The Marriage Bed (32 page)

Despite her hopes, things did not start out well. The first few days were awkward beyond belief. She knew that both her husband and her brother were trying to be civil, but
John
's attempts at light-hearted humor did not amuse Anthony, and her brother's resentment of
John
's past behavior was palpable. That made for long silences at dinner, broken only by the occasional comment from Dylan and the skillful use of small talk by Daphne, Grace, and herself. The trickiest part of the evening, however, was always when the men remained in the dining room for port and brandy after dinner while the ladies retired to the drawing room. Custom usually dictated this practice to last about half an hour. However, less than half that amount of time was usually all that elapsed before the men were joining them.
Until the fifth night of the visit.
That night, everything changed.

Fifteen minutes went by, then half an hour, then an hour, then more. "What do you suppose they are doing down there?" Viola asked the other two women, trying not to be nervous. "Are they getting along or killing each other?"

Suddenly, male laughter erupted from downstairs, and Viola grasped Daphne's arm. "Listen," she ordered as another round of hearty male amusement was heard.

"They are laughing," Viola said, stunned. She glanced from Daphne to Grace and back again. "Anthony and
John
are together, and they are laughing."

"Probably because they are drunk," Grace said serenely, taking a sip of her
madeira
. There was a hint of amusement in her green eyes as she looked at Viola. "Dylan said this stupid feud between his two best friends had gone on long enough. He said he was going to get them both drunk tonight and put an end to it once and for all."

"Getting them drunk?" Daphne repeated. "That's his solution? What if they kill each other instead?"

"I asked him the same question." Grace smiled, tucked back a loose strand of her blond hair, and took another sip of her wine. "Dylan said that wouldn't happen.
John
is especially witty when he's drunk, and Anthony is always much more amiable because he forgets to be ducal and haughty."

Another round of male laughter echoed up from the dining room, and Viola rose to her feet. "I cannot stand it," she said. "My curiosity is eating away at me. I have to find out what they are laughing about down there. Come on."

The other two women willingly accompanied her out of the drawing room and down the stairs. They huddled together outside the dining room and listened. It only took a moment to discover what all the laughing was about. The three men were composing limericks.
Naughty ones.

"There once was a bawd from
Cheshire
," Dylan began as Viola peeked around the edge of the door to have a look at them.

"There once was a bawd from
Cheshire
," Dylan said again, then stopped. "What rhymes with
Cheshire
?" he asked as he poured himself a brandy from the half-empty bottle in front of him.

"Stupid question,
Moore
,"
John
said at once, and took a sip of his port.
"Pleasure, of course.
What else?"

"Measure," Anthony suggested, and uttered a cry of triumph. "I've got it," he said, and leaned forward in his chair, lifting his glass of port. "There once was a bawd from
Cheshire
, with talents well beyond measure. A face like a lime, pickled with time, but God, could she give a man pleasure."

The other two men burst out laughing, and Viola shook her head in amazement. Her brother was composing naughty limericks with
John
and Dylan.

"Deuce
take
it,
Tremore
,"
John
said, "you've a talent for this. We must do another one. There once was a girl from
Norfolk
…"

Viola pulled back from the doorway and whispered, "And to think men are the ones who rule the world."

"Frightening, isn't it?" Grace whispered back.

The three women nodded agreement on that point and tiptoed back up the stairs. Once they were back in the drawing room, Daphne fell into a chair, laughing merrily, and said, "Viola, I think we can be sure of two things.
First, that
my husband and yours are going to get along much better in future. And second, when they wake up tomorrow, all three of them will be very cranky."

Viola smiled, thinking that a very small price to pay for domestic peace.

On the eighth day of the visit, they took tea at the home of Lord and Lady
Steyne
, and this further cemented good relations, for Earl
Steyne
was good friends with
John
and was well-respected by Anthony.

The following morning, all six of them went riding before breakfast, and Anthony was so impressed with his sister's beautiful mare, he insisted that if they bred her, he wanted a foal. Yes, Viola thought watching her brother and her husband discussing horses as they walked back to the house, the visit was going famously.

"
Hammond
, your gardens are lovely," Daphne commented as the six of them mounted the wide front steps and crossed the portico toward the front doors of the house. "I now have many new ideas for our gardens at
Tremore
Hall," she told her husband.

"My wife has become quite passionate about English gardens," Anthony told the men. "And why? She likes to walk in them in the rain. She says an English garden in the rain smells like heaven."

