The Gilded Web (23 page)

M
ADELINE AND
A
LEXANDRA WENT
strolling in the rose arbor after the guests had left. The day was still sunny and warm. The air was heavy with the perfumes of many flowers and made drowsy by the droning of insects and the humming of bees.

“We grew up in close association with several of our neighbors,” Madeline explained. “We were never made to feel as if we belonged to a race apart merely because we were from Amberley and had titles to our names.”

“Then you must have grown up with many friends,” Alexandra said. “That would have been pleasant.”

“And enemies,” Madeline said with a grin. “I never was popular with the boys because I always wanted to do whatever Dom was doing. And it was usually something forbidden or something deemed unsuitable for girls. Dominic and I were forever squabbling about the matter at home, though he would never criticize me in public.”

“But surely you were not allowed to play with the boys, anyway,” Alexandra said.

Madeline looked at her with a smile. “But of course,” she said. “There were no rules. Only what we children imposed upon ourselves or upon those weaker than ourselves. Children are inveterate bullies, you know.”

“I was never allowed playmates,” Alexandra said. “The rector's children would have been considered suitable, perhaps, but they were all boys.”

“None?” Madeline said. “What a sad little girl you must have been. You were doubtless very happy when the time came to go away to school.”

“I was kept at home,” Alexandra said, “with a governess. Papa could never find a school of whose rules and moral principles he sufficiently approved.”

Madeline gazed at her in some horror. “You have never had friends?” she said. “How perfectly dreadful!”

“What one does not have, one does not miss,” Alexandra said. “And I had James.”

“Your brother stayed at home too?” Madeline asked.

“No.” Alexandra reached out to cup a dark red rosebud between her fingers and bent over it to smell its fragrance. “He went to school and to university for two years. He did not finish there. He would not go back after…Well, something happened to upset him and he did not go back. He has always been my closest friend.”

Madeline could think of nothing to say. It seemed unimaginable to her that anyone would be able to make a friend of the silent and morose Mr. Purnell. But if one had no choice and if one had never had a true friend, she supposed that it might be possible.

“You are a very good rider,” she said, changing the subject. “I thought for a minute this morning that you were going to catch up to Dominic. And he is the best rider in our family.”

“Riding has always been one of my main pleasures,” Alexandra said. “I enjoyed the gallop this morning, though I should not have done so. It was always strictly forbidden at home.”

“I could see that Dominic was enjoying your company,” Madeline said. “Perhaps I should not say this, but he was disappointed, you know, when you refused him in London, and even more disturbed when he heard that you had accepted Edmund. I think he is still not happy about your betrothal.”

“It has been altogether an embarrassing situation,” Alexandra said after some hesitation. “Both of your brothers were placed in a nasty predicament. I have done what seems best under the circumstances.”

“I believe Dominic has a
tendre
for you,” Madeline said. She flushed at her own lie. “It is strange, but we have never heard Edmund say that he planned to marry. I think he might have turned into one of those men who are devoted to their homes and duties and never take a wife.” She wished she had not started this particular speech. “Perhaps we should be thankful that he is to marry after all.”

Alexandra said nothing, but her pace had increased. She was walking in the direction of the house, no longer showing interest in the flowers around her. Madeline bit her lip and hurried to catch up. No one had ever said she was good at intrigue. She had meant to make subtle hints. Instead she had been quite bluntly insulting. She had almost told Alexandra that Edmund did not want her. And it was Edmund to whom she was engaged.

Damnation take her twin, Madeline thought in most unladylike language. In future let him do his own wooing and his own lying. It was quite nonsensical to think of him married to Alexandra anyway.

N
OT AT QUITE SUCH AN ANGLE, NANNY.” Alexandra frowned as she felt the feather of her riding hat brush against her neck. “It is intended to be worn straight on the top of my head.”

“Not so, lovey,” Nanny Rey said, surveying her charge's mirrored image over the top of her spectacles. “Hats are meant to be worn somewhere on the head, but no one ever said they were to be worn at the exact center. Ladies' hats are meant to look fetching. This one looks fetching worn at an angle. A jaunty angle.”

Alexandra laughed despite herself. “But I do not wish to look fetching or jaunty,” she said. “I want to look correct, Nanny.”

“Correct!” Her nurse sniffed and moved the hat up an inch on Alexandra's head. “With such a handsome lord as yours? And a kind man too, lovey. It is time you started to think about more than being correct.”

