One Night for Love (20 page)

“Yes.” She sounded wistful, he noticed.

“It must be the most wonderful feeling in the whole world,” she said, “to be able to read and write.”

He took so much for granted, he realized. He had never really considered how privileged he was to have been educated. “Perhaps,” he suggested, “you could learn, Lily.”

“Perhaps,” she agreed. “Though probably I am too old. I daresay I would not be an apt pupil. Papa always said learning to read was the most difficult thing he had ever done in his life. He never did find it easy.” She set the book down and went to stand at the window, looking out.

He had not meant to ask her the question whose answer he dreaded to hear—certainly not yet. He did not feel strong enough to know. But somehow the time and the place seemed right and somehow the words just came spilling out.

“Lily,” he asked her, “what did you suffer?”

He went to stand beside her, facing her profile. He touched the backs of his fingers to her cheek. She looked
so delicate, yet he knew her to be as tough in her own way as even the most hardened of veterans. But how badly had her toughness been tested? “Are you able to talk about it?”

She turned her head and her huge blue eyes gazed back into his. Curiously, they looked both wounded and calm. Whatever she had suffered had hurt her, perhaps permanently, but it had not broken her. Or so her eyes seemed to say.

“It was war,” she said. “I saw sufferings far worse than my own. I saw maiming and torture and death. I have not been maimed. I did not die.”

“Were you … tortured?”

She shook her head. “Beaten a few times,” she said, “when I—when I did not please. But only with the hand. I was never really tortured.”

He would have liked a certain Spanish partisan suddenly to materialize before him. He would have liked to break every bone in the man’s body with his fists and then pluck him apart limb from limb with his bare hands. He had
beaten
Lily? Somehow it seemed almost as heinous a crime as the rape.

“Not tortured, then.” he said. “Only beaten and … used.”

“Yes.” Her gaze lowered to his cravat.

It hurt to imagine another man using Lily. Not because it made her less desirable to him—he had already considered that possibility the night before and rejected it—but because she had been all innocence and light and goodness and someone had taken her as a slave and thrust darkness and bitterness into her very body with his lust. And perhaps hurt her irreparably.

How was he to know? Perhaps she did not know herself. Perhaps her calm acceptance of what had happened, her sensible explanation about its having been war, was merely a small bandage covering a large and gaping wound.
Perhaps in a way her manner of coping was not unlike Lauren’s …

He lost his courage suddenly—or what little of it he had found with that first question. Had he asked, she would perhaps have told him the rest. All the atrocious details of what she had suffered and endured and survived. He did not want to know. He could not bear to know. Even though he realized that perhaps she needed to tell.

Ah, Lily, and you spoke of cowardice
?

He stroked her cheek and her jaw with the backs of his fingers and then set them beneath her chin to lift it. “You have nothing to be ashamed of, Lily,” he said. Did she feel ashamed? But she had fully expected that he might divorce her for adultery. “You did no wrong. I was the one who did wrong. I am the one who should feel shame. I should have protected you better. I should have guessed that they would attack the center of the line. I should have realized that there was a chance you still lived. I should have moved heaven and earth to find you and ransom you.”

“No!” Her eyes gazed calmly into his. “Sometimes it is easier to find fault and place the blame—even on oneself—than to accept the fact that war just does not make sense. It was war. That is all.”

And yet she blamed herself, as had been apparent the night before last. She blamed herself for cowardice in not fighting for her virtue, in not dying with the French prisoners rather than submit. And he could not accept the excuse of war as absolution for his own guilt.

He had thought himself recovered from his wounds. She looked as if she had none. But perhaps in reality they were two wounded people who must somehow find pardon and peace and healing together.

But to do that they surely needed to have everything in the open between them. Yet he could not bear to know …

He lowered his head and touched his lips to hers. They were soft and warm and yielding. And her eyes, he saw when he drew back his head to look into them, were deep with yearning. He kissed her again, as lightly as before until he felt her lips cling to his own and press back against them—just as they had when he had drawn her beneath his blanket in his tent on their wedding night.

Ah, Lily. He had missed her. Even believing her dead, he had missed her. His life had been empty without her. There had been a void that nothing and no one had filled or would ever have filled. But she was back. Ah, she had come home to him. He set his arms about her and drew her against him. He parted his lips over hers.

And found himself fighting a wild thing, who clawed at him and pushed him away in panic, making mewing noises of distress. She whirled away from him across the room and set a chair between them. When he stared at her in shock, she was staring back, her eyes huge with terror. And then suddenly she shut them tightly, and when he would have spoken, she pressed her hands over her ears and continued with the noises. Shutting him out. Shutting herself in.

He turned to ice inside.

“Lily.” He used the only voice he knew instinctively she would recognize and respond to—his officer’s voice. “Lily, you are quite safe. My honor on it. You are
safe.
”

She fell silent and after a few moments took her hands from her ears. She opened her eyes, though she did not look at him. They were huge and blank, the terror and everything else erased from them, he saw in some alarm.

“I am sorry,” he told her. “My deepest apologies. I did not intend either to hurt or to frighten you. I will never do anything … physical to you against your will. I swear it. Please believe me.”

