The Pursuit of Pleasure (18 page)

He struck a Corinthian pose, hand on one hip, one leg casually placed in front of the other so he could swivel from the hip, surveying the room with his cold, patronizing eye. He was the kind of man who was always sure he was the cleverest person in the room. That was probably the real reason why she disliked him. She was almost always convinced
she
was the cleverest.

“I was informed of your happiness by my esteemed Uncle.” He gestured in the Reverend Dr. Marlowe’s direction. “My congratulations.” His paper dry tone told her he meant anything but congratulations.

Lizzie was having none of it. She was a married woman, a young matron, and she could finally speak as she pleased. She gave him her nastiest smile. “Come all this way up the hill to give me your spleen, Wroxham?”

“I know what’s due a bride, however hasty she’s been. When can we expect a certain blessed event?”

“Don’t be any more obnoxious than you can help, Wroxham. Your cousin and I did not marry because I found myself with child.” She pronounced the vulgar words with emphasis, just to watch him recoil with an elaborate show of alarm.

She hated such hypocrisy. He would have it his cleverly veiled barbs were socially acceptable, the norm, while her blunt truths were completely beyond the pale. And she’d have to put up with more conversations like this if she took a house in Dartmouth. The town was rapidly losing its charms.

“Quite. But one can’t help but wonder why my cousin should marry, when he knew he was about to leave for active duty.”

“We married, Wroxham, because it suited us. It pleased us to be married.” She hoped her smile was condescending. “If you’ll excuse me, my mother has other guests.”

He put out an arm to stay her.

“What are your plans for that house?”

Lizzie disengaged her elbow. “What house?”

“His house. That damp little place out in the middle of nowhere. Perhaps you don’t know about it. Glass Cottage.”

So that was the root of his spleen. Their marriage had foiled his hopes of inheriting. “Why, live there of course. I am sorry for your disappointed expectations, but ‘that damp little place in the middle of nowhere,’ as you put it, is actually quite charming, and I am happy to call it my home now.”

His only reaction was two spots of color high on his cheeks. “My dear little cousin,” he drawled. “It’s entirely uninhabitable. The place is a complete wreck.”

Lizzie hated being patronized. Nothing was as sure to raise her temper than a show of self-aggrandized, male superiority.

“And you’d know all about being wrecked, wouldn’t you, Wroxham. I say, does anyone even let you play cards with them anymore? I understand your vowels are, how shall I say, in decline?”

The lines around the edge of Wroxham’s mouth pinched white with suppressed rage.

“You always like to think you’re the cleverest girl in the room, don’t you? You’ll want to mind that. It’s rather unattractive.”

How funny that she had been thinking the same thing. They were rather alike, she and Wroxham. Perhaps that was why she distrusted him.

A body interposed itself between them, dispersing the tension in the air.

“Elizabeth.” Her father cleared his throat. “A message has come for you.”

“Of course.” Lizzie stepped away from Wroxham with the slowest, shallowest impression of a curtsey.

But Wroxham didn’t move away. “What’s that?” He gestured to the official-looking packet in her father’s hand.

“An express, just come from the Admiralty for Elizabeth. From your Captain Marlowe, I daresay,” her father told her.

Lizzie could only laugh and snatch it out of his hand. How romantic. An express! How like her Jamie to be so sentimental.

“It is addressed to you, Elizabeth,” her father clarified for Wroxham’s sake, for the toad was still hovering about. “Why don’t you use my book room?”

“Nonsense. It’s just a silly love note or some such,” she said with real happiness, though she said it to deliberately aggravate Wroxham. But it would send a very clear message to one and all they had married for love. Although Wroxham had been the only one boorish enough to say it, no doubt others were thinking she had married Jamie so quickly to hush up a scandal. “I can’t imagine why he should go to all the trouble of an express for a billet-doux.”

Still, she moved toward the window, where the light was better, if only to cool the impatient heat that had blossomed in her cheeks. His first letter. And he’d said he’d never write.

Her hands shook slightly from excitement and happiness as she tore open the seal and let her eyes skim down the paragraph. But the words didn’t make sense. It wasn’t from Jamie at all.

