A Chance Encounter (19 page)

“We do not care for money,” Elizabeth had replied primly.

“You will, my girl, when you find yourself with a position to maintain, and creditors knocking on your door,” he had said harshly. “Well, we shall have to do the best we can. You will come home with me, Lizzie, until the young puppy has finished all his business in London. Perhaps there will be more money than I think.”

“I must not leave here, Papa,” she had protested. “I have promised Robert that I shall stay, and Lady Bothwell should be here today.”

“Nonsense!” he had said. “The old lady may not come at all. Who better to take care of you than your father? And Norfolk is a great deal closer to London than Devon is. He will be thankful not to have to travel so far.”

Elizabeth had argued. Even when she gave in, she did so reluctantly. But she had been very young. Obedience to her father had been the habit of a lifetime. She had not yet learned obedience to a husband. Lady Bothwell had not been there to advise her. What her father had said about the remoteness of Devon from London made sense. So she had gone, pausing only to pack her bag and to write a note to Lady Bothwell explaining that her father had come for her and that she was returning with him to Norfolk.

And so she had made it easy for Hetherington. He no longer had her embarrassing presence in his grandmother's home to deal with.

Elizabeth turned as she heard the door of the nursery opening quietly. She opened her mouth to scold John and send him back to bed. But it was her husband who stepped into the room and closed the door softly behind him.

He came across to the crib and stared down at the child for a while. Elizabeth watched him, tight-lipped. He was dressed only in his breeches and a shirt open at the neck.

“Poor little devil!” he said. “Is there no change?”

“None,” she answered shortly.

He drew up a chair and sat down beside her. “Can I persuade you to rest awhile?” he asked. “I do not wish you to become overtired.”

“I slept during the day,” she replied. “I do not need rest now, thank you.”

He regarded her in silence for a while. “Why do you hate me, Elizabeth?” he asked.

She turned to him incredulously. “You ask me that?” she hissed.

He raised his eyebrows. “Yes, I believe I did,” he said.

“I shall not answer,” she replied in a loud whisper. “If you do not know the reason, you must be totally lacking in conscience and I was the more deceived in you.”

“I see that you have convinced yourself that you were the wronged party,” he continued. “I believe that such is often the case with guilty persons.”

“You should know,” she shot back.

He leaned back in his chair and linked his fingers behind his head. He smiled. “You were very young and naive, were you not?” he said. “I suppose it did not take you very long to realize that you had settled for very little. And you have blamed me ever since. Poor Elizabeth!”

She stared at him stonily. “I settled for very little indeed, my lord,” she said. “I wish you would go to bed now. Indeed, I do not need your company, and I believe the room should be kept quiet.”

“I shall sit here with you, nevertheless,” he replied. He glanced at the baby, who was becoming restless again. “Will he live, do you think? Poor little mite! He could be ours, do you realize that, Elizabeth?”

She made a strangled sound, but clamped her lips tightly together. And so they sat, side by side, in silence, watching Jeremy as he clung stubbornly to life.

It was Hetherington who first noticed the change. He sprang to his feet, startling Elizabeth, who had been deep in thought.

“There are beads of perspiration on his brow,” he said. “The fever is breaking, love. Stay here. I shall go for your brother.”

He ran from the room and was back in seconds, it seemed, with both John and Louise. The four of them stood and watched tensely as the child broke out in a bath of perspiration, which Louise tried to sponge away with a cool cloth. Eventually the baby lay very still.

“Is he dead?” Louise asked in a voice that sounded shockingly normal.

No one answered for a moment.

“I believe he is sleeping,” Hetherington said, and he reached out one slim hand and took the baby's tiny wrist between gentle fingers.

“If he is dead,” he said, smiling at Louise, “he has a very steady pulse to take with him to heaven.”

“Ohhh!” Louise wailed and collapsed, sobbing, into her husband's arms.

Elizabeth's eyes locked with Hetherington's. He cocked an eyebrow at her as he closed the distance between them.

“I thought you were the stiff-upper-lip type,” he said quietly, grinning at her swimming eyes. “But if you must cry, it had better be on my shoulder, ma'am.”

She was horrified at her own inability to resist such inappropriate levity. How dare he push his way into such an intimate family scene and proceed to laugh at everyone! She fumed inwardly as she sobbed on his shoulder and leaned into the warm strength of his body. She felt deep resentment against the arms that encircled her and stroked comfortingly over her back. But her anger was all on the surface when she felt him kiss the top of her head. She jerked her head back and glared at him.

Before she could say a word, he had laid a finger to his lips. His eyes were still brimming with laughter. “This is not the time or the place,” he said softly.

And she watched him have the great impertinence to turn back to John and Louise and proceed to take charge of the situation. Before any of them could have the presence of mind to realize that he had no right to give orders in that house, Louise had been packed off to bed, John had been sent to rouse the nurse in the next room, the housekeeper had been woken to prepare warm milk to send to her mistress's room and chocolate to send to everyone else's, and John and Elizabeth were also retiring meekly to their rooms.

“You are going to bed too, Hetherington?” John asked in a feeble attempt to have the last word.

“Oh, most certainly,” his guest replied. “If I do not have my sleep, I am quite hagged the next day, you know.”

Elizabeth hoped that her displeasure showed in her stiff bearing as she walked to her own room. The amusement in Hetherington's eyes as he bade her good night suggested to her that it did.

For the following two days the baby bounced back to health with all the resiliency of childhood. By the afternoon of the second day the nurse was expending all her energy on confining the child to the nursery. Louise and John, too, seemed to recover quickly from the strain of the few days and nights when their son had hovered on the brink of death.

