Simply Love (5 page)

Even if everyone in the room had still been a stranger, she would immediately have known the identity of the man who was coming toward her, Anne was convinced. Tall, dark, and austerely handsome, he was also the consummate aristocrat—aloof and dignified, with a powerful presence. And here she was, an ex-governess, an unwed mother, an uninvited guest in his home—and about to dine at his table.

She would have turned and fled if the duchess had not had an arm linked through her own, she believed.

Or perhaps not. She did have some pride.

“Wulfric,” the duchess said, “here is Miss Jewell at last. This is my husband, the Duke of Bewcastle, Miss Jewell.”

Anne curtsied. She half expected that the next moment she would be banished into outer darkness.

“Your grace,” she murmured.

He inclined his head to her and she noticed his long fingers close about the handle of a jeweled quizzing glass, though he did not raise it. It was somehow a terrifying gesture.

“Miss Jewell,” he said. “Her grace and I were sadly remiss yesterday in not welcoming you personally to Glandwr. You will, perhaps, be good enough to forgive us. I trust you and your son have been made comfortable and will enjoy your stay here.”

They were gracious words, but his strange silver eyes did not smile.

“She has been busy in the nursery all day, Wulfric, breaking up fights and organizing games,” the duchess said, smiling brightly at him as if he were the warmest of mortals.

“I see no bruises, ma'am,” his grace said with perhaps the merest glimmering of humor. “But perhaps our nephews and nieces were merely warming up today for worse to come tomorrow. And perhaps it is as well for your health that our son is still but an infant in the cradle. We have great hopes of his keeping alive the Bedwyn reputation for hellery in the years to come.”

The duchess laughed.

And yes, Anne decided, there was definitely humor in his words. And she liked the way he had referred to his child as
our
son rather than as
my
son, as many men in his position would have done.

And then she was whisked away by the duchess to meet those to whom she had not yet been introduced—Mrs. Pritchard, Lady Aidan's elderly Welsh aunt; Lord and Lady Rannulf Bedwyn and the Earl of Rosthorn, who had visited the nursery but had come while she was in David's room playing word games with him and some of the older children; Baron Weston, Lady Alleyne's uncle; Mrs. and Miss Thompson, the duchess's mother and eldest sister; and her middle sister and brother-in-law, the Reverend and Mrs. Lofter, Alexander's parents.

Anne tried to memorize faces and names—though she hoped not to be in a position to use them for the next few weeks.

“Ah,” the duchess said, her arm still linked through Anne's, “and here comes Mr. Butler at last.”

The steward, who was supposed to fall violently in love with her elaborate coiffure and propose marriage to her before the night was out, Anne thought as she turned and looked toward the doorway, feeling the first flickering of amusement she had felt since leaving her room.

For a moment she was again arrested by the extraordinary good looks and manly physique of the man standing there, fully visible this time in the early evening sunshine that streamed through the west-facing windows. And again it was his left profile at which she gazed.

But even as a jolt of recognition half robbed her of breath, he was obscured from sight as Lord Alleyne, tall, dark, and handsome himself, and Lord Rannulf, even taller and fair and ruggedly good-looking, converged on him and slapped him on the back and greeted him heartily.

“Syd, old chap,” she heard Lord Rannulf say, “where the devil have you been hiding? But Wulf put the fear of God in you this morning, did he?”

So he was not a stranger, Anne thought. She
was
fated to meet him again. He was Mr. Butler, the steward at Glandwr.

She felt slightly sick to the stomach. The little appetite she had had as she made her way downstairs to the drawing room fled.

How she
wished
she had not behaved so badly last evening—or that she had been able to find him afterward to apologize.

And this on top of everything else.

If she could have crept back up to her room without his seeing her, she would have done so. But he was standing almost in the doorway. Besides, the duchess still had an arm linked through hers. And besides again, she had behaved cravenly and even cruelly last evening. Now she had a chance—perhaps!—to make amends.

Though she would surely be the very last person he would wish to encounter again today.

