SILK AND SECRETS (51 page)

“Then something happened that made my fear so overwhelming that I felt I had to run away. I discovered…” She stopped walking and swallowed hard, finding it al-most impossible to say what she had never before spoken aloud. “I discovered that I was pregnant.”

She risked a glance at Ross and saw that he was staring at her as if she was a stranger, his face like stone. In a spurt of words she continued, “I didn’t really feel old enough to be a wife, but I married you because I was too much in love not to. The knowledge that I was soon to become a mother terrified me. Much later, I came to understand that part of the problem was fear that I would become like my own mother. I think she had spirit once, but having four children and being utterly dependent on her husband crushed it. Her life revolved around placating a difficult bully. I swore I would never be like her.”

“Did you think I was a bully like your father?” he asked, his voice dangerously controlled.

She made a sharp gesture of negation with one hand. “No, of course not, but you would have gone in the other direction and become too considerate, too protective. If you’d known I was pregnant, you would have wrapped me in cotton wool. Would you have taken me on the adventurous trip to the Middle East we had been planning?”

“I don’t know. Certainly I would have been concerned for your welfare.” The hand resting on his knee clenched. “You were right. I would not have wanted you to take unnecessary risks.”

She felt distant satisfaction when he confirmed what she had suspected, but hastened to add, “That was only part of the problem—most of my fear was blindly irrational.”

She began pacing again, searching for words that could explain the inexplicable. “I had a… a sense of doom, a conviction that staying with you would destroy both of us; I would become a woman that I despised and you could not love, and only duty would keep you with me. Yet I couldn’t talk about my fears, because pregnancy is supposed to be an occasion for joy—I was sure that no one would understand, that there was something horribly wrong with me for feeling as I did.

“I felt trapped in an impossible situation. When you left for a few days to visit your ailing godfather, I found myself taking wild risks when I went riding, secretly hoping for an accident that might solve the problem. That’s when I knew that I had to get away, before something terrible happened, and before my pregnancy was so advanced that you would notice. I bolted on sheer impulse and took ship for Malta, which my family had visited once and I remembered fondly.”

Her head was throbbing and she raised one hand to her temple, knowing that the dull pain was because she was coming to the worst part. “By the time I reached Malta, I knew I had made a terrible mistake, but I was also sure that I had burned my bridges too thoroughly to ever go back. In my logical madness I knew that you might want the baby for dynastic reasons, or at least because you would feel responsible for it, but you certainly would never forgive a wife who had subjected you to such public humiliation.”

Briefly she closed her eyes, remembering. “If I had known you were coming after me—if you had arrived even a few hours earlier, everything would have been different,” she said despairingly. “But ”ifs’ aren’t worth the powder it would take to blow them to hell.“

She drew a shuddering breath. “I still don’t understand why I did what I did. Certainly there was no point where I made a deliberate choice to betray you. But I was eighteen and a fool, desperately lonely and sure that I was already ruined. The Comte d’Auxerre was amusing and flattering and looked a little like you.” She swallowed hard. “I thought that just for one night, he might keep the loneliness at bay, so when he asked to come to my room, I… I let him.”

His voice edged like broken glass, Ross said, “For God’s sake, Juliet, don’t tell me any more about this.”

“Please, bear with me,” she begged. “You need to know to understand what happened later.” Her face twisted with bitter regret. “It’s hard to believe how naive I was. Girls are warned never to be alone with men because a male touch will rouse us to helplessly wanton behavior, and I more or less believed that, because when
you
touched me I definitely lost all sense and control. Oh, I knew better than to think lying with another man would be the same, but I did think that for a few hours I might forget my misery.”

Her restless pacing had brought her to the wall, and she stopped, staring blindly at the rough plaster. “I was so wrong,” she said wretchedly. “I soon realized that I had made another horrible mistake, but… I felt that I couldn’t draw back, not after I had agreed. I loathed every moment of it, not because of anything he did—it was just that he wasn’t you. I felt like a whore—I despised him, and even more I despised myself. I was too ashamed to admit how I felt, so I pretended that nothing was wrong, but I made him leave as soon as I could.”

