The Perfect Mistress (39 page)

Any evidence you might bring against Gladstone now will be tainted. Your motives will be suspect."

Pierce scarcely heard the next several comments as they moved on to consider the possibilities. They were consigning him to a place on the political shelf. His integrity had been compromised, and now both his personal and political judgment were called into question. His marriage had gone beyond mere social embarrassment; the scandal was wrecking his political career. And he had hypocritical old William Gladstone to thank.

"Well, then, our course is clear," Tottenham was saying as Pierce came back to the present. "Everyone knows about Gladstone's depraved involvement with these prostitutes, that he thumbs his nose at decency and morality, while claiming to represent them. But, if his intelligence is as good as Sandbourne's fate would suggest, then we are undoubtedly wasting our time trailing him through the streets."

"Here, here." Harrison sat forward with a gleam in his eye. "I say we need a more direct way to catch him 'in the act.' " After a silence he lowered his voice, so that they all had to lean forward to hear. "What say we help things along a bit?"

"What do you mean?" Disraeli's man was clearly interested.

"What say we arrange a few soiled doves for him 'rescue'… see to it that he has a thoroughly wicked bit of debauch… just before several right-thinking and civic-minded gentlemen discover what is afoot and break in on him?"

Harrison looked to Tottenham, who smiled and looked to Tyburn, who smiled and looked to Sewell. Their glittering eyes and grim smiles registered an ominous note with Pierce. They were talking about
arranging
the old man's demise, not just documenting it. He squirmed, thinking of his outrage at the notion that Gladstone had plotted against him. But, as they began to suggest ways and places and times, he suppressed his twinges of conscience.

Gladstone had tried ruin him politically and personally, he told himself.

Why should he interfere if others now decided to return the old man the favor?

Rosalind's new status as a "reformed tart" did little to make her presence at Thorndike palatable to Beatrice. The two seemed determined to antagonize each other. Why else would Beatrice have roused the staff just after sunrise one morning to begin their annual round of spring cleaning a week early…

and have sent them first thing into Rosalind's rooms to roll up the rugs and collect the draperies for beating and airing? Why else would Rosalind have gone storming down to breakfast in a flame red nightdress and dressing gown… and have insisted on having a shot of brandy in her morning coffee? Why else would Beatrice have invited the local rector to tea the next afternoon and then coaxed him to expound at length on the intricacies of passages of scripture? Why else would Rosalind have winked at the rector, then pulled out a cigar and lighted it?

As wisps of pungent blue smoke wafted across the tea cart, Gabrielle watched her mother-in-law blanching and the rector swallowing his outrage along with his tea, and her face caught fire. As the tension became unbearable, she excused herself and fled the drawing room. Rosalind hurried after her, intercepted her in the entry, and pulled her down the nearby hall, into the walnut-paneled library.

"Mother, how could you?" Hurt and resentment were visible in Gabrielle's pale skin, in the dark smudges beneath her eyes, as she faced her mother.

"It's only a cigar," Rosalind said defensively. When Gabrielle glared at her, then at the cigar she held, she had the grace to redden. "Well, I always wanted to try one, but Augustus was always so dead-set against—"

Lowering her chin, she looked about for a place to get rid of it. Spotting a crystal ashtray on Pierce's desk, she stubbed it out.

"I think it's time you went home," Gabrielle said tightly.

"What? Leave you here… in the clutches of that great gray gargoyle?"

Rosalind lifted her head. "I shall do no such thing. There is nothing more important to me or more pressing than being here to comfort you in your time of crisis."

"Nothing?" Gabrielle's eyes darkened. "You're only making things worse for me."

Rosalind's defiance faltered as she studied Gabrielle and recognized that those disturbing signs of wear and woe were in part the result of her own behavior.

"I am doing it again, aren't I? Giving in to my impulses and letting you take the—"
Consequences
. The moment she had both sought in coming here and dreaded to face had finally arrived. Reaching for Gabrielle's hands, she pulled her to the leather-clad sofa. "I'm sorry. It seems like I'm always…

Gabby, there are some things I need to say to you, things I came here to…"

She searched her daughter's strained face. "I know I have not been much of a mother to you. I want to tell you that if I had it to do over again, I would do things very differently."

Gabrielle watched her mother grappling with memories and regrets, and felt her own difficult emotions rising to the surface again.

"You mean, with the duke."

"I mean with
you
." Rosalind looked down at Gabrielle's hands in hers and drew a hard breath. "I don't know if I can explain, or if you will understand, if I do. I was so young and so much in love with Augustus. I don't know if you can ever understand what I felt for him… how I ached just to be with him, how I craved his presence." She looked away, allowing the memories to come and closing her eyes tightly at the pain they caused. "When he was near, it was like being a little intoxicated all the time."

Gabrielle didn't want to hear it, didn't want to think of the great passion that had produced and then selfishly excluded her. But as she listened to her mother's quiet, pain-filled confession, she felt the stir of understanding in her heart. On her wedding night she had felt just such a passion. It was brilliant and breathtaking and terrifying. It overwhelmed and possessed her, expanding her senses, altering her body's internal feelings and rhythms. It wrenched control from conscious will and yielded it to some deeper and more primal urge imbedded in her very muscle and marrow. It was the kind of experience that could seize a heart… change a soul… and bend a future.

With reluctant insight, she glimpsed her mother's choice from a new perspective. For an impressionable young girl, the promise of love and the awakening of such passions had probably been too overwhelming to resist.

For even with a very different past, an unromantic outlook, and grave personal experience of the price passion demanded of a woman, Gabrielle had found herself making just such a surrender.

