Lord Grenville's Choice (19 page)

“Of course it does,” Alex said, frustrated and out of temper. The longer Felicity was gone, the more he felt her loss in his life and his own helplessness. “Have you remembered something?”

“That was the afternoon of the bandage-rolling party, you recall,” Anabella said.

“Yes?” Alex prompted.

“Well, it may not mean anything, but Elizabeth was gone from the room for quite a while. I do not know why she would have gone up to Felicity’s room. But she might have. Elizabeth is still in love with you.”

“And is not as sweet a thing as you believe her to be, Alex,” Aunt Henrietta added.

Alex looked from one woman to the other. Their theory meant he would have to adjust his impressions of the woman with whom he had been infatuated for so long. But he had to consider that they might have come up with the only explanation. Felicity had been jealous of Elizabeth since before they were married. If Elizabeth had somehow worked on that jealousy . . .

“I will call on her this afternoon,” he said.

“If we are right,” said Aunt Henrietta, “it is probable that she will be lying in wait for you.”

*~*~*

Alex was uneasy as he hammered the knocker on the door of Beaton Hall. This would be the first time he had encountered Elizabeth since he had made the discovery of his long-denied love for his wife. He wondered how he was going to feel.

When the aged butler with the long face and bulbous nose conducted him to her sitting room, Elizabeth rose to her feet in evident delight. He felt none of the customary agitation he was used to feeling in her presence. Anything he might have felt was overshadowed by the loss of Felicity.

“Alex! To what do I owe this pleasure?” Her smile was unrestrained as she held out her hands to him.

The greeting put him on edge. Raising her hands, he bowed over them and let them go.

“How are you, Elizabeth?”

“I am doing well, thank you. I was sorry to hear the distressing news about your wife. How are you?”

“I am not happy about Felicity’s leaving. I am afraid I am at a loss to understand it.”

“Oh?” The lady looked surprised.

“I love my wife, Elizabeth,” he said bluntly, looking into the fireplace. The room seemed suddenly close.

She sat down. For a moment, she said nothing. “Then it is indeed unfortunate that she has left you.”

He strolled to the window overlooking the front walk with its pale yellow petunias and lavender flox. He put his question as casually as he could. “How did she seem to you when you visited with her the day of the charity function?”

Silence. He whirled around to look at her. Her cheeks were flushed. “Uh, well, let me try to remember. She was in quite a lot of pain. I do not think she was really herself.”

“Why did you visit her?” he challenged. “You have never been friends.”

She bristled at this. “Are you accusing me of something?”

“When I left her that afternoon, she was in affectionate spirits. When I returned that evening, she had left me, taking her whole household, including my son. The only unusual thing to have occurred between those two times was your visit.”

Elizabeth’s eyes filled. “Have you no feeling for me at all, Alex? How can you think I would say something so awful that it would cause such an outcome?”

His heart softened and he suddenly felt a beast with his accusations. He sat across from her. “I am truly sorry if I have misjudged you. It is just that nothing makes sense! I am looking for an answer.”

“You must be truly desperate to think I would do such a thing.” She dabbed at her eyes with a lacy handkerchief.

“I am desperate. Would you please tell me what you talked about? I need to have a sense of her state of mind.”

“Well, let me see. She told me the details of her attack.”

Alex stiffened. Felicity had no memory of the attack. He narrowed his eyes. “And?”

Elizabeth wet her lips. “I told her how things were going downstairs. What the latest gossip was.”

He seized on this. “And what
was
the gossip? Anything that would have concerned her?”

She brightened suddenly. “I know! We talked about the doctor. Dr. Caldwell. I said it was my opinion that he was head over ears in love with Anabella. That seemed to concern her. She kept asking me about it. You, know . . . why I thought that and how did Anabella feel. That sort of thing.”

Alex struggled with this information. Elizabeth was clearly inferring that Felicity was jealous. He was nearly certain that his wife had no feelings for Dr. Caldwell beyond what was proper. But one thing he was certain of was that the doctor did have a
tendre
for Felicity, not Anabella.

