Only Beloved (24 page)

“I will not suggest that you try to race me, my love,” Havell was saying to his wife. “But shall we?”

They began a sedate stroll toward the incoming sea.

Dora smiled at Ann. “With red, shining nose and windblown hair beneath windblown bonnet?” she said. “‘Woman Cold and Windblown'?”

Ann laughed. “I shall sketch you from memory and show you when I see you next,” she said. “Or I shall hide it from you and swear I never did it. Some of my efforts are not for sharing.”

“But very few,” James said loyally.

Dora took George's arm again. “Let's go closer,” she said.

“Have some ghosts been blown away?” he asked her when they were out of earshot of anyone else.

She nodded. “Events come and go,” she said, “but this remains.” She indicated the landscape about them with a sweep of her free arm. “And it is beautiful, George. After my cozy little cottage in its picturesque village, I wondered if I would regret having to live in starker surroundings close to the sea. And when I first came to Penderris, I wondered even more. Everything—the house, the park, this—was on such a vast scale. But I have grown to love it, and I will not allow an . . . event to spoil it all for me. It is an event that is in the past. Though not quite, is it? There will be an inquest?”

“Tomorrow,” he said. “In the village. You will not be expected to testify, Dora. Neither will I, I suppose, but I will.”

“Sir Everard and Julian will?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. “And your mother wishes to testify.”

“Ought I?” she asked.

“No,” he said firmly.

“Will Sir Everard admit to having tripped the earl?” she asked.

“I did suggest that he need not do so,” he said. “It would be quite credible that the man lost his footing and fell unassisted. But Havell insisted upon telling the truth last night and he will repeat it tomorrow.”

“George,” she said, “he is a good man.”

“Yes.”

“But I do not want to be talking about this,” she said.

Julian and Philippa were dashing along close to the edge of the water, shrieking and laughing like a couple of children. Julian had just stooped down and scooped up a handful of water and flung it in her direction. Lady
Havell was selecting some seashells and brushing the sand off with her glove before placing them gently in one of Havell's capacious pockets. He was grinning at her. Ann was standing with her back to the water, looking back at the cliffs. She was pointing out something to James, using both her arms in great sweeping gestures.

“Like a party of staid elders, standing here while the children frolic,” Dora murmured. And then a little louder, “I am not ready to be a staid elder yet.”

She kicked off one of her shoes, used his shoulder for balance while she pulled off her silk stocking, and then moved to the other foot.

“What exactly do you have planned?” he asked her, though actually it was rather obvious.

But she only laughed, gathered up her skirts with both hands, and dashed the few remaining feet to the water. George, torn between amusement and dismay—but he was not a staid elder either, was he?—went after her.

She splashed into the water until it was above her ankles. That was all well and good since she was holding her skirts up closer to her knees, but did she not know anything about the nature of waves, especially when the tide was incoming and especially on a rough day? Apparently not. A wave broke over her knees and splashed her to the chin. She gasped and laughed with what sounded like sheer delight.

“Oh, goodness,” she said, sounding again for a moment like the spinster music teacher she had been, “it is cold.”

“I am not sure you are telling me anything I had not already guessed,” he said, glancing down ruefully at his
boots and then wading in after her—only ankle deep, it was true, but there were other waves heading relentlessly their way. “You are going to lose your footing if you are not very careful. You are mad.”

He looked at her and laughed just as foam and water broke over her upheld hems again and over the tops of his boots.

“I am not,” she protested. “I am
alive
.
You
are alive.”

She looked at him with eager, sparkling eyes. Her cheeks were shining red. So was her nose. The brim of her bonnet was flapping out of shape in the wind. Tangled tendrils of dark hair were blowing about her face and down her neck. The hems of her dress and cloak were dark with wetness and the rest of her had not fared much better. He had never seen her more vibrant or beautiful, George thought as he noticed a particularly strong wave rise beyond her. He snatched her up into his arms, but the wave broke over them both, soaking them from the waist down and splashing their faces and making them both gasp with the chill of it. For a moment he staggered, but he managed to regain his footing.

“Alive, yes, and mad too,” he said, laughing and tempting fate by twirling about with her while she clung to his neck and—giggled.

“Oh.” She shrieked as another wave attacked them and he beat a hasty retreat to the shore.

But he did not immediately set her down on her feet. He gazed into her face, and she gazed back.

“It is good to feel youthful again,” he said, “and alive.”

“And cold and wet and lacking all dignity,” she said, smiling fondly at him.

He could almost see his reflection in the tip of her nose.

