Practical Widow to Passionate Mistress (21 page)

‘Ha! She knows it well enough. Believe me, we made it very plain when she had the effrontery to write and condole with us on our loss. Wanting money, more like. We wrote straight back and told her that we refused to acknowledge her existence.’

‘In that case, I wish you good day. Woodward, show Mr and Mrs Halgate out.’

Meg had never been married. And she had, according to the Halgates, gone through a form of marriage with their son knowing he was already wed, however unfortunately. She had lied to him about her marriage, persisted in the lie when he thought that she would have trusted him with any secret. Pride, and the fatalistic expectation that the worst would happen just when he was happy again, nagged at him. He could feel his temper rising, and with it pain that Meg was not all he had thought her. He curbed it, hard.

‘Woodward.’ The butler stopped in his progress across the hall. ‘Kindly ask Mrs Halgate to come to the study.’ He would not tolerate being lied to. Ross fixed that thought in the forefront of his mind and clung to it. Anything rather than examine the puzzled hurt that seethed beneath his anger.

Meg tapped on the study door, then let herself in. Her stomach was fluttering with nerves, but she knew what she was going to do. She would sit down and tell Ross
the story of how she had come to fall into what she had believed was love with James, the long, silent months when he was in London, the delight of finding he still cared for her, her misery at home, the elopement—everything. Then he would understand.

Her courage failed a little as Ross turned from the window to face her. His face was stony, but his eyes burned dark. Meg opened her mouth, but no words came out.

‘I have just had the dubious pleasure of entertaining Mrs Halgate,’ he remarked.

The tone was so at odds with the words that she blinked at him, failing to understand. ‘Mrs…James’s
wife?
She is alive?’

‘I understand that both his wife and child are dead.’

Child?
Meg’s knees gave way and she sat down with a thump. ‘Then who…?’

‘The late Lieutenant Halgate’s parents. The people who, hardly surprisingly, failed to acknowledge you when Halgate was killed.’ Ross hitched his hip on one corner of the desk and studied her face. ‘They felt I should throw you out.’

‘I was going to tell you. To explain.’

‘Yes? Meg—I wish you had told me sooner. It appears to me that you were intent on deception when you boarded that ship and you have kept it up ever since. Why call yourself by a married name you had no right to?’

‘Because it was my identity for five and a half years! I was James’s wife for five and a half years and I—’

All the blood in her head seemed to have ebbed away. The room spun, the only fixed thing in it was Ross’s hard, implacable face, the only reality the pain
and suspicion in his voice. ‘I did
not
know when I married him and I was going to tell you this afternoon.’

‘You did not tell me on the ship, or when I offered you employment. You did not tell me when I asked you to be my mistress.’ He paused and for a moment Meg thought he needed to control his breathing, but his voice as he went on was steady. ‘You did not tell me when I asked you to be my wife.’

‘I did not know how to.’ It was the truth. Even thinking about it had hurt too much.

‘Could you not trust me?’ He picked up the pen from the ink stand and began to roll it between his fingers. ‘Do you know how the Halgates found me? One of my neighbours knows them and wrote them a letter warning that you were back in England, still masquerading as their son’s wife and apparently pulling the wool over the eyes of a certain Lord Brandon. Or perhaps he thought I did know and did not care.’

Everything was mercifully numb now, just as it had been when they told her James was dead. The numbness had begun to melt into regret by the time they showed her his will and the document folded inside it and then the pain had come like a slash from a knife, all consuming. It would again, very soon, but not yet.

‘I did not know when I married him,’ she repeated finally as the silence dragged on. ‘I had no idea.’

‘You say you loved the man, yet you suspected nothing?’ There was a sharp crack and Ross tossed the splintered halves of the pen on to the desk.

‘I was an innocent. A romantic innocent. I thought I loved him.’
I love you. Please do not kill that, please,
the voice in her head clamoured.

‘Then you have changed, Meg. These days you are
all practicality. You seized on my unconscious body quickly enough as a means to get you back to England. I wonder what would have been my fate if that plan had not occurred to you? I would be feeding the crabs on some sandbar in the Gironde, I suppose.’

It seemed her legs would support her after all and that pain and hurt could be turned into anger. Meg stood up, so close that her skirts brushed Ross’s knee. ‘I had years to learn to be practical, years to learn to look after myself and a man who was not the model of perfection a foolish girl thought him to be. And afterwards? When I learned that he had betrayed me and that poor woman? I could have just given up and died, I suppose. Or sold myself. Either would have been convenient for others, I am sure. But I chose to live. It is hard to be a woman alone, Ross; a married title is some little protection, although not much.

