The Temporary Wife/A Promise of Spring (15 page)

He was walking down the driveway with his wife, on the way to the dower house to call upon Claudia. He had had no chance to assess his feelings about the visit. He did not want to assess them. He wondered if William
would be at home. He wondered if he would be forced to meet the children.

“You went into the village earlier?” his wife asked.

“Yes,” he said. “I went to talk to his grace’s physician. The man has been brought from London merely to tend to his health, but according to his own complaints, he is abused and ignored at every turn.”

“Your father is sick,” she said. “He tires very easily.”

“He is dying,” he said. “It
is
his heart. It is very weak. It could fail him any day or it could keep him going for another five years. But he refuses to rest and to turn over his responsibilities to a steward’s care, as he has been advised to do.”

“Then we must persuade him to do so,” she said.

They had stepped onto the Palladian bridge and had stopped by unspoken assent to view the river and the lawns and trees through the framework of the pillars.

We
? He looked at her sharply and raised his eyebrows. “We must?” he asked.

She was alerted by his tone and turned her head to look back at him. “He called you home,” she said. “He must have found it difficult to do so, to make the first move when he is such a proud man. He wants to settle his affairs, my lord. He wanted to see you married to the lady of his choice. He wanted to see you take over from him here so that he could rest and face his end in the knowledge that the future was assured.”

“He wanted the feeling of power again,” he said curtly.

“Call it what you will,” she said. “But you came. Oh, it was on your own terms, as you keep assuring both me and yourself. But you need not have come at all. You had made your own life and your own fortune. You had left intending never to return. But you did return. You even took the extraordinary step of marrying a stranger before you did. You came.”

She had the unerring ability to arouse intense irritation in him. It must be the governess in her, he decided. “What are you trying to say, ma’am?” he asked.

“That you never did break free,” she said. “That you still love your father.”

“Still, my lady?” he said. “
Still
? Your powers of observation are quite defective, I do assure you. Have you not seen that there is no love whatsoever in this family—or in your husband? You see what you wish to see with your woman’s sensibilities.”

“And he still loves you,” she said.

He made an impatient gesture with one arm and signaled her to walk on. The picturesque view was lost on them this morning anyway.

“You can make his last days peaceful,” she said, “and in the process you can make some peace with yourself, I believe. There is the embarrassment of this afternoon to be faced, and of course there will never be the eligible alliance your father had hoped for. But all may yet turn out well. You can stay here—there is nothing in London that makes it imperative that you return there, I daresay. And I believe your father may come to accept and even to like me a little.”

There was so much to be commented upon in her short speech that for a few moments he was rendered quite speechless.

“His grace may come to
like
you a little?” he said at last. Did this woman suffer from delusions in addition to everything else?

“He showed me the gallery,” she said, “and of course thoroughly exhausted himself in the process. He allowed me to help him downstairs to the library and to set a stool for his feet and a cushion for his head. He allowed me to read the papers to him while he closed his eyes. He would spare me at the end of an hour, he said, only because I had promised to call upon Claudia.”

The devil! He was speechless again.

“I know you came here for a little revenge,” she said, “but you can stay for a more noble reason, my lord. We can make him happy.”

“
We
.” He might have shouted with laughter at the notion of the Duke of Withingsby being happy if he had not also been pulsing with fury. “You, I believe, my lady, are forgetting one very important thing. His grace may live for five years, or conceivably even longer.
We
could make him happy for all that time? How, pray? By proving to him that it is a marriage made in heaven? By presenting him with a series of grandchildren? Are you quite sure you wish to expand our business arrangement to include so much time and so much, ah, activity?”

He had silenced her at last. And of course, as he fully expected, she was blushing rosily when he turned his head to look at her. But an idea struck him suddenly. She had no family. Apparently she had no friends. She had no one. Perhaps … Exactly what was she up to?

