The Secret Pearl (47 page)

The words sounded ridiculous when she heard them. She turned onto her side and hid her face against the pillow.

S
OON AFTER
P
ETER
H
OUGHTON’S VISIT
, Fleur asked Mollie, the maid from Heron House, if she would like to move to the cottage to keep house for her. Mollie was delighted at the chance to be housekeeper and cook as well as maid. But she hinted that Ted Jackson would be unhappy to have her so far away. Before a month had passed, Mr. and Mrs. Ted Jackson were both living at the cottage, and Fleur had a handyman and gardener as well as a housekeeper.

Once she was no longer alone in the house, the Reverend Booth sometimes visited her without his sister. He found her presence relaxing, he would say, watching her at her embroidery. And he liked to listen to her play the pianoforte.

Fleur enjoyed his visits and looked back with some nostalgia to the time when she had believed herself in love with him. If all those events had not happened, she often thought—if Cousin Caroline and Amelia had not left for London, if Matthew had not stopped her from leaving the house, if Hobson had not fallen and she had not fled, thinking she had killed him—how different life might be now. She would have moved to the rectory as planned and lived there with Miriam until Daniel had come with the special license.

They would have been married now for many months.

They would have sat every evening as they often sat now. Perhaps she would be with child.

And she would have been happy. For without the experiences of the previous months, perhaps she would never have seen the narrowness of Daniel’s vision. Perhaps she too would have continued to see morality in strict terms of black and white. And she would never have met Adam. She would never have known the passionate, all-consuming love she felt for him.

She would have been happy with the gentle love that Daniel had offered. Sometimes she wished she could erase the past months, go back to the way things had been. But one could never go back, she realized, or truly wish to do so, because once one’s experience was enlarged, one could no longer be satisfied with the narrower experience.

Besides, despite all the pain, despite all the despair, she would not wish to have lived her life without knowing Adam. Without loving him.

“You are happy here, Isabella?” the Reverend Booth asked her one evening.

“Yes.” She smiled. “I am very fortunate, Daniel. I have this home and the school and friends. And a wonderful feeling of safety and security after all the anxiety of that thing with Matthew.”

“You are well-respected and liked,” he said. “I thought that perhaps you would find it difficult to settle here after all you had gone through.”

She smiled at him and lowered her head to her work again.

“I sometimes wish we could go back to the way things were before that dreadful night,” he said, echoing her own thoughts. “But we can’t, can we? We can never go back.”

“No,” she said.

“I thought,” he said, “that it would be possible to love only someone I felt to be worthy of my love. I thought I could love other people in a Christian way and forgive them their shortcomings if they repented of them. But I could not picture
myself loving or marrying someone who had made a serious error. I was wrong.”

She smiled at her work.

“I have been guilty of a terrible pride,” he said. “It was as if I believed a woman had to be worthy of me. And yet I am the weakest of mortals, Isabella. I can only look at you and marvel that you have not been embittered or coarsened by your experience. You are far stronger and more independent than you were before, aren’t you?”

“I like to think so,” she said. “I think I realize more than I did before that my life is in my own hands, that I cannot blame other people for anything that might go wrong with it.”

“Will you do me the honor of marrying me?” he asked.

For all the words that had led up to the proposal, she was taken by surprise. She looked up at him, her needle suspended above her embroidery.

“Oh, Daniel,” she said. “No. I am so sorry, but no.”

“Even though I know of your past?” he said. “Even though I can tell you that it makes no difference to my feelings for you?”

She closed her eyes.

“Daniel,” she said. “I can’t. Oh, I can’t.”

“It is as I thought, then,” he said, getting to his feet and touching her shoulder. “But you have severed all relations with him, have you not? I would expect no less of you. He is a married man. I am sorry, Isabella. I am truly sorry. I would wish for your happiness. I will pray for you.”

He left the house quietly while she stared down at her work.

He did not come alone again for several weeks, though he called sometimes with his sister. And he frequently came to the school.

When he did come alone once more, it was during the afternoon of a day when there was no school. He brought a letter with him.

“I would send it back unopened if I were you,” he said to her gravely as he handed it to her. “As your minister, I would advise
it, Isabella. You have put up such a strong fight against your weaker self and have come so close to winning the battle. Let me send it back for you. Or destroy it without reading it.”

She took the letter from his hands and looked down at the seal of the Duke of Ridgeway and the handwriting that was not Mr. Houghton’s. It had been longer than four months—or perhaps four years or four decades or four centuries.

“Thank you, Daniel,” she said.

“Be strong,” he said. “Don’t give in to temptation.”

She said nothing, but continued to stare down at the letter. He turned and left without another word.

She hated him. She had not expected ever to feel hatred for him again. But she hated him. He had said that he would never see her again, never write to her. And she had believed him.

She had pined for him, thought she could not live on without one more sight of him or word from him.

And he had written. To open the still-almost-raw wound once again. To force her to begin all over again. And in the future she would never again be able to trust him to keep temptation out of her life.

Daniel was right. She should send the letter back unopened so that he would know that she was stronger than he. Or she should destroy it unread. She should give it to Daniel to send back or destroy.

She went into the parlor and stood it, unopened, against a vase on the pianoforte. And she sat quietly in her favorite chair, her hands in her lap, looking at it.

W
ELCOME HOME, YOUR GRACE,” JARVIS SAID with his characteristic stiff bow.