Juliet turned to look at Ross, her gray eyes as dark and frantic as twisting smoke. “That was the only time I ever broke my marriage vows, Ross. I hated what I had done so much that I could never bear to let another man touch me. The rumors that trickled back to England were just that—rumors. I suppose they were inspired by the fact that I was young and wild and heedless, but I swear there were never any other men after that night.”

Ross could no longer endure lying still, so he rose from the bed and jerked on his chapan, as if the garment could protect him from the dark emotions swirling through the room. He did not approach Juliet; he did not dare. It was bitterly ironic to learn that if he had reached the Hotel Bianca earlier, his wife would have welcomed him with open arms.

Instead, they had come within the width of a single door of each other, but because he was too late, they had both been utterly desolate, and utterly incapable of comforting each other. It was a bleak picture, but he steeled himself for worse to come. Tightly he said, “What happened then?”

Juliet spun away, her movements brittle and graceless. “I felt filthy, defiled… as violated as if I had been raped, but in a way this was worse because I was responsible. No one made me do what I did—it was my mistake from beginning to end. More than anything on earth, I wanted to die.” Her voice dropped to a hoarse whisper. “So at dawn the next day I rode outside Valletta to a lonely cove, stripped down to my shift, and I… walked into the water.”

Ross watched her with rising horror, the image of the desperate girl she had been as sharp as the reality of her now. Never, even at his most anguished, had he thought of taking his own life, and he could only dimly imagine what kind of distress had driven Juliet to want to kill herself. Reminding himself that she hadn’t succeeded, he asked, “Who or what saved you?”

“The fact that I was too much of a coward,” she said with sharp self-disgust. “I swam until I was too tired to lift my arms, then just relaxed and prayed for oblivion so I would feel nothing more. But I found out that it isn’t true that drowning is a gentle death. My mouth filled with water, my lungs burned, and I panicked, so terrified that I had the strength to start swimming again.

“Even so, I should have died because I was so far from the shore, but a squall blew up. The way the storm pounded, I thought I really was drowning—I remember it in horrible detail, right up until the moment I lost consciousness. By then, I must have been very close to the shore, because I learned later that the waves washed me up safely near a fisherman’s cottage. He and his wife took me in, naked and bleeding.”

Juliet turned toward him, her face stark as death. “There, at their cottage, I miscarried. I killed our child, Ross.” Silent tears ran down her cheeks. “You wanted to know the worst, and there it is.
I tried to kill myself, and instead I murdered our child.”

She had warned him, but even so, the savage, visceral shock of her story was greater than anything he could have imagined. He felt as if an iron band was tightening around his chest, crushing his heart and soul. Blindly he turned to the window and threw open the shutters as his tortured lungs struggled for air. Then he stared into the empty night, so saturated with pain that he could not separate his own from Juliet’s.

So they had once made a baby together. The child would be almost twelve now, but would it have been a son or a daughter? Red-haired or blond or some unexpected variation? He tried to bring an image into focus, but he couldn’t. Instead, his mind unexpectedly dredged up a half-forgotten memory.

Ross was the only child his mother had ever carried to term, and when he was grown, she told him that she had miscarried three times after his own birth. Because of her vivacity, his mother had been called “the laughing duchess,” while her quieter twin sister, Sara’s mother, was termed “the smiling duchess.” But once, when Ross was about four years old, he had found his mother curled in the corner of the great hall of the Norfolk mansion, weeping hysterically, her beautiful face slashed by her clawing nails. Terrified, he had run to find help for her.

It had been hours before his father had been able to leave his wife long enough to look for his son, who was hiding in a corner of the attic too small for an adult to enter. The duke had coaxed Ross out onto his lap. Then, his own face marked with grief, he had explained that Ross’s parents had wanted another child to love as much as him, but it was not to be, and his mother was mourning the baby that would never be born.

