The Devil's Web (40 page)

James was very tempted to go with Douglas. To go back to Montreal, take up his old job again, and set off with the canoe brigades again the following spring for the inland wilderness where he had found a measure of peace once before. And what, after all, was there to stay for?

It was an idea that grew on him for the rest of the morning as he rode aimlessly about London, neither seeing nor hearing what went on about him. If he went back to Dunstable Hall without delay and made all the necessary arrangements to settle his affairs, he could be on the boat with Douglas before the summer was out.

If he did so, he would be released from the temptation to keep finding Madeline to assure himself that she was alive and well. The temptation to see her and perhaps after all try to force her to come back to him.

Luncheon time found him not eating, but pacing his rooms while his man packed his belongings. The afternoon was not the time to begin a journey. He should wait and set out early the following morning. But he could not bear the thought of inaction. By nightfall he could be well on his way.

But there was something he must do. He must say good-bye to Alex. He could not leave without a word to her.

When he arrived at his brother-in-law's house, he asked for a private word with the countess. She joined him in a small downstairs salon, but when she saw his traveling clothes and heard his errand, she insisted that he join the rest of her family in the drawing room.

“Madeline is not here?” he asked. “And is not expected?”

“No,” she said. “Dominic and Ellen are here, James, but you should say good-bye to them. I wish, oh, I do wish things had turned out differently. And I cannot for the life of me understand why they have not.” She hugged him and shed a few tears before taking him by the hand and leading him upstairs to the drawing room.

There really was not a great deal to say, though they were all cordial. Edmund and Dominic shook his hand and Ellen surprised him by hugging him. Christopher came obediently to be hugged, and Dominic's twins came to stand side by side in front of him, Olivia's thumb in her mouth, until he stooped down and ruffled their hair and hugged them both together. Madeline's nephew and niece.

Alex knelt down on the floor, where her daughter was sitting. “Are you going to give Uncle James kisses, sweetheart?” she asked Caroline.

His niece gazed up at him with her solemn dark eyes that reminded him so much of Alex as a child.

And that was when the double doors of the drawing room were thrown back without warning and Madeline, pale and wild-eyed, stood there.

“Alexandra,” she cried, “has he left already?”

And then her eyes met his and nothing and nobody existed for many seconds or minutes or hours. At the end of it, when the world started to come back, she closed the doors behind her and leaned against them.

“You were not expected back at your lodgings,” she said. “I thought you had gone.”

“Come along, tiger,” Edmund was saying to Christopher.

Alex had Caroline by the hand. Ellen and Dominic were holding a twin each.

“Up on the shoulder it is, then,” Dominic said. “Hold on tight, Olivia. We have all discovered pressing business to be carried out in the far corners of the house, Mad. Stand away from the door, love.”

She stood obediently to one side without taking her eyes from James's, and four adults and four children disappeared from the room.

H
E WAS DRESSED
for travel, not for an afternoon's visiting. He was thinner. Surely he had lost weight. His face looked almost gaunt. He looked impossibly handsome.

“I thought you had gone,” she said again.

He clasped and unclasped his hands behind his back. She was still pale and looking dazed. And very beautiful.

“I am on my way,” he said. “I called to say good-bye to Alex.”

She looked about her. They were alone. And he had seen her burst into the room demanding information about him. How humiliating.

“Are you?” she said, walking farther into the room. “Is it not a little late in the day to begin a journey, James?”

He shrugged. “I might as well be a few miles on the road by nightfall,” he said. “There is nothing left for me to do here.”

“No,” she said, smoothing her hands over the upholstery along the back of a sofa, “I suppose not.”

“I will say good-bye, then, Madeline,” he said. “I am glad to have seen you again. Will you shake my hand? Can we part at least not the bitterest of enemies?”

She held out her hand to him and smiled. “Why not?” she said. “We were never really meant for each other, James. I remember your telling me last summer at Richmond that it could not work between us. You were right. We just forgot that for a while after your father's passing. Now we know it cannot work and we can go our separate ways without regrets.”

“Yes,” he said, taking her hand, feeling its smooth slimness.

His hand was warm and strong, the hand of a man who had worked for a living.

“Good-bye, James.”

“Good-bye, Madeline,” he said. “My solicitor will be calling on you.”

“Yes,” she said, and dropped her hand to her side as he released it. She smiled.

“Well, then,” he said after a pause, “I will be on my way.”

“Yes.”

He turned away and strode to the door. It seemed a million miles away. But she spoke as he set his hand on the knob.

“What did you expect?” she cried, her voice shrill. “What did you want of me? I have never been able to understand that. I tried. I did try, James. I tried to talk to you even when you did not encourage me. I tried to make your house more of a home by pitting my will against that dreadful Mrs. Cockings. I made friends of your neighbors. I always tried to look my best for you. I tried to please you in—in bed. I could never please you. What did you want of me? Why did you marry me?”

He looked down at his hand on the door handle. “I took you for comfort on the night of my father's funeral,” he said. “Remember? I had to make you respectable again after that.”

There was a pause. “No,” she said. “That was not the reason. You took me because you had decided to marry me. That was the way it was, wasn't it? But why? We were never friends. We were never comfortable together. There was only the passion. And if that is why you married me, then you were a fool. For that died too, didn't it? For months before I left you took me as if I were just another of your daily chores. You should not have married me, James. It was not fair to me.”

He turned to face her. “And what of you?” he said. “Why did you marry me? Are you an innocent victim in all this? You have a head on your shoulders too. You knew as well as I the chance we took of running into just the disaster we have met. You knew when I took you up into the hills that night what was going to happen. I did not notice your footsteps lagging or find you at all reluctant. I have had whores who gave themselves with less abandon.”

