Hadrian (41 page)

“How did you know?” Avis put the question to him even as she clung to him with gratifying ferocity.

“After I’d stopped here to speak with you earlier, I went to visit Lady Collins, who told me of Fen’s involvement.”

“You were here earlier?”

“I was, but Lily said you were indisposed and offered her condolences on the end of our engagement.”
The bitch.

“I’m not indisposed. She was growing quite bold. Doubtless she intended to put me in her debt by casting aspersion on Fen.”

Avis had never needed a companion. She’d needed friends, and family, neighbors, and
Hadrian
.

“Lily quoted scripture at me, and then I recalled you telling me her father was clergy who’d left the church for a position in trade. There was a scandal there, Avie, something particularly unpleasant. My bishop wouldn’t pass along many details about Prentiss’s situation, but Prentiss didn’t leave the church voluntarily. He was defrocked.”

“The scripture is how you knew Lily was my enemy?”

A good old biblical term—enemy. Hadrian’s guts churned to think how badly Avis’s trust in her companion had been abused.

“All of your notes had a biblical cast to them,” he said, “and all the worst gossip about you was from the women. You’d told me Lily socialized more than you did. Lady Collins had questioned her maid, who remarked Lily’s willingness to spread veiled contumely regarding you, and further commented that Lily was very interested to learn Fenwick had been among Collins’s cronies.”

Avis was a substantial woman, but in his arms, she felt frail, as if the first chilly autumn breeze might blow her away.

“You weren’t surprised by Tansy’s recitation, were you, Hadrian?”

“I was disappointed.” Hadrian eased back. “When I saw Lady Collins earlier, she told me Fen was Collins’s cousin. I withheld that information because I didn’t regard it as relevant, and I did not want to upset you.”

While Avis had withheld the same information, likely to protect Fen—and Hadrian.

“I knew Fen was among Collins’s familiars the day I was assaulted, but I didn’t want you judging him for crimes he did not commit.”

“Excuse me.” Fen stood on the path leading to the gardens, looking uncertain and weary. “Lily is behind a locked door, guarded by two men I trust, but did I just hear you both say you knew of my involvement with Avis’s assault, and my relation to Collins, and neither one of you accused me of further wrongdoing?”

“There was no further wrongdoing,” Avis said, facing him. “Alex noted your resemblance to the young man who galloped off from the group as we approached the cottage. I don’t know if she recognized you, but I did.”

“I told them all I was going to keep watch,” Fen said, expression miserable. “I hadn’t even gone to university at that point. They were older than I, bigger than I was, holding their liquor better than I could, and capable of taking my life if I thwarted them.”

He kicked at his knife, glinting in the dirt of the stable yard, then went on speaking. “In hindsight, I’ve often wished they had taken my life. I went to find help, Avie, but we were in the middle of a great, sprawling wood, and I got turned around, and there was no help. There was no help at all, so I went galloping back to the scene, claiming we were about to be discovered, but I was too late. I was too bloody late.”

He raised closed eyes to the heavens. “I am so sorry.”

Confession was the worst trial for all concerned.

“So you’ve atoned,” Hadrian said, “by keeping her safe ever since.”

“Not ever since. I ran back to Scotland to attend university, but couldn’t run from the memory of what was done to Avis and to Lady Alexandra. I came back and put myself in service here. I did not think I was recognized—I’d gained height and muscle—or I would not have made Avis or Lady Alex look on my face.”

Avis left Hadrian’s side and went to her friend. “You must not blame yourself. You must not.” She wrapped her arms around him and held him, while Fen buried his face against her hair.

“I’m sorry, Avie, I’m just so damned—”

“Hush.”

They clung to each other for long, long moments, while Hadrian mourned for twelve wasted years.

And was not comforted.

Fen might have been crying. Avis wasn’t sure and didn’t want to know if he was. She kept her arms around him, hurting for her younger self, for Alexandra, and now for Fenwick, who’d banished himself to Blessings because as a boy, he’d failed a challenge many men would never have attempted.

