The Mysterious Heir (9 page)

Once he had drawn her out to the garden at a ball, and that once, he had taken her in his arms, and that one time he had been allowed to kiss her briefly. In a moment she had gently pushed him away, turned her head in shame, and whispered, “We must not.” And that gave him the fuel to continue courting her for weeks. Three times he made his offer to her father, and three times her father had evaded his eyes and said, “She is young yet, give her time.” But Morgan Courtney knew that an older, twice-widowed Baronet was also courting her, and impatience gnawed at him. Then, at the end of the season, the Baronet veered off, and when Morgan Courtney made his fourth offer, her father had sighed and said, “So be it.” And he had won her hand.

During their engagement, which lasted a summer, he spent every available moment with her. But she was still closely chaperoned and he was given to understand that this was the custom in her small part of the world. And he suffered it. Yet each time he finally got her alone and begged a kiss, she was flustered and withdrawn and made him feel a ravening beast. Though she never joked or held long conversation, he was so lost in love he saw no lack of humor or intellect in her, but only lack of confidence in herself. He knew there were worlds to discover in her deep dark eyes. The only real fear he had for their forthcoming marriage was as to how he would overcome that shyness and lead her to physical enjoyment of their union. But he was confident. He had been loved all his life and he was three-and-twenty and had lain with five women and knew he could win her to him, in both mind and body.

He did not attempt to make her his wife physically till they had been wed for more than two weeks. He waited till they had been together for a space, he waited till they had reached the solitude of their rooms in the estate he had rented in Scotland for their honeymoon. He would have wished to take her to some exotic clime to match her mood and style but had no desire to risk her safety, and travel abroad was out of the question due to the armed camp the Continent had become. But after two weeks in her constant company he could wait no longer. He could not wait till he had gotten to know her better, for in truth she was still slow of speech and shy and he could wait no longer.

After much whispering of assurance to her, after long starts and stops, after slow sweet extended embraces, he at last took her to him to complete their union. Suddenly from her armor of reticence she grasped at him, she came forth boldly and clutched him and writhed with him and overwhelmed him completely, making him feel as a child might who stepped into a still pool and found himself carried over a cataract of rushing waters. Later, his mind still whirling as he lay there exhausted, she spoke softly in the stillness of the room.

“You know, of course,” she said, lying quiet now, and studying the lofty ceiling of their room.

“Yes,” he said, wondering what it was he was supposed to know.

“It was only that once,” she whispered.

And whispering, she told him of the stableboy that had overpowered her and taken her when she was only fifteen.

“Do you hate me for it?” she asked in a sad, flat voice.

“Hate you?” he cried, reaching for her again. “No, never, how can you say that? You are my wife. I love you.”

And she smiled into his hair as they renewed their union, again and again.

The weeks that followed, while they rested at their honeymoon home, were a sensual blur to Morgan. If he had had time to think, if he were not so totally immersed in his senses, he might have wondered how it was that she knew so much more than he, how she knew so many ways to please him, how she could be, after that one brute encounter in a stable, so endlessly eager. But their only communication was through their bodies, and he had no time, no thought for thought, until even he, at three-and-twenty, was exhausted and wanted some surcease from the endless demands of her body and time for communion of a different sort.

But she yawned through the art galleries he took her to in nearby Edinburgh, and sat with sphinxlike smile as they toured the antique streets, and fanned herself with uninterest within medieval castles, and toyed with her fan at concerts. In the end she told him with a small smile that she would prefer he went on his sightseeing without her, as she needed her rest.

He had thought it might be a child on the way. So he left her to rest in her warm bed while he toured the vicinity. And on that one Wednesday afternoon, he had been standing in a great picture gallery when his gaze fell upon a portrait of the Madonna and Child that looked so like his dear Kitty and the babe of his fantasies that he slapped his hat against his knee, bit back a grin, and turned to hurry home to her. To surprise her with his early return and his reawakened desire.

Her maid flew at him from a shadowed part of the corridor and tried to call him away from their bedroom. She flapped at him like a great bat, but he only smiled and put her aside, for he knew Kitty would not mind this interruption of her daily nap. He opened the door and saw the ruddy, freckled young man's body like a pulsing growth upon the pale olive clarity of her unclothed form. He remembered the obscenity he saw when he pulled the man off his wife and remembered trying to beat that offending body into nothingness, to erase all signs of gender from the shrieking man he battered.

And then he felt her cool hand upon his shoulder and heard her slow soft voice, louder than cathedral chimes, “Let him be,” she said, tugging at his arm. “Let him go. I asked him to. I asked him,” she said.

Long after the young man had been restored to his senses, long after his wounds had been tended to and he had been given his clothes and dismissed from his job as footman and shown off the premises by the scandalized staff, Morgan sat, his head cradled in his hands, and listened to his wife's gentle litany, a long and slow telling of her tale, a longer conversation than she had ever had with him before, or would ever have again.

At the time he heard everything and heard nothing, his senses were still so disordered. Yet every word would stay with him till the end of his days.

Yes, she had told him, it did begin at fifteen for her. But it had been no attack, no more than today's episode had been.

She had been curious. The stableboy had been obliging. But her father had discovered them and reacted just as her husband had. There was mild amazement, Morgan remembered, in her voice as she related that. Her father had kept her under strict chaperonage, but she was endlessly inventive. There had been, in the years before she had caught his astonished eye in London, many such episodes. Many times. Few refused her, from stableboy to farm worker, from chance acquaintances of her father's to tradesmen from town.

She had been taken first to men of God. Her father had thought, in his strict Methodism, that it was unholiness that accounted for it. That she, poor motherless creature, had been drawn into the devil's net. Thus, she had been lectured, she had been sermonized, she had been beaten, she had spent hours upon her knees, only to arise and slip out to yet more encounters.

