An Infamous Marriage (12 page)

“You’re right,” he said soberly. “There were days, when the surgeons said I’d never be able to walk unaided or ride again, where I came close to it.”

She hesitated a moment, then reached out to touch his arm, very lightly. “I’m glad it didn’t come to that.”

He looked down at her hand, then met her eyes. Elizabeth jerked her hand away. For a moment, she hadn’t seen his betrayal and her pain, but his sufferings. Why was she so tempted to sympathy and forgiveness?

“So am I,” he said. “Only, I wish I could’ve managed to heal in time to not miss most of the war. I think I could’ve done better than Procter at the Thames or Prevost at Plattsburgh.” He huffed out an exasperated breath.

“I daresay you’ll have other chances.”

“But we’re at peace now.”

He sounded almost mournful about it, and Elizabeth felt torn between amusement and irritation. “Perhaps it won’t last. Our history is not that of a peaceable nation.”

“I think it will, this time. The world is grown weary of war.”

She leaned against the wooden stall partition and frowned up at him. “And you haven’t? Would you prefer to kill men, and perhaps be killed yourself, some more?”

He sighed. “I know how it sounds. I’m not against peace. I swear I’m not. Only I should like to prove myself worthy of the honors I’ve been granted.”

“But you’re a major-general and a knight. How much more honor do you need?”

“I was granted all that after I was wounded, and I haven’t fought since.”

“I thought you’d proven yourself by what you did before you were wounded, in taking command after Brock fell.”

“Perhaps—or perhaps it was because my uncle spoke for me. In any case, I was expected to take Brock’s place in the campaign itself, and I never got the chance. Had I not been wounded, I might have served out the war, gained a few victories and made a reputation.”

“Or you might’ve been killed,” she pointed out.

“Leaving you a widow with all this in your own name, free to marry someone of your own choosing, or to never wed again and live out your days as a woman of independent means.”

Inexplicably, Elizabeth felt her eyes sting. “But to wish for such a thing, at the price of your life? I wouldn’t. I couldn’t.”

“Oh.” He smiled, crookedly. “I couldn’t either, you know.”

“What do you mean?”

He held out his hand and she took it, cautiously. “Even if you and I are a bad bargain, Elizabeth, I’d rather make the best of it than wish myself out of it.”

Both of them wore thick gloves against the chill day, but the pressure of his hand, the warm strength of his grip, still sent a jolt of awareness straight to her core. It was a solemn moment, and she almost told him that she
would
forgive him, eventually, and give him his heir—and then the absurdity of the situation struck home and she began to laugh.

“What,” he ground out, dropping her hand, “is so amusing?”

With difficulty she calmed herself enough to speak. “We’ve established we don’t wish each other dead. I suppose it’s a beginning.”

He stared at her, blinked, then laughed along with her. “An excellent beginning.”

She gave Coffee a parting pat, then stepped away from the stall. “Shall I show you the broodmares?”

Jack fell in beside her. “Certainly,” he said. “Did you get the chance to breed any of them to Lord Balkwell’s Dauntless?”

“Not this year. Purvis and I agreed his stud fees had grown too dear for his quality. I bred Eurycleia, Briseis and Hecuba back to Telemachus; Chryseis, Andromache and Deidamia to Odysseus; and Circe and Penelope to Sir Hugo Cresswell’s gray Arabian to see what that cross would bring.”

They had reached Penelope’s box stall. At eighteen she was the oldest of the broodmares and, Purvis had assured Elizabeth, the finest. She had been drowsing on her bed of straw, but she rose ponderously to her feet at their approach. Elizabeth didn’t need to be the kind of expert equestrian her husband was to appreciate the mare’s beauty, with her graceful head, kind eye and dapple-gray coat grown nearly snow white with age.

This time Jack stepped into the stall to greet Penelope, stroking her pale coat and murmuring to her.

“Purvis said she was your favorite,” Elizabeth remarked.

“Oh, indeed she is. We had many a fine run together, Penelope and I, when we were both young. I think I’ll keep her foal and not breed her again. She’s earned a quiet retirement.”

“I hope I did right to breed her this year.” Elizabeth gazed worriedly at the mare. She did look old, and so weary and uncomfortable—not that any mare precisely looked happy so close to foaling. “I know she’s getting old, but she had an easy time of it with her last colt, two years ago, and the Cresswell Arab is such a fine horse.”

“No, you did well.” He leaned against Penelope’s shoulder. “And you’ll do well, too, won’t you, girl?”

“You love horses so.” It was easy to like him here. He seemed wholly at home, in his element, with none of that fidgety energy, the constant effort to charm, that he had otherwise displayed since his homecoming.

