To Love and to Cherish (10 page)

“Come inside,” she said distractedly, backing up toward the door to the kitchen.

He turned to the stranger, a slight, dark, wiry individual with a gap between his teeth and mischief in his eyes, and held out his left hand. “My thanks, Tranter,” he said gravely. “I might’ve perished without you.”

When they shook, the little man said, “Don’t mention it, yer reverence.” He made Anne a rather elegant bow and walked away. When he got to the outer courtyard door he stopped and turned around. She thought he called out “Front an’ center!” before he disappeared through the archway.

“Come along,” she said again, disguising her distress with briskness, leading the way down the area steps and into the short corridor that led to the kitchen. She stopped, dismayed, in the kitchen doorway: she’d forgotten that every maid in the house had been pressed into service, to provide refreshments immediately and dinner in a while for Geoffrey’s uninvited guests, not to mention overnight accommodations later on. The kitchen was bedlam, with servants jostling each other for space, every flat surface covered with raw ingredients for the coming meal, and poor Mrs. Fruit shouting instructions over the din while the maids shouted back to tell her they’d heard. “Oh, ruddy hell,” Anne mumbled under her breath, turning around. She saw Reverend Morrell’s eyebrows shoot up, and realized what she’d said. “Oh—I’m sorry, that’s—a terrible habit of mine, do forgive me—” He was smiling at her, not with saintly forbearance but with something like delight, and she subsided, relieved and embarrassed. “Come this way,” she said, shepherding him and William Holyoake back the way they’d come and into the scullery. “Sit down,” she ordered, pointing to a stool, and the invalid obeyed. “I’ll be right back.”

She returned to the kitchen for the hot water and towels she’d asked for earlier. “Violet, go and get one of Lord D’Aubrey’s clean shirts from his clothes chest and bring it down to me in the scullery, please.”

“The scullery, ma’am?”

“Yes, the scullery. Go along, quickly.” Violet made one of her sarcastic curtseys and scurried out.

In the scullery, Mr. Holyoake was standing around looking ineffectual. When he asked if she needed him for anything more, she said no, thanked him for his trouble, and let him go. “Glad you’re all right, Vicar,” he said gruffly on his way out. “Don’t mind saying you gave me a bit of a fright.”

Christy waved his hand dismissively. “I shall be right as rain in no time. Thank you for everything, William.”

“Right, then,” Anne said brusquely after Holyoake was gone. “Off with this, I think, so I can clean you up. Do you need help?”

“It’s only a little stiffness,” he denied, unbuttoning his bloodstained shirt and shrugging out of it. They examined the wound on his shoulder together. It was extensive but superficial, and the bleeding had almost stopped. “Shallow,” he judged, peering at it narrowly. “No stitches.”

She agreed. “Nasty, though. I must clean it thoroughly. Let me see your head.” He bowed it submissively, and she slid her fingers gently into his gold-colored hair. “That’s a lovely one,” she murmured, tracing the swelling with light fingertips. “Am I hurting you?”

“Not at all.”

His hair was softer than she’d guessed it would be. She thought again of the beautiful, worried lion in the Rubens painting and smiled. She took her hands away reluctantly. “I believe you’ll live,” she said softly.

He looked up at her. His eyes were an unusual shade of ice blue. She’d seen them burn with earnestness and soften with kindness, but right now they were guilelessly wide and alert, with a particular knowledge that she thought was sexual awareness. Her own eyes dropped to his mouth, and quickly lifted away again.
Well, now
, a voice in her brain remarked.
Isn’t this interesting
.

The water in the big clay bowl was still warm. She saturated a soft flannel cloth and held it to Christy’s shoulder wound, bathing it as gently as possible. He flinched only once, the first time she touched him, and after that he endured it all with manly, tight-lipped stoicism.
So different from Geoffrey
, she couldn’t help thinking. “What happened?” she asked to divert him. “Geoffrey said he thought you were right behind him.”

“My horse shied and I fell,” he said, with no tone in his voice. He closed his mouth and tightened his lips.
Why, he’s embarrassed
, she thought.
Geoffrey beat him and he doesn’t like it. How very interesting
. The hair on his chest was lighter than the hair on his head. Compared to Geoffrey he was a giant, thick-muscled and broad-shouldered. Yet his skin was soft and finely textured. Like his hair. She entertained a swift, lascivious thought involving his bare skin against hers, then forced it out of her mind. She tried to laugh at herself, but she was shaken. Actually shocked.