He set her down on her feet and noticed that Ann and James were no longer gazing back at the cliffs and the Havells were no longer picking shells. Julian and Philippa were standing a short distance away, hand in hand. All of them were staring at him and Dora.

“Yes, we are mad,” George said in his best ducal tone, “and wet.”

“And alive,” Dora said, bending to pick up her shoes and stockings. “Most of all, we are alive. And cold. Whose foolish suggestion was it that we come outside this afternoon?”

“When we could be drinking . . . tea in the drawing room,” James said mournfully.

Dora smiled dazzlingly at him.

*   *   *

Dora did not attend the inquest at the village inn the following morning. However, she had sat down the evening before and written a brief statement of what had happened, both at Penderris and at her wedding. She had omitted some details of what the Earl of Eastham had said to her, of course, but she had included enough to leave no doubt in anyone's mind that he had intended to kill her and her unborn child in revenge for what he imagined had happened to his sister, the first Duchess of Stanbrook, when she had thrown herself over the cliff.

Philippa did not go either since she had nothing to add to what Dora's mother would say regarding their meeting with the earl in the village and really did not want to go. She remained at Penderris with Dora and
Belinda. Dora's mother did not want to go either, of course, but she was determined to make it clear to all that her daughter's meeting with the earl had been entirely at his suggestion.

It was an event, Dora told herself, just as the scene out on the cliffs had been. It was an event that would soon be in the past, never to be forgotten but to be put firmly aside. She would not allow the Earl of Eastham to exert any power over her, even from the grave. Perhaps in time she would even be able to find it within herself to pity him.

But not yet.

The carriage returned from the village soon after noon. The inn had apparently been bursting at the seams with the interested and curious—Julian's words. The earl's death had been ruled an act of justified defense of the life of his stepdaughter, the Duchess of Stanbrook, by Sir Everard Havell.

His body, Julian explained, was to be taken back to his home in Derbyshire for burial. A cousin of his would succeed him to the title. And there was an end of the matter.

An end of the matter.

Dora looked across the room at George, who was looking gravely back at her.

An end of something, yes, but not of everything.

We will talk,
he had told her, but she wondered if they ever would.

S
ir Everard and Lady Havell left after breakfast the following morning, bound for Candlebury Abbey in Sussex.

“I only hope we get there in time,” Dora's mother said as the two of them strolled a little way along the terrace while the bags were being loaded into the carriage. “This is one thing I can do for Agnes after so many years of neglect, and she has asked for me, bless her heart.”

“There are a few weeks to go yet before her time,” Dora said.

Her mother stopped walking. “I cannot thank you enough, Dora,” she said, “for inviting us here and being so kind. I can never ask your forgiveness for the past because it is not forgivable, but—”

“Mama!” Dora caught up her mother's hands in her own. “This is an altogether new phase of all our lives. Let it be new, unshadowed by the past. If the past had been different, everything would be different now. I would not be married to George, and you would not be married to Sir Everard. Either would be a pity, would it not?”

Her mother sighed. “You are generous, Dora,” she said. “I do love him, you know. And it is very clear that yours is a love match.”

Was it? Dora loved George with all her heart, but did he love her with all his? Sometimes she believed it. Oh, most of the time she did. Surely he did. She smiled.

“I have adored having you here,” Dora said. “And Sir Everard too, even apart from the fact that I owe him my life.”

A teary-eyed farewell followed before George's traveling carriage was finally bowling along the driveway. Seeing Philippa and Julian and Belinda on their way an hour or so later was altogether more cheerful, for they lived not very far away.

George set a hand on Dora's shoulder as the carriage disappeared from sight. “Alone at last,” he said.

She laughed. “Is it not strange, that feeling?” she said. “I can remember when I used to have visitors at the cottage. I enjoyed most of those visits immensely, but when I shut the door behind the last of the callers, there was always a huge feeling of almost guilty relief that I was alone again. This is even better, however, because we are alone together.”

He squeezed her shoulder and they went inside.

The house felt very quiet for the rest of the day with all the guests gone and all signs of the ball cleared away. George went off somewhere with his steward, and Dora spent some time with Mrs. Lerner in the morning room and Mr. Humble in the kitchen. She wrote long letters to her father and to Oliver and Louisa. She briefly considered returning a book she had borrowed from
Barbara, but even the prospect of a cheerful conversation with her particular friend was more than she could cope with today. She wanted peace.

George found her later in the music room, playing the harp. She spread her hands over the strings to stop their vibrations and smiled at him.

“It will always be the most wonderful gift ever,” she said.

