Lord Lightning (24 page)

But it wouldn’t be easy. The scene on the beach where he had uncovered his shame to her replayed itself over and over again in his mind. He kept remembering the warmth in her eyes, how open and accepting they had been, and the beauty of her silence. He wondered still at how she had refused to judge him, how she had just stayed with him and accepted him for who he was with all his failings—all! How with her silence she had shown him, as no words could ever have, what love might be. That love she had insisted he was born for.

He twisted in his chair, trying to retreat to that comfortable place within himself where he didn’t care and everything was a joke. But he could not.
Hope had entered his heart. It whispered that he
could
learn to love and begged him to explore the possibility.

It was wrong! Like Eliza. Dangerously wrong.

He leaped up out of his chair, unwilling to think about it any longer. He would go up to his room. He would bolt the door. He would give instructions that Eliza leave on the morrow and, by God, this time he would make sure they were carried out. He would not give Black Neville’s son the chance to seduce and abandon her.

But before he could put any of his plans in train, his valet interrupted him to deliver the parcel containing the volumes he had bought for Eliza at the lending library and hand him some letters that had come by the late post. One letter in particular caught his attention with its unfamiliar seal.

It was written on a cheap paper that contrasted strongly with the imprint of the heraldic crest with which it was sealed. The handwriting was that of an educated man, but the letter was written as if in haste, and the hand was difficult to read. Even when he managed to make it out, the words were disjointed and confused. He had to read the letter through twice before he felt he truly understood it.

When he did, he was aghast.

The letter was from Eliza’s father. He sent his compliments and explained that he had only recently discovered from Lord Hartwood’s man of business the identity of his benefactor and the further circumstance that that benefactor had taken his daughter, Eliza, under his protection.

Edward read these words with irritation. What could his man of business have been thinking of to let Eliza’s father know she had gone off with him? He would have thought the man had more sense.

He read on, expecting unpleasantness. But the fear that he was about to find himself involved in an affair of honor with an enraged father gave way to astonishment as he read on. Instead of demanding that Lord Hartwood make an honest woman of his daughter, or meet him at dawn with pistols, Eliza’s father had taken quite a different tack.

Writing that after learning of His Lordship’s fondness for his daughter and bearing in mind that such a girl, had her father’s luck not turned so abominably bad, might have had considerably brighter prospects, but of course, understanding fully, as he did, that such things happened, as unfortunate as they might appear to those who looked only at surface considerations, which a life of philosophy had taught him to ignore, Eliza’s father finally rambled to the point: Might His Lordship be prevailed upon to make himself a small loan, a trifle of some several hundred pounds to be repaid when his circumstances improved? He had every reason to believe this might occur in the very near future. Meanwhile, he hastened to assure Lord Hartwood, if such a loan were made, His Lordship could rest comfortably in the assurance that Eliza’s father would not trouble him again.

Edward sat, stunned. Eliza’s father’s only concern was to extract some financial profit from his daughter’s ruin.

Such things were not unheard of. One could not be a man of the world without knowing that in the degenerate classes men did sometimes sell their daughters when there was no other way to keep body and soul together.

But the letter that he held in front of him, with its heraldic seal and casually scrawled signature, left no possibility that Eliza’s father might be such a miserable brute. For at the sight of the seal Edward had realized he knew the man. Everyone knew him. He was a fixture of the gaming hells. Robert Farrell, third son of the Marquess of Evesbury, the man they nicknamed Pythagoras because of his lifelong obsession with working out a mathematical system with which to beat the house.

Quickly he scanned his memory for what else he might know about the man. He remembered something about a runaway marriage and that Farrell had been disinherited. But all else he knew for certain about the man was that his bad luck at the gaming tables was legendary and that no one, no matter how far gone in his cups, would ever lend Pythagoras Farrell a penny.

But if Eliza was Pythagoras Farrell’s daughter, she was also the granddaughter of a marquess and a woman whose social rank was equal to his own. She was a gentlewoman, an innocent gentlewoman who had borne her untold sufferings with
exactly the kind of quiet, uncomplaining fortitude that embodied what was best about the English aristocracy.

Edward rubbed his forehead in distress. How could he have been so oblivious to the signs she was a woman of his own class? Her accent might be rural, but that was only because she had been raised far from the metropolis. He blessed whatever good angel it was who had taken him under its protection that he had been spared the horror of discovering too late that, like the man he despised above all others—his brother, James—he had ruined a girl of gentle birth.

But his feeling of complacency on that account did not last more than a few moments. Though Eliza retained her maidenhead, his behavior had ruined her as thoroughly as if he had raped her that first night at his town house. Whether or not he had made her his mistress in fact, the polite world
believed
he had, and in that world—in which she deserved to move—the appearance was as important as the fact.

A quiet voice whispered that there was no remedy for what he had done to Eliza except to marry her. The thought stopped him dead. He had never wished to be married. He had seen nothing in the marriages of his peers to convince him that marriage was anything more than a trap every bit as deadly as Eliza’s aunt had suggested. But barely had that thought completed when he remembered what he had felt when Eliza had nestled in his embrace in the carriage as they
had made their way back from the shore, and for the first time in a long and eccentric life, the unpredictability of his nature shot home and Lord Lightning astonished himself.

He wanted to marry her.

Marriage might be a trap, but he wanted her trapped—in his arms, in his bed, in his heart. The realization that his own twisted sense of honor demanded that he marry her unleashed a ferocious desire to keep her in his life. Though the more rational part of him knew he could not succeed at marriage any more than that he could fly off a cliff by flapping man-made wings, he knew he must make the attempt, even if it killed him.

