The Devil's Web (6 page)

Madeline laughed. “And talking about going back into the ballroom to enjoy oneself,” she said, “I must be doing the same, Allan, or Edmund will be thinking I am sick and summoning a physician. There is nothing so enjoyable as a ball, you know.”

She smiled dazzlingly at him, and he lifted her hand to his lips.

“You will find him one day soon, I promise you,” he said quietly before releasing her.

Madeline, on the brink of tears, smiled determinedly and joined a group in the ballroom only a few moments before she was aware of James Purnell doing the same thing. Oh, yes, she would find him soon, all right.

She had been out of the room during the previous set, and had returned after most of the gentlemen had chosen their next partners. She became aware of the situation in some dismay only one moment before she found herself in the unspeakably embarrassing position of being almost alone with James at the edge of the dance floor while other couples were taking their places for the coming set. It was too late to make an inconspicuous exit.

“Lady Madeline?” he said, extending a hand to her.

Lifting her eyes beyond his chin to meet his was the hardest thing she remembered doing in a long while. “Yes,” she said, placing her hand in his. “Thank you.”

I
T WAS A WALTZ.
Of all the dances it might possibly have been, it was a waltz.

Madeline rested a hand on James's shoulder, set her other hand in his, and wondered if he was remembering quite as vividly as she the last time they had waltzed together. The music had been so faint that the rhythm had been felt rather than heard. The gravel of the formal gardens at Amberley had crunched underfoot. The water from the fountain had tinkled into the stone basin.

He had been staying there with his family following the betrothal of Edmund and Alexandra. And she was there, as she always was during the summer. As they all were. Even Dominic in those days had chosen to spend most of his time at his childhood home rather than at his own estate in Wiltshire. It was before he had bought his commission and long before he had met Ellen.

It had been at the annual summer ball at Amberley. She had been feeling restless, as she so often did even in those days. And for the same reason—she had been bewildered by her own powerful and conflicting feelings for Alexandra's brother. Always James. Always the blight of her life. She had wandered out into the formal gardens, not knowing that he was there before her.

He had held her correctly for a while and then drawn her against him. And after a while they had stopped moving. The music and the waltz had been forgotten. That was the time when during an embrace that had grown hotter and more intimate over the course of several minutes she had offered herself to him in all but words. The time when she had told him she loved him. And the time when he had told her that he felt nothing for her but lust. She had not believed him at the time, although she had left him there and although he had left Amberley that same night without another word to her or any message left for her.

She glanced up, hoping that he would be looking about him at the other dancers, hoping that he would be smiling sociably. Hoping that he would not be the old James, whom she had disliked and feared. And loved. She met dark, unfathomable eyes. That lock of hair had fallen across his forehead again. Sometimes things were so frighteningly the same that she wondered if she had imagined the four intervening years.

She licked her lips nervously and watched his eyes follow the movement of her tongue.

“It is a pleasant evening, is it not?” she said, smiling. “I am glad. Edmund and Alexandra do not like to entertain, you know—or to be entertained, for that matter. They are never happier than when they are at home alone with the children. But the evening is turning out well. I think everyone who was invited must have come.”

“It would seem so,” he said. He did not return her smile. “The room is quite crowded.”

“Of course,” she said, “it is all in your honor. Alexandra has been very excited since your letter came last summer to say you were coming home. I don't think they would have left Amberley for any other reason even if it is the Season. They like the greater freedom of the country for the children's sake.”

“I have expressed my gratitude to Alex,” he said.

“Have you met Ellen?” she asked. “She is so lovely tonight dressed in blue.”

“Alex took me to call on them,” he said. “Lady Eden is quite charming.”

Madeline listened to herself in some dismay. And she felt the bright social smile frozen to her face. She always knew she was going to behave just so with him, yet she seemed quite powerless to stop herself. Because he was so silent and because he looked at her always with those unsmiling eyes, she was always totally unnerved. She felt like a butterfly caught and spread by pins for his inspection.

