The Book Of Scandal (33 page)

Evelyn’s mouth dropped open. “But…but why?”

“That, he wouldn’t say,” Nathan said, his gaze piercing hers. “So I must rely on you, Evelyn. Think. Think what you might know,” he said, and looked at her as if he expected her to dissemble. “I find it hard to believe that you don’t suspect something.”

Her belly was churning acidly. “On my honor, I don’t know what I could possibly know, Nathan. There were rumors, always rumors—but everyone gossiped. I can’t begin to recount it all.”

“Rumors and gossip. Such as?”

She gripped her knees even harder. “Awful rumors. Such as incest between a royal brother and sister. Or murder. A-affairs, and children born out of wedlock,” she said, letting her eyes drop to the floor. “But I never heard anything about the Prince or Princess of Wales that wasn’t reported in the morning newspapers.”

“You’re entirely certain?” he asked, his voice a little softer.

She nodded as she searched her memory. “I am certain I heard nothing that would cause anyone to want to shoot me.”

Nathan sighed; Evelyn looked up as he dragged both hands through his hair. “Very well,” he said softly. “I won’t press you further. But for the time being, you are not to leave this house without escort.”

“Oh, Nathan—”

“No,” he said curtly. “You will do as I say, Evelyn. The risk is too great.”

Funny, but she already felt constricted.

An awkward moment passed between them; Nathan put his hands on his waist and looked at the carpet. “I must see to the estate’s correspondence,” he said.

“Of course,” she said weakly. Was it her imagination, or was their fragile relationship beginning to crumble so soon? He began to walk from the room. Devastation seeped into Evelyn’s veins, and she picked up Robbie’s boat and ran her finger over the tiny helm.

“Evelyn.”

She turned—he was standing at the door, his hand on the knob. His gaze swept over her, lingering on Robbie’s boat. “Did you have an affair with him?”

Her heart climbed to her throat, choking her a moment.

“I would know,” he said, letting go the door and turning back toward her. “I have a right to know, although frankly, I don’t know why I even ask. It seems I am the only man in all of England who had not heard of it, for now I hear it from every corner. I have seen the bloody music box in your suite. Yet I have this…this thing eating at me,” he said, gesturing to his chest, “that demands I hear it from you.”

He looked so dark, so cold, that Evelyn put down the boat and slowly stood. “This is madness, Nathan. What good does it do—”

“Did he take you to his bed?” Nathan abruptly interjected.

Evelyn could feel herself coloring hotly. His blue eyes seemed cold as ice as he considered her. She instinctively looked about the room for an escape. Of course there was none, unless she wanted to leap from a second-floor window.

She didn’t hear Nathan move; she was startled by the strong hands that suddenly clamped on her arms, yanking her around. “Did he?” Nathan asked roughly, and pushed her up against the wall, planting both hands on either side of her head. “Did you lie with him? You are my wife, Evelyn! I am asking what I should have asked the moment I saw you with him at Carlton House—did he take you to his bed?”

Her heart was pounding in her throat now, but Evelyn lifted her chin. “No,” she said quietly, and could see the doubt in his eyes. “But had you not come when you did, my lord, I most certainly would have.”

Her honesty took him aback; he shoved away from the wall and turned his back to her. He stood a moment, then took an angry swipe at the tea service. It clattered to the carpet; one cup bounced and skidded several feet, crashing into the leg of a chair.

Evelyn looked down at the debris and bent down to pick up the boat. She rose up, looked at her husband’s back. “I suppose you were a paragon of husbandly virtue while I was gone?” she asked calmly.

“I am no saint, Evelyn,” he said gruffly.

She walked to where he stood and put her hand on his arm, forcing him to look her in the eye. “Neither am I,” she said quietly, and turned away, walking from the room. Let him judge her. Let him judge her if he dared.

T he day after he returned to Eastchurch Abbey, Nathan walked along the riverbank wishing to hell he’d never asked Evelyn about Dunhill. He wished to hell he’d let well enough alone. But what sort of man would remain silent with the question eating away at him, making him second-guess everything that had occurred between them in the days before he’d left for London?

