Fated Folly (15 page)

‘
In name, yes. Please be truthful with me.'

He shook his head. ‘I cannot, Clare. I wish I could, but I dare not.'

‘
You can't be truthful,' she asked in a small voice, ‘or is that my answer?'

Rupert released her hands, and looked away. His eyes fell on the door that separated their adjoining bedchambers. Clare followed the direction of his gaze, and her chest went hollow. Night after night she had waited, the curtains on that side of the bed open, watching that door, hoping against hope that the handle might turn, that Rupert would be standing there. She had imagined him there so often that she almost felt as if he could see her vision, as he stared at the door himself. Her cheeks burned.

‘
Clare, I don't want to deceive you, or—if you will forgive me?—allow you to cherish hopes that cannot yet be fulfilled,' he said, low-toned, and without turning his head. ‘Ours is an unnatural marriage. Oh yes, I know there are examples enough, and there are men who would readily give in to such temptation as you afford.'

Well, at least he admitted the temptation, she thought, hope rising fast despite his expressed prohibition. But then he turned to look at her, and to Clare it seemed that his eyes flicked over her in a fashion as dismissive as it was cursory.

‘
But I am not of their number, Clare. Three-and-thirty to mate with seventeen? Impossible! Dear God, it would be little better than a rape!'

Clare hoped desperately that the shock she felt was not reflected in her face. If that was how he saw the matter, all her efforts were vain. A fleeting question went through her mind, but she dared not ask it. How old would she have to be? And meanwhile, she must presume, he would make use of his mistress rather than his wife. It hurt, dreadfully. She had all to do to keep the pain from showing and braced herself as a determined look came into Rupert's face.

‘
There is one thing I must say, before we leave the subject of yesterday.'

‘
What...' Clare's voice died. She swallowed and tried again. ‘What is that?'

‘
Ashendon, my child, is not to be trusted.'

‘
I know that,' she said quickly.

‘
Perhaps. I am anxious that you should recognise that his expressions of friendship, his avowals of letting bygones be bygones or however he chooses to term it, are false. He is a very clever young man. He studies to be apt, and usually discovers precisely that thing that he knows will most affect his victim.'

Clare eyed him warily. Had he guessed then what Ashendon had told her? Was this his way of refuting it? In spite of all, hope burgeoned. He might say what he chose about not making her in truth his wife, but she knew she had some power over him. He was disposed to be fond of her. She was no fool, she knew that at least. If she could but catch him unawares! And if there was no mistress, after all, to assuage his need and thus stand in her way.

He was waiting for an answer, and she summoned a smile.

‘
Don't concern yourself, ogre. I understand Ashendon only too well.'

Rupert grinned as he rose from the bed. ‘Now what have I said that you could possibly construe as ogreish?'

‘
Nothing at all out of the ordinary,' Clare told him, with a lurking twinkle.

‘
Minx!' he retorted, and left her.

***

 

Clare read her mama's letter, effusive in delight over her younger son's approaching fatherhood, and expressing a wish that her daughter might soon put Sir Rupert in the same case, with far less agitation than she would have done a week ago.

Papa never wrote letters, of course. But Mama had said that he was becoming more reconciled, although he badly missed his daughter. Clare felt a little guilty that she did not reciprocate such feelings. But the melancholy truth was that being daily within sight and sound of Rupert, no matter what their relationship, put everyone else out of her head. Had she won him, she might have room for others, but hitherto her mother's innocently expectant correspondence had served only to heighten her awareness of her difficulties.

Today, however, was different. She had reason, she thought, to be satisfied with her progress. Rupert had made it clear that, left to himself, he would hold to his really stupid (in Clare's view) resolve buckle and thong. But he had reckoned without the determination of his wife. She was not going to wait, perhaps for years and years, until Rupert decided she was old enough. She wanted him now—quite desperately—and she was going to fight for him.

Dismissing from her mind all thoughts of a possible rival—for Ash was not to be trusted, he would lie and say anything if it suited him—Clare planned her campaign and instituted it without delay. Familiarity was to be the order of the day. None of this distancing himself from her and shutting himself up in his library for days on end.

Deserting her guests, therefore—who were in any event only too happy to go over to the Grange—by pleading housewifely duties, she asked Rupert to drive her to Aylesbury on the pretext of keeping his promise to show her the town as she had urgent shopping to do. The expedition took up most of the day, and Clare had several hours in which to tease and plague her reluctant spouse, keeping him at such a pitch of laughing enjoyment, that he ended by dragging her into his embrace and hugging her, saying that he never thought to take to himself so enchantingly witty a wife.

It was an excellent beginning, and Clare followed it up by persuading him to accompany her on return visits to neighbours who had called on them in the first weeks. Even if there was no outing she could legitimately drag him on, she found an excuse to disturb him at his desk, as long as he was alone there, for the sole purpose of making him laugh. For when he laughed with her, he could not help showing the affection in which he held her. And on that affection, to which she steadfastly held, Clare was pinning all her hopes.

But this morning he had gone out somewhere, and Clare, disappointed, turned her attention to her correspondence. She was reading it in the drawing-room, in company with Miss Flimwell, who had returned from Reading and was engaged in studying the advertisements in the newspaper.

‘
I could go as a companion, of course,' she remarked, having discovered an old lady residing at Bath who was in need of such a person.

‘
You had much better stay here, Berinthia,' Clare said absently, her eyes still on her mother's letter.

‘
Now we have been through all that, Lady Wolverley,' began the other lady severely. She maintained a rigid adherence to protocol, despite the fact that Clare had begged her to drop the title, possibly to emphasise her oft-stated intention of removing from the Manor. ‘You have friends and family enough not to need a companion.'

