How comical to have hoped, even briefly, that she would settle for merely twitting him.
Not a coward, she looked him squarely in the eye. “I cannot marry you,” she said.
He had not expected this. His disbelief was too large to manage, or marshal into words.
The stunned silence could not last, though. “What?” Elma cried.
Gwen looked toward the gathered company. “I do beg your pardon,” she said, then paused to clear her throat. Her voice only trembled a little as she pushed onward. “I know this is a disappointment to everybody.” She looked down to the bouquet, fumbling as she tried to remove the strap from her wrist. The gesture, after a moment, became a frantic sort of clawing.
As if in a dream, Alex watched himself reach out and slide the ribbon off her hand. Freed, he thought. Remember this moment, Gwen. From here on out, you’re fair game for the chase.
She gave him a look of astonishment as he took the flowers. He no doubt looked equally astonished. He could not believe she’d done this. She was braver even than he’d imagined.
The thought clamped down on his next breath. In fact, he had counted on her being less brave than this. Lovemaking was not without possible consequences, and—so he realized, all at once—he had assumed, God forgive him, that her fear of those consequences would hold her to him as much as the love that she did, she must feel for him.
But if she was so unafraid, what might she not do? She might well walk out of this room and never look back to him, no matter what had passed between them.
He looked down at the bouquet. His mind felt strangely sluggish. “Lovely roses.” Oh, brilliant remark. “Gloire de Dijon, I think?” A thousand times he’d won the advantage in tricky negotiations by thinking on his feet, and now a remark on flowers was the best he could manage?
Her chest rose and fell on a deep breath. “Sir,” she said. “I do hope you will survive this, the tarnish of your first jilting.”
Smart girl. She would not be distracted by talk of roses.
“But you will understand,” she continued, “at least I think you will, when I tell you that there can be no more sham marriages for me.”
Sham marriages? His brain latched onto that phrase and demanded that it anger him. His senses were attuned to other, more important details. Her blanched face. Her shoulders, which kilted at an unnaturally straight angle.
His wits began to reassemble. She was jilting him by the skin of her teeth, here. It was costing her some great and terrible effort.
There was hope in that fact. More than hope. She would never come to him out of fear. She would only come to him in honesty. He almost wanted to take her hand and give her the encouragement she needed. To say, It’s all right; keep going. Give me hell. You’re almost done.
A thorn stabbed his palm: his hand was crushing the bouquet. He did not look down. “Bravo,” he murmured to her. Her courage deserved his admiration. “Well done, Gwen. Fearless.”
The remark visibly confused her. She took a step back from him. A tremor moved her mouth. “Was this always a joke to you, then?” she whispered. “Did you never mean any of it?”
“No.” He stepped forward, heedless of the company, to slide his palm around the back of her neck. “I meant every word.” Distantly he heard Gerard’s protest, his sisters’ sharp rebuttal, Henry Beecham’s harrumph. None of it mattered. Into Gwen’s ear, he said, “You’ve just jilted me, darling. Wait at least five minutes before you goad me into proposing marriage again.”
She recoiled so fast that it was a wonder her head did not strike the wall behind her. “You’re mad,” she said, wide-eyed.
“In love,” he said.
“I highly doubt it.”
He took a sharp breath. “Yes, I see that you do.” Enough, now, with flippancy: he felt the last thing from flippant. “I will have to prove it to you, then.”
“No.” She shook her head once. “Do not bother. I am sure you love me as much as you love Heverley End. But I told you, Alex, I am done with these shams.”
Heverley End? What in God’s name did that pathetic little estate have to do with anything? “And well you should be done with them,” he said, the first strop of temper roughening his voice. “But if you count me in with the other two shams you have courted, then you’re lying to yourself. I am not another Pennington. I need nothing from you but you. And I am not going to walk away.”
Gwen’s lips parted. She stared at him, her expression arrested; almost, it seemed, she started to speak. Every fiber in him tightened in anticipation.
And then another voice—Gerard’s voice—thundered, “What the hell is going on here?”
