Mary Balogh (52 page)

The Reverend Ormsby grinned. “I cannot answer for God,” he said, “but for myself, I would consider it quite uncivil to ignore such a prayer.”

“It seems that God is a civil gentleman,” Andrew said.

“Even so,” Doris said after the general laughter had died away, “I am not sure that we should be venturing as far as Canterbury today. Fourteen miles.” She frowned. “It would be a treacherous journey in a storm, and a storm is going to be the inevitable outcome of this long spell of heat, mark my word.”

“Doris is going to be thoroughly disappointed if she proves to be wrong,” her husband said with a twinkle in his eye.

“And my children will be worse than disappointed if she is right,” Leila Ormsby said with a sigh. “Especially if I am from home. Should we perhaps stay, Samuel?”

The Reverend Ormsby laughed. “We might be at home forever, Leila,” he said. “They will have their nurse in the unlikely event that the weather does break in the course of the day, and a whole army of other servants in the house.”

“And me, too, dear,” Lady Eleanor said. “I will be unable to come to Canterbury, I am afraid, though I love it above all places on this earth.”

There was a chorus of protesting voices about the table.

“I am expecting some callers,” she said, “on this very day. Annoying, is it not? I invited them, and I cannot put them off without seeming quite rag-mannered.”

“What a shame,” Mrs. Wiggins said politely. “Perhaps we should postpone our drive until tomorrow.”

“By no means,” Lady Eleanor said. “You are all to go and enjoy yourselves. I live close enough, after all, that I can go to Canterbury any day of the year.”

The trip had been suggested during the course of the evening before, and the idea had been received with enthusiasm by all the guests, who were about equally divided between those who were eager to shop and those who wished to view the cathedral.

Lord Edmond was tempted not to go at all. He would
stay and keep his aunt company and make himself agreeable to her callers, he thought. But he changed his mind again. Perhaps Mary was not yet convinced. Perhaps somehow she had persuaded herself that his behavior the evening before had not been so bad after all. Perhaps his failure to make any attempt to enter her room during the night had redeemed him somewhat in her eyes. He would take this one more day to convince her. And then he would leave her alone. He would stay as far away from her as it was possible to when they were both guests at the same country home.

“What?” he said to a question Mr. Bigsby-Gore had just asked him. “Oh, yes, assuredly I am going. I would not miss such a pleasure trip for the world.”

T
HERE WERE TWO
days still to go to Lady Eleanor’s birthday and the grand celebration she had organized for the occasion. And then one more day after that before the party was at an end. It was not long. But it was far too long. Mary would not be able to endure that long. She would have to leave, return to London.

She sat in one of the carriages on the return from Canterbury late in the afternoon and let the conversation of the other three ladies flow about her without participating in it to any great degree. She felt weary, sick, and quite unable to face another three days at Rundle Park.

She could not do it. She had been foolish enough to love him for one day, and now the persistence and vulgarity of his attentions were no longer merely offensive. They were nauseating. Literally nauseating. She wanted to retch and retch and then cry herself dry and empty. She wanted to sleep and to forget. She wanted to get away. She had to get away. Away from Rundle Park and away from him. And, yes, away from Simon, too. She was not sure of anything at all any longer. She needed to
be alone. She needed to think. She needed to lick her wounds.

It had been a horrid day. Somehow there had been a minor misunderstanding between herself and Simon, with the result that when they had arrived in Canterbury and she had been handed from the carriage—the ladies had traveled in carriages, while the gentleman had ridden—he had already committed himself to escort a group of shoppers, whereas she had attached herself to a party set to view the cathedral.

It had not seemed a serious matter. After all, even when they were married, they would not expect to be inseparable. And if he preferred to shop while she preferred to feast her eyes on history, then it was perfectly desirable that they go their separate ways for an hour or two. It had not seemed serious, because Lord Edmond, unmannerly brute that he was, had attached himself to neither group, but had stridden off alone as soon as his horse had been stabled.

But he had reappeared at the cathedral, as she might have expected he would. And he had attached himself to her left side until the gentleman with whom she had been walking moved off from her right to hear some comment that Stephen Wiggins was making.

