Lady Wardeaux spent much of dinner telling Lady Radnor her
plans for their trip to London for the remains of the Season. As Margery had not
been consulted she could feel little prickles of annoyance jabbing her at
regular intervals.
Jem was exerting himself to be pleasant to Mrs. Bunn, the
vicar’s elderly mother, who was placed on his right, and Miss Fox, the doctor’s
dowdy sister, who was on his left. In between he watched Chessie, who ignored
him with polite indifference. It amused Margery. Such lack of interest from a
beautiful woman was a very new experience for Jem.
She felt only slightly less self-conscious herself. Discovering
her feelings for Henry had had a disastrous effect on her composure, making her
as gauche as a schoolgirl in his presence.
The ladies withdrew while the gentlemen took their port. The
talk was of the humid weather and an outbreak of typhus in the village. Miss Fox
commented that a traveling fair was encamped on the green, so no doubt the
village would be a hotbed of crime and was it not a disgrace? She seemed overly
excited at the prospect of so many potential thieves and pickpockets in the
neighborhood. Margery thought she would probably swoon if she realized she had
been sitting next to one at dinner.
“We should make up a party and go,” Margery said. “I love the
fair.”
As with so many of her comments, this one was met with utter
consternation.
“Oh, Lady Marguerite!” Miss Fox twittered. “We could not
possibly! It would be most scandalous and quite, quite wrong!”
“It would be very inappropriate,” Lady Wardeaux confirmed with
a grim smile as though appealing to all the local ladies to sympathize with
quite how much she had to put up with in trying to educate her charge in the
manner befitting a lady.
Later, when the guests had departed and the family had
collected their candles and made their way up to bed, Margery stood by the
window in the tower room and looked out into the spring darkness, across
Templemore’s manicured lawns to where the lanterns of the fair swung in the
distance. She was so tempted to go. Except that she knew that if she disappeared
to the fair her grandfather would worry.
She felt intolerably hemmed in tonight, both held captive in a
gilded cage and hostage to her feelings for Henry. They made her feel restless
and pent up. She glanced toward the door in the corner tower. It seemed to
beckon to her. Suddenly, she made her decision. Tonight she would escape, if
only for a little while. Tonight she was going to be Margery Mallon again.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Lovers: Strong emotions, a choice of the heart, the power of
attraction
T
WO
HOURS
LATER
, M
ARGERY
was as happy as she had ever
been at Templemore, a capacious white apron over the top of her golden evening
gown, her hair bundled up under the cook’s spare cap, up to her elbows in flour
and sugar with a batch of marzipan cakes cooling on the table and some ginger
biscuits cooking in the range.
The air was thick with the scent of spices and steam.
All the servants were crowded around the long pine table sampling the almond
drops and the Naples biscuits. Mrs. Bow, the cook, had been completely won over
by Margery’s sponge roll, declaring it the best she had ever tasted. The hall
boy had taken a parcel of cakes out to the stables for the grooms and the
coachman to try, and even Barnard the butler had biscuit crumbs trailing a
guilty path down his livery.
After the initial half hour he had cracked open the second-best
bottle of sherry, supposedly for cooking purposes only, but it was not long
before one of the footmen had surreptitiously passed the bottle around. From the
sherry they had somehow progressed to port and from there to champagne and so
the confidences had started to flow along with the wine.
Daisy, the second housemaid, had told Margery all about her
younger sister who did not want to go into service but wanted instead to be an
actress, and how their mother thought that was more likely to be the start of a
career as a lightskirt than anything else.
William the footman told Margery about his father’s farm over
near Faringdon and how it was losing money hand over fist because his father
converted the barley into beer and then promptly drank the lot. Even Mrs. Bow
had confided her worries about her sister who was sick with the typhus and had
four children to care for.
Margery listened and chatted, and drank from the bottle, and
felt that at last she was accepted below stairs, not as someone with a
background in common with the servants, but entirely for herself. It was
lovely.
Then, suddenly, the door of the kitchen swung open and Henry
stood there, wet hair plastered to his head, water droplets scattered over the
shoulders of his coat, looking formidably furious.
Silence descended on the kitchen like a shroud falling. Those
servants who had been sitting at the table scrambled to their feet and executed
hasty bows and curtsies. Barnard tried to brush the stray crumbs from his
livery.
“My lord,” he spluttered.
Margery hastily pushed the empty champagne bottles out of sight
behind the dresser.
Henry strode into the room. “I am sure,” he said, glancing
around at the guilty faces, “that you must all have work to attend to.” His
voice cut like a whip.
“We’d finished—” Daisy the housemaid began, only to be hushed
by Mrs. Bow.
“Then you can go,” Henry said curtly.
