The Last Hellion (32 page)

For my part, I am heartily ashamed that he succeeded, that I had been such an
utter fool. Still, I was a green girl when I ran away from home. Though ours is
merely an insignificant cadet branch of the Ballister tree, I had been pampered
and sheltered as much as any duke's daughter, and was, as a result, no less
naive. For a handsome, silver-tongued rogue like John Grenville, I was all too
easy a mark. How was I to realize his stirring speeches and tear-filled
declarations of love were merely… acting?

He was not so wise, either. He viewed me as a ticket to a life of wealth and ease.

He believed he understood the English aristocracy because he'd played
noblemen upon the stage. It was inconceivable to him that so proud a family as
the Ballisters would abandon to penury and degradation a daughter who'd never
known a day of hardship in all her seventeen and a half years. He truly believed
they would accept him: a man who could not by any stretch of definition claim
the title "gentleman," and compounded his infamy by belonging to that
subhuman species labeled actor.

Had I been aware of John's delusions, I should have enlightened him, confused
and ignorant though I was. But I assumed he understood, as I did, that my
elopement severed all ties to the Ballisters, reconciliation was out of the
question, and we must make our way on our own.

I should live contentedly with him in a hovel, so long as we were of the same
mind, and would strive together to better our lot. But striving is alien to his
nature. How I regret that I was never taught a profitable trade. My neighbors
Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion

pay me to write letters for them
—
there's scarcely one who can write his own
name. I do some sewing. But I'm no artist with the needle, and who hereabouts
can afford, let alone see the value of, a private tutor? Except for the odd penny I
earn here and there, I must depend upon John
.

I must stop
—
and in good time, too, for I see I've done little but complain. My
Lydia stirs from her nap, and will soon grow bored with babbling to herself in
her comical baby language. I should have written instead of her, how beautiful
and clever and good-natured she is
—
a prodigy and paragon among infants.

How can I complain of anything, when I have her
?

Yes, sweet, I hear you. Mama comes.

Lydia paused at the end of the first diary entry because her control was slipping again, her voice too high and quavering. She sat upon the bed, pillows heaped behind her. Ainswood had arranged them. He'd also drawn up to the bed a small table whereupon he'd collected most of the room's candles, so that she'd have better light to read by.

He had started out standing at the window, looking down into the courtyard. He had looked back, surprised, toward her, when she began to read aloud. She was surprised, too, when she realized she was doing it.

She had started reading hurriedly, silently, turning and skimming pages, hungry for the words she'd read so long ago, so poorly understood then and so faintly remembered since. Phrases stood out, not because she remembered the words but because they captured her mother's way of speaking. She began to hear Mama's voice, so clearly, in the same way others' voices seem to sound in her ears, even when the speaker wasn't there. She had only to open her mouth, and her voice became someone else's. It wasn't something she consciously tried to do. It simply Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion

happened.

And so she must have forgotten Ainswood for a time or been too much immersed in the past to think of the present. Calmed, reassured it was all there, the little story, Lydia had returned to the first page, and read in the voice lost for so many years, and now returned to her—an unexpected gift, the recovery of a treasure she'd believed forever lost.

Yes, sweet, I hear you. Mama comes.

She had always heard, always come, Lydia remembered vividly, palpably, now.

She'd understood what Mary Bar-ties felt for her baby: pure, fierce, unshakable love. Lydia knew there was such a thing. She had lived within that securest of all havens, her mother's love, for ten years.

Her throat ached. She couldn't make out the words through the mist in her eyes.

She heard him move, felt the mattress shift as he climbed onto the bed.

"Lud, what a way to spend your w-wedding night," she said shakily. "Listening to me b-blubber."

"You might be human now and then," he said. "Or is there a Ballister law against it?"

A warm wall of male moved into place beside her, and a muscular arm slid behind her back, to draw her close. She knew this wasn't the securest of havens, yet for the moment it seemed so, and she saw no great harm in pretending it was.

