Joan Wolf (39 page)

He ran a nervous hand through his hair. “They would have hung him, Annabelle,” he said desperately. “Too many free traders were smuggling gold to France, and feeling in the government was running very high against them. Jem would have been just a small cog caught in the great machine of their so-called justice. I couldn’t let that happen to him.”

“I understand that, but that wasn’t my question, Stephen,” I said levelly. “My question was: Why did you send a note to Jem that night and not send one to me?”

“Oh God,” he said. He bent forward, his elbows on his knees, and buried his face in his hands to hide it from my view. “I should have. I knew that I had made a mistake the moment I learned you had married Gerald. It was the worst decision I ever made, not to see you before I left.”

I waited.

The anguished voice went on, “You see, I was in no doubt at all about what I had to do. I
knew
I had to save Jem’s life.”

I continued to wait, wondering what he was trying to tell me.

The fingers that were buried in the smooth darkness of his unfashionably long hair were cramped, the knuckles white. He said in a choked-sounding voice, “I knew that if you begged me not to leave you, I wouldn’t be able to hold
out against you. I knew that the only way I could keep my resolve to do what I had to do was to go away without seeing you at all.” He dropped his hands away from his head, and I stared in astonishment at his ravaged face.

“Christ, Annabelle, I never dreamed that I would force you into marrying someone else!”

I looked at him with a mixture of doubt and wonder. I had lived my entire life on the premise that nothing I could say would ever divert Stephen from what his conscience dictated that he must do.

He was going on in the same agonized voice, “I thought that I would write to you from Jamaica and explain what had happened. They weren’t going to let us marry anyway. I thought that if they saw that we remained true to each other for the year that I was away, that maybe they would relent and let us have our way.”

They,
I thought. I hadn’t heard the pronoun used with that particular intonation in years. Used as Stephen had just used it, it meant quite simply all the people in the world who weren’t Annabelle or Stephen.

At last he turned to look at me. “I was a fool,” he said bitterly. “A bloody, selfish, blind fool.”

I said, “Everyone knows that when you make a decision, a herd of wild stallions couldn’t change your mind.”

“That may be true about the stallions,” he said. “It’s not true about you.”

Our eyes met and held.

I thought about the seventeen-year-old girl I once had been.

“I might have asked you to give Jem up,” I whispered. “I don’t know. I might have.”

His mouth was tense. He nodded.

“I didn’t know about the baby,” he said, “but I should have thought of that possibility. I should never have left you that way. You were right to blame me, Annabelle. I almost ruined both our lives. I can understand it if you say you will never forgive me.”

A muscle jumped in his cheek once more.

I wrenched my eyes away from his, got to my feet, and walked behind the sofa to the closed French doors. The sun was once more hidden behind the clouds that had drifted in from the Channel. I looked out at the darkened day and said, almost wearily, “Don’t blame yourself too much, Stephen, The fault was more mine than it was yours.”

I heard him getting to his feet. “No, love, that’s not true.”

Overhead it was cloudy, but the sky along the top of the Ridge was almost all blue. The afternoon would be fine.

I said, “I should have gone to the earl and told him the truth. I should have demanded that he send me to join you in Jamaica.”

His voice was soft. “You would have done that, Annabelle, if I hadn’t hurt you so unbearably by leaving you without even a message.”

I fixed my eyes on the line of blue sky, and for the first time I faced the truth about my own conflicted motives. I said, “Jack was right. I married Gerald to punish you.”

Stephen said, “Annabelle, you had every right to feel that I had deserted you.”

I shook my head. “I was jealous, Stephen. I was jealous that you had chosen Jem over me.”

I felt Stephen move behind me, and I swung around to face him. “I have been blaming Mama for pressuring me and lying to me, but my marriage to Gerald wasn’t Mama’s doing at all. I knew that it had been Jem on that path, and I knew why you had taken the blame for him.”

Stephen was standing on the other side of the sofa, and we looked at each other over its curved camel-back. I said, “I wronged Gerald by marrying him when I knew I loved another man. I wronged you, whom I did love. And most of all, I wronged Giles by cheating him out of his real father.”