“You like these old, cold, moldering edifices, Mary?” Lord Edmond had asked.

But she would no longer believe either his ignorance or his lack of taste. “And so do you, obviously,” she had said, “or you would not have come here quite alone, with no coercion at all.”

“Ah,” he had said, “but I came here to be with you, Mary, having guessed that you would choose this rather than the shopping trip. Had I made my intention clear, Goodrich would have been here, hanging on your arm like a leech.”

“What a very unpleasant simile,” she had said.

“Like a watchdog, then,” he had said with a shrug. “Isn’t Chaucer or someone buried there?”

“No,” she had said. “He is buried in Westminster Abbey, as I am sure you are very well aware. You are thinking of the
Canterbury Tales
.”

“Ah,” he had said. “Memories of school days and forbidden readings of ‘The Miller’s Tale.’ A fine story. Have you read it?”

“You are becoming very predictable,” she had said. “If I had had to guess one story from the
Tales
that you would choose as your favorite for my benefit, it would have been that. What else?”

“And no blushes?” he had said. “A shame.”

Their conversation had ended at that point as the whole group came together to stroll about and see all that was to be seen.

It had not been bad—only the sort of encounter she was learning to expect. What had been bad—and especially bad when she considered that they had been inside a church—was the way he had grasped her arm as everyone went outside, and twisted her around so that her back was against a heavy stone pillar and she was suddenly quite out of sight of anyone who was not making a deliberate search. She had been taken so much by surprise that she had made no resistance at all to the press of his body to her own and to his practiced kiss, which immediately opened her mouth so that his tongue could thrust inside.

Looking back on the embrace as she rode home in the carriage, now totally oblivious of the conversation of the other ladies, she could find no way to describe it except with the word “carnal.” It had been horrible. None of his other embraces had been like it. There had been no tenderness, no gentleness, no teasing or persuasion or … or anything except the most nauseating lust. His hands had grasped her breasts, hurting them. His
groin had ground itself against her, parting her legs and setting her off balance.

His eyes had been glittering when he had lifted his head to look down at her. “You see now why I wanted to separate you from the leech?” he had said. “You see, Mary? I want you. And you want me. Admit it.”

She had done the only thing she had been capable of doing. She had imposed relaxation on her body, though the lower half of his own was still pressed against her, and she had stared back at him, her face expressionless.

The half smile had been back on his face, the expression that helped her to hate him. “You are a coward, Mary,” he had said. “We could have so much pleasure together that we would have to invent a new word for it. But you are afraid to admit to anything as unladylike as sexual desire. ‘Attraction’ was the word you used. It is a weak euphemism for what you really feel, my love.”

“I have nothing whatsoever left to say to you, my lord,” she had said, her voice flat. “Not reproach or pleading or denial. Nothing. You will do what you must to pursue your own pleasure, but you will find no more pleasure from me. There will be no further response to whatever approach you care to take with me. You might as well pursue a fish. Now, shall we go? Or would you like to press more kisses on me while you have me imprisoned here? If so, proceed. I have nothing to say.”

“Mary.” His voice had been amused, but he had pushed himself away from her. “I could arouse response in the snap of my fingers if I so chose. But the time and place are not quite right, are they? Later, my love. Later.”

“If you say so,” she had said.

He had bowed before her just as if he had been treating her the whole time in the most courtly of manners. “Shall we rejoin the others?” he had asked. “Take my arm?”

“If you wish.” She had turned toward the doors. “And if you insist.” She had taken his arm.

She closed her eyes in the carriage. It had been a dreadful day. Dreadful. And she could take no more. She had had enough. If she had to face one more of those scenes, she would surely crack.

She was going to have to leave. Rude as it would appear, and much as she hated to throw any sort of blight on Lady Eleanor’s birthday celebrations, she was going to have to go away.

