The Temporary Wife/A Promise of Spring (59 page)

“Are you happy?” she asked, looking up at him wistfully. “Truly happy, Perry? And do you love me?”

He touched her wind-reddened cheek with his gloved fingers. “I have never said it, have I?” he said. “Why are they the hardest words in the language to say? Yes, I love you, Grace. Oh, of course I do. I love you. Do you believe me, or will you be doubting again tomorrow?”

Her eyes were bright with tears. “I have done so much wrong in my life,” she said. “I do not deserve such happiness, Perry. I don’t deserve you.”

“You have no regrets?” he asked. “You were expecting Rose when …” He smiled lamely. “You were expecting Rose.”

“Oh, Perry,” she said, “I had a great and fortunate escape when I was young. I might have married him. I would be married to him now. And as unhappy with him as I am happy with you. I was dazzled by him, overpowered by his charm as a girl. And frightened by him after you and I were married. I was afraid for a while that I deserved no better and that you deserved a great deal better than me. I thought you deserved a young and beautiful and vibrant girl, Perry.”

“Absurd,” he said.

“I do love you,” she said. “Oh, I do love you, Perry. And together we have made Rose. Life is so very miraculous.”

“She knows me already,” he said.

“Of course. All women know you,” she said. “You have only to smile and they all capitulate. Why should our daughter be any different? I have to confess that she never fails to stop crying when you pick her up.”

“She knows that I have a weakness for the female gender,” he said. He bent and kissed her lips before turning with her to walk back to the house again. “Especially her mother.”

She laid her head against his shoulder. “Everyone has been so kind,” she said, “visiting me and sending their good wishes. Did you know that Alexandra is increasing, Perry?”

“No,” he said. “So I am to return the favor and pace floors with Edmund, am I?” He shivered. “Ugh! November! What an ugly day. Turn your poet’s eye onto this scene, Grace, and make beauty out of it. Quite a challenge even for you, I think.”

“Oh, not at all,” she said. “Just look around you, Perry, and imagine all the seeds of spring buried and awaiting their chance. They cannot be held back forever, you know. And look at the sky. Those dark and lowering clouds. Why is it daylight nevertheless? Because there is blue sky and sunshine just beyond those clouds, and even the clouds cannot keep out all the warmth or all the light of the sun. And the wind? It is chilly. And it is life. It is not the chill of the grave but the invigorating breath of life. Look. It has made your cheeks and your nose rosy. And mine too, doubtless. It is a beautiful day, Perry. A new day. A new tomorrow.”

“You are right,” he said with a laugh, hunching his shoulders against the cold. “Whatever would I do without you, Grace? I would still be looking about me in the greatest gloom, counting the months to spring. And since it is such a lovely day, my girl, and you have just proved it to me, you can stand here with me outside our
door to be kissed instead of waiting for the greater warmth of your sitting room. Hold your face up to me.”

“You expect me to grumble now and beg to be taken indoors for my kiss, don’t you?” she said, smiling up into his eyes and putting her arms up around his neck. “I want a good long kiss before you take me inside, sir. And I don’t care if the servants see us, either.”

The chill of the November wind did not abate as they stood locked in a close embrace on their doorstep. Nor did the clouds part to allow one glimpse of the blue sky and sun Grace had spoken of. But they did not notice and would not have cared if they had. For in each other’s arms they found all the warmth and brightness the sunniest day could have brought.

In each other they found the eternal promise of spring.

G
wendoline Grayson, Lady Muir, hunched her shoulders and drew her cloak more snugly about her. It was a brisk, blustery March day, made chillier by the fact that she was standing down at the fishing harbor below the village where she was staying. It was low tide, and a number of fishing boats lay half keeled over on the wet sand, waiting for the water to return and float them upright again.

She should go back to the house. She had been out for longer than an hour, and part of her longed for the warmth of a fire and the comfort of a steaming cup of tea. Unfortunately, though, Vera Parkinson’s home was not hers, only the house where she was staying for a month. And she and Vera had just quarreled—or at least, Vera had quarreled with
her
and upset her. She was not ready to go back yet. She would rather endure the elements.

She could not walk to her left. A jutting headland barred her way. To the right, though, a pebbled beach beneath high cliffs stretched into the distance. It would be several hours yet before the tide came up high enough to cover it.

Gwen usually avoided walking down by the water, even though she lived close to the sea herself at the dower house of Newbury Abbey in Dorsetshire. She found
beaches too vast, cliffs too threatening, the sea too elemental. She preferred a smaller, more ordered world, over which she could exert some semblance of control—a carefully cultivated flower garden, for example.

But today she needed to be away from Vera for a while longer, and from the village and country lanes where she might run into Vera’s neighbors and feel obliged to engage in cheerful conversation. She needed to be alone, and the pebbled beach was deserted for as far into the distance as she could see before it curved inland. She stepped down onto it.

She realized after a very short distance, however, why no one else was walking here. For though most of the pebbles were ancient and had been worn smooth and rounded by thousands of tides, a significant number of them were of more recent date, and they were larger, rougher, more jagged. Walking across them was not easy and would not have been even if she had had two sound legs. As it was, her right leg had never healed properly from a break eight years ago, when she had been thrown from her horse. She walked with a habitual limp even on level ground.

She did not turn back, though. She trudged stubbornly onward, careful where she set her feet. She was not in any great hurry to get anywhere, after all.

