by Mary Balogh
Madeline hugged her knees more tightly.
“Do you ever get the feeling,” he asked, “that everything that happens in life happens for a purpose? When I sailed for Canada, I was going away, leaving something, running away. I had no notion of going to anything. But those four years in the wilderness were the most important years of my life.”
“Do you wish you were back there?” she asked rather bleakly.
He was quiet for a moment. “No,” he said. “Those years served their purpose, but I don’t believe I could settle there for the rest of my working lifetime as many men do.”
She laid one cheek against her knee. She thought he had finished and was sorry. She liked to hear him talk. It happened so very rarely.
“I suppose I did not spend enough time out here when I lived here,” he said. “I had to go halfway around the world to find myself. I think I found God there, Madeline.”He was silent for a while. “That is a nonsensical thing to say when I do not know God or even for sure that there is a God. I was brought up to think of Him as very much involved in human affairs, very stern and judgmental, unyielding, humorless. Far more inclined to condemn than to praise. But when you are in a place like this—just earth and sky and yourself—you wonder about God.”
He lapsed into silence.
“God has been mainly a Sunday occurrence for me,” she said. “Though I always thought God was love, and I have always seen love all about me.”
“I think perhaps,” he said, “that when you are alone in such surroundings, you come face-to-face with yourself or else go mad. You learn that being is more important than doing, that perhaps God is not to be found in the noisy affairs of men but in the silence of the heart. Perhaps I am talking nonsense.”
“Tell me about your life there,” she said when he fell silent again. She felt a little like crying. She felt closer to him than she had ever felt before, and she did not want to lose the moment, though she realized that he had been talking to himself more than to her.
“You like to hear about it?” he asked. “It was a dull life, Madeline. Days and days, weeks and weeks, of tedium.”
“Tell me about the canoe travel,” she said. And when he propped himself up on one elbow and she knew that he would do so, she stretched out on the grass beside him, her face turned to the warmth of the sun.
Perhaps there was a reason for her fascination with hearing about those years of his life, she thought. And perhaps she had just glimpsed that reason. Perhaps the key to knowing and understanding her husband lay in his experiences during that time, experiences that he seemed to be only just beginning to assess himself.
“Months of hard toil and hell,” he said, “though it can get into one’s blood. And I was one of the fortunate ones, being a clerk of the company. The Frenchmen who man the canoes, the voyageurs, live lives of unbelievable hardship. They paddle their canoes or portage them past rapids for eighteen hours of every day. And yet a more cheerful breed of men or a louder and more quarrelsome one it would be hard to find.”
He launched into a lengthy account of his travels, as she had hoped he would. She listened in fascination for a long time until drowsiness overtook her. She realized a few times, with a little start of guilt, that she had drifted and not heard him at all. And finally she lost the battle and drifted right off.
“AND WHEN WE GOT BACK to the water finally,” James said, “there were six mermaids sitting there in a row, all singing off-key.” He grinned when Madeline made no objection to the absurd ending to his story.
He reclined on his elbow for a long time, staring at her, her curls tousled about her face, her lips slightly parted in sleep. His eyes traveled down her slim body and came to rest at her waist. Would he be able to cause a swelling there soon? He hoped so. He passionately wanted a child. With Madeline. And he believed that she had been disappointed when it had not happened the month before.
He wanted a child that could be truly called his own. A child of his wife’s.
Her riding habit had pulled up well above her right ankle. A slim and shapely ankle. He smiled.
And he leaned across her and kissed her softly on the lips.
“Mm,” she said, and stirred slightly.
He kissed her very lightly again, his opened mouth over hers, his tongue tracing the outline of her parted lips and probing gently between.
“Mm,” she said, and stirred again. And there was response there. She opened her mouth wider.
He had meant it just as a mark of affection. He had not fully intended to waken her. But he took almost instant fire. Inside, her mouth was moist and very warm. He smoothed the curls back from her face.
“Mm,” she said once more, and her eyes opened suddenly and looked first into his and then beyond him to the blue sky.
He watched her swallow as he began to open first the buttons of her jacket and then those of the blouse beneath. Then he kissed her again while his hand completed the task and found its way beneath her shift to her warm breasts. Her nipples tautened beneath his touch.
It took him just a minute longer to remove both jacket and blouse and pull down her shift so that his mouth could continue the task of arousal that his hands had begun. An unnecessary task, though she moaned and pushed herself against him. She was ready for him. He lifted himself over her, kissed her throat, her chin, her mouth, again.
Was he mad? Had he completely taken leave of his senses? But no one ever came this way. He had been out on the moors a thousand times and never once met anyone by chance. If he was mad, it was a glorious insanity.
He moved half off her and drew her velvet skirt up to her waist. He pulled at the undergarments beneath; adjusted his own clothing; and remembered the hillside at Amberley, where he had taken her for the first time, crushing her beneath him into the hard ground, doubtless hurting her dreadfully, though she had uttered not one sound of complaint. The ground was a hard and unyielding bed for a woman in the act of love.
