The Gilded Web (49 page)

He looked into her eyes and then away over her head. “Yes,” he said curtly. “Yes, I am. Just don't say anything more about her, Mad. All right?”

“All right,” she said.

He looked down at her and took her hand in his as they strolled the remaining distance to the black rock.

“Something happened with Purnell last night?” he asked. “Do you want to talk about it? I won't pry if you would rather not.”

He did not think she was going to answer. She took her hand from his as she sat down on the rock and spread her riding skirt carefully around her.

“I made a fool of myself,” she said. “I offered myself to him, Dom. I mean really offered myself. I would have given everything.”

Lord Eden sucked in his breath. “Mad, he didn't…” he said.

“No, he didn't,” she said. “But I wanted him to and would have allowed him to. I thought everything was going to be all right between us. I thought he loved me. No! I
think
he
loves
me. But there is something. I don't know what. Something that makes him hate himself. And now I will never know. Canada! The other end of the world. He is going to Canada.”

He reached out and touched her hand. “Winter will be here before you know it,” he said. “You will be going to London with Mama, I expect, and soon you will be in love with someone else, Mad. Perhaps really in love this time. Happily-ever-after in love.”

She smiled at him and squeezed his hand. “Yes, perhaps,” she said. “Tall, I think. Blond. Broad-shouldered. White teeth. A deep musical voice.”

“Forty thousand a year,” Lord Eden said.

“Forty thousand a year,” she agreed. “Let's see, what else?”

She jumped to her feet suddenly and made a dash for her horse, which was standing quietly with her brother's close by.

“Help me up, Dom,” she said. “I'll race you back to the head of the valley. Help me up.”

“I say,” he said, rising to his feet in order to comply with her demand. “You aren't crying again, are you, Mad?”

“Of course I'm not crying, numbskull,” she said, gaily, her face turned in to the horse's side. “How could I see to race you if I were crying? Help me up this instant!”

N
ANNY REY WAS BRUSHING ALEXANDRA'S hair and preparing to draw it back into its usual chignon. She teased the brush through the worst of the tangles and looked shrewdly over the tops of her spectacles at the mirrored image of her mistress. Alexandra was gazing off into the distance from slightly shadowed eyes. There was a flush of color high on her cheekbones.

“I took your green riding skirt downstairs to the kitchen to be washed and ironed,” Nanny Rey said. “The hem was wet.”

“Ah, yes,” Alexandra said absently.

“And your shoes are drying before the kitchen fire. They were soaked through.”

“It was the dew,” Alexandra said.

Mrs. Rey paused in her task and peered at the mirrored image, but Alexandra seemed oblivious of her presence.

“Not quite so severe, Nanny,” she said when her hair was pulled back firmly from her face. “Could you get it to wave down over my ears, do you think? Would it look too frivolous?”

“Like this, lovey?” Mrs. Rey loosened her hold on the hair, which looped down over Alexandra's ears and immediately softened her features and showed off both the thickness and the shining waviness of her hair. “It would look very pretty, if you ask me, which you are doing.”

“Yes, please.” Alexandra smiled.

“We must not keep your Papa waiting, lovey,” Nanny Rey said. “He said half an hour when I came up here, and there cannot be more than five minutes of that left.”

“In his room, you said, Nanny?” Alexandra said. “I shall go now and be two minutes early. You have finished? Yes, I like it. Thank you.” She stood up, turned around, and surprised her old nurse by bending and planting a kiss on her withered cheek.

“There,” Nanny Rey said. “Get along with you now.”

Alexandra did not look forward to the interview with her father, but she did not feel afraid, as she usually did. She took a deep breath before tapping at his door, and waited for his valet to open it to her.

“Good morning, Papa,” she said, looking around the dressing room when she went in and seeing that they were alone. She folded her hands in front of her, drew back her shoulders, and lifted her chin.

“I don't know what is good about it, Alexandra,” he said, turning at the opposite end of the room and glaring severely at her. “Your mother is unwell and confined to her bed until luncheon time at least, and our grand gentleman insists that an interview between himself and me is not satisfactory. It seems that you and your mother and his mother must be there too. So we must be kept waiting until this afternoon. A pretty situation this has turned out to be.”

“But Lord Amberley is quite right, Papa,” she said calmly. “What we have decided concerns both him and me, and it is right that we should communicate that decision to our parents and discuss the matter in a civilized manner.”

“Silence, girl!” he roared. “When I want your opinion, I will ask for it. And you may be sure that you will have a long wait before that happens. Is a man not to be master of his own family any longer?”

Alexandra swallowed. “I will not be silent, Papa,” she said evenly. “This is a matter that concerns me very directly. I will have a voice in what happens to me.”

She wondered for a moment what he was about to do. He stood arrested, staring at her. She did not move or remove her eyes from his.

“What is this?” he said, his voice ominously quiet. “What ways have you picked up in this place of iniquity, Alexandra? Do you know that you are talking to your father, girl? And do you dare look me in the eye while you defy me? You had better go to your room and spend the hours until you are summoned downstairs on your knees begging for mercy. I shall make your excuses at luncheon.”

“No,” she said, “I will not do that, Papa. I will not be praying to that imaginary God of wrath and vengeance ever again. And I intend to ride out onto the cliffs this morning if our interview with his lordship has been delayed. I am a grown woman, Papa. I am one-and-twenty. And I have decided to take my life into my own hands. I do not know what I will do with it. I suppose I will have to take a position as a governess or something like that. I will decide that after I have left here.”

