He meant it. Heaven help her, he meant it. Viola stared at her husband, appalled, his declaration pounding through her mind like the beat of a drum. He wanted an heir. Now, after all these years, he wanted an heir. After the pain and humiliation she had endured, the social censure and blame heaped upon her for his lack of a son, after all the women he had enjoyed, now he expected to come back into her life, into her bed?
“Not in a thousand years,” she said and turned to leave.
He put his hands on her shoulders to stop her. “An heir is crucial, Viola, and you know it. Without Percy, I need a son of my own.”
“You already have a son,” she reminded him and wrenched free. “Lady Darwin’s youngest boy is your son. Everyone knows that.”
“I know that is the rumor, but in this particular instance, the rumor is false.” When she made a sound of disbelief, he went on, “And even if it were true, it would not signify. I need a legitimate heir.”
“Why should I care what you need?”
“Like it or not, you are my wife, I am your husband, and circumstances now force us to do what our positions demand.”
“Your circumstance and your position force me to do nothing. I am not your brood mare. Our marriage is a farce and always was. I see no reason to change that now.”
“No reason? You are a peeress, the sister of a duke and the wife of a viscount. You know the rules that govern our lives, Viola.”
She met his gaze with a determination equal to his, and she could almost hear the clash of their wills like the clang of two sabers. “I may have to be your wife in name, but I do not have to be your wife in deed. Damn the peerage, damn the rules, and damn you.”
“Damn me all you like, but we are taking up residence together when I return from the North. Decide whether you would rather stay at our villa in Chiswick or move to my town house in Bloomsbury Square. If you choose the town house, notify Pershing and have your things sent there while I am gone.”
“You and I under the same roof? Heaven forbid!”
“The same roof, Viola, the same dinner table.” He paused and gave her a heated, knowing look. “The same bed.”
“If you think…if you really…if you believe…if—” She broke off, too angry to stop spluttering. The idea of him making love to her after all the other women he had bedded was so galling, so intolerable, she could hardly speak. Taking a deep breath, she fought for self-possession and tried again. “If you think I will ever let you touch me again, you are insane.”
“Like it or not, lovemaking is how sons are made. There is nothing insane about it. Married couples do it every day, and from now on so shall we. About damn time we did, if you ask me, since not making love created this whole mess between us in the first place.” With that, he bowed, turned away and strode toward the door.
She stared at his broad back as he walked away. “God, how I despise you.”
“Thank you for informing me of that fact, darling,” he shot back. “I hadn’t noticed.” He paused at the door with his hand on the knob and turned slightly toward her. His face was in profile, his head lowered, one lock of his brown hair falling over his forehead. After a moment, he looked at her, and to her surprise, no easy, careless smile came to his lips. When he spoke, he made no flippant remark. “I never meant to hurt you, Viola. I wish you could believe that.”
If he wasn’t such a cad, she might have fancied a hint of regret in his expression and sincerity in his words. But he was a cad, he was a liar, and he had never loved her. Any sign of regret was gone before she could be sure it had ever even been there.
“You cannot really mean to do this. You know how I hate you, yet you expect me to take you to my bed now?”
“A bed is the most comfortable place,” he said, “but if you’ve another suggestion, I am willing enough. I know it has been a long time, but as I recall, adventurous lovemaking was one of our favorite pastimes.”
She made a sound of outrage, but before she could express it in words, he was gone.
The arrogance of the man. Seething, she began to pace the library, her animosity toward him so powerful at this moment that she could scarcely believe her feelings for him had once been quite the opposite.
When she had first set eyes on John Hammond nine years ago, it had been like something out of a novel. Across a crowded ballroom, he had looked her way, he had smiled, and her entire life had changed.
Twenty-six, he’d been then, and the handsomest man she had ever seen, with eyes the color of brandy and the body of a man skilled at sport. He had just come into his title the previous year, but had he been a tradesman instead of a viscount, she would not have cared. That night on a ball-room floor, she had fallen helplessly in love with that strong, handsome man, her seventeen-year-old heart captured by his devastating smile.
