Fool Me Twice (36 page)

She dropped her hand and ogled him. “A compliment! I change my mind: my nose must be the eighth wonder of the world!”

Expression darkening, he settled back against his bench. “I’ve complimented you before.”

“Have you?” She shrugged. “Very well.”

“I have.”

She saw no point in arguing. She looked out the window, aware suddenly of a certain nervous flutter in her stomach. This stretch of Kent, the last ribbon of fertile soil before the ground turned to salt and sand,
was the land of her ancestors. Flat green fields stretched endlessly beneath the gray sky. If these people, the Holladays, tried to slam the door in her face, she would
not
weep. Had it not been for the . . . interlude . . . on this very bench, she would have been primed to rage at them. Instead, she decided she would task Marwick to coldly intimidate them.

“I’ve told you you’re beautiful,” he said.

She glanced at him, startled. “Oh, yes, of course. But that was during . . .” She felt herself blush. Peculiar how one could do things without shame, but not be able to speak of them.

His smile now was deliberately suggestive. “It counts,” he said. “But I’ll say it again, lest you feel skeptical: you are beautiful, Olivia.”

She frowned at him, puzzled by why he might say so. “I’m not, particularly.”

He frowned back at her. “Yes,” he said. “You are.”

What nonsense was this? “You and I both know what beauty looks like.” A waspish tone had crept into her voice. She did not like to be patronized. “Your late wife was beautiful. The very picture of beauty.”

It was a calculated decision, mentioning her. Olivia expected it to end the conversation. But he merely shrugged. “She was lovely to look at,” he said. “But not beautiful.”

She smiled despite herself. “That’s ridiculous. Do you mean to say that beauty lies in a lantern jaw?” She touched her chin. “A perfect square?”

His eyes followed her hand. “Determination,” he said. “Resolve. Yes, those things are beautiful.”

“I’m talking about my
jaw
.”

“That is what your jaw looks like to me.”

She felt a fluster of confusion. Was he serious with this mad babble? But he appeared quite serious. He was gazing at her with perfect sobriety.

She suddenly could not hold his eyes. She looked out the window again. If he was mocking her . . . “Obviously you find me attractive,” she said. “And I’m handsome, no doubt. I have all my teeth. But that’s a different thing from beauty. That’s all I mean.”

“Self-possession,” he said. “Dignity. Gorgeous qualities. I see them in your straight spine. In the way you hold yourself, your carriage.”

Did she hold herself so distinctively? She had never realized it. She felt a flush of gratification, quite unfamiliar, stemming as it did from her neglected vanity. “Don’t be silly.”

“I’m the fifth Duke of Marwick,” he said. “Also the Earl of Beckden and the Baron Wellsley. I am many things, but I am not
silly
.”

She rolled her eyes at the clouds.

“Resilience,” he said. “In the tilt to your chin.” Dryly he added, “It verges on stubbornness, of course, but all the virtues extend into flaws when carried too far.”

She cast him a quick, mocking glance. “In the manner of compliments that edge on criticisms?”

He smiled at her. She looked away again, but now she was holding her breath, hoping (ridiculous of her!) that he might go on.

And he did. “Passion in the vibrant colors of your hair,” he murmured. “I see new shades every time I look at it. I’ve counted at least nine.”

He’d been cataloging the shades of her hair?

“Intelligence in your brow. Thoughtfulness in the way it has furrowed, as you try to figure out whether
I’m speaking truthfully. Which I am. And you would be wise to believe me. I’ve been making a study of you for quite some time now. Yours was the first face I’d seen in months, after all. The face I saw through the darkness. And it seems that I know it even better than you do, if you doubt your own beauty.”

She’d been holding her breath, and now she could not catch it. She looked back at him wonderingly, and the expression on his face . . . It was sober and tender and intent. She had wondered, in his garden, if any man would look this way at her again. She’d never dreamed that he might be the one to do it.

But that had been her secret hope.

“You’re mad,” she whispered. She felt shaken. “Perhaps
you
need the spectacles.”

He gave her a gentle smile. “Humor and wit, in the quirk of your lips. And in your eyes . . .” His smile faded. “Hope.”

She swallowed. He had commented on that before, in the library.

