Charity Begins at Home (25 page)

"I have told you why." Guilt made her impatient; she wanted only to have this encounter done. She should never have accepted him in the first place—he deserved better than this—but she saw no other remedy than to unmake the mistake quickly.

He jammed the ring into his pocket and strode to the door. "You are right then, I don't know you. For I would never have imagined that you, with your sweet face and manner, could be so heartless!"

The door closed, and after a moment, she rubbed the tears off with the back of her hand and rose. She still had to explain this to Francis, and he was even less likely than Tristan to understand why she couldn't marry.

Just then the drawing-room door crashed open and she found herself trapped in the burning gaze of her erstwhile fiancé. "What you are complaining about then," he said, as if their conversation had never ended, "is that you think I will not love you."

Charity took a prudent step back until she felt her chair against the back of her legs. Then she sat on the edge of her seat, poised to run. "I wouldn't say I was complaining precisely."

"Implying then. When you said you wanted more, that is what you meant."

Charity clasped her hands in her lap and stared down at them, evaluating his inquiry. Love. Such a small word, to fill such a large gap in her. "I suppose that is part of it."

"Well, then. That's fine. I have no doubt I will love you."

Charity's breath caught in her throat. "Oh, how sweet of you to say so!"

His expression was still taut, but he brought the ring out of his pocket with a flourish. "Then put this on and we'll set a wedding date. An immediate one."

Charity pushed back in her chair till her back touched the upholstery. She looked regretfully at the ring but made no attempt to take it. "But that doesn't change my mind."

Tristan pressed the fist with the ring against his forehead. "What do you want from me, you heartless vixen?"

"Now there's no call for that, you know." Knowing she had behaved unconscionably added an edge to her voice. "You have called me heartless twice now. And I'm not that at all."

Tristan was bitter, despairing. "Then what does that heart of yours want? I told you I would love you. What more do you want?"

"Something more. I don't know." So she would not have to look at him, she studied the misty June day outside the window. "Love at first sight, perhaps."

"That might be hard to arrange," he answered acidly, "as we've met any number of times already. Why isn't the other good enough as it's all we can have now?"

Charity shrugged helplessly. "It should be enough. For anyone else it would be enough. But you see, don't you now, that is why we would not suit. I am not very like you imagined, am I? Being loved—merely loved—isn't new for me. People usually do come to love me, you must have noticed. I don't mean to boast," she added hastily. "Because it isn't anything to boast of. I work hard at it, and usually I succeed. But just once, I'd like not to have to work at it. I mean, if I am just going to be the same after this, then I may as well stay with what I have. At least I will not be disappointed. Oh, I'm not explaining this well at all. Couldn't you just perhaps consider me a bit tetched and have it done?"

"No. I can't. You've taken this too far to drop it without explanation." Tristan's eyes were hard and glittering now with his anger. Anger was better, she dimly recalled telling herself recently. Perhaps he had discovered that, too. "You need only have told me that you didn't want to marry me—God! only two days ago—and it would have been put to rest. But you told me you would be my wife and let me think you meant it."

"I did mean it, or I wanted to mean it. Oh, Tristan, I can't explain. But please let it go. If you think you need a wife, you can find another easily enough. There are dozens of girls who would do you well right here on the Kent coast. Good sensible girls, who can make you a home and be happy doing it. You'll find a replacement to suit your purposes if you would only look a bit farther afield."

This bit of advice did not assuage him. Savagely he jammed the betrothal ring back into his pocket. "And will you so easily find a replacement for me? Or will that prove impossible? I'm only the latest of a series, I recall. I expect none of the rest suited either. They didn't understand you, is that it? I should write them and tell them they are lucky in that, for in my experience, you hardly improve on more intimate acquaintance!"

Although that was exactly Charity's point, hearing him rephrase it so brutally brought her to her feet in affront. "Thank you, Lord Braden, for making this so easy for me. For I know I shall never regret turning away a man who is so quick to insult a woman just because she has declined the honor of being his wife!"

From the shamed, stubborn set of his face, it was clear he knew he had gone too far. But with the air of a man who would as soon hang for a sheep as for a lamb, he said just before he slammed the door, "And I will never regret being refused by a girl who, all evidence to the contrary, believes she is too good for mortal man!"

Chapter Fifteen

Tristan was beyond shock. Instinctively he turned his horse south down the winding road out of the village. He hardly noticed the tall pastoral hedgerows and rolling fields until they suddenly ended at the brow of a rocky cliff. Below was the solitary beauty of a sandy beach. He dismounted to stand at the edge, waiting for the salt breeze to clear the dizziness from his mind. But when the vertigo remained, he guided Giotti to the steep path leading down to the beach. The chestnut, who had carried him uncomplainingly across the Italian Alps, dug in his hooves and refused to follow.

No one cares what I want, Tristan thought with a self-pity he recognized as particularly childish. He yanked at the reins, and with a whinny of protest, Giotti picked his way down the cliff.

In recompense Tristan took Giotti on a gallop along the beach. But the ferocity of the ride only enflamed his raging thoughts.

"I want . . . love at first sight," she had sighed, exactly like the silly dream-spinning girl he knew her not to be. Silly, fickle, vain, emotional, inconstant: exactly the sort of woman he wanted to avoid.
Love at first sight.

The horse's hooves kicked up sand and saltwater, the mist stinging Tristan's eyes. He didn't want to think of having to announce this fiasco to his sister, to his nephews, to the world at large. He had always cherished his privacy, almost resenting his new fame, glad to inherit the title so he could sign his paintings in that impersonal fashion. Even writing the announcement of his engagement and sending it to the
Gazette
was difficult. Retracting it—God, one day after he'd posted it—would be humiliating.

