The Temporary Wife/A Promise of Spring (38 page)

Grace thought for a moment. “No,” she said, “don’t refuse. We will go.”

After all, she thought, she had come home in order to confront her past. She might as well face all of it. There had been a time when she had liked the viscount, who had indulged Gareth as much as her father had her. She
told Peregrine of the invitation. She did not explain that their host was Gareth’s father. She had meant to, but did not add the information when the time came. Perry must be tired of hearing of her former lover and her son. It seemed almost an insult to his good nature to be constantly referring to them.

Peregrine was in his usual good humor when he crossed from his dressing room to join Grace in hers before they left on the evening of the dinner.

“Perkins’s chest has just swelled by a good two inches,” he said, grinning at Grace’s image in the mirror. “He has finally succeeded in tying a mathematical. You see?” He indicated his neckcloth. “Don’t you think the folds quite magnificent, Grace? I feel I should be on my way to St. James’s or Carlton House at the very least.”

“Quite splendid,” she agreed.

“Ah,” he said, “you are wearing a blue gown. I think you are right that it is time to leave off our mourning gradually. You look delightful in color again. Did you enjoy your walk with Ethel this afternoon?”

“Yes,” she said. “We called on two of the sick cottagers. I remember them well. It was good to see them again.”

Peregrine grinned. “How delightfully silly young girls can be,” he said. “I swear those three did not stop giggling all the time I was with them this afternoon. One of them had to purchase ribbons and another lace. And they all had to try on a dozen bonnets each at the milliner’s, though they did not buy one between them. And they found the eating of ices and cakes at the confectioner’s an enormous joke. The new curate saw us through the window and came inside to pay his respects. And they all blushed and giggled behind their hands. The curate didn’t giggle, by the way, but he did blush to the tips of his ears.”

Grace smiled at him in the mirror and dismissed her
maid. “Priscilla and Miss Stebbins will be going to London soon,” she said. “And there they will join dozens of other giggling girls, Perry. It is the Season, the marriage mart.”

He was laughing, she saw, his eyes dancing in merriment, his teeth very white and even. “Life there will certainly not be dull,” he said.

Their group were not to be the only dinner guests. That was clear as soon as they approached Lord Sandersford’s drawing room behind the straight back of a footman and heard the buzz of voices coming from inside the room. Grace was nervous. She drew Peregrine back behind Martin and Ethel and Priscilla—her father had declined to come—and tried to calm her thumping heart. The viscount was greeting two other guests, who stood between him and her view.

But finally he was able to turn to greet the new arrivals. He bowed to Ethel and Priscilla, shook Martin’s hand, and turned to Grace and Peregrine. He was a tall man of military bearing, fit and well-muscled, extraordinarily handsome. His hair was dark and wavy, rather long, his face tanned even though March had scarcely begun. A slight cleft in his chin added to his attractive appearance. He regarded his guests with keen, rather mocking eyes.

“Ah, Lady Lampman,” he said, taking her cold hand and bending over it as he raised it to his lips. “As lovely as ever, I see. Sir Peregrine Lampman, I assume?” He took Peregrine’s hand in a firm clasp and stood exchanging pleasantries with him for a couple of minutes.

But Miss Stebbins and her mama attracted Peregrine’s attention and beckoned him away. He must, it seemed, admire the ribbons that he had witnessed the girl purchase just that afternoon.

“Well, Grace,” the viscount said when they were relatively
alone, “are you going to faint, or are you going to scorn to do anything so weakly feminine?”

“Your father is dead, then, Gareth?” she asked, her voice sounding far away to her own ears.

He laughed. “Had you not heard?” he said. “Did you not know it was I you were to meet tonight? How famous! My father died six years ago.”

“I did not know,” she said. “I had not heard. Or that you had come home. Where is your wife?”

“Dead too,” he said. “She was a poor thing, Grace. Weak. Following the drum was just too much for her constitution. She died in childbed more than nine years ago. And even the child did not survive.”

“I am sorry,” she said.