                  

Sydnam had walked up to the main house despite the drizzle. He would a million times rather be at home in his cozy cottage, he reflected as he let himself in through the front door, handed his wet cloak and hat to a footman, and climbed the stairs to the drawing room. But Bewcastle had issued the invitation in person this morning, and when Bewcastle invited he was really commanding—especially, Sydnam gathered, when he invoked the name of his wife.

“The duchess was disappointed when you did not come to dine last evening,” he had said while pulling one of the estate books toward him across the desk in the library, where he always did business while at Glandwr. “I have a curious aversion to seeing her grace disappointed, Sydnam, though of course it was unavoidable last evening since you did not receive your invitation until well after the dinner hour. There will not be that problem this evening.”

Bewcastle had recognized a lie when he heard one, of course. Not that it had been an outright lie. Sydnam had not actually read the invitation before going outside to walk, but he
had
seen it and guessed what it was and deliberately avoided opening it until it was too late.

“I will apologize in person to her grace this evening,” he had said while Bewcastle turned pages as if he were not even listening.

And so here he was to eat humble pie before dining. He amused himself grimly with the mental picture of all the Bedwyns and their spouses being forced to sit at table with a patch over one eye and their right arms bound behind their backs. But he must not be vicious, even in his thoughts. The invitation was a kind one. And being human, with all the contrariness to which human nature was prone, he supposed that if they were here for a month and never once extended an invitation to him to join them, he would be hurt and offended.

He grinned ruefully at the admission.

He must be somewhat late, he thought as he approached the drawing room doors. Or if he was not late—and he knew he was not—he nevertheless was last to arrive. A grand entrance was all he needed. But even as he stood in the doorway looking about for Bewcastle or the duchess, Rannulf and Alleyne bore down on him, one from either side, and suddenly he felt that the ordeal would not be so bad after all. Many of the people here were old friends of his, and none of the others would bear him any ill will. It was not as if he were a houseguest to be in their sight every moment of every day, after all. And none of the children would be here.

“I have been cowering inside a cave down on the beach,” he said in answer to Rannulf's question, “as you might have discovered for yourself if you had come down there to look, Ralf. But a little rain kept you indoors, did it? Or is it the steep cliff path that deterred you?”

Alleyne clamped a hand on his right shoulder, a gesture that endeared him to Sydnam since most people avoided his right side whenever they were able.

“How are you, Syd?” he asked. “It is a veritable age since I saw you last. We have brought a stack of messages from home, some from Lauren, a dozen or more from your mother, one or two from Kit, one from your father—but I cannot for the life of me recall a single one of them. Can you, Ralf?”

“Something about wearing warm woolens in the damp weather, at a wager,” Ralf said with a grin. “Of course I do not remember. The ladies will, though. You had better come and meet the people you do not already know, Syd. Ah, here comes Christine. Have you met our formidable duchess?”

“He has,” the duchess said, smiling warmly at him. “I am so glad you were able to come this evening, Mr. Butler.”

She gave him her left hand and he bowed over it.

“I must apologize most humbly, your grace,” he said, “for last evening. I was from home and did not read your invitation until—until it was too late.”

The sudden pause had been occasioned by the glance he had stolen at the lady through whose arm the duchess's right hand was drawn.

He recognized her instantly.

He had certainly not been mistaken about one thing, he thought. She was quite breathtakingly beautiful, with hair the color of warm honey and blue eyes made smoky by long lashes, and regular, perfect features. And now that she was no longer wearing a cloak, it was obvious that she had a figure to do justice to the face.

So his first guess had been correct, he thought. She
was
one of the Bedwyn wives.

He felt a curious, quite unreasonable bitterness.

“No apology is necessary,” the duchess assured him. “May I make you known to Miss Jewell, a particular friend of Freyja and Joshua's? Mr. Butler is Wulfric's steward at Glandwr,” she explained for the lady's benefit.

Sydnam bowed and she curtsied.
Miss Jewell.
Her name suited her well. And she was
not
one of the wives. But he felt no kindness toward her.

He remembered suddenly that he had dreamed of her last night. She had stood on that path waiting for him, and he had walked close enough to touch her cheek—with the fingertips of his right hand. And he had looked into her lovely blue eyes—with both his own. He had asked her please not to pinch him as it was important never to wake up, and she had told him that they needed to wake up without delay so that they could go searching for his arm, which had fallen over the cliff, before the tide came in and washed it away. It had been one of those strange, bizarre dreams that sometimes have one hovering between reality and fantasy, dreaming but knowing that one dreams.