She deliberately relaxed the muscles of her face and shifted her gaze to the hand that rested on his shoulder. They danced in silence for a while. And would dance in silence forever and a day before she would break it.

“You have not changed,” he said at last.

She looked back up into his eyes. “Is that meant to be a compliment?” she asked.

“Most women, I suppose, would be glad to be told that they had not changed in four years,” he said.

“But you did not approve of me four years ago,” she said, and flushed. “You did not like me.”

“But I never disputed the fact that you are beautiful,” he said.

Madeline's stomach felt as if it had turned a complete somersault inside her. “It was my character of which you disapproved, then?” she said.

“That was a long time ago,” he said.

It seemed he had nothing left to say. And she had done with nervous prattling. Or with any honest effort to initiate a conversation to which she could expect only monosyllables in reply. She tried to concentrate on the music and the couples dancing around them.

But he was so very unmistakably James. He was leaner, stronger. But James, nevertheless. She would have known him at a touch, blindfolded. Her heartbeat would have known it and the muscles of her legs and the blood beating through her temples.

She was touching him again, one hand on his shoulder, the other resting in his. And she could feel his other hand warm at her waist. She had spent so many weeks, even months, reliving his touch, at first with a desperate misery, and later with a dull unwillingness. So long. And now she was touching him again. And he was a stranger again. Yet so familiar that her throat ached with the tears she must withhold.

He still disliked her. He still despised her and withheld from her even the common courtesies he would accord any other woman. She wondered why he had asked her to dance.

“Why did you ask me to dance?” she asked.

He raised his eyebrows. “It seemed the civil thing to do,” he said. “This occasion is for dancing, is it not?”

“Was it because Anna said no and I was the closest lady to you apart from her?” she asked.

“Yes, I suppose that is the reason,” he said. “Are you offended?”

“No,” she said. But she was offended. Or hurt, perhaps.

Or outraged at honesty that did not try to mask itself in tact and good manners. “Why should I be offended?”

There was nothing else to say. Madeline waited tensely for the music to end and guessed that her partner was no less eager to be rid of her. What neither of them had realized, she discovered with dismay when the music actually did draw to an end, was that it was the supper dance they had been engaged in. The members of the orchestra laid down their instruments.

“There is no need for you to lead me in to supper,” she said hastily.

“But there is every need,” he said. “Good manners dictate that I now offer you my arm and take you in. Do you think I have forgotten such niceties of polite behavior in the North American wilderness, Madeline?”This time it was her heart that somersaulted. And all at the sound of her given name on his lips without the formality of her title before it. Was she a green girl fresh from the schoolroom to be so affected by one word spoken by an attractive gentleman?

She placed a hand on his arm without replying.

T
HE
E
ARL OF
A
MBERLEY
seated his wife at a table in the supper room. “I don't care if it is not quite the thing to lead my own countess in to supper,” he said. “I have been apart from you quite long enough for one evening, Alex.”

“I am not arguing,” she said. “You do not need to defend yourself to me, Edmund. I was hoping that James would dance the supper dance with Miss Cameron. She truly is a delightful girl, is she not? And I do not care at all that some people might say that she is not quite
haut ton
. But I suppose it was unrealistic of me to expect some sort of announcement tonight.”

“Probably,” he said, smiling at her with amused affection. “Here come Ellen and Dominic. They are together, you see. I feel reassured.”

Lord Eden held a chair so that his wife could seat herself beside Alexandra. “We have been upstairs feeding the babies,” he said, “and giving them strict orders to sleep through until a decent hour of the morning. Or rather, it would be more accurate to say, I suppose, that Ellen has been feeding the babies. Have we missed anything startling? Madeline has not contracted or broken any engagements, has she?”

“Not to my knowledge,” the earl said. “But North has a tendency to gaze on her like a lost puppy, poor devil.”

