The Devil's Web (10 page)

Her eyes looked back into his with no defenses. There was none of the customary gaiety and sparkle in her look. She was pale and vulnerable. As was he.

When he kissed her again, she moved her hands finally from behind her and set them at his waist. And she let his mouth open over hers and paid no more heed to the trembling of her lips. She stopped thinking and comparing. She clung to his waistcoat beneath his coat and allowed herself finally and at long last—after four endless years—the luxury of feeling.

James! James!

All she had ever wanted, or would ever want.

But he did not bring her against him. He did not deepen the kiss.

“You see?” he said eventually, not at all in the voice she had expected to hear, the voice that would have matched her own feelings. “You needed company after all.”

She had been too vulnerable. He could not take advantage of her vulnerability. But he was James Purnell and she Madeline Raine. His only alternative was to hurt her. And he did so quite unavoidably, without ever wanting to.

She spun away from him, brushing twigs and creases from her muslin skirt, undoing the strings of her bonnet so that she might tie them afresh. “It will be teatime,” she said. “Everyone will wonder where we are.”

But he caught at her shoulder from behind as she would have rushed away. It was a firm grip, which she would not have been able to shrug off even if she had felt like trying.

“Madeline,” he said quietly, “it would not work. There is nothing at all except this. We cannot be five minutes together without quarreling. We are two very separate beings who by some strange quirk of fate happen to feel a powerful physical attraction for each other. There is really nothing else. And we are from different worlds. Literally. In little more than a month's time I will be gone. It would not work.”

“No, it would not,” she said. “But you were right just now. I did need the company. And the comfort. I feel better already. Thank you.”

She took his arm since she could scarcely walk beside him all the way back through the trees and across the wide lawn without touching him. And they walked back in total silence.

And if this was feeling better, she thought with grim humor as the carriages and the blankets and the company came into sight, then feeling merely good must be death itself.

And James walked beside her and cursed himself. For if it was true that they could never agree, then perhaps his cruelty and his moroseness with her were to blame. And if it was true that there was a powerful physical attraction between them, then it was also true that he felt the pull of a far deeper emotion. And if it was true that a relationship between the two of them would never work, then he had only his past to blame. His thoughtless and irresponsible past.

He really would not need his father's hell as punishment for his sins. He lived there very effectively already. A hell of his own making.

Madeline smiled brightly at her mother when the latter raised a hand in greeting as they approached.

“Are we late?” she called gaily. “I hope Dom has not devoured all the lobster patties. He used to have a dreadful habit of doing that.”

Her twin pulled a face. “I have been sitting in the carriage with Ellen and Charles, playing fond husband and father,” he said. “I have not even peeped into the hampers yet, Mad, to see if there are lobster patties or not.”

Madeline relinquished James's arm and took her brother's. “Let's look together, then,” she said. “I'm starved.”

I
N SOME WAYS IT FELT GOOD TO BE SIX AND twenty years of age and free, Madeline often thought. One was not burdened with a tyrannical or peevish or inattentive husband or with a brood of noisy and bad-tempered children. Neither was one hemmed in by all the restrictions on one's behavior that being a very young lady imposed.

Life had been good to her. She had taken well with the
ton
during her very first Season, and she had remained popular ever since. Younger ladies liked to be seen with her. They liked to copy her fashions. Younger men also seemed to feel that they gained in consequence if they were part of Lady Madeline's court. And older men treated her with more deference than they showed the younger girls.

There were definite advantages to being past the first blush of youth and still unattached. There were also, of course, disadvantages. One was not entirely free. When one's family decided to disperse from London even before the Season was out, one had little choice but to attach oneself to some of them.

She would have liked to stay in town. There she could lose herself in the whirl of social activities, and surround herself with admirers. There she could to a certain extent choose her companions. And there she could keep her mind off herself.

It would have been possible to stay. The Carringtons were not quite ready yet to return home. Perhaps they would stay another week, Aunt Viola said. Perhaps two, Uncle William added, merely to watch his wife become cross and flustered. But one week or two would not help Madeline a great deal. Sooner or later she would have to remove herself elsewhere.

Probably to Amberley Court. She did not want to go to Amberley.

She thought perhaps she would go into Wiltshire with her twin. Until she talked to him about it, that was.

He and Ellen were in a salon with Ellen's father when she called one afternoon. Dominic was holding Olivia and entertaining her by waving a quizzing glass from its ribbon before her eyes, pendulum fashion. Lord Harrowby had Charles and was making him smile. Ellen was sitting beside her father.

