Elisabeth Fairchild (26 page)

“I know,” she said, and lifted her lips that he might kiss them again.

“Well deserved,” he said, and trailed his fingers along her spine so that she arched her back, fitting her body more tightly to his.

He chuckled wickedly in her ear, and shifted his hips that he might accommodate the depth of their embrace even more.

She pushed away from him, breathing hard. “What motivates this sudden ardor, my lord?”

His brows rose. He smiled playfully. “Proximity, Elaine. Would you not agree?”

She would not allow him to take her in his arms again. She held him at arm’s length, breathing hard, trying to regain some sense of decorum, of self-control.

“A letter arrived from my sister. She says that your past lends credence to all that Palmer would claim, that my name is now inextricably linked to yours.”

“Yes. I would have it so linked. Would not you?” He stilled, only his eyes moving, focused on hers, intent in their regard. “I have endangered your reputation. And so you must marry me.”

He made this proposal matter-of-factly, as if it were already decided, and kissed the tip of her nose, as if she were a child to be placated.

She stared at him in disbelief. “You wish to marry me?”

“I must marry you. Surely you see that.”

She saw no such thing, heard only the word “must”, as if this decision were thrust upon him rather than chosen.

It pained her to think he would marry her because he “must” rather than because he wanted to, or longed to, or loved to. It hurt deeply to think he asked out of a sense of duty rather than true desire. It piqued her pride that he did not ask her if she wished to marry him.

“I confess myself astounded, my lord, to such a suddenly posed question.” Pain spoke, her voice dropping away in asking, “Is it a question?”

“Is it?” he repeated, taking a step back, as though she surprised him. The breeze waffled his shirtsleeves, and tossed his hair. The sea washed in, inevitable as his response. “Is there any question that you must marry, Elaine? I think not. Is there any question that you must marry me?”

She did not answer at once, and now his voice evidenced pain, even a trace of anger. “Do not try to convince me you hold me in disgust, even disdain, for I will not believe it.”

“No, I . . .”

“Would you have me go down on bended knee?” He gave every indication that he would do just that, right there in the sandy shale.

“No,” she caught at his arm. “Please.”

With an expression of growing pique he pulled free from her grasp. “What is it that makes you hesitate to say yes to my proposal, Miss Deering?”

“I--” She struggled with the words. “I must know. . . I must know if you would marry me rather than see me ruined as Penny was ruined.”

“Penny?” He grew irritated, seemed compelled to take two strides away from her, voice rising. “Penny has nothing to do with this.”

“She has everything to do with the man you have become. You loved her. I know you loved her. Love her still.”

He went very still a moment before he said, carefully, “You think me irrevocably heartbroken?”

“I know you are loath to let anyone in, other than Felicity.”

“Who else needs letting in?”

She blinked, hurt by the question. Was he blind to her feelings? Could he not see the truth whenever he looked into her eyes?”

He asked again, tone softer, “Who else needs letting in, my Deering?”

The truth hovered between them, in her silence, in his expectant wait for an answer, but she found she could not tell him, could not reveal herself any more than she already had.

“You would not see another woman’s name smeared due to your actions,” she said at last--an accusation. He waited for soft words. She gave him hard.

He laughed, a snide sound. “And so you think I offer marriage as a kindness?”

“Do you? While I would hold such an offer in deepest respect, I could not accept.”

“What?”

“It would not be a kindness in me to saddle you with a wife for no more reason than gossip gone awry. It would not be a kindness to Felicity.”

“She loves you.”

“And you?”

Silence hung heavy between them.

“Do you fear I do not love you?” he asked. “That I would seduce you, as I have just seduced you, without some affection involved?”

She could not look at him. “I would suppose there is some sort of affection involved with any seduction.”

He stepped away from her, wrapped his arms about his torso, as if to shield himself from her opinion. “Fair enough. I am deserving of all doubts. My history provides you with all sorts of reasons to question my intentions, does it not?”

“I think, my lord, your intentions are . . .”

He threw up his hands. “Do not say kind. I beg you.” He sounded angry.

