The Clarendon Rose (10 page)

“What changed that?”

He smiled faintly.
 
“It is now you who flatter me, Miss Merriweather.”

She had started to feel the effects of the wine.
 
A delicious languor had begun to spread through her body, relaxing her.
 
Her face felt flushed, but not unpleasantly so.
 

She shook her head at his comment, making an impatient gesture with her hand.
 
“I hardly know you well enough to judge that, Your Grace.
 
I meant, what prompted the self-awareness?”

“You don’t like asking easy questions, do you?”
 
He took another sip of wine.
 
“I suppose it was a combination of factors.
 
In part, I just woke up one day and felt utterly disgusted with myself—more so than ever before.
 
In part, I received another one of Mother’s alarmist missives telling me Father was on his deathbed.”
 

He sighed.
 
“I decided it was time to take some responsibility for myself, and for the fact that despite my best efforts, I was still alive.
 
Rather than waste what I had left of my life, I felt it might be better to make more productive use of it.
 
Of course when I decided to clean myself up and return home, I didn’t realize that this time Mother spoke the truth,” he concluded, his tone bleak.

Tina frowned, trying to assimilate the implications of his comments.
 
She decided to ask about the most obvious of them first.
 
“So the duchess had written to you before, saying Uncle Charles was unwell?”

“Every few months, since not long after I left England the first time.
 
Once I sold my commission and began my travels, the letters would take longer to reach me, but they would always be full of woeful tidings about Father’s health—every cough exaggerated into consumption, every sniffle into pneumonia.
 
Once I realized the truth, I suppose the effect was the opposite of what she hoped.
 
I began to think he would live on indefinitely and that his health was perpetually robust.
 
By the time Edmund’s letter reached me, giving me to understand that this time Father truly was ill, it was too late, though I set off immediately.”

They sat in silence for a time, watching the glint of sunlight on water and the fresh green of the budding trees.
 
Tina noted his expression had turned inwards.
 
He was close enough to touch.

“We’d hear stories of your latest exploits, and Edmund was convinced that you were trying to get yourself killed.
 
He worried about you.”

Clarendon’s looked at her, his eyebrows raised.
 
Then, his lips twisted.
 
“That brother of mine always worried too much.
 
But in this case, he was right.
 
For a few years there, I really did make the best possible effort to get myself killed.”

“Intentionally?
 
We never heard about that.
 
Just about the mad bets you’d take on.
 
The duels at dawn.
 
That sort of thing.”

He shrugged.
 
“I didn’t think about it consciously—as I said, until recently, I haven’t been a very self-reflective person.
 
But I think some part of me thought putting my head through a noose was the coward’s way out.
 
So instead of doing that, I lived recklessly and hoped that would do the trick.
 
Half those ‘exploits,’ as you call them, were undertaken when I was, by all rights, too drunk to survive them.”

“But why would you want to do that?” she asked, horrified by the thought that he had been so deeply troubled.
 
Yet, it also mystified her, for here was a handsome, intelligent, charming man who, at the time, stood to inherit a fortune.
 
What possible reason could he have for wishing himself dead?

“War changes a person, Miss Merriweather.
 
I bought my colors thinking it would be a lark—and blinded by absurd notions of patriotic zeal.
 
But the reality was that you see the best and the worst of humanity on the battlefield.
 
I saw some things I would never want to remember.”
 
His voice had grown distant as he spoke.
 
Tina, watching his expression, was shocked by the raw, bleak pain in his face.
 
His mouth was a bitter line, and looking at his eyes, she began to understand why she had that sense of consuming fire in their depths.
 
For now, it became clear that those eyes had looked into hell, to be forever changed by what they had seen there.
 

“There was one fellow—supposedly one of us, on the ‘good’ side.
 
You wouldn’t know it from the kinds of reprehensible acts he committed.
 
I should have killed him when I had the chance, but I didn’t,” he muttered, clearly having forgotten that she was even there.
 
“Still too brainwashed by all that stuff about honor and the English way.”

Clarendon shook his head.
 
His hands had tightened into fists.
 
“But worse than that, even, was the
stupidity
of some of it.”
 
He spat out the phrase as if it were distasteful to him.
 
“They gave me a medal, you know—for ‘acts of unprecedented heroism,’ they said.
 
Unprecedented idiocy was more like it.
 
But then, they didn’t see the faces every time they closed their eyes.
 
The slow deaths were bad enough.
 
We lost many—too many—to untended infections, their bodies weakened from bad food and traveling with shoddy equipment and garments through weather that would have made Hell seem like a balmy afternoon on the strand.
 

“But it was the others who wouldn’t let me alone—whose faces I kept seeing.
 
Anderson and Chilton, their expressions twisted with pain in the final moments before they were gone.
 
I remember Chilton was screaming at me to cut off his leg.
 
‘Damn you Southam, do it!
 
Cut it off, now!’
 
He kept saying, over and over.
 
I didn’t know how to tell him it was already gone—I could see the bones poking out from the bloodied mess of his thigh.”
 
Clarendon’s voice cracked as he spoke, but his eyes were blank and the words continued to tumble from his mouth, as if he couldn’t stop himself.
 

“And Severn—he just looked so damned surprised to be dead when we found him lying in the mud.
 
Carruthers.
 
He went in my arms, begging me to tell him it was just a nightmare.”
 
