The Temporary Wife/A Promise of Spring (33 page)

“I hope you are right about Miss Howard and dear Perry,” his wife said, wandering toward him almost absentmindedly. “Oh, William, what are you about now? And in broad daylight too. Anyone would think I was still a spring chicken. Oh, dear, I really think I am old enough now that this should be done only in darkness. Oh, very well, then. Are you sure the door is locked?”

T
HE
E
ARL OF
Amberley paid a call on his friend when he heard the news.

“It is really true, then, Perry?” he said when they had walked out behind the stables and stood looking out over the fields of Reardon Park.

“I assume you refer to my betrothal,” Peregrine said. “I have heard that tone of voice from several others in the last day. I did not look for it from you, Edmund. Yes, it is true. Miss Grace Howard has consented to honor me with her hand. She is going to be my wife.”

Lord Amberley was silent for a while. “She needs help,” he said. “She is quite destitute, as far as anyone seems to know. But she is older than you, Perry, and although I will admit that she is a handsome woman, she
seems to be quite lacking in openness and charm. Is your gesture not just too noble? Are you prepared to ruin the whole of your life for the sake of doing a kindness?”

Peregrine allowed his friend to reach the end of his speech before throwing the whole of his weight behind the fist that connected painfully with the earl’s nose.

“Damn you, Edmund,” he said between his teeth, glaring as the other staggered on his feet and lifted a hand to the blood that was spurting from his nose. “Damn you to hell. You will apologize if you expect me ever to speak to you again.”

The earl took a handkerchief from his pocket and mopped at his bleeding nose with a slightly shaking hand before looking at his friend again. “I am sorry,” he said from among the folds of the linen. “I do apologize, Perry. What I said was unforgivable. The lady is your betrothed, and of course you must defend her honor.” He withdrew the handkerchief, glanced down at it with a grimace, and raised a tentative hand to his reddening nose.

“I shouldn’t have hit you,” Peregrine said, turning sharply away to look out over the fields again.

“Yes, indeed you should,” Lord Amberley said, checking the bridge of his nose to see if it were broken. “I could be happier without this pain, of course, but I am glad you did hit me, Perry. It proves something to me. Forgive me, please.” He held out his right hand.

Peregrine took it and the friends smiled ruefully at each other. “It’s not quite what you think, Edmund,” Peregrine said. “It’s not just because she is destitute, and it’s not just because Paul was my friend. I care for her. I know that most people will never believe that. And I suppose it does not matter to me a great deal as long as she believes me. But I would like you to believe it. You are my oldest friend, Edmund, and probably the nicest person I know.”

Lord Amberley squeezed his friend’s hand. “It seems strange to think of you married, Perry,” he said. “Somehow I have never thought of you settling down. I thought I would race you to the altar, though I have no thought of marrying before I am thirty. Three years to go yet! I wish you well. I really do. All the young ladies around here will be wearing the willow for you, you know.”

Peregrine grinned. “Why would they miss me when they have you to angle after?” he said. “And Dominic twenty already and as tall and handsome as they come. And the Eden title and an estate in Wiltshire to boot. That nose of yours is shining like a beacon, Edmund. And still bleeding a little. We had better go back to the house and get some cold water for it.”

T
HE BISHOP HAD
told Grace before he left late on the day of the funeral that he would send a new rector in one month’s time and that she might stay at the rectory until then. Peregrine arranged it that the new man should marry them on the day after his arrival. Grace spent the night before her wedding with the Misses Stanhope, who preened themselves indeed on the distinction of having a bride married from their house. Even dear Bertie had not been wed at home.

Grace spent the month cleaning the rectory from top to bottom and sorting through Paul’s effects. His books, his most valued possessions, she gave to her betrothed. His other few belongings, including his vestments, his sermons, his watch, and pitifully few other items, she put together into a box inside her own trunk, which was by no means overflowing when it was finally packed.