“Why
did
you think Caldwell had a penchant for Anabella?”

The question seemed to confuse her. “It was just an accumulation of little things that only a woman would notice.”

“So you think Felicity stole the good doctor out from under Anabella’s nose, running away with him together with Jack, his nanny, her father, and all her servants?”

Elizabeth emitted a jerky laugh. It was this, together with the way she bit her lip, that convinced him the whole thing was nothing more than a Banbury tale.

“Why will you not tell me what you really talked about, Elizabeth? Felicity’s injury caused a loss of memory about the attack. I know for a fact you could not have talked about that. And for reasons of my own, I have grave doubts about any connection between Caldwell and my sister.”

“Anabella is mad about him,” Elizabeth insisted.

“And he is mad about my wife.”

Elizabeth stood suddenly and began to move about the room. “I do not know why,” she said finally.

“Felicity is an unusually good woman. She has a warm heart . . . in fact, all one has to do is to see her with her father or our son to realize she is tenderness itself. She has tried to be a good wife to me all these years that I have been intent on going my separate way. And . . . there are other attractions that it would not be proper to discuss with you.”

“But what about
me
, Alex? You swore you would love me forever!”

When she turned to him, her face was suffused with fury. Struggling with a ring on her hand, she removed it and threw it at him. He recovered it from the floor and, as he recognized it, dread coursed through him, overtaking his astonishment at the woman’s behavior.

“I gave you this before you were married,” he said heavily. It felt as though the entire universe was pressing down on him. “You showed it to Felicity, did you not?”

“I have clung to that promise, Alex. All these years, I thought you loved me!”

Remorse sickened him.

“Anabella told me what you said—that Felicity had bought you. That you hated her for it.”

“What did you tell Felicity four days ago?” he asked, his voice tired now.

“I told her that we had been lovers these last five years!”

He looked at her in disbelief.
The Elizabeth he had known all these years had said that? Had lied so brazenly?
Her words set him reeling. An almost uncontrollable rage rose inside him. For a moment, he wanted to choke the breath out of the woman. He could not even imagine the depth of Felicity’s hurt at such words. No wonder she had left him!

Fury ignited him. He grabbed her shoulders. “How could you, of all people, be so malicious? How could you be so cruel to another human being? My wife had just barely escaped from villains with her life! She is increasing! She has undertaken a journey to who-knows-where and may very well miscarry. She could
die
, Elizabeth. I love her, and you have ruined our marriage. I may never find her again.”

Elizabeth tore away from him. Her face contorted into an expression of anger he had never seen. “I thought you wanted to be with me. Anabella said you hated Felicity!”

Alex’s fury began to dissolve. How much of this
was
his own fault? Elizabeth had always been between them, and Felicity knew it.

But this woman, this spiteful, vicious woman, was a complete stranger to him. Waves of heat washed over him as he thought of how he had put her on a pedestal all these years. He had never even known the woman! He had also been too blind and stupid to realize how much and how long he had loved his wife. Elizabeth clearly thought he
had
remained true to the promise he had blithely engraved in her ring.

He sighed as he looked at the termagant before him. “I cannot believe how wrong I was about you. And you never knew me if you thought I would sanction your lying and injuring my wife and son this way.”

“She was supposed to leave Jack behind!”

“And you thought she would do that? Are you really human, Elizabeth, to think a mother like Felicity would leave her child?” Elizabeth’s lips were clamped shut, her eyes downcast. He continued, “I can only thank heaven we never married.”

Her face crumpled and she turned away from him. “Leave! Go away and do not ever come back.”

When Alex was once again out in the street, he wanted to club himself. How could he have been such an idiot at age twenty-one to have not seen past superficial beauty? And then, to have held it between himself and his wife for five years!

How would Felicity have felt to think he could have had such a woman for a lover for those five years when he was intimately acquainted his own wife? Their whole life together must have appeared to be a mockery to her.

And Elizabeth—he had led her to believe for all those years that he had loved her. Not difficult, perhaps, for he had thought he did.