She cast a glance over Alex’s shoulder at the blustering ass, then snatched up her skirts. Her brown eyes flashed toward Alex; her chin lifted. “You do not need to walk away,” she said. “I will.” And turning on her heel, she bolted for the door.
Dumb surprise dulled his reflexes. After such bravery, she would flee like a coward?
A second too late, he lunged for her elbow—he would be damned if she would leave like this. But Elma and Caroline rose up in front of him, Caro catching hold of his hand, Elma’s face flushed and furious. “What did you do!” Elma cried. “What did you—oh!” She whirled and ran after Gwen.
The door thumped shut as Caroline hung like a dead weight on his elbow. “Not now,” she was saying into his ear. “Alex, not now. Heaven knows what ails her but she’s in no state to hear you! Give her a minute—an hour, perhaps—”
An hour? He took a step backward. An hour to do what? What in God’s name ailed her?
The question echoed in his brain and finally pulled him to a halt. He did not fully understand what had happened here. He’d had no opportunity to find out. How the hell could he fix it, then?
He turned on his brother, who was standing with arms crossed and brow furrowed, so comfortably and self-righteously aggrieved. “Can you never keep your mouth shut? Christ—five minutes, Gerard! Would that be so much to ask?”
“I quite agree,” Belinda snapped.
Gerard went purple, choking on his own words as he waved wordlessly toward Alex for the benefit of the glaring company. “Can . . . can . . . can he not even manage to get married without driving off the goddamned bride? Do you know how hard I worked to get that license—not to mention this goddamned minister—”
“Sir,” the minister gasped. “Your language is blasphemous!”
“Blasphemy, is it? What of him? What do you call what he—”
“Could you both desist from fighting for once?” This from Caroline, who set hands to hips and looked sternly between them. Alex’s niece, Madeleine, clambered to her feet as well, mimicking her mother’s pose with a fiercely jutting five-year-old lip.
This miniature imitation caught Gerard’s attention and neatly deflated him. He muttered some expletive in tones too soft to corrupt young minds. Then, at normal volume, he added with disgust, “Thoroughly typical.”
Alex looked at him. What a pathetically poor judgment of the situation. Typical would be brilliant. Typical would be much easier. It would mean a cool head and calm confidence. I will fix this: that was his typical resolve, the tried-and-tested approach. But he had no idea who had created this particular mess.
He turned away to stare at nothing. His role in the Trent debacle could not fully explain this. His handling of that episode had done him no credit, but it certainly did not, in any way, give Gwen cause to doubt his love—or to think him in any way similar to the two shams that had greeted her at more formal altars.
The door thudded again, this time on the exit of Henry Beecham.
The minister snatched up his Bible and, with a hunted look, ducked out after Beecham.
With every exit, that thud was sounding more and more significant. The sound of finality.
Which it was not.
Of course he could fix this problem. There was no need to panic. He turned back to the mumchance assembly. “I only need to know what the problem is,”
he said.
Belinda and Caro exchanged veiled looks.
He did not like that. “Say it to my face,” he said, and his voice had a grim note in it that made him wonder whether his instincts had recognized something that his brain had not yet. In an hour, perhaps, he would not feel so calm at all.
“I believe that she told you,” Belinda’s husband said helpfully. “Doesn’t think you love her.”
Belinda shot her husband a glare.
Ah. But the man was right. At present, Alex’s truths held no value or meaning to her. He would not know how to speak them persuasively until he cracked this riddle. It would take more than an hour to do that. Why do you doubt me, Gwen? What was the true cause?
Little Madeleine spoke. “Why did the bride run away, Mama?”
“Because she got scared,” Caroline said, smoothing down her daughter’s hair. “Uncle Alex is going to fix it by proving to her that she doesn’t need to be scared anymore.”
“Does Uncle Alex love her?”
“Of course he does,” Gerry snapped.
