Love's Reward (27 page)

Lord and Lady Evenham, stiff, awkward in their mixed commiseration and pride. Lady Acton, shrewdly watching her daughter, but saying very little. A Lord Grantley, who apparently had been Fitzroy’s contact in the government.

The only exception was Quentin. He stood immobile, facing her, and refused to go away, when all she wanted was to be left alone to go back to the bedside.

“I don’t care if he’s asleep, Joanna. At least let me sit by him for an hour. I know how you must feel about me, and I don’t blame you. But in my ramshackle way I’ve only wanted to help you, because Fitzroy—”

He choked and stopped.

“What?” she asked.

His eyes were bleak. “There is no one else, except Mary, that I love in this world.”

So Joanna allowed Quentin to go up to the sick room to keep vigil alone. It took all of her forbearance to do it.

A few hours later he came down and stood in the doorway.

“He’s asleep again,” he said.

She leaped up. The last of the visitors had just left. “He woke?”

“For a moment.”

“Quentin, what’s wrong?” Joanna rushed up to him. His expression terrified her. “Is he worse?”

He pushed a hand over his face as if to knead away his distress. “No, no. It’s not that.”

“Then what is it?”

“I asked Fitzroy if there was anything I could do to make amends. I told him I would do anything.”

He paused for a moment, then with obvious reluctance met her eyes.

Ice touched her heart. “What did he want?”

Pushing away from her, Quentin strode to the door. He glanced back and spoke just once more before he left.

“He asked me to stop drinking,” he said. “It’s the one thing I cannot do.”

* * *

Later that afternoon a note arrived. It was sealed with scented wax. The handwriting was florid.

Joanna put it away in Fitzroy’s desk, knowing perfectly well that it was from Lady Reed.

The next letter that arrived truly surprised her, for it was addressed to her and not to Fitzroy.

She tore open the seal and spread out the sheet.

“Madam: When I take on a pupil it is forever, knowing that I have gloried in the enlargement of her mind and the perfection of every faculty, inculcating the highest standards of moral and virtuous behavior in my young ladies. I beg, therefore, to offer your ladyship my most sincere felicitations on your most happy and blessed union. Your ladyship’s most humble servant, Eliza Able.”

Joanna gazed at this in astonishment for a moment, and then she began to laugh.

Sitting alone at Fitzroy’s bedside, she laughed until she cried.

* * *

Fitzroy still slept.

Joanna sat beside him, watching and waiting. He seemed feverish and uncomfortable, tossing and turning, filling her with fear. She didn’t want to eat, and she couldn’t bear to leave him.

The doctor came again and insisted that Joanna take the air, before she too became ill.

“This won’t do, your ladyship. A turn around the gardens before you spend another moment at the bedside.”

The garden was quiet, still and calm. Joanna walked through the trees. Somewhere in the distance a church bell sounded, marking the call to the evening service.

All the birds of the air fell a-sighing and a-sobbing when they heard the bell toll for poor Cock Robin.

As she came up to the pigeon loft, she saw George scattering grain into the little troughs and closing the birds up for the night. He smiled at her and asked after the master before touching a finger to his forehead and walking away.

Joanna sat on the top rail of the yard fence and watched the light die away in the west.

Cock Robin.

A young man, filled no doubt with immense conceit and confidence, who had believed he could solve any problem just by wishing it so. Yet his motives had surely been driven by compassion?

What had happened when that young man almost died at the hand of his first wife to become the Fitzroy Mountfitchet she had met at the Swan?

Had it been inevitable that such simple faith would be broken against reality? If she had a lifetime of study, could she ever understand the rogue he had become? What was she to do now?

For she too had begun her journey with such simple beliefs, and discovered a cruel world she hadn’t dreamed existed.

A rustle and the whirring of wings.

Joanna glanced up, shading her eyes against the dying sunshine.

Dropping in a rush of feathers from the sky, a pigeon landed on her upraised hand. Attached to its leg was a little leather pouch.

With trembling hands she tore open the packet. A small slip of paper lay inside.

“Success. Plot foiled. All safe.”