No one argued. One by one they melted away.
“You did not need to spoil their fun,” Margery said
reproachfully. She felt miserable, all the pleasure she had taken in the baking
and the camaraderie of the evening leaking away like gas from a balloon.
Henry’s gaze focused on her hard and fast, and she felt her
stomach drop with nervousness at the anger she saw there. “What the devil do you
think you are doing?” he demanded.
“I am baking cakes,” Margery said, “as you can see.” She
gestured to the scatter of pastries, marzipan and ginger across the table. “I
like it,” she added defiantly. She was scared by the anger she saw in Henry’s
face but she felt mutinous, as well. Henry was so good at spoiling her fun. “It
makes me happy,” she said.
“You were distracting the servants from their work,” Henry
said. His gaze picked out the bottles lurking behind the dresser. “And I see you
are drunk, as well.”
“No, I am not!” Margery said, stung.
Henry simply looked at her. He came up to her and took her by
the shoulders. Margery’s stomach swooped down to her toes with a mixture of fear
and anticipation. Henry bent his head and, without any preamble at all, he
kissed her. Shock skittered through Margery’s veins at the rough possession. She
gasped in outrage as he slid his tongue into her mouth, tasting her. It was
deliberate and insolent and she felt it all the way through her body. A heat
that was different from that radiating out from the ovens lit her from
within.
“You taste of champagne,” Henry said. There was something dark
and heavy in his eyes now. His gaze lingered on her lips.
“We were only having a little glass,” Margery said. She wiped
her damp palms down her apron, willing her hands to stop shaking. “The servants
had finished for the night,” she said. “You heard Daisy—”
“Who?” Henry said.
“The housemaid,” Margery said. “She is sister to one of the
grooms. You know their father. He is grandpapa’s chief gamekeeper—”
Henry made a brief gesture, cutting her off. “I am not
concerned with that,” he said shortly. “I am concerned with you disappearing and
letting no one know where you were.”
“I don’t see why it matters,” Margery said.
Anger flared again in Henry’s eyes. She could feel it in him,
banked down, under control, but burning fiercely for all that. His fists were
clenched at his side as though he wanted to catch her to him and shake her. She
could feel his fury and his frustration but she could not understand it.
“It matters because it is dangerous,” he said. “Do you know
where I have been?” He flung out a hand. “I have been out looking for you
because I thought that you had run away to the fair! Anything might have
happened to you—” For a second there was raw anguish in his voice, then he took
a steadying breath and moderated his tone. “It was foolish of you not to tell
anyone what you were doing.”
“I am sorry,” Margery said. She felt shaken and confused by his
anger but she sensed something deeper, something that tormented him.
“Sorry is not good enough!” Henry said. His voice shook with
repressed feeling. “Someone is running around taking pot shots at you with a bow
and arrow and yet you vanish for several hours without explanation. You have
become so spoiled that you do not have any sense, nor do you stop to consider
other people’s feelings!”
The blatant unfairness of this made Margery’s temper snap.
“That,” she said furiously, “is completely unjust.”
She walked over to the sink and washed the flour off her arms.
She did it very deliberately, keeping her back turned to him. Inside she was
fizzing with indignation at Henry’s criticism. All he ever seemed to do was tell
her off and drag her back to face her unremitting duty. He drained the joy and
the color out of everything.
“I did not even leave the house.” She swung back to face him.
She could feel her cheeks burning with heat and fury. Her whole body was
shaking. “The reason you did not realize that I was here was because you are so
stiff-necked and proper that you would never visit the kitchens yourself!” She
threw down the cloth she had been using to dry her arms and stalked straight up
to him. “You claim to care for the people of Templemore, but I think you are a
fraud, Henry. You don’t even know the servants by name! I think all you care for
is to be seen to fulfill your obligations. The people themselves do not matter
to you at all. They are just another means by which you can demonstrate that you
do your cold duty!”
There was a frozen silence. Henry’s eyes had gone as icy as a
winter night, his expression terrifyingly aloof.
“Is that all you have to say?” His tone was extremely
polite.
“No,” Margery said. She felt like a runaway carriage careening
down a hill; now she had started, she could not stop until the inevitable crash
at the end. “You show your mother not a single jot of affection,” she said. “You
call your godfather ‘sir.’ You care for no one. You have not a drop of love in
you and you never have—”
She stopped. For one brief second she had seen in Henry’s eyes
a pain so searing, so vivid, that it stole her breath.
“You have no idea,” he said, very quietly. “No idea at
all.”
He turned and walked away. The sound of his footsteps echoed on
the stone flags of the floor. Margery heard the soft swish of the green baize
door closing. Then there was nothing but silence.