“I always have.”

“Perhaps you’ll make a name for yourself as a horse breeder and a rider to hounds, rather than as a general.”

“It’s hardly the same.”

Elizabeth shook her head in exasperation. “I think you would’ve been happier to be an Armstrong of three centuries before, and get your living as a reiver—a life of action and glory.”

He chuckled. Giving Penelope a parting pat, he rejoined Elizabeth. “Perhaps I would have been. Then you would have been a reiver’s lady, and rejoiced when I brought home a fine string of cattle and horses.”

“I would’ve been nothing of the kind,” she said primly. “It would be like marrying a pirate. I would’ve been a proper farmer or villager, only trying to guard my own from the likes of you.”

“You and Giles. That’s exactly why he always wanted to play the farmer.”

She smiled, but sighed. She tried not to dwell on what might have been, but if Giles had lived, by now they would be leading a prosperous, settled life. The clerical living he’d been promised had become open less than a year after his death. Had he only had chicken pox as a child and got over it as everyone else did, they would be living there together now, with the beginnings of a fine brood of children growing up around them, all happy and affectionate together. She would have been so
safe.

But there would have been no chance of going on a Grand Tour,
a traitorous voice whispered in her mind.
Giles would never have had funds enough for that. And, dear as he was, and as well as he understood you, he never cared about travel and seeing the world the way you do.

“Are you all right?” Jack asked. “I’m sorry—I should never have mentioned Giles.”

“No, don’t apologize. It wouldn’t seem right never to speak of him.”

He smiled and touched her arm gently, and they moved on to inspect the rest of the horses, more or less in charity with each other.

Chapter Nine

Jack had not ridden through Selyhaugh the day before, nor had he or Elizabeth sent word of his arrival, but the rest of the day was spent receiving a perfect barrage of callers.

“I daresay one of the Purvis lads called on his sweetheart this morning, or else Mrs. Pollard sent Ellen to do the marketing,” Elizabeth commented drily after the Ildertons left but before Mrs. Young arrived.

“The only place I’ve known news to travel faster than through village servants is in a regimental mess.” Jack smiled, trying to hide his weariness as he massaged his aching leg.

“Your leg,” his wife murmured.

He snatched his hand away and rested it casually on the arm of his chair. “A slight stiffness, nothing more. I suppose all that riding yesterday was too much for it.”

“Then it’s just as well we’re at peace and you can give it a proper rest at home. Are you truly fit for duty, should it come to that again?”

She sat opposite him, anxious concern in her eyes, and Jack knew he should have rejoiced at any sign of thawing toward him. Yet he couldn’t, not for this. He didn’t want her pity, but her admiration and desire. And he couldn’t allow himself weakness. He was a soldier, a warrior, who must be strong and enduring.

“I’ll make myself fit,” he said. “I’ve lain abed long enough.”

She gave him a secretive smile. “But I thought your whole purpose in coming home was to lie abed.”

Was his wife actually trying to joke him out of his bad humor, with talk of bed? Was she beginning to think of a shared bed as a probability rather than a possibility? It was so unexpected he couldn’t help smiling back. “Only in the most active, vigorous possible way,” he assured her.

She rolled her eyes, but she laughed, too. Oh, it would be such a pleasure to finally get her into bed.

* * *

There were moments the day after Jack came home when Elizabeth was almost tempted to yield and invite her husband to her bed that very night. They were not the moments when he was trying to be charming, or making those obvious innuendoes of his. Where had he got the idea there was anything winsome about those? Had his other women found them seductive, and was she the odd one out in her inexperience? Yet surely she wasn’t so humorless as all that.

No, the moments that made her want to yield to Jack were when he showed himself vulnerable. When he stumbled on his aching leg or yawned and blinked weary eyes between callers, she wanted to put her arms around him and comfort him. She even wondered what it would be like to rub the sore muscles of his thigh—such dangerously intimate contact, but how
would
his leg feel under her hands?

When he spoke of Giles, she wanted to slip her hand into his and lean into his solid shoulders, letting their shared grief draw them together. And when he admitted, without saying it in so many words, that the confident, heroic face he presented to the world felt like a sham when he’d done so little compared to the generals who had fought in Europe’s larger theater and made their names household words—why, then she wanted to sit down beside him and draw up plans so that, war or peace, he could find the accomplishments, the glory, that clearly drove him. She’d become a great hand for planning as mistress of Westerby Grange, and she rather relished the idea of trying out her skills beyond the confines of the farm.

