The Secret Pearl (25 page)

And if he continued to stand where he was, he thought as a buzz of quiet conversation spread around him again, then he was going to draw attention to himself. He moved to sit beside one of the ladies who was listening to the music and watched Brocklehurst move around to stand behind the music stool.

Did she play like an angel? If she did not, she certainly looked like one. The unadorned simplicity of her pale blue dress, the same one she had worn to the ball, the plain smoothness of her red-gold hair, the calm beauty of her face—all set her apart from any of the other ladies present. Yes, she looked like an angel.

Who was she? Isabella? Last name unknown? “Her—,” she had begun to call her former home. Brocklehurst lived at Heron House in Wiltshire.

He would get to his feet when the music had ended and escort her to the door. She could return to her bed and to sleep.

But his brother spoke before he could do so.

“Bravo, Miss Hamilton,” he said. “You have a superior touch, indeed. You have some acquaintance with Lord Brocklehurst? I am sure I speak for the whole gathering when I say that you may be excused now with our thanks. Indeed, both of you are excused. Bradshaw?”

Lord Brocklehurst bowed as she half-turned on the stool.

“I had hoped that I might take a stroll with Miss Hamilton in the long gallery,” he said. “With your permission, your grace?” He turned his bow on the duchess.

“You have my permission, Miss Hamilton,” her grace said with a smile, “and you may for the present forget about the task I set you for tomorrow morning.”

His grace resumed his seat and watched her leave as calmly as she had entered, Lord Brocklehurst a few paces behind her. She afforded him only a brief expressionless glance as she passed him.

“Well, I am for bed,” Sir Philip said with a yawn. “May I escort you to your door, Victoria?”

“I think everyone is ready for bed,” the duchess said. “I never felt more tired in my life.”

The duke rose to offer her his arm. And he wondered if it had been a trick as deliberate on her part as on his brother’s, to bring Fleur to the drawing room at a shamefully late hour and then to snare her into a tête-à-tête meeting with Brocklehurst.

“You are feverish again,” he said to his wife, a hand over one of hers when they paused a few minutes later outside her dressing room. “You need rest, Sybil. Why don’t you stay in bed until noon tomorrow? I will see to the entertainment of our guests.”

“I will be better by morning,” she said. “I am just tired. And how can I miss a single hour with my guests? Life is so dull when they are not here. You are either away altogether or about your own business somewhere all day.”

“It need not have been that way,” he said. “We might have made a marriage of it, Sybil. We might at least have shown each other some kindness.”

“No, it need not have been this way,” she said, looking up at him, her eyes bright and feverish. “I might have been happy.
He
would not have neglected me, Adam. He would not have left me for months at a time and then resented my inviting guests here to relieve my boredom and loneliness. But then, I would not have needed guests with him. I would have been neither bored nor lonely.” The color was high in her cheeks.

He opened the door for her.

“I will send for the doctor in the morning if your fever persists,” he said, “and for a physician from London if we get
no more satisfaction than we did in the winter when you were so ill.”

“I don’t need anyone but Dr. Hartley,” she said petulantly. “Why did you send Thomas away, Adam? I will never forgive you, you know. And I am glad he has come back. Glad!”

She whisked herself inside the room and closed the door hastily. He could hear her coughing behind it.

He turned back with a sigh to the daytime apartments.

F
LEUR HAD NOT AT FIRST
been sorry to be woken up. The face bent over her, the body that was causing her such tearing pain and such eternal humiliation, was Daniel’s. His handsome, pleasant features were distorted by raw carnal lust so that she hardly recognized them. But she knew they were Daniel’s.

He had been calling her whore while hurting and hurting her.

The maid who had been sent to her room told her, wide-eyed, that she was to dress immediately and present herself to the company in the drawing room.

He had told everyone, she thought, as she dressed herself hastily and with trembling hands. He had decided to tell everyone, and now he was going to confront her with her crime in front of the whole gathering, for the amusement of all.

