The Shadow and the Star (44 page)

He stood rigid, with the full extent of the disaster dawning upon him as she spoke. "There is nothing to acknowledge," he said tightly.

"Nothing!" In her passion, she pushed Tommy at him. "Does he seem like nothing?"

Samuel had to take the baby or allow it to fall; Tommy arched his spine awkwardly and screamed at the clumsy transfer, one screech after another.

"Why, he has your eyes!" she said with scorn. "I don't know why I never remarked it!"

"You never remarked it because it is nothing but imagination." That much he managed to say, barely grinding out the words. He could not reason with her now. Temper stiffened all his movements; fury at fate and at himself. He moved past her toward the nursery with the shrieking child.

She came after him; he felt her hand on his arm and turned—but her eyes were shining with furious tears. She snatched Tommy from him and whirled away, kicking out her skirts with the force of her stride as she fled up the hall toward the nursery stair.

"Samuel." Lord Gryphon's voice stopped him cold at the door. The evening lay in a frigid mist on the drive and lawns, swallowing the last carriage headed for the railway station.

"Yes, sir." Samuel did not turn around.

"Going out?" The question was soft, almost lazy, with infinite implications.

Samuel closed his eyes briefly. "Yes, sir."

"I'll go with you."

"Yes, sir." He yanked on his gloves. "If you wish."

They walked out together. Lord Gryphon moved silently alongside Samuel, his hands in his pockets, breathing frost. The gravel drive curved away from the house, leaving warmth and light behind.

Samuel had wanted isolation. He had not wished to encounter anyone, not after his confrontation with Kai. He'd secluded himself while the rest of the guests finally departed, watching from a window as Kai went out on the front steps to see Haye off. She had stood in the drive and waved until the carriage disappeared.

Samuel's hands tightened in his leather gloves at the recollection. He'd no mastery of himself, could find nothing but jealousy and outrage in his heart.

The trees showed dark shapes through the mist. They seemed to float slowly past, while the crunch of his and Lord Gryphon's footsteps filled up the quiet. A set of steps that led to the formal gardens loomed, darkly silvered with the damp.

"What do you intend to do?" Lord Gryphon asked.

He gave the question no context. Samuel stopped. He took a deep breath. "I don't know what you mean."

"The hell you don't." The words were mild. Lord Gryphon kicked a stone to the side of the drive. He looked off into the mist and smiled grimly.

Samuel's mute endurance broke. "I'll send her away," he snapped. "I'll never lay eyes on her again. I'll give her money enough to live like a princess for the rest of her natural life. I'll cut my throat—is that good enough?" He tilted his head back to the empty sky with a wordless sound of torment. "What would be good enough?"

The other man leaned against a stone pedestal, crossing his arms. "Good enough for what?"

Samuel met his cool stare.

"I'm not requiring absolute pristine virtue of you." Lord Gryphon watched him steadily. "I'm no particular saint myself, but when I found the woman I loved, I didn't lay a different one."

Samuel's throat was dry, the air cold in his lungs.

"Do you understand me?" Lord Gryphon asked softly.

Don't
. Samuel closed his eyes against it.
Don't do this to me
.

The quiet voice was inexorable. "I retract my consent. I won't let you hurt my daughter. Or my wife."

Samuel turned on him, walking away. He stopped and looked back through the vapor. "I would kill myself first."

"Yes." Lord Gryphon uncrossed his arms and pushed off the stone. "So I thought."

The footman held out the note on a silver tray. Samuel recognized the handwriting before he touched it. He pulled off his gloves, reduced to such small and pointless evasions for postponing the inevitable.

Lady Tess waited in the music salon to see him.

That was all it said. Samuel had been beaten once, bludgeoned in the back by a barroom stool, in the days when he'd been learning what it meant to be hit. It had arrested his breath, centered all his consciousness on exploding pain, annihilated him—and he had had to go on, to keep fighting, to move when his body was paralyzed.

He did it now. He functioned on discipline and nerve alone. He knocked on the door, opened it in response to her voice, and closed it behind him.

White and pink orchids nodded gently from the mantelpiece and reflected from the black glaze of the grand piano. She sat on the bench, fingering a sheet of music. As he entered, she set it back on the rack.

"I was never a musician," she said. "Kai could play—" She stopped, and looked embarrassed. "Never mind that. Samuel, I…"

Her voice trailed off again. She stood up, smoothing her skirt awkwardly, resting her hand on the piano lid and taking it away again.

"Lord Gryphon has already spoken to me," he said.

She looked up from the keys.

"You don't have to trouble to say it again, ma'am. If seeing me makes you uncomfortable."

She pressed her lips together. "I'm sorry that—everything became common knowledge. I would not have told anyone. Not even Gryf."

A candle burned softly within a frosted globe on the instrument. He watched that, unable to look elsewhere. "You have nothing to be sorry for." He locked his hands behind his back. "Nothing. Beyond bringing me into your house. I've never—been able to tell you. I've tried to say… what that meant…"He lost authority over his voice. Finally, openly, he looked up into her face and said, "I would not be alive."

"Oh, Samuel." She turned back to the piano keys. He watched her bent head, her slim, sun-darkened hands. His chest felt too taut to breathe.

"Hell," he said stupidly, knowing he had made her cry.

