Almost Heaven (16 page)

“You
not only refused to delope,” Lord Howard bit out, sounding as angry as Robert, “you fired before the call was given. You disgraced yourself
and
me. Moreover, if word of this duel becomes public, you’ll have the lot of us arrested for participating. Thornton gave you satisfaction by appearing this morning and refusing to raise his pistol. He admitted guilt. What more did you expect?” As if unable to bear the sight of Robert any longer, Lord Howard turned on his heel. Elizabeth followed him helplessly into the hall, desperately trying to think of something eloquent to say in Robert’s defense. “You must be cold and weary,” she began, stalling for time. “Won’t you at least stay for some tea?”

Lord Howard shook his head and kept walking. “I only returned to get my carriage.”

“Then I’ll see you out,” Elizabeth persisted. She walked him to the door, and for a moment she thought he actually meant to leave without even saying good day. Standing in the open doorway, he hesitated and then turned back to her. “Good-bye, Lady Elizabeth,” he said in an odd, regretful voice, and then he left.

Elizabeth scarcely noticed his tone or even his departure. She realized for the first time that this morning – perhaps at this very minute – a surgeon somewhere was digging a ball out of Ian’s arm. Sagging against the door, she swallowed convulsively, fighting the urge to vomit at the thought of the pain she’d caused him. Last night she’d been too terrified by the prospect of a duel to consider how Ian must have felt when Robert told him she was engaged. Now it was finally beginning to hit her, and her stomach clenched. Ian had spoken of marrying her, had kissed and held her with tender, possessive passion and told her he was falling in love with her. In return for that, Robert had barged in on him and contemptuously told him she was beyond his touch socially and already engaged besides. And this morning he had shot him for daring to reach too high.

Leaning her head back against the door, Elizabeth stilted a moan of contrition. Ian might not have a title nor any claim to being a gentleman in the
ton’s
interpretation of the events, but Elizabeth sensed instinctively that he was a proud man. That pride had been stamped on his bronzed features, in the way he carried himself, in his every movement – and she and Robert had trampled it to pieces. They had made a fool of him in the greenhouse last night and forced him into a duel today.

At that moment, if Elizabeth had known where to find him, she really thought she would have braved his anger and gone to him to explain about Havenhurst and all her responsibilities, to try to make him understand that it was those things, not any lack in him, that had made it impossible for her to consider marrying him.

Shoving herself away from the door, Elizabeth walked slowly down the hall and into the drawing room where Robert was sitting with his head in his hands. “This isn’t finished,” Robert gritted, lifting his head to look at her. “I’ll kill him one day for this!”

“No you will not!” Elizabeth said, her words shaking with alarm. “Bobby, listen to me – you don’t understand about Ian Thornton. He didn’t do anything wrong, not really. You see,” she said in a suffocated voice, “he thought he was well, falling in love with me. He wanted to
marry
me –”

Robert’s sharp bark of derisive laughter rang through the room. “Is
that
what he told you?” he sneered, his face purpling with fury at her lack of familial loyalty. “Well, then let me set you straight, you little idiot! To put it bluntly and in his own words, all he wanted from you was a tumble between the sheets!”

Elizabeth felt the blood drain from her face, then she slowly shook her head in denial. “No, you’re wrong. When you first found us he said his intentions were honorable, remember?”

“He changed his mind damned quick when I told him you are penniless,” Robert flung back, looking at her with a mixture of pity and scorn.

Too weak to continue standing, Elizabeth sank down on the sofa beside her brother, crushed by the full weight of responsibility for her stupidity, her gullibility, and all that those two traits had brought down on them. “I’m sorry,” she whispered helplessly. “I’m so sorry. You risked your life for me this morning, and I haven’t even thanked you for caring enough to do that.” Because she couldn’t think of anything else to say or do, she put her arm around his slumped shoulders. “Things will work out for us – they always have,” she promised unconvincingly.