Her day of reprieve was at an end. And she was indeed his puppet on a string. And would be for the rest of her life.

She felt weary to the marrow of her bones by the time a footman opened the doors into the drawing room and she stepped alone inside to be confronted with light and sound and the sight of a large number of people. But she would not show it. If it was the last thing she was ever to do, she would carry this off with dignity. Neither Matthew nor anyone else would have the satisfaction of seeing her grovel or beg or break down and cry.

And then his grace was standing before her informing her very briefly that the reason she had been called from her bed at
midnight was that he wished to display her talents before his guests. She was now to pay for the privilege she had been granted of practicing alone each day in the music room.

Or so she interpreted the few words he did speak.

She looked into his harsh and shuttered face, she looked at the disfiguring scar, and she hated him. Not only did she feel a fear of him and a physical shrinking from him. She hated him. She hated the fact that he could grant what seemed like free favors and then demand payment for them purely for his own pleasure. She hated him for claiming to care for and protect his servants while using them as slaves to cater to his whims.

She remembered their ride, the exhilaration of their race, the splendid sight of him galloping alongside her on his black stallion, surging ahead of her, leaping over the gate in the wall, laughing at her as she came after. She remembered her own laughter, her own happiness, her own strange forgetfulness, just as it had happened when she had waltzed with him.

And she hated him.

She spoke only to Lord Thomas Kent, who always smiled at her with open friendliness, and who had spoken up on her behalf that afternoon in the duchess’s sitting room. She would play for him since he had asked and since she did not have any real choice anyway.

His grace stood at the door for a while and then sat down. He had betrayed her. She had played her whole heart out in his hearing morning after morning and he had never disturbed her. He had always given the impression that he listened but respected her need to be alone with her soul. And yet now he had brought her here to play like a performing monkey for people who had had too much to drink and who had no real interest in music anyway.

Something special about those mornings, something she had not thought of or identified before, died. She was very aware of him sitting next to Miss Woodward, quiet, still, dark, and morose. Listening to her. Watching his performing slave.

She hated him. And she was surprised by the force of her hatred. She had only feared him before.

She had not noticed Matthew come up behind her. Amazingly, she had not noticed. But he was there. She felt his presence as soon as she had finished playing and his grace got to his feet.

But her only friend suddenly became her greatest enemy. Lord Thomas Kent, completely misunderstanding the situation, thinking to do her a kindness, was hinting that she be allowed to escape from the drawing room with her acquaintance, Matthew.

And her grace was agreeing with him and rescinding her command of that afternoon that Fleur hand her resignation to Mr. Houghton the next morning.

And so she had been maneuvered into something that was inevitable anyway. But she could have wished that it were not quite so late at night, that she did not feel quite so weary and hopeless. She could have wished for time.

But time had run out.

Two footmen were lighting some of the candles in their wall sconces the length of the long gallery.

“Take my arm, Isabella,” Matthew said. “If we are to stroll, let us do it in a civilized manner.”

The footmen closed the doors behind them when they left.

“Why is it that you succeed in looking beautiful even when dressed so plainly?” he asked.

She slid her arm from his. “What do you want, Matthew?” she asked. “If we are not to leave immediately, if you are not to drag me off to prison, what do you want? Do you want me to lie with you here at Willoughby, become your mistress here? I will not.”

He sighed. “You make me appear so very uncivilized, Isabella,” he said. “Those were your suggestions, not mine.”

“Tell me, then,” she said, “and stop playing games with me.”

“I want you,” he said. “I have for a long, long time. Is that so reprehensible?”

“And for a long, long time I have told you that I am not interested in your protestations,” she said. “If you had loved me, as you always claimed to do, Matthew, you would have respected my feelings. You would not have interfered between me and Daniel.”

“Daniel Booth,” he said scornfully. “A smiling, gentle maid. He could not have made you happy, Isabella.”

“Perhaps not,” she said. “But the choice should have been mine. Why did you arrange things so?”

