Laura Kinsale (23 page)

“I don’t...” Zenia prevented herself from biting her lip. “What is
de trop?”

“In the way,” he said dryly. The carriage rocked forward, following the procession at a slow, stately pace.

“No,” she said. “This is your home.”

He made a sound of bitter amusement. He did not seem to want to look at her, watching instead the painfully slow progress of the funeral cortege past the church.

“God, how long will this take?” he asked again, dropping his head back against the seat.

“A quarter hour to the new cemetery,” she said. “It’s across the river. Then the service—and a luncheon at the Forbis’s... your mother will not stay more than an hour. It should be over by three.”

He lifted his eyebrows, an expression that brought a flood of memories. “You are an authority on funerals, I find.”

“I’ve attended a number,” she said shyly. “With your mother.”

“Have you indeed. What a dutiful daughter-in-law.”
 

“It is no trouble,” she said. “I enjoy them.”
 

He turned his head back to her. “The devil you say. You enjoy this?”

“It is the way English people do things.” Zenia stroked the muff. “It’s very sad for the families, of course. But—well, it hasn’t been anyone that I know who died.”

“Oh?” He made a wry face. “Did I not even rate a memorial service?”

She kept stroking the muff, over and over. “There was a memorial.”

“Did you shed a tear, wolf cub?”

She lifted her eyes. His old name for her seemed to echo in the chill air between them. Abruptly he looked away, out the window again, the gray light harsh on his cheekbones and his profile.

“You’ve been eating well,” he said.

Zenia was vividly aware that her figure had changed. Her breasts and hips were full and round, still shaped by Elizabeth’s effect on her body, and none of her bones showed anywhere. It was no more than a candid observation, no different than she might say that he had been long in the desert sun—and yet she flushed. He had made Elizabeth inside her, changed her body and her life.

They sat like strangers. They were strangers.

“Everything is different now,” she said.

He gave a sarcastic laugh. “Certainly. You’re wearing a dress.
Allah akhbar! “

“I will not speak Arabic,” she said stiffly. “I am done with that.”

“I see,” he said. “Pardon me, Lady Winter.”

He stopped the landau at the gate and got down, sending it on up the drive without him. Ahead, the coach that carried his mother and her daughter-in-law had already disappeared around the curve of the landscaped grounds. He had let her escape—or perhaps he had let himself escape—at the funeral luncheon, making no protest when she went into the other rig with his mother.

He stood looking at the iron gates emblazoned with the crest of Belmaine, ignoring the keeper. The man touched his forelock, went inside the porter lodge, and then tried to stand out of sight behind the curtains to spy. Arden didn’t know him. He had never paid much attention to the servants at Swanmere. There was little point; under his mother’s exacting requirements, the turnover was so steady that all the employees were known in the house by their position rather than their name. Engaging and dismissing were two of her prime pastimes.

He turned, walking up the drive until he came to a familiar tree. The rhododendrons had grown higher under it, but beyond their arching branches, the path still wound down through the wood. He pushed aside dew-laden winter twigs with his cane. His breath steamed and vanished in the cold air.

He stopped before he came in sight of the lake. He was not quite ready for that yet. Or the house; he was not ready for that either. He was doing it in stages.

There was a little taste of smoke in the air, and wet leaves, and perhaps the first edge of a frost to come in the night. He closed his eyes, breathing the winter in an English wood. If he could have lived all his life in a forest, he thought, like some hermit, or a fox in a hole, he would not have had to leave England.

He remembered that he had dug a burrow once in this wood, tunneling back beneath the great roots of an elm, a den so deep that he could crawl all the way inside and turn around and curl up like a woodchuck. He had lined it with a horse blanket and laid there for hours, pretending he was a bear. Or sometimes a mole, squinting up his eyes and trying to smell worms in the dark.

He’s rather a furtive boy, madam,
said one of his governesses.
Perhaps a companion his own age would bring him out.

And so the repellent cousin three times removed came and spent a summer, jumping up and down on Arden’s burrow so that the roof caved, and peaching on him when he tried to put the horse blanket back. Arden had learned how to fight that summer, and run away on a dare. He only got as far as the local tavern, but that was merely the beginning. He liked running away. He got devilish good at it. By the time he was fourteen, he’d joined the army, and only the bad luck of being recognized by a footman who had just been dismissed from Swanmere and taken the king’s shilling had prevented Arden from marching away with the Eighty-second Foot.

He came to the elm, still standing on the crest of its steep bank, its roots running out through the leaves and soft soil. The tunnel was long vanished, but he sat down on the thick root that had formed a lintel over the passage.

He took off his hat and put his face down on his crossed arms.

He dimly remembered fragile, sun-kissed, dusty beauty—but she was utterly magnificent. The jet black silk, tight-waisted, with voluminously spreading skirts, the feathered bonnet, the net gloves and sable muff: all were formidably elegant. Her face was like ivory framed in this stylish black outline, cool and white, her dark eyes brushed with rich lashes, the curve of her cheek soft purity, her mouth calm perfection. She did not look like anyone he had ever seen before. She looked like a goddess of fashion and ice.

