To Have and to Hold (39 page)

"What?"

"She says she's not coming. She says—she says—"

"What?"

"She says to tell you to go hang!"

They stared at each other in utter astonishment, until Sebastian's wits came back and he had the presence of mind to send the girl away. Alone, he stared blankly at his soup for ten more seconds. Then he threw down his napkin and stood up.

He'd gotten to the doorway when they nearly collided. He started to laugh with relief. "There you are. Rachel, what—"

"I changed my mind." She kept moving; he had to walk backward to get out of her way. She went to the head of the table and stood beside his chair, as if waiting for him to resume it. Something told him it would be safer to keep his distance.

He leaned his hip against the edge of the table, twelve feet away, and folded his arms. He couldn't take his eyes off her face, which had an expression he'd
 
never
 
seen before.
 
It wasn't
 
only
 
angry—

although it certainly was that, finely, superbly angry, her cheeks blazing crimson, her eyes shooting sparks of ire. But something else tempered the anger, dampening any satisfaction he might have taken in it. With a sinking feeling, he realized the other quality was disillusionment.

"What's the matter?"

Her eyes narrowed on him in disbelief. "Do you have no idea? Not a single clue?"

"Why don't you—"

"I'll tell you what's the matter. You laughed at me." He started to deny it, but she lifted her fist and smacked it down on the table. "You
laughed."
Dishes rattled; a glass toppled, sloshing water onto his plate.
"Damn you."

"Calm yourself. I wasn't laughing
at
—"

"I don't even want to marry you!
I
will not be laughed at."

He could have kept on insisting she'd mistaken him, missed the point, taken it wrong—but the depth of the hurt he'd caused her wasn't to be denied. "I'm sorry," he said quietly, "I wish I could take that back. It was stupid and I regret it. You deserve much, much better. I swear it will never happen again."

He could have saved his breath, or given his apology to the wall. She sneered at him, and folded her own arms as if she were mimicking him. "No, you're right, it won't, because I won't be here. And I'm
glad
it happened, because for the first time since we met, Sebastian, I'm seeing you clearly."

He might have been alarmed, but her voice broke when she said his name, and her eyes glistened. He pushed away from the table. "Rachel. Listen to me."

She held up her hands, warning him away. "There's nothing you can say, nothing you're capable of saying that will mean anything to me."

"What do you want? Just tell me what you want."

"If you think this is about marriage, you're mistaken!"

"Then what is it about?"

She looked incredulous. "How can you ask me that?"

"How can I
answer
if you won't—"

"How could you not know?" She raised her voice, as if speaking to a deaf person. "I understand why you won't have me; you're a viscount and I'm a convict. But once you said you loved me—were falling in love with me."

"I—I—" He couldn't finish.

Disgust turned her eyes a frigid shade of gray. "I feel sorry for you. I do, because you're a coward. You laughed at me, and I can't forgive you for that."

He stared at her. "This is what you can't forgive me for?
This?
After everything else I've—"

"I gave you credit for decency and human feelings, a heart. But you've only been using me in some kind of—
experiment.
'What an extraordinary idea,' you said. 'Really, Vicar, you amaze me!' "

"Rachel—"

"You make me feel cheap! You wanted to change me, and you have—but you don't even have the courage to see it through, or the decency to take responsibility for what you've done to me.
'What an extraordinary idea,'
" she said again, mocking him. "There's something missing in you, Sebastian! I feel pity for you!"

He clenched his jaws, but anger wouldn't come to his rescue. "I thought you were happy," he tried in a reasonable voice. "You told me you were. You seemed to be."

"I am happy," she said grimly, "and it has nothing to do with you."

"That's good. I'm glad." He was anything but glad. He remembered the day he'd vowed to "resurrect" her, bring her back from the dead. He found it beyond ironic that he'd succeeded so well, she wanted to leave him now. He'd wanted her independent, but not
this
independent.

