A Lady's Wish (11 page)

Patricia kissed her aunt’s hands. “Thank you. I do not know precisely why, but thank you!” She dashed for the house. Calanthia discovered her donning her cloak in the foyer.

“Where are you going?”

“Out.” She grabbed her bonnet and ran through the doorway, her sister in pursuit.

In the stable the old groom peered into her fraught face and chewed upon his lip.

“Maypole again, hm?”

“You remember?”

“Not likely to forget that one, miss.” His mouth screwed into a grin. “I’ll drive. Time I see what all the fuss is about.”

The three miles seemed to last a lifetime, the sun dipping steadily toward the horizon. They rounded the final bend to the village and fifty yards in the clear distance stood the lone Maypole, a sturdy tree trunk buried in the earth. As on that morning nine years ago, the field around it was completely empty.

Her gaze darted to the wooden fence of the competition sheep pasture. No animals inhabited the pens now, only the pale green of new grass.

But she could not give up hope.

“My aunt said I must dig at the Maypole for something buried there.”

“Auntie said
what
?”

“Didn’t bring a shovel along, miss.”

Patricia looked about. “There! A cottager’s hut.”

“Don’t know how them villagers’ll like digging around the Maypole. Hundred years old if it’s a day.”

But Patricia was already jumping from the carriage. “A little hole won’t hurt it.” She ran across the green toward the hut.

Callie followed. “Tricky, what
is
this all about?”

She reached the hut and pounded on the door. A heavy-set woman answered, wiping floury hands upon an apron. “Can I help you, miss?”

“Good day. Have you a shovel I can borrow?”

“Now, what would a lady want a shovel for?”

“To dig up a parcel my late husband left in the ground for me.”

“If she wants a shovel, Mother,” a portly man said from behind the woman, his whiskered jowls jiggling, “there’s no sense in not giving it to her.” He sized her up. “But you’ll be needing a man to do the digging. You’re nothing but a reed, if you don’t mind me saying.”

“Not at all. And I shall pay you.”

“Keep your silver.” He moved his wife aside and came out the door, then went to a shed beside the hut for the shovel. “Where did he bury it?”

“Beneath the Maypole.”

His heavy brow lowered. “Maypole’s sacred around here.”

She clutched her hands together. “Please, sir? This is— This is life to me.”

“Constable better’d not see me at it. Be run out of the district. But let’s go.”

“Thank you!”

They marched across the green, Patricia and the cottager followed by his wife, Callie, and the old groom. A scruffy boy pulling a goat on a lead crossed their path and straggled along.

The pole rose at least eighteen feet straight from the grassy earth. In a month and a half it would again be crowned with a wreath and twined with gaily colored ribbons, and the local maidens would dance. She studied the ground beneath it.

“He buried it at least four years ago.”

“Best to get started ’fore it comes on to dark.” The cottager set the shovel to the earth, slammed his heel onto it, and brought up a clod of grassy soil. Then another, and another.

Patricia held her breath.

The goat boy scratched his thatch of hair. “What’s he diggin’ for?”

“Dead husband’s treasure,” the cottager’s wife said sotto voce. “I’ll tell you, if he left me something it’d better be above ground.”

“It’s got to do with the festival some years back,” the groom muttered.

“But this wasn’t in the letter, Tricky. How do you know to—”

The shovel clanked against metal.

“Well, I’ll be Old Father Christmas,” the cottager uttered.

“Yes.” Patricia’s voice cracked.

A few more shovelfuls of soil came up and, stripping off her gloves, she fell to her knees. Her fingers sought the edges of the box, the size of a large book, and pried it free from the earth.

“Ma’am?” The cottager’s wife proffered Patricia the apron and she wiped the box clean. It was fastened with only a tab closure. With shaking fingers, she lifted the lid. In a wrapper of red felt lay a small leather-bound volume. It slipped into her muddied palms and a sob caught in her throat.

“What is it?” Callie whispered.

“My diary. I threw it away years ago. I threw it right into the grate. It burned.” Only the edges were singed, though, the back cover cracked from the fire’s heat.

“Why did you wish to burn your diary?”