“I do believe she is at last serious over Colonel Huxtable,” Alexandra said. “Indeed, when I saw him draw her aside during the very first set of the evening, I thought perhaps matters would come to their conclusion tonight. But no matter.”

“Here she is with Mr. Purnell,” Ellen said, looking toward the doorway. “I cannot help thinking that they make a rather splendid couple. It is a pity you cannot persuade him to stay in England, Alexandra.”

Her sister-in-law looked at the approaching couple, arrested. “James and Madeline,” she said. “Gracious, I had never thought of it before. How very splendid that would be. But of course there is no chance. He is to return to Canada before the summer is over, and Madeline has eyes for no one but the colonel these days. Oh, Ellen, do you think there is the faintest chance?”

Lord Amberley pursed his lips and looked with marked amusement across the table at his younger brother. But Lord Eden, his face quite serious, was gazing across the room at his twin sister.

Jennifer Simpson and Lord North, Duncan Cameron and Miss Marshall were also approaching their table.

J
AMES STOOD UNDECIDED IN THE DOORWAY, looking about him. Should he choose an empty table? One occupied by strangers? Or one with family members? His companion's hand burned through his sleeve and through his arm.

“Shall we join your brothers?” he suggested.

“Yes,” she said.

He had been determined this evening to treat her no differently from the way he would treat any other lady. He would ignore her if he could, he had decided. And if he could not, then he would behave toward her with a cool courtesy.

And what had happened? He had been rude to her again. He had agreed with her suggestion that he had asked her to dance only because her cousin had been engaged to dance the set with someone else. And he had made almost no effort to match her attempts at conversation. He had felt quite unable to prevent himself from putting on the usual defenses against her. He had become surly.

Sometimes he did not understand himself at all. And sometimes he angered himself. He seated her at the table and found himself quite unable for the moment to smile at any of its occupants.

“James,” Alexandra said, her cheeks flushed, “I had no idea there would be such a crush here tonight. Everyone must have come out of curiosity, knowing that it is all in your honor.”

James managed a grin at her. “More likely it was out of curiosity to see the Amberley ballroom,” he said. “I gather it is not used a great deal.”

“For which I make no apology,” the earl said. “One ball a year is usually quite sufficient for my peace of mind, and the neighbors at Amberley Court would be severely disappointed if we were to discontinue the annual ball there.”

“You must realize what a great honor is being done you, Purnell,” Lord Eden said with a chuckle. “Edmund has a reputation in town as something of a hermit. Yet here he is, playing amiable host to the
crème de la crème
.”

“You will all be making Mr. Purnell decidedly uncomfortable to know that he is the cause of all this,” Ellen said, giving him a quiet smile. “I for one think it all very splendid, and I am glad you came home and made it all possible, sir.”

Madeline was sitting straight and silent in her chair beside him, not at all her customary sociable self.

“I danced with Mr. Cameron earlier,” Jennifer Simpson said, smiling at that gentleman across the table. “He told me that he has traveled thousands of miles inland by canoe, climbing in and out of the boat constantly to pass rapids and waterfalls. It sounds like the most exciting job in the world.”

“But do you prefer this part of the job?” Ellen asked Duncan. “Coming to England, I mean?”

“It is a novelty to be invited to English parties, I must confess, ma'am,” Duncan Cameron said. “And to waltz. But I do believe the lure of the wilderness is in my blood. I am hoping that next spring I can be on my way back there.”

“Do you feel the same way, James?” Ellen asked.

Madeline's hands were twisting in her lap, he could see out of the corner of one eye. He turned cold for a moment when he realized that he had been about to reach out to take one of them in his.

“In my blood?” he said. “I am not sure I would put it quite like that. But it is a great experience. One comes face-to-face with oneself when surrounded with such vast emptiness and such harsh living conditions. I can well imagine that it could become essential to one's being.”

“You make it sound very romantic,” Jennifer said.