Silence fell between us. A ray of sunlight broke through the clouds, slanted through the French door, and fell on the carpet at my feet. Stephen walked around the sofa and said quietly, “You do come first with me, Annabelle. You always
have and you always will. And that is precisely why I didn’t have the nerve to talk to you before I was sent away.”

He held out his arms and I ran into them, knowing that I had come home at last.

We held each other as if we meant never to let go
.

I shut my eyes and thought about what would have happened if I had succeeded in convincing Stephen to relinquish his heroic protection of Jem and stay home with me.

“Perhaps it was all for the best,” I said in a low voice, my lips moving against his neckcloth. “If something terrible had happened to Jem, you never would have forgiven yourself,”

His arms lightened convulsively. “Annabelle,” he said, and I lifted my face for his kiss.

“There you are, Mama,” said an all-too-recognizable voice from the doorway.

Stephen’s arms dropped like stones. I turned slowly to face the door.

“What are you doing downstairs, Giles?” I inquired dangerously.

“Genie is talking to Jack, so I thought I would come and find you,” my son replied with a sunny smile.

Obviously it was time to replace Eugenia as Giles’s governess.

“Were you just kissing Uncle Stephen?” Giles asked curiously.

As I considered a reply, Stephen came to my rescue. “Yes, she was, Giles. Your mama and I are going to be married.”

Giles half ran, half skipped across the room to us. “Oh good,” he said. “Luke will be so pleased.”

“Luke?” Stephen said.

“One of the footmen,” I told him. “He is a particular friend of Giles’s.”

“He betted that you would marry Uncle Stephen in September,” Giles explained. “All the footmen have taken a month, and Luke’s was September.”

“Oh, my God,” I said.

Stephen began to laugh.

“You are going to be married in September, aren’t you, Mama?” Giles asked.

“Think of Luke, Annabelle,” Stephen said. “You owe it to him.”

I smiled. “All right,” I said. “I know my duty. September it will be.”

Epilogue

Gile’s sixth birthday festival was a good deal larger and more elaborate than his fifth had been. The previous year we had entertained our own servants and laborers and tenants; this year we added the local townspeople and yeomanry to the list. This meant that on festival day Weston Hall was crowded with almost five hundred people, all of whom Stephen and I had to feed and entertain.

For some reason, Uncle Adam and his family were in my thoughts for the whole of the day. They had played so large a part in this festival, for so many years, that their absence made them vividly present in my mind.

From what we had heard from Stephen’s legal correspondent in America, Jasper was doing well. He had made an immediate impact on the social scene and was engaged to be married to an American girl whose father was one of the largest planters in Virginia. I learned this last piece of information from the letter I had back from Aunt Fanny when I wrote to invite her, Uncle Adam, and Nell to attend Giles’s birthday party. In the same letter she had given me the news that Nell also was shortly to become engaged to be married.

“It was kind of you to think of us, my dear,” Aunt Fanny had written, “but I think it best if we do not renew a relationship that ended so sadly for the both of us.”

The tone of her correspondence had sounded more like her old self, which had lightened my heart considerably. I also thought that she was probably right, and I determined to make
no farther attempts to reach out to her. There were some things that simply could not be undone.

The rest of my family were on hand, however, and everyone joined in to make the festival run smoothly. Eugenia organized and supervised the children’s games. I had been hesitant to ask her to do this, as she was five months pregnant, but she had insisted. To my astonishment, Jack had said he would assist her, so I did not need to worry about her overdoing it. I knew he would watch her like a hawk.

Eugenia’s brother, Tom Stedham, was at Jasper’s old post at the lake. Tom had come home from Jamaica the previous November, and Stephen had given him Adam’s old position as agent for Weston. He had also given Tom the Dower House and a very decent salary.

Stephen and Tom were close friends, and they had devoted a great deal of time during the past year attempting to organize an effective Society for the Abolition of Slavery.

I felt safe in putting Tom at the lake, as Tom could swim.