Loath as she was to admit it, he was even more physically attractive now than he had been then. Unlike most other men in their middle thirties, he hadn’t started getting stout or bald. Not John. He still had the body of a Corinthian, and maturity had only made him stronger. Beneath the broadcloth of his evening suit, his chest and shoulders looked wider than ever, his long legs even more muscular. He still had that thick, unruly dark brown hair, the only change a hint of gray at his temples. He still had eyes like cognac, but there were lines around them now. Laugh lines other women had put there.
So many other women.
Viola sank down in a chair, swamped by a bitterness she hadn’t felt for years. As baffling as it seemed now, she had loved him, and with a power beyond all reason. She had married him because she thought the sun rose and set each day just to shine on him. What a fool she had been.
He told her he loved her, but that had been a lie. He had married her not for love, but for her money. All her love wasted on a man who did not love her in return, a man whose mind had decided he needed a wife of means, but whose heart had never belonged to her.
Viola stood up. All of that was in the past. She had long ago accepted his perfidy and her own folly. While he had provided himself with a string of mistresses over the years, she had spent her time building a life of her own. A contented life. A life of charity work and good friends and serenity. A life that did not include him. She had no intention of allowing that to change. Her marital duties and her husband could both go to the devil, where they belonged.
“‘Fear no more the heat o’ the sun; nor the furious winter’s rages; Thou thy worldly task hast done, home art gone, and ta’en thy wages…’” John’s voice suddenly failed him, and he paused for a moment, staring down at the open volume of Shakespeare in his hands. He tried to continue, but couldn’t seem to make his mouth form words.
He glanced away and stared at the crumbling gray ruins of Castle Neagh in the distance. He and Percy used to play among those ruins in the summer holidays, acting out sieges and battles. John felt a queer, heavy tightness within his chest, thinking of those days. Thinking of Harrow. And Cambridge. Rowing in the boat races every May Week. And how Percy had always gone along with him, following him through every boyhood scrape and every youthful adventure, every joy and every pain. Even falling for the same girl hadn’t broken their friendship.
Your cousin is dead. Can you not even grieve for him?
Viola’s words echoed through the silence all around him, penetrating his muddled senses. Grieve? So unfair of her to ask that question. He ached with grief, but to spill it out all over the place in front of people was unthinkable. His emotions were private, hidden by a veneer he had spent his entire life perfecting. Viola was so different; she displayed what she thought and felt openly. He didn’t understand that. He never had.
A slight cough brought him back to the task at hand. John drew a deep breath and caught stern hold of himself. Everyone was waiting. With all the discipline he possessed, he found his place in the words from Cymbeline and continued, “‘Golden lads and girls all must, as chimney sweepers, come to dust.’”
Snapping the book closed with one hand, he bent and reached for a handful of dirt with the other. He held it over the coffin in the grave, listening to the vicar recite from the Book of Common Prayer.
Ashes to ashes. Percy was dead. He held the dirt over the casket, but he could not drop it onto the polished surface. His hand began to shake, and he tightened his fist around the damp soil in his grasp. He turned on his heel and walked away from the silent mourners, breathing deeply of the cold spring air.
When he reached the ruins of Castle Neagh, he walked around to the other side of the tumbledown turret. Still clenching the dirt in one fist, he tossed the book of Shakespeare aside. Memory guiding him, he placed his free hand on one of the stones, a loose one. Curling his fingers around its crumbling edges, he pulled it out of the castle wall.
Sure enough, it was still there, the niche he and Percy had made behind the stone. Their secret place, where they used to hide things—snuff and pipe tobacco, naughty sketches, things like that. He’d hidden Constance’s chemise there once, he remembered, a pretty, lacy thing of delicate muslin with yellow daffodils embroidered on it. He’d stolen the garment off the clothesline at her house one summer day when they were thirteen and hidden it in here. To his amazement, Percy had laid him out with a blow right across the jaw for that. Twelve years later, John had danced at their wedding.
He put the lump of dirt in the niche, crumbling it into a little pile. It seemed right, somehow, to put it there, not drop it over the wooden shell that encased Percy’s now lifeless body.
John stared at the niche and the small mound of dirt for a long time, and the burning in his chest deepened, grew thicker and heavier, until he couldn’t stand it. He shoved the stone back into place, turned around and leaned against the rough stone wall, sucking in deep breaths of air. He sank down to the ground and lowered his head into his hands, swamped by grief and a sudden, terrible loneliness.