“Of course,” Duncan said with a grin, “there are the mosquitoes and black flies to eat one alive in the summer and the snow and the ice to bury one alive in the winter.”

They all laughed. James was watching Madeline's hands. White, long-fingered hands. She was twisting a ring on her right hand. Those hands had once touched him with desire. They had been warm on his face and in his hair.

Her hands clenched suddenly in her lap, and when he glanced quickly into her face, it was to find that her jaw was set and she was staring down at her hands. He looked away from her.

Duncan was describing how the
voyageurs,
or canoe-men, portaged all the contents of the canoes and the canoes themselves around rapids. He added some details of his own. It was inevitable, James supposed, that people here would be curious about their lives as fur traders. He did not resent the questions.

His father, he noticed, had come for supper, but he had not approached their table. He was seated with the dowager countess and Sir Cedric Harvey.

Madeline's hands were alternately still and fidgeting. She had scarcely spoken. And for his part, he could not recall a time when he had felt quite so suffocatingly uncomfortable. He turned to her impulsively. Only a few people had risen and left the room. Most were still eating.

“May I escort you back to the ballroom?” he asked.

She rose to her feet as the other occupants of the table looked at them in some surprise.

“To some private room,” he said to Madeline as they left the dining room. “We need to talk for a few minutes.”

If she felt surprise, she did not show it. Or reluctance. He had half expected her to refuse to be alone with him. She led him to a small room at the front of the house. A morning room, he guessed.

She crossed the room to the fireplace as he closed the door behind him, and she set both hands on the mantel, above the level of her head. A single candle burned there.

He stood just inside the doorway, his hands clasped behind him, his feet set slightly apart.

“Is there anything we can do about this awkwardness between us?” he asked.

He thought she would not answer. She gripped the mantelpiece and stared downward. “I suppose,” she said at last, “we could contrive to stay away from each other. I would leave London if I could. But it is not easy being an unmarried lady in our society. My mother is in town, as are my two brothers. It seems that I have no option but to remain here too.”

“I thought Lady Madeline Raine lived for London and the Season,” he said. “You must dislike me indeed if you would leave rather than have to meet me.”

“Of course,” she said, and she lowered her hands and turned to face him, “the frivolity of London society is the only thing I am capable of enjoying. I had forgotten that you discovered my darkest secret years ago, the secret that I have a brain full of feathers. And as for my disliking you, you have never given me reason to do otherwise.”

“Ah,” he said, advancing one step farther into the room, “plain speaking. I found it difficult meeting you again this summer. And no easier after the first time. I have noticed that you share my embarrassment. I suppose the nature of our last encounter before this year has something to do with it.”

“Where was that?” she asked. “I have forgotten.” She raised her eyebrows coolly, but she flushed.

“You are a liar,” he said. “There is no reason why we should both remember that occasion quite so vividly. Even at the time we were both undoubtedly adult, and embraces happen between adults. But the fact is that we do remember it, and it has created this awkwardness. Is it because I left so abruptly and did not face you the following morning?”

“It was, as I remember, a rather hot embrace,” she said, lifting her chin. “It was doubtless due to the moonlight and the music and perhaps the wine. There was nothing particularly unusual about it, sir. I am sure you have done the like with many women, as I have done with many men.”

“I suppose I owed you marriage after what happened,” he said. “But instead I left.”

She laughed. “Then it was doubtless as well you did,” she said. “You might have found my reception of a marriage offer somewhat humiliating. You are the very last man on this earth I would ever consider marrying, Mr. Purnell.”

“And yet,” he said coldly, “you told me on that night that you loved me.”

Her eyes flashed at him, and he knew that was the one detail he should never have confronted her with. He had done so only because her words had inexplicably hurt.

“Well,” she said, “you have called me liar this evening. It seems I was a liar then, too. You at least were honest, I seem to recall. You told me that it was nothing but lust you felt. I was a lady. I would not admit to a purely physical craving. I dressed it up in respectable terms. How could I have loved you? You treated me with as much contempt then as you have shown me since your return.”

