The Devil's Web (11 page)

Her first husband, Jean understood, had been killed at Waterloo just as Lady Eden's had been.

Mrs. Courtney showed her her vegetable garden.

The Misses Stanhope showed her their treasures of lace and displayed a great deal of interest in her Scottish ancestry on her father's side and her English ancestry on her mother's. Both Mrs. Morton and Mrs. Cartwright plied her with cream cakes and tea and kindly questions. And Mrs. Colin Courtney wanted to know all about Montreal and thought it must be wonderful to have been all the way to the new world, while Colin and his older brother, Howard, talked with Madeline and smiled at Jean occasionally and talked with her when Mrs. Colin paused for breath.

Jean was very happy, and she told James so whenever they were together. They frequently were together, always in company with some other people, usually the earl and his countess or Anna and Walter Carrington after they
had come home. They usually walked with their arms linked.

“If I lived in this part of the world,” she said to him on one occasion when they were walking inland along the valley, the river on one side, trees on the other, “I don't think I would ever leave, not even to go to London for a Season. Would you, James?”

“I have heard Edmund say,” he said, “that he likes going away merely for the pleasure of loving his home even more when he returns to it.”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “I am sure that is true. Have you ever known such friendly people, James? They have not made me feel a stranger at all.”

“How could they?” he said with a smile. “You are so very friendly yourself, Jean. It is enough to make one smile just to look at you.”

She laughed. “I think it is my accent they smile at,” she said. “While to me it seems funny that everyone here talks as you do. James, I am so very, very happy.” She laid the side of her head very briefly against his arm.

James was rather glad at that moment that his sister and brother-in-law were coming along behind them. He would have taken her into his arms and kissed her and asked her if she would take him into her own happiness—though he would not have used those exact words. He would have asked her to marry him. And he was not quite sure yet. Either for her sake or his own.

M
RS
. M
ORTON PAID A CALL
personally at Amberley Court only two days after the earl resumed residence there, in order to invite all family and guests to a dinner and evening party. She had come as soon as she decently
could, she explained quite candidly, in the hope of extending her invitation before the Courtneys had completed their own plans. It was usually the Courtneys who won such races. Though, of course, this year they were somewhat preoccupied by the coming nuptials of Susan. Mrs.
Courtney would be leaving for London soon, and even Mr. Courtney would exert himself on this one occasion to go to town for a few weeks.

But the Courtneys were not to be outdone. Their own dinner and informal dance was set for two evenings after the Morton party.

“It is going to be a busy month,” the earl told his wife with a sigh and a smile combined. “We had to miss giving the annual summer ball last year. I am sure no one will let us get away with such a thing this year, Alex. We might as well hold it early so that we can make it a celebration for your brother too.”

“I will begin to associate the ball with his leaving,” she said. “The last time he left it was in the middle of the ball.
But it should not be quite as bad this time. I think he really must be fond of Miss Cameron after all, don't you, Edmund? I think perhaps they will be happy together.”

“Yes,” he said. “I just wish Madeline were not quite so determinedly gay. It makes me tired just to look at her.”

“And I sometimes think that James is so attentive to Miss Cameron as a defense against stronger feelings for Madeline,” his countess said with a sigh. “Oh, dear, Edmund, why do people have to be so foolish? I don't think the two of them have exchanged a dozen words since they have been here.”

The earl had no answer or comfort to offer.

But what Alexandra had said was true, or almost so.
They had probably exchanged more than a dozen words,
since just a bare “good morning” and “good night” used up four in a day. But they had certainly not spoken more words than were necessary or looked more looks than they could decently avoid during the first week at Amberley.

It was a nasty surprise to both when they realized one morning that Jean had asked each of them to ride down onto the beach with her. And both had accepted without realizing that the other had been invited.

Madeline was very relieved to see Howard Courtney at the house. He had just finished some business with Edmund. Howard had been a playmate all through their childhood and had declared undying love for her when he was eighteen and she seventeen. He had remained faithful for years after that, and watched her with adoring eyes whenever she was at home. He had never asked her to marry him, realizing that the social gap between the daughter of an earl and the son of a tenant farmer was insurmountable.

She was thankful he had never asked. She was extremely fond of Howard, as who could not be? His placid temperament and good nature extended back to his early childhood. And though he had never been handsome, and already showed signs of acquiring some of his father's portliness and of losing some of his fair hair, he was pleasant enough looking. But she had never felt more than affection for him. She was thankful that in the past few years he had kept his adoration contained if, indeed, he still felt it. She hoped he did not.

She smiled dazzlingly at him now and hoped fervently that he would not misunderstand. For James Purnell had accused her four years before of breaking Howard's heart.

“Howard,” she said, “you simply must save Miss
Cameron and me from the dreadful fate of having to share one gentleman between the two of us for the remainder of the morning. Will you come riding on the beach with us and Mr. Purnell?”

Jean too turned her sunny smile on him. “Oh, will you, Mr. Courtney?” she asked. “It is such a beautiful day and simply made for pleasure. I hate to think of your riding back home in order to work.”

Howard smiled his usual placid and good-natured smile and agreed without further persuasion.

Madeline, riding along the valley in the direction of the beach, went to such great pains to converse with both Howard and Jean so that Howard would not think that she was flirting with him that she succeeded only too well.
As their horses stepped from grass to sand and turned to walk along the beach, Howard drew his horse alongside Jean's and proceeded to tell her of his turnip crop, for which he had great hopes.

And so Madeline found herself looking sideways into the dark eyes of the man she had successfully avoided for almost two weeks. And so James found himself looking into the green eyes of the woman he had successfully avoided for an equal period of time.