She set the pigeon carefully into an empty cage and gave it grain and water. Then she raced into the house and up the stairs.

His valet met her at Fitzroy’s door. “His lordship just woke, my lady.”

Joanna ran inside.

“Look!” she cried. “It worked. Wellington is safe.”

The dark eyes bored into hers.

“Then I have achieved that, at least.” He sounded infinitely empty. “Though it would seem that everything else I have done has left only desolation in its wake.”

“Has it? I don’t see why.”

“If I’ve learned nothing else, Joanna, it’s that damage once done cannot be undone. Cruelty masked as cleverness is still cruelty. Oh, dear God!”

“What do you mean?”

He sighed and pressed his hand to his eyes. “I could have confided in Quentin, asked for his help. Instead I disdained him, my own brother. You wouldn’t have done so with yours.”

“With Richard or Harry or John? No, I suppose not. But perhaps it’s different between men.”

“Perhaps it is. Yet in spite of everything, I’ve never really been a rake. I was faithful to Juanita, even when I knew she was not so with me. I did not take Lady Carhill, nor Lady Reed, nor Lady Kettering, to my bed. But I let them be used in this foulness, Joanna. I guessed they were just pawns in some deeper game, but I didn’t spare them.”

Her joy died away. So it was not over.

“Lady Reed has written to you. I’ll fetch it.”

A few minutes later she handed him the scented missive. Fitzroy read it through once.

“The candle,” he said.

Joanna handed him the flame and watched him burn Lady Reed’s letter.

“The doctor left this for you.” She took up a draught laced with opium. “You must drink it.”

He looked at her with that old sarcastic ferocity. “Am I safer unconscious?”

It is when the person you love behaves badly that the first test comes, and you must return generosity for pettiness.

“Absolutely,” Joanna said. She grinned. “More polite, at least.”

She watched him drink the laudanum, and saw his eyes close again, before she laid her head onto the pillow next to his.

For a long time she stared dry-eyed at the ceiling.

* * *

When she awoke again, he was still asleep.

A shaft of sunlight fell across the pillow, casting highlights of deep sienna in his hair, and throwing bold shadows over the planes of his face.

Joanna slipped from the bed and rang for Fitzroy’s valet.

While the man took over the vigil, she went to her own room to bathe and change and order breakfast. She came back to find her husband sitting up, gazing across to the open window.

“My man has done his professional best to make me into a gentleman,” he said. “I am shaved, washed, and bandaged once again in pure linen. But the important attributes remain unchanged. I have made light of what is serious, and the only question I care about remains unanswered. Do you forgive me, Joanna?”

“I don’t know.” She stood helpless, staring at him. “I don’t know.”

His lids dropped again, shielding the black well of pain in his eyes.

“I don’t blame you. Do you want to be free of me?”

Joanna thought of all the paintings she had tried and destroyed. He was so lovely to her. Why did she still feel so much confusion?

“I don’t know that either. Fitzroy, why didn’t you tell me what was going on? Why did you let me go on believing that everything that happened was just your whim? It was cruel.”

“Perhaps I am cruel, Joanna.” The words were barely audible. “Merely through carelessness and my own bloody conceit.”

“And your talent— Why has it gone wasted?”

“Did I require things to be as they have been? Don’t you think that I’d rather have painted than do what I have had to do? Dear God, I could not do both! If that’s cowardice, I freely confess it.”

Joanna’s confusion crystallized into the one vital question, the question she hadn’t been able to face before, let alone formulate. Knowing that she risked everything, that the answer would finally reveal what she had to understand, she forced herself to ask it.

“What would you have done, if Juanita had not stabbed you? Would you have risked yourself to save her from the partisan’s bullet, or would you still have let her die?”

He looked up at her with his midnight gaze as still and deep as the night ocean.

“I have spent two years asking myself that question. What would you have done?”

Joanna walked blindly up to the bed. Fitzroy caught her hand and held it, pulling her down beside him. His pulse beat under her fingers, fast and strong.

“If I discovered that you were a traitor? That unless you were stopped, you would escape to the enemy with vital information? Oh, Lord!”

