The Devil's Web (17 page)

“I must talk to Papa again,” he said. “I don't suppose I shall ever forgive myself or ever live at peace with myself if I don't. And yet I know that it will be quite as pointless to do so as it was the first time. And I can't quite picture
myself listening to him and then kissing him and telling him that I love him.”

“You are his son,” she said. “His heir. And so he loves you most and finds you most impossible to love, James.”

He stopped walking suddenly. “I am procrastinating,” he said. “I have done so all month here. But I can't leave it until the day of the ball, can I? And certainly not until the day after. Are you ready to go in, Alex? I'm going to find him out right now.”

“Leave me, then,” she said. “I need a little more air and exercise.”

He turned to leave, his face hard and serious.

“James?” she said.

He turned back to her and she walked quickly toward him. She put her arms about his neck and kissed him warmly on the cheek. “I love you,” she said.

He smiled somewhat grimly. “Am I now supposed to scold and grumble and mumble but not be entirely displeased?” he asked. He kissed her on the cheek. “I love you too, Alex.”

L
ORD BECKWORTH, HAVING TAKEN A SOLITARY stroll up along the valley earlier in the afternoon, was settled in the library with a book, as he so often was. He looked over the top of it and set it down when his son came into the room.

“It is a lovely day again,” James said lamely. “I have been walking in the garden with Alex.”

“Hm,” Lord Beckworth said. “She ought to be in the nursery with her children.”James let the remark pass. He took the chair across from his father's. “I will be leaving here the day after tomorrow,” he said. “We will probably set sail for Canada within the week.”

“It will be as well when you are gone,” the other said. “Your mother does nothing but cry when you are here. I hope you are proud of yourself.”

“Neither proud nor ashamed,” James said carefully. “It is my chosen life, and I have worked hard and honestly to establish a place for myself. I am sorry if it does not meet with your approval and Mama's. I really am sorry. I hoped to return with your blessing and your love.”

His father looked at him with the steady, cold eyes that had always been able to cause other eyes to drop before them. James's eyes wavered and held.

“You forfeited both a long time ago, James,” Lord Beckworth said.

James closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the chair. “You do not love me,” he said. “You can offer me no peace. And yet you resent the fact that I went away and that I am going away again. What do you want of me?”

“I want nothing,” Lord Beckworth said sternly. “I am merely your earthly father, James. I believe another Father demands a change of heart in you, a repentant heart, and a dutiful and a filial heart. I see no signs of repentance in you despite your protestations of need.”

James sighed but did not open his eyes. “I was so very young,” he said. “Can you not make allowances for youthful wildness and rebellion?”

“You had been brought up to the straight and narrow path to salvation,” his father said. “I cannot forgive the sins of fornication and riotousness. I do not have the power to offer such forgiveness. The shame and the suffering to your mother and Alexandra and to me I could forgive. And I have forgiven them even as I am to expect forgiveness. But I cannot forget them for as long as your heart is hardened.”

“I loved her,” James said, “with all the ardor of a young and first love. Whether I would have continued to do so I do not know. That does not matter now. I was twenty and she seventeen. It was wrong, yes, to lie together as we did. The consequences showed that. We could have learned to take the consequences together. Perhaps we would have been happy; perhaps not. But we should have been allowed to put right what we had put wrong.”

“I would not have seen my son married to a slut,” Lord Beckworth said fiercely.

James opened his eyes and gripped the arms of his chair. But he held on to his temper. “Dora was not a slut,” he said. “She gave me a husband's privilege, which she should not have given and I should not have taken. But she was not a slut. She was young and in love.”

“Youth does not excuse such sin,” his father said. “And even at the time you would not show the proper shame. There were all the eruptions of violence. And years of sullen anger afterward. Your mother and I had a great deal to put up with, James. And you expect me now to forget?”