Percy had always been a brick—a sensible fellow with sound judgment. He would have been good to Hammond Park, and Enderby, and the other estates of the viscountcy. He would have taken care of them, preserved them for the next generation of Hammonds. He’d known Percy would always be there, at his back, ready to take on a responsibility that because of his own disastrous marriage he had not fulfilled.
The security of that knowledge had given him the convenient luxury of avoiding what was truly his responsibility and always had been—providing an heir. Given that he had not been able to stomach the idea of forcing his wife to an act that had become so repugnant to her, John had seen Percy and Percy’s son as the only option for the viscountcy. It had never occurred to him that his cousin, his best friend, one of the few people in the world he trusted, would die, that his son would also die. That the next viscount would be Bertram, of all men.
Everything in John rebelled against that thought. He had to have a son of his own or see everything he had spent a decade salvaging go to ruin once again. He and Viola had to find a way to come together and rediscover the spark of desire that had been so explosive between them in the beginning. It didn’t have to last long—if it did, they would probably destroy each other—but it had to be long enough to have a son.
“Percy always did like Shakespeare. Thank you.”
Constance’s soft voice interrupted his thoughts, and John lifted his head an inch, staring at the black bombazine skirt of Percy’s widow, the braided trim of black silk at her hem. Mourning clothes. That hot tightness in his chest came rushing back, and he turned his face away, striving for composure.
“They used to call him Owl at school, I remember,” he muttered. “He always had his head in a book and had to wear spectacles to read.”
“And the other boys teased him mercilessly about it. He told me the story of how three of them took his glasses once and broke them. He said when you found out what they’d done, you went flying after them in a fury. That was the only time he ever saw you lose your temper.”
“Percy was right behind me, believe me, and did his fair share to square things up. We beat them to a pulp, and almost got sent down because of it. Afterward, they still called him Owl, but they never broke his spectacles again.”
Constance sank down on the grass beside him. “What did they call you, John?”
He turned and looked at the woman he and Percy had both known since childhood, remembering the girl both of them had fallen in love with that summer they were thirteen. Constance had been the first girl John had ever kissed. About her, he had written some of the worst poetry ever conceived. About her, he’d had every erotic fantasy a boy could invent. He had stepped aside when she married Percy that autumn nearly ten years ago, pretending for their sakes that it hadn’t hurt. But it had taken a lot of drink, a lot of sleepless nights, and a lot of pretty women to get over Constance.
He looked into the gray eyes and tearstained face of his childhood love and saw his own grief mirrored back at him. Yet he knew it was far worse for her, for she had lost both her husband and her son. He focused his mind on the trivial subject that might keep both of them from shattering. “My nickname was Milton.”
“That’s right. I had forgotten.” She took out her hat pin and pushed back her black straw hat, letting it fall down her back. The sun gleamed on her dark reddish-brown hair, making it look like satin-finished mahogany. “Why Milton?” she asked. “It doesn’t suit you at all.”
He forced himself back once again to nicknames from Harrow. The mundane seemed comforting just now, comforting and safe. “But it does suit me. Very well, in fact. Didn’t Percy ever tell you how I acquired it?”
“Strangely enough, he didn’t.” She paused, then said, “It’s odd, all the things about your spouse’s life you don’t know. After ten years of marriage, I thought I knew everything there was to know about my husband, but I was wrong. The past few days, so many people have been telling me stories about him. Some of them I knew, of course, but some I had never heard before. So many stories—” Her voice broke and tears glistened on her dark lashes, threatening to spill over.
“Connie, don’t cry!” he ordered in a ravaged whisper. “For God’s sake, don’t cry.”
She turned her face away, composing herself for his sake, knowing how much he hated tears. After a moment she turned back around, smiling a wobbly little smile. “So, are you going to tell me how you got your glorious nickname?”
“On my first day at Harrow, I got into trouble—of course—and Master Johnson told me if I kept up that sort of thing, I’d never serve heaven well when I died. I answered that was all right, since I intended to rule in hell.”