Between her and the dream in the desert, there was no remotest link. It dazed him to imagine he had made love to that stunning woman in black. He would not have had the presumption. In spite of her beauty, he thought that with the slightest effort, he could actively dislike her. He hated society ladies. He’d called her by his name for her, and she had only looked enquiringly at him, as if he had committed some faintly embarrassing faux pas.

If it had been her alone, he would have stood up now and turned and walked away from Swanmere. There was no more a legal marriage between them than pigs could fly. She was an actress indeed; she could transform from a Bedu boy to a vulnerable female to
Lady Winter,
but he could strip her of this new pretense in an instant.

And yet he did not walk away. They said he had a daughter. He was not, having seen what a remote stranger this woman was, instantly ready to accept her child as his own. But he did not deny that it was possible. He could remember the fact of having lain with her—he just could not in his mind transform the fact into the living existence of a child of that ephemeral union.

She had been a virgin. That was one of the more powerful imprints of the memory. He had never taken a virgin before. And he had not had a woman since.

A startling spike of desire ran through him. He lifted his head and contemplated the trunk of a tree. After such a long abstinence, he was living continually at a low-level smolder, but to meet it so suddenly and intensely, touched off by the thought of
her
—his own reaction unnerved and annoyed him.

He hurled a pebble and watched it strike the trunk and bounce back. Then he dusted the dirt from his hands and stood up. He could not put it off forever.

As he walked along the path, he could see the house appear through the trees. The lake reflected a gray sky, sheer silver with a long leisurely V spreading in the middle where one of the swans paddled. Beyond, the handsome facade of Swanmere dominated the long rise of lawn, a white precision of form and adornment, tall pedimented windows and pilasters and urns in a calibrated sweep of majesty.

Arden stopped. His breath seemed to condense in his chest. His mouth and jaw hardened.

So long. So long it had been. And yet it looked the same. Always precisely the same. Huge and cold and flawless.

He closed his eyes and gave a silent, aching laugh. The elm tree and vanished burrow seemed more like home.

For a ridiculous moment, as he started down the path that circled the lake, he wished he had Selim at his side. The silent laugh escaped in an outraged chuckle. Selim! His mouth lifted in a sneer, and he thrust the tip of his cane deep in the damp ground as he pushed off.

Zenia had gone directly to change, not pausing with Lady Belmaine in the saloon. Let her tell Lord Belmaine that his son had finally come—Zenia wanted Elizabeth.

She interrupted her daughter in a game of nesting spoons together between her chubby fingers. Zenia dismissed the nurse and caught the child up in her arms, pressing her face into Elizabeth’s tummy, making bubbling noises. Elizabeth laughed and grabbed for Zenia’s hat plume. The leading strings on her blue-and-white pinafore dangled as Zenia carried her.

Elizabeth did not live in the nursery. Zenia could not bear to be separated so far from her. They slept together in Zenia’s own bed, and the adjoining chamber held a crib and playthings and a cot for the nurse. Lady Belmaine did not approve of this arrangement, Zenia knew, but neither she nor Lord Belmaine seemed to take any deep interest in their granddaughter. Lady Belmaine had not favored Elizabeth since her birth, because she was not a boy, and Lord Belmaine’s only comment had been that he was not much of one for babies, but he thought her a charming child—a remark that somehow implied that he would take a look at her again when she grew up, but probably not before.

Zenia did not mind. Elizabeth belonged to
her.
She was glad she had not had a boy—she well knew that Lord and Lady Belmaine would have exercised their authority to the utmost with a boy, and never allowed her to keep him with her to spoil and adore and cherish. But they let her do as she pleased with Elizabeth, as long as she did not take her daughter away from Swanmere. And on the baby’s first birthday, the earl had called Zenia into his study and showed her the papers that made Elizabeth his sole heiress outside of generous jointures for Lady Belmaine and Zenia. “The title will go into abeyance, of course,” he had said, sitting behind his great desk, never lifting his eyes from the papers before him, “but I have arranged that the entail shall be commuted. When she marries, her husband must take the Mansfield name, and with that proviso her male issue inherits. I need not subject you to the legal details, as they are rather tedious, but you may be assured that the girl will have everything.”

He had been very cold and businesslike when Zenia had thanked him. “You need not thank me.” He had looked up at her at last with his pale blue eyes. “Bluntly, madam, I have waited this long to be entirely certain that the child is my son’s. But the resemblance is incontestable. That being the case, this is simply the proper and fitting way in which things must be left.”

At the time, Zenia had not agreed that there was any resemblance at all, though she would never have dared say so. Now, she knew what the earl meant. And somehow it chilled and frightened her. He had come back, this man who was Elizabeth’s father, and somehow in spite of utterly different features and coloring, she looked like him.