Tangled (43 page)

She heard the echo of the last sentence but could not recall it.

He stood up and rested a hand on her head.

"I wish all this had not happened," she said wearily. "I wish you had not joined the Guards, Julian, just because David did. I wish there had not been that dreadful war and that mix-up in the Crimea.

I can't understand how they could have thought they had buried you when you were still alive. I wish—I wish David had not come home.

Oh, it's no good, is it? It did happen. But everything will be all right again. Once we are away from here it will be as it used to be. Won't it?"

He pressed his hand down a little harder on her head. "I'll start making the arrangements," he said.

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David recognized the handwriting though he had not seen it for several years. He opened the letter with some reluctance. As long as there was no contact whatsoever he could somehow live on from day to day. He would not write even to his father. He had asked his father not to write to him.

He was keeping himself as busy as he could. Construction had just begun on three more laborers' cottages, and he spent some time each day at the site, often helping with the work. He had planned out the year's farming with his steward. He was considering the schoolmaster's plea for a new schoolhouse.

His neighbors had been understandably shocked at the news he had brought back from Craybourne. For several days they had even left him alone, too embarrassed perhaps to visit him, not knowing what they would say when they did so. But after church on Sunday he forced himself to stay and talk, Charles in his arms.

Although he had no desire to take up again with the social round, he did so. Nothing was going to change, he told himself. He was a bachelor again. Alone again. He would not become a hermit, much as he would like to do so. He had a child to consider. His son would need friends and neighbors.

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The Sharps, he realized after a few more weeks, were visiting him and inviting him out more than any of his other neighbors. And Stephanie Sharp, who was still unattached despite a Season in London and despite considerable beauty, was usually paired with him. He felt sickened at first when he understood what was happening. But why not? he thought again. He was in need of a wife, wasn't he? Charles was in need of a mother.

Except that Charles had a mother and he had a wife.

He went through the motions of living much as before. It was a life he could perhaps continue to live provided there was no contact. But now a letter had come.

It was a short letter. "Becka is pining away for the child," Julian had written. "I think you had better send him for a visit, Dave. Better still, bring him yourself. I think there is some unsettled business among the three of us that needs taking care of before I take her away for a year or two. But she needs to see the child first."

She was pining for Charles. Not for him. For Charles. But the hurt he felt was ridiculous and self-pitying. Of course she was pining for their son. He remembered how badly she had wanted him, how patiently she had borne that month in bed, how frantic she had been when she had thought she was losing him, how ecstatically happy she had been when he was born. And how doting a mother she had been during the eight months before Julian came home.

Perhaps she would have another child soon. Unconsciously he crumpled the letter into a tight ball in his hand. He would have to advise Julian to keep her very quiet during the first and last months and to keep her in bed during the fourth. God! He closed his eyes very tightly.

He was on his way to the nursery a few minutes later— he had been on his way up there anyway to take Charles out for his morning dose of fresh air, riding up on his shoulders. Before they left, he gave instructions to his son's nanny to pack a bag for herself and Charles for a week or so at Craybourne. They would be leaving on the afternoon train tomorrow.

He would go too, he decided later. He would not have Charles going alone with only servants to take care of him on the journey.

Besides . . .

Besides, he was starved for news of her. For a sight of her. He had not even known until Julian's letter came that she was still at Crayboume.

There were wild daffodils growing around the lake. Rebecca strolled there with Julian during the afternoon of a beautiful day in early March. She was reminded of another walk she had once taken there, with the earl and Louisa and David. He had proposed marriage to her there for the second time. It seemed so long ago.

"I'm glad spring is here," she said. "I'm glad summer is coming.

The dreariness of winter is behind us at last."

"You should live through a winter in Russia," Julian said with a chuckle.

She held more tightly to his arm and rested her head against his shoulder for a few moments. "I wish I could have lived through one with you there," she said. "I wish you could have got word to me, Julian. Would they not even allow you to write?"

"There was a war on, Becka," he said. "Or so I thought."

She tried to see and feel only the signs of spring all around her—the blue sky and water, the warmth of the sun, the fresh green of the grass, the gay yellow of the daffodils. She tried to let it all soothe her and heal her. More than anything she wanted to return to the bliss of those two good years she had had with Julian.

Except that there had not been real bliss. There had been the heartrending miscarriages, the unsettled nature of their lives, her boredom when Julian was not with her. There had been the intimacies, which she had never learned to enjoy.

But she would choose to look back on those years as blissful, she decided. She was too afraid to see them as they really had been—though she did so even while telling herself that she would not. She had been a girl in

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love with a boy. The realities of life had begun to trouble her and make her uneasy, but, young as she had been, she had ignored them and persuaded herself that all was bliss. It had not been the love of a woman for a man that she had experienced. Perhaps that would have come. Perhaps if there had not been the long separation, and if there had not been David, they would have grown up together and the bond of their love would have deepened.

But there had been the separation. And there had been David. She had grown up with David. She had learned with him what she should have been learning with Julian. And now perhaps it was too late to change things to what they might have been and should have been.

She wished it were possible. She hoped it still was.

"Julian?" she said, and she knew even as she spoke that perhaps she was starting something that she would not be able to stop, that perhaps she was about to destroy something that was already badly broken and in need of mending.

“Mm?'' He smoothed his hand over hers as it lay on his arm.

"Flora Ellis's son, Richard," she said. "He is not David's."

His hand stilled for a moment and then continued stroking. "She told you that?" he said.

"More or less," she said. "She did not come right out and say it, but I understood her."