He paled a little and seemed to stop breathing while she worked on the dirtiest part of his abrasion, over the hard, rigid muscle in the top of his shoulder. “Anne, are you . . . do you . . .” He closed his eyes and said with great nonchalance, “Geoffrey’s all right, isn’t he? Doesn’t . . . never would . . .” He cleared his throat. “You feel perfectly safe, don’t you? None of my business about your marriage and all, I’m not asking that, but you—you’re quite all right, aren’t you, Anne?”

Her hands had gone still in the middle of his extraordinary question. All at once the motive for it hit her, and she stepped back. “What happened?” she said sharply. He looked at her in surprise. “What did he do? Tell me!”

“Nothing. I don’t know what you mean.”

Before she could speak again, Violet appeared in the doorway, carrying the shirt she’d asked for. “Thank you,” she said tightly.

“Yes, ma’am. Will there be anything else?” Her small brown eyes narrowed avidly on the fascinating spectacle of her mistress attending to the wounds of her half-naked minister.

“No, nothing. Go and help Susan,” she snapped, and Violet sent her a poisonous glance before she whirled and left. Detestable girl.

She set the flannel down in the cooling water and fixed Christy with as steely a gaze as she could muster. “He did something, didn’t he? He hurt you. Why won’t you tell me?”

He had the most annoying patience. “Why would you think that?” he asked, deceptively mild. He stood up, towering over her, all naked torso and big, intelligent head. “Unless he’s hurt
you
. Has he?”

Checkmate. She said, “No,” through her teeth. The sensitive skin of his cheeks went pink. She was beginning to love his flushes, even though this one came from frustration instead of embarrassment.

“Geoffrey drinks too much,” he said combatively.

“Sometimes. Not today, though. Did he hurt you? Come, you might as well tell me.”

“Why do you think he did?” he countered cagily. He was trying to be shrewd and slippery, but he was so transparent she wanted to laugh.

Without answering, she turned away, busying herself with Geoffrey’s shirt while she got her face and her emotions in order. Neither of them was going to tell the other the truth, that was obvious. She would have liked to know what Geoffrey had done to him, but it wasn’t worth trading any information about her own private life. She was a woman without confidantes, and had been for so long that anything else was unthinkable.

When she turned back, she saw that he’d been engaged in the same effort to disguise his feelings. Ah, poor Reverend Morrell: he lacked her years of experience; compared to her, he was a hopeless amateur.

“Lady D’Aubrey—”

“Oh, for God’s sake—”

“Call me by
my
name, then!” he burst out, and his fine, irate righteousness set her back on her heels.

“All right,” she said, shakily placating. “I’ve meant to before.
Christy
.” There. It sounded completely natural, and she wondered why she hadn’t said it before now. General perverseness, no doubt. “Christy,” she said again, softer. An addictive name, that irrepressible voice in her brain murmured. She held the shirt out to him, for something to do.

He got it on unassisted, but afterward she decided to button it for him—because his right arm was still stiff, she rationalized. Halfway down, he said to her very quietly, “Listen to me.” If he’d followed then with something suggestive or seductive, she wouldn’t have been surprised—which summed up everything about her frame of mind just then, didn’t it? But he fixed her with a burning blue stare and said soberly, “If you ever need help. If you ever need anything. You know that you can come to me, don’t you? I can help. I can do something. Anne, I
will
help you.”

She nodded matter-of-factly, but inside she felt breathless. The possibility . . . the possibility. . . . Against everything, all her experience, she found herself almost believing him. To have a friend, someone she could trust, someone who might really help her. . . . It was a heady sensation, like contemplating a dive from a great height. “Thank you,” she whispered, ambivalent. Oh, but the possibility . . .

“Stay for dinner,” she said with more force. Returning to normal, he’d think; he couldn’t possibly guess at her urgency. “You can meet Geoffrey’s friends,” she added—as if that were an inducement.

“Thank you, but I’d better go. I’m riot fit for company.”

“Are you in pain?”

“No, not at all, I’m—”

“Then please stay.” Too urgent. She forced her clasped hands to relax. “I wish you would.”

“I think I must go.”

She made her voice light, made it a joke. “Ah, so you’re taking back your offer of help so quickly? Please, it’s just that—I’ve met Geoffrey’s friends before. And I’d be very grateful if you would stay.” She almost said his name again.
Christy
. He’d have stayed if she’d said it.

“Then I’ll stay,” he said.