He had never taken her any other way.
He slipped an arm beneath her waist and rolled over onto his back. He swung her over on top of him, holding up her skirt. She looked down at him with wide eyes, her breath coming in short gasps.
“Hug my sides with your knees,” he told her, helping her to position herself and then moving his hands to her hips and bringing her down onto himself.
They both gasped.
When he moved in her, she did not, as she usually did, move with him. She held tightly to him with her knees and tightened her inner muscles, and closed her eyes. He spread one hand against the back of her head and brought it down to within a few inches of his own. And she opened her eyes and looked into his.
And they continued to look into each other’s eyes as she gradually relaxed and trembled against him. And he watched her teeth bite into her lower lip.
Her skirt was in heavy folds over the both of them. And she was warm and wet and trembling beneath it all. He could not have imagined a more erotic lovemaking. He touched one naked breast with his free hand and brought her mouth down to his own.
And he slowed and deepened his movements as he felt her coming to him and came to her at the exact moment. He had never, he thought with what rationality was left to him, been more aware of Madeline as his love partner.
Her head dropped to his shoulder when the tension of climax had shuddered out of her. He nudged at her legs, helping her straighten them out to either side of his. And he wrapped his arms about her so that he might hold her in the aftermath of passion.
Even several minutes later he knew that she was not sleeping. She was perfectly relaxed but awake. As was he.
So close. They were so close to each other. They could not be closer physically. They were still joined in body. The seeds of his lovemaking were in her. And so close in other ways too. Relaxed and contented in each other’s arms. Husband and wife.
It should have been so easy. So easy to say something. Anything. Her name at the very least.
Madeline.
But if he spoke, he might spoil everything. He might at best jolt her back to reality and put an end to these minutes when he held her as closely as a man can hold his woman. At worst, he might see her look at him in shock, incomprehension, derision. She had surrendered her body to him from the start. She had never made any sign that he also had a claim on her heart.
He was afraid of spoiling what little closeness with her he had. His fingers played gently and absently with her curls.
And Madeline for her part lay warm and comfortable against his lean strength, her head pillowed on his shoulder, and willed the moment to last forever. She could hear his heart beating steadily beneath her ear. She wondered if he knew that his fingers were playing with her hair and massaging her scalp.
And if the moment could not last forever, as moments never could, then she willed him to speak. To say it. To say what she sensed. It could not be just physical. There had to be more: some affection, some tenderness, some love perhaps. It had been in his kiss. She had felt it in his touch.
And she had seen it—oh, she had gazed into it—in his eyes. She had looked into his eyes for seemingly endless minutes when he had been thrusting into her. And there had been something there, some nakedness. Something almost frightening in its intensity. Frightening because she was terrified that she was mistaken.
He loved her. His eyes had told her that he loved her. She willed him to say it. Or just to say her name. Or even just to kiss her again and smile at her and let her know beyond the level of words.
She had been mistaken. She must have been mistaken. In the intensity of her own passion she had seen in his eyes what she had wanted to see there. Instead of which she had been watching rising physical desire.
She had been mistaken. He was not going to say anything.
“I told you the moors were dangerous,” he said.
“Yes,” she said, “so you did.”
“You should not allow such goings-on outside of our bedchamber, Madeline,” he said. “There is always the chance that someone else will come along.”
Was he teasing? Or was he serious. One could never tell with James. He sounded serious. But he must be teasing her.
“Do you speak from experience?” she asked.
His hand stilled in her hair. She felt his muscles tense. “What do you mean?” he asked.
She kept her eyes closed and her head against his shoulder. But she knew the moment was lost irrevocably. She knew she had somehow said something wrong.
“Only that you must have brought dozens of girls out here in your time,” she said lightly, wading further into the quicksand she had taken as her chosen path.
“To whom have you been talking?” he asked. “Who has put such nonsense in your head?”
“It was just that,” she said. “Nonsense. I talk a lot of it. Hush, James. Don’t be cross.”
“It was Beasley, wasn’t it?” he said. “What did he tell you about me?”
“Oh, hush,” she said, putting one arm about his neck and burrowing her head closer to him. “I was teasing, James. I meant nothing.”
He took her by the hips in a very firm grasp and lifted her off him. He turned and laid her down on the grass beside him. His face, she saw with a sinking of the heart, was furiously angry. She fumbled with her shift and pulled it up to cover her breasts.
“I told you to stay away from him,” he said. “Now he has poisoned your mind. Well, Madeline, if you believe that you are one of a long string of females to be brought out here to be tumbled, then may you have joy of the thought. If you are interested, you compare quite favorably with all the others. You are well worth the bedding. Indeed, I think I did very well in choosing you as a lifelong bedfellow.”
He fumbled for a moment with his own clothing, got to his feet, and strode out of the hollow.
