by Mary Balogh
And so Alexander’s carriage set off at last in the right direction, though west country was a vague enough description of a destination. It could be Somerset or Devonshire or Cornwall or Wales, or even Gloucestershire. They had to proceed, as they had before, by stopping far more frequently than they would have liked, asking about the carriage and its occupants. At least this time, though, their questions bore results. By gradual degrees they arrived in Devonshire.
“We could have traveled just as fast,” Joel said in some frustration one afternoon, “if we had boarded a snail in Bath and told it to move at its briskest pace.”
“But we would have been a bit crowded riding on its back,” Elizabeth said, a twinkle in her eye.
“And the shell would have made a hard seat,” Alexander added. “As far as I know, there are no springs beneath snail shells.”
“I have never seen any for hire in Bath, anyway” Abigail said. “You would have had to go hunting for one, Joel.”
But in truth it was hard to retain their sense of humor when they seemed to have been traveling forever and still did not know when or whether they would reach their journey’s end—or what they would discover when or if they got there.
She has run away with a man, Abigail kept thinking. Whatever will Camille think? And Harry if he ever finds out? Harry would kill the man.
Twice over.
* * *
• • •
The carriage from Redcliffe was several days behind the Earl of Riverdale’s to start with, though it did gradually narrow the gap. At first the search was slow and André regretted not having insisted upon bringing his brother’s carriage or at least his coachman. He did not find it as easy as he expected to recognize the place where he had left Marcel. Most villages looked essentially alike to him, and he had not observed scenery and landmarks with the sort of attention he would have paid them if he had known he would have to find his way back. When they finally reached the right one, however, he recognized it with some relief and knocked on the front panel to signal the coachman to stop outside the inn at the end of the street.
The Marquess of Dorchester was no longer there, of course, and never had been there under that name. But the innkeeper recognized André and was able to inform him that Mr. Lamarr had indeed stayed there—and had left the next morning with Miss Kingsley.
André wished he had settled the ladies, and perhaps Bertrand too, in the dining room before he asked his questions.
“What?” Jane Morrow said. “And who, may I ask, is Miss Kingsley? Bertrand, take your sister into one of these rooms behind us if you will. She will be ready for some refreshment.”
But it was too late to shield them from looming scandal. Neither twin moved.
“She is an acquaintance of his,” André explained. “And of mine. A perfectly respectable lady, Jane. I daresay she gave him a ride to somewhere where he could hire a carriage for his own use since I had taken his.”
Jane was not about to question her brother-in-law’s ramshackle brother while the innkeeper was an interested spectator—or in the hearing of her niece and nephew. But her mind reeled. Why exactly had Dorchester sent his brother and his carriage out of the way? And who exactly was this woman André insisted was respectable? Was it respectable to take a man who was not one’s husband up into one’s carriage? And had they both spent the night at the inn? In separate rooms? Oh, she ought to have locked the twins in their rooms at home and embarked on this journey with Charles and André.
The innkeeper was able to direct them to the town where Miss Kingsley’s hired carriage had been bound.
“But where did he go from there?” Estelle asked of no one in particular. “Why did he not come home, as he had promised he would?”
Jane could think of one excellent reason, but she held her peace.
André rubbed the side of his nose with one finger and held his peace too.
“I daresay something happened to make him change his mind, Stell,” Bertrand said. “Maybe we will find out what that is when we reach that town.”
Jane Morrow looked at André with narrowed eyes while the twins climbed into the carriage again. “You knew about that woman,” she said quietly enough not to be overheard by her nephew and niece. “You ought not to have brought them here. I suppose it did not occur to you that it was highly improper to do so. You are no better than your brother.”
“Oh, I say,” he said indignantly. “I did not bring them here. I had no wish to come here at all. It stood to reason that Marcel would be long gone. They brought me.”
“We really have no choice now,” she said, raising her voice to address the twins inside the carriage, “but to return home and wait for your father there. He will come in his own good time. He always does.”
“But the party,” Estelle protested.
“We do have a choice, Aunt Jane,” Bertrand said. “We can go and find out where he went, or at least try. We have come this far. Why go back now without at least making an effort to track him down?”
Jane could have offered a very good answer, but how could she speak bluntly to her two young charges? “He is probably busy and will resent the intrusion,” she said.
“You think he is with that woman, Aunt Jane,” Estelle said. “Well, what if he is? I daresay it is not the first time and will not be the last. But I want him to know that I have arranged a birthday party for him. I want to tell him to his face that he has . . . inconvenienced me.”
Her aunt stared at her in some exasperation. It was so very unlike Estelle to be stubborn. What a shame it was that children had to grow up.
“Onward with the search, then?” André asked cheerfully, offering his hand to help Jane into the carriage.
“Yes,” Estelle and Bertrand said in unison.