It was a disturbingly domesticated scene, Madeline thought. Sometimes it was becoming hard to realize that Dominic was her twin. He and Ellen seemed as reluctant as Edmund and Alexandra to leave their children in the nursery all day under the care of their nurse.

“Come into the library,” Dominic said to Madeline, relinquishing his daughter to Ellen's care. “There's less chance there that you will have some baby dribbling all over your dress.”

“But you know the babies are my only real reason for coming,” she protested, smiling.

“On this occasion I think not,” he said as he closed the library door behind them. “I am conceited enough to think that I am the reason. What's bothering you, Mad?
I could see as soon as you were shown in that something is.”

“Really, nothing,” she said, “except that you are leaving for Wiltshire the day after tomorrow, and Edmund is leaving for Amberley. And I won't see you until goodness knows when, and we have always been close, haven't we, Dom? And yet if I ask to come with you, I will be imposing my presence on a family group and Ellen may resent it, though she will be far too polite to say so. And if I go with Edmund I will be interfering in a family party. For Alexandra does not see her parents often, and of course she does not see her brother for years at a time. So I am caught between the devil and the deep blue sea.”

“Am I the devil or the sea?” he asked, reclining back against a large oak desk and crossing his arms over his chest. “Since when have you dreamed up this nonsense of not being welcome either with Edmund or with me?”

“Dom,” she said, “you cannot conceive of what it is like to be a woman and unmarried at my age. It did not strike me fully until recently, perhaps because you were not married either. But it is a terrible feeling to be a spinster and to not quite belong anywhere.”

Dominic grinned.

“Oh, you horrid man!” she cried, temper flaring. “I might have known you would have no sympathy at all.
Now that you have Ellen and two babies all at once, you are wallowing in domestic bliss, and I may go hang for all you care.”

“Mad!” he said, putting his head to one side and opening his arms. “Do you want to punch and pummel me?
Come on, I won't even defend myself.”

“Stupid!” she said. “We are not children still to fight
each other, Dom. Though sometimes I wish I could have those days back. They were so uncomplicated. May I come with you to Wiltshire?”

“No,” he said.

She looked at him as if he had just slapped her face. She flushed painfully.

“You should not have come to me, you know,” he said. “You should have gone to Ellen. I know you altogether too well. I think you are thoroughly convinced by this unwanted-spinster-relative image of yourself you have dreamed up. I am not at all convinced. It's Purnell, isn't it?”

She frowned. “What can James possibly have to do with all this?” she asked.

“Only everything,” he said. “He is going to Amberley, so of course you must avoid it at all costs. Is it really very painful?”

She stared at him for a few moments and then turned to walk away from him. She stood staring out through one of the windows. “I have to end it once and for all,” she said. “I don't want to see him again, Dom. I can't spend a month at Amberley with him. Please don't say no. Let me come with you.”

His voice came from just beyond her shoulder when he spoke next. “Last year when I returned from Brussels,” he said, “Ellen wanted nothing more to do with me. She did not want to see me. And the pain was so dreadful that I wanted to go away and forget. The fight for her seemed too impossible to win and too painful. I probably would have gone, too, if I had not discovered just in time that she was with child. We fought it through, Madeline. I dread to think what my life would be now if I had given up so easily.”

“But that was different altogether from my case,” she said crossly.

“Of course it was,” he said. “In details it was very different. In essentials I think it was much the same. You love Purnell. You want to cut off the pain now, when you can still feel somewhat in control of it. You are afraid that after another month the pain will be unbearable and will destroy you.”

She rested her forehead against the window, “Can you promise me that it will not?” she said. “It is easy for you, Dom, to look back and see that following Ellen to Amberley last year was the best thing you could have done. But there is no hope for me. For even if by some strange chance he did make me an offer and I accepted, we would not be happy together. I am incapable of making him happy, because he does not like me. And I could not be happy with his morose nature. Let me come with you.”

He took her by the shoulders and turned her to him. “Will you trust me?” he asked. “We have always known each other almost better than we have known ourselves, haven't we, Mad? I can't look into the future. I can't make promises for you. It may well be that if you go to Amberley, you will have a broken heart at the end of a month. Perhaps it will throw a blight on the rest of your life. But if you don't go, you will never be free of what has pursued you and haunted you for four years.”

“Geoffrey will marry me,” she said.

“North?” he said scornfully. “That is not even a good try, Mad. What has happened to Huxtable? Rejected already, at a guess. Now, having given my little sermon, I will say this. If you will do us the honor of spending the summer with us in Wiltshire, both Ellen and I will
be delighted. I know I speak for her too. She thinks of you as a sister and is very fond of you. You may come with us the day after tomorrow. But for your sake, I hope you don't.”