He closed his eyes, his body taut with the recollection.
 
“So many others, gone because of my command.
 
And for what?
 
I crawled out of that stinking graveyard, covered with the blood of my men, only to learn that it was all a damned mistake.
 
How do you live with that?”

He opened his eyes, and the self-loathing in his expression was more than Tina could bear.
 
Setting down her cup, she reached over and drew him into her arms.
 
She pushed the hair back from his face with infinite tenderness, then cupped one cheek in her hand.
 
She placed her face against his and held him against her, for once unconscious of the sexual pull he normally exerted upon her.
 
Her only motive in bringing him close was to comfort a fellow human being in pain.

After a few moments, his entire body shuddered, the drawn tension of his muscles shifting.
 
Then, in an abrupt movement, his arms encompassed her waist, drawing her close against him.
 
His cheek moved against hers, and before she realized what was happening, his lips were on hers, hard and demanding, sending an explosion of excitement through her.

Her rational self knew she should pull away—that this was exactly the sort of impropriety her mother had cautioned against.
 
But the kiss was an act of a suffering man.
 
She could not turn away from that.
 
She gave him those moments, feeling a strange blend of excitement and fear, for this was not a man in control of himself—and yet, his lips tasted so good.

His callused hand cupped her cheek.
 
The rough sensuality of his skin against hers woke a dormant awareness within her that had been half-roused by the potency of his lips.
 
Her body stiffened with the power of the sensations coursing through her.
 
The wild creature within raised her savage head and Tina lost herself to the fierce pleasure of her body pressed hard against his muscled torso.

She let out a gasp when his tongue pushed into her mouth, pulling back from him in surprise.
 
He froze for a moment, then released her abruptly, standing up.
 
He turned and walked a small distance, one hand pushing the curls back from his forehead.

They remained silent for a time, breathing hard, not looking at each other.
 
In those moments, Tina knew that if not for her momentary startlement, and its jarring effects upon his senses, he could have had her right then, on the picnic blanket beside Blakney’s Pond, amid the remnants of bread, meat and cheese.
 
She would have done nothing to stop him—would, in fact, have been a willing participant in her own ruin.

She stood as well, turning away from that knowledge, for once truly frightened by the force of her own feelings.
 
What kind of wanton beast had his kiss roused from its blessed sleep?
 
How could he have done this to her in so short a time?
 

She had hardly known him two days, and yet some part of her had memorized the slight roughness of his cheek against her own, the hard intensity of his lips on hers.
 
Her breasts, so recently crushed against his firm chest, now ached from the deprivation.
 
She felt a heated longing to turn and throw herself back into his arms.

Her sharpened senses heard him shift.
 
She turned to see him facing her, starting forward, his expression rigidly under control once more.
 
He had not even allowed a hint of remorse to show through, but when he spoke, his voice was heavy with it,
 

“I apologize—and in the wake of my assurances that you had nothing to worry about from me.
 
You were wise to keep your distance, after all.
 
But, I shall do my best to ensure that doesn’t happen again.” The ghost of a smile touched his lips.
 
“Once again, you find yourself in need of that parasol, Miss Merriweather.”

It was not him she had to worry about.
 
His kiss had been born out of the need for comfort from the dark emotions that racked his mind and body.
 
As soon as he had realized what he was doing, he stopped himself from continuing.
 
“We need never mention it again, Your Grace,” she said, already trying to think of ways to get away from him.
 

She had agreed to help him familiarize himself with the estate.
 
Then, she must go, though already the thought of never seeing him again elicited pain that was almost physical in its intensity.
 
Which meant that the further she went, the better.
 

Still plunged in her thoughts, she turned to the picnic spread, gathering up the remnants of their lunch and wrapping them in the cloth Cook had used for the loaf of bread.
 
She slipped that into a saddlebag, then started when the duke held the corked bottle of wine out to her.
 

“Thank you,” she murmured, already looking away from him as she forced herself to concentrate on packing the wine into the bag, moving the wrapped pasties and bread so that the bottle could slip in beside the bundles.

He had picked up the blanket and was shaking the crumbs from it.
 
Then, after folding it roughly, he passed it to her.
 
She stuffed it into the other saddlebag and buckled it closed.

Once they were packed, Tina untethered Achilles and mounted, only then allowing herself to turn and look at him.
 
His expression was grim and distant as he mounted Hercules.

“Perhaps we should return to the manor, Your Grace.
 
We can discuss other estate matters later this afternoon, once we have changed and tidied up.”

He gave a curt nod.
 
“Of course.”

They rode in silence.

“I will understand if you choose to reconsider,” the duke said eventually, startling her out of her thoughts.

“Reconsider?”

“If you decide to let me sink or swim with these estate matters, given what I just did.
 
But of course even there I exaggerate.
 
Your notes are exemplary and I will, without a doubt, be able to come to a comfortable understanding of all the goings-on in time.”

Tina was startled at the vehemence of her response to his suggestion, for though she knew she would have to get away from him soon, she had cravenly hoped for at least a few more days in his company.

“As you yourself pointed out, having me on hand to answer questions, proffer additional explanations and attend to the ongoing matters, until you are familiar with your duties, would be far more efficient.
 
And please, we need not mention that recent incident again.”

Clarendon’s jaw tightened at the reminder.
 
He shook his head, watching her as she rode, her gaze fixed on the ground directly in front of her horse.