James surged to his feet and began to pace the room. “Why did you do it?” he asked. “I could never make proper sense of it. She was very young, it is true, and I can understand that you were ambitious for me since I was your only son. I can see that you might have thought my future would be blighted by a marriage when I had not even finished at university. But she would not have been an ineligible match, by any means. She was the Duke of Peterleigh's ward. She was not a nobody.”

“She was a slut,” Lord Beckworth said.

James paused in his pacing and pushed back with some impatience the lock of hair that had fallen across his brow. “If she was,” he said, “then I was the male equivalent. You knew I loved her. You must have known something of the heartbreak you would cause. Why did you marry her off in such haste to Drummond? You and Peterleigh between you? I don't blame Peterleigh so much. He was in London and doubtless did not know the true state of affairs. I am sure you would have covered the truth in your communications with him. And her brother would not have acted alone—he would not have stood against you and Peterleigh. You are the one who did it all. Paid off Drummond. Intimidated Dora. Prevented her from communicating with me and not doing so yourself until it was too late. Why did you do it? Just tell me.”

“I did it to save us all from scandal,” his father said, his voice rising. “I did it to save my son from the embraces of a whore. I hoped that you would be capable of acknowledging your sins and freeing yourself of them before your immortal soul was put in eternal danger.”

James stopped pacing and stood looking down at his father. “Did you not know how you would destroy me?”he asked. “Or her? Did you have no compassion whatsoever for the feelings of a young girl who had no one but a young brother and an absent guardian to defend her? Did you not see that you gave me no path to redemption? And did you expect me to find my way back to God when you withdrew from me even the restrained signs of love that you had shown me through my childhood and boyhood? Did you not see how very wrong you were?”

Lord Beckworth slammed a fist on the arm of his chair. “Enough!” he said. “You are unchanged, unregenerate. Your sin must be turned from yourself and thrown onto me. It was always so. I am loaded down with enough guilt, James, without taking yours on my shoulders too. I am burdened with the sin of having been a too indulgent father. If I had not spared the rod when you were a boy, perhaps I would not now be responsible for the peril your soul is in.”

“Spared the rod,” James said quietly. “Did you? I dread to think what Alex and I might have suffered if you had been a harsh parent, then. It seems to me that the rod figured very prominently in our upbringing. Perhaps if there had been less rod and more love, I would have been a little more responsible in the expression of my love for Dora. Perhaps I might have saved her from great suffering.”

Lord Beckworth's breathing was loud and harsh. “You dare to preach to me about love?” he said. “You dare to stand there and say these things to me?” His hand went to his chest.

James was down on one knee before his father immediately. “Is something wrong?” he asked. “Your heart?”

“The only thing wrong with me,” Lord Beckworth said, sinking back in his chair and letting go of his rage, “is having to listen to an undutiful son.”

James sighed. “I did not come here to accuse you,” he said. “Time has cleared my vision. I can see that what you did, you did with what you thought were my best interests at heart. I no longer hate you or even blame you. Occasionally we all do wrong things from right motives. Only time can prove us right or wrong. The past is the past. Nothing can change it now, and who is to say that it was all wrong, anyway? Let's forgive each other and forget, shall we?”

His father laughed. His hand was still over his heart. He was still breathing quickly. “You forgive me,” he said.

“You impudent puppy.”

James pushed himself to his feet again. “Very well, then,” he said wearily. “It's unimportant. Let us not part bitter enemies. Forgive me, then, will you? For all I have done to offend you, forgive me.”

“You can best show your sorrow to me,” his father said, “by going from this room to your own and falling on your knees and begging forgiveness from above.”

“Give me your blessing.” James held out his right hand. “Don't let me go without your blessing.”

His father ignored the hand. “If you are truly contrite,” he said, “you will give up this vulgar pursuit of yours, James, and come home where you belong. I cannot give you my blessing to go and break your mother's heart.”

James's hand closed upon itself. “Well, then,” he said, “so be it.” He turned to leave the room. But he paused with his hand on the doorknob and turned back to look at his father. “I love you,” he said. “Despite everything, you gave me life and you sheltered me and brought me up according to what you believed true principles. I would like to leave with your blessing. It will always hurt me that you would not give it. But you must remain true to yourself to the end, I see. I will console myself with the belief that your very anger with me shows that you also love me.” He opened the door and shut it quietly behind him.