‘I was coming to tell you the truth today, give you the opportunity to withdraw your offer. You can believe instead two people who were deeply hurt by their only son’s behaviour. They need to blame someone, poor things, especially if they have lost a grandchild as well as a son.’ Meg fought for composure as Ross straightened up, his eyes fixed on her face. ‘If I may go now?’

‘In a moment,’ he said as he reached for her and pulled her into his arms. His mouth was hot and hard, but his control was complete as he plundered her mouth, holding her with one hand cupping the back of her head, the other at her waist. Meg tasted anger and need and confusion and fought her own wildly conflicting instincts, to claw at his eyes and to melt into his arms.

It was the last time they would kiss, the last time her nostrils would be full of the spicy scent of his skin, the
last time his body would heat hers with demands that her own flesh leapt to answer.

Then Ross released her. ‘Meg, I want to trust you, I want you. But—’

She knew him now, saw the pulse beating in his throat, the vein blue on his temple and the rise and fall of rigidly controlled breathing. That demonstration of male dominance had been as hard for him as it had been for her. But if he could not trust her, there was nothing, could be nothing. He would never be sure of her again.

‘But?’ she asked rhetorically, turned on her heel and walked out, up the stairs and into her room. She turned the key in the lock and then simply slid down the door until she sat crumpled at the foot of it.

She loved Ross and she had lost him, not because she had refused him, not because he had heard her explanation and acknowledged that Lord Brandon could not marry a woman in her situation. No, she had lost him because, it seemed, she had never truly had him. Perhaps he could not trust, perhaps his past had killed that in him. She did not know, all she knew was that she hurt.

He did not trust her or he would have shown the Halgates the door, she told herself. He did not love her or he would have fought for her. Meg drew up her knees, wrapped her arms around them and sat, face buried in her skirts, and sobbed.

‘M
rs Halgate!’ The knocking shook Meg out of a cramped sleep. She was still huddled against the door, her face sticky with half-dried tears, her skirts rumpled, her back aching. She scrambled to her feet and went to sit on the edge of the bed.

‘Mrs Halgate, ma’am!’

‘Damaris, I have a sick headache,’ she called back, her voice convincingly shaky.

‘Oh. I’m sorry, ma’am. Can I get you anything? Some tea? A tisane?’

‘No. Thank you.’

‘I’ll leave you in peace to sleep, then. Only, you don’t know where his lordship’s gone, do you? He went out, very suddenly without saying and Perrott was wondering what clothes to lay out for him this evening.’

‘I’m sorry, Damaris. I have no idea.’

He may go to the devil, for all I care,
she thought, knowing it was not true. But she was angry, she realised, as she splashed water on her blotchy face and dragged a brush through her hair. Furious with Ross and the
Halgates and James. The only people in the world who loved and trusted her and always would, whatever anyone said about her, were her sisters. And she was going to find them. If the villagers would not talk to Jago, perhaps they would talk to her.

Meg dragged open drawers and threw wide the clothes press. Out of old habit she had simply packed everything she owned—it was little enough—when she came to London. Now she stripped to her skin and folded each item she had bought with Ross’s money on the bed. She dressed in her old gown and underthings and shook every penny she had out of her purse and the money bag that contained her savings and the salary Ross had advanced.

She knew how much she possessed on the day she met Ross. She put that to one side. He owned her nothing for the voyage; she had exchanged her care of him for food and the cabin. She totalled the days she had been employed and counted out the money for those and added it to her own cash. Then she wrote a careful sum out on a piece of paper and piled the remaining money with that on top of the clothes.

Meg packed everything else she owned back into the valise, put her old bonnet on her head, wrapped her shawl around her shoulders and unlocked the door.

The hall was deserted when she leaned over the banister. Meg eased her way down the remaining flight of steps, ran across the hall and opened the door. The street was busy and there, coming towards her from Piccadilly, was a hackney carriage. She hailed it. ‘Ludgate Hill, the Belle Sauvage.’

Ross woke with a blinding hangover and lay staring at the ceiling while he tried to remember how much he
had drunk, and why. Meg. He sat up, winced and reached out an arm for the bell. He had gone out, fully intending to get drunk and make someone else’s life miserable. He had found a gaming hell off St James’s—Pickering Place, he seemed to recall—and had proceeded to win a great deal of money at cards while drinking an inordinate amount of very bad, very expensive claret.

‘Good afternoon, my lord.’ Perrott came in with catlike tread and proffered a salver with a small glass of an unpleasant milky-brown liquid on it. ‘My previous employer used to swear by this.’

It could only kill him. Ross swigged it back, gasped and collapsed on to the pillows while his head spun and his stomach churned. Then, by some miracle, he felt marginally better.

‘What time is it?’

‘Two, my lord. Shall I send for your bath?’