Because it told the story of a young man she met the day before she learned of her betrothal. It detailed that day, and the days, weeks and months that followed during which she wept over losing him while she struggled to become accustomed to a husband who, no matter how she tried, gave her only the admiration one might offer a fine statue or painting—not a living breathing woman aching for warmth and laughter.

“I threw it away because I had given up hope.” Her fingers traced the crusty edges of the binding.

“Did he read it, mum?”

“Man don’t read his wife’s diary, boy.”

“Well he buried it here then told her to come find it! Just saying p’raps he read it first.”

“He did.” In it, clearly, he had learned of the appointment at the Maypole.

“Here there!” a firm voice came across the green, and more distant, hoof beats. “What’s going on there?”

“Constable,” the cottager said in a resigned voice.

“Churchwarden too,” the groom muttered.

“We’ll never hear the end of it now.” The cottager’s wife sighed.

“I will speak with them.” Calanthia sounded twice her age. “My brother is a viscount.”

The others moved away, but Patricia barely noticed. She opened the cover of the diary and her husband’s script stared up at her. Her heart raced. She unfolded the single sheet of foolscap.

16 August 1809

Patricia,

I knew when we wed that you did not love me. But I was a fool to believe that simply because I could not engage your affections, another man would not—had not already.

I am angry now. I imagine myself betrayed and deceived. A man of extreme passions, however, I am not. I did not wish to cause you pain in taking you as my wife, and I blame you for your unhappiness as much as myself. I would like to imagine this interlude of yours a childish whim and that by now you have forgotten it entirely. But I know you perhaps better than you understand. Your heart is constant. I cannot force you to love me, but so too I cannot release you. If I had known upon that day of our betrothal what I know now, I would not have released you even then.

I bury this here in the hope that some day I will find the courage to tell you that I understand, or—in greater hope—to allow it to rot into forgotten memory. To have brought it here to dispose of in this manner is a gesture of symbolic nonsense. But for two years already you have made me a fool for you. And although I have never been able to express it to you as you wish, a fool for you I will remain to the day I die.

Oliver

Tears tumbled over the rims of Patricia’s eyes and onto the page.

“Tricky?” Her sister’s voice came beneath the pounding of horses’ hooves. “Tricky!”

She dashed the tears off her cheeks and looked over her shoulder. The villagers and groom and her sister were all turned toward a pair of horsemen advancing at a gallop.

The bottom fell out of her heart. She stood on shaking legs as Nik pulled his mount to a skidding halt and jumped from the saddle.

“Do you know why I wear this ring?” She thrust out her hand as she walked to him and he to her, swiftly. “I wear it because the girl for whom it was intended perished before she could enjoy life with the man she adored. And for nine years I have felt as though I did too. For one miraculous day I lived, and then you disappeared and I lost that. Instead I wore all the passion bottled up inside me in this silly ring, believing I could not have it in my real life because it did not belong there.”

He reached her and pulled her into his arms. His hand came around her face and his thumb stroked across her cheek, his beautiful eyes scanning her features full of awe.

“That is why I asked you to make love to me yesterday,” she said brokenly. “I wanted to feel that again, even if only for a moment, so that I might have something to carry with me through the next nine years. The next ninety. But I don’t want that any longer. I want it always. I want to feel the laughter and excitement and passion I feel with you every day of my life.” She pulled in a deep breath. “What are you doing here?”

“A very fine speech, Lady Morgan.” He smiled slightly, but his voice was not entirely even. “Long, but quite good. I liked it.”

“Will you cease teasing me!” She pressed her fist to his chest. “Why are you here?”

“To ask you if you came here that morning.”

She lifted the diary. “Feel free to read it all yourself. My husband did, apparently.”

He glanced at the diary, his breaths hard, then back at her. “Patricia, did you come?”

“Of course I did! But my father and mother took it upon themselves that very morning to betroth me to a man I barely knew without my consent. I was late, only, and you were not here.”

His eyes shone. “No coincidences.” He bent his head and captured her mouth in a full kiss of need and strength and sheer beauty. She clung to him and a sob escaped her that he caught and transformed into a sigh. She did not want it to end, the caress of his mouth that made her tremble in love. But he separated their lips and pressed his brow to hers.

“I searched for you for a year.”

She stilled. “You—?” Her throat closed. His gaze adored her so openly, showing her his feelings. She finally uttered, “A
year
?”