H
E WAS FEELING RATHER SICK
. P
HYSICALLY NAUSEATED
with self-disgust. It was rather a new feeling. He supposed that Mary had been right when she said that he hated himself. When he thought about it, he had to admit that she had a point, though he had never consciously hated himself through the years—not since the rawness of pain and guilt over Dick’s death and his mother’s had receded, anyway. Rather, he had turned the feeling outward and looked on the world and all that made it meaningful to many people with contempt. His most habitual expression, he guessed, though he rarely looked at himself in a mirror, was a sneer.

So this disgust with himself was a new thing. He would not use even the most degraded whore with the coarse vulgarity he had accorded Mary in Canterbury Cathedral—in a church, of all places. But the setting was perhaps a fitting one for him. The final degradation. The final thumb at the nose to the world and to God and what they had done to his life—to what
he
had done to his life. There was no point in starting to blame God. He had never done that. At least he had never become a whiner.

He was riding beside Andrew Shelbourne as they turned onto the driveway to Rundle Park, Peter and Bigsby-Gore close behind them. Two of the carriages
were ahead, one of them containing Mary. He had not participated a great deal in the conversation on the way home.

He was going to have to leave. He did not want to do so. He loved his aunt and he owed her a deep debt of gratitude. He was not quite sure how he would have fared if all ties to his family had been broken when he was so young. But there were two days to go to her birthday. He could not hold out that long. Two days was an eternity. And he did not know how he was to face Mary again.

He eased his horse to the back of the group as they approached the house. The ladies would need to be helped from the carriages. Only Goodrich and Wright were up ahead. Perhaps he would not help at all, he thought. Perhaps he would disappear in the crowd and withdraw to the stable block. After all, most of the ladies did not expect perfectly courtly behavior from him anyway.

But before he could suit action to intention, his aunt appeared at the top of the horeshoe steps, and with her another lady and two gentlemen—doubtless the callers for whom she had had to stay at home. Lord Edmond glanced at them with little curiosity. He did not know the lady. She was perhaps his own age, perhaps a little older. She was elegantly, if quietly, dressed. His eyes moved on to the elder of the two men, the tall white-haired one—and then jerked quickly to the younger man, whose hair was only beginning to gray at the temples.

And then he was off his horse and thrusting the reins into the hands of he knew not whom and striding he knew not where. He was looking for someone—he did not know whom. Desperately looking. Looking in a panic. And then he saw her and he was beside her and his hand clamped onto her wrist.

“Come with me,” he said, and he jerked her into motion so that she almost fell.

“Take your hand off me,” she said coldly.

“By God, Waite, you will answer to me for this,” Lord Goodrich said, his voice low and furious. “Take your hand off Mary this instant or this whole gathering will witness the breaking of your jaw.”

Lord Edmond did not even hear either of them.

“Come,” he said. “Come.”

Mary looked up at the top of the steps and back to Lord Edmond. “It is all right, Simon,” she said. “I will go with him.”

“Mary!” the viscount protested.

“It is all right,” she said.

But Lord Edmond did not hear the exchange. His eyes were on the corner of the house at the end of the terrace. He knew only that he had to reach the corner and round it. His hand was like a vise on Mary’s wrist, but he did not know it. She had to take little running steps to keep up with him.

She should dig in her heels and stop. She should demand release. She should rant and rave at him, scream if necessary. She had had enough of him. More than enough—a raging excess. She should claw and kick at him.

But she did none of those things. She had looked up and seen the two unfamiliar gentlemen with Lady Eleanor and she had understood. And she had looked into Lord Edmond’s face and seen the whiteness of it and the wildness of his eyes. And she did none of those things. She half ran beside him around the corner of the house and down the side, past the rose arbor, and diagonally across the back lawn toward the closest of the trees.

At first there was pain in her wrist and then numbness, and then pins and needles in her hand. But he did
not release her or relax his hold on her. And she said nothing. She hurried along at his side.

They were among the trees at last, and he swung them around behind the huge trunk of an ancient oak, set his back against it, and pulled her hard against him. One arm came about her waist like an iron band. The other hand tore at the ribbons of her bonnet, tossed it carelessly aside, and cupped the back of her head. Her face was against his cravat, pressed there so that there was no possibility even of turning her head to one side in order to breathe more easily.