Only Enchanting (35 page)

With trouble looming.

Caused, he was almost sure, by Velma. She had gone digging, and she had found gold. Yet it seemed so out of character for her. She was all sweetness and light.

The drum pounded at his head from the inside again.

“Flavian?” The voice came from just behind him. “What is it?”

He had woken her. But, dash it all, was it surprising? His grip on the window frame tightened again, and he closed his eyes.

“I could not sleep,” he said. “Go b-back to bed. I’ll be with you shortly.”

He felt her hand come to rest against his back, between his shoulder blades, just below his neck. For a moment he tensed. And then a door opened in his mind, and he knew it was what had woken him. Memory had come bursting in upon him—a whole set of memories that had been closed to him for years to such a degree that he had not even realized there was anything missing.

“God!” he said.

“What is it?” Agnes asked again. “What woke you in such a panic? Tell me. I am your wife.”

“She schemed and lied,” he said, “and broke his heart.”

There was a short silence.

“Lady Hazeltine?” she asked.

“Velma, yes,” he said. “It s-started the year we were fifteen.”

He lowered his arms and turned from the window. Agnes was wearing her nightgown again, a flimsy, pretty new one. The room was chilly. He strode over to her dressing room and in the near darkness found a woolen shawl. He brought it back, wrapped it about her shoulders, and led her back to the bed. He seated them side by side on the edge of it and took one of her hands in his. He closed his other hand into a fist and rubbed it over his forehead.

“I lost a whole chunk of memory,” he said. “And then it came b-back and woke me, and shut down again. It is how it used to h-happen when I was still at Penderris. Not so much now, though. I always assume I have remembered everything.”

“Have you recalled it again?” she asked, turning slightly so that she could hold his hand with both of hers.

Yes, it was there. In the open. It was not going to wink out again.

“Len—Leonard Burton, my school friend who later became Earl of Hazeltine—had not c-come to stay that
summer, as he usually did,” he said. “He had to go home to Northumberland for some family event. I can’t recall what. Marianne had just made her come-out and was off at a house party with our m-mother. David stayed in the house or close to it most of the time. He did not have the energy for much else. So I wandered about the park alone—riding, swimming, fishing, doing whatever took my fancy. I was easy to p-please. I always enjoyed just being home.”

“And you visited Farthings Hall?” she asked.

“I do not think so,” he said. “Not to see Velma, if that is what you mean. We were never really f-friends, except perhaps when we were very young. She was a girl.”

He frowned at his bare feet, which were stretched out before him.

“
She
came to Candlebury, though,” he said. “To see David, she always claimed. They were to be officially betrothed when she was eighteen, and m-married when she was nineteen—that had been planned by both sets of parents when she was still in the c-cradle. No one ever questioned it. She ought not to have come. There were only the two of us—David and me—there apart from the servants, and she never brought either a groom or a maid with her. She came by all sorts of different routes too. She had an uncanny knack of coming across
me
on her way to the house.”

“Was it just coincidence?” Agnes asked.

“I thought so,” he said. “She was always so s-surprised to see me and so full of apologies for disturbing me. But she always stayed to stroll or sit with me. Sometimes she spent so long with me that she never did get to the house to see David. Whenever she
did
, though, he would send immediately for a m-maid to sit with them and then for a groom to accompany her back to Farthings. She told me she liked David, even l-loved him, that she l-longed
to be old enough to m-marry him so that she could look after him.”

He could remember being annoyed the first few times she had found him and not simply ridden on and left him to his own company. But he had been
fifteen
, for God’s sake. It had not taken him long. . . .

“And then I started touching her,” he said, “and kissing her, even though she used to cry afterward and tell me we absolutely must not do it ever again. Because of D-David. Then one afternoon we went farther than kisses. Considerably farther, though not . . . all the way. And that was the end of it. She cried and t-told me she loved me. I told her I loved her too but that it was over, that we m-must not meet like that again. And I m-meant it. I could not do such a thing to my brother. I knew he adored her. I d-don’t think I set foot outside the house for a week, and then I went to stay with another school friend who had been p-pestering me to visit him. It meant l-leaving David alone, but I was having a hard time looking him in the eye anyway.”