After that, the pursuit was relatively easy. They found the inn at which Miss Kingsley’s hired carriage had set down its passengers, and they found out about the newly purchased carriage without having to leave the inn. They spoke with the ostler who knew which direction the carriage had taken—with both the lady and the gentleman. All of Jane’s worst fears were confirmed. The same ostler was obliging enough to mention that four other people—two gentlemen and two ladies—had gone in pursuit of that same carriage two days earlier. Even more obligingly he gave them a description of that carriage too.
It was merely a case after that of following a trail that fairly blazed before them. Almost everyone they spoke with remembered one or other of the two carriages, or, in many cases, both. They were further assured that they were going in the right direction when André suddenly remembered something.
“Oh, I say,” he said with a loud clicking of his fingers. “I will wager Marc has gone to the cottage.”
“Cottage?” Jane asked.
And André told the story his mother had told him of the great-aunt on their father’s side who had taken a fancy to Marcel when he was an infant long before he, André, was born, and of her making him her heir and leaving him her cottage somewhere in the wilds of Devonshire.
“It seems a likely sort of place to take a wo—” André said before being cut off too late by a pointed glare from Jane and a sharp elbow in the ribs.
“Woman,” Estelle said. “Where in Devonshire, Uncle André?”
He rubbed one side of his nose, but doing so did not prompt his memory further. Or perhaps, he admitted, he had never known. Close to the sea, perhaps?
That was very little help.
Twelve
The sky had cleared and the wind had died down, at least in the valley. The hillsides and the valley floor had had a day to dry out. It was time to go out again, Viola announced, to take a long, brisk walk along the valley to the sea.
“There will be mud,” Marcel predicted.
“It can be stepped around,” she said. “Coward.”
It turned out to be not the brisk
hike she had anticipated. The valley floor beside the river was spongy at best after all the rain, muddy at worst. In places, old, dead branches and even whole, rotted-out tree trunks were strewn across what had not really been a path in the first place. It was all very wild and overgrown. It was possible, even probable, that no one had walked here for years. But it was an exhilarating exercise anyway as they weaved about obstacles, clambered over a few, avoided the worst of the mud, and stopped frequently just to look about at the glory that was the early autumn trees and to listen to the birds.
“Is it not amazing,” she said, “how they make so much noise but are barely visible?”
“Amazing,” he agreed in the deliberately flat voice he used whenever he was teasing her enthusiasm.
She was not deterred. She had discovered this enthusiasm during the past couple of weeks and wondered why she had considered it so important all her life to quell it in the name of dignity.
It took them more than an hour to reach the sand of the beach—and the wind again. It slanted across the sea from the southwest unobstructed, ruffling the waves, taking their breath away, and flattening their clothes against them. He had to hold his hat on. The river, as it widened to flow in shallow runnels to the sea, had cut the beach in two. They strolled along their side of it, hand in hand, not talking. Often they did not. But it was never because they had run out of things to say. Sometimes there could be a more companionable feel to silence than to conversation. High cliffs rose to one side of them. The sea stretched to infinity on the other.
“I am glad the cottage was built in the valley, out of sight of all this,” she said.
“You do not like the sea?” he asked.
“Oh, I do.” She drew her hand from his and turned to see the whole panorama. The beach stretched for miles in both directions. Endlessly long waves were breaking in foam and flowing onto the wet sand some distance away before being sucked back into the deep. The air was cold and salty. A lone gull, buffeted by the wind, cried mournfully, or so it seemed. She must not ascribe human feelings to other creatures, though. “But I do not believe I would like to live close to it. It is too . . . elemental.”
“On that at least we are agreed.” He came to stand in front of her and dipped his head to kiss her. She leaned into him and kissed him back, seeking comfort and forgetfulness from him as well as warmth. They had been so very good, these weeks. The best of her life. Oh, by far the best. Why, then, had there been a thread of melancholy dragging at her spirits for the last few days, like a faintly throbbing bass note in an otherwise light and joyful melody?
“At least?” she said. “Are we not agreed upon most subjects?”
She had not meant it as a serious question. She was not sure he had taken it seriously. Except that suddenly it seemed to hang between them like a tangible thing. Were they not, in almost every way that mattered, very different from each other? It was easy to ignore that basic fact for a short idyll of a romantic affair. But it would not remain masked forever. Fortunately they did not have forever.
Fortunately?
She took a step to one side, fighting a certain inexplicable panic. “I am going to walk down to the edge of the wet sand,” she said.
I am going to . . . Not Let us . . . It had not been deliberate. Maybe he had not taken it that way. But he did not come with her. He remained where he was or he walked onward. She did not look back to see. Were affairs always this way? He would know. She did not. Did one suddenly know, without warning or any particular reason, that it was over? There was no reason. She was desperately happy here. She was deeply satisfied with their relationship, if it could be called that. But of course it could, however brief it would be. She was invigorated by his company and had come alive to his lovemaking. She still did not know how she was going to do without him once it was all over.
