The Gilded Web (24 page)

He watched Alexandra swallow and flush and continue to stare straight ahead. It was impossible to tell if she was satisfied with his explanation. Perhaps in her moral world it was shocking indeed to discover that one's betrothed had been bedding another woman for longer than a year.

“Would you like to get down and walk?” he asked. “The horses will be very happy to graze here, I am sure, and on foot we can climb a little way into the hills. There are some magnificent views from up there that I would like you to see.”

“Yes,” she said, “that would be lovely.”

He found again when he lifted her down from her sidesaddle, as he had the morning before, that her body was far lighter and more shapely than it looked. Her upright bearing and disciplined movements distracted the eye from her very feminine form. He was careful to hold her away from his own body as she descended and to release his hold on her slim waist as soon as her feet touched the ground.

“The weather is very warm,” he said. “Would you be more comfortable if you removed your jacket and your hat?” He smiled apologetically down at her when he saw her stiffen and flush. “I am hoping you will say yes so that I may remove my own.”

He did not know for several moments how she would respond. She was clearly engaged in a mental battle between inclination—it really was a very hot afternoon—and the strictness of a narrow upbringing.

“Yes,” she said. “It is very warm.”

“And warmer in the valley here,” he said, “sheltered from any breeze that may be blowing.” He unbuttoned his own coat and removed it with a sigh of relief. The air felt almost cool against the loose linen sleeves of his shirt. He hooked the coat over the branch of a tree above his head.

She was wearing a pale green silk blouse beneath her darker green velvet jacket. Despite its loose fit, its high collar and long sleeves, it seemed to emphasize her shape more than the tighter, more revealing gowns that she wore indoors. She had firm, generous breasts. She was struggling with the pins that held her hat to her hair.

“May I help?” he asked.

“This one will not seem to move,” she said, exasperated. Her head was bent forward, both arms raised above it.

“Here, let me,” he said, and was instantly reminded of another occasion when his hands had fumbled at the back of her head to remove a gag.

The pin finally came away and she took the feathered hat away with one hand. But his clumsy efforts had also pulled loose some of her hairpins. One side of her hair came cascading down from its smooth chignon to curl about her shoulder and over her breast. She looked up at him, startled and blushing.

Lord Amberley took a hasty step backward. She looked quite vividly lovely. He felt a totally unexpected stab of desire for her.

“I do beg your pardon,” he said. “I am afraid I am no lady's maid.”

“When Nanny Rey pins on a hat,” she said in some confusion, gathering the long hair in her hands and twisting it up behind her head again, “she puts it on to stay.” She stooped down to pick up two offending hairpins from the grass at her feet.

In one minute her hair looked even more severe than before, though not quite as sleek. Her shoulders were back and her chin high. Lord Amberley, hanging her jacket over a branch next to his and wedging her hat into an angle from where it was unlikely to fall, was left to wonder if he imagined the voluptuous woman who had stood before him a minute before. Alexandra Purnell was untouchable again and quite in command of herself.

T
HEY WALKED BESIDE THE RIVER
for a while. It flowed along in its narrow bed almost without sound. Unseen birds sang in the trees. The grass was thick and springy underfoot, the smell of it heavy with summer. Alexandra consciously kept her chin up and her shoulders back, imposing calm on her mind, drawing on the peace of her surroundings.

The gently moving air felt warm and pleasant against the thin silk of her blouse and against her hair. If only she were walking alone or with James or even with Lord Eden, she would be feeling thoroughly happy. There must not be a lovelier place on earth. But she was not alone. She was with her betrothed, who had shown her nothing but kindness and courtesy since she had known him. And who had trapped her into this situation. She was alone with a man with whom she did not know at all how to deal.

She had been so very embarrassed a few minutes before. Even the suggestion that she remove her jacket and hat had unsettled her. She did not know why. Indoors she wore clothes that were far thinner and that covered far less of her than her blouse did. Perhaps it was the whole idea of removing part of her clothing in his presence. She had been strongly reminded of how very inadequately clothed she had been when he first saw her. And as if that had not been enough, he had had to help her with the stubborn hat pin. She had felt almost as if she must swoon with his arms at either side of her face, his hands on her head, her forehead almost touching the folds of his neckcloth.

And then her hair had come down as the final mortification. Papa felt very strongly about a woman's hair being confined at the back or top of her head. She could remember only one occasion since she had started to wear it up at the age of sixteen when she had appeared in her father's presence with it down. She had arrived home in the rain after a ride with James and had tied her damp hair loosely at her neck in order to come downstairs for tea. She had received a thundering scold in front of everyone, including the butler and a footman who had brought in the tea tray, and sent back upstairs without her tea. She had spent the rest of the day and all of the following one there too. She had been seventeen at the time.

She had felt as humiliated to have Lord Amberley see her with her hair all down around her as if her blouse had come off with her jacket. She had felt naked and defenseless. And she had not failed to notice how he had stepped back in embarrassment, though he had been courteous enough to take the blame and to apologize for being so clumsy.

“Do you feel up to a climb?” Lord Amberley asked. “If we go up a little way here, I can show you a splendid view back from the valley to the house.”

“Yes,” she said, looking up the wooded incline to her right. It did not look impossibly steep. She would have liked to gather her velvet skirt in her hands and run up the hill.

“Let me help you,” he said as they began to climb.