Dear Madam … Sad duty … Regret to inform …

Lizzie felt the cold settle into her bones even as she read and reread the words, searching, hoping vainly she was mistaken—she had misread the horrifying news.

“No!” The words fell from her lips like drops of poison. “So soon.”

The room had gone quiet around her. She looked up to find the company was staring at her. Her knees became jelly and she sat on the floor in an abrupt little heap.

“Not this soon. So very soon.” Why did breathing feel so cramped?

“Elizabeth,” her father hurried over, “what is it?” He bent over her to assist her.

“I had not thought he would die so soon. He just left.” The painful squeezing tunneled down into her chest.

“Who has died? You don’t mean …?”

“Jamie. My Jamie. He’s gone.”

“What?” Her father took the letter out of her useless hands.

“Yes.” She felt like winter, bare and exposed for the fraud she was. “I thought it would take …”

“You thought what?”

Was it Wroxham who asked? Where was her mother? She wanted her mother.

“I didn’t think it would happen so soon.”

The burning sensation in her chest expanded and then contracted to a hard knot of icy fire. She could feel the itchy heat sting her eyes. Oh, good Lord, she was crying. She would not. She’d said she wouldn’t. She clenched her jaw and willed the tears away, blinking furiously.

But it hurt so much. How could she feel such pain without anything happening to her? She hadn’t been shot, she hadn’t been poisoned. It only felt like it.

She tried to think, to understand what she was doing and what was happening, but she felt like she was watching the drawing room from underwater. She felt heavy and still, weighed down, as if someone had thrown a wet blanket over her.

Then she saw her mother’s face, white with shock and distress as she came to her. Her face was crumpled into folds, but she held Lizzie and shielded her from others’ view. Her father had begun to politely usher people out. He must’ve been saying something, but Lizzie couldn’t hear.

The faces of the guests blurred before her, all wide eyes and shocked, chattering mouths. They had barely stopped talking long enough to catch the news. And now they would go and spread it. Jamie was dead.

Only Wroxham resisted the exodus. And only he had the bad taste, or perhaps it was morbid curiosity, to look directly at her face, to pry into her pain. All the other guests had averted their eyes from her, leaving her some semblance of privacy to fall apart. But not Wroxham.

“Get him out.” Her voice rose, with a sharp, hysterical edge. She didn’t care. “Get him out of my sight.”

He looked too much like Jamie.

Jamie. All she could think of was his hand. How he’d laid it across her cheek and then all along her body. How he’d looked so happy. And now he was gone. Totally and completely gone. Just as he’d said.

Soft, careful hands came around her arms and lifted her to the chaise. It was Celia who, along with Mama, came close to comfort her and sit next to her on the chaise. Her knees bumped up hard against Lizzie’s. She barely felt it—but the pain in her chest and throat was horrendous.

Celia had an arm around her shoulders and was talking to her quietly.

But all Lizzie could hear was her own coldly mocking voice echoing in her head.
You did say you’ve always wanted to be a widow.

C
HAPTER 11

O
ne thought, one need, stayed in Lizzie’s mind while the world crumbled around her: she must get back to Glass Cottage. If she could just get back there, to the place where she had been so happy with Jamie, everything would be all right.

No, not all right. But better somehow. Her heart would stop racing and starting, and the piercing pain that recurred every time she temporarily forgot and then remembered he was dead, would go away.

Jamie. Thoughts of him crowded her mind. The image of him walking out of the darkness on the assembly room’s veranda as if she’d conjured him from her silent yearnings. He had been everything she remembered and nothing she had expected.

Grown so tall and powerful, so handsome. So teasing. So ready to shake the dusty boredom out of her life. God help her, she wasn’t bored now. She was wrecked.

Hands steered her up the stairs of her parents’ house and into a darkened guest chamber. But it was an impersonal room. She wondered, with one of the distracted thoughts that kept flitting across her mind, why she could not even have her childhood room for comfort.

But of course, her childhood room, the one she had occupied until just a week ago, was another two flights up, on the third floor, in the schoolroom. She’d taken over the whole wing up there, once she’d grown too old and too unruly for governesses.