"Ah," he said. "Well, that's good news for you, isn't it, Becka? Did I hear that she is going to be marrying soon?"

"Mr. Chambers," she said. "He has leased Horace's house. David and Father have been supporting Flora since before Richard was born, Julian."

"Have they?" he said.

"Yes." She would say no more. Perhaps it was not too late to stay quiet. Perhaps after all she had not begun anything or destroyed anything. She tried to think of am other topic of conversation that would put this one out of his mind.

"I suppose you know, Becka, don't you? "he asked quietly. "Or guess?"

"Yes," she said.

314Mary Balogh

"It happened in a moment of thoughtless passion," he said. "I had to wait another endless few months for you and she was there. She said she loved me. Said she always had. It didn't mean anything, Becka. I swear it didn't mean anything."

"It didn't mean anything?" she said. "And yet Flora was ruined and cast off by her father. She had to bear her child alone and in shame.

Richard was born a bastard. And if she meant what she said, she had a broken heart to contend with too. Yet it meant nothing? Flora was always a good girl. Did you promise her marriage, Julian?"

"Who knows what one promises at such times?" he said. "But I was engaged to you. The wedding was all planned. And I loved you. She knew all those things."

"She knew that you promised marriage only to get her to give herself to you," she said. "It meant nothing."

"I swear it didn't, Becka," he said. "She hasn't suffered, has she?

She has been well looked after, and now this Chambers is going to marry her. He must be well set up if he can afford your brother's home."

There was nothing to say. There was no point now at this late date in anger and outrage. There was no point in expressing horror at the callousness of his present attitude. Now after all he was trying to defend himself to her as best he could. Perhaps at the time he had suffered. Perhaps he had known dreadful pangs of conscience. Good heavens, his son had been born after his wife had miscarried.

"It was a long time ago, Becka," he said. "And it was before our marriage. You aren't going to get all upset about it now, are you?''

"David must have agreed to take the blame," she said. "He did nothing to stop the rumors. Even when I accused him of it after he came home from the Crimea, he did not deny it. Why did he agree to such a thing?"

"Habit, I suppose," he said. "Dave was always a good sort that way.''

"A good sort?" she said. "In what way?"

He shrugged. "He might have hated me," he said, "and been jealous of me. He had had all of Father's

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attention after all until he was seven or so. He could have seen me as an intruder especially when Father made it clear that he was going to treat me as a son. But he didn't. He treated me as a brother and always tried to make sure that I didn't get any harsher treatment than he just because I was not really Father's son. I think he was afraid sometimes that I was going to get kicked out."

"How did he make sure?" She was almost holding her breath, she realized.

"I was a mischievous lad," he said. "If David thought I had done something worse than usual, he would sometimes tell Father that he had done it. Poor Dave. Father had a heavy hand and the cane in later years was no lighter. He didn't spare either the hand or the cane when he thought we had deserved it."

"You let David take the blame for things you had done?" she asked with widened eyes. "You let him be beaten for you?''

He grinned. "He wanted to do it," he said. "Dave was always stronger than I was. I used to quail at the very thought of the cane.

Dave never let out a sound."

"And yet," she said, "you never stopped doing the things that would earn punishment—for David."

"Oh, Beck," he said, chuckling and patting her hand again, "we were just children. Children get into trouble. It's what childhood is all about."

"Father was always a stern man," she said. "But he was never cruel.

He would have used a cane only for misdeeds that he thought particularly serious. That incident with the gardeners' daughters being locked in a hot shed for hours on end ..."

"I forgot all about them." He laughed. "They were almost roasted alive, weren't they?"

"And the kittens taken from their mother ..."

"I meant to take them back," he said. "I forgot. I had a lamentable memory in those days. None of them died as it happened, though one came close, didn't it? Ned had to feed it by hand for days until it could go back to the mother cat. I was a wretched child, wasn't I?"

"I was a very prim and prudish girl," she said. "I grew to dislike David heartily on the strength of such incidents."

316Mary Balogh

"Poor Dave," he said. "I think he quite fancied you at one time, but you would have nothing to do with him."

And she had fancied David too except that her conscience and her moral upbringing had forced her to repudiate the attraction she had felt. He had not been worthy of her regard, she had told herself. And so she had turned her love to Julian and away from the man both her parents and his had chosen for her.

She had married Julian when she might have married David.

"And so," she said, "he did it once more when Flora was got with child. He took the blame. Was he still afraid that Father would turn you off?"

"No," he said. "I must admit that I begged and groveled on that occasion, Becka. I was afraid that you would be upset if you knew. I loved you too much to see you upset. And there would have been a dreadful scandal if you had felt it necessary to call off the wedding.

You would have suffered too much."

"Didn't you think I had a right to know?" she asked. "A right to decide if I still wanted to marry you?"

"Your love wouldn't have been a very strong thing, Becka," he said,

"if you had sent me packing for one transgression."

"Didn't David think I had a right to know?" she asked. "And Father."

"Oh, Lord," he said, "Father doesn't know. There would have been all hell to pay if he had found out."

"So even David's father thought him guilty of that villainy," she said. 'Poor David. It must have been difficult to quell the urge to justify himself just so that I would not be upset. Did you promise him that no such thing would ever happen again?"

"It was an easy promise to make, Becka," he said. "Believe me it was easy."

"And have you kept it?" she asked.

"Of course I've kept it," he said, squeezing her hand. "Of course I have, Becka. How could there be anyone else but you? I love you."

They had come to the end of the lake where the reeds grew out of the water. They were worse this year. It

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