Midnight Scandals (9 page)

“I’m sorry if that’s inaccurate.” Briefly, she closed her eyes. Her memories of him took on weight, the nights he’d walked here from Wordless under a starlit sky like tonight’s. “I don’t know what it was to you.”

“We’ll leave it at that, then.” He turned and tilted the pot, watching the play of light over it. He wore a thick gold ring on his first finger, and that, too, was something she did not recognize. In ten years, she’d acquired only two pieces of jewelry: a necklace and a pair of earrings, both a gift from Magnus when she turned twenty-one. Since she’d almost immediately lost one of the earrings, she almost never wore the necklace that matched. “You were not your usual self,” he said in his stranger’s voice. He looked up. “It would not be absurd to suggest I took advantage. I’ll apologize if you need that from me.”

“No.”

He leaned against the dresser, still holding the pot of crocuses. “Your favorite flower, are they?”

“They’ve always reminded me of you.” Too late, she realized how much that gave away. “They bloom every spring in the field between Northword Hill and the Grange. Every spring when Magnus and I were little, I tried to count them whenever we walked up the hill.”

He gave her a sideways look. “I remember.”

“There weren’t as many then as there are now. The first spring after you left, the hill was covered with crocuses as far as the eye could see.” She waved a hand. “Not just a few, but a carpet of them. People came all the way from Aubry Sock to see them. I told Magnus to paint it for you. Did he not send it on?”

“He did. My wife saw it and thought it lovely.” He let out a short breath. “I didn’t know it was from you. I had it framed and gave it to her as a gift.”

“Did you?”

“You know Magnus. He’s a gift for choosing an interesting perspective in whatever he paints or draws. She particularly liked that you could see a part of Wordless. I suppose it’s still hanging in her room.” Crispin, slouched against her dresser, set the pot back in its place. He watched her under half-lidded eyes. A lock of his hair, that lovely shade that was not quite blond yet not quite brown either, fell in a crescent slash across his forehead. “It’s a wonder you don’t curse them the way she does.”

He meant Eleanor. “Never.” She brought her shawl closer around her shoulders and caught the edge of his frown. “Why would I?”

“I don’t know.” He shrugged and avoided looking directly at her by focusing his gaze just past her ear. “Because I took your virginity on a night like this?”

“Turn about is fair play. After all, I took yours.”

That frown of his flashed again. He ought to have smiled at her joke, but he didn’t. And this time, he looked her full in the face. “For whatever offense I gave that made you leave me.”

She sat on the armchair, just on the edge of the seat, and clutched the padded arm. Her heart turned to ash in her chest while she searched for the words to explain what had happened. “I didn’t leave you.”

“You didn’t come with me.” He made a sharp, dismissive gesture. “It was ten years ago. We were practically children. Young and foolish, the both of us, but I have always, always, wanted to tell you that I never wavered.” He set his palm on his head and looked away in a gesture she’d seen a thousand times from him. When he did that, he was gathering his words, assembling thoughts, so that when he spoke he said precisely what he meant to say. “It’s done. You and I. Over.”

“I know.” She wanted to go to him, but that would be worse than presumptuous. She wanted so badly to touch him, to tell him she understood his anger and that he should let old hurts go.

“I ought not blame you for youth and inexperience of life, and yet I do.” He let out a frustrated breath. “It’s nonsense, my doing that. But seeing you again— Sometimes I think we were only yesterday and all my old habits with you come back.”

“It’s been difficult for me, too.”

He pushed away from the dresser and walked to the fireplace. For a while, he stood with his back to her, staring at the line of chimney ornaments on the mantle. He touched a bird’s nest he’d given to her when she was eleven. “You still have this.”

“I’m sentimental about such things. Magnus is always on about how I won’t discard anything. I’ve collected a box of buttons I’ll surely never use. Old grammars and the like. Sketches Magnus did when he was a boy. I kept them all, you know.”

He turned, and his eyes were hard as stone. “What happened today should not have. I’m sorry. I hope you’ll forgive me.”

“There’s nothing for me to forgive.”

He said, softly, after far too long, “I think about him all the time.”

She closed her eyes.

“He’d be nearly ten, if you’d had a boy. I imagine him with your beautiful eyes. My mouth.” His voice rasped over her, killing her. “Or a girl with your hair and my smile. She might have had your brother’s gifts.”

“Don’t.”

“I don’t think I ever told you how I felt, and I ought to have.”

She turned her head toward him. “It’s not the men who suffer. It’s the women who are turned out of the house. Women bear all that burden.”

“How could you not trust me? The day you told me you were with child, that night, I lay in my bed at Wordless, and I was glad and at the same time I was afraid of what my father would say when I told him. Afraid of Magnus and what he’d think of me for what I’d done to you. And afraid for you. Terrified for what might happen to you.”

She didn’t dare open her eyes. She couldn’t, didn’t, and still the tears came. In those days when she’d been trapped and desperate and unable to tell anyone for fear Magnus would find out, she’d felt as if the poison of Lord Northword’s hatred had given the man the power to twist the world into any shape he wished. Crispin’s father did not wish for a world where his son married a woman like her, and he had transformed the world until he had what he wanted.

“I knew you were afraid and distraught and that you blamed yourself, as if you’d gotten with child without any help from me. I knew you blamed yourself, but I never told you how much I wanted to marry you and hold our baby in my arms. I thought you understood that. I thought you knew I loved you too much to let that happen to you or our child.”

She rested her head on her arm, face down so that she could not see him. “Don’t do this to me.”

He moved closer. “What, Portia? Do what?” The ice was back in his voice. “You went to that woman without giving me a chance to convince you I would do anything you needed. Anything. My father could threaten me all he liked, and I would not have refused to marry you. You didn’t need to save yourself from that fate.”