So they had left her in the first available, empty guest room, at least temporarily while Mama went to find a maid to come to sit with her, so she could go and make one of her famous soothing tisanes. Laudanum with tea and oranges, most likely. But Lizzie didn’t want laudanum. Not even opium could dull this pain.

And if she stayed still and quiet, as they all softly advised, the pain would consume her.

It didn’t occur to her to change out of her silk morning gown, or to change her lovely shoes for boots. She simply walked down the empty back stairs and out to the stables, saddled her horse, and rode home as fast as the mare could carry her.

The ride was a blur, a series of sharp tableaux passing in sequence. The gate at Hightop. The turn around the high stonewall at the corner. The long lane across the ridge of the hill and the perfect blue of the sky above. The brilliant and delicate wildflowers dancing in the wind.

And then her lane. Her home.

Home.

She had enough presence of mind to do the bare minimum for the mare, pulling off her tack and leaving her in a clean stall with water. Each task gave her something on which to focus, a momentary respite from feeling the immediate pain, before she made her way across the stone-paved yard to the kitchen door.

The house was locked, completely closed up.

Even though she hadn’t sent word she was coming, she had rather expected Mrs. Tupper to be up and about the house the way she had been the last time she had come out unannounced. With Jamie.

She pushed thoughts of Jamie, the pain of Jamie, from her mind and headed down the lane toward the steward’s cottage, like a dumb animal seeking shelter, the hems of her pretty silk dress trailing in the muddy ruts. Surely Mrs. Tupper was to be found there.

Lizzie tried to occupy her mind with tame observations. She busied her brain with the thought that to call the main house a cottage was a misnomer, a gentleman’s affectation, especially as there were two other, large-sized cottages on the property. The steward’s cottage was just as charming and rose-covered as the main house, a smaller two-story version of the gray stone building.

Lizzie trudged around to the kitchen door.

“Mrs. Tupper?” she called. Her shoes clicked on the blue slate floor of the passageway. She could hear voices, cheerful and ordinary, as she came by the pantry and larder.

Mrs. Tupper was seated at the deal table in the kitchen taking a dish of tea, bread, and cheese. It looked so homey. So ordinary. Beside her was a weathered, one-armed man, his empty coat sleeve pinned to his lapel. As soon as she entered, he stood up from the table.

“You must be Mr. Tupper. He spoke of you.”

“Yes, ma’am. Are you … are you all to rights?”

“No. No, not at all to rights.” She could feel the tears, cool and wet against her face, and taste the salt that dripped into her mouth. “He’s dead.” The words hollowed her out inside, leaving her empty of everything but the racking ache that wouldn’t subside.

They both stood now, the Tuppers, but stayed where they were and looked at her strangely. They didn’t understand.

“Captain Marlowe. They sent me… notice.” She pulled the crumpled piece of paper out of her pocket, creased andsmudged from being too tightly held in her hand, and reached it out to them. Proof.

Mrs. Tupper looked to Mr. Tupper for a long moment.

It was all so strange. How could they just stand there? They shared that long look, and then Mrs. Tupper came forward tentatively, holding on to the back of the chair for stability, or courage, the way one did when approaching a stray dog.

“Ma’am, you’ve had a shock. A nasty shock.”

“God, yes. A horrible shock.” A sound halfway between a laugh and a cry came out of her mouth. She covered her face with her hand and looked away, down at the simple slate floor. At her shoes. They were covered with mud. “They’re ruined. It’s all ruined.”

“You poor lamb.” Mrs. Tupper took her into her arms, and Lizzie was gently cradled in a warm, lavender-scented embrace. She threw her arms around Mrs. Tupper to stop the shaking that had begun in her hands and had traveled down to her knees.

The monstrous ache in her chest expanded until she couldn’t hold it back. Grief poured out in hot, stinging tears and wailing sobs. She was embarrassed to lose such control of herself, but it was too much. It was too horrible.

And it was all her own fault. She had doomed him. She had, by blithely agreeing to his proposition. By laughing and teasing when he said he was likely to be killed. By never telling him she loved him more than any other person or thing here on this beautiful, godforsaken earth.

And no matter what the terms of their agreement had been, she was never, never going to forgive him for leaving her so utterly, completely alone.