Soon, very soon, she would find out.
She stopped when she came to the edge of the wet sand. The tide must be on its way out, but the sand it had covered a short while ago had not dried yet. It gleamed with wetness in places. She felt isolated here, cut off from everything but her thoughts. She did not turn to look back. The wind whipped mercilessly at her.
Her daughters would be starting to worry. She had given no hint of where she was going or with whom, only that she was going. They would be starting to wonder what they would do if she never came back. She had not written again since she came here. Her great escape was seeming more and more like her great selfishness. And she was starting to worry about them, or at least to wonder. She was missing them. She was missing her grandchildren, or at least the frequent news she always had of them in Camille’s letters.
She was worried about Harry. Always, always, always. Pointlessly worried. There was nothing she could do to ensure his safety. But she should at least be there to read any letter that came from the Peninsula. Oh, would the wars never end?
And what had happened to her moral core? Morality had been her compass through her life until . . . how long ago? Two weeks? Three? She was losing track of time. But in that time she had been living a life of sin. Or had she? Was it sinful to love a man and to allow him to love her? It was not love, though, what was between them. It was lust.
It felt like more than lust. But that was self-deception. He had never pretended that this was anything more than business as usual for him. How many days ago had he told her what he wanted most out of life was pleasure? She had known it from the start, though. She had not been deceived. She had come with him because she had wanted pleasure too.
Because she had lusted after him, and still did.
She lifted her face to the wind and closed her eyes. A gull—the same one?—cried mournfully again. She felt horribly, despicably lonely. But she deserved no better. She turned and walked back up the beach. He was standing surely in the very spot where she had left him. She stopped a short distance away.
“I need to go home,” she said.
And then felt sheer, raw panic.
He looked very large with his tall hat pulled firmly onto his head, in his many-caped greatcoat and his top boots. He looked remote, austere. His eyes, hooded as they often were, looked darker than usual in the shadow of the brim of his hat. He looked curiously like a stranger, a rather grim stranger.
“I am glad you said it first, Viola,” he said. “I never like to hurt my women.”
Even his light, soft voice sounded unfamiliar. She felt hurt anyway. Had he intended that—to hurt her even as he denied any wish to do so? Or was he merely speaking the truth? He had tired of her and was glad she had announced the end of the affair before he had to do it himself.
“I miss my family,” she said. “They will be worried about me.”
“I thought you said you had written to them,” he said.
She had mentioned it soon after their arrival.
“But without any detail or explanation,” she said. “And it has been longer than two weeks.”
“Has it?” he said. “It is amazing how time flies when one is immersed in pleasure.”
Was he insulting her? There was no insult in the words themselves, but something in his tone chilled her. “It has been a pleasure,” she said.
“Indeed,” he agreed. “I have rarely known better.”
Was that word rarely carefully chosen to cut into her? But she had no reason to be offended. This had never been anything else but an affair, and only for her was that a momentous thing.
“You will be glad to go home to your children,” she said.
“Indeed I will,” he said. “I will need to recover some stamina. You have come near to exhausting me, Viola.”
Oh, he was insulting her. In the subtlest of ways. He was telling her that she had been a thoroughly satisfactory mistress, but that now he was ready to move on to the next one—or would be after a short spell in which to recuperate. He was suggesting that she had been insa
tiable—as she had.
“There does not need to be any bitterness in our parting, does there?” she asked.
“Bitterness?” His eyebrows rose and he raised one hand as though to clasp the handle of his quizzing glass. But it was hidden beneath his greatcoat. “I certainly hope I never arouse bitterness in any of my women, Viola. We will part as friends, and it will be my hope that you will have fond memories of our liaison after you return to the respectability of your life.”
. . . any of my women.
He made no mention of any fond memories he would have. In a month’s time he would probably have forgotten all about her.
She had known that from the start.
“Tomorrow?” she said. “We will set out for home tomorrow?”
He did not reply for a few moments. His face looked a bit like granite, his eyes hard and opaque. And, fool that she was, she hoped he would beg for a few more days.
“With these longer nights I suppose it would be wiser to wait until tomorrow,” he said. “Yes, we will leave early.”
It felt like a slap to the face. He would have preferred to leave today.
It took them less than an hour to make their way back up the valley. They did not stop to look around or listen to the birds or catch their breath. They skirted muddy puddles and scrambled over fallen tree branches without fuss—and without touching. The only time he stopped to help her over a tree trunk, she pretended not to notice his hand. The next time he did not offer it. They spoke not a word to each other.
They had not quarreled. There was no reason in the world why they should not still converse amiably and be easy with each other. There was the rest of the day to live through, after all, and the night and then however many days it would take them to travel back. She would have him take her to Bath rather than all the way to Hinsford. It would surely not take many days to get there. They would not be traveling in anything like the leisurely manner they had when they came here.