To Have and to Hold (31 page)

The two women bowed to each other and said how-do-you-do. Rachel had seen Sophie Deene in church and knew who she was; indeed, in a village as small as Wyckerley, a woman with her self-assured manner and radiant looks couldn't go unnoticed for long. Close up, Rachel was struck by the girlish freshness in her features, which seemed slightly at odds with the poised, mature air she projected.

"I'm happy to meet you, Mrs. Wade," she said with a clear, blue-eyed gaze that appeared guileless, but it was impossible to tell if she meant that or not. "Anne—Mrs. Morrell—told me she'd met you, and I've been hoping we would run into each other."

"How is Mrs. Morrell?" Rachel asked. "I haven't seen her in church lately."

"She's been a little under the weather. The doctor's had her keeping to her room these last few weeks."

"Oh, no. Oh, I'm very sorry to hear that."

"She's not really
ill,
only a little, um . . . just not quite herself, you know. And now she's
much
better."

"I'm so glad," Rachel said warmly. Something in Miss Deene's manner told her as clearly as words could have that Anne Morrell was pregnant. "Please give her my best regards when you see her."

"Yes, I will."

They said good-bye. Sebastian told Rachel he would be back in a moment, and went out of the room with Miss Deene.

While she waited, Rachel tried to come to terms with the bleak mood seeing him with the lovely Sophie Deene had cast over her. It wasn't the lady herself, it was the fact of him being with, speaking to, admiring, being charming to
any
woman that made her feel cold and miserable. But what an imprudent reaction; she'd thought she had her emotions in better order. Jealousy implied prior possession, some degree of ownership, and all she owned of Sebastian was his transient attention. She was currently an object of interest to him, a sort of experiment, really. That he would move on to other women when the interest waned was so obvious it didn't merit a second thought.

But she was making him her best friend. Even knowing she couldn't have him, she was opening herself up to him a Httle more each day. She was sinking deeper and deeper, not into despondency but trust. Once she'd wondered if the reason she couldn't find satisfaction in bed with him was because she was afraid he wouldn't want her afterward—that the challenge she represented would then be met, and discarded as no longer interesting. But she knew now that the real reason was because she wasn't brave enough to bear the consequences of ceding to him so much trust.

She heard his footsteps and turned toward the door. When she saw him she started to speak, but he crossed the room quickly, purposefully, and before she could say a word he caught her up in a lavish embrace and kissed her.

Breathless, she pulled away. "What was that for?" He kissed her again, slowly and thoroughly, and when he was finished she had the answer to her question.

They broke away, both remembering at the same moment that the door was open. Smiling the same secret smile, they took up places on either side of the mantel, a discreet six feet apart, Sebastian with his hands in his pockets and rocking on his toes a little, the conscientious country squire having a word of business with his housekeeper.

Rachel heard herself blurt out, "Miss Deene is very attractive, isn't she?" She could have bitten her tongue.

"Yes, she is," he agreed, a little too heartily. "Bright, too. I like the way her mind works. I like her enthusiasm." Rachel nodded glumly. "As a woman, what's your impression of her?"

"My impression?"

"Yes. Would you trust her? Does she seem competent to you? Levelheaded, honest?"

"Yes, all of those, I suppose. But of course," she couldn't help adding, "I hardly know her."

"No, but I value your opinion. And I'm inclined to agree with you. Which is why I've decided to invest in Sophie's mine and not her uncle's. It won't endear me to Mayor Vanstone, but that can't be helped. What are you smiling about?"

"Nothing." She resolutely wiped the grin from her face. But she couldn't help feeling relieved that he was interested in the beautiful Miss Deene as a business associate, not as a woman.

"I've got a surprise for you," he said softly. She blushed; he laughed. "Not that kind of surprise, nothing you have to take your clothes off for. Unless, of course, you want to."