It was a long time before the duchess was her normal self again, and there were no more pregnancies; Ross suspected that his father took steps to ensure that his wife would not endure such emotional and physical punishment again. But Ross had not forgotten his parents’ pain, and now, a dozen years late and in a far country, he mourned his own lost child.

Yet that sorrow was only one among many, a distant ache, not quite real. There was far more immediacy in Juliet’s wrenching account of all that had happened in Malta. Like a kaleidoscope that had been twisted, the past had just taken on an entirely different pattern.

Now that he knew the whole, he could believe her claim that she had never stopped loving him, for it was clear that what had kept them apart was not lack of love but her soul-destroying guilt. If the circumstances had been reversed, he might have felt as unworthy and self-destructive as she had; understanding that made it impossible to condemn her.

The wind caressed his face like a cool hand, and he realized that his cheeks were moist. There was a fitting symmetry to the tears, for he had not cried since that night in Malta, when he had wept for the loss of his beloved wife. Then his tears had been for himself, but this time most of his grief was for Juliet, and for the knowledge of how different things might have been.

It was a mark of Juliet’s fierce sense of honor that she took full responsibility for what had happened, rather than trying to blame anyone else. Yet she had been scarcely more than a child herself, so confused and tormented that she had tried to take her own life. Then, too vital to seek death again, but convinced that she had sinned past redemption, she had turned her back on all she had ever known and run to the edge of the world, where she had turned all her personal and financial resources to helping others.

Ross raised his hand to his head, where the bullet wound was throbbing under the bandage, beating like the king’s drums of Bokhara. Inside he felt hollow, not like a drum, but with a strange blankness that he could not define.

Slowly he realized that it was the emptiness of deliverance, not loss. For years the legacy of his marriage had been pain and guilt and anger. The pain was a bone-deep part of what had shaped him, but now that he knew Juliet had not left because of some dreadful failing on his part, his guilt dissolved. And, infinitely more important, he realized that his anger was gone as well.

In Malta, when he had learned that his wife had betrayed their love and her marriage vows, his fury had equaled his anguish. Though with time his agony ebbed until it was a chronic ache rather than a raging insanity, for over a dozen years he had lived with anger, even when he and Juliet had been at their closest in Bokhara.

But now that he knew the truth, anger was replaced by compassion for a desperate, terrified girl.

He turned back to the room. Juliet was curled up in a shadowed corner of the divan, her head bowed forward and her copper-bright hair rippling over her drawn-up knees like a mourning veil. His wife, whose warmth and courage and quixotic gallantry made her unlike any other woman he had ever known. If she had had a simpler nature or less unflinching Scots integrity, their marriage would have been easy—yet if she had been anything other than what she was, he would not love her as much as he did.

As he gazed at Juliet, his emotional turbulence began ebbing away, leaving grief-scoured clarity in its wake. It was another irony that he had thought she had chosen to become a wanton, yet she had lived more chastely than he, and God knew that he hadn’t lived a very rakish life. Apparently nature had intended them both for monogamy. Passionate monogamy with each other.

A jury of moralists would judge Ross more sinned against than sinning, but he had no interest in assigning blame. Nothing could be done about past mistakes except to try to learn from them; what mattered now was the future, and he saw quite clearly that if anything positive was to be salvaged from the wreck of the past, the initiative must come from him. Since Juliet condemned herself too severely to think she was worthy of happiness, he must find a way to bridge the distance between them.

He took a deep breath, then crossed the room and sat down next to her. “I know the worst now, Juliet. You were right that the truth hurts, but wrong that I would hate you. I still love you, and I still want to spend the rest of my life with you.”

She raised her head to reveal a face ravaged by tears. “Ross, I betrayed you unforgivably, in every way a woman can betray a man. How can you possibly want to live with me again?”

“The most unforgivable thing you did was to leave me, and that can be corrected.” He literally pried her fingers free from where they were clenched around her knees, then took one cold hand between both of his. “It isn’t
my
forgiveness that you need, Juliet. It’s your own.”