"She doted upon me," Lydia told him, her blurry gaze still upon the page.

"Why shouldn't she?" he said. "In your own dreadful way, you can be adorable.

Furthermore, being a Ballister, she could appreciate the more appalling of your personality traits as an outsider couldn't. As Dain does. He doesn't seem to believe there's anything wrong with you." He uttered this last in sorrowful amazement, as though his friend must henceforth be considered certifiably Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion

insane.

"There's nothing wrong with me." She pointed to the page. "Here it is in black and white: I am 'a prodigy and paragon.' "

"Yes, well, I should like to hear what else she has to say," he answered. "Perhaps she'll proffer valuable advice on how to manage such a paragon and prodigy."

He nudged her with his shoulder. "Read on, Grenville. If that's her voice, it's a most soothing one."

It had been, Lydia recalled. She was soothed, too, by his nearness, and his teasing, and the strong arm holding her.

She read on.

A wavery morning light was mingling with the room's shadows when Grenville finally closed the book and sleepily returned his share of the pillows before sinking down onto hers. She didn't turn to him, yet she didn't object, either, when Vere made more comfortable adjustments, drawing her up close against him, spoon fashion. By the time he had her snugly tucked up as he wanted her, she was breathing evenly, sound asleep.

Though he customarily took to his bed at the time respectable citizens were waking, if not already up and at their work, he was aware of fatigue weighing upon him more heavily than usual. Even for a man accustomed to live hard, who craved excitement and danger and all their accompanying batterings upon his mind and body, this long day and night had proved a strain.

Now, while there was silence and what should have been peace, he felt as though he'd been both captain and crew on a vessel tossed upon the rocks after a day and night of battling a furious tempest.

He might have managed to put into a safe harbor, if it hadn't been for the little Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion

book.

Its contents were the rocks he seemed to have foundered upon.

At least a dozen times while he'd listened to the voice—his wife's, yet not his wife's—he'd wanted to tear the book from her hands and throw it in the fire.

It was horrible, hearing the cool courage and irony with which Anne Grenville described the hell her life was. No woman ought to need such courage and detachment; no woman ought to live a life that demanded so much. She lived from day to day, never knowing when she might be evicted or see her few shabby possessions borne away by the broker's man, or whether this night's supper would be the last. Yet she made jokes of the privations, converted her husband's infamies into satiric anecdotes, as though to mock at Fate, which dealt so brutally with her.

Only once, at the very end, had she made anything like a plea for mercy. Even then, it wasn't on her behalf. Those last, barely legible lines, written days before her death, stood stark and blazing in his brain as though burned there with an iron:
Dear Father in Heaven, look after my girls
.

He'd tried to blot out her story, as he'd banished so much else from his mind, but it stuck and rooted there, like the stubborn gorse that grew on the inhospitable moors her Ballister ancestors had made their home.

The words of a woman eighteen years dead had dug into him as few others'

words could do, and made him feel like a cur and a coward. She'd borne her lot with courage and humor… while he couldn't face what had happened on his wedding night.

He'd leapt at the chance to quarrel with Dain, eagerly used anger to blot out the other thing.

As though what he had to bear, one disagreeable realization, were the most Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion

excruciating thing in the world.

It wasn't. The joke was on him, that was all.

He'd wanted Grenville, hadn't he, as he'd never wanted any other woman. Why then should he be so amazed that when he'd finally bedded her, it wouldn't be like bedding any other woman?

With the others, he'd merely coupled.

With his wife, he'd made love.

She was a writer. In his place, she'd have found streams of metaphors to describe the experience, what it was like, how it was different.

He hadn't metaphors. But he was a libertine, with more experience than any man ought to have. Experience enough to discern the difference. And wit enough to understand his heart was engaged, and to know the word for that.

Are you in love with me
? he'd asked, smiling, as though the possibility amused him. And he'd had to go on smiling and teasing, all the while aware what the thing was that stabbed his heart, and why it hurt, as no physical injury had ever hurt him, when she didn't give the answer he wanted.

