15

CHARITY WAS BEGINNING TO REALIZE THE ENORMITY of the mistake she had made. She had agreed quite cold-bloodedly to a marriage that was not really a marriage just for the sake of money and security. It was a horrible sin she had committed. I thought you were a fortune hunter—Charles’s words had haunted her all day. She had married on the very foolish assumption that her feelings would be no more engaged during a few weeks of a temporary marriage than they would have been during a brief period of employment as a governess. But her feelings had become involved with almost everyone at Enfield.

And now she knew that she was to suffer the ultimate punishment for her sin and for her foolishness. Her feelings were very deeply engaged in a much more personal way than just concern for a family that was living in its own self-made hell.

She had experienced the ultimate embrace on her wedding night and again last night. But she had perhaps been too involved in the wonder of physical sensation on those occasions to feel the full impact of what was happening to her heart. She had understood with blinding clarity during that kiss at the lake. It had been exquisitely sweet, totally different from what she had expected. She had expected passion and had found tenderness. Tenderness was not something she would have associated with the Marquess of Staunton if she had not experienced it there in his arms and felt it in his lips. His lips had even trembled against her own.

She was not in a dream as they walked back up the lawn toward the house. She knew what was ahead for her, and the prospect was daunting to say the least. But there was tonight. And tonight all things seemed possible. It was a magical night, set apart from real time. And so she had suggested, quite impulsively, that he come to the library with her and wait there.

But there was magic elsewhere too.

She stopped walking suddenly, squeezing her husband’s hand a little tighter as she did so.

“Look,” she whispered. Perhaps she ought not to have drawn his attention to what she saw, but she sensed that he too was in a mellow mood.

Not far from the house, but hidden from it by the particularly massive trunk of an oak tree, a man in dark evening clothes stood face-to-face with a woman in a delicate white dress, his hands at her waist, her body arched toward his. Even as Charity watched, they drew closer together and kissed. Charles and Marie.

“They are bound only for heartache,” the marquess said softly, drawing her firmly onward again. “He may be a duke’s son, but he is only a younger son—hardly a worthy substitute for the heir, for whom she has been groomed. Her father will never allow it.” He sounded more sad than cynical.

“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.

NOW 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.

The marquess hurried from the room without a thought to his wife, who was lying awake in his bed.

His father had had a heart attack. There would be no recovery from this one. He was dying. That much was clear to his son the moment he hurried into his bedchamber. He lay on the bed, gasping for air. Every breath was labored. Brixton was flapping a large cloth in front of his face, trying to make more air available to him. The marquess chafed the duke’s hands in a futile attempt to do something though he knew himself to be utterly helpless.

Time passed without his being aware of it. Marianne was in the room, closely followed by Charles. Then Twynham was there too, and Will and Claudia and Charity. Finally the physician appeared and they all stood back at the edges of the room watching while he made his examination and straightened up to give them the inevitable message simply by looking at them and slightly shaking his head.

The Duke of Withingsby was dying.

“Fetch Lady Augusta,” the marquess said, looking at Mrs. Aylward, who was standing in the doorway.

“I will go,” Charity said quietly. “I will bring her.”

The duke was still breathing in audible gasps. But he was conscious. His eyes were open.

“It is time to say good-bye,” the marquess said, the fact registering on his mind that they were all—family, servants, physician—looking to him for guidance. The duke was dying. He was already the acting head of the family. “William? Claudia?”

They stepped up to the bed, Claudia chalk white, Will scarcely less so. And then Marianne and Twynham, and after them, Charles. The butler and housekeeper were nodded forward to say their farewells. Even through the numbness of his mind, the marquess realized that this was the leave-taking his father would want—something strictly formal and correct, his death like a well-orchestrated state occasion.

Charity had returned with a pale and clearly frightened Augusta. She clung to Charity’s hand and shrank against her and hid her face when Marianne would have taken her. And so it was Charity who led her to the side of the bed.

“You must say good-bye to your father,” Charity said gently. “He is looking at you, you see.”

“Good-bye, sir,” the child whispered.

But the marquess could see, and Charity could see, that his grace’s hand was pulling feebly at the bedcover.

“He would like you to kiss him,” Charity said. “He would like you to know that he loves you and that he leaves you in the safe care of Anthony.”

Augusta had to stand on her toes to lean far enough across the bed to kiss her father on the cheek. “I will be a good girl for Anthony, sir,” she said. “And I will work harder at my lessons.” She hid her face against Charity’s skirt.

“Father.” Charity had taken that feeble hand in her own. “You have been kind to me. I thank you for your kindness. I will always remember it and you.” And she bent over him, kissed his forehead, and smiled into his eyes. “With love,” she added.

And then she bent down, picked Augusta up in her arms, and moved with her out into the anteroom of the bedchamber.

The marquess stepped forward and stood, his hands clasped at his back, gazing down at his father.

“Clear the room.” The words were whispered and hoarse and breathless, but they were perfectly clear.

“Perhaps you would all wait outside for a few moments,” the marquess said without looking away from his father’s face.

They all left uncomplaining except for Marianne, who was muttering to Twynham that she was his grace’s daughter and was being treated like a servant by her own brother.

The Duke of Withingsby was not a person one touched uninvited, and the invitation was rarely given. But the Marquess of Staunton looked down at the pale, limp hand on the covers and took his hands from his back so that he could gather it up in both his own. It was cold despite all his efforts to warm it a few minutes before.

“Father,” he said, remembering even as he spoke the idea of a sentimental deathbed scene with which he had mocked his wife, “I have always loved you. Far too deeply for words. If I had not loved you, I could not have hated you. And I have hated you. I love you.” He raised the hand briefly to his lips.

His grace’s penetrating, haughty eyes, startlingly alive, regarded him out of the gray face and from beneath heavy lids. “You are my son,” he managed to say. “Always my favorite son, as you were hers. You will have children of your own, my son. Your duchess will be a good mother and a good wife. You have made a fortunate choice. There will be mutual love in your marriage. I envy you. You have not succeeded in annoying me.”

He could say no more. He closed his eyes. His son watched him for a while and then went down on his knees and rested his face on the bed close to his father’s hand and wept. He felt foolish weeping for a man he had hated—and loved, but he was powerless to stop the painful sobs that tore at him. And then the hand lifted and came to rest on his head. It moved once, twice, and then lay still while the rasping breathing continued.

It felt like forgiveness, absolution, a blessing, a benediction, a healing touch. A father’s touch. It felt like love. The marquess despised the feelings at the same time as he allowed them to wash over him. His father had touched him with love.

The nature of the breathing changed. He got to his feet and crossed to the door. It was time to summon the family back into the room. It was their right to witness the end. And the end was no more than minutes away.