Would you always look at me so?
She bit her lip to stop the words, and put her hand over her chest, which twisted painfully. For she knew the answer to that question better than he did. He thought he would never recover his old life. But one day he would. The world would not be content to move forward always without him. And he, eventually, would not be able to endure the sidelines.

He would stop looking at her like this once he remembered who he was.

The coach began to slow. She made herself look out. She did not recognize the house. It was only a single story, weatherboarded in white, barely larger than the
cottage in which she’d grown up. A stone barn stood a short way beyond it, through a field of waving grass.

“Of course,” he said as the vehicle rocked to a halt, “the final element, which shows nowhere in particular, and everywhere at once, is your courage.”

She took a deep breath.

“I know you’re ready to face these people—your family, Olivia. But there is no need for you to do it. You can stay here while I speak with them. And then, if they wish to meet you, they can make the approach themselves. I think you deserve that—to be the one who is approached.”

Her throat closed. He had not mentioned kindness. That was
his
quality, which she lacked. But it suffused every part of him, though he fought so hard to hide it. Perhaps she was the only person in the world who managed to see it so clearly in him. Even he himself seemed blind to it. “Thank you,” she said. “But today . . . I seem to want to do it all.” He thought her very brave, but without him, she would never have dared approach those women on the promenade. By his side, she discovered new parts of herself fashioned from steel and armor, parts that she liked very much. She would take advantage of them now. “I want to get through it all in one fell swoop.”

He moved onto her bench. “For luck then,” he said, and lifted her hand for a single kiss that she felt all the way through her bones.

*  *  *

Mrs. Holladay, white haired and petite, had the rosy cheeks and bright eyes of a figure in a fairy tale: the white witch who saved children from wolves. But she
wore the weeds of a widow, and when she received them at the door, her courteous greeting was sluggish, dulled by obvious fatigue.

Her mourning black, and the lock of hair she wore at her wrinkled throat, silenced Olivia. Marwick spoke for them both, but he only shared his own name, and conveyed that they had come on a matter of delicate but urgent import. “You should sit,” he said, “before we speak.”

Mrs. Holladay ushered them into her parlor, where tea was laid. After handing them each a cup, she said, with a polite but bewildered smile, “How may I help you, then?”

Olivia took a breath. “You won’t recognize me. But my mother was Jean Holladay, your daughter.”

Mrs. Holladay dropped her cup. Tea splashed across the carpet, but she did not seem to notice. She stared, lips trembling. “Oh. Oh. Oh, you’ve come home!” She lifted a hand to her mouth. “If only Roger had lived to see it . . .”

Roger, it transpired, was Mrs. Holladay’s late husband, only two months’ deceased. She rushed to find a photograph of him, then changed course and flew outside. Olivia heard her tasking the coachman to take a note to the neighboring farmstead—the denizens of which must have worked to spread the news very rapidly, for within a quarter hour, the parlor had filled with strangers, all of them claiming to be Olivia’s relations.

Cousins, uncles, nieces and nephews, dear old friends of her mother’s, swarmed to introduce themselves. Amid this strange and ardent welcome, Olivia found herself quite unable to cut to the point of her visit. She felt
numb, overwhelmed, a cold point of sobriety amid tears and laughter. Marwick, now seated on the sofa watching her with an inscrutable look, now cloistered in the corner in conference with a farmer (whose trousers were still coated with stray bits of hay), proved no help at all. But when she finally extricated herself from embraces and found a seat again, he somehow managed to appear beside her, asking in a low voice if she was all right.

Of course she was. She reached for her resolve. “Mrs. Holladay,” she said (making clear with a pointed look that she did not mean any of the four other Mrs. Holladays, two of whom had babes in arm). “I must speak with you privately.”

“Of course, dear!” Mrs. Holladay proposed a supper, and this seemed a signal for everybody to disperse, with promises of a quick return, and a dish or two each to contribute.

Once the three of them were alone again, Mrs. Holladay (
Grandmother, you should call me
) took a seat opposite, taking up her knitting, beaming as her needles clacked.