Sir Peregrine Lampman and Grace Howard were married on a gray and chilly morning in spring with all their friends and neighbors in attendance. It was a quiet celebration. Both bride and groom wore deep mourning.
The Earl of Amberley and his mother, as well as his sister and brother, Lady Madeline Raine and Dominic, Lord Eden, had postponed their removal to London for the Season in order to provide a wedding breakfast in the state apartments at Amberley Court.

The gathering was a large and a quietly cheerful one. If the warm affection and hearty good wishes of a community could ensure the happiness of a marriage, then this one must prove to be one of the happiest. If any of those present still felt dismay at the age difference between bride and groom and at the disparity of their personalities, then they hid those feelings well and in all probability pretended even to themselves that they felt no such misgivings.

Peregrine took his bride home late in the afternoon and showed her the house and the garden and the stables. She had been to Reardon Park only once, several years ago when Peregrine’s father had still been alive and his mother still at home.

Grace looked quietly at the long lawns and few trees behind the house and felt her husband smiling at her.

“I have an unimaginative gardener and am no better myself,” he said. “If you wish to work your magic here, Grace, please feel free to do so. I have always been an admirer of your garden at the rectory.”

“There is room for a rose garden here,” she said. “I have always longed for a separate rose arbor. There was not enough space behind the rectory. And there should be daffodils and primroses among the trees. And flower beds.” She gazed about her, obviously seeing in her mind far more than the bare green expanses that surrounded them. “There is room for a splendid orchard over there.” She pointed to another stretch of lawn to the east of the house.

Peregrine laughed. “My gardener will be handing in his notice,” he said. “I shall have to hire others. And I
will learn from you, Grace. I have always wanted a beautiful garden, but I am afraid I gaze about me and cannot picture what can be done. You shall convert me into a devoted and domesticated gardener.”

Grace looked at him seriously. “You must not curtail your activities on my account,” she said. “I will be content just to be here. You must not change your life.”

He smiled. “But my life has changed,” he said. “Today. I am a married man now, my dear.”

It seemed strange to Grace after nine years to have a maid again to help her change her dress for dinner and brush out and coil her hair. It seemed strange to go down to a dinner that someone else had planned and prepared and to have it served by a butler and a footman. Strange to have someone else clear away the food and the dishes, and to know that someone else would wash the dishes in the kitchen.

And it was strange and somewhat embarrassing to discover that, although she had her own dressing room and sitting room, she was to share a bedchamber with her husband. She had not been at all sure during the past month exactly what kind of a marriage it was that Peregrine planned.

“I thought that perhaps you were offering me a marriage in name only, Peregrine,” she said when he came to her after she had dismissed her maid and stood in the middle of the bedroom, her nightgown covering her decently, her hair brushed out and lying smoothly down her back. Her one concession to vanity was the absence of a nightcap.

“Perry, if you please,” he said, coming to stand close to her. “I love my mother dearly and loved my father, but I have always been appalled by the lack of sensibility they showed when they named me.” He grinned. “Grace, I have married you. You are my wife. I would have offered you the position of housekeeper here if I had not
wanted more of you. And I have always thought rather strange the frequent custom of a husband and wife occupying separate rooms. I will want to make love to you frequently. It is far more convenient for us to share the same bed. Is it not to your liking?”

She raised her large calm eyes to his. Her thin face was pale. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I will be the wife you want me to be, Perry.”

“You have beautiful hair,” he said, reaching up both hands and smoothing them lightly over it. “You are a beautiful woman, Grace.” He bent his head and kissed her pale lips. “Come to bed. I will see to the candles.”

A
S SO OFTEN
happened after a gloomy day, the clouds had moved off during the evening, and the night was brightly illuminated by an almost full moon and myriad stars.

Grace Lampman lay with her head turned to one side, watching her husband sleeping beside her. He looked absurdly young in the repose of sleep, his fair hair rumpled, his usually smiling face relaxed. She felt an ache of tenderness for him. Perhaps there was an end to punishment, after all. For her, that was. Only time would tell what her marrying him would do to Perry.