“Miss Jewell,” he said now.

“Mr. Butler,” she murmured in return.

The duchess took him about the room then, without Miss Jewell's company, and introduced him to the people he did not know.

He still disliked meeting strangers, though he was long past the stage of trying to keep the right side of his body out of sight. His ugliness had been hard to accept. He had been accustomed to seeing nothing but admiration in the eyes of others—and even adoration in some female eyes. Not that he had taken a great deal of advantage of the latter. He had still been very young when everything changed. And he had never been conceited about his good looks. He had taken them for granted—until they were destroyed forever.

Everyone here had known about him in advance, he realized as he made his way to the dining room a short while later with Miss Eleanor Thompson, the duchess's sister, on his arm. None of them had openly flinched.

But
she
had not known—Miss Jewell, that was. She had run from him last night as if he were the devil himself. He found himself resenting her incredible beauty even though he recognized that it was somewhat childish to do so. Some people just had an easy path through life.

He turned his head to note that Morgan was seated on his blind side and set himself to making conversation with her as well as with Miss Thompson. At least, he thought, the kitchen staff here knew him and understood that they must not place anything before him that could not be cut one-handed, preferably with the edge of a fork.

Miss Jewell, he could see, was smiling warmly at Baron Weston beside her and saying something to him that brought an answering smile to his face. She was charming him, enslaving him.

No, he would
not
dislike her, he decided. Or resent her. Or envy Weston or Alleyne on her other side.

Good Lord, he was not a man normally given to petty jealousies.

Or to spite. Or resentment.

He picked up his soup spoon with his left hand and tackled the first course.

The evening turned out to be slightly less of an ordeal than Anne
had anticipated. Not all the guests were aristocrats or the offspring of aristocrats.

Mrs. Pritchard, near whom Anne sat at the dining table, had once earned her living down a Welsh coal mine, and her niece, Lady Aidan Bedwyn, had been brought up as a lady only because her father had made his fortune in coal and then set up as a gentleman on an English estate he had purchased. Lady Rannulf Bedwyn, Anne discovered in the drawing room later, was the daughter of a country clergyman—and the granddaughter of a London actress, she mentioned as something of which she seemed proud. The duchess herself was of the lower gentry class, as she had freely admitted during the morning. Her brother-in-law was a clergyman in a small country parish. Her mother and sister lived together in a cottage in the same parish.

Yet here they all were, as fully accepted by the Bedwyns as if they had all been born with the bluest blood.

It was true, of course, that no one else here at Glandwr had an illegitimate child, but no one treated Anne as if she were a pariah—or as if she had no business being among present company. Indeed, Lady Aidan asked her particularly about her son and laughed when Anne told her how he had been spoiled by teachers and girls alike at Miss Martin's school.

“Though for his sake I must send him to a boys' school when he is a little older,” Anne said. “It will be hard—for me if not for him.”

“It will,” Lady Aidan agreed. “We will be sending Davy to school next year when he is twelve, and already I am feeling bereft.”

They exchanged a smile, just two concerned mothers commiserating with each other.

“That poor man,” Mrs. Pritchard said softly in her musical Welsh accent as the gentlemen joined the ladies. “It is a good thing he is not of the working classes. He would never have found employment after the wars were over. He would have become a beggar and starved as so many of those soldiers did.”

“Oh, I am not so sure of that, Aunt Mari,” Lady Aidan said. “There is a thread of steel in him despite his quiet manners. I believe he would have overcome any adversity, even poverty.”

They were talking, Anne realized, of Mr. Butler, about whom she had been feeling horribly guilty all evening and whom she had consequently avoided even looking at—though she had been aware of him almost every moment.

“What happened to him?” she asked.

“War,” Lady Aidan said. “He followed his brother, Viscount Ravensberg, to the Peninsula against everyone's wishes but his own. His brother brought him home not long after, more dead than alive. But he recovered, and eventually he offered his services to Wulfric and came here. That all happened before I met Aidan, who was still a cavalry colonel in the Peninsula at the time, the superior officer of my brother, who never came home. How
glad
I am that the wars are over at last.”

