Irresistible (38 page)

Lavinia clucked her tongue.

“I AM SO SORRY, NATHANIEL,” Sophia said as they left the drawing room together.

“For what?” He offered her his arm.

She was almost overwhelmed with embarrassment—and awareness. “For all this,” she said, shrugging her shoulders. “For feeling obliged to come here. For making
you
feel obliged to invite me. For this tête-à-tête.”

“Sophie,” he said, leading her down the stairs to begin the tour on the ground floor, “have we come to this, my dear? To being awkward with each other after all? We were once close friends. Nothing has happened really to change that, has it? Can we not simply be friends again?”

“Yes, I suppose.” She smiled at him, though she was feeling suffocated by that part of their relationship that was not friendship. “Beatrice and Edwin would have been hurt if I had not come, and Lewis too, I believe. And I wanted to see Sarah again now that she is returning from her wedding trip. She and Harry look very happy, do they not?”

“Indeed yes.” He opened a door, having waved away the servant who had crossed the tiled hall toward them. “This is the library—my personal domain. My favorite room.”

Yes, it would be. It was a large and elegantly furnished room. Three walls were lined with books. There was a huge oak desk covered rather untidily with papers and inkwells and pens. There was a fire laid, though not lit, in the hearth. There was a large and comfortable-looking leather chair on either side of it. It was an impressive room but also a cozy room that looked lived in. It was very masculine.

This was his favorite room, Sophia thought, releasing her hold on Nathaniel’s arm and walking farther into it. This was where he spent much of his time—alone. He sat here in the evenings, reading a book. She touched the headrest of one of the chairs, the one that looked more worn than the other—and there was a book on the small table beside it. She picked it up.

“ThePilgrim’s Progress?”
she said.

“Yes.” He was still standing just inside the door, watching her. “It is a book I have always intended to read and never have read until now.”

He sat here working, she thought, moving to the desk, running her hand over the surface closest to her. He read his letters here and wrote letters. To all his friends. To Rex and Kenneth and Eden and others she did not know. She was his friend, he had just said. But he would never write to her here or read any letter from her.

The tall windows looked out over the tree-dotted lawn that sloped down to the lake. He would stand here, she thought, standing there herself and gazing out, when he wished to think over some problem or when he simply wished to relax.

“It is a beautiful room,” she said.

“Yes.”

He had not moved from just inside the door, she noticed. He had not pointed out any features of the room. He had just stood there in silence, watching her. He had probably intended to have her just peep into this room and move on. They would take all day seeing the house at this pace. She turned her head and smiled at him.

“I’ll show you the music room next,” he said.

He asked an abrupt question when they were in the conservatory later, looking at tropical plants that must make it a veritable paradise during the winter.

“Does Lavinia appear to you to be in good spirits?” he asked.

“Oh.” She smiled at him. “You really must not worry about her, Nathaniel. She is almost five and twenty and she has made her own choices about the sort of life she wishes to lead.”

He nodded. “She was annoyed, I suppose, at Eden’s calling on her yesterday?” he asked.

She searched his face. “Irritated,” she said, and smiled.

“Hmm.” He smiled too. “It would be the most unlikely match in history.”

“An exaggeration surely,” she said. “But I am afraid she will suffer heartbreak—not that Lavinia is the sort to invite quite that disaster. She has firm control of her feelings, I believe. Eden is not ready yet to settle down. I doubt he ever will be.”

“He is rattled,” Nathaniel said. “I believe he feels an attachment to her but is fighting the feeling every step of the way.”

“Oh,” she said. “And Lavinia too.”

“Perhaps they need some help?” he suggested. “A shove in the right direction? If I contrive with Ken over the coming day or two to get them alone together, you will not feel obliged to chaperon her, Sophie?”

She raised her eyebrows and then laughed. “You—the very proper cousin and guardian—are plotting to leave her
un
chaperoned?” she asked.

“Well.” He chuckled. “I am still determined to be rid of her by hook or by crook before her thirtieth birthday, you know.”

“I will not feel obliged to chaperon her,” she assured him. “I never have, if you will recall, Nathaniel. The very idea! I am only four years older than she.”

They grinned conspiratorially at each other and Sophia felt herself relax for the first time that day. Perhaps that other relationship could be forgotten after all. Perhaps they could be just friends again—
matchmaking
friends. She was not at all sure their schemes would work. If left alone together, Lavinia and Eden would probably have a massive quarrel and never speak to each other again. But that would be their business. At least it was worth trying to make them understand that perhaps they could make a match of it.

It was half an hour later before Sophia and Nathaniel came to the gallery, a lovely room that ran the whole width of the house on the upper floor, long windows at each end. It was bathed in late-afternoon light as they moved from portrait to portrait and she learned some details about the Gascoigne ancestors.

She was particularly charmed by a family portrait of a youthful Nathaniel with his parents and his sisters, the youngest of them—Eleanor—a bonneted baby on her mother’s lap.

“You must have been a happy family,” she said. Nathaniel was standing at his seated father’s shoulder, smiling at the artist, his chest puffed out with pride.

“We were.” He chuckled. “But I can remember my growing disgust as my mother continued to produce nothing but sisters for me.”

“But now the last of them is about to be settled,” she said, “and you will have peace and independence. No more women underfoot. You must be very happy.”

“Yes,” he said. “Sophie, are
you
happy?”

The uncomfortable tension between them returned instantly, though it seemed an innocent enough question.

“Of course,” she said too quickly.