Madeline found when she picked up her blouse that her hands were trembling almost too badly to allow her to do up the buttons. What had she said that was so bad? Why the tirade? Had she hit on a raw nerve?
He had been smitten with Mr. Beasley’s sister many years ago, Mr. Beasley had said.
He had fought Mr. Beasley after she had married another man, and he had fought the two brothers of her husband.
Why?
The one child—the oldest—looked quite different from the other three, Miss Trenton had said. He was tall and thin and dark. One would hardly guess that he had the same parents as the other three.
“Henrietta!” Mr. Trenton had hissed, in an agony of embarrassment.
Perhaps even yesterday there had been the tiniest, vaguest uneasiness in her. But so tiny and so vague that it had been forgotten.
What if it was true?
What if what was true?
Oh God.
“Did you think I had left you?” James asked from the lip of the hollow, his voice as cold as ice. “I was fetching the horses. Come on, Madeline, let’s go home. We just spent too long together this afternoon, that’s all. It is tempting fate too strongly to spend more than an hour at a time in each other’s company, is is not? And I think it would be wise to keep this sort of activity—” he gestured back to the hollow, “for our marriage bed, where it belongs.”
“I could not agree more,” she said, pulling on her jacket and willing her hands to steadiness while she buttoned it and pinned her hat to her hair. She glared steadily up at him while she set her foot in his hand so that he might help her mount her horse. “I certainly did not marry you with the expectation of such dealings encroaching on my days. I was told that a wife owed that duty only at night.”
“If it is only duty and not pleasure,” he said, “it would suit me well to make it much briefer for you, Madeline. I will do so tonight.”
“Good,” she said, turning her horse’s head for home even before he was in the saddle. “It is a duty. How could it be anything else?”
And how could she expect such a barefaced lie to be believed? she wondered a few minutes later when her temper had cooled a little. He had only to think back on any of the numerous beddings he had shared with her to know that there had been a great deal more pleasure than duty involved in her response. But of course he was too angry to think rationally.
And now she was probably going to be subjected to nights in which he would take his conjugal rights without ever making love to her again.
The afternoon had started so well. And turned magical when he had talked to her and told her a great deal about himself. And grown delirious when they had made love. But now they were back firmly to the old hostility. And the seeds of doubt and suspicion had been sown in her mind.
Oh, she was very angry indeed.
She hated him.
Why in the name of all that was wonderful had she married him?
THE SLIM CHANCE THAT THEIR MARRIAGE might have brought them relative contentment seemed to have slipped away during that afternoon when for perhaps an hour they had both known even more than contentment. Had that afternoon not brought them brief happiness, each reflected bitterly, perhaps the unhappiness might have been kept at bay too.
She was sorry she had married him, James convinced himself. She had done so only because he had ruined her on that hillside at Amberley and rushed her afterward into a commitment. She would never have married him if she had had time to reflect.
He thought of the men he had seen her with in London, Colonel Huxtable and others, and of Captain Hands at Amberley. He watched her with Alfred Palmer and Carl Beasley and even young Mark Trenton during the weeks and months that succeeded their disastrous ride on the moors. And he knew that he was not the man for her. He had nothing to offer that would meet and nurture that glow of vitality that was always there in her for other men.
The only way he could please her was sexually. And that enjoyment was despite herself. She did not like him. After that afternoon she rarely spoke to him unbidden. And because he was hurt by what sh
e had said to him on that occasion, and burdened with the guilt of having forced her into an unwanted marriage, he stopped taking advantage of that one vulnerability in her.
He did not stop their marriage. He was too selfish to do that entirely, he told himself ruefully. And besides, he wanted an heir. Though as for that, he would not mind if she presented him with half a dozen daughters and no sons. He wanted a child—one he could acknowledge and hold and give his name to. One he could love.
If he was capable of love. He was not sure that he was.
And so he continued the marriage. But he no longer made love to his wife. He took her each night in what became a brief and regular routine except for those few days each month after she told him, defiance and triumph in her eyes, that she could not. She had come to enjoy telling him in so many words that he had not succeeded in impregnating her.
Or so it seemed.
Sometimes he tried to be kind to her.
“Mrs. Hurd was telling me at dinner last evening,” he said to Madeline one morning when he knew she planned to drive into the village, “that the milliner has some very dashing new bonnets for the winter. Why don’t you buy some?”
“Why?” she asked him, looking very directly into his eyes and lifting her chin in an expression he had come to recognize. It was an armor she put on against him. “Am I not fashionable enough for Lord Beckworth’s taste?”
“I thought you might like having something new and pretty,” he said. “We are very far from London.”
“Have I complained?” she asked.
“No,” he said, “but it has occurred to me that perhaps you miss a fashionable center. Would you like me to take you to Harrogate for a week or two?”
“So that we may take the waters and promenade in the assembly rooms?” she said. “I think not, James. We would have to endure each other’s company all day long.”
“I had not thought of that,” he said stiffly. “It would be a terrible infliction, would it not?”