Seven Wicked Nights (49 page)

“She didn’t?”

“No. And that’s why I have to marry Jeremy.” She gripped the lapels of his coat. “I can’t stay here. I can’t. I’m not a good enough person for that. I’ll go mad if I stay, and if I don’t go mad, then one day I’ll say something to her I shouldn’t, and Magnus must take her side.”

Crispin stroked a hand over her head. “But him?” He spoke in a low voice. “The man’s not worthy of you.”

“You don’t know that.” She pushed away from him. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”

He followed her to the very rear of the lawn but needed another step to come even. They were off the path, both of them moving quickly.

She spoke before he’d caught up. “Magnus likes him.”

“Magnus tolerates him because he thinks you love the man.”

She put out a hand to slow him down. “Oh, do watch where you put your feet. You’ll step—”

“What?”

She stopped walking. But Crispin, being a tall man and in the middle of a step, moved those few inches more. She cried out. Too late. His foot came down on the grass. “Look what you’ve done.”

“What? What have I done?” He followed her downward glance with a puzzled expression.

“You’ve killed it.” Tears burned in her eyes and choked off her words until she managed to swallow. “There’s little enough beauty here anymore. Eleanor is determined to ruin it all, and now you’re destroying what’s left for me to enjoy. There’s nothing else here I love. Not any more.”

“I’m sorry.” It was plain he’d no idea what he’d done. None at all.

“You’re not.” She stared at the crocus that he’d smashed into the dirt, and all she could see was her future if she stayed. She knelt by the flattened plant. “You’re not sorry at all. Don’t pretend you are. This one’s managed to escape her and now you’ve crushed it, and it’s dead.”

Crispin crouched across from her and pushed away her hand. He built up a wall of mud and propped the flower on it. “There. Perhaps like the rowan it will recover with some benign neglect.”

“It won’t.” Those were tears thickening her voice, but she met his gaze head on. “If it survives the day, Eleanor will find it, and she’ll tell Hob to dig it up. If she doesn’t kill it with her own bare hands. That’s all she ever does, murder what I love and all the time she makes it impossible to be angry at her.”

He frowned at the mud on his gloves. With a hard sigh, he pulled them off and dropped them in his coat pocket. Then, both of them still bent over the plant, he tapped the underside of her chin. “I’m sorry I was clumsy and trod on your flower. I’m sorry Eleanor digs them up.” He took her hand and brought her to her feet. “I’m an oaf. I don’t watch where I put my feet. And now I’ve made you unhappy when that’s the last thing I meant to do. Listen to me.” He grabbed her by the shoulders again, and she looked at him through a blur of tears. “I’ll have the groundskeeper plant a hundred of them at Wordless. You can go there every day to see them. She won’t be able to ruin them for you there.”

Her chest was stuffed full of feelings, and she could not contain them all. “A hundred isn’t enough.”

“A thousand then.” With her hand still in his, he walked them toward the rear of the house.

“It’s too late for that, Crispin. I’ll soon be living too far away to walk to Wordless.”

His mouth thinned. “Then you can bloody well live at Wordless. I don’t mind if you do. I’m never there. Why oughtn’t you?”

“Because then everyone will think I’m your lover, that’s why.”

“It wouldn’t be true.”

Emptiness settled in her belly and made everything familiar and dear seem unfamiliar, from Doyle’s Grange to Crispin to her future life. “You’ve not changed a bit, have you? Still full of grand and impossible ideas. I might as well make my home in the clouds as live at Wordless.”

He cupped her face and brushed his thumbs across her cheeks and when he did that and looked at her the way he was now, the world with all its troubles dropped away. When he touched her like that, she believed she could live in a castle in the sky.

“Do you feel that?” he whispered. “Whenever I touch you there’s nothing but that heat.”

“I cannot live on that.”

“He’s not your equal.”

She blinked several times, but the heat coursing through her stayed. “Of course he is.”