“Not this time,” he said, his eyes harsh with despair. “I think we’re ruined, Elizabeth.”

“I can’t believe it’s as bad as that. There’s a chance none this will come out,” she continued, not believing her own words. “And Lord Mondevale cares for me, I think. Surely he’ll listen to reason.”

“In the meantime,” Lucinda said at last, with typical cool practicality, “Elizabeth must go out as usual – as if nothing untoward has happened. If she hides in the house, gossip will feed on itself. You, sir, will have to escort her.”

“It won’t matter, I tell you!” Robert said. “We’re ruined.” He was right. That night, while Elizabeth bravely attended a ball with her fiancé, who seemed to be blessedly unaware of her weekend debacle, lurid versions of her activities were already spreading like wildfire throughout the
ton.
The story of the episode in the greenhouse was circulated, along with the added slander that she had purportedly sent him a note
inviting
him to join her there. More damning by far was the titillating gossip that she’d spent an afternoon with Ian Thornton alone in a secluded cottage.

“That bastard is the one who’s spreading those stories,” Robert had raged the next day when the tales reached his ears. “He’s trying to whiten his own hands by saying you sent him a note inviting him to the greenhouse, and that you were pursuing him. You’re not the first female to lose your head over him, you know. You’re just the youngest and the most naive. This year alone there’ve been Charise Dumont and several others whose names have been linked with his. None of them, however, was unsophisticated enough to  behave with such wanton indiscretion.” Elizabeth was too humiliated to argue or protest. Now that she was no longer under the influence of Ian Thornton’s sensual magnetism she realized that his actions were, in retrospect, exactly what one would expect of an unscrupulous rake who was bent on seduction. After only a few hours’ acquaintance he’d claimed to be half in love with her and to want to marry her – just the sort of impossible lie a libertine would tell to his victim. She’d read enough novels to know that fortune hunters and dissolute libertines intent on seduction often claimed to be in love with their victims when all they wanted was another conquest. Like an utter fool, Elizabeth had thought of him as a victim of unfair social prejudice.

Now she realized too late that the social prejudices that would have excluded him from respectable
ton
activities had existed to protect her from men like him,

Elizabeth didn’t have a great deal of time to devote to her private misery, however. Friends of Viscount Mondevale, upon learning of his betrothal in the papers, finally felt it incumbent upon them to disclose to the happy bridegroom the gossip about the female to whom he’d offered his hand.

The next morning he called at the town house on Ripple Street and withdrew his offer. Since Robert had not been at home, Elizabeth had met with him in the drawing room. One look at his rigid stance and unsmiling mouth and Elizabeth had felt as if the floor was falling away from beneath her.

“I trust there won’t need to be an unpleasant scene over this,” he’d said stiffly, without preamble.

Unable to speak past the tears of shame and sorrow choking her, Elizabeth had shaken her head. He turned and started for the door, but as he strode past her he swung around and grasped her by the shoulders. “Why, Elizabeth?” he demanded, his handsome face twisted with angry regret. “Tell me why. At least give me
that.”

“Why?” she repeated, stupidly longing to throw herself into his arms and beg his forgiveness.

“I can understand that you might have accidentally encountered him at some cottage in the woods in the rain, which is what my cousin, Lord Howard, tells me
he
believes happened. But
why
would you have sent him a note to meet you alone in the greenhouse?”

“I didn’t,” she cried, and only her stubborn pride kept her from collapsing in a sobbing heap at his feet.

“You’re lying.” he said flatly, his hands falling away. “Valerie saw the note after he tossed it away and went looking for you.”

“She’s mistaken,” Elizabeth choked, but he was already walking out of the room.