But she knew if she stepped into his arms—and probably even if she offered him a neatly written list of suggestions for proving his usefulness to the army and the government—one of two things would happen. He would either instantly transform back into the annoyingly cocksure Jack who made her so weary and impatient, or else he would kiss her, she would kiss him, they would consummate their marriage, and half an hour later she would come back to herself, furious she had yielded her husband everything he wanted out of a moment’s pity.

Pity...and desire, too. She had to be honest with herself and admit the desire. He had kissed her, once, five years before, and she had liked it very well then. She expected she’d like it even better now that she wasn’t dazed with grief, and now that he was coming home instead of going away.

She liked his eyes, too, so dark a brown and alternating between storms and merriment. And there was something about the way he moved, the careful grace with which he tried to hide his limp. She couldn’t stop watching him.

What was she thinking? Why was she letting him charm her already? One couldn’t take so dramatic a stand as barring one’s husband from one’s bed only to invite him there after only one night. He would never take her seriously, and he would always believe himself free to do just as he liked, if all he needed to do to get back into her good graces was come home, smile at her and arouse her pity. She must remember that he’d charmed her once before, made her halfway to falling in love with him through those witty, enthralling letters of his, all the while he was cheerfully flirting and philandering his way through Canada as though she didn’t exist.

So Elizabeth kept her distance for the rest of the day and tried to keep the dinner conversation to commonplaces about the marriages, births and deaths that had taken place in Selyhaugh while he was gone.

But he took advantage of a slight lull in the conversation when the servants removed the mutton and brought in dried fruits and cheeses to ask, “Have you thought of where you wish to go first?”

“Go?”

“On the Continent. Where else?”

“But nothing is decided yet, with us,” she sputtered. “And we—I couldn’t leave
now.
It’s almost foaling and lambing season.”

“That’s what the Purvises and the hands are there for,” Jack said firmly. “If they aren’t enough, we can well afford to hire another man or two now. Besides, just because nothing is decided yet doesn’t mean you can’t have the fun of planning. So, where first? Don’t tell me you haven’t thought of it.”

She had indeed, while she lay awake the past night. “Why, Paris, I suppose. Only I’d wager all of England will have the same idea.”

“That’s no reason to avoid it. If I—if we take this Grand Tour together, Paris would be my choice as well. You’ve spent the past six years on a farm, while I spent them on the frontier. We could use a good dose of crowds and civilization.”

Now that she’d been lured into talking of travel, Elizabeth let Jack keep the subject going. When he came to her room that night, he brought an atlas he’d found on the parlor bookcase, and they plotted a possible route together, not without some debate. Elizabeth wanted to linger in the Alps, while Jack had taken a fancy to the Ionian Islands of the book he had bought her. In the end, they concluded they had time enough to do both, should they choose to travel together, and funds, too, if they spent carefully.

“Living is cheaper on the Continent, after all,” he said. “I’ve heard any number of distressed gentlemen and not a few families have flocked to Brussels already.”

Elizabeth laughed. “We could add it to our itinerary, I suppose.”

“Ah, but our circumstances are not at all distressed, thanks to Uncle Richard. We could stop there and call on any old friends we find, on our way to Paris. No, if I could be anywhere now, I’d want to be in Vienna, deciding the fate of nations.”

“You’re ambitious.”

“I want my deeds to matter.”

“You’ll have your chance,” she assured him.

“I hope so.” He leaned back in his spindly chair and massaged his forehead. He was too large and too male for her room, and Elizabeth was abruptly aware of the intimacy of their situation—her husband in his shirtsleeves, rolled up to the elbow to bare his strong arms. From nowhere her mind was filled with a vision of him atop her in bed, those arms encircling her with gentle force.

Then she blinked and shook her head. Not yet. It was much too soon, even if some part of her wanted to explore just what he had in mind for the most active, vigorous way to lie abed. She produced a yawn. Taking the hint, he smiled, bowed over her hand and took himself off to his own chamber.

She lay awake again, missing him and cursing her own weakness.

* * *

The next day brought Jack’s valet and trunks from York. Elizabeth saw that Macmillan was assigned proper quarters, in the long-vacant room that had belonged to Jack’s father’s valet many years ago, and that he had all that he needed. He wasn’t what she expected in a gentleman’s gentleman, with his heavy accent, a scar on his face where, he said, a French saber had cut him at Fuentes de Oñoro, and his rough-and-ready soldierly bearing. But it was Jack’s business whom he hired as his personal attendant. She wouldn’t take kindly to it if he questioned Jane Hodgson’s suitability as her abigail, after all.

But apparently she didn’t quite hide her doubts. That afternoon when Jack and Elizabeth sat in the parlor, she mending while he read through a stack of correspondence, he said, “Macmillan was a major’s personal servant for the last two years of the war. It’s not as though he has no experience as a valet.”