‘The bath and cold water. Then coffee.’

He forced himself out of bed when the shallow tub was manhandled into the dressing room and stood there stark naked while Perrott poured cold water over him. It was vicious, but effective. By the time he had drunk two cups of coffee his brain was working again, which was unfortunate as he was then able to recall, in unpleasant detail, just why he had gone out to get drunk yesterday.

He had to go to Meg, speak to her, try to convince her that he did trust her. Yesterday the shock and anger had overwhelmed him and the cold temper that was his inheritance had ridden him. She had seemed so shaken by his disbelief, so angry when he kissed her. She was as hurt by his lack of trust in her as he had been that she had lied to him.

Something was nagging him, some turn of phrase. Ross rang for food and poured more coffee, forcing his memory back over every word they had exchanged.

I was coming to tell you the truth, give you the opportunity to withdraw your offer.

Before…
That was the unsaid word in that sentence. Meg had been going to tell him the truth so he could withdraw, because if he did not she would accept him. If he believed that, then other things made sense. She was not trying to trap him, or she would not tell him the truth—not until she had accepted him, by which point his sense of honour would probably bar him from withdrawing.

And if she was prepared to marry him, at the cost of confessing her whole painful history—what did that prove? That she loved him?

Perrott put a veal chop coated in steaming onion gravy in front of him. Ross cut into it and chewed. What had she said to him when they had had that furious argument?
Don’t men realise that it is not the lying together that is important to women—however good that is—it is all the other things. Friendship, companionship, trust, give and take between two people…

And he had sneered at her about love and she had gone white. If she loved him, and thought she would lose him by telling him about her sham marriage, then that would explain her reluctance, the time it had taken her to pluck up courage.

Love. Did he want love? Of course he did. He wanted Billy’s love, as the grandfather he had never known, Lily’s love, the sister he never had, William’s love, another brother. And Meg’s love. A wife and lover’s love.

‘You damned idiot.’ He stared at the half-eaten chop.

‘My lord?’

‘Not you, Perrott. Me. Where is Mrs Halgate?’

‘In her room, I believe, my lord. Damaris said she was unwell yesterday afternoon and I have not seen her since.’

Something trailed one icy fingertip down Ross’s spine. He shoved back his chair and strode out of the door, up the stairs, two at a time. There was no answer as he hammered on Meg’s door, only the silence of an empty room. When he opened the door the bedchamber was immaculate and on the end of the bed was a neat pile of clothing and money. Money and paper.

Ross snatched at it.

‘Oh, my lord.’ Damaris arrived flustered in the doorway. ‘Mrs Halgate said she had a sick headache, my lord. I left her to sleep until she rang.’ She stared about the room, then at Ross’s hand. ‘She’s gone? And left a note?’

‘She has gone and left a precise accounting of her wages.’ Ross strode to the landing. ‘Woodward!’

‘My lord.’ The butler appeared below him in the hall.

‘When did Mrs Halgate leave?’

‘I was not aware that she had, my lord.’

Ross closed his fist and felt the painful scrunch of the paper against his palm.
Where have you gone, Meg? Back to Cornwall?
No, there was nothing for her there. So where? Where could a young woman without friends, without references and with virtually no resources, go?

Meg climbed down from the farmer’s cart, stiff in every joint. The journey had seemed to last for ever. The stage from Ludgate Hill had been cramped and smelly
and it had been a relief to climb down at the Falcon in Ipswich, even though she then had to find a carrier’s cart to take her as far as Framlingham. When they finally arrived she had given up for the day and went to seek a room at the inn, too tired and hungry to face finding someone to carry her the remaining six or so miles to Martinsdene.

Discomfort was a blessing sometimes, Meg decided, buttering bread in one corner of the dining room of the Blue Boar. It was difficult to think too hard when you were uncomfortable. Now with a chair beneath her bruised behind and good food in front of her it was all too easy to think about Ross and to mourn what she had so nearly shared with him. He might even have come to love her, one day. Just a little.

She no longer even wanted to throw things at him, exasperating, proud, private man that he was. She just ached for him and the challenge of teasing the faintest twitch of a smile from that gorgeous, wicked mouth.

Meg finished her roast gammon and found she even had appetite for the apple pie the waiting girl was bringing out from the kitchens. She had learned in the Peninsula that it was no good picking at food, however miserable she was. Food was strength and she needed that.

Now, as she turned up the lane towards Martinsdene, the church tower was visible ahead, the slopes of the hills and the angles of the copses as they met the fields were all achingly familiar. Life had gone on while she had been away and the place that had once been the centre of her world had got along perfectly well without her. Meg shifted the valise from one hand to another.