She bowed her head, wrapped her arms about her shoulders, shaken. “My experience has been that you are capable of great kindness. And yet, I would not have you offer me marriage as nothing more than that.”

Silence stretched between them, and the unbroken song of the sea. Despair rising, she turned once more to go. Only then did he find voice.

“Wait,” he cried.

She stopped.

“I will not deny the past came to confront me again in you. In unfounded rumors.” He pulled a wry face. “Unfounded until this evening, of course. But, you see, what is so very different, is that I cannot turn my back on the harm that I once blithely walked away from. It is a good thing, I think, to atone for past mistakes.”

Her spirits fell.

He took a step toward her. She took a step away.

“You are mistaken in assuming I marry you for no other reason.” His voice swept over her, as it always had, from the very beginning. Dangerous waters.

“Oh?”

“I ask that you do me a great kindness. Make a leap of faith.
Sublimiora petamus
. Marry me.”

Seek the sublime.

She turned, tears in her eyes. “You will give me time, my lord? To consider your . . .” she stopped herself from saying kind, took a deep breath, finished lamely, “your offer?”

He nodded.

She ran back to the inn, tears streaming down her cheeks, wet nightshift slapping against her legs.

T
wo events helped Elaine to decide what she must do next.

The first occurred when she returned to the room she shared with Mrs. Olive, whom she found standing at the narrow window, fanning herself with a bit of paper, and dabbing at her upper lip with a damp handkerchief.

“A warm night,” she said, her gaze passing over Elaine rather searchingly. Her brows rose. “I see you have been out, Miss Deering.”

“I went to the beach. For a breath of air.”

“These windows are too small for much of a breeze, though not too small for a bit of a view.” She cocked her head, as if waiting for more.

“I went wading.”

“Wading is it? With whom? Up to no good he was, you can be sure.”

True enough. I was up to no good, and Lord Wharton no better.
And yet, she would not undo a moment of it. Not one single heated moment.

“Ruined is it?” Mrs. Olive waved an agitated hand.

The gravity of Elaine’s situation reared ugly head. Am I ruined?
By a touch? A kiss? Funny how it did not feel like ruination at all. Quite the opposite.
She felt newly made, clothed in a new skin.

Clothes. The hem of her wrap. Mrs. Olive meant her hem. Was it ruined?

Elaine slipped the wrap from her shoulders, thinking of the moment it had been drenched, his hands steadying her in the swim of the tide, his hands sending her reeling in a swim of extraordinary feeling. He had wrapped himself around her, like the wet hem of her nightshift about his legs in the tide. Her skin burned with the thought. She studied the dampened and dirtied garment by what little light might be had from the window. “Just a bit of sand and salt,” she said. “Nothing that cannot be washed away.” It was a lie. She could never wash away the memory of this evening.

“And you, my dear? You look . . . flushed.”

So worried the older woman looked. As if she knew. But she could not know. She could not have seen them from the window, could she?

Elaine pressed the back of her hand to flaming cheek, and went to the window that she might peer through the pane. “Almost as warm without as within,” she said as she hung her garment to dry, across the windowsill, and studied the view of the beach, and on it a man walking. Lord Wharton. One could see a great deal from such a vantage point!

“Are you ruined, my girl?” Mrs. Olive asked, low-voiced, the question startling.

Elaine flushed with guilt. She managed to say quite firmly,  “No more ruined than my gown. Why would you ask such a thing?”

“I’ve eyes in my head, haven’t I? And ears to hear the gossip that is bandied about. I know that you care for the master, and he for you.”

Elaine sighed as she unlaced her shoes, caught off guard. She could silence the woman in an instant. All she had to say was the truth. He asked me to marry him. To be his wife. Why did she not say it? Why did she not proclaim it from the rooftops?

It did not seem real. That she, the penniless daughter of a drunken gambler might marry a known rogue and womanizer--father to an illegitimate daughter. A man far above her in wealth and station, and yet a man too much like her father--like Palmer. Could it really be true? That he loved her? Wanted her? That he was a changed man? It seemed a page out of a fairy tale. And the damsel is much confused. Definitely in distress. The knight offered rescue. It is his duty. And yet, is there love? Magic? Or does the tale turn in on itself?