“So,” she said, straightening her shoulders and lifting her chin, “that is what I was to you, is it? The truth at last? I have been your whore. Better than a whore because more eager. And I came cheaply—at the expense of a special license and a wedding ring. But I will cost you now, James. There will never be a cast-off mistress more expensive than I. And I threw away your wedding ring. I threw it from the mail coach window.” She held up her hand, palm in.

He made an impatient gesture. “Theatrics,” he said. “You should have been on the stage, did you know that, Madeline? You would make a magnificent Lady Macbeth.”

“I would be even more magnificent in the green room,” she said.

“Perhaps,” he said. “You are determined to make yourself into a victim, I see, and into a proud woman scorned. The fault was not all mine, Madeline. Mostly mine, I will admit, but not all. Why did you make a friend of Beasley against my wishes?”

“Don't you mean against your commands?” she said. “You are good at giving commands, James. I am not good at obeying them. I saw no reason for not being his friend.”

“But events have proved you wrong,” he said. “Sometimes commands are given for another person's good and not for the mere love of exercising power. Did you ever think of that? Did you ever think that perhaps I had good reason to tell you to stay away from him?”

“Then why did you not give me the reason?” she said.
“Have you ever talked to me since we have known each other? Have you ever shared anything of yourself with me? Have you ever given me reason to want to obey you?”

“We are not all easy conversationalists, Madeline,” he said. “You could have respected my silence. And you could have kept your mouth shut about our business outside our home.”

Her eyes widened. “What is that supposed to mean?”she asked.

“Carl Beasley,” he said. “He seemed to know something of the sad state of our marriage, Madeline. I think we behaved with enough decorum in public that he would not have known unless you had told him.”

“Well!” she said, nostrils flaring and bosom heaving.
“So I am to blame for everything after all. And now enough has been said.”

“And almost the first question Alex asked me when I came down here was if it was true that Dora was my mistress. Where did she get that idea from, Madeline?”

“Doubtless from Dominic,” she said. “Did you expect me to come here, James, and pretend to my own family that I had come to enjoy the Season?”

“I think we might have kept our own problems at home,” he said. “You might have told me that you wished to leave. We might have worked something out in privacy and with some dignity. This has all been performed on a very public stage, has it not?”

She advanced on him. “Nothing had to be played out on any stage,” she said. “I left you because I wished never to see you again. I did not ask you to follow me. I did not ask you for anything at all.”

“Well,” he said, “if you wish never to see me again, Madeline, you are about to have your wish. And I will not follow you anywhere else in this life, you may be assured of that. I think we are both fortunate to be free of this entanglement.”

“I could not agree more,” she said.

“I will be going back to Canada at the end of the summer,” he said. “I won't be in England again, Madeline.”

“To Canada,” she said, her expression falling blank.

“You will be well rid of me,” he said.

“Yes,” she said.

“And I of you.”

“Yes.”

“I must be on my way,” he said. “I am wasting precious daylight hours.”

“I would hate to be responsible for that,” she said.

“Yes, I'm sure you would,” he said, turning back to the door. “Good-bye, Madeline.”

“Good-bye,” she said.

He did not hear the rest of what she mumbled. “What?”he said, looking back over his shoulder with a frown.

“I am going to have a child,” she said. “I thought you should know.” Her head was tilted proudly back.

There was a buzzing in his head. “
My
child?” he said.

Her eyes blazed. She picked up a cushion from the sofa beside her and hurled it at him. It caught him on the shoulder. “I don't know whose it is,” she yelled at him. “It could belong to any of a dozen men. We will just have to wait to see whom it resembles, won't we? Perhaps it will have neither dark hair nor dark eyes.”

“Madeline,” he said.

“Perhaps you would like to divorce me,” she shrieked, “and I could go from one to another of the dozen seeing which one would be willing to marry me after all the scandal. I think that would be a good way of settling the matter, don't you, James? Don't you touch me.
Don't touch me!
”

But he had her arms in a vise and her body against his
own and her face pressed among the folds of his neck-cloth.

“Madeline,” he said as she pounded his chest with her fists and sobbed noisily against him.

“It's your baby,” she said. “It's yours. But you may think what you like. I don't care. I hate you anyway. I told you only because I thought you should know. And I have not told anyone else, even Dom. There are some things I can keep my mouth shut about, you see.”

“Madeline,” he said, his arms holding her to him like iron bands. “Madeline.”

She threw back her head suddenly to reveal red and swollen and flashing eyes. “I suppose you will want me back now,” she said. “Now that I can put a child in your nursery. You will want me back now because I can give you heirs. Because I am not infertile after all.”

“Because I love you,”
he said between his teeth. “Because I love you, and for no other reason in the world. Because I can't live without you, Madeline. Because my soul will die in me if I walk out through that door without you. I want you back because I love you.”

She did not even try to stop the angry tears that ran down her reddened cheeks and dripped from her chin to run down her neck. “You don't,” she cried. “It is because of the baby. And I am not coming back just because I am a breeder and suddenly valuable property. I am not coming back. You don't love me.”

“That's what it is, isn't it?” he said, his hands on her arms holding her close to him still. “That's what it has always been. Not just an obsession. Not just a passion. It's love between us, Madeline. On both sides. We both have too much to give to have been satisfied with what we have had. And the fault has been mine. I have been too caught
up for years in my guilt over what I thought I had done to Dora to be free to love you. But I have loved you from the beginning. I have longed to give myself to you. All of me.
Everything that is me.”

She was shaking her head.

“And you love me too,” he said. “You said yourself a few minutes ago that you tried to make our marriage work.
You gave and you gave, but I would not receive. I poisoned your love and have put you through all this. Forgive me, Madeline. For your own sake as well as mine, forgive me.”