Lord Amberley had stopped Nanny the day before as she was about to disappear down the servants' stairs. He had asked her if she found all to her comfort at Amberley Court and if there was anything he could do for her that might make her feel more at home. Nanny had answered in the affirmative to the first question and in the negative to the second, bobbed a curtsy, and made her escape. But she had been wholly enslaved by his blue eyes and his kindly smile.

Alexandra wandered to the window of her bedchamber after Nanny Rey had left. She buttoned her velvet riding jacket to the chin, glancing at the clear blue sky as she did so. She sighed. If only Nanny knew how much more she had thought about in the past two days than just doing what was correct!

She was to go riding northward through the valley with Lord Amberley. Just the two of them alone. She had been very reluctant to accept the invitation when she knew that James was going with Sir Cedric Harvey up onto the western hills to see the view from the top of the cliffs, that Lord Eden and Lady Madeline were going visiting, and that Lady Amberley and Mama were driving into the village of Abbotsford to call on the rector. She had not wanted to ride alone with his lordship, but James had not been his usual sympathetic self when she had appealed to him. He had told her that she must begin to accustom herself to the company of the man she had chosen to marry. And even Mama had considered it quite unexceptionable for her to ride alone with her betrothed on his own land.

So go she must. But she did not look forward to doing so. And there was the social gathering at the Courtneys' to look forward to that evening. She would meet an unknown number of Lord Amberley's neighbors and acquaintances. Her betrothal and coming marriage were becoming quite horrifyingly real to her. She felt as if a net were closing around her. She should not have come, she had thought more than once. Not to his home. Even her awareness of the foolishness of the thought did not amuse her. She had to come to his home sooner or later.

Of course, until she had arrived at Amberley, she had not known what Edmund's home meant to him. Home to her had always meant a house where she lived in relative seclusion according to prescribed rules. It had been the anchor of her existence, the place where she knew she was being trained for the real life ahead of her—the life of the Duchess of Peterleigh.

Amberley was different. Very different. Even after more than a month spent in London, Alexandra had not realized just how very different her life had been from that of most other people around her. Now she was beginning to realize it. Amberley was a place of happiness, a place where everyone seemed free to say and do whatever he or she wanted. It was a place of unashamed beauty. A place where love was important. And it was not the sort of love that she had been given. It was a warm and free love in which censure seemed to play very little part.

Amberley was a place of friendship, a place where one could be invited to dine with a mere tenant farmer and accept that invitation without any sense of either outrage or great condescension. It was a place where a child from the schoolroom could ride with his elders and talk freely with them. A place where children were free to play with those of lesser social status and where boys were free to mingle with girls. Where girls were sent to school so that they might befriend other girls, not withheld for fear that they might become contaminated by those of looser morals.

It was a place where people did things together for enjoyment, not in order to judge one another. She had been persuaded the evening before—by Sir Cedric—to go down to the music room to play the pianoforte. Not to give a recital to a silent and critical audience, but to accompany his singing.

“Will you oblige me by coming, Miss Purnell?” he had asked when everyone else was still drinking tea in the drawing room after dinner. “You play the pianoforte, I have been told, and I love to sing. Perhaps this will be my only chance to have you as an accompanist. In future, you may wish to make all sorts of excuses in order to avoid the pleasure.”

“How very unfair you are being to yourself, Cedric,” Lady Amberley had said with a laugh. “You know very well that I always come to listen to you from choice. He has a lovely baritone voice, Alexandra, as you will hear for yourself. I shall come along too. Would you care to join us, Lady Beckworth?”

It had ended up with them all going downstairs except James and Lord Eden, who had gone walking up into the hills. And it had been a relaxed evening in which everyone had been willing to play or sing, talent notwithstanding.

And Lord Amberley had talent, she had discovered. He had played a short Bach fugue that had held her spellbound for a few minutes.

And Amberley was a place where people touched and showed open affection.

Alexandra fingered the feather of her hat as it curled around her ear. She was staring sightlessly from the window. She had forgotten entirely that Lord Amberley might already be awaiting her downstairs. Yes, she was very strange indeed. Quite out of tune with her world. And not at all sure whether she wanted to try to fit in or whether she would deliberately hold herself apart from it all.

What would it have been like to grow up in such a place, with parents and grandparents who loved her unconditionally, as Lord Amberley had put it? Parents who did not make her feel that their love and the love of God must be earned and could easily be forfeited by a selfish or thoughtless deed? What would it have been like to have had friends with whom to play, in whom to confide? She had been fortunate to have James. She loved him dearly and had convinced herself for years that he was the only friend she needed. But James was five years older than she. And James had been away so much during her own childhood and girlhood.