Louise seemed convinced that Hetherington was somehow responsible for the miracle of Jeremy's recovery. She told Elizabeth so as the two of them sat on the terrace on the second morning, soaking up the morning sunshine.

“I really do not know how we should have managed without his cheerfulness and his strength to keep us sane,” she said, “and without your devotion during the nights, Elizabeth. John and I were very close to the breaking point when you arrived.”

Elizabeth was outraged. “I consider his behavior to have been most inappropriate in the nursery,” she said primly. “He was laughing, Louise!”

“Yes, of course, dear, and the rest of us were crying,” Louise answered cheerfully. “Neither reaction was suitable to the occasion. But both tears and laughter are ways of letting out emotion when it becomes too powerful to bear.”

Elizabeth tutted. “You are very wise,” she said, “but I cannot think the Marquess of Hetherington capable of deep emotion.”

“Oh, there you are quite out,” her sister-in-law assured her. “Your marquess cares very much, Elizabeth. He stayed here in this house of gloom, did he not, when he could have gone riding back to his friends? And he was sitting up with Jeremy when his fever broke. And he spent an hour with him yesterday. Nurse said he allowed Jeremy to play with his quizzing glass and to pull his hair, and to leave a wet patch on his breeches. No, dear, I do not know exactly what passed between the two of you when you wed, but I must believe that there is some explanation for his behavior.”

“How can there possibly be an explanation?” Elizabeth cried. “He would not see me, Louise, would not answer my letters. And then he divorced me.”

“But he did not, dear,” Louise reminded her. “And if you have been mistaken about the one thing, perhaps you have been mistaken about the whole. Why do you not confront him now that you have the opportunity? Ask him what happened. The worst that can come of it is that you will find that you have been right all along.”

“I would not condescend to show him that it matters to me,” Elizabeth replied.

Her sister-in-law gave her a despairing glance.

John too was concerned about the relationship between his sister and her husband. He saw her walking past his office later the same morning, called her inside, and closed the door.

“I cannot but feel the awkwardness of your situation,” he said. “It goes very much against the grain with me to offer hospitality to the fellow when I have always despised myself for not calling him out all those years ago for the suffering he made you endure. Shall I send him packing, Elizabeth?”

“I am not sure he would go,” she said wryly. “He seems to be quite thick-skinned when it comes to insults.”

“It is so deuced awkward,” he said, exasperated. “The fellow has been a model guest. He has treated Louise with great courtesy. Jeremy really took to him, I understand. And he has been of great assistance to me, riding for the doctor early yesterday morning and back again to the apothecary later. I would find it hard now to summon the nerve to tell him that he is no longer welcome in this house.”

“Then say nothing,” Elizabeth said, smiling. “I am sure that he will leave of his own accord within the next day or two. I cannot think that life here has enough of excitement for him.”

“And he is your husband still,” John added, troubled. “I am not sure that I have the legal right to order him away from you.”

In the following two days there was no sign that Elizabeth was right. Hetherington showed no symptoms of boredom or restlessness. It seemed that he was planning to stay. Elizabeth avoided him as much as she could by staying close to Louise. She spent time in the nursery with her sister-in-law and went visiting and shopping with her..

The two of them spent time in Elizabeth's room trying to find clothes suitable for her to wear. She had brought with her only the gray cotton dress that she had been wearing. There were numerous dresses in her wardrobe, but all of them were from six or seven years before, all to a lesser or greater degree out of fashion and some of them quite unsuitable to a woman of six and twenty, Elizabeth believed.

Louise convinced her, however, that several of the dresses would be quite unexceptionable with a few minor alterations. That particular evening saw Elizabeth descending to dinner in a pale-green silk gown whose puffy sleeves had been narrowed, and whose plunging neckline had been disguised with a delicate lace inset. She was self-conscious. As a consequence, her hair had been swept back into its bun with extra severity.

Hetherington and Louise were in the drawing room when she entered. “Oh, you look so lovely, Elizabeth!” Louise exclaimed. “I wish I might throw away that dreadful gray. Perhaps I should instruct one of the maids to burn a hole in it with the iron. An unfortunate accident, of course.”

“I have a better idea,” Hetherington added, grinning. “Elizabeth should wear it into the nursery when Jeremy is eating bread and jam. It would be ruined beyond repair.”

Elizabeth glared.

Louise became flustered. “I am so sorry about your neckcloth, Robert,” she said. “But I am sure they will be able to wash the jam out of it belowstairs.”

He laughed. “If I had children of my own,” he said, “I should probably have learned long since not to snatch an infant into the air when he is in the process of eating his tea. It was my fault entirely, Louise.”

If he had children of his own! Elizabeth's fingers itched to slap him. She could recall now the stinging satisfaction she had had from doing so on a previous occasion. And since when had he and her sister-in-law been on first-name terms?

When the butler finally announced dinner a few minutes after John arrived in the drawing room, Hetherington offered Elizabeth his arm with exaggerated politeness.

“I liked it better without the lace,” he said quietly to her, his eyes hovering at the level of her breasts.

She shot him a startled look.

“Almack's,” he said. “You wore it there one evening. I seethed with indignation while you waltzed with old Ponsonby, because his eyes were definitely not on your face, nor his mind on his dancing, I believe.”

“Oh!” Elizabeth said, lost for words.

“Of course,” he added, eyeing her hairdo with distaste, “on that occasion you had some curls to cover some of the bare flesh.”

“You are insufferable, my lord,” she seethed.