Hearing this truth from Gerry’s mouth brought a wave of foreboding over Alex. Christ, if Gerry could believe this but not Gwen—
“Well,” Gerard continued gruffly. He took a seat at the desk, graceless as a sack of turnips. “I’ll say no more, then. But it’s a damned shame. Family could have used three million pounds.”
“Oh, Gerard,” Caroline sighed. Alex opened his mouth to deliver the truly cutting reply that his brother’s asinine remark deserved—and a nudge of intuition stopped his tongue.
“Could we, then?” he asked mildly.
Gerard’s eyes, meeting his, widened infinitesimally—then dropped. “Who couldn’t?” he muttered.
Alex did not look away. A possibility, theretofore unthinkable, spun through him. He did not like unthinkable possibilities. He liked none of this. You love me as much as you love Heverley End. Is that what she thought she was to him? A problematic millstone around his neck? Some unwanted weight?
A glimmer of inspiration struck him. “I’ll fix this,” he said slowly.
At the Beechams’, he discovered that Gwen had fled to Heaton Dale, and Elma had taken to bed. She called him up to her sitting room, where she subsided across a chaise longue, tipping her head to the cold compress held by a solicitous maid. “Do not chase after her,” she advised. “You will waste the trip. She would not permit even me to accompany her. I have never seen her in such a state!”
He did not argue. “If she asks after me—”
Elma took charge of the compress and sat up. “She won’t, Mr. Ramsey. I tell you, she has lost her wits. I reasoned with her all the way to the station. I might as well have been speaking to a lump of clay!”
He mustered a smile. “If she asks,” he said, “tell her I have gone to Heverley End.”
The compress thumped to the floor. “But why?” Elma frowned. “That’s the opposite direction! Surely you can’t mean to listen to me? You must go after her!”
He laughed. “And so I will,” he said. But first he had to find Gwen what he had promised her: the proof she required.
Heverley End was a Jacobean cottage of Portland stone, weathered and pocked by the centuries of salt that had scoured its golden face. It sat atop a serpentine cliff veined with copper, and its mullioned windows overlooked the surf’s retreat. In Alex’s memory it was fearsome, a place better fit to abandonment and hauntings. In his more recent imaginings on the journey here, men with bowler hats had menaced the perimeter.
The truth was far less remarkable. The house was pretty in the setting sun. Quaint, even. And if Barrington had yet visited his new possession, he’d made no changes to the staff. The gatekeeper recognized Alex from boyhood, and the front door opened on another familiar face: the housekeeper, Mrs. Regis, still as spare and tall as a Maypole. He remembered her as a stiff and bloodless presence, always hovering a few paces from the doctors and nursemaids. Now, to his surprise, she insisted on crying briefly into her apron before leading him on a tour of the old terrain.
As he followed her, he grew conscious of a stupid disappointment. He would have taken pleasure from fighting his way into the house. It would have seemed fitting, for he’d certainly fought his way out of it, once upon a time.
“We have kept it up,” Mrs. Regis assured him as she guided him down the creaking corridors. No electricity here yet; gaslight lent the scene the bluish tinge of history, things already receding, soon forgotten to the world. Emptiness pervaded the rooms: walls denuded of their paintings, rugs rolled away, furniture put to sleep beneath dust sheets. But Mrs. Regis spoke the truth: the oak floorboards squeaked beneath a layer of fresh wax.
On the second floor, outside his old bedroom, she stepped aside to permit him entrance and he thought that here, surely, was the moment when things would finally become difficult. He stepped in on a breath that wanted to falter in physical memory of his time here. They had removed the bookshelves and armoire. Stripped the bed of its mattress. But the view of the sea, of the whitewashed cliff and the pale blue waters stretching endlessly out beyond, was the same.
He walked to the window. The vista felt more intimate and familiar to him than his own reflection. His reflection was a fluke, a product of chance. In that endless vista he had looked to find his courage and his future as the sour smoke of burning nitre-paper had roiled endlessly up behind him. He had worked to discover himself.
For your own good, Alex.
He pressed his fingertips to the pane. He forced a long breath.