“Your problem,” he said, “is that for years you have had nothing but adulation from the gentlemen around you. You have come to expect it as your due. If a man does not fawn on you and sigh over you, you feel insulted.”

“What a ridiculous notion,” she said. “Your problem, sir, is that you have never felt it necessary to afford other people the common courtesies. You smile when you wish, and you speak when you wish. And it is not very often that you wish to do either. It is your moroseness and your silence that create awkwardness.”

“Ah, the old story,” he said. “I remember your saying as much four years ago. And on one of those occasions I remember undertaking to entertain you for the whole of a walk of two miles or more. And what was the point, pray? I will wager that you cannot now recall a single word I said to you on that occasion.”

“Well, there you are wrong,” she said, her nostrils flared and her eyes still flashing at him. “You told me about your years at school and at university, and I mistakenly thought that after all perhaps you were human.”

“Both our voices are rising,” he said. “I suppose it was inevitable that we quarrel. We always seem to have done so. I should not have brought you here. I merely thought that perhaps we could behave like civilized beings at last. It seems I was mistaken.”

“And if you are,” she said, making no attempt to lower her own voice or accept his veiled suggestion that they hold on to their tempers, “it is entirely your own fault. You need not talk of ‘we' and ‘us.' I am perfectly willing to behave in a civilized manner at any time. It is you who have decided that boorishness is an acceptable form of behavior.”

“I might have known,” he said, “that you would not have changed at all, that you would be just as childish now as you ever were.”

“Oh!” she said, and her lips clamped together while her bosom heaved. “I don't believe there can be a more despicable man alive than you, James Purnell. I was prepared to be civil to you, for Alexandra's sake and Edmund's. But I find that my dislike of four years ago has turned into a full-blown hatred. I hate you, sir, and I believe it would be in both our interests if we make every effort to avoid each other during what remains of your stay in England. The time cannot go fast enough for me.”

“Or for me, either,” he said, making her a half bow, and standing aside as she swept by him and out through the door. She did not stop to close it behind her.

James stood where he was and shut his eyes tightly.

God! Oh, God.

What had he said to her? What unspeakable atrocities had he said to her to make her so furiously angry? The dreadful thing was that at the moment he could not for the life of him remember.

He could only recall that in the supper room he had had the impulsive idea to take her aside, to talk to her, to try somehow to clear the air between them, to have done with the ridiculous and paralyzing awkwardness between them.

It had seemed like a good idea.

Who had started hurling insults at whom?

Had he started it? He could not remember. All he did know was that within minutes they had been glaring and yelling at each other and that he had felt a blind instinct to hurt her, to set her down, to humiliate her.

But why?

God!

He set a hand up over his eyes and closed them again. Why did he want to hurt her? And why did it hurt him so badly when he succeeded? Was that it? Was that what he was trying to do? Hurt himself?

But why would he wish to hurt himself? Why punish himself? Punish himself for what?

For loving her?
Did
he love her?

Did he have the right to love her? To love any woman? Did he have the right to seek happiness with any woman?

With any woman who was not Dora? He had loved Dora. He had told her so. And he had shown her so. And then he had left her to the unthinkable nightmare of the consequences of that love. He had not done so knowingly, of course. He had not known what she had had to endure until it was too late to help her. By the time word reached him at university, Dora had been married off to John Drummond and sent off with him to an unknown destination.

He had been unable to save her. Incapable of saving her. He could not be blamed. He had told himself that over and over down the years. He could not be blamed.

But her life had been ruined forever. And was he to seek happiness for himself? He, who had not had to take any of the consequences of his irresponsible love for Dora?

He threw back his head and gazed sightlessly up at the ceiling. Madeline. He had just hurt her again, as he knew he had hurt her four years before. Was she to be punished because he had been weak enough to fall in love with her when he was not free to love?