“So?” He raised his eyebrows in inquiry.

“Your mother and Amelia going away to London,” she said impatiently, “and leaving me alone with you. It was so very improper, and they must have known it, and would have done something about it too if they had had any feeling for me whatsoever. And then refusing to let me go to Daniel’s sister to stay when she asked me, and refusing to let me marry Daniel by special license. You planned it so, didn’t you? So that with no options open to me and no reputation left, I would have no choice but to become your mistress. So that you would have the chance to overpower me even if I refused.”

He stopped and took her hands in his even though she tried to pull them away.

“It was more than time for Amelia to go to town for her come-out,” he said. “And of course my mother wished to go with her. It would have seemed cruel to send you with them, Isabella. The three of you could never agree.”

“It is hard to agree or disagree with someone when you are almost totally ignored from the age of eight,” she said bitterly, “except when you are being criticized and scorned.”

“However it was,” he said, “I thought it kinder to keep you at home where you belonged, Isabella. And it was never my idea to be your guardian, you know. It was your father’s will
and my father’s death that did that—until your marriage or until the age of twenty-five. I did not make those terms.”

“Until my marriage!” she said. “I could have been married to Daniel. You could have been free of such a burdensome responsibility.”

“It was not burdensome,” he said. “But I could not in all conscience consent to your marrying such a milksop, Isabella.”

“It was better to make me your mistress,” she said.

“You are the only one who has ever used that word,” he said.

She laughed. “I suppose you wanted to marry me,” she said.

“Wrong tense,” he said, holding her hands more tightly. “You are a lady. Isabella, daughter of a baron. How can you suggest that I was out to ruin you?”

She laughed again. “Strange that you never thought to mention the honorable nature of your intentions before,” she said. “How delighted your mother would be, Matthew. And I suppose the seduction that evening was to put the stamp of your possession on me before the ceremony.”

“Seduction?” he said.

“I was leaving the house,” she said, “despite the lateness of the hour and the coldness of the evening. My trunk was in the gig. Miriam was waiting for me at the rectory. But you would not let me leave and berated me for my disobedience. And you were not about to send me to my room, Matthew. You were about to take me to yours. Or perhaps not even that. Hobson was to hold me, wasn’t he, right there in the library, while you raped me.”

He released one of her hands in order to pass a hand over his forehead. “What strange notions you have, Isabella,” he said. “You were screaming at me and fighting like a demented creature because I would not allow you to elope with a man I had refused quite lawfully to allow you to marry. Hobson stepped up behind you to prevent you from tripping over the hearthstone and hurting yourself. And you turned and lashed
out at him too and caught him off-balance. It was a crime of passion pure and simple.”

“Yes,” she said, “I suppose a judge would see it that way—once you had explained it to him.”

“It is a pity that the jewels made it seem all rather premeditated,” he said. “Though doubtless I was your intended victim.”

“The jewels?” She had gone very still.

“Those too costly for my mother to take to London,” he said. “They were found in your trunk after you had run away in a panic.”

She stared at him. “Found by someone other than you, I gather,” she said at last.

“By your maid,” he said.

She smiled at him.

“But it must all have been done impulsively,” he said. “It must have been hard for you, Isabella, to lose your parents at a young age, to see my father and us come to the house and take over the property and possessions that you had grown to believe were yours. But they can be yours again, and your children’s.”

“Our children’s,” she said. “Are you really serious about marrying me, then, Matthew?”

“I love you,” he said. “You cannot imagine how I have suffered in the last two and a half months, Isabella, not knowing if I would ever see you again. You must marry me.”

“Must
being the key word, I take it,” she said.

“I would never have forced you,” he said. “You must know that you were wrong about that.”

“My answer is no,” she said.

“You will change your mind,” he said.

“No, I will not.” She smiled at him. “When you leave here, you will leave alone, Matthew.”

He raised his hands and set them loosely about her neck.
He lifted them to her chin, tightened them slightly, and jerked upward.