“And all this you have just remembered?” Agnes asked him.

He frowned. Velma had come to Candlebury that summer because his mother and Marianne were away, and David was more or less housebound, and Len was home in Northumberland. She had come to see
him
. David could have held little attraction for a fifteen-year-old girl, not when he had a more robust brother, and not when that brother would surely be Viscount Ponsonby of Candlebury Abbey in the not-too-distant future.

But could she be blamed for such conniving?

“No,” he said. “This I remembered, and the apparently random meetings during the next three years, and the t-temptation. She was a lovely girl, and I was a l-lusty boy. But the date for their betrothal was coming c-closer,
and D-David was happy, though he once confided in me that he thought p-perhaps it was selfish of him to hold her to a promise made by our parents and hers so many years ago. She was always so
f-fond
of him, though, whenever they were together.”

“What
have
you remembered, then, Flavian?” she asked.

He swallowed once and then again. She was holding the back of his hand against her cheek, he realized.

“When Velma turned eighteen,” he said, “and plans were being made for a betrothal party and an announcement to be sent to the London papers, David suddenly refused to marry her. He said it would be unfair when he was not w-well enough to give her the life she deserved. He set her free to find someone else. He hoped she would go to London for a Season and make a b-brilliant marriage. She was inconsolable, and he was heartbroken. And all this I remembered too.”

She set her lips against the back of his hand.

“Our families immediately devised an alternate plan,” he said. “It seemed almost as if they were r-relieved, as if they were far h-happier with the idea of Velma’s marrying
me
. And then D-David s-spoke privately with m-me.”

He shivered and got to his feet to go and stand close to the window again. His hands found the pockets of his dressing gown and shoved inside.

“He asked me if it was t-true,” he said. “And he asked me if I l-loved her. And he t-told me that I had his blessing anyway, and that he would not stop loving me. Though he did add, as a sort of j-joke, that if he only had a bit more energy, he m-might challenge me to pistols at d-dawn.”

He opened and closed his hands inside his pockets. Agnes said nothing.

“She had told him—and sworn him to secrecy,” he
said. “She had told him that she and I had l-loved each other p-passionately for three years and were l-lovers, and that I had assured her we would s-still be lovers after she married David, but that she had decided she could not c-continue with the deceit. She had b-begged him to set her free to m-marry the man she loved.”

He could hear Agnes draw an audible breath.

“He believed her?” she asked.

“She was sweet and without guile,” he said. “Or so we both thought. And perhaps her motive was understandable. She was more or less l-locked into a marriage plan in which she had had no say. But what she did was . . . cruel. He would have set her free if she had but asked.”

Her arms came about his waist from behind, and her cheek came to rest against his back.

“Did you
explain
?” she asked.

“I d-did,” he said. “I told him everything, as I have told it to you. I t-told him I did not w-want to marry her. And
he
told
me
that I would have little choice, given the determination of our families to bring about the match. And she would surely see to it that she got her w-way. I b-begged him to purchase a commission for me, and he agreed, even though I was his heir and ought not to have put myself at risk as a soldier. Worse, my going away to war for an indefinite time made it l-likely that we would never see each other again.”

“You did not love her, then?” Agnes asked.

“I was
eighteen
,” he said. “I had barely tested my wings.”

“Did she love you?”

“I cannot answer for her,” he said. “She was always ambitious, though. She always talked quite openly about the time when she would be a
viscountess
and half the world would have to curtsy and bow to her and obey her every bidding. Her father is a baronet, but he is not particularly well off. She m-might not have done so well on
the marriage mart. Though, as it happened, she married an earl.”

“Your friend?”

“Len,” he said. “Hazeltine. Yes.”