Ah, but he had his truth now, didn’t he?

He was, he realized, astoundingly and surprisingly hurt by her truthful admission. He berated himself for that, too—she had been gone three years, and God knew he’d been glad to see her go at the time. She was right—he hadn’t exactly waited chastely for her return, had he?

Nevertheless, this seemed different somehow, and it tasted bitter in his mouth.

He marched along to the cottage—the one place that didn’t contain any signs of her presence, the one place he might find some relief from his raging imagination. In the cottage, he walked directly to the end of the table and picked up his current journal. He flipped it open, studied his most recent notes—once, twice, thrice, until the words registered in his brain.

Fortunately, his attention to his work proved to be a respite from thinking about her. He’d slept poorly last night, his thoughts churning. He worried for her safety first and foremost, of course he did, but he believed she was safe under his roof, and he had put two armed footmen to the task of staying with her every moment she was away from the house.

But it was images of her with Dunhill that made his nights excruciating. He couldn’t seem to shake them, and now he feared they would mar any hope of true reconciliation with his wife. He wanted to forget it, but he was having a devil of a time understanding how precisely he might do that.

When he’d finished his work—including the recording of some meticulous notes and drawings he intended to send to a friend at the University of St. Andrews for his thoughts—Nathan returned to the main house under an increasingly cloudy sky. More rain was coming.

He’d retired to his study when he heard a commotion in the foyer—specifically, a woman’s raised voice. It sounded as if an army had trooped in behind her. He was about to go and have a look when someone rapped sharply on his door and then pushed it open.

“Come,” he said wryly as Evelyn sailed across the threshold with two footmen in her wake.

“My lord,” Evelyn said, folding her arms crossly, “would you please tell these two that keeping an eye on me does not mean shadowing my every move! They’ve made it quite impossible to do any sort of browsing in the shops!”

“Have they?”

“Yes!” Evelyn exclaimed as the two footmen exchanged a look. “They accompanied me to the village, which I thought entirely unnecessary, what with the driver and the coachman, but I acquiesced, given your wishes. Yet they insisted on following me into every shop! I expressly told them they could wait at the shop’s door and they refused to heed me!”

Nathan looked at the two footmen. So did Evelyn, her expression triumphant as she waited for Nathan to deliver what she obviously thought would be a sharp reprimand. “Thank you, gentlemen,” Nathan said. “You have performed admirably in what seem to have been difficult circumstances.”

Evelyn gasped and jerked her gaze to him. “Nathan! They accompanied me into a ladies’ dress shop to peruse undergarments!”

The two footmen looked at the floor; one of them turned crimson.

“If Lady Lindsey does not appreciate your loyal service, please know that I do,” Nathan said to the men. “You are relieved from your afternoon’s duty…in more ways than one, I suspect.”

“Thank you, milord,” one of them said hastily. They both bobbed their heads at Evelyn as they went out, but she never saw it—she was glaring at Nathan, her hazel eyes shimmering with her wrath. “When you said I should be escorted, I didn’t think that you could possibly mean into every little shop in Eastchurch!”

“I meant for you to stay here, but if you did not, I did indeed mean every little shop,” Nathan said as he turned back to his desk. “Every room, every carriage, every step. You are not to be alone except in the privacy of your suite of rooms, Evelyn. And even then, I’d feel better if Kathleen remained with you at all times.”

“No! Nathan, there is no real proof that the bullet was meant for me, nothing but the remark of one man!”

“I can and I do mean it,” he said firmly. “Do not argue—I am inflexible on this subject.”

“For how long?” she cried.

“As long as is necessary,” he said, and insanely, pictured her dancing with Dunhill. “If there is nothing else, I have some work I really must be about.” He turned toward his desk and picked up a piece of correspondence, staring blindly at it.

But Evelyn didn’t move. Damn it, why didn’t she leave him? Nathan waited for her to speak, to leave the room, but she didn’t move as much as a finger. He glanced at her sidelong and winced inwardly at her wounded expression. “I have quite a lot of work to do,” he said again.