Mrs. Olive turned from the window, “It will not do to care too much for him, lass. If you take my meaning.”

Elaine’s right shoe dropped to the floor with a thump. “I am well aware of my place, Mrs. Olive.”

“Good,” the older woman said briskly, and crawled back into the bed and turned her face to the wall. “You must not take offense that I have warned you in such a matter.” Her voice came muffled but firm as the second shoe dropped. “He can be a winning lad when he turns on the charm, our Valentine.”

“Yes, Mrs. Olive he can,” Elaine murmured as she pulled off her stockings, and remembered the dance of his hands as he put them on her.

The second event that helped Elaine decide what she must do occurred on the way to Pembroke Castle.

They took a sloop rigged barge, big enough to walk around in if one were careful of the rigging. Felicity scrambled about as agile as any sailor, following her father wherever he went. Elaine avoided him, knowing he expected an answer to his proposal. Just as well. His mother seemed bent on positioning herself or the Biddingtons between them.

They had just sailed past Dale Point, a bony finger of rock that pointed their direction into the inlet known as Milford Haven, when Deliah Biddington, who seemed most unhappy when conversation ceased, asked of Lady Wharton, “Do you know, are there any legends associated with the castle we are going to see?”

“Pembroke?” Val’s mother shrugged, and adjusted her hat that it might more fully protect her face from the sun. “I’ve no idea. You had best ask my son. I am unfamiliar with it. However, there is a sad legend connected to the Norman castle of Haverfordwest, which we passed on our way to St. David. Do you remember the place?”

They assured her that they did. It overlooked the river Cleaddau did it not?

Lady Wharton glanced over her shoulder then, as if to be sure Elaine was listening before she began her tale.

“A Welsh bowman was captured by the English there, long ago, when Welshmen and Englishmen fought one another. While in captivity this commoner befriended none other than the governor’s son, whom he entertained with tales of his prowess.”

Again the glance over her shoulder. For a moment she looked right at Elaine--not through her--but directly into her eyes. She did not look as if she particularly cared for what she saw.

“One day the bowman lured the nobleman’s son to the top of the castle wall, from which he threw the lad to his death.”

“Oh my!” The Biddington sister’s faces were twin pictures of shocked fascination.

“How dreadful!”

Their eyes glittered like matched emeralds with a need to know more. “What happened to the despicable bowman?”

“Was he hanged?”

“Perhaps drawn and quartered?”

Lady Wharton shook her head sadly and looked away. Once again Elaine felt blessedly invisible.

“It would seem he loved the lad, after all, and regretted his revenge. He followed the lad, leaping to his own death.”

“Goodness. That is indeed a shockingly sad tale.”

“The most affecting I have heard in an age.”

And meant for my ears. She believes I lead her boy astray
.

“Imagine the poor governor’s wounded feelings,” Lady Wharton said.

As she is wounded.

“He built a monastery nearby, and named it--can you guess?”

“After his son?” one of the sisters suggested.

“Certainly not after the dreadful Welshman?” said the other.

Once again Val’s mother’s sad eyes fixed on Elaine.

“Sorrowful. He called it Sorrowful.”

“Imagine that,” Deliah Biddington laughed. “A monastery named Sorrowful. One cannot hear the name without growing melancholy.”

Her sister did not seem in the least melancholy. “Shall I go and ask Lord Wharton if there are any similar such tales of Pembroke?”

“Oh yes, let’s do.”

With that, they scrambled to the other end of the boat.

Lady Wharton said, without turning from the rail, “My son tells me he means to marry you, Miss Deering. That you have captured his heart.”

Surprised by her directness, Elaine said, “So he tells me.”

“He brings much to such a marriage, Miss Deering. A fine old name, a worthy title, a life of comfort for the woman lucky enough to win his heart. Can you tell me what you bring him?”

Elaine was taken aback by such a question, but gathered nerve to say, “Love. Understanding. Commitment. Trust. A faithful heart.”

“I think you bring him something else, Miss Deering, perhaps all unknowing.”