The Secret Pearl (6 page)

But Willoughby had remained in his blood. It was what he had fought for—Willoughby, his home, England in miniature.

And yet now he hated to go back there. Because Sybil was there. Because life could never be what he had grown up dreaming that it would be.

And yet he must go. And something deep in him was perversely
glad that he must. Willoughby in the late spring and summertime—he closed his eyes and felt that deep surge of longing that he always felt for his home when he was away from it and allowed himself to think of it.

And there was Pamela. Sybil did not care a great deal for her despite her protective attitude, despite the fact that she hated to allow him near the child. She spent almost no time with their daughter. Pamela needed him. She needed more than a nurse.

She had more than a nurse. She had a governess.

Fleur.

He had put her from his mind after salving his conscience by finding her employment. And Houghton had assured him that she seemed qualified to be a governess. Houghton would have interviewed the girl thoroughly.

He did not want to think of her. He did not want to see her again. He did not want to be reminded. He had only ever been unfaithful to Sybil that once, though there was precious little to be unfaithful to.

Why had he had Fleur sent to Willoughby? He had other properties. He could have sent her to one of them in some servant’s capacity.

Why Willoughby? To be in the same house as his wife. As himself. To teach his daughter.

A whore teaching Pamela.

“That’s enough, confound it,” he said, opening his eyes. “Are you trying to put me to sleep?”

“That I was, sir,” Sidney said, smiling cheerfully. “There is less of your temper to contend with when you are asleep, sir.”

“Damn your impudence,” the duke said, sitting up and rubbing at his eye again. “Fetch my riding clothes.”

F
LEUR DID NOT MEET
either her new charge or the duchess during the day of her arrival at Willoughby Hall. They had
apparently gone visiting during the afternoon, taking the child’s nurse with them.

“Mrs. Clement was her grace’s own childhood nurse,” Mrs. Laycock explained. “They are very close. I am afraid she will resent you as much as the duchess will, Miss Hamilton. You must just keep in mind that it is his grace who pays your salary.” She spoke briskly, so that Fleur got the impression that she was not the only servant who must keep such a fact in mind.

His grace was, apparently, from home. It was likely that he was in London for the Season if the Mr. Houghton who had interviewed her was his personal secretary. Mrs. Laycock did not know when he was to be expected home.

“Though he will be here, no doubt, if he gets wind of the fact that her grace is planning another party,” that lady said, “and a grand ball.” Her tone was disapproving, though she said no more on the topic. She would take advantage of the absence of her grace, she said, to show Fleur something of the house abovestairs.

It was so magnificent and built on such a massive scale that Fleur could only trail along behind Mrs. Laycock, gazing in awe and saying almost nothing. All of the state and family and business apartments were on the
piano nobile
, the schoolroom and the nursery and the servants’ quarters in the smaller rooms above. Fleur had already seen her own room, small and square and light and airy, next to the schoolroom. It overlooked back lawns and trees. It looked rather like heaven in comparison with her room in London.

The tour of the house began in the great domed hall at the front of the house with its clerestory lantern high, just below the dome, flooding the room with light, and the dome itself painted with soaring angels. A gallery ran the circle below the lantern.

“An orchestra sits up there on grand occasions,” the housekeeper explained. “When there is a ball, the doors to the long
gallery and saloon are kept open to make one grand ballroom and promenade. You will see it if it rains the day of her grace’s ball. It is to be outdoors by the lake, and we will be invited, Miss Hamilton, it being an outdoor affair. But it will be moved indoors if the weather is inclement, of course.”

Fleur looked up and tried to imagine an orchestra sitting up there and music echoing around the circular pillared hall. She imagined crowds of people dressed in their evening finery, bright and laughing and dancing. And she smiled. Oh, she was going to be very happy. Despite what Mrs. Laycock had hinted about the duchess and Lady Pamela’s nurse, she was going to be happy. How could she not be? She had had a glimpse of hell and had survived it.

The long gallery ran the whole length of one of the wings, along the front of the house, one side of it consisting entirely of long windows and ancient Roman busts set in niches. The coved plasterwork frieze and ceiling gave an impression of great height and splendor. The long wall opposite the windows was hung with portraits in gilded frames.

“His grace’s family from generations back,” Mrs. Laycock said. “You would need the master himself to explain it all to you, Miss Hamilton. There is nothing about Willoughby that he does not know.”

Fleur identified a Holbein, a Van Dyck, a Reynolds. It must be wonderful, she thought, to have such a line of ancestors to picture in one’s mind. The Duke of Ridgeway, Mrs. Laycock told her, was the eighth duke of his line.

“We are all waiting for an heir,” she said, her voice turning a little stiff. “But so far there has been only Lady Pamela.”

The offices and most of the guest rooms were behind the long gallery, Fleur was told, though she was not taken there.

The great saloon was on the central axis behind the hall, two stories high, its wall hangings of crimson Utrecht velvet, the heavy furniture arranged neatly around the perimeter of the room upholstered in the same material. The great pedimented
doorcases and the cornice and mantel were gilded, the ceiling painted with a scene from some mythological battle that Mrs. Laycock could not identify. Large landscape paintings in heavy frames hung on the walls.

The dining room, the drawing room, the library, other rooms, and the private family apartments were in the other wing, the one that balanced the gallery wing.

Fleur was awed by it all. She had grown up in a grand house. Indeed her father had been its owner until his death in an inn fire with her mother when Fleur was eight years old. Both the house and his title had passed to his cousin, Matthew’s father, and she had become a mere ward of the master, kindly though carelessly treated by him, unwanted and resented by his wife and daughter, ignored by Matthew until recent years.