The enormity of her loss hit her again. What might have been, the life they might have had. Words came on the heels of a short, low breath, fast and propelled by the force of all the years she’d kept those words back. She lifted her head and stared at him through a blur of tears.

“Your father told me if I married you, he’d have Magnus expelled from school. He said if you were still a minor he’d have the marriage annulled. He told me if I thought we could wait until Magnus was graduated, that if we did that, Magnus would never have a living anywhere, not for as long as he lived. He told me he’d already personally seen to it that the Royal Academy would never admit him, and he had. He did that to punish me, to make sure I knew he’d stop at nothing. That’s why Magnus was rejected. If it weren’t for me, he would have been admitted. He ought to have been.”

He set both hands to his head this time and stared past her.

“Your father was right about me. And so are you. I didn’t love you enough to bring more harm to my brother. I couldn’t do that to him when I’d already cost him his dream.”

Crispin dropped his hands to his side. She didn’t move. The silence ripened. At last, he said, “You ought to have told me.”

She leaned sideways against the chair and stared at the window frame past Crispin’s shoulders. She didn’t want to know if he was looking at her. It would kill her to know. “What difference does it make what I should have done or wish I had? There’s only the choice I made. And I am sorry. So sorry to have hurt you. I never wanted that.”

“I married someone else, and by the time I understood what an awful mistake I’d made marrying in anger and resentment, it was too late.” His voice was bleak, and if there had been a way to blot that out, she would have. “My wife deserved better. She was a good and decent woman, and she deserved more from her husband than the man she got.”

That took her aback enough to look at him. She had always imagined they were happy. Crispin would never have married a woman who wasn’t worthy of him. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

He made a face when she reacted by reaching to him. Her hand fell back to her lap. “Don’t you be either, Crispin Hope. You never wrote of her except in the most tender and respectful ways. I always thought it was plain as anything that you loved her very much indeed.”

“Not the way I loved you.”

“Of course you didn’t.” She clenched her hand on her lap. “There isn’t only one way to love someone.”

He strode to her and did not stop moving until she was trapped between him and the chair. Her heart headed toward her toes. His every look recalled what they’d done today, and though she still felt the aches of their encounter, her body wanted him again. She wanted all the marks of their passion, the imprint of him on her soul rising up and taking shape once again. “Then why do I feel as if nothing’s changed with us?”

“The past hasn’t changed. It’s there in our memories. It won’t ever go away.”

The silence was uncomfortably long.

“I loved you.”

“We can’t go back.” She wiped at her tears. “My God, can you imagine if we tried? We aren’t that couple anymore. I don’t know you any more than you do me. Please, let’s be friends. Let’s keep that.”

He stepped back.

Her heart broke again.

Chapter Nine

Two days later

A
FTER BREAKFAST THEY WERE ALL
sitting in the parlor as near to the fire as they dared now that Hob had brought in the morning post. There were letters for everyone. Crispin had several, most of which he put in his pocket, but he read aloud from one in which a friend of his, a man whose name she recognized from reading the
Times,
described with lively detail his days spent hiking in Northumberland.

Magnus sat on a chair idly sketching while Eleanor knit. When Crispin had finished reading his letter and they had exchanged news or excerpts from the other correspondence, Portia cleared her throat and said, “I have happy news.”

Eleanor put down her knitting and beamed at her. “I adore happy news, and I should very much like to hear yours.”

“Jeremy and I have advanced the date of our wedding.”

In the silence that followed, Eleanor drew her eyebrows together. “But the day’s been set for weeks now.”

“We’ve decided to be married sooner. Not October, Eleanor, but May.”

“May? Next year, do you mean?”

“No. Next month. Nothing fancy. There’s no time for anything but the simplest of ceremonies, and we’ve decided we prefer it that way.”

Eleanor’s hands stilled. “But May is when we’ll be in London. For the end of the season.”

“You and Magnus may still go, of course.”

“When did you decide this?”

“I wrote to Mr. Stewart just a few days ago.” She was aware of Crispin’s silence, the way he watched her. “He agreed a May wedding was more convenient than October. I should like it very much, Magnus, if we could be married here at Doyle’s Grange on the last Sunday in May. As soon as the last of the banns are called.”

Eleanor’s hands fluttered. “I’ve told everyone you’re to be married in October. In West Aubry. ”

Her stomach folded in on itself. She glanced at her brother, hoping to see in his face confirmation that he supported her in this change. Magnus did not meet Portia’s eyes.

Eleanor smiled radiantly. “You see? It’s not convenient at all. I assure you, I am happy to be of assistance in bringing your wedding about in a suitable manner. At a suitable and convenient time.”

“Jeremy and I are settled on this.”

“I excel at managing such matters.”

“I’m sure you do.”

She leaned close and gave Portia’s arm a squeeze. “Your parents would have wanted you to have a lovely wedding, attended by the people you love. You’ve not had a mother’s firm guidance nor been able to see your father’s pleasure at seeing you properly married. The way I saw how happy mine were when Magnus and I were married.”

Resentment bubbled up even as she told herself that Eleanor only wished for her wedding to be perfect. But she wanted nothing more than to be gone from Doyle’s Grange. She did not want to continue an intruder on her brother’s new life. She wanted to be away from a world where the Viscount Northword could destroy her peace of mind. “I appreciate that. Truly, I do.” Lord, she could feel Crispin’s gaze. “But Jeremy and I are in accord that this change in date is for the best.”

“You have a sister now, my dear. Wiser and more experienced in such matters. I’ll take care of everything. You ought to be married in the church at West Aubry, with your brother presiding. You can’t have seen my guest list, the people I’ve invited for October. Or Mr. Stewart’s guests for that matter. I have the list from his mother, you know.”