Tangled (34 page)

"Yes," she said. But his voice was coming to her from very far away.

Everything was very far away. There was a buzzing in her ears. The air she was breathing was suddenly very cold. She was very cold.

"It's all right," someone was saying—from very far away. "She merely needs air. It has been a busy day for her. Appleby, signal to the orchestra to start playing again, will you?"

She was being lifted from the floor by strong arms and carried out into fresher air and up the stairs. She was sitting on a hard chair, and a strong hand was at the back of her neck, forcing her head downward toward her knees.

"Just relax," David said. "There is no hurry. You fainted, that's all."

She was in her dressing room, she realized as the world started to come back.

"How foolish of me," she said. "Whatever will people think?"

"That the room was too warm and the excitement too much for you," he said quietly. "Just keep your head down for a while. I'll fetch you a glass of water."

"I can't imagine doing anything more embarrassing," she said, lifting her head after a minute or so and taking the glass from his hand. "And I can't think what brought it on. I never faint. We must go back down, David."

He set the glass down on the washstand after she had

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taken a few sips. "What was he saying?" he asked quietly.

"Oh, the usual," she said. "About you saving his life. About Julian getting shot through the heart. I'm afraid I am rather squeamish about the thought of such things. It was the wrong time and the wrong place."

"He said nothing more?" he asked.

"No," she said brightly. "Just the usual. But the trouble is, David, that now I know what to expect him to say and it is even worse. It is not the sort of conversation one wants to listen to at a ball."

"They will be on the morning train," he said.

"I am sure he means no harm," she said. "But his conversation is distasteful. I am ready to go back downstairs. I feel so embarrassed."

"Lean on my arm," he said. "Stay close to one of the windows.

Signal me if you feel faint again."

"I won't," she said. "I am so sorry, David, to have caused such a commotion."

A redcoat, she thought as they walked downstairs and she tried desperately to think of something else. Three redcoats. Three British officers—the third man too had carried a sword. No Russian at all.

Two of them in conflict over a woman—the wife of one of them, the lover of the other. And the third one—the one in the middle, the peacemaker—getting shot. And killed.

"You are sure you are well?" David asked as they approached the ballroom doors. He set a hand over hers.

She felt instant panic. She wanted to snatch her hand away. But it was no time for hysterics. No time was good for hysterics. The self-discipline of years would not allow her to go all to pieces.

Merely because she was walking with her husband, her husband's murderer.

"Quite well, thank you," she said. "It was very foolish of me to faint. I am quite recovered."

She smiled, hiding embarrassment as many people turned her way, concern on their faces, when she stepped into the ballroom again on David's arm.

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He should have had the strength of will to turn them away on their arrival, David thought. He had, after all,

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asked Scherer to leave the last time. The man had known he would be unwelcome.

But he had not turned them away. And Scherer had said something to make Rebecca faint. It was nothing in particular, she had said.

Only the usual. The usual was bad enough. Reminding her in the midst of a ball that Julian, whom she had loved so dearly, had died with a bullet through his heart was more than enough to make her faint.

David wondered again why Scherer hated him so much since he had undoubtedly saved the man's life. If he had shot one second later, Scherer would have been dead with Julian's sword embedded in his chest. David had saved his life.

But the reason was not so hard to discover, as he had realized before. It would be humiliating to a man like
Scherer, as to many men, to know that he had had to be saved from the sword of a man who also had been sleeping with his wife. It would be as easy to hate the man who had saved him as to feel gratitude toward him.

And David knew that Scherer was wondering about his motive for killing Julian in light of his seemingly hasty marriage to Julian's widow on his return home. Scherer was wondering if his motives had been as selfless as they might have appeared at the time. Scherer's suspicions were echoing David's nightmare—that he had killed Julian out of hatred and jealousy, that he had wanted the field clear so that he could marry Rebecca himself.

It was also clear that Scherer hated Rebecca. Because he suspected that she had been unfaithful to Julian as his wife had been to him? Or merely because she had been Julian's wife? It was an eye-for-an-eye hatred, perhaps. Julian had made him suffer. Now he would make Julian's wife suffer too.

For Rebecca's sake David cursed himself for not turning them away. He hated the thought that they were in his house for the night, that they would not be on their way until the morning.

It was a mistake to try to make love to Rebecca after
the ball. She was tired, and Charles had woken up and demanded a late and leisurely feed. She looked dispirited when she finally came to bed. She was suffering a feeling

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of anticlimax after such a busy day, perhaps. And the leftover distress of her fainting spell. She was upset over whatever it was Scherer had said to her. And David was upset and agitated for all the same reasons. And because he had neglected to protect his wife from distress.

She was the old Rebecca when he touched her, stiffening at his first touch, then imposing deliberate relaxation on her body. She was totally silent and unresponsive. Only submissive. He persevered, touching her and kissing her in ways and in places that he knew from the experiences of the past month could arouse her to passionate frenzy. And yet finally he had to admit defeat and mount her un-aroused.

Except that he could not do even that. At the last moment he found himself humiliatingly impotent. He moved to her side and lay staring up into the darkness. He did not turn his head to see if she did the same or if she had fallen asleep.

But he knew she was not sleeping.

He fought panic and despair. It was just that they had both had a busy day and were tired. And they were both upset at the unwelcome arrival of their house guests. Tomorrow they would be alone again.

Tomorrow they would be able to rebuild what had fallen apart today.

It was such a fragile thing, their happiness. So near to the brink all the time. But tomorrow they would recapture it.