“You need not be.” He shrugged. “It was all a long time ago. Come. My butler is summoning us to dinner, I see. I will lead you in. Take my arm, Grace. You are not going to faint, are you?”

“No.” By sheer effort of will Grace dragged herself back along the dark tunnel that had been sucking her toward oblivion for the past several minutes, and lifted a hand that felt as if it were not quite part of her to rest on Lord Sandersford’s arm. She looked around for Perry and saw him across the room offering his arm to Miss Stebbins and saying something that had both the girl and her mother laughing merrily.

P
EREGRINE WAS RATHER
enjoying himself. It had amused him since his arrival at his father-in-law’s to find that he had been adopted as a favorite by three very young ladies, his wife’s niece among them. It had always been so, he thought entirely without conceit, ever since he had grown past boyhood. He had never had to make any effort at all to attract the attention of young ladies or the liking of their mothers and older female relatives.

He had never been able quite to explain to himself his success with the ladies. And perhaps it was not any great success either, he thought. Very rarely, if ever, had he felt that one of his admirers was languishing with love for him. They merely seemed to enjoy his company and do a great deal of giggling and flirting when he was by.

Perhaps they sensed that he liked women a great deal. He had always found it a good foil to his more serious and introspective side to amuse the ladies and devise new ways to draw their laughter and their blushes.

And it was amusing to find that he could still surround himself with giggling girls and their smiling mamas even though he was a staid married man. It amused him even further to note that the same girls who derived great merriment from his company tended to blush and sigh over the thin and romantic figure of the young curate, who looked as if he could do with a good square meal. Doubtless they all dreamed of feeding his stomach and finding a way into his heart. None of them seemed at all smitten by the very handsome figure of the evening’s host, who was apparently widowed and therefore perfectly eligible. But then they were very young ladies and Sandersford must be close to forty.

Peregrine stood patiently and good-humoredly behind the pianoforte stool turning pages of music as his regular trio of young girls each in turn tried to impress both him and the rest of the company with her musical talents. And he grinned across the room at Grace, who was seated with some of her former acquaintances. She looked so very suited to her name and so very lovely without the usual black mourning gown that he gazed rather too long at her and missed his cue to turn a page.

A few minutes later a delegation of young ladies asked the viscount if they might dance, and the servants came in to roll up the carpet, and a plump matron took the stool in order to play for those eager to exert themselves.
And Peregrine found that he had hardly a moment even to think of his wife. He laughed and danced his way through one vigorous set after another, assuring two young ladies that, yes, their dancing skills would be quite up to the standards of Almack’s and a third that, yes, dancing in Lord Sandersford’s drawing room was every bit as splendid as dancing in the grandest ballroom in London.

Peregrine was enjoying the whole experience of meeting his in-laws and the other people who had been a part of Grace’s past. He liked the rather dull and plodding but solid and respectable Martin, and the serious, dutiful, and shrewd Ethel. And he was intrigued by his father-in-law, who spent most of his days shut up in his own rooms, rather like a volcano that one was never quite sure was dormant. There was a great deal of resentment and guilt and love and other muddled emotions locked up inside the old man, Peregrine was sure. He only hoped that Grace’s father would not die before he had come to some sort of peace with himself.

And Grace. Peregrine, standing beside a panting Miss Horlick, sipping lemonade with her, looked fondly at his wife, who was not dancing at that moment, though she had accepted a few partners. This was a hard time for her. She was looking rather as she had looked at the rectory for five years: withdrawn, rather tight about the lips, only her eyes calm. It was only now that he realized that in the last year since their marriage her expression had relaxed, softened, and that she had bloomed into a mature beauty.

She was looking severe again. Perhaps a little less than beautiful, though it was hard for him to tell. He knew her so well, was so familiar with her every mood and expression, that he could not possibly say any longer if she was beautiful or not. He could only say that, to him, she always was. She was Grace, his wife. She was the
only woman, perhaps, on whom he looked not with his customary indulgent amusement, but with something of an ache. He could make other women happy without any conscious effort. He wanted so very badly to make Grace happy, and he was not at all sure that he did so.