"I can't stay here," she was saying. "I could fool myself before that you felt something for me, but not anymore."

"What the hell are you talking about? How could you possibly think I don't feel something for you!"

At that moment Preest poked his head in the doorway. "The carriage is waiting, my lord," he said tonelessly, and vanished.

Sebastian closed the gap between himself and Rachel. "I have to go," he said, reaching for her stiff hand.

"How
convenient."

"Rachel, I have a
train
to catch." He put a wounded note in his voice; he felt he'd finally caught her on lower moral ground, and he'd better take advantage of it. "My father's dead; I've got to go to my family."

"Oh, of course—the family you hold so dear to your heart—the father who meant so much to you. Go, Sebastian, no one's stopping you!"

He ground his teeth. "I don't have time to talk about this. You can't leave, and you know it."

"Why not? I could be someone's legitimate housekeeper. I'm grateful to you for that, at least—for making respectability mean something to me again."

"Will you listen? I'm sorry I hurt you. I wish I could take it back."

"I don't. You've opened my eyes." But the tears were back, mocking her bravado, and he was torn between compassion for her and gladness, because she didn't mean what she was saying.

"I'm sorry. We'll fix it," he promised, trying to pull her into his arms. "When I come back, we'll talk about everything. Some of the things you said—I can't deny them. But we can make it right. At least give me a chance to do better. You've taken me unawares—

give me a little time to think about the things you've said. That's fair, isn't it?" She turned her face away. "You can't leave me. Say you won't, Rachel. Come, say it."

She took a deep, quavery breath. "I don't know," she said miserably. "I don't know what I'll do."

He closed his eyes in relief, resting his forehead against her temple. She wouldn't leave him. "I'll miss you," he told her, holding her narrow shoulders when she would've broken away. "I'll come back as soon as I can. Sweetheart, won't you kiss me good-bye?"

"No."

They sighed in unison. "Let me kiss you, then." She craned away, but he held her and put his lips on her cheek. Her body was both stiff and yielding, ambivalent. That was the best he could hope for—but God, how he wanted her arms around him now. "You'll wait for me, won't you?" he asked again, holding her, pressing a kiss to the corner of her mouth.

"I don't know."

A thought occurred to him. "You have to stay— you're in my legal custody now. That's how I got Carnock to agree to a postponement of your arrest." She didn't answer, and finally he had to let her go. "Damn the train," he muttered, trying to make her smile; he'd have settled for a rueful smile, even a bitter one, but she wouldn't even look at him.

At the door, he glanced back. She was staring down at the hand she had gripped around the back of his chair, her eyes narrowed, her beautiful face taut. She seemed to be listening, not to the sound of his leave-taking but to something else. A voice in her own head, perhaps—probably the one telling her to go. A precarious second passed. The words that would have kept her for certain wavered on the tip of his tongue, but he didn't speak them. Couldn't. Instead he said, "Wait for me."
        
.

She didn't look up.

19

I
ought to feel something.

But he didn't, even leaning over the open casket and staring intently into the Earl of Moreton's lifeless face. The rigid features were sallow, not pale, and too sharp, as if the corpse were a soapstone carving. Sebastian searched for something of himself in the still countenance, but there was nothing. In death as in life, father and son were strangers to each other.

Nothing? Really? What about that tight, unyielding look about the mouth? That looked familiar. Stubbornness, he supposed. Or maybe just a gritting of the teeth, a habit acquired from a determination to get through this business of life without feeling anything. If that had been the late Lord Moreton's goal, he'd succeeded admirably.
He never knew his son,
might be his epitaph.
And they both preferred it that way.

Sebastian straightened, stepped back. He hadn't been that physically close to his father since . . . since ever. Every few years they ran into each other and shook hands. That was all. He had no memories of sitting on Dad's knee, being carried in Papa's arms; the idea seemed ludicrous, in fact, almost obscene.