“Perhaps,” he said, his eyes narrowing on her, “it is what you hope for, ma’am. Perhaps you would like to emulate my mother with seventeen pregnancies during the next twenty years. I might be persuaded to comply with your wishes. My own part in such an undertaking would, after all, be slight—and not by any means unpleasurable.”

“I would be a fool,” she said quietly, “to want a relationship of any extended duration with you, my lord. You are not a pleasant man. The only reason I endure you at all is that I cling to the belief that somewhere behind your very carefully shuttered eyes is a person who perhaps would be likable if he would only allow himself to be seen. And there is nothing so very horrifying about large families. They happen. The agony of losses in childbirth or infancy is often offset by the great happiness of family closeness and love.”

“Something you would know a great deal about,” he said. He heard the sneer in his voice at the same moment as he saw the tears spring to her eyes. She had no one. Even her parents were dead, and she was only three-and-twenty.

“I beg your pardon,” he said stiffly. “Please forgive me. The words were spoken heedlessly and hurt you.”

When she looked at him, her eyes were still large with tears. How could he ever have convinced himself that she was plain? he thought. But irritation saved him from feeling more discomfort. Damn it all, but she was becoming a person to him. A person with feelings. He did not want to have to cope with someone else’s feelings. When, for God’s sake, was the last time he had apologized to anyone? Or felt so wretchedly in the wrong?

“You have a father,” she said, “and brothers and sisters and nephews and nieces. They are all here with you now. Perhaps tomorrow or next month or next year they will all be gone. Perhaps you will be separated from them and it will not be easy or even possible to be with them again. Pride and other causes I know nothing of have kept you from them for eight years. You have been given another chance. Life does not offer unlimited chances.”

Lord. Good Lord! Deuce and the devil take it! He had married a preacher. One with large, soulful blue eyes that he would fall into headlong and drown in if he did not watch himself.

An avalanche of leaves cascading downward over his hat and into his face broke his train of thought. He was aware of his wife waving them away from her own face and exclaiming in surprise. There was the sound of muffled giggles. Well. He and Will had done the same thing once with gravel and had been soundly spanked for it, the two of them, by the head gardener, who had soothed their pain when he was finished by promising not to report them to his grace.

His wife was looking upward, her head tipped right back. “It must be autumn,” she said with loud and exaggerated surprise in her voice and in her expression, “and all the leaves are falling off the trees. I believe if you raise your cane, my lord, and swish it through the lower branches, you will dislodge more of them.”

More smothered giggles.

“It is not autumn, my lady,” he said, “but elves. If I poke them with my cane, they are like to fall out of the tree and break their heads. Perhaps I should give them a chance to come down on their own.”

The giggles became open laughter and one small boy dropped onto the driveway in front of them. He was dirty and untidy and rosy with glee.

“We saw you coming, Aunt Charity,” he said, “and lay in ambush.”

“And we walked into the trap quite unsuspecting,” she said. She looked up again. “Are you stuck, Harry?”

Harry was. It seemed that he was marvelously intrepid about climbing trees but found it quite impossible to descend again—or so his brother claimed. The marquess reached up and lifted him down. He was quite as dirty as the other child. He was also blond and green-eyed and scarcely past babyhood. He was just as his own son might have looked, the marquess thought, if he had married …

“You may make your bows to your Uncle Anthony,” his wife was saying. “These two elves are Anthony and Harry, my lord.”

“I was named for you, sir,” the elder boy said. “Papa told me so.”

Ah. He had not known that. So these were the two children they had produced, Will and Claudia.

“I am going to tell Mama that you are coming,” Anthony said, taking to his heels.

“And I am going to tell Papa. You are not to tell first,
Tony.” Harry went tearing along behind. He would not catch up, of course. Younger brothers never did. Until they grew up and could use stealth and deceit.

“We must be close to the dower house.” His wife smiled at him.

“We are.” And Will must be at home. “Take my arm. We are supposed to be in love, after all.”

“You must smile, then,” she reminded him.

“I shall smile,” he promised grimly.