Felicity never would have believed Elizabeth if he and his wife had understood what they really had. If he had made her realize the reality and depth of his love.

Yes, the blame was his. And somehow, he must find her and convince her, however long it took.

Anabella pointed out a report of his visit in the
Morning Post
’s gossip column the next morning, and Alex cursed roundly. Someone must have been watching Elizabeth’s house. He could only pray that, wherever she was, Felicity did not have access to the
London
papers.

It bothered him unbearably that she could think so ill of him, that she could believe he had been so false to her.

{ 26 }

T
ywyn House did receive the London papers, though they were often a week out of date. While Lord Morecombe read his
Times
as soon as it arrived, Felicity often let The
Morning Post
stack up on the occasional table beneath the window in the study before she felt a need to scan it. She was afraid of what she would read in the gossip columns, but on the other hand, she knew that she needed to be aware of what her husband was doing.

“I read the
Post
this morning from only a few days after we left,” she told the doctor on their morning walk. “They obviously had someone watching Elizabeth’s house.”

“Yes?” said Alan.

“Alex called on Elizabeth in the afternoon and remained there for some time.”

“I am sorry, Felicity.”

Tears that she could not stop rolled down her face to be dried by the stiff, salty breeze. Suddenly, Felicity could not walk another step. “I have to be alone. I am sorry,” she said. “I just cannot be strong for one more moment.”

Turning, she ran back, not to the house, but up a side path that would take her to the old ruins. She was drawn to the mellow old stone battlements poking through the velvet spring green of the Welsh hillside. There was not much here anymore, but it was a place where dreams had died, where a nation had died. As she sat with her back to the cold, honey-colored stone, she wept it all out. Her tragedy was small compared to the downfall of Llewellyn the Great, but it was a tragedy, nonetheless.

The memories of nights together with Alex that had stitched together the days of their fragile marriage were now torn apart by his betrayal. She had known it before. But until now, she had not been able to take it in.

Those arms that had held her close to him now held Elizabeth, and had for the past five years. She was not even a woman Felicity could respect. Reliving the scene in her bedroom, she remembered the woman’s taunting behavior. The winner in such a situation would only taunt if she were mean-spirited. How could Alex love such a woman?

She thought of the big-hearted affection Alex bestowed on Jack and could not reconcile it with his illicit love of someone like Elizabeth. The person who rendezvoused in secret with that woman was not the person Felicity had always cared for.

Her baby’s innocent kicks fluttered in her abdomen, and Felicity’s tears dried.

{ 27 }

“F
elicity is the soul of this house,” Alex told his aunt as they sat together after dinner. “I never dreamed I could miss her so much.”

“It is a pity it took you so long to come to your senses,” she said. “But, on the other hand, I never would have imagined Elizabeth could be such a viper.”

“Have you had any reports yet from Bow Street?” Anabella asked.

“I expect to hear something tomorrow,” Alex said, pouring himself a whiskey. “Even if I find out what direction she went, we are still a long way from finding her.”

“Why do you not put an advertisement in the personals?” Anabella asked with sudden animation.

Alex considered this. “I shrink from carrying out my intimate affairs in the public press. But as a last resort, I may be forced to do so.”

“I feel so responsible, Alex,” his sister said. “I just wish there was something I could do.”

“Why do you feel responsible?” he asked.

“I was so biased toward Felicity, I think I encouraged Elizabeth. If it means anything, I am most heartily sorry.”

“I am at fault for leading you to believe I did not love my wife. I am at fault for all of it.”

Aunt Henrietta said, “The entire situation is a web of misapprehensions. I pray the day may come when your family can be put together again.”

The following day brought word that Felicity’s party had not proceeded on the Great North Road. Nor had they gone south. The other toll booths were more distant. Alex went to his club seeking some solace, but parliamentary issues did not interest him at the moment. How could he have spent so many idle evenings at the club when he could have been home with Felicity? Stubbornness. Pure pig-headedness. Sheer determination not to give in to his feelings.