In that quiet moment, Gabrielle felt another missing part of her heart somehow fall into place, edging out a bit more of the resentment she felt toward her mother. She was seeing Rosalind's life from a woman's perspective now.

"I think I understand."

"Do you, Gabby? Dear heaven, I hope so." Rosalind stroked Gabrielle's cheek with a pained tenderness. "When you were born, I loved you so very much… but I was so terrified of losing him. He was my lover, my support, my life. I knew I would have to send you away when you were old enough, and I searched out the finest school money could buy… a place that would prepare you for a brilliant future. I believed it was the best thing I could do for you. And I followed your progress. Louise Marchand wrote me regularly." She rose and began to pace, rubbing her hands together, growing more agitated with each step.

"If only I hadn't been so immersed in
him
. I lived my entire life for that man. I ate only what he liked and wore what he liked, read what he liked, and learned about whatever subject caught his fancy, just so I could talk with him. I played whist and faro because he liked them… and I nearly always
lost
because I knew he liked to win. I purged my wardrobe of pink because he wasn't fond of it. I loved horses but never rode because he said

'city riding' bored him. I was the perfect mistress. But I was only a mistress.

I never had any claim on Augustus, except his desire for me."

The pain in her heart finally exploded in her face and form. "The bastard

—it was all about him, you see. His needs. His desires. Yes, he gave me love. His sort of love. And passion and comfort. Everything I needed, in fact, except respect. I thought he was jealous to be with me and me alone"—

she stared into her past, seeing it all from a very different perspective—

"when in fact he had built me a luxurious little box so that I wouldn't taint the rest of his 'noble' life."

Beatrice stood outside, transfixed by what she was hearing, halted on her way to clear them out of the library and send Rosalind packing from the house. She had seen them on the sofa, glimpsed tears in Gabrielle's eyes, and caught part of Rosalind's confession. Since last night she had been plagued by Rosalind's revelation in the dining room. The woman's story was so different from her own—yet they had the same regrets, the same pain, the same need to reach out to a child they had lost…

"Don't let it happen to you, Gabby." Rosalind knelt by Gabrielle's feet, seizing her hands. "Don't let him put you into a box. You're a wife… you needn't be a slave to a man's desires. You can have a respectable life. I wish I could help you—but I honestly wouldn't know where to begin. God knows, I never thought to hear myself say this, but perhaps you can learn from Pierce's mother, use her as your example. She knows what it takes to be a wife—"

"No."

That single powerful syllable stopped both their hearts. They turned to find Lady Beatrice standing in the doorway with her hands clasped so tightly that they were whitened, her dark eyes mirroring the turbulent emotions inside her. They glanced at each other and wiped hastily at tears, wondering how much she had heard. Her next words let them know she had heard enough.

"You mustn't follow my example… It is true, I have been a wife, and I have lived a life of scrupulous respectability. But I was put into a box just as surely as your mother was." She came forward slowly, groping for words to express things she had scarcely allowed herself to think.

"Like you, my girl, I was married and bedded and left… after only one night."

Gabrielle rose, seeing the eyes that were so much like Pierce's, now dark and luminous with pain. Behind that slip in composure, she glimpsed for the first time the person inside Lady Beatrice: a complex woman, controlling and opinionated, fiercely committed to a set of standards and a way of life.

But there was something more… a deeper feeling, a sense of having struggled, of having won and lost.

"I was a green young girl when I married… fresh from my first season, dazzled by Royce St. James's good looks and charm. But I never had a chance at his heart." Lady Beatrice took a tight breath. "After one night, he was gone.

"I was tucked away respectably in the country for much of the year. At first, I tried to be exactly what he expected—demure, proper, respectable, accommodating. I saw to his household and made his life comfortable. I was the perfect wife. But I was only a wife. I never had any claim on my husband except his name. Pierce was born soon after, and the succession was secure. Royce never shared my bed again. I wanted more children, but…" She glanced at Rosalind, seeming both troubled and relieved by her recognition of what they shared. "So you see, I, too, was put into a box… a tidy, respectable, suffocating box."

Her eyes filled with moisture. "I love Pierce from the depths of my being.

But he is his father's son, my girl. For your sake and for his, don't let him do to you what his father did to me. Don't let him lock you away… out of his life."

Gabrielle stood rooted to the floor, stunned, staring at her mother and her mother-in-law. They were women from entirely different worlds—one the perfect wife and the other the perfect mistress—the very embodiments of the two paths a woman could choose. The thing that separated them was passion. The thing that joined them was regret.

"I've always believed there were two choices for a woman: being a mistress or being a wife," Gabrielle whispered. "But, the duke decreed I could not be a mistress, and Pierce has made it clear he wants nothing to do with a wife." The ache in her heart was spreading through her entire body.

"All I wanted was the chance to choose for myself."

"What would you choose, Gabby?" Rosalind asked. "What do you
want?
"

Gabrielle turned to the window and stared at the sundrenched lawn, wishing some of the sun's light and warmth could dispel the chill in her.

What
did
she want?

A month ago she could have answered easily: marriage, respectability, a bit of personal freedom. A month ago, she had believed that marriage would protect her. She had wanted to forever separate herself from the hurts and disappointments that love and intimacy and caring would inevitably cause. But marriage to Pierce had stripped her of that defense and plunged her headlong into the very joys and agonies she had struggled to avoid.

Now there was no safe haven, no protection for her against the pleasures and the pain that love would work in her life. For good or for ill, she now had to face them… to survive and somehow surmount them.