoulders. He remembered with some relief even as he did so that she was not naked.

“What is it?” he asked harshly and felt her jump in his arms.

“I did knock, my lord,” the butler said. He was dressed, the marquess saw in the light of early dawn, but not with his usual immaculate precision. “It is his grace, my lord.”

The marquess was out of bed without knowing how he had got out. “Ill?” he asked sharply. “He is ill?” He grabbed for his dressing gown, which he had tossed over the back of a chair before getting into bed.

“Yes, my lord,” the butler said. “Brixton thought you should come, my lord.” Brixton was his grace’s valet.

“Has the physician been sent for?” the marquess asked, tying the sash of the dressing gown and moving purposefully toward the door as he did so. “Send for him immediately—and for Lord William. Have Lady Twynham and Lord Charles summoned. Lady Augusta may be left in her bed for now.”

“Yes, my lord.” The butler sounded uncharacteristically relieved to have responsibility lifted from his shoulders.