Before anyone could comment about that, the sound of carriage wheels crunching on the gravel was heard, and all of them paused on the portico, turning as an unmarked carriage pulled into the drive and came to a stop.

The footman jumped off the dummy board. He opened the door, unfolded the steps, and a slender woman in green descended from the vehicle. She lifted her head and saw them.

It was Emma Rawlins.

Viola could scarcely believe it. The woman glanced at her, and though her eyes widened in surprise, she turned her attention to
John
at once.

"My lord," she said, halting at the bottom of the steps, "you and I have business to discuss."

Business?
It was brass indeed for a former mistress to come to a man's home. And to speak thus, in front of his wife and his guests was unthinkable, but Emma did not seem to care about the propriety of it.

We've no business,
madam,
John
said evenly, his face expressionless. "I thought I had made that clear."

"Clear?" Her voice rose shrilly. "How could you make anything clear when you have not written to me? Nor have you answered my letters."

"I answered the first three. After that I saw no point."

"You did not even read them. You sent them back." She reached into the pockets of her skirt and pulled out handfuls of paper-folded pink sheets just like
those Viola
had seen that day at
Enderby
. She threw them in his face. "You are the
cruelest
man I have ever known!"

"Control
yourself
, Mrs. Rawlins," he said in a low voice as letters fluttered all around him to the ground. "We are not alone."

"Control myself?" she cried. "Why should I?" She cast a glance in Viola's direction.
"Because your wife is here?
Because you have guests?
Because it might humiliate you?"
Her face twisted with terrible pain and she began to weep. "It is I who
have
been humiliated, my lord. Not you!"

As if her strength had suddenly given way, she fell into a heap at his feet. "I loved you," she said, sagging against the stone steps.
"God, how I loved you.
I gave you everything,
John
.
Everything.
How could you do this to me?"

Viola stared at the woman in horror, watching Emma's shoulders shake with the force of her cry
ing
, watching her fingers curling in spasms against the cool gray flagstones near his boots.

She glanced around, but all the people on the portico, including the servants who had come out of the house at the sound of the carriage, were watching the woman as if paralyzed,
staring
at Emma as if they were witnessing some horrible accident. No one moved.

"You loved me, too," Emma moaned. "I know you did. You must have. The things you said. All the special things you did because I liked them. The yellow roses you sent because you knew they were my favorites, and the tea from
Ceylon
you gave me because I once said I liked it. You did love me. You did."

Viola looked into her husband's face. He was staring down at the woman sprawled at his feet, hands behind his back, tight-lipped and silent. His face was white, his body utterly still. His countenance was blank, with no emotion in it, no affection, no compassion, nothing.

"What did I do to drive you away?" Emma lifted her face, looking at him in bewilderment, tears streaking her cheeks. "What did I do wrong?"

John
made a wordless sound, and reached out a hand toward the bent head in front of him as if in pity, then changed his mind and pressed his fist to his mouth.

"I wrote you," she went on, heedless of all the other people watching, "sheets and sheets. And your secretary sent them back to me with a letter from him to never write you again." She let out a faint, bitter wail, so like a wounded animal that Viola was startled. The woman's body slumped forward, red curls falling over her face.
"Your secretary.
After everything we had, what we once meant to each other, you couldn't even be bothered to write such a letter to me in your own hand?"

Viola stared down at the weeping woman on the stone steps. She pressed her fingers to her mouth, her heart aching with pity, and she could not bear it. She started forward,
then
stopped, knowing that as
John
's wife it would be cruel beyond belief for her to attempt to give comfort or assistance to this woman. She turned to Daphne and Grace.

Daphne caught her pleading glance. As if coming out of a daze, she moved, turning to touch Grace's shoulder. The two of them stepped forward in unison, descending the steps on either side of the wretched woman. Together, they made an attempt to lift her to her feet.

Emma's head snapped up, the bright red lights in her hair glinting like fire in the morning sun. She slapped away the hands that tried to assist her and jumped up on her own. She stumbled backward down the steps but stayed on her feet, staring at
John
. "I hate you!" she cried, hands balling into fists. "I loved you, and all my love was wasted.
And for what?
I'll show you the results of loving you."

Whirling around, she ran for her coach as if to depart. Flinging open the door, she reached inside and pulled a bundle from the coach. It was only when she turned around again that Viola could see what it was. It was a baby.