This had really been the most horrid day of a horrid fortnight. She had come for a month-long visit, entirely from impulse, when Vera had written to inform her of the sad passing a couple of months earlier of her husband, who had been ailing for several years. Vera had added the complaint that no one in either Mr. Parkinson’s family or her own was paying any attention whatsoever to her suffering despite the fact that she was almost prostrate with grief and exhaustion after nursing him for so long. She was missing him dreadfully. Would Gwen care to come?

They had been friends of a sort for a brief few months during the whirlwind of their come-out Season in London, and had exchanged infrequent letters after Vera’s marriage to Mr. Parkinson, a younger brother of Sir Roger Parkinson, and Gwen’s to Viscount Muir. Vera had written a long letter of sympathy after Vernon’s death, and had invited Gwen to come and stay with her and Mr. Parkinson for as long as she wished since Vera was neglected by almost everyone, including Mr. Parkinson himself, and would welcome her company. Gwen had declined the invitation then, but she had responded to Vera’s plea on this occasion despite a few misgivings. She knew what grief and exhaustion and loneliness after the death of a spouse felt like.

It was a decision she had regretted almost from the first day. Vera, as her letters had suggested, was a moaner and a whiner, and while Gwen tried to make allowances for the fact that she had tended a sick husband for a few years and had just lost him, she soon came to the conclusion that the years since their come-out had soured Vera and made her permanently disagreeable. Most of her neighbors avoided her whenever possible. Her only friends were a group of ladies who much resembled her in character. Sitting and listening to their conversation felt very like being sucked into a black hole and deprived of enough air to breathe, Gwen had been finding. They knew how to see only what was wrong in their lives and in the world and never what was right.

And that was precisely what
she
was doing now when thinking of them, Gwen realized with a mental shake of the head. Negativity could be frighteningly contagious.

Even before this morning she had been wishing that she had not committed herself to such a long visit. Two weeks would have been quite sufficient—she would actually be going home by now. But she had agreed to a
month, and a month it would have to be. This morning, however, her stoicism had been put to the test.

She had received a letter from her mother, who lived at the dower house with her, and in it her mother had recounted a few amusing anecdotes involving Sylvie and Leo, Neville and Lily’s elder children—Neville, Earl of Kilbourne, was Gwen’s brother, and lived at Newbury Abbey itself. Gwen read that part of the letter aloud to Vera at the breakfast table in the hope of coaxing a smile or a chuckle from her. Instead, she had found herself at the receiving end of a petulant tirade, the basic thrust of which was that it was very easy for Gwen to laugh at and make light of her suffering when Gwen’s husband had died years ago and left her very comfortably well off, and when she had had a brother and mother both willing and eager to receive her back into the family fold, and when her sensibilities did not run very deep anyway. It was easy to be callous and cruel when she had married for money and status instead of love. Everyone had
known
that truth about her during the spring of their come-out, just as everyone had known that Vera had married beneath her because she and Mr. Parkinson had loved each other to distraction and nothing else had mattered.

Gwen had stared mutely back at her friend when she finally fell silent apart from some wrenching sobs into her handkerchief. She dared not open her mouth. She might have given the tirade right back and thereby have reduced herself to the level of Vera’s own spitefulness. She would not be drawn into an unseemly scrap. But she almost vibrated with anger. And she was deeply hurt.

“I am going out for a walk, Vera,” she had said at last, getting to her feet and pushing back her chair with the backs of her knees. “When I return, you may inform me whether you wish me to remain here for another two weeks, as planned, or whether you would prefer that I return to Newbury without further delay.”

She would have to go by post or the public stagecoach. It would take the best part of a week for Neville’s carriage to come for her if she wrote to inform him that she needed it earlier than planned.

Vera had wept harder and begged her not to be cruel, but Gwen had come out anyway.

She would be perfectly happy, she thought now, if she
never
returned to Vera’s house. What a dreadful mistake it had been to come, and for a whole month, on the strength of a very brief and long-ago acquaintance.

Eventually she rounded the headland she had seen from the harbor and discovered that the beach, wider here, stretched onward, seemingly to infinity, and that in the near distance the stones gave way to sand, which would be far easier to walk along. However, she must not go
too
far. Although the tide was still out, she could see that it was definitely on the way in, and in some very flat places it could rush in far faster than one anticipated. She had lived close to the sea long enough to know that. Besides, she could not stay away from Vera’s forever, though she wished she could. She must return soon.

Close by there was a gap in the cliffs, and it looked possible to get up onto the headland high above, if one was willing to climb a steep slope of pebbles and then a slightly more gradual slope of scrubby grass. If she could just get up there, she would be able to walk back to the village along the top instead of having to pick her way back across these very tricky stones.

Her weak leg was aching a bit, she realized. She had been foolish to come so far.

She stood still for a moment and looked out to the still-distant line of the incoming tide. And she was hit suddenly and quite unexpectedly, not by a wave of water, but by a tidal wave of loneliness, one that washed over her and deprived her of both breath and the will to resist.

Loneliness
?

She never thought of herself as lonely. She had lived through a tumultuous marriage but, once the rawness of her grief over Vernon’s death had receded, she had settled to a life of peace and contentment with her family. She had never felt any urge to remarry, though she was not a cynic about marriage. Her brother was happily married. So was Lauren, her cousin by marriage who felt really more like a sister, since they had grown up together at Newbury Abbey. Gwen, however, was perfectly contented to remain a widow and to define herself as a daughter, a sister, a sister-in-law, a cousin, an aunt. She had numerous other relatives too, and friends. She was comfortable at the dower house, which was just a short walk from the abbey, where she was always welcome. She paid frequent visits to Lauren and Kit in Hampshire, and occasional ones to other relatives. She usually spent a month or two of the spring in London to enjoy part of the Season.