She stood irresolute for a moment. Already, the anger draining
from her, she felt completely wretched. Stung by Henry’s criticism, weary of
always being forced to put duty before pleasure, she had lashed out at him in
frustration and hurt, and in doing so had hurt Henry in turn. She had been
unfair to him. The one thing she could not question was his devotion to
Templemore and its people. She had seen his kindness to them and seen, too, the
respect in which they held him.
She grabbed the candlestick and hurried from the kitchen, her
quick steps pattering on the stone stairs up to the green baize door. If she
left this now and went to bed she knew what would happen in the morning. Henry
would be his usual courteous but distant self. He would behave as though nothing
had happened. They would continue in this state of remoteness and yet another
brick—an entire row of bricks—would have been erected in the wall between
them.
She did not want that.
She realized it with a little jump of the heart. She did not
want Henry to treat her like a stranger. She could not bear such coldness
between them. She wanted more than that.
The house was very still. A light showed beneath her
grandfather’s door and from within Lady Wardeaux’s chamber came the sound of
voices. No servants were about. At times like this, Templemore echoed with
emptiness.
Henry’s chamber was at the end of a long, dark passage shrouded
in tapestries and wreathed in shadow. Margery paused outside his bedroom,
listening for voices, but there was no sound from behind the heavy panels of the
oak door, no sound other than a faint crash and Henry giving voice to a muffled
curse. Margery stood listening some more. She pressed her ear to the door. And
then she turned the handle.
The room was almost as large as hers, with a stone window
embrasure smothered in heavy curtains and a roaring fire even on this mild May
evening, but where her room was brightened by flowers and colored hangings,
Henry’s was as sparse and masculine as he was himself. The wide, unruffled
expanse of the bed stood before her. There was no sign of Henry.
Margery’s racing heart steadied slightly. She heard another
crash from the dressing room. Shadows moved. She crept forward to the
doorway.
Henry was throwing random items in the direction of a
portmanteau that stood by the dresser: boots, a shaving brush and stand, a
shirt. There was repressed violence in every movement he made. Fear curled in
Margery’s stomach. Her nerve deserted her. This had been a mistake. She turned
to creep out of the room as quietly as she had come but she was in such a hurry
that she tripped over a chair.
Henry pounced on her as quickly as a hawk. His hand bit into
her arm and he spun her around so that she was facing him.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
The expression in his eyes was harder than she had ever
seen.
“You’re leaving,” Margery said. The desolation ripped through
her, taking her by surprise. “Why?” she said. “Why are you going?”
A veil of darkness had fallen across his eyes. “It is for the
best. I should never have come back.”
“No,” Margery said. “Please.” She stopped and took a deep
breath. If she was not careful she would make this worse not better.
“I came to apologize,” she said. Her voice wobbled. She wanted
to sound strong but she was not sure she was going to achieve it. “I was wrong.
I’m sorry. I know you care deeply about Templemore—”
Henry turned away. “I don’t want to talk about it. You had
better go.”
“No,” Margery said. Her stubbornness was returning. “I am not
going. You always turn people away, Henry. Well, I’m not going. I came to say I
am sorry.”
The silence was absolute. Margery was trembling but she was not
sure why. She could see tension tight as a drum in every line of Henry’s body.
His jaw was tense.
“Very well,” Henry said after a moment. His tone was
indifferent. “Thank you, Lady Marguerite. I accept your apology.”
Margery felt dismay crash through her. So that was that. She
had not reached him. His tone and the formal use of her name told her so. His
formidable defenses were back in place. She had not even made the slightest
impression on them.
She went up to him and put her hands against his chest. He went
very still. She could feel his heart thudding beneath her palm.
“Don’t push me away,” she said.
She thought that he was going to dismiss her again, but
something flickered in his eyes. The tension between them simmered, feral and
hot.
“You had better leave,” Henry said again, but this time there
was a warning in his voice. His tone was rough. He took Margery’s wrists,
forcing her hands back down to her sides. His gaze was on her face, intent,
focused. “Go,” he said quietly.
Margery did not move.
Henry took the final step that brought their bodies into
contact and then he kissed her. It felt different, as though he was perilously
close to the edge of control, desperate for her, with a complicated hunger that
he could neither understand nor control. Margery felt it, too. She had known
only that she could not withdraw, that she could not walk away and leave him
because under that self-containment and control she sensed the absolute
solitariness and loneliness in his soul.
“Margery,” he said. He sounded dazed now. She knew he was
searching for the words to make her go, but she knew equally intensely that she
would never leave him now. This was her decision to take and for the first time
she felt as though she was close to him, within touching distance of his heart,
able finally to break down all the barriers he had erected against her and
against the world. The love swept through her so violently that it made her
shake.