‘
Yes, but Pippa is going in a few days,' Clare pointed out, looking up with a smile. ‘You see, here is my Mama, demanding to know in this very letter if she may expect them back in Kent next week.' She rose from her chair and crossed to the desk. ‘I may as well answer her now.'

‘
If I could think I might be of some use to you, Lady Wolverley,' began Miss Flimwell plaintively.

‘
But, Berinthia, I could not manage without you,' Clare said with a twinkle. ‘I cannot keep house.'

‘
Tush, my dear,' protested the lady, colouring a trifle, ‘it is little enough I do. In any event, you may employ a housekeeper, as the first Lady Wolverley did.'

‘
I should not know what to say to her,' Clare answered on a laugh, drawing a sheet of paper towards her and taking the pen from its stand. ‘I wish you might write my letters for me. I hate doing it. Oh drat, this pen is quite split.' She regarded the end of the quill in some annoyance.

‘
Shall I mend it for you?' Miss Flimwell twittered, rising from her own chair and coming over to the desk, eager to be of service.

‘
Well, I don't know what with,' Clare said in irritated tones, opening a drawer and rummaging within it. ‘There is not even a knife in here, that I can see.'

‘
Perhaps there is another pen,' suggested the erstwhile duenna, peering into the drawer Clare had left open, while she wrenched out another.

‘
No, nothing,' Clare reported, sifting through the welter of jumbled papers in the drawer. She thumbed a wadge of parchment, riffling past something that caught her eye. ‘Why, what is this?'

Lifting the papers above it, she exposed a picture done in charcoal. It was a sketch of a man's face, resting on a pillow, eyes closed in sleep, a mass of dark hair falling away either side, and below the strong column of his neck, a glimpse of his bare chest where the fastenings to his shirt lay open.

‘
Heavens, it is Rupert,' Clare exclaimed, pulling the parchment away from the rest and lifting it out of the drawer.

‘
Oh, my goodness,' burst from Miss Flimwell in a breathless squeak.

Clare was examining the sketch, holding it away a little, a faint feeling of puzzlement struggling with the pleasure she felt at what she saw. Rupert looked so serene, so relaxed, yet his strong features were so well delineated that his natural vigour still came off the portrait.

‘
It is a very good likeness,' she commented slowly. ‘Who did it?'

Miss Flimwell's fingers half reached out as if she would snatch the sketch from Clare's hands. Her voice was shaky, shooting up into a nervous shriek.

‘
Oh, no one of any—any note. I can't think how the wretched thing got in there.'

Clare turned from the sketch to look with astonishment at the lady's fluctuating colour. ‘What in the world—?'

Again the fingers reached out, and were pulled back, twisting about one another.

‘
You had better give it to me, Lady Wolverley. It should not be—it is quite foolish of him to—'

Something hard and cold slipped into Clare's bosom, and her eyes clouded as dread began to mount. She turned her gaze back on the sketch, hardly hearing Miss Flimwell's agitated twittering beside her. Very different was this second study from the first. What was there about the image to put the elder lady on the fidgets?

It did not take much imagination to see it. Who was it that might have access to Sir Rupert Wolverley in such an unguarded moment? Who was it that could see a man asleep? Who would choose to take advantage of such a time to imprint the memory of it, with so remarkably accurate a hand, on a sheet of parchment to be treasured forever?

‘
Give it to me, pray, Lady Wolverley,' begged Miss Flimwell, almost tearfully. ‘I will return it myself. It is better—far better—that you should remain—or at least pretend to remain—in ignorance of it.'

Clare looked at her, trying to ignore the heavy stone that was sitting in her chest. ‘Why?'

‘
Don't ask me,' pleaded the other, making a grab for the parchment.

Clare automatically held it away, out of her reach. Her eyes demanded an answer. ‘Who drew it? Tell me.'

‘
Oh dear, oh dear. You do not want to know, Clare,' uttered the afflicted lady, forgetting the proprieties in her anxiety. ‘I insist that you give me that picture.'

‘
And I insist that you answer me, Berinthia.'

‘
I cannot. It is better by far that you do not look at it too closely. Pray let me have it.'

She held out her trembling hand again, but Clare, arrested by her words, swiftly brought her gaze back to bear on the image. Her eyes swept across the few keen strokes that translated into Rupert's face, the shadowing that made up the hollows, forcing the contours into uncanny resemblance.

The very intimacy of the pose struck at her heart. But instinct told her the answer to her frantic question was contained in the item itself. Why else should Berinthia be so anxious to take it from her?

The lady's fingers came into her view as they reached once more to take the offending sketch away, but Clare snatched it out of reach and, as she did so, unintentionally turned it, and saw the writing on the back.

‘
Ah, too late,' Miss Flimwell cried, as Clare slid Rupert's image out of sight and bent to read the inscription.

‘
Caught in sweet repose, my dearest dear—replete with love—B.
'

Silent and still, the heart shrivelling within her, Clare gazed at it, her campaign in ruins.

 

 

 

Chapter Six

 

‘
All is not entirely satisfactory, is it?' Blanche Dearham asked quietly.

Rupert was aware that her eyes were on him as he stood at her parlour window looking out at the excellent view of the forest that was afforded from the first floor of her cosy little house.

He glanced quickly towards her and away again. ‘Why should you think so?'

Her soft laugh came. ‘Come, Rupert, it is I you are talking to.'

Rupert shrugged, but he did not turn. ‘You know me too well.'

‘
Yes. It is a pity Meriel did not.'

The remembrance of his first wife sent a flitter of distaste through him. ‘Meriel had no desire to know me—after the first breathless year.'