Lord Beckworth closed his eyes and clenched his teeth hard. His hands gripped the arms of his chair with such force that his knuckles turned white.

T
HE STATE APARTMENTS
, the pride and joy of the Earl of Amberley, were always opened for the annual summer ball and for a few very special occasions, like weddings. Dinner was served in the state dining room, and the ballroom was so decked out with flowers that it was indistinguishable from the garden beyond the French doors, Sir Cedric said. The flowers and the splendid clothes of the guests were multiplied in grandeur by the long mirrors that stretched along one wall.

“I can remember what an agony the ball always was after I was past about my twelfth birthday,” Anna told Jean as they stood fanning themselves against the mirrors, waiting for the dancing to begin. “I was brought over here, as we always were, to sleep in the nursery, and we were allowed to creep into the minstrels' gallery to hear the orchestra and to see all the fashions and watch the opening quadrille. I say ‘we,' though for the last few years it was just me. I thought the time would never come when I would be allowed to come downstairs and dance too.”

“I think Nanny Rey has Christopher up there now,” Jean said, peering up at the minstrels' gallery, which had never been used as anything but a not-so-secret hideout for the children of the family. “I heard the countess say that he was too excited to go to sleep.”

“Mr. Purnell is to dance the opening set with you?”Anna asked. “How fortunate you are. He has not signed my card yet, though he surely will, will he not? I am still chagrined that I did not know he was not your beau. I might have had him on his knees before me by now. But how heart-wrenching a parting there would be tomorrow. Perhaps it is as well I did not know.” She giggled. “I was truly annoyed when Lieutenant Cowley asked for the first set before Sir Gordon had a chance to do so. But all is well. He has asked for a waltz, and that comes second.”

The earl began the ball by leading his countess onto the floor.

“I think all our guests are enjoying themselves,” she said beneath the sounds of the music.

“But of course,” he said. “It is strictly forbidden not to enjoy oneself at the Amberley ball, you know.”

“Did we enjoy our first?” she asked.

He grimaced and took one of her hands in his. “I was to break our engagement the next morning,” he said, “because you wished to be free and I wanted to do the noble thing. And then you announced its end at suppertime, to Mama and your parents. And I had to continue to host the ball and smile and smile. No, it was not my happiest evening, I suppose.”

“It was not mine, either,” she said.

“Of course—” he brought his mouth close to her ear, “the hours following the ball more than made up for any unhappiness during it.”

“Yes,” she said.

“A memorable night,” he said. “Our first lovemaking.”He smiled at her. “Up in our hut in the hills. Where Christopher was conceived.”

“Edmund,” she said, flushing, “this is not at all proper conversation for such a time and place. Will any romances flourish here tonight, do you think? Anna and Sir Gordon Clark, perhaps? And Madeline and Captain Hands? They really seem to deal splendidly together.”

“We will hope for at least one,” he said.

Anna achieved one of her goals, as she confided to Jean during supper. Sir Gordon Clark had kissed her and expressed a hope of seeing her and renewing his acquaintance with her in London the following spring.

“I shall die if Papa will not take us,” she whispered, round-eyed. “He has been saying that we will definitely not go there for a third Season in a row, but Papa is such a dreadful tease that one never knows when he is serious and when he is not. Mama says that I can wrap him around my little finger. I do hope that is true. I am going to set to work on him tomorrow.”

“Do you think Sir Gordon really meant it?” Jean asked.

“Of course he meant it,” Anna said. “He kissed my lips and my temples—and my throat, Jean. He kisses quite divinely. And the feel of those curls around my fingers! I am deep in love, I promise you. And he is to be here for almost a week more. Who knows what will happen during that time?”

There was no more chance for whispered confidences. Their supper partners had brought them plates of food.