“You would say something like that,” she said, laughing even as she fought back tears. “You’ve always gone your own way.”
The nine years of his marriage flitted across his mind in the space of a few heartbeats. He hadn’t ruled his own hell all that well. “I’ve gone my own way too much, perhaps,” he admitted. “So sensible of you to pick Percy instead of me.”
“Nothing sensible about it. You were a viscount’s son, and would have been a far more sensible match for a girl like me. I was the daughter of a man in trade, a girl who had plenty of money but no connections. No, no. I picked Percy because he loved me so very desperately.”
“I loved you,” he said with a rueful smile. “It didn’t help me.”
“Well, he’s the one who proposed.” Constance smiled back at him right through her tears. “Besides, you never loved me, John. Not really.”
He sat back, staring at her, unable to believe what he had just heard. “What are you talking about? If you only knew how it wrecked me to come home from Europe that autumn and find that Percy had stolen your heart away from me. I was in agony at your wedding.”
She shook her head. “Nonsense. That was your pride. You never loved me, not in a way that makes for marriage. You always flirted with me, and charmed me, and remembered my birthday. You wrote me letters from school every week, picked my favorite flowers, and gave me the right compliments. You stole kisses from me behind the hedgerows, and said the most torrid things to me, but you never did the one thing that a man does when he is truly in love.”
“What’s that?”
“You never made a fool of yourself for me.”
He blinked, trying to understand what she meant. “Well,” he said after a moment, “I did write you some god-awful poetry. Does that count?”
“You did?” she asked in astonishment. “When?”
“Cambridge days. I never showed it to you.”
“Exactly my point. If you had read some of it to me, even just once, things might have turned out very differently, for I was madly in love with you.”
That startled him. “You were?”
“I was. But I knew you didn’t really love me, and when you went to the Continent for your Grand Tour, I got over you.”
“With Percy’s help.” He could say that lightly now, for he felt no bitterness. Many years had passed since then.
“He loved me, John.”
“I know.” John glanced over his shoulder, looking up at the stone where the niche was hidden, and he thought of the look in Percy’s face when he’d found that chemise. “He always loved you, Connie. As I said, you were very sensible to choose him.”
She began to laugh. “He blundered his way through the most incoherent marriage proposal you ever heard at the May Day fete, in front of Lord and Lady Moncrieffe, the Miss Dansons, the vicar, and heaven knows how many others. In front of all those people, right on the village green, he got down on his knees, confessed eternal love in the most passionate language you can imagine, and said that if I didn’t marry him and end his misery, he would shoot himself and end it for me.”
He eyed her with doubt. “Our Percy?”
“Yes, our sensible, straitlaced, calm, reasonable Percy. Given his nature, no woman could have resisted a proposal like that. I couldn’t.”
John tried to imagine Percy on his knees babbling declarations of love and desperate threats of suicide. He failed utterly. He couldn’t make his mind form that picture, not even to win a prize like Constance.
“He made me happy, John. So very happy.”
“I am glad of it, Connie,” he said, and meant it. “The two of you are the only people in my life who ever gave a damn about me.”
“What about your wife?”
The question was soft and cut him like a knife. He did not want to talk about Viola, not with Connie, of all people. Not today, of all days. He opened his mouth to make a flippant remark, but for the life of him, nothing came to mind.
Constance studied him without speaking for what seemed an eternity. Then she laid a hand on his arm. “If there were only one thing I could wish for you, my dear, I would wish you happiness in your marriage. The women, John. The gossip—”
“Isn’t worth listening to,” he cut her off. “I beg you, do not concern yourself with the wagging tongues of scandalmongers. They talk all the time and say nothing. Amazing, but there it is.”
“I am concerned about you.”
“No need to be,” he said at once. “I am content.”
“Contentment is all very well.” She let out her breath on a soft sigh. “But John, though marriage is very difficult, it can give so much joy. Mine did.” Her voice cracked on a sob. “Oh, God in heaven, what am I going to do without Percy? And my son, my darling son—” She put her face in her hands.
This time he did not admonish her not to cry. He said nothing. There was nothing he could say, no amusing anecdote to make her laugh, no antidote to the pain. For either of them. He closed his eyes, lifted his face to the sun and leaned his weight back on his arms, bearing the sound of her sobs because he had to, feeling her tears flay him with his own grief as if each one were a whip. He envied her that—the ability to cry. He never could.