"Yes." She wiped at her eyes. "That's just the way I feel, too."

He wanted it over with and plunged ahead, speaking in stiff sentences that held nothing of what he felt. "I'll be leaving tomorrow. I won't see Kai. I'd only ask—that someone tell her the baby isn't mine. That's the truth. I never saw… Miss Etoile—before that day at the dressmaker's. And I never—before last night—"

The words got knotted again. She stood gazing down at the piano keys.

He wished that she would look up at him. He thought that what he couldn't say must be plain in his face. But she did not. She touched one black key, running her forefinger down the length of it.

"I would wait for Kai the rest of my life," he burst out suddenly, "if you thought there might come a time when you could forget this day."

Her finger traced the shape of an ivory note. "It's not mine to forget."

"Kai doesn't know. She only heard what they said about the baby. She doesn't understand—the other."

"It's not Kai's to forget, either," she said quietly. She turned and looked up at him. "Have you not once thought of the girl you've ruined?"

His back and shoulders grew tight. "Ruined."

"I think that word might be used, yes."

"Miss Etoile will be well taken care of. I don't think she'll regret this particular 'ruin.' "

Lady Tess arched her fine eyebrows. "That isn't what she's told me."

He swore sharply. "She shouldn't have spoken to you about it. What has she said?"

"Very much what you've said. That she's betrayed our friendship. That she will leave here. That you are in love with Kai."

"What did she ask for?"

"Nothing. She told me that she isn't your responsibility. I believe that she almost asked me for a letter of character, so that she might become a typist." She tapped her fingernail against the keys. "But in the end, she didn't."

"I'll talk to her." With an abrupt move, he turned to the fireplace. He took up the poker and thrust it among the coals. "She won't have to become a damned typist."

"What will you make of her, Samuel?"

He dropped the poker and leaned both hands against the mantel. "I'll give her a house and five thousand dollars. She won't have to be a typist."

"No," Lady Tess said gently. "What will she be instead?"

He scowled hard into the fire, seeing blue flames lick among the charcoal.

"I wished you to forget where you came from," she said. "I always wished you to forget. Now—I can't believe you don't remember."

Deep inside himself, he began to shake. "I remember."

"And you don't care that she—"

With a violent push, he turned from the fire. "I remember!" he shouted. "If you think it's the same—that I'd make her into what I was—that I could—" He expelled a furious breath, controlling himself, putting the black expanse of the piano between them. "I haven't forgotten where I came from."

Her lower lip trembled. She looked down. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said such a thing."

"Don't cry!" He spoke through his teeth. "God help me, don't cry. I'll come apart."

She sat down abruptly on the bench. The piano made a discordant note as her elbow hit the keyboard.

Never had he said something like that to her before. Never raised his voice, never asked for anything.

His hand closed around a glass paperweight on the ebony surface, his fist reflected in the shine. With a careful command of his tone, he said, "She'll expect me to give her a liberal amount of money. A house in addition is… more than generous. She won't have to sell herself anymore. Unless she wishes to."

Lady Tess lifted her head. "Anymore?"

"She's far better off than she's been in the past. The Lord Bountiful who sent her that note at the dressmaker's had her living in a garret."

"Samuel—" Her face paled. "You are mistaken."

"I'm not mistaken," he said grimly. "I know the place."

"But last night… did you not—" She wet her lips. "Oh, Samuel."

Something in her voice drew him to her wide and dismayed eyes. His hand tightened on the glass.

She spoke slowly, as if the words were difficult to utter. "Samuel… did you not realize she was a virgin?"

He looked down at his hand. Inside the crystalline oval, swirls of color and circles of tiny blossoms made a gay pattern. "Did she tell you that?"

"She didn't need to tell me. I've seen her. A young woman of experience would not weep so, nor bleed."

He remembered a boy who had done both: tears and blood that a lifetime of resolution had not scoured clean. Tears and blood were all that he recognized, the only connection between what he remembered of his past and the physical joy of last night. But he could not admit that he had expected such things, and still had allowed it to happen… had wanted it to happen, wanted it.

The paperweight fell into his palm, heavy and cold. In the oval of glass, his body perceived a potential weapon: his muscles weighed it automatically; his hand judged and shaped the surface for possibilities. He set it down again with care.

He had wished to marry Kai, had tried to make himself good enough, had longed for her purity to absolve him of what he was. He felt walls closing on him.

"I promised her… that you would do what is right."

If he looked up, he would see Lady Tess pleading, and her daughter in her, and everything he'd fought to become.

"Samuel—" The plea faded to bewilderment. "I was so sure that I knew you."

He moved his hand, curled his fingers around the paperweight.

"I never thought… you would not look me in the face," she whispered. "I never thought you would disappoint me."

The glass hit the marble hearth with a sound like a gunshot. He saw the colors explode before he knew he'd hurled it. Curved shards fell into the fire, sending flame and sparks sailing upward.

The flare died back. Lady Tess stood with her hands over her mouth, staring at what he had done.

All his fury, all his frustration—glittering in facets of glass amid the coals.
What's right. Do what's right
.

Kai
! He could not believe it. He could not believe that everything was gone.

He turned, walking out in a haze, leaving Lady Tess alone with the razor-sharp fragments of his dreams.