“I am afraid,” she said, her voice toneless. “So afraid.”

“I know.” All of his earlier questions had been answered more forcefully than if he had articulated them and she had answered them in words. She was maimed as surely as a soldier who had returned from the wars with missing limbs—more so. He was afraid too—mortally afraid he would never be able to atone. He took a deep breath and used his officer’s voice again. “Look at me, Lily.”

She looked. All the vibrant color she had gained from her escapade on the beach had fled from her face. She was pale and haggard again.

“Take a good look,” he told her. “Whom do you see?”

“You,” she said.

“And who am I?”

“Major Lord Newbury.”

“Do you trust me, Lily?” he asked her.

She nodded. “With my life.”

It was an answer that terrified him—he had betrayed her trust once with appalling, incalculable results—but he could not afford to show his own weakness at the moment. “I will not promise never to kiss you again,” he said, “or never to do more than kiss you. But I will never do either without your full, free consent. Do you believe me?”

She nodded again. “Yes.”

“Look about you,” he commanded her. “Where are you?”

She looked. “In the cottage,” she said. “At Newbury Abbey.”

“And where is that, Lily?” he asked.

“In England.”

“There is no war in England,” he told her. “There is peace here. And this little portion of England is mine. You are safe here with me. Do you believe me?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Let me see you smile again, then,” he said.

Her smile was tremulous. But her terrible fear had gone, he could see, even if his own had not.

“I am sorry,” she said.

“Don’t be,” he told her. He sighed. “We had better not try talking further today. I did not bring you here to upset you. I brought you here because I love this place and instinct told me that you would love it too. It is yours as well as mine, my dear. You are my wife. You must come here whenever you wish. You will always be safe here—even from me. I swear it. And you may be yourself here. You may be exactly the person you choose to be.”

She nodded and reached for her bonnet. He watched her tie the ribbons beneath her chin and turn toward the door. He opened it for her and they stepped outside again to make their way down the valley in the direction of the hill path. He walked beside her, his hands clasped at his back. He was afraid to offer even his arm.

The wounds were far deeper than had been apparent, then. Would they ever heal? And was he capable of healing them? Here, where she did not belong, where she was unable to be the woman she had grown up to be, vibrant and spontaneous and free?

But he had no choice except to try to help her heal and cope with the present reality of her life. She was his wife. He had loved her deeply before he married her. He had loved her passionately for that one night of their marriage. He had loved her without ceasing since her apparent death.

And he had loved her again from the moment she had stepped into the nave of the church on his wedding day two mornings ago.

  
11
  

L
ily made her apologies to Aunt Theodora, Viscountess Sterne, and took all the blame upon herself for Miranda’s wayward behavior. She did it publicly, at dinner, so that everyone would know that the fault had been hers. But Aunt Theodora merely flushed and assured Lily that the incident had really been nothing at all. Hal added hotly that indeed it had not been and his father, Sir Samuel Wollston, told him sharply to hold his tongue. Joseph, the marquess of that long place, sounding decidedly bored, muttered again about storms in teacups. Pauline giggled. And Elizabeth changed the subject.

Lily was left with the conviction that yet again she had done the wrong thing.

It was a feeling with which she became increasingly familiar over the coming days. After she had taken a new dress down to the kitchen one morning and insisted upon ironing it herself and had then helped a kitchen maid carry out an enormous basket of laundry to be pegged on the clothesline, she had been told very gently by her mother-in-law that servants were hired to perform such tasks so that ladies might busy themselves with more important work. But the important work involved a daily meeting with the housekeeper and a perusal of accounts that were written in a ledger Lily could not decipher. Soon enough the dowager countess resumed the task alone.

Ladies—and a few gentlemen—came to call at the abbey, and Lily had to face the ordeal of having them presented to her and of then having to make conversation
with them while they all sipped tea. One afternoon Mr. Cannadine, who had accompanied his mother, spoke of the war with Neville and the Duke of Anburey and some other gentlemen, and Lily enthusiastically joined in the conversation. But after the visitors had left, Lauren drew her to one side and pointed out to her that it was not quite genteel for ladies to discuss such unpleasant subjects. Lily was not to blame, of course, Lauren had added hastily. Mr. Cannadine ought not to have introduced the subject when it was possible the gentlemen’s conversation might be overheard by the ladies.

The calls had to be returned. It was common courtesy, the dowager explained, to acknowledge those who had shown such civility. But when the barouche was passing through the village one afternoon on its way to Lady Leigh’s, Lily spied Mrs. Fundy and impulsively called to the coachman to stop. She asked Mrs. Fundy how she did, and how her husband and her children did. They were not rhetorical questions. She listened with interest to the answers and reached out her arms for the Fundy baby so that she could hug him and kiss him—even though Mrs. Fundy warned her that he needed his nappy changed and did not smell too sweet. But when the barouche was on its way again and Lily turned a brightly smiling face toward her mother-in-law, she found that she had incurred yet another gentle lecture. One might nod graciously to certain people, but it was quite unnecessary to engage them in conversation.