“You are enjoying your stay here?” she asked, and wondered immediately why she always said such foolish and unnecessary things to him.

“Yes,” he said. “It all looks very familiar.” He glanced to the cliff that towered to their right. “The pathway we descended is somewhat farther along, I believe.”

“Yes,” she said, pointing ahead. “It begins almost across from that black rock.”

“The occasion of one of our more vicious quarrels, I recall,” he said.

“Yes.”

“It was a long time ago,” he said. “We have both done a great deal of living since then.”

“Yes.”

“And it seems to me,” he said, “that we have switched roles. I was the one at that time who was berated for answering in monosyllables.”

“Yes,” she said. And when the silence lengthened, “I cannot speak with you. I am always conscious of what I must say, and therefore what I say is of no value at all. And you think I am foolish when in reality it is just the words I say to you that are foolish.”

“And does my opinion matter to you?” he asked.

“I suppose not,” she said. “But no one likes to be despised, for all that.”

“I have never despised you, Madeline,” he said. “Oh, perhaps at first. Yes, I think perhaps I did then. But I have not in the past four years. I do not now.”

“Have you ever thought of me in the past four years?”she asked. And she looked ahead of her and all around her, and despised herself for asking the question. As if the answer mattered to her.

“When you are alone a great deal of the time,” he said, “you think of a great many things. The people and events of your past. Your own reactions to both. Yes, I have thought of you, as I have thought of everyone else I have ever known.”

Well, she had asked for it, she thought, as a pain of something knifed through her heart. But she could not let it alone. “And what have you thought of me?” she asked.

She did not think he would reply. He was silent for a long time. “That I was a fool,” he said, “ever to have allowed myself to feel an attraction for someone so
eminently unsuitable for me. And someone for whom I was equally unsuitable. That I was a fool not to have stayed that night and the following morning so that I could see you with lust gone and know again and let you know how impossible it all was. That I was a fool ever to think of coming back here again.”

“And you still think so now,” she said, her eyes directed between her horse's ears. “That you are a fool where I am concerned.”

“Not exactly,” he said. “We understand each other, I believe. And we both know that for a reason neither of us understands fully it is impossible. When I go away, I will finally be able to leave you behind me.”

Again that knifing pain. “Will you?” she said.

“Yes.”

“And you will not think of me again,” she asked unwisely, “when you are off in the wilderness alone once more?”

“No more than of anyone else,” he said. “Besides, I may stay in Montreal. I may have reason to ask to stay there.”

He was looking ahead to Jean Cameron. And this time the pain came crashing at her from all directions and she could no longer ask the questions that might make it finally unbearable.

“And you,” he said. His eyes bored into hers for a moment. “What will you do when I am gone?”

“I am going to marry Lord North,” she said, smiling dazzlingly at him. Poor Geoffrey had not even asked her, she thought, but he would. It would take only one such smile. “We have known each other forever. We will be comfortable with each other.”

“I see,” he said. “And you will be content to be comfortable, Madeline?”

“Oh, yes.” She laughed. “I am practically in my dotage, you know. I think I am past anything else.”

“And if anything you have said to me in the past month is calculated to confirm me in my old opinion that you are foolish,” he said, “those words are undoubtedly it.”

She could not tell from his expression, though she looked directly into his eyes, whether he was serious or teasing. But how could James Purnell tease? It was surely an impossibility.

She shrugged. “Miss Cameron is undoubtedly being unwise enough to show interest in Howard's farming,” she said. “He may just go on forever, you know. You must do what you did the last time we quarreled on this beach.
Then you told me stories about school. Now you must tell me stories about the land where you stayed for three years. What did you call it? Ath—?”

“The Athabasca country,” he said. “Very well, then, Madeline. I shall do as I did then. I shall tell you to relax and merely add a ‘Really?' and a ‘How splendid!' in the appropriate places. I will entertain you.”

And she was entertained, too. For the very first time, she realized much later as she rode back up the valley with Jean while Howard told a new audience about his turnip crop, she had forgotten herself and him and their surroundings and had been enthralled by his stories of a northern land that sounded as if it must be on a different planet, so remote was it from anything in her experience.

She did not think she had removed her eyes from his face during the telling. But she had seen the thin, angular, darkly handsome face and the live, dark eyes of a fascinating storyteller. Not the forbidding, rather frightening face of the James she knew.

And now she was almost sorry that she had not
allowed them to ride along in their customary uncomfortable and rather hostile silence. For she had had a rare glimpse of him as a real person. And it had been a glimpse of a person she could like and be drawn to. Not just by the power of a physical attraction but by the compelling fascination of his character.

She fought, as she had fought for four years, not to put her feelings into words. For if she did so, then the pain would be unbearable indeed. Dominic had put it into words, of course, two days before they left London.
But she would not remember the words or acknowledge their truth. She would not admit to herself—and never would—that she loved James Purnell.

And James, for his part, riding along the valley with Howard, listening with part of his attention to an enthusiastic account of turnip crops and boars that might one day rival his father's and drainage schemes that would increase his acreage, watched Madeline and marveled at what had just happened.

For though he was accustomed to people's curiosity about life in the far Northwest, both in Canada and in England, and though he had accustomed himself to answering that curiosity, no one else had ever opened the floodgates of his memories and observations as she had just done. Though she had only requested the stories. She had not said a word once he had begun.

It had been like talking to himself, thinking to himself, a skill he had become expert at. And when he had glanced at her in the telling, it had not been Madeline he had seen, the Madeline with whom he always felt taciturn and watchful and gauche, the Madeline he had always been convinced would not care a fig for him or his life. It had been a vibrantly beautiful woman whose green eyes and
parted lips had shown her engrossment in what she heard.