“He’s not.” He dipped his head and for a breathless moment, she thought he meant to kiss her. She could no more deny the passion between them than she could deny herself air. He moved his finger again. “You’re cold.”

She drew her head back, and his finger slipped away. “Your hands are warm.”

“You’ve made up your mind, haven’t you?”

She nodded.

“Nothing will shake your conviction that he’s more than he is?”

“He’s what I need him to be.”

He shook his head. “Don’t. It’s a mistake. Don’t marry just to get away. I, of all people, know what a mistake that is.”

She swallowed hard. “I can’t stay here. I can’t.”

“Not even if it’s good sense? You’re running from a bad situation into a worse one, and it’s one you can’t take back when the hard light of reason proves your mistake.” He kept his voice low. “I promise you, there’s nothing worse than to marry where there is no love.”

“She’s ruined Doyle’s Grange for me. Ruined it.”

“He’s a belly on him and only half a head of hair. No doubt he’s losing his hearing.” He checked himself and after a glance at the house, lowered his voice. “Do you want to spend the best years of your life shouting at a fat old man who probably never read a novel in his life? And if he did, he’d not think it grand.”

While they stood here, the clouds had gotten thicker and darker and the air colder. She grasped his hand and pressed it. “He likes me, with my red hair and despite all my faults.”

“Is he marrying a wife or a nurse for his mother?”

“That’s uncalled for.”

“It’s entirely called for.”

She recognized that mulish look. “You’ve never had to do without something you want, let alone something you need.”

His eyes widened. “The hell I haven’t.”

“You? With ten thousand a month and houses all over England? He is a decent man. We understand one another.”

“Don’t attempt to tell me you love that man. I know what you look like when you’re in love.”

“It won’t be the way you and I were.” Her heart cracked open, irreparably broken, and there was just no way to repair the damage she’d done. “Not that kind of love, but then Jeremy and I are not young and foolish or in love for the first time. I dare say we’ll get on quite well. I know we shall.” She walked away from him. The chickens had been let out and a few of the hens scattered as she and Crispin approached the back gate. “Besides,” she said when he was next to her again. “He’s no objection to me, not even at my advanced age.”

His face emptied of emotion. “Marry me instead.”

“You don’t want that.”

She knew from experience that Crispin, when angry, turned quiet. His gaze was quite capable of freezing one to death with a glance. No doubt he’d learned that from his father. He went silent long enough to tie her stomach in knots. She waited him out and won that contest, for he spoke in a low, tight, voice. “Have you more to say about how I think or feel?”

“You’ll always resent me for what happened, for the choice I made. You were steadfast, and I was not.”

“I don’t blame you. Not for what my father did to you. To us.”

“You haven’t forgiven me.”

“You willfully misunderstand.” He touched her arm, and she flinched. “It’s not I who hasn’t forgiven. It’s you.”

Her mouth gaped. “I do not blame you. Not for your father, that’s hardly your fault, and not for anything else.”

“You can’t forgive yourself.”

She drew in a stuttering breath. “What sort of person would I be if I did?”

“The woman I used to love.”

“I’m not that woman. Don’t you see? There’s no repairing what happened. I’m broken. Nothing will ever fix that.”

Chapter Twelve

The following day

N
ORTHWORD LEANED FORWARD
on the chair he’d brought next to Magnus’s and breathed in the scent of the beer that filled his mug. They were in Magnus’s office, sitting on chairs drawn up to the fireplace. It was just after one, and the remains of their luncheon were on the table by the door. That arse-kissing toady Jeremy Stewart had driven his mother, Eleanor, and Portia to Aubry Sock for tea. They weren’t expected back for another three hours at least. That left him and Magnus with the house to themselves. They were taking full advantage.

He reached behind him and flipped open the box of cigars on the table. He gave Magnus cigars whenever they saw each other. Northword fished out two and handed one over before he hefted his mug. “Good friends and happy marriages.” He did not intend for his toast to extend to Portia and that prick Jeremy Stewart, so when Magnus raised his glass he narrowed the scope of his words. “To you and Eleanor.”