He was thirty-five years old, and the last time he had cried, he’d been seven. In the nursery at Hammond Park, staring into a glass bowl of trifle that had been brought to him for dessert. He had listened to his nanny as she had broken the news to him about his sister, Kate. He remembered how the tears had rolled down his face, and how the colors of jam and cream and custard had all blurred and swirled together. He loathed trifle to this very day.
He listened to Connie’s sobs, and he wanted to do that, too. Lie down, bury his face in the cool grass, and feel the cathartic relief of bawling like a baby. But his eyes were dry, his stomach felt like lead, he wanted to cut his heart out. He curled his fingers into the turf on either side of his hips, set his jaw and did not move.
They sat there for a long time before she finally lifted her head. “What will happen to Hammond Park now?” she asked, wiping at her eyes with the back of her hand. “Bertram will inherit everything after you, won’t he?”
“Not if I can help it.” He pulled his handkerchief from his pocket and handed it to her. “Besides, if Bertie ever becomes the viscount after my death, he shall rue the day. For I vow to return as a ghost and haunt him.”
She almost laughed even as she dabbed at the tears in her eyes. “Is there any possibility you and your wife could reconcile?”
“We already have,” he lied. “Viola and I both know our duty. Pray do not burden yourself with concern for Hammond Park. Everything will turn out well.”
John spoke with far more assurance than he actually felt, for he knew that as far as Viola was concerned, duty would never be more important than love. And love for him was something Viola hadn’t felt for a long, long time.
One month later, John discovered just how right he had been about Viola’s notions of love and duty. By the time he had finished helping Constance settle Percy’s business affairs, the scarlet fever epidemic had subsided, the risk of infection was gone, and he was able to return to London. But when he arrived there, he found that his wife had not moved her things into his town house. Nor was she at Enderby, the villa in Chiswick outside London where she lived most of the year. The servants there did not know her destination, for she had taken only her maid and one footman with her, but John had a pretty fair notion of where she had gone.
When he called at the Duke of Tremore’s home in Grosvenor Square, his suspicion was confirmed. She had taken refuge there. He could envision Viola on Tremore’s doorstep, asking to be sheltered from her shameful excuse for a husband.
Tremore was as haughty toward him as ever. He came into the drawing room bearing the ducal countenance he reserved for recalcitrant servants, ill-mannered commoners, and John. What his brother-in-law still did not understand about him was that he had never been intimidated by all that hauteur.
Thankfully, Tremore did not try to make polite conversation. He came straight to the point. “I assume you have come to see my sister.”
Not in a mood to be clever just now, he met the other man’s hard gaze with an equally hard one of his own. “No,” he answered, “I have come to fetch my wife.”
Viola stared at her brother in dismay. “So Hammond can just drag me off and there is nothing you can do?”
Anthony looked back at her without replying. In his hazel eyes so like her own was a look she recognized, a look of many emotions she had seen before. Rage at Hammond, compassion for her situation, regret that he had allowed the marriage in the first place. But Viola also saw something else—inevitability.
“How can I go with him?” she cried, feeling the chains of her marriage vows tightening around her like a noose around her neck. “After everything that has happened, how can I live with him as his wife again?”
“You are his wife,” her brother said, his voice strangled, as if the words choked him. He looked down at the glass of brandy in his hand. “However much I might wish it were otherwise.”
Viola turned to give the other woman in the library a pleading glance, a glance that impelled her sister-in-law to speak. “Is there nothing you can do, Anthony?” Daphne asked her husband. “You are a duke, after all, and have enormous influence.”
“My influence is useless in this situation, my dear. Hammond has legal right on his side, and even I cannot protect Viola from that.”
His glass in his hand, Anthony rose from his chair and crossed the room to sit beside his sister on the settee. “If I were to gainsay Hammond and prevent him from taking you, he could bring action against me in the House and force your return to him by legal decree. If you wish me to fight him, I will. But I will lose.”