"Look at him!" Emma demanded, holding the child with its face toward
John
. "Look at your son. What do you think I wrote in all those letters I sent you? The letters you couldn't even be bothered to read. I told you that I was with child. And yes, he is yours,
John
. You shall pay the support for him, per the terms of our contract."

She gave the tiny baby a shake as if it
were
a lifeless doll, and that snapped Viola out of shock and into action. She walked down the steps and over to the woman. As gently as she could, she took the baby from her. Emma, green eyes glittering with tears of pain and devastation, barely noticed. Her gaze was fixed on
John
, demanding he do right by her.

The baby was crying. Viola cradled him in her arms, patting his bottom and making little soothing sounds. She turned to look at her husband again and found he was not looking at Emma. Instead, he was looking at her. His face might have been carved out of stone.

Viola felt cold suddenly, cold in the sultry August air, and she wondered how any man could be the cause of such a heartbreaking display, watch it play out before him, and say nothing to the miserable woman, not even a kind word. She stared back at her husband, waiting in expectation for him to do something.

A muscle worked in his jaw, his lips parted, but he did not speak. Instead, he turned on his heel and strode toward the house.

"I hate you,
John
!" Emma shouted after him. "I hate you, and I will hate you until the day I die!" She turned, grabbed a leather traveling case from the carriage and turned, throwing it at Viola's feet. Then, without retrieving the baby, she climbed up into her carriage, slammed the door, and thumped sharply on the roof with her fist. The footman jumped on the back of the carriage, and her driver pulled away. The carriage rolled out of the graveled drive and down the lane toward
Falstone
.

Daphne, Grace, Dylan, and Anthony all went into the house, but Viola did not follow them. Instead, she turned and walked in the opposite direction. She circled around the side of the house, spied a stone bench by kitchen gardens, and sat down. She held the tiny baby close and kissed his cheek, listening to his heart-wrenching sobs and feeling his tears on her face. "Hell," she said, and started crying herself.

John
strode straight through the house and out the back. He walked through the gardens, past the stables and into the woods. He had no conscious direction, no conscious thought. Outrage smothered him, but it could not smother the sound of Emma Rawlins's wrenching sobs. They seemed to reverberate all around him—from the trees and the sky and the ground beneath his feet as he walked.

He tried to tell himself that his outrage was justified for Emma's gall in coming to his house and for the horrible scene to which she had subjected Viola. Outrage at fate for giving him a son who could never be the heir he needed.
Outrage at the whole baffling idea that a mistress would fall in love.
The tea, the roses, harmless things, so innocuous.
How could any woman think that those things and cold, hard sterling for bedroom services amounted to love?

Viola's voice echoed through his mind, overtaking Emma's wretched sobbing.

Oh,
John
, do you not see? Women fall in love with you. It's in the way you smile and the things you say.
The way you pay attention to what we tell you and how you remember what we like.

Ludicrous, he'd thought at the time. Viola being overly sentimental and
kindhearted
about a woman she should by all rights despise. Emma Rawlins in love with him was silly, absurd. Yet, only moments ago, Emma Rawlins had debased herself at his feet.

Not so silly after all.

He hadn't known, he told himself. He'd never dreamt the woman had such passionate feelings for him. And a baby with her had never entered his head. Why should it have? He had used the proper protections. Could he be sure the child was his? What business did a mistress have falling in love with a man anyway?

Even as he heard his own attempts at self-defense and justification, they nauseated him. Loathing followed on nausea's heels, loathing for himself and his thoughtless, callous behavior.

That was really the cause of his anger. Not poor Emma, who had been pregnant and hiding from the shame of it in France, writing him all those letters, no doubt terribly frightened at what would happen to her if he continued to ignore her. Nor was he angry at fate. Whether it was fornication or lovemaking, whether it was with or without the protection of French letters, children were the eventual, inevitable result, as hard as that was for a man to remember when a woman was in his arms and his wits were slipping. No, all his outrage was directed at himself.

John
stopped walking and leaned his back against a tree. Nothing has changed, he realized with despair. After all that he had done these past nine years to become a responsible man, to do his duty by his estates and his family name, to be a good caretaker of his wife's income and his own, yet in his private life, he was still as careless and thoughtless of the feelings of others as he had been as a youth.
And as heedless of the consequences of his actions.

He sank down to the ground and put his head in his hands, Emma's pathetic wail of sorrow ringing in his ears. Her emotional display might have been pitiful, but it was he who deserved the blame for it.
He and he alone.