The family chapel at Steyne Court was much grander than the one at Lynton, but exactly as musty and unused. Ashe, the parish priest, sat in a corner of the front pew, either praying or sleeping. What he was doing here at all Sebastian couldn't imagine, unless he hoped to ingratiate himself with the new earl, a feat he'd never managed with the old one.

Not that that was necessarily Ashe's fault. The old man lying in the mahogany coffin hadn't been one to socialize much with parish priests. An unintelligent man, oblivious, chronically unfaithful, Lord Moreton had had few passions in his life, although he'd filled it with desultory vices like gaming, drinking, and whoring. His dull days had occasionally lit up with flashes of spectacular decadence, but not often or brilliantly enough to lift him out of his own overwhelming mediocrity. Sebastian had never felt singled out by his neglect, since he'd neglected his wife and daughter equally, as well as his friends, acquaintances, tenants, and employees. If he'd been born a commoner, he'd have perished early on from the combined effects of stupidity, torpidity, and unimaginativeness.

"So much for you, Father," Sebastian said softly. He put his hand on the raised coffin lid. "I wish it could have been otherwise." As soon as he said it, an emotion finally entered his heart. It was grief, of a sort, not for the man but for the love they'd never felt for each other. For the gaping void of indifference they'd shared in place of friendship or affection. If there was blame to cast, Sebastian kept plenty for himself. "Good-bye," he whispered, and closed the lid of the casket with a final-sounding thud.

Reverend Ashe must have been listening for it. He sprang from his pew and advanced on the new heir with unseemly haste. He had long, luxuriant, yellow-white hair, a glossy mustache, and a monocle dangling by a silk ribbon on his chest. The ruby glinting on his smallest finger looked incongruous with his clerical collar. Christian Morrell wore simpler clothes, Sebastian reflected, and not only because St. Giles was a poor parish. He was a simpler man.

"Again, allow me to tender my most sincere sympathies, my lord, for your terrible loss. His lordship was a good man, a great man, respected by all who knew him. He will be sorely missed."

"Do you think so?" Once he'd have tweaked the reverend for this patent nonsense, labeled him a toady and a hypocrite, and done his best to embarrass him. He was an obsequious fool—but there were worse sins, and Sebastian had committed most of them himself.

"Oh, undoubtedly. I'm certain the funeral tomorrow will be well attended by your father's innumerable friends and loved ones."

"I suppose anything is possible," Sebastian conceded gravely. "Now, I won't keep you any longer; I'm sure you'd like to be at home, Reverend, working on your eulogy."

Reverend Ashe looked as though that thought hadn't occurred to him. But he recovered quickly and said, "Yes, of course, how kind of you, my lord, I will be running along. That is, unless you require my services, as it were, in a personal way before I go?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"If you would like to pray with me, or if you were moved to speak of your feelings on your father's passing—"

"Ah! No, no, thank you very much indeed." He turned away rather than grin in the minister's face.

They walked to the chapel door together and shook hands on the small porch. Reverend Ashe climbed into a smart green landau while his driver held the door for him. Sebastian thought of Christy again, and the chestnut stallion he rode in all weathers to visit the sheep in his humbler flock.

Across the park and the fountain pond, the massive stone pile of Steyne Court rose, its two mammoth wings spread out from the noble center more in the manner of barriers than welcoming arms. The house had been a sturdy, sensible Georgian mansion—he knew this from pictures—until his mother, newly married and flush with the power of sudden riches, had decided to have it rebuilt in the style of a French chateau. Now it boasted turrets and towers, battlements and balustrades, and fourteen separate chimneys vying for air space among the dormers, buttresses, corbels and cornices. It looked like a Parisian due's summer residence, or Cardinal Richelieu's, and it was as out of place in rural Sussex as a tiara in a root barn, and about as useful. It had embarrassed him in his youth; later it amused him; now it irritated him, because the cost of maintaining the aberrant monstrosity had just shifted from his father to himself.