His eyes smiled. The rest of his face did not. It looked austere, she thought, thinner and paler than it had looked even just a few days ago. If she were meeting him now for the first time, she would be far more awed than she had been last year.

“Summer is playing us a swan song,” he said. “It is really quite warm outside. Would you care to sit in the flower garden?”

She stood the harp upright and got to her feet. He stood too and looked at her for a few moments before offering his arm and leading her outside. They sat on the wooden seat beneath the window of the morning room in the small flower garden that was her favorite part of the cultivated park. It was always sheltered from the wind and it had a special rural appeal because it was out of sight of the headland and the sea. Multicolored daisies grew in the stone urn that stood at the center of the plot. Late in the year though it was getting to be, there were still chrysanthemums about them and asters and snapdragons among other late-blooming flowers.

“But never a weed,” she said aloud. “I have never been able to find a single one.”

“It would be more than a gardener's job would be
worth,” he said. “He would be cast into outer darkness, without notice and without a reference.”

She laughed, and they subsided into a silence that must have lasted for several minutes before he broke it.

“I was the greenest of boys,” he said at last, “when my father summoned me home from my regiment and expected me to sell out only a few months after he had purchased my commission. It did not occur to me to fight him though I was bitterly disappointed. I was also grief-stricken to learn that he was dying and overwhelmed at what lay ahead for myself. Why he got it into his head that I should marry before he died when I was only seventeen years old, I do not know. I do know that my brother and he were always at loggerheads over something or other. They were too similar in nature, perhaps. My father wanted to make sure I would get to my duty early, I suppose, and produce an heir so that my brother and his descendants would be safely distanced from the succession. However it was, I did not fight him on that issue either. I was young, but I had a growing boy's appetites. When I saw Miriam for the first time, I could not believe my good fortune, even though I was also consumed with embarrassment, for I was being forced to make her an offer in the presence of both our fathers. She was extraordinarily beautiful and remained so all the rest of her life.”

He stopped talking as abruptly as he had started. He was sitting, apparently relaxed, on the seat beside Dora, but he was turned very slightly away from her.

“I was hideously nervous on our wedding night,” he said. “But I need not have worried. She refused me
admittance to her room. I did not actually try the door, but she told me the next day that she had locked it. She also told me it would remain locked against me for the rest of our lives. I have no idea if it did. I never put the matter to the test.”

Dora turned her head sharply to stare at his profile. She could feel her pulse drumming in her ears and her temples. Did that mean . . . ?

“She also told me,” he said, “that she was passionately in love with someone else, that she always would be, that she was with child by him, and that her father had married her to me with instructions to be very sure to have marital relations with me at the earliest possible moment so that the child would appear to be mine. She even told me, when I asked, who the father was. I suppose he told you?”

“Yes.” Dora was almost surprised to hear her own voice sounding normal.

“She defied me to turn her out,” he said, “to refuse to acknowledge the baby as mine, especially if it should turn out to be a boy. It was apparent that she utterly despised me, an impression she gave for the rest of her life. She was three years older than I. I must have seemed like a gangling boy to her, especially when her lover was ten years older.”

Dora lifted one hand to set against his back, closed it in on itself, and returned it to her lap.

“I have been inclined to condemn myself as spineless,” he said. “But really I was just young. My father died three weeks after my wedding, and while he still lived he was in no condition to share my burden and give
advice. Perhaps I would not have consulted him anyway. I was too ashamed. I said nothing to anyone. I believe that for a few months I was full of inward bravado and the determination not to remain a victim of such deceit. But when the baby was born—a son—and I saw him for the first time, I saw that he was puny and ugly and crying and my mind hated him while my heart felt his helplessness and his innocence. I was eighteen. I had been dazzled at my first sight of Miriam. But I fell in love at my first sight of her son.”

He spread his hands before him, closed them into fists, and relaxed them.

“I do not know what Miriam hoped for,” he said. “That I would accept the child as my own so that she could remain respectable and her son would be heir to a dukedom? Or that I would repudiate him so that she would be irrevocably ruined and beyond the power of Eastham, her father, and could be set up somewhere in a cozy love nest by Meikle, her half brother? She never said which she would have preferred, and I did not ask. Brendan was my son from the moment I saw him. Though I was probably not motivated entirely by love. I probably felt a certain satisfaction in keeping Miriam from the other alternative, which was obviously what Meikle hoped for.”

He examined his palms for a few moments.