His train of thought was interrupted as Eliza entered the room. She had changed out of her wet clothes as he had instructed her to do, but rather than donning another gown as he had expected her to do, she had wrapped herself in nothing more than a dressing gown of the thinnest silk. Its peach-like tone brought out the beauty of her auburn hair. Its soft folds emphasized the curve of her breasts. Was she wearing anything underneath it at all? He would have sworn she wasn’t. With difficulty he forced himself to ignore the provocation she presented, wondering all the while what she meant by appearing this way. Coming from any other woman the message would have been unmistakable. But this was Eliza, so he knew not what to make of it.

Unsure how to proceed, he reached for the gift he had bought for her earlier, Miss Austen’s book.
Considering what he was about to offer her—his hand in marriage—the gift was of trivial importance, and yet, as he handed her the fat parcel containing the four volumes, he could not help but feel anxiety as to how she would receive it. He wanted so much for it to please her.

She took the parcel from him with a smile that seemed to him, oversensitive as he was at this particular moment, a trifle forced.

“You were too kind to purchase so extravagant a gift for me, “she said as she set about unwrapping the brown paper in which it was covered.

He thought he detected a slight hesitation in her voice. Perhaps it was only his guilty imagination that made him think it, but she seemed to be avoiding his eye, too, which was unusual, given how fearlessly she was wont to gaze at him. The absence of her regard made him aware of how accustomed he had become to losing himself in the sea green depths of her open gaze whenever they were together.

Still wishing to avoid conversation, he strolled over to a small desk and picked up a paper knife with a gold and onyx handle and brought it over to her. She would need it to cut the pages of the new book. “This was my father’s, so I expect it’s mine now,” he said. “You may consider it, too, a gift.”

Again she thanked him. Again he had the feeling she was holding herself apart from him. Had he frightened her that much with their seaside embrace? But if so, why had she appeared wearing
nothing but that provocative dressing gown?

Finally she spoke. “I should like to begin reading my new book immediately, but that would be rude, and a very poor way of thanking you for my gift.”

“On the contrary, I should take your enthusiasm as proof that my gift pleased you.” He was glad to find a neutral topic with which he could converse with her.

Eliza gave him a wary, considering look. Then she seated herself in the tall brown leather chair across from where he already was seated, and for a good half hour they sat in companionable silence, Eliza reading and Edward pretending to do so.

How could he bring up the subject of marriage with her? And how could he do it without revealing that he had received her father’s shameful letter? He wished to spare her any knowledge of that—indeed he must. He did not wish her to know how the letter had catalyzed his desire to wed her. He knew Eliza well enough by now to guess how she would respond to any hint that he wished to marry her out of pity.

It was unfortunate that the subject of marriage had come up the previous afternoon and that he had told Eliza that he shared her Radical aunt’s disapproval of the institution. It would be hard to suggest marriage now without seeming like the worst sort of hypocrite. On the other hand, she did seem fond of him, and the way her body had responded to his during that lingering kiss by
the seaside had certainly confirmed that however unusual a creature she might be, she was still, at heart, a woman. So perhaps, though her theories condemned matrimony, she might respond more favorably were she to receive an actual proposal. Perhaps she had declared her disdain for marriage because she thought it was what he wished to hear.

But a moment’s reflection brought home to him that Eliza had never shown the slightest inclination to say what he wanted to hear. Her disdain for marriage was real, so he must move carefully. If he were to make her a formal proposal only to have it thrown back in his face, he couldn’t answer for what might happen. He could not bear to lose control of himself again and make her his victim as he had done to Estella. So before he could risk making a proposal, he must determine exactly the true state of her feelings on the subject.

It was time to interrupt her reading.

“Does Miss Austen live up to your expectations?” he inquired.

Eliza looked up from her book. As she cocked her head in that irresistible way of hers he saw the slightest trace of a blush infuse the adorable freckles scattered over her cheek, almost as if he had interrupted
her
in some guilty thought, but she quickly responded to his question. “The story begins with some selfish relatives, rather like the beginning of
Sense and Sensibility,
but the heroine is out of the common way.”

“How so?”

“She isn’t a young girl, like the heroines of most novels, but an older lady of some seven-and-twenty years, well past her prime. She has turned away a suitor in her youth because he had no prospects. Now he is to return to the neighborhood after having earned himself a fortune.”

“And does he pay her his addresses, despite having been previously rejected?”

“I haven’t read that far, but as it is a novel, and as she appears to be the heroine, one has to assume they will eventually be happy, though not before a good deal of suffering is got through. One doesn’t expect the story in a novel to work out as it would in real life.”

Hoping to turn the conversation from such polite generalities to the subject that now filled his mind, he ventured, “Perhaps now that her objection to him has been removed, her suitor will propose to her again.”

“That would be unlikely. What wealthy man would want a faded woman of twenty-seven when he could have a beauty of eighteen?”

This had possibilities. “At twenty-seven a woman may still have much to recommend her. I can’t imagine having the conversations I have with you with some chit of eighteen, nor can I imagine turning to her, as I have to you, for advice.”

If only he could get the benefit of that advice in his current situation! Then it struck him how he could. He need only pretend that the advice he was seeking was for someone other than himself.

He cleared his throat, “Speaking of advice,
I had a letter today from a good friend of mine in town who has got himself into something of a pickle with a young lady. I had meant to ask you what you thought might be the best thing for him to do, but it slipped my mind until now.”

Eliza’s face lit up. Like all women she
did
love to give advice. “What are his circumstances?”

He tented his fingers before him and plunged on. “My friend is, not to put too fine a point on it, something of a rake—not at all the sort of man a decent woman would consort with. But with one thing and another he’s managed to compromise a girl of good birth. The thing to do, of course, would be to offer for her. But my friend is having a great deal of trouble bringing himself to the point. He writes to me for advice, probably assuming I will talk him out of it. Still, I find myself somewhat at a loss to know what it is I should tell him.”