She had not expected to come alive again. She had given up life nine years before. Because she could never, even in her worst moments, contemplate suicide, she had been forced to keep on breathing and eating and sleeping and filling in the time until she could stop living indeed. And she had always been thankful for the small but infinitely precious gift of Paul’s love and for his need of her time, that commodity that hung most heavily on her hands. But she had never expected more than that, had never felt the need of more.

Until Perry had tempted her and in her weakness she
had given in to that temptation. And even then she had hoped not to be forced back into life again. She had hoped that what he wanted of her would be no different from what Paul had accepted for nine years. She had hoped to be no more than his housekeeper, to share no more than his name.

She had always liked Perry, had always brightened at his knock on the rectory door, at his sunny smile, his frequent inquiries after her health, his praise of her embroidery and her garden. She had loved him for the brightness he had brought into Paul’s life. Paul had always been different: small, gentle, studious, misunderstood and reviled by would-be friends as a boy, alienated by a family who would have liked him to be more aggressive, more ambitious as a clergyman. Perry had been not only a friend of the intellect to Paul; he had brought laughter and some gaiety into her brother’s life for the first time ever.

She had liked to look at him, slender and graceful, handsome in his own very special, sunny-natured way. Yet she had never looked at him in the way a woman looks at a man to whom she is attracted. He was so much younger than she, a boy almost, though he was in fact well past boyhood. It amused her at church, and at the social gatherings she sometimes attended with Paul, to see the young girls look at him with admiration and some longing and to see him smile back and flirt with them. Yet never in a cruel manner. They knew perfectly well that he merely flirted. He did so even with the older ladies, though never with her.

She had always thought that perhaps he would end up marrying Lady Madeline Raine, a young lady of equally sunny nature and equal ability to flirt quite inoffensively. They would make a handsome and a glittering couple, Grace had thought. They could not fail to be happy together.
Lady Madeline was twenty years old. But he had married a thirty-five-year-old woman instead.

Grace lifted her head from her husband’s arm, on which it had been resting. His arm would be horribly cramped if he left it there. She eased it slowly down to his side. He grumbled slightly in his sleep, but did not wake. He turned over onto his side, facing toward her.

Her own youth seemed such a very long time ago, Grace thought. It could have been another lifetime altogether. She had always been restless and headstrong, stubborn, the spoiled daughter of a father who had only two sons besides her. Her mother had died soon after Paul’s birth. And she had been the close friend of Gareth, only son of the Viscount Sandersford, for as far back as she could remember. Gareth, as headstrong and as stubborn as she, arrogant, intelligent, vibrant with life, yet with a streak of cruelty that often showed itself on weaker playmates, especially Paul.

She had played with him, defended him, argued with him, fought with him, and ultimately loved him. And she had given herself to him during those final days before he left for the wars, heedless to the consequences that she must have known were a strong possibility. She must have known. She had been one-and-twenty already. She could even remember feeling a stubborn, frightened sort of pride when she first suspected that she was with child, though Gareth had no longer been there to scorn with her the opinion of the world.

It had been a love with a cruel ending. A love and an ending that could only deaden anyone who survived it. And she had been dead to all intents and purposes for nine years since Jeremy had left her, and only painfully alive for more than four years before that, knowing when it was far too late to acquire such wisdom that her own selfish heedlessness of the moral code would ultimately bring more suffering to her innocent son than it
would to her. She was half-dead anyway with Gareth gone. Jeremy was the only light in her life. Yet she had doomed Jeremy from the moment of his conception.

And was she to come alive again now? It was far more peaceful to live in the shadowed land of the half-dead. There was no pain there. She had fought off the pain of Paul’s death, fought desperately, allowing it to force itself past the barriers she had built around her emotions only on the morning after his funeral when Perry had come to her, and put outside the barriers again immediately after.

But Perry had married her in good faith, with every intention of making her his wife indeed. And he had made her his wife, in the quiet ceremony that morning, with a strange rector taking Paul’s place, and in this bed an hour before. And though she had not made the comparisons at the time, she could not help making them now. Gareth and Perry.