“Ashton Fenwick, you must know I do not blame you. Sixteen is young, and Collins’s family would not have held him accountable for harm befalling you.”

They hadn’t held Collins accountable for the harm Avis and Alex had suffered.

Fen eased out of Avis’s embrace. “I don’t deserve your understanding, Avis Portmaine, but I’m grateful for it. Vim and Benjamin didn’t know who they were hiring, or they’d have likely turned me over to the magistrate.”

“So you took a great risk to remain at Blessings. God knows what Lily might have got up to had you not been on hand to keep her in check. I see no need to inform my brothers of your connection to Collins.”

He was puzzled by this forbearance, clearly, but Avis did not have time to explain to him that forgiveness was one of few powers left to a crime victim. Hadrian had disappeared into the stables, and it was to Hadrian that Avis owed the greater debt.

“Go up to the house, Fen. Get something to eat, and tell the maids to pack up Lily’s effects.”

“Shall I send for the magistrate?”

A clip-clop of hooves coming up the barn aisle distracted Avis from answering. Hadrian drew Caesar to a halt as the horse emerged from the gloom of the barn into the quiet of the stable yard.

“I must discuss potential charges with Hadrian, for Lily threatened my happiness, but she might have taken Hadrian’s life.”

Something silently passed between the men, an entire discussion that Avis could only guess at—about responsibility, friendship, and trust.

“Bothwell, get off your horse,” Fen said, “the lady wants a word with you.”

“Go, Fen,” Avis said, shoving at his shoulder. “I want a word with Hadrian
in private
.” She wanted much more than a word, too.

But what did Hadrian want?

He swung off his horse and looped the reins around the hitching post. “I am at your service, Lady Avis, for I want a word with you too.”

So grave. Did he want a word of parting, because Avis had kept Fen’s identity from him? Because Lily had been found out and her scheme finally foiled? Because Avis had not agreed to his choice of wedding date?

“Walk me up to the pond,” Avis said, for if she was to beg, let it be in a place that had wonderful memories for them both.

Hadrian bellowed for a groom to see to his horse, then winged his arm at Avis. She grabbed for his hand instead and kept hold of it until they’d reached the still silver mirror of the quarry pond.

“The blankets are still here,” Avis said, surprised to see the hamper tucked in the shade of the rowan.

Hadrian dropped her hand and marched over the tree. “Did you think they wouldn’t be?”

She’d thought exactly that. She’d assumed that when she’d balked at his proffer of a wedding date, Hadrian had quit the marital field.

“Cooler weather’s coming,’ she said as Hadrian snapped the blankets out over the grass. “Summers here are brief, and winters fierce.”

“And you’ve been denied twelve summers of trysts by the pond, twelve winters of cuddling with a husband before a cozy fire. What will you do to redress that larceny?”

“What will I do with Lily?” For Avis couldn’t read Hadrian’s mood, couldn’t even establish the topic of their conversation. Desperation welled at his clipped tone, a fear that now, now when she needed Hadrian more than ever, he’d decide that his objective had been achieved—or could be abandoned.

“What I’d like to see befall Lily,” he said from across the spread blankets, “and what a former churchman’s scruples suggest should be her fate, I leave as conundrum for you to resolve. I doubt she is entirely sane and thus cannot endorse summoning the magistrate.”

“I don’t care what happens to Lily. I don’t even want to talk about her.” Not now, especially. “Will you sit with me, Hadrian?”

He looked out over the pond, an expanse of cool silver that would soon be edged with ice. “I’d rather lie with you.”

He’d muttered. Avis couldn’t be sure exactly what he’d said. “I beg your pardon?”

“I would rather lie with you,” he said, dropping to the blankets, and wrenching off a boot. “I would rather make passionate love to you, raise a family with you, and ensure that Landover continues to prosper for several more generations at least. You will please join me on these blankets
this instant
.”