What would it be like to feel free to chatter when there were older people in her company, and free to offer her opinions in the presence of gentlemen? Free to smile and to dress her hair and her person in order to draw the admiring glances of the people around her? Free to touch and be touched? Free to show affection, and free even to kiss?

She did have some of those freedoms, she supposed. She was one-and-twenty years old and she was betrothed to a gentleman who wished her to behave as his sister behaved and as Miss Courtney had behaved the afternoon before. She could be free of her father's world and become a part of her husband's.

And yet freedom was a relative term, she thought rather bitterly, turning sharply from the window as she realized that she had been daydreaming there altogether too long. Would she be able to call herself free in a marriage that had not been of her own choosing? And would she ever be able to be free in the way Lady Madeline was free? Or Anna? She had no practice, no training, in such an attitude to life.

T
HEY TURNED THEIR HORSES'
heads up into the valley away from the sea. They soon passed the lawns and the orchard and the one small sheep pasture that was not upon the plateau above. Then the trees that covered the hillsides closed in around them, reaching almost to the banks of the river, and brought with them that sense of peace and seclusion that Lord Amberley valued most about his home.

He had always loved this part of the valley more than the wider, more open reaches farther down, and the sea. Here he could ride or walk, think or read, or merely drink in the beauties of nature around him. He could be alone with himself. Alone with God perhaps.

He had deliberately brought Alexandra here on their first outing together. There were many places he could have taken her even if he did not wish to repeat the route she had taken the morning before. He could have taken her to call upon his aunt and uncle or any of his neighbors. He could have taken her to see the view from the cliffs, as Sir Cedric was doing with her brother. Or into the village. Or to half a dozen other places.

But he had decided to take her to the place that meant most to him after the house itself. The temptation was to keep her at arm's length, to keep her on the outer fringes of his life, to keep private to himself the important things of his world. It was a very strong temptation, especially when, try as he would, he could not feel any closeness to his betrothed. It was not that he did not like her. He could not get close enough even to know if he liked her. She was unknowable. And the temptation was to keep himself equally aloof from her.

But he would not do it. They must marry. And he could not keep his wife on the outer reaches of his life. He must keep persevering in trying to draw her into his heart. He had tried the day before. But he was not at all sure that she had had any powerful feelings about the house. Except perhaps for the library. And his grandmother's salon. She had appeared to be affected by that. He had ruined the occasion, of course, by rushing his fences and kissing her long before she was ready for any such intimacy. If she ever would be ready. He was beginning to have serious doubts on the matter.

But he must try again. He must try to begin some sort of friendship with her. He must begin to trust her enough to open his innermost life to her.

“This is my favorite part of all my land,” he said. “I come here often.”

“It is quiet,” she said, “and quite lovely.”

He smiled at her. “It is good to have a quiet place to escape to, is it not?” he said. “Did you have somewhere at home?”

“Only the moors,” she said, “and only if James was at home. I was never allowed to ride or walk alone, and it was never the same to take a maid or a groom with me.”

“Being female is sometimes hard, is it not?” he said. “Here you will have much greater freedom, Alex. There are many private places on my land where you may go and no one will be any the wiser. You need not always be followed around by a servant. Or even by me. There is one place especially where you may wish to come. I will show it to you later.”

Lord Amberley grimaced inwardly. He had not intended to be quite so rash. He had meant to open his life to her. Did he have to reveal his very soul? No one but he knew of that particular place.

“What would you have done,” she asked abruptly, turning to look at him with her dark eyes, which could look so intense on occasion, “if you had not been obliged to marry me?”

He smiled and shrugged. “I probably would have drifted on,” he said.

“For how long?” she asked. “Forever? For a few years? Would you have married eventually? Would you have continued your friendship with Mrs. Borden? Or perhaps you still do. I am sorry. I am being unpardonably ill-mannered. Please disregard my questions, my lord.”

“On the contrary,” he said, “you have every right to ask them. And to demand answers. I am sorry you know of Eunice Borden. Does the knowledge give you pain?”

“I would be foolish to allow it to,” she said, staring straight ahead. “Wives are supposed to ignore such matters, are they not? Pretend they do not even know?”

“I would expect my wife to be furious to the point of violence,” he said. “Fortunately, she would never have cause. Never, Alex. Eunice is part of my past. Not part of my present or my future. She is a perfectly respectable lady who just happened to do me the honor of being my mistress for a year. In your morality it probably seems impossible for a lady to be both respectable and a man's mistress, but it is possible, believe me. I will not dismiss her by saying that she is a creature of no account. I respect her deeply. But she is in my past nevertheless, by her insistence as well as by my choice.”