“I was a mere boy,” he said. “Such a green boy. She doted on Brendan and kept him from me as much as she could. She used to go off to visit her father for weeks at a time, and I did not forbid it. Meikle used to come here to visit her—and it was years and years before I had
backbone enough to show him the door and tell him never to return. I like to believe I would have matured far faster than I did if my father had lived and my life had continued as it was. But life is as it is. We never know what twists and turns it will take or what hand we will be dealt. It is what we do with the unexpected and with that hand that shows our mettle. I did not lose my virginity until I was twenty-five. Pardon me, I should not mention this, I suppose. But even then I felt guilty because I was married and had vowed to be faithful. I may not have lost it even then if Miriam had not told me she was with child again. She miscarried after three months. I was a cuckold and a weakling, Dora, and ultimately, an adulterer.”

This time she did set a hand on his back. He was leaning slightly forward, his arms draped over his thighs, his hands hanging between them. His head was lowered.

“I was
twenty-five,
” he said.

“George.” She circled her hand over his back and patted it.

“Whenever I felt rage against the two of them and felt I must at last
say
something and
do
something,” he said, “I thought of Brendan and what any scandal would do to him. He was not an attractive child. He was overweight and petulant. Miriam was overprotective of him. She always fancied he was of a delicate constitution and would not allow him to mingle with any of the neighborhood children or do anything she deemed dangerous or anything at all with me. She gave in to his tantrums and gave him whatever he wanted. The servants disliked him. So did the neighbors. Miriam loved him. So
did I. It was perhaps the only thing we ever had in common. And she hated me for it.”

Dora patted his back again.

“Self-pity,” he murmured. “I have always fought against it. It is not an admirable trait. She would not allow me to send him to school when he was old enough, and she fought against the hiring of a tutor. It was one thing over which I did assert myself, though. I did not want my son to grow up both ignorant and detestable. I chose the man with care. And then one day, when Brendan was twelve, I caught a look on his face when he heard that I was about to go to London for a month or so. He looked—wistful. I asked if he would like to go with me. He had never particularly liked me, perhaps because I would never take notice of his sulks, but he brightened when I asked him that. And he said yes before sneering and adding that of course I would not take him. I had to fight Miriam over it, but he was legally my son and she could not stop me. We were in London for three weeks, my boy and I, and they were three of the most precious weeks of my life. Of his too, I believe. He blossomed before my eyes, and we saw everything there was to be seen. Only once did he try sulking and having a tantrum. I observed that he was being a prize ass, and we looked at each other and both—laughed.”

He paused to smile and then sigh.

“He was my son indeed after that,” he said. “Oh, I will not say that life changed and became suddenly perfect. It did not, and Brendan often returned to his old self, especially in his mother's presence. But we did things together. We went fishing and shooting targets.
We went riding. He had never been allowed to ride before then for fear he would fall and kill himself. He lost some of his weight and his sulky looks. I took him over to my brother's a number of times and he and Julian established something of a friendship, certainly more than I had seen Brendan establish with any other boy. I had great hopes for his future.”

He inhaled, lifted his head, and looked around him as though he had forgotten where he was.

“And all that,” he said, “was the good part of my married life, Dora.” He turned his head to look over his shoulder at her. “Perhaps you can see why I have kept it all to myself until now. I have never told even my fellow Survivors, all of whom have bared their souls to me and one another. I have kept it to myself, however, only partly because it reflects badly upon me. That does not matter
that
much.” He snapped two fingers together. “I have kept it to myself out of respect for my dead son. He was
my son,
and no one knew differently except Miriam and her father and her half brother and me. Now I am the only one left and I have told you. I did not intend to do even that, as you are well aware. Brendan must live in memory as my son. But I owe you all of myself, past, present, and future. I would trust you with my life. I can trust you with my son's memory.”

Dora blinked and bit her upper lip.

And all that was the good part of my married life.

What, then, was the bad part?

“Thank you,” she said. There seemed nothing else to say.

He looked up at the sky. The afternoon was growing
late, and the air was cooler. But neither made a move to go back indoors.

“Meikle came for a visit the year Brendan turned seventeen,” he said. “His father was still alive at the time so he had not yet inherited the Eastham title. And I had not yet forbidden him the house, though I had made it clear for the previous few years that he was unwelcome here. He liked to spend time with Brendan, but Brendan did not particularly enjoy his company. I do not know why. Actually, I do. I cannot remember the context, but I do recall Brendan's saying to me in clear resentment one day when he was fifteen or so, ‘
sometimes he acts as if he is my father
.'” On this occasion, Miriam wanted to go back home with Meikle for a while, and she wanted Brendan to go with them. He refused and she got upset. Brendan dug his heels in. Meikle tried to wheedle and persuade, and when that failed, he lost his temper and told Brendan everything. The full truth. I was away from the house at the time.”