Jago had found nothing here but a wall of silence. It
was only her anger and the hope born of desperation that made her even try. But try she would. There was even the faint, forlorn hope that her father would welcome her back, that after all these years apart they might find a way to reach each other. Meg walked into the Royal George inn. ‘Good morning, Mr Wilkins. I require a room for two nights.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’ Ben Wilkins put down the cloth he had been polishing tankards with and smiled his familiar gap-toothed smile. ‘We’ve a nice one overlooking the green.’ Then he blinked, stared and Meg smiled back. ‘Miss Margaret! Why, they said you’d run off with young Mr Halgate, so they did—and here you are, home again.’

Meg winced inwardly at the word
home,
but kept her smile bright. ‘Yes, here I am. It is good to see you looking so well, Mr Wilkins.’

‘I’ve been married to Jenny North—you remember her?—for five years now and we’ve three nippers, all bright boys too. And Jenny, she’s smartened this old place up wonderful fine…’

Meg nodded and smiled and waited until Ben ran out of news and started thinking. ‘But, Miss Margaret, why do you want to stay here?’

‘I may not be very welcome at the vicarage,’ she said frankly. His expression showed embarrassment and comprehension and an obvious question. ‘But I need to find my sisters.’

‘I don’t know, Miss Margaret. It’s a mystery, certain sure.’ All she got after half an hour of speculation and gossip were the dates that Jago had gleaned.

‘I will visit my father, of course,’ she told Wilkins as he carried her bag upstairs, ducking under the low
beams in the room he showed her to. There was no point in trying to be secretive. Better to be frank and give the village gossips something accurate to clack their tongues over.

And there was no point in putting things off either, she decided after eating the luncheon that Jenny Wilkins had provided along with five years’ worth of village news.

The vicarage looked just as it had when she had left. She walked in at the side gate and cut across the yard to the kitchen door. The garden was clipped and regimented, the door knocker shining, the white curtains starched. Everything as upright as its inhabitants, Meg thought with an attempt at humour.

The back door was open so she went right in.
I am a grown woman now. He can neither control me nor harm me.
So why was she feeling sick?

Mrs Philpott the cook, greyer and stouter than Meg remembered, was standing with her back to the door at the range. ‘Good afternoon, Mrs Philpott.’

The cook turned stared, gasped, ‘Miss Margaret!’ and went into strong hysterics, throwing her apron over her face and shrieking.

‘Oh, be quiet and pull yourself together!’ Meg gave her a little shake and the hysterics turned into gasps. ‘I have come to find out where my sisters are,’ she said as calmly as she could.

‘What is this racket?’ The door opened to reveal the Reverend Shelley, spectacles on his nose. ‘I am attempting to write tomorrow’s sermon—’ He stopped dead. ‘Margaret!’

‘Father.’ Once, long ago, there had been laughter,
once he had loved her, she thought, reaching back into childhood memories and the hazy recollections of the time before Mama died. She had wanted so much when she was growing up to please him, make him proud of her, find that vanished love again. She held her breath—she was home again, the prodigal daughter. Would he forgive her? Could she learn to love him again?

‘What are you doing here, you sinful girl?’ The pain twisted in her stomach. Rejection, not forgiveness. But she would not weep, there were her sisters to think of.

‘Where are Arabella and Celina?’ Meg demanded, her eyes fixed on her father’s face, searching for some hint that he knew as avidly as she had searched for some spark of welcome. But there was only baffled anger and righteous indignation on the vicar’s lean features.

‘I do not know and I do not care. They have fallen into sin as you did, I have no doubt. I failed to drive the wickedness out of you all, now I must bear the burden of it.’

Meg stood her ground for a long minute. She was not going to allow him to intimidate her, or to hurt her, ever again. It was worth coming back, worth the pain of the last few minutes, just to know that. Without a word she turned on her heel and walked away.

Sunday dawned bright and sunny. Meg lay listening to the sounds of the inn and the village starting the day, then got out of bed and began to wash and dress. She had one more idea, one more faint hope. If that did not work then she would go back to London, find whatever employment she could with no references, and advertise for her sisters. And she would forget Ross Brandon. The last resolution seemed impossible. How could she
forget him when she ached for him, worried about him, thought about him every moment?

She timed her arrival at church for Matins just as the organist lifted his hands from the keyboard and the vicar emerged from the vestry. Her veil down, Meg slipped into the rear pew. It was strange to be back here. The view was different from here and not from the high-sided Vicarage box pew. But there were the familiar monuments on the walls and the familiar hymn boards hanging on the pillars. The same vases held greenery around the font and the organ still wheezed on the high notes.

The ritual was soothing, although her father’s sermon was both dull and uninspiring after the warmth of Reverend Hawkins’s words.