“It might have meant so many of our soldiers lives, you see, and yet I loved her. I don’t know the answer. I shall never know. I can only be grateful that the choice was taken away. It was her only real gift to me, and I believe that may be why she did it.”

Joanna sat in silence for a moment, studying his face.

She knew every line and shape of it. She loved him. Quite suddenly she saw why. Not just because he was brilliant and handsome and passionate, but because of this. He could not save Juanita from her demons, but he had wanted to. He even hoped that she had stabbed him so that he would not be faced with choosing life or death for her.

This was not cowardice or lack of honor. It was the opposite. It was an overwhelmingly generous belief.

In return for her compulsive infidelity, Fitzroy had offered Juanita only loyalty and compassion.

So there had been something of love between Fitzroy and Juanita, after all. It had been doomed from the start, because of the war, because of Napoleon’s ambition and Britain’s reaction to it, because the Spanish were divided in their loyalties, because at Badajoz the British officers had lost control of their men.

She was sixteen.

But Fitzroy understood love.

“Do you still love her?” Joanna asked quietly.

Fitzroy looked surprised. “She is dead. I loved her then, but she is only one part of my life, and in the past. If Carmen had not thought up such a devious plot to take her family’s revenge on me and on England, I could have let Juanita sleep on, at peace in that part of my memory. I wish I could have helped her, but I failed. I don’t blame myself any longer for that. It wasn’t because of Juanita that I lived in such a rage when I first met you. It was because of my innocent men, being slaughtered when I was powerless to stop it.”

“You should have told me,” Joanna said.

“Ours was supposed to be a marriage of convenience. It wasn’t meant to matter.”

She glanced down. “No, I suppose not.”

Now only one question remained. Joanna looked up, straight into his eyes, and asked it.

“So what do you want now?”

His voice was soft. “Shall I be honest? Honesty is an infinitely worse risk than art, isn’t it? But here’s the truth, upon my honor. What I want now is for you to take off that dress and get into this bed with me.”

She blushed scarlet. “But you’re hurt.”

“Yes, I’m aware of that,” he said dryly. “But I still have one good side. I just want to hold you.”

“Just hold me?”

“And maybe kiss you a little.”

“Fitzroy! Please, the doctor feared for your life.”

“So you do care, Joanna?”

Joanna knew that she would be justified in refusing him. Yet she remembered Helena’s words with a new understanding:
Not striking back when you’ve been wounded takes every ounce of courage and conviction you have.

This was not the end of a story. It was the beginning, if she was prepared to find compassion and generosity in herself as well as desire. Now it was her turn to be honest, to risk it.

“I care with all my heart, Fitzroy. But I thought perhaps that you only made love to me that night from charity.”

“Charity!” He laughed aloud. It scattered her doubts more surely than any protestations.

“I thought you felt sorry for me.”

“Then how very little you know about men, sweetheart! I shall be very happy to teach you more about a man’s desire. But, alas, you’ll have to undo all those buttons by yourself. I don’t believe I can use both hands yet.”

“Very well,” she said, releasing his hand and standing. “But you must promise not to move too fast and tear your stitches.”

“I promise,” Fitzroy said.

Joanna slowly undid the buttons on her dress. She let it slip to the floor, leaving her in nothing but her shift and stockings.

“Take down your hair.” Fitzroy gazed at her steadily, his eyes as wide as the night sky. “I love your hair. I longed to touch it ever since I first saw you at the Swan.”

She reached up and pulled out the pins, running her fingers through the strands and shaking the mass down over her shoulders.

His dark, heated longing as he watched her lit a fire in her heart.

“I wish I could take off your stockings. I’d like to peel them down, very slowly, and kiss the back of your knee and your ankle and your instep.”

Joanna put one foot on the bed and rolled off her stocking. Heat spread from her heart and set flames running through her body.

“You may say what you like,” she said. “When you can’t act on it.”

His voice was gentle, teasing. “Are you so sure that I can’t act on it? Now the shift, if you please.”

It took all of her trust and courage. He hadn’t earned it, but she would take a risk and find out whether there really was a future for them, after all.