It was so tempting to beg him to try anyway, despite the certainty of the outcome. “It would be quite a scandal, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes, and you would be the one blamed, Viola, not he. What with his appearance at Kettering’s ball the other night and the news of his cousin’s death, the gossip is all over London.”
“What are people saying?”
Her brother did not answer, but he did not have to.
“No doubt, Hammond is being applauded for finally bringing his recalcitrant wife to heel,” she said, fuming at the unfairness of it all.
Anthony did not confirm nor deny her conclusion. Instead, he handed her his glass of brandy. “Here. Drink this. You look as if you need it.”
Viola stared down into the fiery liquid that was the exact color of her husband’s eyes. After a moment, she set the glass on the table beside her. “I don’t need brandy. What I need is a divorce.”
“You know that is impossible.”
“I know, I know.” She leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees and clasping her hands together. “What am I going to do?” she whispered, feeling almost as if she were saying a prayer. “What am I going to do?”
Anthony muttered an oath and rose. “I’ll go down to the drawing room and talk to him again,” he said. “God knows, Hammond has taken my money in the past willingly enough. Perhaps I can bribe him to go away.”
Her brother left the library, and his wife crossed the room to take his place on the settee.
“Oh, Daphne,” Viola mumbled against her clasped hands, “how I wish I could go back and undo the past. What a stupid girl I was.”
Daphne, always a good listener and loyal friend, said nothing. Instead, she put a comforting arm around her shoulders. “You have never been stupid.”
“Oh, but I was. Anthony tried to warn me all those years ago,” she went on. “He told me Hammond was stone broke. He said I was too young, and he wanted me to wait. He tried—in the most delicate terms, of course—to tell me about Hammond’s reputation with women. He was just like his father, Anthony said, a scoundrel and a rake. But I was so in love with Hammond, so determined to marry him, I could not see reason. I was relentless, and Anthony gave in. Why did I not listen?”
Daphne’s arm around her tightened. “Don’t do this. Dearest Viola, do not berate yourself for the past, do not torture yourself with what cannot be undone.”
Viola turned and looked into Daphne’s violet-blue eyes, the eyes that had so enslaved her brother’s heart three years before. In a small way, she had helped to bring Daphne and Anthony together, and she had been delighted to see them fall in love. Yet there were times when she could not help but envy her sister-in-law. To have the honest, true love of one good man must be a wonderful thing indeed. She had always longed for it. She once thought she’d gotten it. How wrong she had been.
She forced herself to smile. “You’d best go down and make certain Anthony doesn’t kill Hammond,” she advised, and stood up. “They are none too fond, you know.”
Daphne hesitated as if unwilling to leave her alone, then nodded. “We will not let him take you against your will,” she said and rose to her feet. “We will fight him any way we can if that is what you wish.”
Her sister-in-law left the room, and Viola walked to the window. It was a brilliant April afternoon, warm and sunny. Looking down over the square, she could see Hammond’s carriage below, and she remembered another spring nine years before. She remembered the countless times she had stood at this very window during that season so long ago, staring down at Grosvenor Square, waiting for the sight of Hammond’s carriage, eager and impatient, scared and hopeful, and so, so in love.
God, it hurt to relive those days, to remember how her spirits would soar every time his carriage came into view, how she could barely stand the wait until she heard his voice in the foyer below, how he could twist her heart with sweet, painful pleasure just by looking at her.
Do you love me?
Of course I do. I adore you.
It hurt to remember the innocence with which she had believed him. It hurt to remember her own vulnerability and the blind devotion with which she had entrusted him with her heart, her soul, and her future.
She pressed her forehead to the window glass, remembering the pain of heartbreak, of learning that his words and acts of love had been false, that Anthony had been right all along, and it was her money John loved. It was other women he wanted. She still remembered how he had turned his back on her without even trying to understand her feelings about what he had done, how he had abandoned her and walked into the arms of another woman. Then another. Then another. As she stared down at the carriage below, she felt her frustration settling into the deep rage she thought she had overcome a long time ago. The rage of betrayal.
The liar.
Viola turned her back on that square below and those memories. She wasn’t a girl anymore, she wasn’t in love with him anymore, and she most certainly wasn’t a fool anymore. There had to be a way out of this mess, and she was going to find it.