It came easily. Of course it did. Sometimes life was kind, and illness faded more gracefully even than the dead.
He blinked, and the view was not so portentous, after all. It was merely . . . pretty. Yes, he thought, if Gwen thought the Seine at sunrise lovely, she would find this view no less pleasing. This view: how curious that it had once meant so much to him, so much anger and desperation and possibility as well. It was only a small slice of the world, a pleasant slice, framed and made coherent by wood and glass and plaster, rude, dumb material that had no pull on him, no claim, no weight.
This house laid no weight on him. He pressed his hand now against the window frame. Of course it didn’t. It was only a damned building.
He breathed again, even more deeply. How could she think she weighed on him? Even standing in this house, thinking of her, he felt light. As a boy, if he could have looked out this window and seen her instead of the sea, he still would have proved no less ambitious for himself.
Well . . . perhaps not. He felt himself smile—here, in this house, without effort. Boys were dim-witted about women. Even as a man, he’d been dim-witted for too long.
A groaning floorboard announced Mrs. Regis’s approach. He turned, and the smile still lingering on his lips appeared to startle her. Her hands flew together at her waist, burrowing into her apron strings like two bony birds in search of cover.
He supposed his sudden appearance, his silent survey, might have looked a bit queer to her, particularly in light of the sale to Barrington. “And how is it with your new master?” he asked, seeking to put her at ease. “Have you met the gentleman yet?”
Her brow knitted. Myopically, she peered at him. “Sir? We’ve not seen the master for some months, now. But . . . that is to say—” She spoke more hastily, perhaps fearing that this remark would be taken as criticism. “He is in regular communication with Mr. Landry—that would be the steward, now, sir. A very good master, Lord Weston is; the rent rollback saved many a family in the village this spring.”
Alex stared at her. “Lord Weston,” he said slowly.
She blinked at him, a startled sparrow. “Aye, sir. Your . . . brother?”
“This spring?” He sounded like a parrot. No matter. Here it was: his intuition finding its aim.
Her sunken face took on a delicate pink hue. “Ah—perhaps more properly summer, sir. We count May as spring in these parts, you know.”
So. The smile was back on his lips
now. A month ago, long after news of the sale had circulated, Gerry had been rolling back rents on the property.
He laughed, and she flinched. Poor Mrs. Regis. No doubt the village would soon be whispering that the boy asthmatic, who had bedeviled the family with his reckless antics, now had grown into a full-fledged madman. “He never sold this place.”
Mrs. Regis drew herself up, affronted by the idea. “Certainly not! This property has been in your family for near to three hundred years, sir.”
“True enough,” Alex said. That hypocritical, two-faced bastard. “And so it shall remain.”
Of all the things to be loathed in a London season—the hypocrisies and charades, the cruelties small and large, the shallow praise and shallower judgments—none was worse than this: the season had robbed Gwen of springs in the countryside. She had forgotten how beautiful Heaton Dale was in June, even with the pagodas, which made such a ridiculous mismatch with the surrounding cornfields.
She sat in a wicker chair on the back terrace, overlooking this land, the light shawl across her shoulders donned for a chill that the morning sun had long since burned away. So take it off, she thought. But she did not move.
She had moved very little in the last two days. It was as if making her way out of London had exhausted all her strength and now she could do nothing but sit very still, and look, and try not to think.
She looked, then, and tried to nourish herself on beauty. Heaton Dale sat on a slight rise—a hillock, really—to which her parents had added. Layer upon layer of sediment had been pressed into the earth, lifting the house farther toward the sky than nature had intended. From this lofty vantage point, the countryside rolled out in all directions, the grass walks that bordered the cornfields drawing a geometrical grid to guide the eye. The hedges bristled with shepherd’s roses and blossoms of white hawthorne, and closer by, interspersing the remaining pagodas (she’d had two chopped up and carted away this morning, and the rest would fall to the axe tomorrow), limes and honeysuckle dotted the lawn. Nightingales and larks flitted from limb to limb, serenading the sky, the season, the sun.