He wondered with a dull ache of the heart exactly what George Scherer had said to her.

It was a dreadful thing indeed, Rebecca found over the coming months, to have deep, dark suspicions bottled up inside. No longer suspicions that could be put firmly behind her because they did not really concern her. These concerned her very much indeed.

And yet they were suspicions that were totally unfounded. They rested entirely on the malicious insinuations of a spiteful, wronged man who wanted any revenge that he could wreak, no matter how innocent or guilty his victims. Even his wife had admitted that she sometimes thought he was deranged.

They were ridiculous suspicions. Wild. Insane. Nightmarish.

Terrifying.

She knew as the days and then weeks and even months passed that she should have acted decisively at the start. She should have told David as soon as she recovered from her faint what Sir George Scherer had said. She should have looked him in the eye and explained what she thought he had been insinuating. She should have asked if it was true.

Of course it was not true. David would have looked at her with incredulity and laughed. They would both have laughed—not entirely with amusement but with relief. He would have admitted that he had indeed had an affair with Cynthia Scherer and that now Sir George was trying to destroy David's marriage as David had destroyed his.

There would have been guilt. It was not a pleasant thing David had done. But relief too. It was in the past. It was something he had put an end to. And it really would not have touched their own marriage at all. It had all happened long ago.

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That was what she should have done, Rebecca told herself. But she knew that she could not have done it. For there was always the chance that he would not have looked at her with incredulity and he would not have laughed. There was always the chance . . .

No! There was no chance at all.

Sometimes during those months Rebecca suspected that she must be pregnant again. Certainly she felt queasy enough much of the time and sometimes vomited in the mornings. And she was frequently tired and lethargic. But she was not pregnant.

They still worked together and discussed business together. They still shared an active social life. They still spent a great deal of their time with their son, often together. And they still shared a bed and made love-sometimes with a fierce intensity. But the contentment, the happiness had gone. There was too much mutual awareness of the barriers that divided them. And too much reluctance to admit that they existed. And no willingness at all to bring them into the open to discuss them.

She was terrified to confront the barriers.

And so she remained locked up inside her mind with the unwilling and terrifying suspicions. And watched the grim, shuttered look come back to his face and the bleak look to his eyes. Sometimes she wondered why he did not ask the questions if he did not have anything to hide more serious than the affair with Lady Scherer. She had already confronted him with that, after all.

And the wondering would bring on yet another wave of nausea.

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Spring was not too far off, David thought when they were returning to Stedwell after spending Christmas at Cray bourne.

Perhaps things would improve once they could be outdoors more and all the work of the year began again.

Rebecca had Charles on her lap in the train compartment and was making him laugh helplessly. It was not difficult to make him laugh.

He was a sunny-natured child and adored his mother. Rebecca was barking like a dog

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and pretending to bite his stomach—and then laughing with him.

But the quiet, poised self-discipline had returned to her dealings with everyone except their son. The signs of contentment and even happiness had disappeared. Even when she responded to his lovemaking, as she sometimes did, it was with a fierce sort of desperation rather than with the joyous wonder she had been learning with him for a while.

The changes could be dated exactly, of course. Scherer had not been dealing out the usual to make her faint on the night of their ball. It had been something else. He should have acted decisively right then, David realized now. He should have forced her to tell him. He should have forced it all into the open.

Except that he had not the courage.

What if she knew?

How would they go on if that ever came into the open between them? Would they be able to go on?

And yet, he thought now as Charles, tired of the dog game, crawled off Rebecca's lap and onto his to pull at his watch chains, wouldn't anything be better than this constant tension between them? This constant awareness of all that was unspoken between them?

Perhaps it would be better to force the issue even now. Perhaps it was not as bad as he feared. Would she have been able to go on at all if Scherer had told her the truth? Perhaps Scherer had told her only about the affair between his wife and Julian. Perhaps that was what was eating away at her. He would be able to comfort her over that—perhaps. It would be a dreadful thing for Rebecca to know that. But he would be able to assure that it had happened because Julian was lonely, because he desperately missed Rebecca. He would be able to tell her about Julian's sense of guilt, about his longing to be home.

He would not even have to tell many lies.

He drew his watch out of his waistcoat pocket to hold against Charles's ear and chuckled as his son turned his head to see what he could hear and try to put it in his mouth.

David knew he would not talk to her. He was too much

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of a coward. There was too much to lose. Even what they had now was better than nothing.

And yet, he discovered when they returned to Sted-well, silence between them was no longer possible.

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Charles was cross by the time they arrived home, having refused to fall asleep in the train and so having missed his afternoon nap. David carried him up to the nursery and Rebecca went along too to change the baby's nappy before turning him over to his nurse's care.

"Mrs. Matthews said tea was being sent to the drawing room immediately,'' David said as they left the nursery. "Let's go straight there. The fire and a cup of tea will be very welcome, won't they?"

"It is chilly outside," she agreed. "Perhaps it would warm up a little if it would only snow. We haven't had any this year yet.''

Someone had set the post that had arrived during the week of their absence on a salver beside the tea tray. David flicked through it while Rebecca poured the tea. Thus it was that they both looked together at the Christmas card that had arrived too late to be opened before Christmas.

The handwriting was large and bold. "Cynthia joins me in sending our greetings for a very merry Christmas," Sir George Scherer had written. "We sincerely hope that the two of you and your son have enjoyed your week at Craybourne."

It was a perfectly conventional greeting for a Christmas card.