She suddenly put her palms to her cheeks. “I don’t understand what has happened,” she said, dropping her hands again. “You’ve come back from London and now you seem a stranger to me. You won’t dine with me, you won’t come to me—I’ve scarcely seen you since you returned.”

“I beg your pardon for being distant,” he said carefully. “But I have quite a lot on my mind.” He turned back to his desk once more.

But he heard the rustle of her skirts and knew she had come to stand directly behind him. He flinched when she put her hand on his back.

“Nathan…I thought we’d come so far in such a short time,” she said softly. “But now I think you will toss it all aside because of a conversation with Dunhill.”

The mention of her lover’s name grated; it felt as if there were a band tightening around his chest. “Please don’t mention his name again.”

“Will you not speak to me?”

“Evelyn…when I agreed to let you go to London, I was not so gullible that I didn’t understand what I risked. I am no stranger to court and the things that go on there. But…” He looked at her. “But I suppose I was not prepared to be presented with it so boldly. I need time to let it settle. I need time to think some things through.”

“What things?” she demanded.

It was impossible to explain it—he hardly understood it himself. He took her hand in his. “When we married, I never dreamed our lives would go as they did,” he said softly. “But they did, and while a part of me understands what happened in London, another part of me is wounded by it. I thought we could repair our marriage, but now…now I need to think.” It occurred to him that in the space of a fortnight, he’d gone from never wanting to think to needing desperately to think.

“But…I was never in his bed,” Evelyn said, her cheeks coloring as she tried to put a brighter face on it.

She was only making it worse. “Don’t say more, I beg you,” he said, not unkindly. “I’ve heard all that I ever hope to hear of it.”

“You find such fault in me, Nathan, but how is it any different than what you’ve done?”

There was no good answer for that, and he knew it. He looked at her hand in his, ran his thumb across her knuckles, marveling at the softness of her skin. “I suppose because I believe in my heart that my indiscretions were never more than that—indiscretions.” A drunken tryst here or there to relieve himself physically, but he’d never stopped loving her. A part of him had never stopped wanting her home. He’d never been with another woman and actually seen that woman—he’d seen only Evelyn. “I never wanted anyone but you, Evie. But it would seem I was supplanted in your heart by another man.” He looked up into her eyes. “I could see it in your face at Carlton House.”

Her lashes flickered and she dropped her head guiltily. “We both behaved badly,” she said roughly. “You forced me here against my will, and I hated you for it. But it made me realize how much you mean to me. I want to forgive and forget, Nathan, and I thought you wanted that, too. Why can’t you want that?”

“I am trying,” he answered honestly.

She looked up, her eyes shimmering with tears. “Trying? What does that mean?”

He didn’t have to say it—she could obviously see it in his expression. A moment passed with her waiting hopefully. A moment later, she silently pulled her hand from his. Without a word, she walked to the door, her shoulders sloping as if they carried some invisible weight on them. She did not look back as she quit the room.

Nathan watched her go, feeling as if she were dragging his heart along behind her. When he could no longer hear her footfall, he turned back to his desk, his task completely forgotten now.

He was trying. With everything he had, he was trying. He just couldn’t seem to rid himself of Dunhill’s image.

From his perch in the woods, the rider had watched the countess return to the house in a carriage and emerge, sandwiched between two lanky footmen. Lindsey knew, then. The rider thought he should have taken his shot days ago, after the men the earl had hired to sweep through the woods had come and gone, finding nothing. That very afternoon, the countess had visited the grave of her son. It would have been so easy, and so poignant for Lindsey to find her body draped over the grave of her son. He might even have made it look like a suicide.

He’d been contemplating how, precisely, to do that when the boy had appeared. He’d been moved by the boy—he wanted to see Lady Lindsey dead, but he did not want to harm the boy.

Now, it seemed as if it might be too late, for somehow, Lindsey had discovered she was the target.

The rider glanced up; the clouds were as dark as ink. He would need shelter for the night and some time to think. His mission required a different approach. He retreated deeper into the woods to return to his shelter and to mull over his options.

F or two days, the rain fell in great long swaths, leaving the earth so saturated that water pooled on the ground. And for two days, Evelyn moped about the house, trying to find her way in the storm inside her.