The Temporary Wife/A Promise of Spring (46 page)

“There is something quite strange about this situation, Grace,” he said. “The bulk of your guests amusing themselves with great energy at the other end of the room while you sit here behind the teapot in demure domesticity. The Grace I knew would have been in the very center of that activity.”

“The Grace you knew was considerably younger, Gareth,” she said. “Would it not look extremely peculiar for a matron of my age to be romping with the very young?”

“And yet your husband does,” he said quietly.

Grace said nothing. She stacked the cups more neatly on the tray beside her.

“I could do violence, Grace,” he said. “I want to shake you out of your torpor.”

“You are quite unrealistic,” she said. “You expect me to be as I was fifteen years ago. I was only a little past twenty then. I am close to forty now. I cannot stay a girl forever.”

“Nonsense,” he said. “Age has nothing to do with the question. You were alive then. You are half-dead now. You have been avoiding me, Grace. Are you afraid of me?”

“Of course I am not,” she said, her eyes dropping from his momentarily. “But you cannot expect me to seek you out either, Gareth. I am married to Perry.”

His lips tightened. “I might end up doing murder, you know,” he said. “Look at him, Grace. Look at the man to whom you insist on remaining loyal. He is a boy. A thoughtless, laughing, undoubtedly empty-headed boy. Though I will grant you, a tolerably pretty one. And you call him husband? I will not accept it. I give you due warning that my patience is running out. You cannot tell me that you feel any attachment to him beyond some gratitude, perhaps. He did rescue you, I grant, after Paul died, though you might have come to me if only you had known that I was widowed and back home.”

Grace’s silence was stony.

“He was at Kew with Lady Leila Walsh last week,” he said. “Did you know? Did he remember to tell you? Oh, with a few other young people as well to add some respectability. But very much with her, nonetheless. Do you not know that she means to have him, Grace, and that he has every intention of being had? If it is not already an accomplished fact, that is. Are you blind, or do you refuse to see?”

“And do you mean to have me, Gareth?” she said in some anger. “And do you believe that I have every intention of being had?”

“No,” he said, “to the second half of what you said. You are a coward, Grace. You are afraid to examine the state of your own heart and act on what you find there. Are you afraid of the scandal? Are you afraid your Peregrine will divorce you? It is very unlikely, I do assure you. He will be happy to let you go your way while he goes his. And I do not care that much”—he snapped his fingers—“whether we can be legally wed or not when you come to me. We belong together. We will be married in all ways that matter.”

“Yes,” she said, “I know that you do not set much store by marriage, Gareth.”

He laughed and tried to take her hand, but she moved
it away in order to adjust the angle of the teapot. She was finding his presence suffocating again. She was very aware of him, as she always had been—of his broad shoulders and his long-fingered hands, his dark hair and handsome face. She was aware and she was frightened. She could feel the pull of his power over her, but did not know the nature of that power. Did she still love him? Or did she hate him? Was she afraid of him? Or was it herself she feared?

“Sometimes,” he said, “and with great relief, I see flashes of the old Grace. There was pure spite in those last words, my dear. You are still angry over my desertion, are you not?”

“My son lived the whole of his life without a father,” she said.

“Well,” he said, “I was not responsible for his early death, Grace.”

“And the whole of his life as a bastard.”

“I am sure your family was far too well-bred ever to use that word in his hearing,” he said.

“But it was used in my hearing,” she said. “And it was used by a few to comfort me after he died. I must be relieved, it seemed, to know that my son would not grow up to know himself a bastard.”

“Come on,” he said, his voice grim at last, “tell me more. This has to all come out before we can get anywhere, you and I. I think we may even come to blows before it is all over. But, yes, Grace, I mean to have you. And you will have me. Because at the bottom of your anger is your love for me. So come on. Keep talking.”

“They put the label on the wrong person,” Grace said. “It was his father who was the bastard. And who
is
a bastard. You are trying to destroy my life all over again, Gareth. I have been happy for more than a year. Happy!
But you must kill that happiness. I hate you now as I have hated you for years.”