It was really not necessary. The trees were more widely spaced than they appeared to be from below, and the ground between them was quite firm. But he took her hand in his nevertheless, lacing his fingers intimately between hers. Those long, sensitive fingers that rather disturbed her.

“This is a good test of fitness, is it not?” he said a few minutes later with a grin. He was a little breathless. “Are you all right, Alex?”

“Yes,” she said. She was considerably more out of breath than he and thankful finally for the support of his strong hand.

“Ah, here we are,” he said. “You will be able to sit and rest in one moment.”

The trees thinned out before them into a small grassy clearing. They resumed a little higher up.

“I should have brought my coat with me for you to sit on,” he said. “I wish I had thought of it. But look first, Alex, before you sit down. What do you think?”

He had released his hold of her hand. He set his hands lightly on her shoulders now and turned her to look down the slope over the treetops, and along the valley.

Her breath almost caught in her throat. It had to be—yes, it had to be the loveliest scene on earth. She had not realized that they had climbed quite so high. The valley beneath them looked almost like a green rug, its greenness broken only by the blue hairline of the river and by the gray stone house and its outbuildings and gardens in the distance. The blue haze on the far horizon must be the sea.

“It is lovely,” she said.

His hands tightened on her shoulders for one moment before he released her. “Will you ruin your skirt, do you think, if you sit down for a few minutes?” he asked.

She looked back to him. She had wanted to stand and gaze for considerably longer. “I think not, my lord,” she said, and lowered herself to the grass. She clasped her knees as he sat beside her. She could still see down to the house in the distance but had lost the total perspective of the valley below them and the path of the river.

There was silence for a few minutes. “Alex,” he said at last, “we should get to know each other. Do you not agree? We are to be married. I do not know you at all. I rode beside you yesterday morning and you commented that the house was lovely. I showed you the inside of the house in the afternoon and you said it was lovely. We rode in the valley earlier and you said it was lovely. I have brought you up here to show you the view. And you think it lovely. I feel rather as if I am pounding away at a very strong shield. Who is Alexandra Purnell?”

She tightened her grasp of her knees and gazed rigidly down toward his house. “I am sorry,” she said. “I did not know I had offended you. I have not meant to do so. I have felt that all this is lovely. I have felt it deeply. I did not realize that the word was inadequate.”

“And now I have hurt you,” he said quietly.

“I am so inadequate to all this,” she said, her voice almost angry. “You and your family—you seem always able to express your feelings freely. I cannot do so. Not in speech. I have been taught to contain my feelings. I cannot change now just because suddenly the circumstances of my life have changed. I cannot suddenly become like Lady Madeline or Lady Amberley. Or Anna. If I say something is lovely, I feel that it is so. I cannot express rapture. I do not know the spoken words.”

“Pardon me,” he said gently. “I have committed the error of believing that only I feel any frustration at our relationship. But yours, I see, is equal to mine, and probably worse. As my wife, you will be expected to live in my world and adjust to it. And my world is so very different from what you know. It is unfair, is it not?”

“Yes,” she said abruptly, and pushed herself to her feet. She continued to look down into the valley. She breathed in lungfuls of the warm, fragrant air to calm herself. “I have read that poem. The one about Tintern Abbey. And read it and read it. It says everything that can be said and felt, does it not? I can never do as well. Oh, never. But it is at least possible to express feelings in the written word. In speech the words will not come.”

“You write?” he asked.

“Oh.” She turned to him. “Only to relieve my feelings. Only to express thoughts that I cannot share. I do not even pretend that what I produce is literature.”

“I am sorry,” he said, “for flaring up at you just now, Alex. I seem always to be apologizing to you, do I not? I find you so difficult to come to know. And yet the more I am with you, the more I see there is to know. Forgive me.”

She shrugged and turned away from him. “I know so little,” she said. “I have had no experience in communicating with others.”

“I know,” he said. “Would you rather go back now? Or will you come to see the place I told you about earlier? Forgive me, Alex, please. I have not meant to upset you. Just as I did not yesterday afternoon. I hoped that we could get to know each other better this afternoon, become friends perhaps.”

She turned toward him reluctantly. “I would like to see the other place,” she said. “Is it close by? Is it as lovely as this?” She shrugged and half-smiled at her choice of word.

“Yes, it is close,” he said. “It is rather different from this.”

It was a stone hut built into the side of the hill at some undetermined time in the past for some undetermined reason.

“I used to think it was once a gamekeeper's hut,” he said. “But why would it have been built so high up? Was it a hermitage perhaps when the old house was first built or when the old monastery still stood at the other side of the valley? I like to think so, but no one now living seems to know for sure. Indeed, no one seemed even to know it existed when I first discovered it as a boy. And everyone else seems to have forgotten about its existence since. Perhaps it would seem absurd to everyone but me that it is almost the most important spot on this earth to me.”

It was very different from the clearing they had just left. The treetops around them were just too high to allow a view into the valley. All that was visible around were the tops of trees behind them and stretching below and climbing the hillside opposite, and the sky above them. But Alexandra knew immediately what he meant. There was total seclusion, total peace, here.

She stopped herself from saying that it was lovely.

“Come,” he said, pulling open the heavy wooden door of the stone hut and stepping inside. He had lit a candle by the time she reached the doorway.

There was a roughly carved table and bench inside and a bed of straw with a folded blanket against one wall. Against the other was another bench piled with books and papers, quill pens and an inkwell.