“I never questioned his suitability,” Elizabeth said earnestly.

“No, but you looked it.”

“Oh, I do hope he didn’t notice, because I certainly didn’t mean to. He simply...stands out, for Selyhaugh. When you hardly venture ten miles from here, a Highlander seems quite as exotic as...as a red Indian, or a Russian.”

Jack smiled. “We must get you traveling. I want to show you so much of the world not even an Indian or a Russian would seem out of the common way.”

“Now, that I can hardly imagine.” She inspected the row of stitches she’d just completed. “I’m sure Macmillan will suit. He seemed courteous, insofar as I could understand a word he said. I thought I was used to Scottish accents from your Armstrong relations, but he sounds entirely different.”

“Oh, that’s just the difference between the Lowlands and the Highlands. You’ll soon grow accustomed. I suppose perhaps I ought to have hired a Selyhaugh man, but when I met Macmillan and heard his stories, and how with the peace he’d been turned out to make his own way even though the reason he’d joined the army in the first place is he couldn’t find work at home...”

“Of course you did what you felt you ought to do.” She’d observed from both Jack and Sir Richard that there was a brotherhood among soldiers, that any man who had fought for Britain had earned a greater loyalty from Jack than he could possibly feel for anyone who merely shared the same birthplace. “Only, I do wonder what became of this major he served, and why Macmillan isn’t still his valet.” She left unsaid her nagging worry that this Major Whoever had turned Macmillan off for some piece of incompetence or dishonesty.

Jack gave a rueful, mirthless chuckle. “He died at Toulouse, at the very close of the war.”

Elizabeth shook her head. “Poor man. I believe Bonaparte had already abdicated by then, so what a pointless loss.”

“At least it wasn’t a defeat for us like New Orleans.”

She sighed. “I suppose it’s unavoidable, but dying in battle after the war is over does add a certain bitterness.”

On that sober note, she returned her attention to her stitches and Jack opened his next letter. She watched covertly as his brows drew together in concentration, then, after a moment, he grinned and slapped his thigh. “Ha! George Lang married and living in Alnwick? I’ll be glad to see him again.”

Lang... She recognized that name. “Isn’t he the officer who lost his savings because of my father?”

Jack’s smile instantly faded, and he set the letter down. “Yes, though I didn’t fancy you’d remember it.”

“Anything to do with that time is hard to forget.”

“In any case, Lang got word I’d come home and wrote the very same day to invite us to dine—says he’d be delighted to meet an old friend from the Forty-Ninth.”

“Surely he wouldn’t include me if he knew who I was.”

He sighed and regarded her soberly. “You’re not your father, Elizabeth.”

“Still. My family did him harm.”

“Harm which he has overcome. He came home from the war a lieutenant-colonel, and it sounds as though he’s married an heiress and settled down to enjoy peace and wedded bliss.”

“Perhaps he had to marry her to mend his fortunes. Perhaps she wouldn’t have been his choice otherwise.”

“Elizabeth. It’s in the past. You were little more than a child, and it was none of your doing.”

She closed her eyes and quoted the verses branded on her memory.
“‘And the LORD passed by before him, and proclaimed, The LORD, The LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, Keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children’s children, unto the third and to the fourth generation.’
The Book of Exodus, the thirty-fourth chapter, the sixth and seventh verses.”

Jack stood and began to pace. “Why do you know that by heart?” he asked, sounding outraged that she did. “It isn’t the Ten Commandments, or the Twenty-Third Psalm, or the Lord’s Prayer, or anything else I can imagine asking a child to commit to memory.”

“I have a good memory for that sort of thing.”

He looked at her as if that wasn’t quite answer enough, and perhaps it was not. “My great-uncle had me read scriptures to him, after my parents died and I came to live with him. That was one of his favorite passages.”

“Sanctimonious bastard,” Jack muttered.

She had thought much the same, as a lonely and resentful girl of sixteen, but— “He wasn’t required to take me in.”

“Only by common decency and family feeling. Tell me, if you gave a home to some young niece or cousin whose father or mother had stolen or murdered or committed adultery, would
you
oblige her to read you those parts of scripture that most condemned their sins?”

“Of course not.”

“Because you are not a sanctimonious bastard who’d resent being obliged to house such a child and take out your bitterness by using the Bible as a bludgeon.” He huffed out an exasperated breath. “If you truly believe God has cursed you for your father’s sins,” he said after a moment, “then why the
devil
did you marry first Giles and then me, and run the risk of extending the curse to a third and fourth generation?”