In her seventeenth year, her father had given up on God and taken her to a different set of holy men. He had brought her far from home to a round of physicians of all stripes. Her diet had been altered to whole grains and spring water. She had been denied spices and salt. And then sweets and savories, then red meats and hot foods. She had endured it, for her hunger was of a different sort. She continued to indulge that hunger whenever she could steal away. She had been immersed in steaming hot baths to draw out her sensual humors, and when that failed, steeped in icy waters to depress her heated passions. And no cure was effective.

At last her father was told of an operation, a surgical procedure that would remove that tiny wedge-shaped part of the female anatomy that was supposed to give the keenest pleasure and be the root of unseemly female desire. The surgery would thus effectively remove all her desire for future encounters. The Arabians, her father was told, regularly performed such mutilations upon their women in childhood to keep them content in their harems. “After all,” the learned physician had joked, for he was a jovial fellow as well as a man of science and he was both perturbed and annoyed at the look of horror writ large upon his patient's father's face,
“how else do you think the old sultans can keep one hundred wives happy?”

When her father, driven to despair after yet another fall from grace upon her part, had threatened her with that, she had only smiled and told him it would be to no avail. It was not pleasure she sought, she had explained, it was only a thing she must do.

Yet his distress was such that he was about to give his consent for it to be done, when the physician said in passing the one thing that staged his hand.

“Of course,” he had said, “you know that then marriage for her will be out of the question. For her husband would of course notice the alteration and would then have adequate grounds for divorce. There are some men,” the physician said, with a sad shake of his head for those less scholarly and scientific, “that would find a woman thus scarred repugnant to them.”

But if the physician had removed one possibility of escape, he had implanted the idea of another. She was yet young, her father reasoned. He could not, as some had urged, incarcerate her in Bedlam; she was his only child. Perhaps marriage would be the answer. Marriage would mean a man at her constant service. Marriage to a man stern enough to contain her might answer.

They went to London.

“Papa wanted me to marry the Baronet,” she said at last, in the last hours of the night, “but I didn't like him. He was old and ugly. I liked you, Morgan. I do. I told Papa so. Truly. And you are the best I've found. But I cannot help myself. I cannot. I didn't mean to hurt you, you know. I will try harder in future. I will, Morgan, truly,” she said, and then curled up in peaceful sleep, while he sat up through the dawn and tried to understand all he had been told.

They packed the next day and returned to London. Morgan could not bear to touch his wife; could not now bear the looks of admiration upon the faces of other men when they saw her glowing beauty, which had once pleased him; could not even speak with her. He paced and thought, went without sleep,
and finally, his mind too full to bear it alone, left Kitty in London and rode back full tilt to Lyonshall.

His father and brother wondered at his leaving his new bride alone so soon. Morgan spun them a tale of her exhaustion after their travels on their honeymoon, and they smiled knowingly. Perhaps, his father suggested gently, they would be seeing her soon again, perhaps then with his grandson in tow? A new terror gripped Morgan at his words.

It was late night after dinner on the third day of his visit that Morgan decided to seek his father's counsel. They sat before the fire and let a companionable silence fill the room, and Morgan had just cleared his throat to speak the unspeakable problem when his father sighed with contentment and spoke first.

“Simon and I are pleased, Morgan, to see you so well settled. He would be here with us now, poor soul, if he felt sturdier. But the doctors have said he needs his rest, and so he does, so he does. And as for me, my boy, I suppose now that you have a wife and are about to start your own family, you can bear the news. For I have been told I have not much longer a race to run, either. It is my one solace, my dear son, to know that you are so fortunate in your life, and that you will ensure that Lyonshall remains as it is. You were a surprise to your poor mother, God rest her, and to me, coming so late in life. But the Lord is wise, and now I can know that when I leave and Simon must go, all will yet be well.”

When Morgan Courtney returned to Town, he was a changed man. Marriage had matured him, his friends opined when they saw his set face, his new air of dignity, his sober aspect. He went to his clubs, he drove his curricle, he visited Gentleman Jim's, he lived his life as befit any young man of his rank and station. He confided in no one and none knew that he did not touch his wife.

“I cannot divorce you now,” he told her, “as I yearn to, for the scandal would kill my father. But I shall kill you, my dear, if you present me with a babe. For I will know it is not mine.”

“Have no fear on that score, Morgan,” she had replied,
unfazed, “for I almost had one years ago, and when I lost it, I was told there was little chance of ever having another. I didn't lose it, precisely,” she said, watching him closely, for he had so changed since she last saw him that she feared him a little now. “An old herb woman aided me. But, Morgan, I vow I shall make you forget those harsh words. For I promised I would try, did I not? And so I shall. But don't turn from me. For I need you.”

Looking at her, seeing her soft and yielding, arms held out to him, he had stepped back and snarled, “All this you tell me now? Now when we are irrevocably wed? Perhaps I could forget all that went before, but why did you wait to tell me now?”

“Would you have wed me else?” she said with perfect mad logic.

And he had turned and left. He would not touch his wife, he could not seek other women, for in doing so he would give her license to pay him back in similar coin, and in truth now he wanted nothing to do with them. Those months they stayed in London, he fully believed he was slowly losing his senses.

Everywhere he went, he thought he heard hushed whispers. When he attended a ball with Kitty, he thought he caught sly nudges made by other gentlemen, and covert comment from the ladies. Conversations seemed to be cut off mid-sentence when he entered his club. And he thought he caught pitying looks from the older men he most admired. The world seemed filled with knowing eyes. He was a proud young man and could not believe what was happening to him. For when he taxed Kitty with it, she would protest he was imagining things and that she was faithful to him. And asked when he would come back to her arms.