Olivia took Marwick’s hand. Mrs. Holladay’s rheumy gaze flicked down to take note of it, and somehow, that faint whisper of propriety finally jarred Olivia into speaking the question that, once voiced, sparked a burn of anger: “Why are you being so kind to me? You turned my mother away from your doorstep when she most needed you. Why?”

Mrs. Holladay dropped her needles. “Gracious, child! Turn her away? Did
she
say that? We never did any such thing!”

Curiously, Olivia felt Marwick’s surprise more than her own. It registered very clearly in the sharp squeeze
of his fingers around hers. “But you did,” she said. “I remember it. You quarreled with her, and then we went away in the dark, and she said we couldn’t stay.”

“But that’s because she refused to listen to us.” Mrs. Holladay sat forward, looking white as paper. “We told her she needn’t put up with him. We told her she should sue him in court. And she refused. She wouldn’t do that to him, she said. As though she owed him anything! And yes, by heaven, we quarreled with her for that—your grandfather would have no part in letting that rascal abuse her. He wanted justice. He would have sold every inch of this land to fund a lawsuit, if she’d only allowed it.”

The woman might as well have been speaking in tongues. But a strange, prickling foreboding came over Olivia. “A lawsuit?”

“Yes, a lawsuit! How else were we to go about it?”

Marwick spoke then. “A lawsuit on what grounds?”

Mrs. Holladay made a disgusted noise. “On the grounds of bigamy, of course! How could he marry that American girl, how
dare
he do it, when he was already married to my daughter?”

*  *  *

Olivia sat on a fallen log, by the edge of a pond choked with lily pads. The dark water glimmered in the late afternoon light. As if winter had forgotten about this stretch of Kent, many of the branches still bore leaves, and the air was temperate, scented by mulch and sap.

She heard Marwick coming long before she saw him. Branches cracked underfoot, and then a stone flew past her, skipping across the pond’s surface.

“Well done,” she said.

“I can do better.” He came to sit beside her on the log. After a brief study of the ground, he plucked up another stone and proved his claim.

She rather thought she knew how that stone felt when it made the final plunge. Surprised to be so suddenly out of its depths.

She had listened as long as she’d been able. But when the family had begun crowding into the parlor again, carrying dishes and bottles, full of merriment, her numbness had cracked. She had excused herself to the washroom, then ducked out the door and followed the path through the scraggly wood to this pond.

“They must be wondering where I am,” she said now.

He shrugged. “They’re aghast that your mother didn’t tell you the truth.”

She bit down hard on her cheek. Yes, all right, it was anger she was feeling. Anger and . . . deep, deep injury. “She must have had her reasons.”

He said nothing.

“She loved him.” A jagged laugh spilled from her. “This, above all, is the ultimate proof of it.” To have protected him against his own evildoing, even at the cost of her own happiness.

“She might have loved you better,” he said quietly. “To have put you through such a childhood—”

“Don’t.”
She snatched up a rock and hurled it. It did not skip once, but it made a mighty splash as it sank. “She loved me very well. What could
you
know about it? And who knows? If she hadn’t taken his bigamy quietly, perhaps he’d have sent a man to throttle
her
.”

“Perhaps,” he said after a pause. “I suppose it does
solve the mystery of why he hounds you. If he feared you had the proof of his marriage to your mother . . .”

Tears pricked her eyes. Why now? She had been staring dry-eyed for half an hour. “What a joke. I don’t.”

He turned to her. “Olivia. You do.”

She dashed a hand over her eyes. “Do I?”

He brushed his thumb over her cheek, his handsome face grave. “That’s what your mother meant by that line in her diary. The ‘hidden truth’—that’s the parish register. Your grandmother explained the whole of it. The night your mother brought you here, the family conferred with the rector who had married your parents. He decided to hide the register—a very wise decision, for the church was later burgled. A few pieces of silver went missing, along with the registers—save the one which the rector had locked away.”

“Oh.” The syllable seemed to flop out of her mouth. She stared at the ground where it would have landed.

“So it can be proved,” he said.

She nodded once.

His hand found hers. “Is that all you have to say?”

She glanced at him and felt a strange flutter of anxiety at his frown, which she identified after a moment: concern that she had disappointed him. She pulled her hand free and stared at the lily pads again.