But Heron House was not one of the great showpieces of England. Willoughby Hall evidently was. And despite her regret over the lost dream of a cozy manor and a small family group, she felt excited. She was to live in this magnificent mansion. She was to be a part of its busy life, responsible for the education of the duke and duchess’s young daughter.

Good fortune was to be with her, after all, it seemed. Perhaps she was to have a small glimpse of heaven to balance her other recent experiences.

“I would take you walking in the park,” the housekeeper said, “but I can see that you are weary, Miss Hamilton. You must go upstairs and rest for a while. Perhaps her grace will wish to speak with you later and perhaps you will be expected to become acquainted with Lady Pamela.”

Fleur retired gratefully to her room. She was feeling somewhat overwhelmed by it all—by the events of the past two months, by the great good fortune of finding such a post when she had not been to that employment agency for a week, by the unexpected discovery that the post was no ordinary one at all. The journey had been long and exhausting.

And she had just that morning had one of her great fears put to rest—she was not with child.

Altogether, she thought, sitting by the window of her room, enjoying the peaceful scene outside and the gentle breeze that lifted the curtains and fanned her cheeks, she was far more well blessed than she could have expected to be just two months before.

She might have hanged. She might still hang. But she would not think of it. Today her new life had begun, and she was going to be happier than she had been at any other time in her life—since the age of eight.

She removed her dress, folded it neatly over the back of a chair, and lay down on top of the bedcovers in her chemise. How different from her room in London, she thought again, looking up to a silk-covered canopy over the bed, and looking about at neatness and cleanliness and hearing nothing but silence about her, except for the distant chirping of birds.

She closed her eyes to float on blissful drowsiness. And saw him again—his face dark and angular and harsh, the scar a livid slash across it from the corner of his eye to his chin. Bending over her, his dark cold eyes looking directly into hers.

His hands on her, first between her thighs and at the most secret place and then beneath her. And that other part of him searing its red-hot and relentless path into her very depths. She could feel it tearing her apart.

“Whore,” he said to her. “Don’t think ever again to escape that label. You are a whore now and will be for the rest of your life, no matter how far or fast you run.”

“No.” She shook her head from side to side on the bed, braced her feet more firmly on the floor, tried to pull back against his powerful hands so that he would not push so deeply into her. “No.”

“This is not rape,” he said. “You have sold yourself to me of your own free will. You are going to take my money.”

“Because I am starving,” she said, pleading with him. “Because I have not eaten for two days. Because I must survive.”

“Whore,” he said softly. “It is because you enjoy it. You are enjoying it, aren’t you?”

“No.” She squirmed to release herself from the strong hands that held her while he worked his pleasure in her. “No.”

No. No. There was nothing of herself left. No dignity. No privacy. No identity. Deprived of her clothes. Held wide by his knees and the powerful muscles of his thighs. Invaded to the very core of her being. No.

“No. No. No!”

She was sitting up on the bed, sweating, shaking. The familiar dream. The dream that was haunting her nightly. One would have thought that it would be Hobson’s dead face that would come to her as soon as she released her hold on consciousness, she thought, but it was not. It was that of the gentleman with the ugly scar who had hovered over her, taking the very last possession that had been hers to give—or sell.

Fleur got up wearily from the bed and stood before the window to cool her face. Would she never forget him? The sight of him? The feel of him?

Had he really said those words to her? She could no longer remember. But his face and his body had said them even if he had not uttered them aloud.

There surely could not be an uglier, more evil man in the world, she thought. And yet, memory reminded her, he had bought her food and insisted that she eat it. And he had paid her three times what she had asked for outside the theater. He had not done anything to her that she had not freely consented to.

And he had brought her a cold cloth with which to cleanse away the blood and soothe herself.

She rested her face in her hands. She must forget. She must accept this gift of a new life that some benevolent power had granted her.

“T
HAT IS PRETTY, DARLING,”
the Duchess of Ridgeway said, bending down to kiss her daughter on the cheek and glancing smilingly at the painting the child held up for her inspection. “I will certainly see her, Nanny. It must be made clear to her that she is to be subordinate to you and that she must not force Pamela into doing anything she does not wish to do.”

“She is expecting to meet her charge this morning, my lady,” the nurse said. “I have explained to her that Lady Pamela likes to be quiet in the nursery during the mornings.”

“Must I meet my new governess today, Mama?” the child asked petulantly. “Did Papa send her?”

“He did it to provoke me, did he not?” the duchess said to her nurse. “He must have heard of my plans and thought to have his revenge by sending a prosing schoolmistress for my darling. But I have a right to company, don’t I? Just as much as he does. He is enjoying the Season in London. Does he think I can live here all alone and be dull? Does he think I do not need company too to dispel this endless boredom?” She coughed dryly and reached for a handkerchief.

“I told you to wear a pelisse yesterday, lovey,” the nurse said. “It is still just spring, even if the sun does shine. You will never get rid of your chill if you don’t take care of yourself.”

“Don’t fuss, Nanny,” the duchess said crossly. “I have had this cough since winter, even though I always bundled up warmly then, as you told me to. Do you suppose he will come home if he hears?”

“I daresay he will, lovey,” the nurse said. “He usually does.”

“He does not like me to have any enjoyment or company,” her grace said. “I hate him, Nanny. I really do.”

“Hush,” the nurse said. “Not in front of Lady Pamela, lovey.”

The duchess looked at the child and touched one soft dark ringlet. “Send her down to my sitting room, then,” she said, “this Miss Hamilton. Adam may have hired her, Nanny, but
she must be made to see that she will be answerable to me. After all, Adam—”