She had a fleeting vision of it, herself naked for him right now, right here. The blush deepened; she actually felt weak in the knees. She fiddled with a candlestick on the mantel, pretending nonchalance, but Sebastian's alert look told her she wasn't succeeding. "What is the surprise?" she asked carelessly, and he laughed again.

"Come and see." And he took her hand and pulled her out of the room.

They passed down the corridor toward the east wing of the house. He was taking her either to the library, the chapel, or her own room, and it said something for the deplorable state of her mind that she hoped it was the latter. But it wasn't; it was the library. Most of the floor space was taken up by three enormous wooden packing crates and half a dozen smaller ones.

"Guess what's in them," Sebastian challenged, sitting down on one of the big crates and folding his arms.

The only guess was the best guess. "Books," she said hopefully.

"No. Dogs. All different sizes, males and females, purebreds and mongrels, futryones, sleek ones—"

"They're not, they're books! Oh,
lovely.
They are books, aren't they?" When he said yes, she clapped her hands in delight. "Can we open them? Oh, Sebastian, how wonderful. But where will you put them? There must be a
hundred
here."

"Over three hundred, actually. Handpicked by a London bookseller I know and trust. I told him I wanted
new
books, nothing more than twenty years old, because I have a peevish housekeeper too smart for her own good who keeps grousing about the shortcomings of my lihrar y.''

She laughed gaily. "But there's no room—you'll have to add an annex!"

"Well, what I thought we could do—
you
could do, since the books belong to you—I thought you might go through the old ones and weed out the wheat from the chaff, the chaff being the ones you've already read. Keep whatever you think is worthwhile, I leave it entirely up to you. For the rest, I thought we might give them to the subscription library Christy Morrell is trying to start for the parish."

"Oh, that's a wonderful plan." Of course the books didn't belong to her; the very idea was too outlandish to contemplate. But he'd ordered them with her in mind as the primary reader, and the thoughtfulness of that added another snarl to her already tangled emotional state. How could she accept more things from him, even nominally, even when she had no intention of keeping them?

"Look." He'd prized open one of the smaller crates and was lifting books out by the handful. "Turgenev, Trollope, Thackeray, Tennyson—this must be the T box. No, it's not, because here's Stowe,
Uncle Tom's Cabin,
and here's Browning and Balzac. Have you read them all, my little bluestocking? You couldn't have read this—
Little Dorrit,
Dickens—because it's only just come out. Do you like plays? Poetry? We have Ibsen, we have Dostoevsky, Charlotte Bronte, Mrs. Gaskell. I know you think I'm an illiterate, but here's one I've actually read myself—La
Dame aux Cornelias.
Great pathos; reduced me to tears, I don't mind admitting."

She would be reduced to tears herself in another minute. Each new volume was a wonder, a miracle. In prison, reading had saved her life—literally, she truly believed—and even though her new life was rich and full, sensually and intellectually alive, stimulating,
dazzling
in comparison to her old one, she'd missed the pleasure of new books, new voices. "If you had given me jewels," she said haltingly, "if you had given me paintings or—
gold
—you couldn't have made me any happier. Thank you. Thank you. That's inadequate, I know, but there aren't any words to teU you what I'm feeling."

His eyes softened with tenderness. He threw down the book in his hand and came to her. She thought he meant to embrace her, but he only took her hand. "There's more."

She started shaking her head. "What do you mean? How could there be?"

"I've had a letter from my mother, Rachel. She says my father's worse."

"Oh.no."

"She's said it before, but this time it might really be true. In any event, it looks as if I'll have to go to Rye."

"Oh, Sebastian. I'm so sorry."

He sent her a quizzical look. "It's all right. Thank you for your sympathy, darling, but it's not necessary. I've told you before, there's no love lost in my family. When my father dies, I'll go through the proper forms for decency's sake, but I won't pretend that his passing means anything to me."

He seemed to mean it. He said it without bitterness or irony, simply as a statement of fact. "I'm sorry," she said again, because it was sad.