He smiled. But his eyes were burning down into hers. “This is better,” he said. “Now we are approaching the truth. We are not there yet, but we are on the way. Keep talking.”

“No!” Grace picked up the teapot with hands that were not quite steady and poured some into her empty cup. “Not again, Gareth. I am not going to forget my surroundings again as I did in that ballroom. No.” She drew a few steadying breaths. “Do tell me about your late wife’s property, the one you have invited us to next week. Is it large?”

“It is large enough,” he said, “for us to find some privacy, Grace. We will continue this, ah, discussion there, perhaps even conclude it. We will have everything out in the open that has been festering in you for years. You will have the chance to strike at me with your fists or your fingernails if you wish. But the moment cannot be avoided. I promise you that. Now, Lady Lampman, was there anything else you wished to know about my property?”

“No, I thank you, my lord,” she said. “You have been most specific.”

She met Peregrine’s eyes across the room and did not even try to quell the ache inside her. She knew now that it would not go away and that she could no longer expect Perry to take it away for her.

L
ORD
S
ANDERSFORD’S HOUSE
at Hammersmith overlooked the river and was so beautiful, Ethel declared, that it was amazing that his lordship had not made it his principal seat. But the viscount merely smiled and explained that home is something one feels in one’s blood
and heart and has nothing necessarily to do with obvious beauty.

His town guests had been invited to stay overnight. Ethel, Martin, and Priscilla were among this number, as were the Stebbinses and two male cousins of his late wife’s. And, of course, Grace and Peregrine.

Peregrine knew as well as Grace did why they were there, that these two days in the country somehow represented a crisis in their marriage. He had known it from the moment their invitation had arrived, and even before that probably. And he had seen it very clearly at his own home the week before. He had expected Sandersford to contrive to have a private word with his wife there. And he had expected that same look of intensity in their faces he had seen at the ball.

He had expected too that Grace would not be happy afterward, that she would be feeling guilt and uncertainty. The crisis was coming, something far more powerful than had yet happened, and something that could not be averted. Oh, yes, it probably could be prevented, Peregrine granted. If he chose to assert his masculinity, his rights as a husband, there were probably several courses he could take to protect what was his own. He could take his wife home and keep her there. A very simple solution. Or he could confront her with his knowledge, forbid her to speak alone with Sandersford ever again. And he had no doubt that Grace would obey him. Perhaps she would even be relieved to have all the stress of the situation lifted from her own shoulders.

But he could not take either of those courses. He could only take the apparently unmanly course of staying quiet, of leaving his wife free to find out and to live her own destiny. Perhaps it was only in that week of his intense unhappiness that Peregrine realized fully what his feelings for his wife really were. And it was only in the
same time period that he realized fully the nature of love. The terrifying nature. For love cannot take anything for itself. It can only give and leave itself wide open and defenseless against emptiness and pain and rejection.

And so Peregrine took his wife to Hammersmith with no comment upon the white, set face that had been hers for all of the previous week or on her eyes, which held desperately to their calmness during the carriage ride, in which they were accompanied by Priscilla and Lucinda Stebbins.

And in Hammersmith he allowed Grace to stay close to him without in any way following her around. He let her take his arm and hold to it throughout the tour of the house given by their host, knowing that that same host was far too skilled a man to allow her to stay there at his side for the whole of the rest of the day and the morning of the next.

They stopped in the gallery that overlooked the river and became so absorbed in examining the rare collection of Chinese porcelain there that they were scarcely aware of the glorious view from the window that had the other guests exclaiming in delight. And in the music room they admired all the various musical instruments collected by Lord Sandersford’s mother-in-law.

“It is as well that we do not own these things, Perry,” Grace said, “or I would spend half your fortune on music lessons so that I could play them all.”

“And I would spend the other half so that I could play them too,” he said. “Then, with no fortune left, Grace, we could wander the countryside, like the minstrels of old, earning our daily bread with our music.”