Elizabeth had thought she could not feel more humiliated than she did at that moment, but she soon discovered she was mistaken. Viscount Mondevale’s desertion was taken as proof that she was guilty, and from that day onward no more invitations or callers arrived at the town house on Ripple Street. At Lucinda’s insistence Elizabeth finally got up the courage to attend the one function she’d been invited to
before
the scandal became public – a ball at Lord and Lady Hinton’s home. She stayed for fifteen minutes, and then she left – because no one except the host and hostess, who had no choice, would speak to her or acknowledge her in any way.

In the eyes of the
ton
she was a shameless wanton, soiled and used, unfit company for unsullied young ladies and gullible young heirs, unfit to mingle in Polite Society. She had broken the rules governing moral conduct, and not even with someone of her own class, but with a man whose reputation was black, his social standing nonexistent. She hadn’t merely broken the rules, she’d flung them in their faces.

One week after the duel Robert disappeared without word or warning. Elizabeth was terrified for his safety, unwilling to believe he would desert her because of what she’d done, and unable to think of any other, less tormenting explanation. The actual explanation, however, was not long in coming. While Elizabeth sat alone in the drawing room, waiting and praying for his return, news of his disappearance was spreading allover the city. Creditors began arriving on her doorstep, demanding payment for huge debts that had accrued not only for her debut, but over many years for Robert’s gambling and even that of her father.

Three weeks after Charise Dumont’s party, on a brilliantly sunny afternoon, Elizabeth and Lucinda closed the door on the rented town house for the last time and climbed into their carriage. As her carriage drove past the park the same people who had flattered her and sought her out saw her and coldly turned their backs. Through the blur of her hot, humiliated tears Elizabeth saw a handsome young man with a pretty girl in his carriage. Viscount Mondevale was taking Valerie for a drive, and the look she gave Elizabeth was meant to be pitying. But Elizabeth, in her private torment, thought it was tinged with triumph. Her fear that Robert had met with foul play had already given way to the far more believable possibility that he had fled to avoid debtors’ gaol.

Elizabeth returned to Havenhurst and sold off every valuable she owned to payoff Robert’s gaming debts, her father’s gaming debts, and those from her debut. And then she picked up the threads of her life. With courage and determination she devoted herself to preserving Havenhurst and to the well-being of the eighteen servants who elected to stay with her for only a home, food, and new livery once each year.

Slowly her smiles returned and the guilt and confusion receded. She learned to avoid looking back on her grievous mistakes during her season, because it hurt too much to remember them and the awful retribution that had followed. At seventeen years old she was her own mistress, and she had come home, where she had always belonged. She resumed her chess games with Sentner and her target practice with Aaron; she lavished her love on this peculiar family of hers and on Havenhurst – and they returned it. She was contented and busy, and she adamantly refused to think of Ian Thornton or of the events that had led up to her self-imposed exile. Now her uncle’s actions were forcing her not only to think of him but to see him. Without her uncle’s modest financial support for two more years there was no way Elizabeth could avoid giving up Havenhurst. Until she could accumulate the money to have Havenhurst properly irrigated, as it should have been long ago, it could never be productive enough to attract cottagers and support itself.

With a reluctant sigh Elizabeth opened her eyes and gazed blankly at the empty room, then she slowly stood up. She’d confronted more difficult problems than
this,
she told herself bracingly. Wherever there was a problem, there were solutions; one simply had to look carefully for the best one. And Alex was here now. Between the two of them they could surely think of a way to circumvent Uncle Julius.

She would take it as a challenge, she decided firmly as she headed off in search of Alex. At nineteen she still enjoyed challenges, and life at Havenhurst had become a little bit routine. A few short trips – two of the three, at least might be exciting.

By the time she finally located Alex in the garden, Elizabeth had almost convinced herself of all those things.

CHAPTER 8

Alexandra took one look at Elizabeth’s carefully composed features and fixed smile and was not fooled for a moment, nor was Bentner, who’d been entertaining Alex with stories about Elizabeth’s efforts in the gardens. They both turned to her with matched expressions of alarm. “What’s wrong?” Alex asked, anxiety already driving her to her feet.