Hurt, that was all. In love, that was all.

What was that to what Anne Grenville had endured? To what her daughter had endured?

Not to mention, he knew only a fraction of the tale. The slim volume scarcely covered the palm of his hand.

Its few pages held so little—most of it appalling—with great gaps in time between entries. He was sure it told only the smallest part of the story.

He didn't want to know more, didn't want to feel smaller than he did already.

Small and petty and selfish and
blind
.

Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion

But if Grenville could live it, whatever that life had been, he could certainly bear learning about it.

Not from her. She hadn't wanted the past raked up, she'd said, and he wasn't going to make her relive it.

Dain would know more of the tale, and he'd tell, like it or not. He had a lot to answer for. The least he could do was answer a few questions, Lord All-Wise and All-Knowing.

He would seek Dain out first thing, Vere resolved, and pound the facts out of him if necessary.

With that agreeable prospect in mind, the Duke of Ainswood finally drifted into sleep.

As it happened, Vere didn't have to seek Dain out. Midafternoon, upon learning from Jaynes that the master and mistress were up and about, Dain arrived to bear Vere off to the private dining parlor, while the ladies enjoyed a late breakfast in Dain's chambers.

"Jessica is nigh exploding," Dain said as they descended the stairs. "She must have a private tete-a-tete with my cousin, in order to share her experience in the art of torturing husbands. Trent's taken Miss Price to Portsmouth to shop for some fripperies my lady insists your lady can't do without, so he shan't pester us with his blithering while we eat. Jess and I will take the pair of them with us to Athcourt. You will need to reorganize your household to accommodate a wife, and you won't want Trent about. Not that I want him, either, but he shouldn't be too much underfoot—at least not under my feet. He will trot after Miss Price, and show a degree of intelligence for once in his life, in falling head over ears in love with the only female in all the known universe who has any idea what to Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion

make of him."

Vere paused on the stairs. "In love?" he said. "Are you sure?"

"Certainly not. How should I know? To me, he sounds and looks as imbecilic as usual. But Jessica assures me he has fixed his minuscule brain upon Miss Price."

They continued on, Dain calculating aloud the amount he'd settle upon Miss Price if she would take pity on Trent and marry him, while Vere heard "in love"

echo in his mind and wondered whether Lady Dain had noticed symptoms of the same ailment elsewhere.

"You are abnormally quiet," Dain said as they settled into their chairs. "We've passed a full five minutes together, with nary one belligerent remark passing your lips."

A servant entered then, and they ordered. When the man had left, Vere said, "I want you to tell me everything you know about Grenville."

"As it happens, that was what I intended to do, whether you wanted to hear or not," said Dain. "I had prepared myself to beat you senseless, revive you, and drop your broken body into the chair. In that agreeably spongelike state you would absorb the tale, and perhaps even the occasional tidbit of advice."

"Interesting. I had something like that in mind for you, in case you chose to be your usual aggravating self."

"I'm in charity with you this once," said Dain. "You've made my cousin a duchess, restoring her to her proper place in the world. Furthermore, you wed her with, if not noble motives, at least not entirely ignoble ones. I was touched, Ainswood, I truly was, by your serene unconcern for her origins." The mocking half-smile played about his lips. "Perhaps 'serene' is not precisely the word I want. Still, I was affected—not to mention deeply aston-ished—by your evidencing taste, for once in your misbegotten life. She is a wonderfully Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion

handsome girl, is she not? They are appallingly handsome, most of the Ballisters.

She gets her looks from her maternal grandfather, you know. Frederick Ballister and my father were much alike in their youth. But Frederick contracted smallpox in his late teens, and the disease disfigured him. That must be why Anne compared her daughter to my father, instead of her own. She mustn't have been aware that Frederick had been one of the beautiful Ballisters. We haven't yet discovered a portrait of Anne. However, if one exists, you may be sure Jessica will find it. She has an alarming genius for finding things."