It was some time later when Anne noticed that Mr. Butler was seated alone in a far corner of the room after all the groups had just rearranged themselves with the setting up of some card tables. She herself was with Miss Thompson and the Earl and Countess of Rosthorn, all of whom had declined a place at the tables. But Anne stood and excused herself before she could lose her courage. She could not allow the whole evening to go by without speaking to Mr. Butler, though she doubted he would have any wish to speak with her.

He looked up sharply when he saw her approach and then got to his feet.

“Miss Jewell,” he said.

Something in his manner and voice told her that indeed he would have preferred to remain alone, that he did not like her—but she could hardly blame him for that, could she?

She looked into his face and quite deliberately adjusted her focus so that she looked at both sides. He wore a black patch over his right eye—or perhaps over where his right eye had been. The rest of that side of his face was covered from brow to jaw and on down his neck with purplish burn marks. His empty right sleeve was pinned to the side of his evening coat.

He was, she noticed, half a head taller than she—and she had not been mistaken about his broad chest and shoulders. He was clearly not a man who had wallowed in his disabilities.

“I went back last night,” she said, “a few minutes after I ran away. But you had gone.”

He looked back at her in silence for a few moments.

“I am sorry,” he said abruptly then, “that I frightened you. I did not intend to do so.”

Courteous words, courteously spoken. Yet she could still feel his dislike, his reluctance to speak with her.

“No, you misunderstand,” she said. “
I
am sorry. It is what I went back to say. I truly am. Sorry.”

What else could she say? She could only make matters worse by trying to offer an explanation for her behavior.

Again there was a silence between them long enough to be uncomfortable. She almost turned and walked away. She had said what she had felt compelled to say. There was nothing else.

“Going back was a courageous thing to do,” he said. “It was getting dark and the cliff top is a lonely, dangerous place to be at night. And I was a stranger to you. Thank you for returning even though I had already gone home.”

She had, she supposed, been forgiven. She did not know if he still disliked her, but that did not really matter. She smiled and nodded and would again have turned away.

“Will you have a seat, Miss Jewell?” He indicated the chair close to the one he had been occupying.

She had hesitated too long, she thought, and courtesy had compelled him to offer to prolong their encounter. She would rather have moved off somewhere else. She did not like being close to him. Ashamed as she was to admit it, she did not like having to look at him.

And how difficult it was to look at him as if he were any normal man, not to focus only on the left side of his face, not to look away lest he think she was staring. Did some people who knew about her find it equally difficult to look at her, to treat her as if she were a normal woman? But she knew very well that there were such people.

She sat straight-backed on the edge of the chair and folded her hands in her lap.

“You are a brother of Viscount Ravensberg, Mr. Butler?” she said politely, her mind having turned blank to all the many possibilities of interesting conversational topics.

“I am,” he answered.

And there was nowhere else to go with the topic. She did not even know who Viscount Ravensberg was. But he took pity on her.

“And son of the Earl of Redfield of Alvesley Park in Hampshire,” he told her. “The estate adjoins that of Lindsey Hall, Bewcastle's principal seat. My brothers and I grew up with the Bedwyns. They were all hellions—but then so were we.”

“Brothers?” She raised her eyebrows.

“Jerome, the eldest, died of a chill taken while rescuing farm laborers and their families from flooded homes,” he said. “Kit and I are the only two remaining.”

There must have been much nerve damage to the right side of his face, she thought. It was immobile, and his mouth was rather lopsided as he talked.

“It must have been hard to lose a brother,” she said.

“Yes.”

She did not usually have undue difficulty making conversation, but everything she had said during the past minute or two was markedly stupid. Her mind, meanwhile, chattered incessantly with questions she knew she could not ask.

What happened out there in the Peninsula?

In which battle did it happen?

Did you sometimes wish you had died?

Do you sometimes still wish it?

He must have been extraordinarily,
impossibly
handsome once upon a time.

“What an utterly foolish thing to say,” she said. “As if you could possibly reply that no, it was not hard at all.”