7 May, midnight

Impossible to sleep. The rain beating against the window and gurgling in the leaky gutters isn’t the culprit; it’s my scattered thoughts, flying around in my head like circling rooks, repeating and repeating. And my guilty conscience.

I made an awful mistake tonight. How could I have forgotten how detestable Claude Sully and the others are, Geoffrey’s so-called friends? But I hadn’t forgotten; it was cowardly and selfish of me to ask Christy Morrell to stay, to help me get through an evening with those men. But I never could have foreseen how they would treat him. If I’d had any idea, I would never have imposed on his apparently limitless good nature. I’m ashamed of myself, I’m angry with him, disgusted with Geoffrey—

No, no, I’m not angry with Christy any longer—how could I be? But I was. Oh, I was. I wanted to shake him and shout in his face, “Do something! Hit somebody!” Even now, when I remember the things they said to him, my fury comes seething back and I want to beat my fists against someone’s unguarded face. Sully’s, preferably.

There were three of them: Sully, Brooke, and Bingham, all rotters, hangers-on, the sort of men Geoffrey is attracted to because he’s smarter than they are but they have more energy (and money); they egg each other on in mob fashion and get up to loathsome “pranks” together that would shame a beastly adolescent schoolboy. Claude Sully is the worst of the lot. Because I never tell Geoffrey anything, I’ve never told him about the time, while he was away in Africa, I think it was, that Sully paid a call and made the slimiest, most boorish attempt to seduce me. It came to blows—I actually struck him across the face—and the worst is that I think he liked it. At least he’d got
something
out of me for his trouble, and he could leave knowing I would despise him
and
myself for a long time. And so I did.

The bloody beast.

And I set Reverend Morrell down in the midst of them, like a Christian among the lions. A cheap, easy analogy, and yet it’s exactly right. He didn’t understand at first what they were about. (
This
is what kills me; there’s a pain in my chest, a real, true ache when I remember the surprise in his face as the truth gradually dawned on him. Why didn’t he see it sooner? What kind of a minister doesn’t know evil exists?) When the taunting stopped being subtle and became blatantly cruel, he didn’t get up and walk out, as it seemed to me any sensible man would have done—that or start throwing the furniture. And after that, his bewilderment over their treatment of him changed to a truly infuriating patience. He literally
turned the other cheek
. The only good thing about it was that Sully grew baffled and enraged, but he couldn’t show it. I loved watching his smooth, oily, insinuating facade crack and the tantrum-throwing little boy peek out. By then I was ready to give them all a good, hard smack, Christy included. There’s not an ounce of Christian saintliness in me, and I’m not sorry. No, not sorry. I’m glad. I feel such contempt for Geoffrey, I don’t even want to speak to him. But I probably will, because I want him to know that I found his passive complicity despicable. Christy, he says, is his best friend. Pity his enemies, if that’s true.

I won’t write the things they said to Christy, they’re too hateful. It was as if his very existence infuriated them. He didn’t look like a minister in his buckskin riding breeches and Geoffrey’s shirt, stretched tight across his chest. He looked like . . . well, I don’t know what. Not anyone’s idea of a country parson, anyway. But that’s what he is, and Sully and the others could hardly wait to let him know that he is a joke to them, a walking relic from the prehistoric past. They asked him about his “calling,” snickering behind his back when he answered them seriously. They made me feel ashamed for the times I’ve tweaked him a little myself, comfortable and obnoxious in my relative worldliness. He tried to engage them in an actual discussion—the fool, the fool!—but of course it was hopeless. Men like that can’t debate, they can only wound and run away.

And never once did he lose his temper. That galled them to the end, and I think they were glad when he finally went away. God knows I was.

But I couldn’t let him go like that, with all my anger still bottled up inside! And I wanted to know how he really felt, what was going on behind all that exasperating tolerance and forbearance. So I went after him. Told Geoffrey I was retiring, and went out the kitchen door and ran all the way around the house. I caught him on the bridge; I was out of breath, hardly able to speak at first. He thought something was wrong, he was worried for
me
—which, of course, made it hard to keep the edge on my anger. But I managed. I’m ashamed to say I berated him, but I couldn’t help it. “Why did you let them do it? What kind of man are you?” Yes, I said that, and much more, as if I had the right, as if what kind of man he is has anything whatever to do with me. But I was wrought up. “Didn’t you hear them? Don’t you know what they were doing? They laughed at you!” Nothing; I had no better luck than Sully at trying to make him angry. “I despise humility,” I said scathingly. “It’s no virtue to me, it’s weakness.”