Giles’s new governess, Miss Manders, was supervising in the gallery.

My mother and the duke were holding court on the terrace for the long-suffering rector, his wife, Stephen’s uncle Francis, and any other poor soul whom Mama felt was socially elevated enough to deserve a conversation with the ducal pair. Uncle Francis met me at the food table late in the afternoon and told me that Mama had spent the entire afternoon deploring the lack of a gala house party of London friends such as she and the earl used to invite.

“Obviously the rector and I are not up to her standard,” he said with a laugh.

“I am so sorry, Uncle Francis,” I apologized. “I had to invite her, you know, and for some reason, she came.”

“Oh, you know Regina, Annabelle,” he replied carelessly. “She is secretly delighted that you fall so far short of her achievements as a hostess.”

I stared into his pleasant, kind-looking face. His eyes
were exactly the same shade as Stephen’s. I said slowly, “You know, I never thought of that.”

The dark blue eyes twinkled. “She comes to make certain that you don’t outshine her,” he said.

I laughed. “She will always be safe from me on that score, Uncle Francis. Still, it was wretched of me to stick you with her. I apologize, but I didn’t know what else to do.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Uncle Francis said cheerfully. “I am hopeful that the lord will count the hours I spend with Regina and Saye as penance for my sins. I asked the rector what he thought about my chances of this, and he said he thought they were very good.”

We both laughed.

I hadn’t seen Stephen for hours, as we had separated earlier in the afternoon in order to greet as many people as we possibly could. I had done my duty faithfully, speaking to hundreds of smiling faces, but at six o’clock fatigue struck me with a suddenness and a violence that would not be denied, and I made my way through the house and into the morning room, where I collapsed on the sofa with my head on a pillow and my legs up.

I had felt this kind of exhaustion only once before in my life, and I knew what it meant.

I was carrying a child.

I folded my hands on my still flat stomach, closed my eyes, and thought about how wonderful it would be to hold a baby in my arms once more. My eyes filled with tears of tenderness.

Another sign of my condition, I thought. Ordinarily I was not the weepy sort.

I thought about how the soft fuzz of the baby’s head would feel under my lips, and the happy tears began to trickle down my face. I sniffed and wiped at my face with my fingers.

How happy Stephen would be, I thought. He had been cheated out of his firstborn, but this baby would be unequivocably his.

Although, over the course of this past year, Giles had certainly become excessively attached to “Uncle Stephen.” A memory of the two of them, laughing themselves silly during a snowball fight in the Weston garden at Christmastime last year, got the tears going once more.

Then I thought of the four new hunter prospects sitting in my stables, and my tears dried up.

I rubbed my hand up and down my stomach, assessingly.

I had four Thoroughbreds who needed to be taught to hunt, and Jack was so involved with his own stud that I couldn’t expect him to give me any time at all. Stephen had said he would help me during cubbing season, because Sir Matthew never actually found a fox, but I was the one who was going to have to get these horses out and over fences.

This baby is scarcely started, I thought. There is no reason why I cannot hunt until January.

We would be leaving Weston in January anyway, because that was when Parliament opened, and as expected, Stephen had been elected the previous year to his uncle Francis’s seat. This was the reason I had cut back on the number of horses I had bought to retrain; I now had only half the season to make them into hunters.

Last year Sir Matthew had tried to convince me to let Stephen go up to London alone, but I had refused. Home for me was not a place but a person, and I would accompany Stephen to London this January as well.

The door to the morning room opened and Stephen’s voice said, “Are you all right, Annabelle?”

I turned my head to look at him, but otherwise I didn’t move.

“I’m fine. Just a little fatigued, that’s all. How did you find me?”

“Hodges saw you coming in here.”

“The all-seeing, all-knowing Hodges,” I said. Stephen came over to the sofa, and I moved my legs aside to make room for him. He sat down facing me and picked up my hands.

“You’re never fatigued,” he said.

“I think I have as much right to be fatigued as anyone else,” I said with feigned indignation.

“You have the energy of a lioness. Is something wrong? “