“You have set up your new home?” he asked her. “Describe it to me. I would like to be able to picture it.”

“No, not yet,” she told him, turning away from the painting, the last to be seen. “I am still with Thomas. I—I have not yet seen quite the house I want. And I may go somewhere else where I can have more independence—Bristol, perhaps, or even Bath. I do not know. I have not quite made up my mind.”

“You do not—regret the way everything turned out in London?” he asked her.

She shook her head firmly and moved toward the window at one end of the gallery. And there—oh, yes,
there
were the flowers at the back of the house, banks and parterres and meadows of them, a glorious profusion of bloom and color.

“Sophie—” he said quietly. He had come up quite close behind her, she could tell. She hunched her shoulders and said what she had in no way planned to say, what she had not dreamed of saying ever to any living soul.

“I need to tell you something,” she said. “About those letters.”

There was a short silence. If he did not break it, she thought, the silence might stretch forever. She might never know the release she had not realized until this moment she had always craved.

“The letters Ken burned?” he said then. “You do not have to say anything, Sophie. None of us looked at them. I do not care who she was. I care only that Walter did that to you. Perhaps it is as well for all of us that he is not still alive.”

“They were not written to a woman.” She closed her eyes and bowed her head.

The silence stretched longer this time.

“His name was Lieutenant Richard Calder,” she said. “I did not know him. Perhaps you did. Or perhaps you remember the name.”

“The man he died trying to save.” Nathaniel’s voice sounded almost shockingly normal.

“Ironic, is it not?” She chuckled without humor. “Walter was decorated posthumously and I was awarded a house and a pension because of his great bravery in dying to save an inferior officer—his lover.”

“Sophie,” he said.

She should not be burdening him with this. He would at best be dreadfully embarrassed. At worst he would be horrified and disgusted. The latter was what she had always feared in London, during the spring, while Boris Pinter was still blackmailing her. Somehow it did not seem to matter now. She felt compelled to tell him.

“I did not know,” she said. “Those letters were written over a two-year span, Nathaniel. They were tender, passionate letters that made quite clear the fact that a physical love affair existed between them. But he was very discreet. I did not even suspect. He would have to be discreet, of course. He would have been disgraced as an officer if the truth had been discovered. And—it is a criminal offense. He could have—one can be hanged for it, can one not?”

“Yes,” he said.

“If Lieutenant Calder had been equally discreet,” she said, “I would have been none the wiser. Neither would Boris Pinter have been. But he was the one to sort through the dead man’s effects—and he had kept the letters.”

“Oh, Sophie.” He did not
sound
disgusted, she thought, reaching out to grip the window ledge with both hands. “He must have loved you too. Perhaps—”

“Oh, I did know,” she said quickly, “about his—preferences. How could I not? He married me when I was eighteen and still naive enough to expect a happily-ever-after. He was not a cruel man. I do not believe he intended to make me suffer. I believe he married me only partly to give himself respectability. He also, I think, wanted to convince himself that he was—normal. He—I—oh, Nathaniel.” She buried her face in her hands. “On our wedding night—afterward—he ran across the room and behind the screen and—and
vomited.”

The gallery was uncarpeted. She could hear behind her the click of his booted feet as he walked away from her. She gasped against her hands. She had had
no idea
she was about to reveal those intimate, nightmarish details of her shame. How could she have just said that aloud—to Nathaniel of all people?

She could hear his footsteps coming back again until they stopped a short distance behind her. She did not believe she would ever again be able to move or look up.

“Tell me the rest now,” he said. “Tell me whatever you need to tell me, Sophie. I am your friend.”

She could say nothing for a while. She was biting hard on her upper lip, fighting the ache of tears in her throat. Could anyone have ever said anything more purely precious to her?

“After a week like that or almost as bad as that,” she said eventually, “I asked him to send me home to my father. That was when he told me. He begged me to stay with him. And I could not bear the thought of going back home and admitting my inadequacy. And so we struck a bargain. We would live together as man and wife in the eyes of the world—or of the
army—
but in reality we would be each other’s companion. We both promised to remain faithful to our vows and live celibate lives. I kept my promise. I believed he had kept his—until Boris Pinter came to me with one of those letters.”

There was a lengthy silence again. But she knew he was still there. She would have heard him walking away.

“And so,” he said, “after the first week of your marriage when you were eighteen, there was no one—until me?”

“No.” She shook her head.

“And I suppose,” he said, “it was after that first week that you went into hiding.”

“What?” she said. She was holding to the window ledge again and watching Lewis and Georgina strolling in the garden among the parterres. They were holding hands. They looked young and innocent. They looked as if they expected a happily-ever-after to be awaiting them after tomorrow’s ceremony. She prayed with all her heart that they were right.

“Was it then,” Nathaniel asked, “that you started dressing in clothes that did not become you and that you cultivated the placid, cheerful, comradely manner of a woman twice your age? Was it then, Sophie, that you began to hide your beauty and your femininity from the world? And even perhaps from yourself?”

“My reason told me,” she said, “that even the most beautiful, most charming, most fascinating woman in the world would not have tempted Walter. He explained to me—and I believed him—that admiring and wanting other m-men came as naturally to him as admiring women came to most men. It was not something he chose to do out of any sense of perversity or out of any lack on my part. It was the way he was created. I did not hate him, Nathaniel, or even dislike him. But—oh, but I
felt
so inadequate. I
felt
that if only I had been a little lovelier or a little more fashionable or a little more experienced ... Or if I had been a
lady,
perhaps. He could not bear to
touch
me.”