He found himself thinking in Italian as he always did when he was angry, another legacy of his histrionic mother. In his mind he heard his thoughts run like the long heart-rending lamentation of a Venetian gondolier deprived of a fare. He cut the flow off. Reining in his horse, he forced himself to continue in precise, clipped English, so much more conducive to rational thought.

Barely winded by his hard ride, Giotti dropped his head to graze on the sea oats that edged the beach. Tristan walked away, the hard-packed sand crunching under his boots. At the remains of an old pier, he sat down on a battered pylon and contemplated the great gray Channel, dreaming of escape. In a month or so he could be in Italy again, away from these incomprehensible English, away from the cold gray northern seas, away from the odd silvery light that filtered through the mist, away from Charity and the hurt she had dealt him.

He scooped up a handful of pebbles, automatically checking them for fossil material to interest Charlie. But they were just pebbles after all, and he tossed them one by one into the water and watched them disappear under the surf.

What had she said, this other Charity, the one he didn't know? Oh, yes, exactly that. "But you don't know me." What dark secret was she hinting at? Some ruinous love affair?

No. Her kisses, though sweet, were not those of an experienced woman. And besides, if that were her secret, she would be sensible enough to confess that, and he hoped he would be sensible enough to accept it without condemning her.

She had no secret vice, he'd make book on it. She'd lived all her life in a village where everyone knew her. This suffocating intimacy didn't allow for secret vices, nor secret virtues either. Tristan, the perpetual outsider, been there less than a month and already knew where smuggled brandy was sold, where cockfights were staged, and which Ferris girt liked interludes in the hayloft.

He had learned this last not from a personal experience, being too occupied with the Calder girl to do more than take appreciative notice of the nubile Ferris girls. No, his informant had been the wily Crispin Hering, hoping, no doubt, to scotch Tristan's chances with Charity. For a dark moment Tristan considered how much better off he would be had he gone along with that scheme and been discovered by Charity
in flagrante delicto
with the blonde maid. He would still be missing one betrothed, but at least he would have had a bit of fun, and a reason anyone could understand.

Instead, he was left unfulfilled and uncomprehending. You don't know me, she had said sadly. And if you did, you wouldn't want to marry me. It was incomprehensible. Of course he wanted to marry her. She was exactly the wife he'd never thought to dream of but had recognized right off as right for him. An excellent wife—how she had flinched when he said those words, as if he had insulted her.

Could that be it, that after all she had decided that she couldn't be an excellent wife to him? Did she think his standards were too high, too inflexible? But she did it all already, making a home, nurturing a family. He wouldn't expect much more than that. Oh, of course, wives had a duty that maidens didn't. But from the cling of her embrace, he couldn't imagine Charity balking at fulfilling that, or even considering lovemaking a duty. His pulse quickened just remembering her passionate response to his kiss, her bold demand: "Kiss me again." It couldn't be that which frightened her, surely.

He had promised to love her, and she wasn't much impressed. Everyone loved her, she said. From another woman, that might sound vain, but in this paradoxical Charity, it sounded poignant. Sad.

She hadn't, of course, reciprocated his promise. For a moment Tristan gave into the most anguishing possibility of all—that she didn't think she could love him. And if that were so, of course they were better off apart, for he was old-fashioned enough to believe that lasting love was necessary for a happy marriage.

Almost reluctantly, he rejected that. If she didn't care for him, he would have to let her go. But she must care for him, or nothing in the world made sense. He recalled their conversations, sparkling with spoken and unspoken contact, with an intimacy they hadn't had to earn. And he remembered those few kisses, shimmering with passion's promise. No, they had shared too much. Their caring wasn't entire yet, for they'd only known each other these few weeks. But surely she, too, had felt them on the brink of something new and profound. But that must be less—or more?—than she wanted.

Love at first sight. 'That was what Kenny had professed for Anna, what Tristan's parents had used as an excuse for their impossible marriage. Charity couldn't want that ephemeral and absurd emotion, not the Charity he knew. Not when he offered her something lasting and complete instead. But therein lay the conundrum—if she did prefer the other, then she really wasn't the woman he thought he knew, the only woman he had ever thought might share his life.

"You don't know me . . ." How sadly she had said that. The anger seeped out of him like the sand through his fingers. He had wanted to believe that she would come to him complete, without any edges to cut up the peace she brought him. He had needed to see her as fitting the world in a way he had never fit, one with nature and her fellows, belonging. He wanted only to add her to his life to absorb that completeness, that serenity.

But he had never really wondered what she needed. And if he had, he would have supposed—oh, that she needed nothing, really. She was complete already. She needed a husband of some kind, of course. Girls were supposed to marry. But otherwise, she was so cheerful. Not always, of course. She still grieved for those lost boys. But she had never asked for his sympathy, never asked for anything, except that once, when she asked him to kiss her again.

But then she wouldn't ask, would she? He hadn't known her long, but he knew that much. She offered help; she didn't ask for it. She might eventually get what she wanted, but not by requesting it.

Perhaps that was all. She wanted more than he offered—more than nothing. And she didn't want to have to ask for it.

And she had concluded that he was not likely to give it to her.

It was a brutal realization. He had fallen short somehow, without even noticing. He had disappointed her. And she thought it best to cut her losses and cut him out of her life.

He might have known it had all been too easy. He hadn't even had to court her in the usual manner, with flowers and love letters and tiny tokens of esteem. He had asked so much of Charity and hadn't considered what she might want out of courtship and marriage. If he had to do it all over again—

Tristan let another handful of sand sift out of his cupped hand. Would he do it all over again? Knowing now that she wasn't likely to be a source of stability and calm in his life, that she might bring her own complications to complicate his life? Knowing how right he was to be wary of connection and how deeply this connection had already wounded him? Did he still want her as his wife?