This time was hard for her. But it was also good for her. He was sure of that. Her life would never be complete if she could not be reconciled with her family. And that reconciliation was coming slowly, inch by cautious inch. And she could never be at peace until she was reconciled with herself, until she could forgive herself. She must have this time, agonizing as it might be for her now, to learn that there had been no connection whatsoever between the death of her child and her sin in conceiving him out of wedlock. She must learn to see that death as the tragic accident it had been.

She was looking particularly drawn tonight, Peregrine thought. It must be more than usually hard on her to be in a gathering such as this, surrounded by all the people who had known her when she lived through her five-year ordeal. His eyes twinkled down at Miss Horlick as he took the empty glass from her hand and assured her that she would doubtless survive even if Mr. Piper, her next partner, did choose to swirl her down the set as he liked to do. And his heart ached for his wife.

There was only so much he could do to help her. She must live alone through the torment of her memories. She must find her own peace. He could only be there to smile at her, to hold her hand during the worst moments, to leave her alone to find room for her memories, to hold her and love her with slow tenderness at night.

He caught her eye across the room and smiled warmly as he came toward her.

“Are you enjoying yourself?” he asked, knowing very well that she was not. “Will you dance this next one with me, Grace?”

“I have promised it to his lordship,” she said, looking up at him with her large, calm eyes and setting her hand in his without seeming to realize that she did so.

“Grace?” Peregrine frowned and lowered his voice so as not to attract the attention of anyone else. “You are not going to faint, are you?”

“No, of course not.” Her eyes appeared to grow larger. “Only it is hot in here, Perry. And I have been dancing. Of course I am not going to faint.”

And of course being overheated did not turn one as pale as any ghost, Peregrine thought, squeezing her hand and turning his attention and his smile on the lady seated beside her.

G
RACE HAD TOLD
only one conscious lie in her relationship with her husband. She had told him on the day he had offered her marriage—or, rather, she had agreed with his assumption—that Gareth was dead. And yet at the time it had not seemed like a lie. Gareth was dead to her, had been since his final letter to her when she had already been increasing for six months, explaining that circumstances had forced him to marry a girl she had never heard of.

That was all. He had not explained what the circumstances were or what made them more important than returning home to marry the woman he had claimed to love for the past four years, the woman who was bearing his child. There were the usual protestations of undying love and a few enthusiastic details about life as an officer in the Guards.

He was dead. As far as Grace was concerned, he was dead. Except that she had not grieved or worn mourning for him. She had merely died a little inside and grown up a great deal and turned all her thoughts and
her passion inward to the child she had so selfishly and so carelessly conceived.

The lie to Perry should be easy to correct. It had been a fairly innocent lie, and Perry was not a hard man to deal with. She should have been able to turn to him when he came from his dressing room later that night, put down her hairbrush, and simply tell him. Tell him that Gareth was still alive, that Gareth was the Lord Sandersford who had been their host that evening. It should have been easy. And it was certainly essential.

“Let me do that,” Peregrine said, reaching for the brush. “You have such lovely hair, Grace. Did you send Effie to bed?”

“She was yawning rather loudly,” Grace said. “Effie is quite an expert at dropping not so subtle hints.”

“She is very young,” he said.

“I know.” Grace smiled at him in the mirror. “And very smitten with that blond-haired footman of Martin’s. Have you noticed?”

He grinned back at her. “It was a pleasant evening, wasn’t it?” he said. “We haven’t danced since Christmas.”

“Yes,” Grace said, “it was pleasant.” She closed her eyes. He was drawing the brush gently through her hair. Her heart was thumping uncomfortably.

“Was Sandersford ever a soldier?” he asked. “He certainly bears himself like a military man.”

Grace kept her eyes closed. He had provided her with the perfect lead-in to what she must say. “Yes,” she said. “The Guards. He sold out, I believe, when his father died six years ago. He … we … they have always been neighbors of ours.”

“A pleasant man,” he said. He laughed suddenly. “Who do you think is going to get the curate, Grace? Would you care to place a wager?”