“Oh, horrid!” she said, leaning forward to rest her forehead against his neckcloth. “You have turned into a horrid, very grown-up and wise man, Dom. You are quite as bad as Edmund. I far preferred it when we bit and scratched.”

“I never did either,” he said. “I slapped and punched and swore. And what a beautiful compliment about my being like Edmund. I could do a great deal worse. Come and have tea now, and you shall let us know tomorrow what you have decided to do. There will be no reproaches, by the way, and no more sermons.”

She lifted her head with a sigh. “I don't really need until tomorrow,” she said. “Miss Cameron is traveling down to Amberley with Mama and me. It would be unmannerly to absent myself, would it not?”

“No comment,” he said.

“And our trunks are packed,” she said. “And some of my things are hopelessly mixed up with Mama's. I suppose it would be easier for me to go with her.”

“Yes,” he said.

“I don't suppose Edmund and Alexandra will mind too much, will they?” she said. “I have been spending my summers at Amberley for so long that I must be hardly distinguishable from the furniture.”

His lips twitched. “Quite,” he said.

“And there are so many friends and neighbors to be visited,” she said, “that I can be away from home for most of every day.”

“A good point,” he said.

“And then, of course, Miss Cameron will be there, and she will be with him all the time. It is likely that I will scarce see him and never have to converse with him.”

“You are being very sensible about the whole thing,” he said.

She punched him suddenly with a hard jab to the stomach. “And you are being horrid,” she said. “Don't you dare laugh at me, Dominic Raine. You know I can tolerate anything except being laughed at.”

“Quite so,” he said soothingly.

And so Madeline found herself less than a week later at Amberley, and wondering how she could have thought of going anywhere else. There was the gray stone mansion in the valley, which was surely one of the loveliest houses she had ever seen and which had always been home. And the valley was peaceful and green, and the cliffs wild and windblown, and the beach flat and golden when the tide was out.

And there were the Courtneys glad to see her home, even Howard, the oldest son, now one of Edmund's tenants in his own right, and for many years her faithful admirer. And the Mortons and the Cartwrights and the Lampmans and the Misses Stanhope and the rector and his wife. And Mr. Watson, who had recently married. And Uncle William and Aunt Viola would be back soon.

It was good to be home. And if there were some visitors with whom she was less than comfortable, well then, it was easy enough to avoid them. The house was large enough and the countryside much larger.

And she had to endure for only one month. The
Adeona
was to sail in August.

• • •

I
F
J
EAN HAD BEEN EXCITED
by London and delighted with Richmond Park, she was enraptured with Amberley Court. It seemed she could not have enough of walking and riding and even running out of doors. The state apartments of the house and the family portrait gallery enchanted her. She frequently spent an hour at a time in the nursery or out on one of the lawns, playing with Christopher and trying to coax smiles from Caroline. And she loved the neighbors and their friendliness. Jean had stood in awe of the English. She had not expected to be taken notice of by any of them. She had certainly not expected any to befriend her.

Before Anna's return one week after their own arrival, she spent much of her time with Madeline. And Madeline could not help but like the girl, whose sunny nature matched her own as it had used to be. They went visiting together when the dowager Lady Amberley was too busy entertaining Lady Beckworth or escaping for private walks with Sir Cedric.

Jean loved to visit the rector and his wife, whose home was anything but the tidy, quiet haven one might expect of a rectory. Seven children had been given the freedom of the house, and used the privilege to its full advantage. The eighth would doubtless join them when he once learned either to crawl or to walk. And the rector's wife sat amid the chaos, huge with the ninth addition to their family, beaming goodwill on all comers.

And she loved to visit the Lampmans and their two quiet, well-behaved children, although Rose was not quite four and Paul not quite two. Lady Lampman took her into the flower garden and the rose arbor and the orchard, and Jean thought that she had never in her life seen anything more splendidly colorful. And Sir Perry teased her about
her accent, which was not quite Scottish and not quite French and not quite anything else either.

“But quite, quite charming,” he added, his eyes twinkling when he was not sure that she knew he was teasing.

She liked the Courtneys, who lived in a large house and were clearly prosperous tenant farmers, but who were so friendly and so cozy that she felt quite unthreatened by their grandeur. Large, genial Mr. Courtney, creaking inside his stays, showed her his prize boars and a large number of their twenty-three cats. There would not be so many of the latter, he said with a rumble of a laugh and a creak, now that his Susan was from home. She was living in London with her brother-in-law, Lord Renfrew, and his good lady, preparing for her wedding to Viscount Agerton in St. George's in the autumn.