While the April sky might be blue, it was bloody cold outside. The nearest window was open a crack to let out the smoke. The office where they sat was on the small side of cozy, with shelves jammed with books, a desk with stacks of pamphlets, papers, a two-day-old
Times,
and a Bible. A trunk with broken trim sat underneath the window. An oak highboy painted red took up half the wall across from the fireplace. The table behind them, close enough for them to use it, was covered with paper. Magnus’s doing, that riot of thick, odd-sized sheets of paper.

Charcoal and gum rubber littered the surface, and Crispin had flicked away a pencil that rolled underneath the cigar box. Several of the pages were sketches of the view from various windows of the house or of everyday items: a cup, an apple, a Bible seen from the page edges. Some were of furniture, a view of a window, and more recently, the church in Aubry Sock where Magnus, naturally, had spent a great deal of time before he had the living in West Aubry. There were a few sketches of him and several of the men and women who lived near Up Aubry. He had a knack for taking a likeness.

Magnus lifted his mug, recently filled from the contents of the earthenware jug he’d brought back from Up Aubry earlier in the day. The tavern there was half the size of this room and comfortably held the entire male population of the village, counting the proprietor and including Crispin. They served a dark and bitter beer that had to be the finest anywhere in England. “To good friends.” He winked. He took a long draw on his beer and when he was done, let out a sigh. “Light the bloody thing.”

“Impatient sod.” He leaned over with a candle for Magnus to use to light his cigar. He lit his when Magnus blew the first puff of smoke in the direction of the open window.

“If the subject should happen to come up, don’t mention the cigars to Eleanor.”

“Why not?”

Magnus contorted in order to tap the top of the cigar box. “She’ll have my head if she finds out about these. Thinks smoking is vile. Ungodly for a man of God.”

Crispin didn’t reply right away “Are you telling me you aren’t permitted to smoke a fine cigar in your own house?”

“Not just my house now.” He let out a stream of smoke. “There’s always the vicarage in West Aubry, but it’s smaller than here. Lovely, make no mistake, but she’s taken a fancy to the Grange, Eleanor has. It’s here she wants to live.”

“If she complains, tell her it was me, and that you tried to dissuade me.” He drew on his cigar. When he’d let out the smoke, he said, “Tell her I said I am the bloody Viscount Northword, and I can smoke a cigar anywhere I damned please.”

Magnus laughed. “Perhaps I’ll not say precisely that. But she’ll agree with the sentiment, I tell you that.”

“Tell her I refused to save my soul, but that yours remains unsullied.”

“That I will.” They sat for a bit, contemplating the fire and the warmth and the hint of chill at their backs. “Did Lady Northword mind you smoking?”

“Never. Though to be fair, I never did around her. The way you won’t around your wife.” He tried for a smoke ring and muffed it. “I don’t think less of you for that.”

“Your bloody house is big enough you could have a dozen men smoking and no one at the other end would know.” Magnus exhaled, then sank a little lower on his chair. “Put another bit of coal on the fire, won’t you?”

“Why should I when you’re nearer?”

“Because I’m more comfortable than you. Because I’m an old married man now. I need my strength.” He put his finger in the stream of smoke leaving his mouth and traced it upward as far as his arm could reach. When he’d settled again on his chair, he examined his cigar. “The last cigar to be smoked at the Grange. What would Doyle say if he were still alive?”

“Arf. Arf.”

Magnus’s belly shook. “The poor dog froze to death, I hear. For lack of coal on the fire.”

“God help us all if the Grange must be renamed ‘Doyle and Magnus’s Grange.’”

“I’ll carve it on my headstone. ‘Doyle was a fine dog but Magnus was the better man.’”

“Amen, my friend. Amen.” They laughed at that together, and when Crispin was back on his chair, having added half a scuttle of coal to the fire, they smoked in companionable silence. He stretched his legs as close to the grate as he dared. The wind rattled the shutters harder, then died away. “Will it rain soon, do you think?”