“That sounds good,” she said. “I will carry the flute, Perry, and you can load the pianoforte on your back.”

They both laughed. “Perhaps it is as well we do not own them,” he said.

And they walked in the gardens and down by the river and agreed with the other guests that they were fortunate indeed to have been granted such a gloriously warm and sunny day for their visit after more than a week of indifferent weather. They stood and watched as two of the cousins rowed Priscilla and Miss Stebbins out on the water, and agreed that they were quite content to keep their feet on firm—and dry—ground.

They sat side by side on the terrace to take tea and listened as Lord Sandersford, at his most charming, entertained his guests with amusing anecdotes of military life. And Peregrine felt Grace’s arm brush his during a gust of laughter over one of the stories, and smiled down at her. Soon after, all the guests retired to their rooms to rest for a while and to get ready for dinner and the evening party, to which several of the neighboring families had been invited.

It would be that evening, Peregrine thought as he stood in his dressing room that opened off one side of the bedchamber he was to share with Grace. He buttoned up his shirt slowly and smoothed out the lace at the cuffs so that it covered his hands to the knuckles. There was to be dancing in the lower drawing room, Sandersford had announced, to accommodate the young people who had been invited. And doubtless the doors onto the terrace would be kept open on such a warm evening.

It would be that evening. He was powerless to prevent it, or rather, he had chosen to be powerless. He must only watch to see that the confrontation when it came was not entirely against Grace’s will. He knew that she did not want it, that she resisted the moment. He knew also that she did want it, that she recognized its inevitability.
But even so, the moment must not be forced on her against her will. Against that at least he could and would protect her.

L
UCINDA
S
TEBBINS HAD
not taken well during the first weeks of the Season. A little overplump for most tastes and with hair that tended to be more yellow than blond and that she wore in an unbecoming style with masses of tight ringlets, she could not lay claim to any great prettiness. And her tendency to become tongue-tied or giggly in company and to blush in uneven patches of red did not add to her attractions.

Yet she was an innocent and sweet-natured girl, Grace knew, and one whom Perry had very kindly taken under his wing. He sat next to the girl at dinner and had her giggling with amusement rather than embarrassment before the end of the first course. And he danced the first country dance with her in Gareth’s large lower drawing room.

Grace was happy to see that one of the cousins led her into the second dance and lingered to converse with her afterward. He was a particularly small and thin young man. It was rather unfortunate perhaps that he tried to overcome these deficiencies by padding out the shoulders of his coat and the calves of his legs and by wearing a lavender and yellow striped waistcoat and extremely high shirt points, and by putting a quizzing glass to frequent and absurdly languid use. Grace had sat next to him at dinner and had found him to be a perfectly sensible young man once she had penetrated beyond the bored superficiality of his opening remarks.

Priscilla, of course, was preening herself before the obvious admiration of the other cousin and two tolerably handsome and eligible neighbors. She had taken well
with the
ton
and was clearly enjoying every moment of her triumph.

“Of course,” Ethel was saying to Grace and Mrs. Stebbins, “Priscilla will not even be eighteen for another five weeks. We have no great wish for her to fix her choice this year. She is far too young to marry. We merely wish for her to gain experience.”

“Lucinda will doubtless be considering some of her offers this year,” Mrs. Stebbins said, “since it is doubtful that Mr. Stebbins will consent to bringing us here for another Season. He is so hopelessly rustic, Lady Lampman. Of course, we wish to choose an eligible husband for her. We do not have to accept the first offer she receives.”

It was strange, Grace thought, that she had never been brought to London for a Season. She could not now remember if there had even been any question of her coming. She certainly could not recall craving any such thing. If she had, doubtless she would have had her way. In those days her father had been quite unable to deny her anything she had set her heart on.

But she had been in love with Gareth by the time she reached the age to make her come-out. And planning to marry him and live happily ever after with him. They were to travel together, visit all the fashionable cities of Europe together. There had been no need of a come-out Season.