He made a dismissive gesture. "The point is, I've got to leave for Steyne Court tomorrow. I wanted this to be a surprise, but I can't see how to manage it without barring you from the entire west side of the house."

She frowned. "What?"

His eyes twinkled with suppressed excitement. He waited, watching her, prolonging the suspense. "I wish I had a picture to show you. Well, I do, actually, come to think of it, but it's not—you won't really be able to
see
the thing, at least I can't, it looks like a lot of squiggles to me—"

"What?"

He waited another excruciating minute. "All right, I'll tell you. I'm having a glass conservatory built on the west wing, opening off the great hall. That day I was in Plymouth, I hired a fellow to design it, a landscape architect, supposed to know what he's doing. He sent me these drawings"—he opened a drawer in the big library table and pulled out a sheaf of papers—"but I can't make much out of them." He put the papers in her hand.

"Anyway, it'll be big and it'll overlook the river. He's built in all sorts of things I told him you wanted—a shed for your tools, a separate place for a table and a bench where you can sit and have tea or read a book, whatever you like, plus it's heated in winter—your sitting place, I mean—with a stove that's shielded from the plants so they don't get too hot. Which doesn't seem like something you'd have to worry about in wintertime, but apparently it's a danger. This here, this taller part, he calls that the orangery. Pretty, isn't it? Can you picture it? Think of it as a tower on a house; I think it'll be quite graceful-looking as you approach the house from the bridge. It's for orange trees, of course, or lemon trees, although you'd have to call it a lemonary then, I suppose. The architect fellow says you could do camellias there, too, since apparently they can grow very tall in the Devon climate. He suggested
a fernery
as well, but I thought that was a bit much. I mean, where does it end, where does one draw the line? A rosary, a gladiolary, a petuniary. But of course if you
want
a fernery, that would be an entirely different thing. I suppose it might be all right, damp and close, aquatic, somewhat fetal, really, but—"

He stopped, finally realizing she was crying. She'd turned her back to him, pretending to be absorbed in the architect's diagrams, but she couldn't see anything because her eyes were blurry with tears.

"Ah, Rachel." He sighed, stroking her shoulders. He didn't ask why she was weeping, and she was glad. "Don't be afraid to be happy, darling. Open yourself up. Take what I want to give you."

She let him hold her, press her back into his arms,
squeezing her tight against his chest. A rather bleak insight came to her, warring with the fledgling joy that wanted to burst out and take over: it wasn't that she was afraid of happiness, not anymore; what she feared was losing everything. And everything had come to mean Sebastian.

"I'll miss you," she told him, turning in his arms. "I wish . . ." But she didn't finish the thought. It wasn't in her yet to wish for things.

He rested his cheek against hers. "I wish you could come with me. I would take you, but you'd hate it, and I wouldn't inflict my family on anyone. Least of all you." He let his fingers drift over her cheek. "Smile for me, Rachel. How beautiful you are, even though your eyes are sad. Do you like your gift?"

She couldn't speak, only nod. She thought of the day she'd told him of her prison daydream—that her cell was a greenhouse filled with flowers and damp, sweet-smelling earth. Her heart ached, and she knew that what she felt for him was love, not gratitude. A complicated love, born out of need and helplessness at first, but moving away from them as time went by, moving into a cleaner, clearer place as she grew stronger, less dependent on,him for survival. Where would it end? Maybe, without knowing it, he was helping her to prepare for the day when she'd have to live without him. Maybe—but why not be happy now anyway? Why not seize the chance for it that he held out to her time after time, disregarding his motives, accepting his gifts not just with thanks but with gladness? Why not?

"I love it," she answered, holding his face between her hands.
I
love you,
she thought, and kissed his lips before he could see it in her eyes. "God keep you safe, Sebastian. I hope you find some peace with your family."

"It won't happen. The only thing I hope is to come back to you soon." He kissed her, with a mixture of passion and tenderness that devastated her. She clung to him, shameless. As long as he held her, she could pretend that his home was here, with her.