He must have fallen in love with her, though, he thought, when he was home on leave the year David died, must he not? He had left his brother on his deathbed in order to dash off to London to celebrate at the lavish betrothal ball the Fromes gave in their honor. Unless . . .

It frightened him to realize that there might still be great holes in his memory in places he did not even suspect. And he was beginning to wonder about those weeks of his leave. He was quite aware of the fact that he could not remember the whys of his behavior.

He turned to Agnes and wrapped his arms about her and rested one cheek against the top of her head.

“I am sorry,” he said. “I am s-sure the last thing any new wife needs to hear in the middle of the night is the story of her husband’s dealings with another woman.”

“
Part
of the story,” she said softly. She tipped back her head and looked into his face, her own dimly lit by the light from the window. “This is not the whole of it, is it? You do not remember the whole?”

His stomach churned slightly.

“The trouble is,” he said, flashing her a grin, “that I cannot always remember what I cannot remember—or
that
I cannot remember. Perhaps there are still all sorts of gaps in my mind. I am a m-mess, Agnes. You have married a mess.”

“We are
all
a mess.” He could see the flash of her teeth in the darkness, and he could hear the smile in her voice. “I think it must be part of being human.”

“But not many of us are walking around free and unfettered with heads like those cheeses with g-great holes
in them,” he said. “You have married a man with cheese for a head.”

She was laughing now. So, astonishingly, was he.

“What an adventure,” she said.

“Speak for yourself.” He lowered his head and brushed his nose across hers. Briefly, he thought about warning her of what had been buzzing about Lady Merton’s party the night before last. But there had been enough drama for one night. “Cold nose.”

“Warm heart,” she retorted.

“I
am
sorry,” he said. “I am so sorry.”

“I am not,” she told him. “Come back to bed and pull up the blankets. It is chilly.”

“I have something better to offer than b-blankets,” he said.

“Braggart.”

“If I cannot w-warm you more effectively than blankets,” he told her, “I will need to find a mouse hole somewhere and curl up inside it for the r-rest of my life.”

“Come and warm me, then,” she said, her voice a soft caress.

“Yes,
ma’am.
”

He felt a dizzying sort of happiness, as though some great load had been lifted from his shoulders. What a relief to know he had
not
loved Velma.

At least . . .

But for the moment he was safe and even happy with his wife.

20

O
ne of Flavian’s aunts and two of his female cousins came during the morning to meet Agnes, about whose existence they had learned late yesterday upon their arrival in town. They ended up bearing her off with Flavian’s mother for a drive in Green Park. It was his aunt DeeDee—a corruption of Dorinda, he seemed to remember—his mother’s younger sister, and his cousins Doris and Clementine, her third and fourth daughters. Or was it the fourth and fifth? Dash it, he should know. Clemmie was the youngest, anyway, and yet another cousin about to make her debut into society. She was a giggler, Flavian discovered during the few minutes he spent in her company, but then, most girls her age were.

He wondered whether Agnes had been a giggler at that age, but would bet his fortune she had not been. She had married her William when she was eighteen, and if there had ever existed a duller dog and one less romantically inclined, he would be surprised to hear it. Not that he had known the man, of course, and not that Agnes had said much about him. But much was to be deduced. . . .

If Flavian had the right of it, she had married Keeping because her father’s remarriage had made her feel like a
stranger in her own home. She had married him because he was safe. Strange, that. For now
he
,
Flavian, had married
her
for the same reason.

He stood outside the front door of Arnott House after handing the ladies into the open carriage, all five crowded in together, and waving them on their way. He brooded for a few moments before going back inside.

A family was a good thing to have, even if it sometimes seemed that its numbers must extend into the hundreds and that it was made up almost entirely of the noisiest, most talkative members of the beau monde, both on his father’s side and his mother’s. Yes, it could be a
very
good thing to have, for his family had always been close-knit. Every member pulled for every other member, even if there were sometimes squabbles among individuals, especially siblings.