Avis nearly fainted onto the blanket, for polite, dear, considerate Hadrian Bothwell, former vicar of St. Michael’s of the Sword, was working up to a proper rant.

“You are not withdrawing your proposal?”

He tossed his second boot to the edge of the blanket. “I won’t allow you to send me on my way, Avis Portmaine. Nobody’s threatening anybody now, unless you consider holy matrimony a threat.”

He started on her boots next, a man very intent on his task.

“You don’t need to marry me to keep me safe, Hadrian, and I do not consider holy matrimony a threat.”

“Wait until our sons use the portrait gallery to practice their archery,” he said, reaching beneath Avis’s skirts to loosen her garters. His touch was far from loverlike, but he was certainly getting the job done.

“We’re to have sons, plural?”

He paused, Avis’s stockings in his hand, and gave her a look that should have set the nearby pond to boiling. “Winters in Cumberland are long and cold, Harold needs his heirs, and I need you, Avie.”

Avie, he’d called her
Avie.

“How could you possibly need me? I let that vile woman keep me cowering and alone at Blessings for years, let her convince me I deserved all the talk she kept circulating about me. I want to slap her, Hadrian, to see her pilloried as she pilloried me, and have her whipped at the cart’s tail all the way to London.”

Now, now when Avis needed to keep her wits about her, tears welled, and words fled.

“Avie, don’t cry. You cannot cry now, when I’m trying to confirm a date for our wedding. I forbid it, and I’m begging you, woman—”

He kissed her, soundly, deeply, passionately, and Avis kissed him back, until they were sprawled on the blankets, Hadrian’s jacket tossed in the direction of his boots, his cravat hanging from the lowest branch of the rowan like a white flag of surrender.

He lifted his mouth away from hers and remained crouching over her. “You’re entitled to be angry, Avis. Furious and hurt and raging, all of it. You’re not entitled to send me away again. I won’t politely accommodate your wishes this time. I can no longer be that sort of gentleman if its means I lose you.”

This
Hadrian didn’t propose out of duty or loneliness, and Avis had no intention of sending him on his way.

“Twelve years ago, I was young and confused, Hadrian. I know what and who I want now, I know who I am. You can set any date you like, but promise me, you’ll never leave me.”

He gave her that promise, with words, with kisses, and with intimacies as brilliant as the Cumbrian sunshine, until darkness fell, and they wandered down the hill, arm in arm, a date set, and names picked out for the first several of their children.

“Mrs. Ellerby has declared herself in love with you, and you’ve been overheard singing to Dusty,” Hadrian informed Fenwick. “A barely recognizable baritone rendering of ‘Green Grow the Rashes,’ though why you’d inflict such sentiments on a gelding, I do not know.”

“I’m that pleased to have escorted Lily Prentiss back to her mother’s household,” Fen said, ambling along a path that wound through golden birches, “and Handy has a fine ear.”

Handy had a fine owner, whom Hadrian was about to enlist in some mischief.

“Has Avis left to pay her call on Gran Carruthers?”

“Am I your spy, Bothwell, to report Lady Avis’s comings and goings to her fiancé? In another week, Avis will be coming and going from Landover, unless you bungle badly.”

Perhaps Handy had a prescient owner as well. “I was rather hoping we could do some spying together. I’ve been thinking about correspondence, notes, and Lily Prentiss. Will you sit with me for a moment?”

Fen wasn’t wearing his knife, and he wasn’t wearing a smile either. “Bothwell, I don’t know what you have in mind, but if it’s something Avis should know about, then I will not for any reason—”

Hadrian took a seat on the same bench he’d occupied when he’d overheard vicious gossip about Avie. “Cease bleating, Fen. I’m not going behind Avis’s back, but I’ve been thinking.”

Fen sat beside him, making the bench creak. “You’re soon to be a new husband. Thinking isn’t what Avis will need from you for a good while.”

“Jealous?”

Fen crossed long legs at the ankle. “Brutally. If you hurt or offend Avis in any way, I will hunt you down and sing all my Scottish ballads to you in public.”