“I fell in love with you. I wanted you beyond reason. No matter how I told myself I was a fool—for you had not come—I could not stop searching. I went to war to force an end to my desperate search.”

“You came here that morning?”

“I came, and I despaired. Even not knowing who you were, I knew I was not good enough for you. I knew that with time overnight to reconsider, you had realized that. But I could not give you up.”

“I did not reconsider. I should have refused them, but I had never disobeyed them, and you had not come. Still, I never ceased regretting it.”

“We were both mistaken,” he said tenderly and kissed the tip of her nose, then her brow, then her cheeks, his arms tightening about her like in a dream, but no longer a dream. This was finally reality.

“If I had not married Oliver,” she whispered, “I would not have my sons. And you would not have become a great war hero.”

“Patricia, I will care for your sons and protect them as though they were my own. I could not do otherwise.”

Tears gathered behind her eyes anew. “You are a good man, Nik. A great man.”

“I became who I am for you.” He grasped her hands. “If we had met that morning, it’s true, I might not have thrown myself into battles with such enthusiasm. But I would have become a ship captain as you ordered. I would have done whatever required to win you. I think something within me believed that if I pursued that course, I would someday find you again.”

“But when you did find me, you teased, even when you believed me married. And why did you leave here so abruptly this morning?”

“Ignoble reasons. Anger. Hurt. Jealousy.”

“But no longer?”

“No longer.” He stroked the backs of his fingers along her cheek. “Patricia, your husband sent me here.”

She gasped.

His eyes sparkled. “I knew him. One night with him in Portugal, I told him about the girl I had lost. Until two hours ago I had forgotten his name. But he did not forget mine, and for that I thank him eternally.”

Holding her hands tight, he went to his knee before her as he had on that day long ago.

“What’s he doing down there in the mud?”

“Proposing, lad. Gen’lemen don’t care about their trousers.”

“Always got a spare, I s’pose.”

Nik kissed her hands softly, soberly. “Patricia Ramsay Morgan, marry me. I don’t care if you are betrothed to a hundred titled Midases successively. I will fight every one of them before giving you up again. Through rain, snow, wind, and high water I will remain here at this fool pole until you say yes.”

Laughter tumbled through her tears. “Yes.”

“Yes,” he said in wonderment. “Yes.” He stood, drew her into his arms again, and kissed her. Applause erupted around them, hearty huzzahs, and Calanthia’s joyful laughter. But Patricia heard only the beating of Nik’s heart entwined with her own, and the intoxicating rush of life’s passionate embrace.

Epilogue

I
n the breakfast parlor of his elegant Mayfair townhouse, the Earl of Savege took up a cup of coffee and
The Times
. Crossing long, muscular legs to which at least half a dozen beautiful married ladies had written poems, not to mention any number of exquisite young widows, he leaned back in his chair.

The gossip column on the right proclaimed the imminent wedding of Captain Nikolas Acton of the Royal Navy to Lady Patricia Morgan. The happy couple would reside in London, with no present plans for the war hero to return to sea. Under the heading
Board of the Admiralty
, the facing page announced that a search would soon be undertaken for the notorious pirate Redstone. Several vessels on light duty since the Treaty of Paris would be enlisted to hunt down the criminal for trial and execution.

Alex drew a slow breath. A light, cool breeze blew in through the cracked parlor window, scented with coal dust, pavement, and rain. London at its late-winter best.

And yet, two hundred miles to the west, the wind blew fresh with salt off the ocean mingled with the mossy green scent of the Devonshire hills. But Alex could not go to his estate there quite yet, no matter how he longed for it. Spring was fast advancing and his ship and crew already awaited him. If the Navy had finally determined to come for Redstone, then Redstone had better be at sea when those boys started looking. A man must keep up appearances, after all, even if that appearance was a complete falsity.

He glanced again at the gossip column, a slight grin tracing a mouth that had given pleasure to more women than the
ton
could count.

His old friend had chosen a woman over the sea. Better this way. Alex would not be obliged to blow Nik’s ship to pieces if he were to find him. It was a shame though, the petticoat ensnarement of a fighting man. But some men were deuced fools for the fairer sex. Even heroes.