The Duke of Ridgeway acknowledged his butler’s greeting with a nod and handed him his hat and gloves.

“The house seems very quiet,” he said. “Where is everyone?”

“All of the guests have left, your grace,” the butler said. “Most of them departed two days ago.”

“And Lord Thomas?” the duke asked.

“Left yesterday, your grace.”

“And where is the duchess?”

“In her apartments, your grace.”

The duke moved away from him. “Have Sidney sent to me,” he said, “and hot water for a bath.”

It was an enormous relief, he thought as he strode along the marbled corridors to his private rooms, to be out of his carriage finally. It had seemed so very empty and so very quiet without her. And there had been little to do all through the journey except think. And remember.

He did not want to do either. He was going to have a brisk bath, change into clean clothes, go up to see Pamela, and then call on Sybil. Thomas had left, then, without her. And he supposed that he would be the villain again, as he had been the last time.

Poor Sybil. He felt genuinely distressed for her, and he knew well how she was feeling—sore, empty, quite unable to convince herself that life could ever again bring any happiness. It was hard sometimes to know with one’s heart as one knew with one’s head that there would ever be reason to laugh again.

“Where the devil is that water?” he said ungraciously as his valet came through the door of his dressing room.

“Somewhere between the kitchen and here, sir,” Sidney said. “You will only tighten the knot of your neckcloth beyond any possibility of loosening it if you jerk on it like that. Let me undo it properly.”

“Damn your impudence,” his grace said. “How have you managed to live through the past week without me to fuss over like a damned mother hen?”

“Very peacefully, sir,” his valet said. “Very peacefully indeed. The side is aching?”

“No, it is not aching,” the duke said impatiently. “Ah, at last.” He turned to watch two menservants carry in large pails of steaming water.

“I shall rub it down for you anyway after you have bathed, sir,” Sidney said. “Sit down and let me tackle that knot or it will be fit only to be sawn through with a knife.”

The duke sat down and lifted his chin like an obedient child.

He was eager to bathe and dress and be on his way upstairs. To see Pamela. Yes, very definitely to see Pamela. There was no one else. There would be no more of the old urge to go up there, to sit in the schoolroom and listen to her talk and turn every lesson into an adventure. From now on there would be only Pamela.

And yet he was impatient to be up there even apart from his eagerness to see his daughter. Perhaps he had to prove to himself that Fleur really was gone. In some ways she was fortunate, he thought. She would be living in a place where he had never
been. There would be no ghosts. He was going to have to enter the nursery and the schoolroom, the music room, the library, the long gallery—all the places he associated with her.

But he did not want to think. He would not think. He got restlessly to his feet after Sidney had untied the knot in his neckcloth with almost insolent ease, and pulled impatiently at his shirt buttons. One came off in his hand, and he swore and dropped it onto the washstand.

“Someone must have slept on a mattress made of coal lumps last night,” Sidney said cheerfully to no one in particular.

“And someone is asking to be tossed out on his ear outside this house,” the duke said, discarding his shirt and sitting down again so that his valet could help him remove his Hessian boots.

T
HE
D
UCHESS OF
R
IDGEWAY
was in her sitting room. His grace could hear her coughing as he approached. He tapped on the door and waited for her maid to answer it and to curtsy to him and leave the room.

She was standing at the far side of the room, between the slender pillars that supported the entablature. She was dressed in a flowing white nightrobe, her hair loose down her back. She looked as pale as the robe except for the two spots of color high on her cheekbones. She looked thin and gaunt. Surely, the duke thought as he strode toward her, she had lost weight even since he last saw her.

“Sybil,” he said, reaching out his hands for hers and bending to kiss her cheek. “How are you?”

Her hands were as cold as ice, her cheek cool.

“Well,” she said. “I am well, thank you.”

“I heard you coughing,” he said. “Is it still bothering you?”

She laughed and withdrew her hands from his.

“You don’t look well,” he said. “I am going to take you and Pamela to London, where you may consult a physician who
knows what he is doing. And then we will go to Bath for a month or two. The change of air and scenery will do us all good.”

“I hate you,” she said in her light, sweet voice. “I wish there were a stronger word to use because I feel more than hatred for you. But I cannot think of any other way of saying it.”

He turned away from her. “He left yesterday?” he asked.

“You know he did,” she said. “You ordered him to leave.”

He passed a hand across his brow. “I suppose you begged him to take you with him,” he said. “Why do you think he refused, Sybil?”

“He has too much regard for my reputation,” she said.

“And he would put your reputation before your happiness?” he said. “And his own? Did you find his refusal convincing?”

“I want to be alone,” she said, crossing to the daybed and sitting down on it. “I want you to go away. I hoped you would not come back this time. I hoped you would find her charms just too enticing. I wish you would go back to her so that I would never have to see you again.”

He sighed and turned to look down at her. “Six years ago,” he said, “I would have given my life to save you from pain, Sybil. I think perhaps I gave more than that. I still hate to see you in misery. You are my wife and I am pledged to do all in my power to secure your safety and happiness. I know you are feeling a pain almost too great to be borne. But nothing can be accomplished by looking back. Can we not just go on together and try to make what remains of our lives at least peaceful?”

She laughed again without looking at him.

“A marriage works in two directions,” he said. “I am your husband, Sybil. You are pledged, too, to do all in your power to secure my happiness. Would it not give your mind something to focus on, trying to please me? I would not be hard to please. I would be satisfied with a little kindness, a little companionship.”