“I will decide what is to happen to you after we have left here,” Lord Beckworth blustered, striding across the room and glaring down at her. “I see that I will have to take responsibility for your immortal soul myself, Alexandra. You have let it slip to the devil.”

“Papa,” she said, letting her shoulders relax and her chin fall an inch, “must we be like this? Can we not just love? When you arrived here a few days ago, I was so happy to see you. I realized how much I love you. You are my father, and I have spent my life with you. And you have cared for me. I know that you love me and James too. But you are so afraid to show it, so afraid of appearing weak and sinful. It is not sinful to love, Papa. God is love.”

He gazed at her incredulously while she talked. One hand opened and closed at his side. “You are preaching to me?” he said.

She shook her head. “I just want to hug you, Papa,” she said. “I just want to love you.”

“I never heard such nonsense in my life,” he said. “I would think you should love me too, Alexandra. Your soul would be in a sorry state if you did not. And I would think I love you too. Have I not devoted the past twenty-one years to bringing you to eternal salvation?”

“Papa,” she said almost in a whisper, “I love you.”

“Hm.” The hand was opening and closing convulsively at his side. “I cannot think what can have come over you, Alexandra. You must be sickening for something. Go to your room, girl. I would advise you to lie down for an hour or two. I shall have to summon a physician when we return to town.”

Alexandra closed the small distance between them and kissed him on the cheek before turning and whisking herself out of the room.

“What in thunder has come over the girl!” were the last words she heard before she closed the door behind her.

L
ORD
A
MBERLEY WAS IN
his mother's sitting room. He was standing before her, both his hands in hers.

“Dear Edmund,” she was saying. “I have been so happy for you. I love Alexandra very dearly, and she has seemed so right for you. I thought that finally my son was to be rewarded for a lost youth and years of service to others. My firstborn son, Edmund. You are so very precious to me.”

He was smiling. “You make it sound as if I have lived a life of misery and hardship, Mama,” he said. “How very untrue. I have had you and Dominic and Madeline. I have had this home and wealth and comfort. Many people would give an arm and a leg for the privilege of enjoying such misery. Don't make a tragedy of what is happening now, dear. Alex and I are not right for each other. That is all. We will both be happier away from each other.”

She looked searchingly into his smiling eyes. “Liar, Edmund,” she said. “Oh, liar! Do you think I do not know you a great deal better than to believe that? You love her, do you not?”

“Yes, Mama,” he said gently. “I love her. She is everything in life to me.”

She looked stricken and squeezed his hands more tightly. “And there is no hope?” she asked. “None, Edmund?”

“No, Mama,” he said. “I have given Alex her freedom because that is what she wants most and has been without all her life.”

She nodded. “You have given,” she said. “Yes, Edmund. And all is now said. I will not keep you. You must want to get away about your own business. Such meetings are a strain on you, are they not? I will see you at luncheon, dear.”

She held up a cheek for his kiss and watched him leave the room. Sometimes he looked so much like his father that her heart ached with pain. But he was so much more vulnerable than his father, though not many people would suspect the fact. And she knew from long experience that the worse Edmund was hurting, the more firmly and gently he would smile.

How dreadful it was to be a mother, to have borne a child and suckled him at one's breast, to have watched him grow into manhood, and to know oneself powerless to shield him from harm and from suffering.

Lady Amberley sighed and turned back to her embroidery frame.

H
E COULD NOT LEAVE
her alone. He knew she had left the house. She had gone minutes before he had left the chapel, the butler told him. And when he stepped outside, he saw her ride alone up the hill to the west, on her way surely to the cliff top. It was where Alex would go this morning. And he had to follow her there. Perhaps she wanted to be alone. But there was so little time left. This might be his final chance to be alone with her. He had to go after her.

Lord Amberley rode up the hill slowly, battling with himself. Perhaps he should turn back and leave her to herself. There really was nothing more to be said, nothing more to be done. Better to remember those magical early hours of the morning and their silent, strangely peaceful walk back to the house together as his final encounter with her. Better not to spoil it now with the awkwardness of a lone meeting in the cold light of day, when as like as not they would not be able to find one thing to say to each other.

But he rode onward. He had to be alone with her one last time. Once more to see her, to look into her eyes, to touch her perhaps. He had not allowed his mind to dwell upon what had happened up in his hut early that morning. There was too much to be said and done that day, too much for which he must keep himself alert. He would open up the treasure of his memories when she was gone—tomorrow or the next day.

But he could not stop the memories and images as he rode on. Alex naked and unembarrassed and more beautiful than any woman he had seen or imagined. Alex hot and fierce with passion in his arms. Alex above him, moving to his rhythm, gazing down into his face with dark, luminous eyes and voluptuously waving hair. Alex with her soft, wet, womanly depths opening to him and giving all of herself so that they had met and united in an ecstasy of giving and receiving.

Alex!

He could see her as he rode across the plateau toward the cliffs. She stood looking out to sea, her hands at her sides. She was hatless. Her horse was grazing on the coarse grass a safe distance from the cliff.

She turned as he approached, and stood watching him. She did not come toward him or turn to move away. He left his horse beside hers and walked toward her. She did not smile or take her eyes from his face.

He smiled and stood beside her. He looked down at the sea below them. “It is almost calm today,” he said.

“Yes,” she said.

“Alex,” he said, “you will not regret last night?”

“No.”

“You will not forget?”

“No, never,” she said. “How could I?”

“I am glad,” he said.

There seemed to be nothing else to say. He stood beside her, his hands clasped behind his back, gazing down at the water, which he did not see.

“You will be leaving tomorrow?” he said.