His one dark eye met hers with a hard, bleak look for a moment as if he were about to make a sharp retort. Then it twinkled, and surprisingly they both laughed. The left side of his mouth lifted higher than the right in a lopsided grin that was curiously attractive.

“Miss Jewell,” he said, “shall we agree, for both our sakes, to pretend that last evening did not happen, that we have met here for the first time this evening?”

“Oh.” She relaxed back a little farther on her chair. “I should like that.”

His left hand was resting on his thigh. It was a long-fingered artist's hand, she thought. She hoped she was wrong about that last point—or that he was left-handed. She looked up into his face.

“I have been feeling horribly intimidated all evening,” she was surprised to hear herself admit.

“Have you?” he asked her. “Why?”

She wished she had not said it. But he was waiting for her reply.

“Joshua—Lord Hallmere—offered to bring my son here for the summer so that he would have other children to play with,” she explained. “But he is only nine years old, and I have never been separated from him. And so, when I hesitated, the marchioness invited me too and I accepted because I did not want to disappoint my son. But I did not expect to be treated as a
guest
.”

From his short silence, she realized that she had just told him volumes about herself. And perhaps now it was
his
turn to run from her or to show some unmistakable sign of revulsion.

“I teach and live at a girls' school in Bath,” she said. “I like it extremely well, and David has always been happy there. But he is getting older. I suppose I ought to have let him come with Joshua—David worships him.”

“Children do need other children,” he said. “They also need a father figure, especially perhaps if they are boys. But most of all, Miss Jewell, they need a mother. I daresay you did the right thing in coming here with him.”

“Oh.” She drew unexpected comfort from his words. “That is very obliging of you.”

“I hope,” he said, “Bewcastle has not intimidated you. But if he has, you may be consoled to know that he intimidates almost everyone. He was removed abruptly from a wild childhood when his father knew he was dying, and he was carefully, even ruthlessly trained to take over all the vast responsibilities of the dukedom, which he inherited when he was only seventeen or eighteen. He learned his lessons consummately well—too well, some would say. But he is not unfeeling. He has been remarkably good to me.”

“I met him for the first time this evening,” Anne told him. “He was very gracious, though I must confess I was ready to sink through the floor with fear.”

They both laughed again.

“The duchess is exceedingly amiable,” she said.

“According to Lauren, my sister-in-law,” he told her, “it was a love match. It was the sensation of last year. No one would have predicted that Bewcastle would marry for love. But perhaps he did.”

The tea tray was being brought in, and two of the card games were coming to an end.

“I must be going home,” Mr. Butler said. “I am pleased to have made your acquaintance, Miss Jewell.”

She set both hands on the arms of her chair and got to her feet. She noticed that he got up a little more slowly from his low chair, and it occurred to her that being without one arm and one eye must shift the natural balance of the body that she took so very much for granted. How long had it taken him to adjust to the change? Had he ever adjusted completely?

“I shall go and convey my thanks to the duchess,” he said, holding out his hand to her. “Good night.”

“Good night, Mr. Butler.”

She held out her own hand and he shook it before releasing it and turning away.

Anne was left biting her lip. She should, of course, have given him her
left
hand as she remembered the duchess had done earlier. Their handshake had been horribly awkward—as if they had been holding hands and swinging them. It had felt almost intimate. Embarrassingly so.

He was bowing to the Duchess of Bewcastle, who smiled warmly at him and set one hand on his arm while she leaned a little toward him to say something. Lord Rannulf came up behind him and slapped a hand on his right shoulder. The two men left the room together.

Where did he live? Anne wondered.

Would she see him again?

But it would not matter too much if she did. She had got past the awkwardness of what had happened last night. She was vastly relieved about that. It would be easier to meet him next time.

But how tragic for him to have lost a limb and an eye and to have had his looks so marred.

Was he lonely? she wondered.

Did he have friends?

Outcasts were frequently both lonely and friendless. Her mind touched upon her years in the Cornish village of Lydmere, living on the very fringes of local society.

She had never ceased to give thanks for the fact that she finally had found friends at the school in Bath and that three of those friends—Claudia herself, Susanna, and Frances—had come to be as close as sisters to her. It was so much more than she had ever expected—or felt she deserved—after those long, lean years.