H
E NOT ONLY
smiled. He slid an arm about her waist and drew her closer to his side as they approached the house through neatly laid-out parterre gardens. But his arm, she could feel, was not relaxed. Neither were the smiles on the faces of Claudia and William, who had come out of the house to meet them. The little boys came dashing out ahead of them.

But at least they were smiling. They were all smiling.

“Charity,” Claudia said, “I am so glad you came. And you brought Anthony. How delightful.”

“Anthony?” William inclined his head. “My la—” He looked acutely embarrassed. “Charity. Welcome to our home.”

There was something, Charity thought. Something very powerful. It was not just that he had offended them by going off eight years ago. They had married one month before he left. One month before Augusta’s birth, before the duchess’s death. Claudia was very beautiful. William and his elder brother were very close in age. Had her husband loved Claudia too?

“Thank you,” she said. “It is very splendid. In fact yesterday when we were arriving, I mistook it for Enfield Park itself and was marvelously impressed.”

They all joined in her laughter—all of them. She had never heard her husband laugh before. He was looking
down at her—
He should be on the stage
, she thought—with warm tenderness in his eyes.

“You neglected to tell me that yesterday, my love,” he said.

“You would have laughed at me,” she said, “and I cannot abide being laughed at. Besides, I could not speak at all. I had my teeth clamped together so that they would not chatter. You would not believe how nervous I was.”

“With me by your side?”

Her stomach performed a strange flip-flop. On the stage he would draw a dozen curtain calls for each performance.

“You were just as nervous,” she said. “Confess, Anthony.” She turned her face from him and smiled sunnily at the other two adults. “But the ordeal of yesterday is over and we may relax in congenial company—until this afternoon, that is. Your Anthony and Harry mounted a very successful ambush on us out on the driveway. We were showered with leaves. We had no chance at all to take cover.”

“I will not ask if they were up in a tree,” William said dryly. “There is a strict rule in this family that no tree is to be climbed unless an adult is within sight.”

“There was an adult within sight,” the marquess said. “Two, in fact. So no rule was broken.”

“Uncle Anthony had to lift Harry down,” Anthony said.

“Hence the rule,” his father added. “Harry would find a whole day spent in the branches of a tree somewhat tedious, I do not doubt.”

And so, Charity thought, they had established an atmosphere of near-relaxation through some pleasant and meaningless chitchat. But preliminaries had clearly come to an end.

“Charity.” Claudia stepped forward to take her arm.
“Do come inside. I plan to tempt you. But perhaps we should consult Anthony first. We never go to town, a fact about which I make no complaint at all. But I do like fashionable clothes and it pleases William to see me well dressed—or so he declares when I twist his arm sufficiently. And so twice a year he brings a modiste from town down here to stay for a week or so with her two seamstresses. They are here now and I am trying my very best not to cost William a fortune. It has occurred to me that since the two of you married in such a hurry that you had no time to shop for bride clothes, you might wish to make use of her services too.”

“Oh.” Charity flushed and was afraid to turn her head in her husband’s direction. The poverty of her wardrobe was very deliberate on his part. But was there any more to be proved by it now?

“I am to be saved after all, then,” he said, “from the faux pas of having been so besotted and so much in a hurry to wed that I forgot I was bringing my wife directly from the schoolroom to Enfield? It is no excuse, is it, to protest that to me Charity would look beautiful dressed in a sack. Clearly his grace would disagree. Will you have clothes made, my love? For all possible occasions? However many you wish?”

Poor Anthony. He had been given very little choice. Charity could not resist looking at him and smiling impishly. “You may be sorry for offering me carte blanche,” she said.

“Never.” He grinned back at her and tipped his head toward hers. For one alarming moment she thought he was going to kiss her. “You must have something very special for tomorrow evening’s ball.”

The ball that was to have celebrated his betrothal to the Earl of Tillden’s daughter? Would it still take place? She supposed it must. All the guests would have been invited. And she was to attend it? A full-scale ball? As
the Marchioness of Staunton? She was not sure if the weakness in her knees was caused more by terror or excitement.