“Catherine cannot ride. No one can doubt that
she is
a lady,” Jennifer pointed out, instantly defensive of her friend. She glanced away, finding that meeting his steady gray gaze made her inexplicably nervous.
“She can ride,” Grey said, relieved yet at the same time sorry that she had dropped her gaze from his, “though it is somewhat awkward for her to mount and dismount. The simple fact is that she is afraid of horses.”
At this slight upon her mentor, the woman she regarded as the epitome of all ladylike graces, Jennifer actually dared to contradict him. “She isn’t afraid of anything.”
Grey laughed out loud again. “You are damned loyal,” he said admiringly. “Or do you really perceive her that way? My sister is a strong woman, I’ll admit—too strong, some might say—but the fact is that she is terrified of horses. She was thrown from a horse when she was younger, you know, and her leg failed to heal properly, despite the best efforts of the doctor. She will not go near the stable.”
He paused and considered her appraisingly for a long moment. “Perhaps I can teach you to ride.”
Jennifer was by now so nervous under his steady, unwavering gaze that she retorted without thinking. “I am not certain I care to be taught by a man who cannot keep his seat, sir.”
Grey scowled blackly for a moment, then, reluctantly, smiled. “You may have a point there.” He turned away as though her acerbic comment had broken some sort of spell, walked to his stallion, and untied the beast. “Come. I’ll walk you home.”
She quailed at the idea of actually walking all that distance in her husband’s terribly unnerving company, but she had little choice. Timidly she walked beside him as he led the great bay stallion back down the path.
Grey was silent for a time, and Jennifer, characteristically, did not speak. At last he said musingly, “I don’t know what I am to do with you.”
At her questioning glance he went on, “I had no business marrying you. As young and pretty as you are, you should not be tied to a—a drunkard. To a man who cares nothing for you. Yet there is no way out of this predicament. Divorce is not possible in Virginia. Annulment is a possibility, but having pulled a weed from the mud and transformed it into a flower, I find myself strangely reluctant to cast it back into the mud.”
“I am not a flower yet,” Jennifer said, uncertain whether to be flattered or offended by this curious speech.
“Not yet, perhaps. But I doubt you would be content were you to return to the ordinary. You are not the same simple girl I met there. Your horizons have expanded. Catherine tells me that you love to learn, and that you are, in fact, quite intelligent.” He sighed. “Having brought you here, I cannot send you away. To do so would be unfair to you. You are, after all, my wife.”
“For better or for worse,” Jennifer agreed, as solemnly as ever.
“Probably for worse,” Grey said, smiling in that sardonic way he had. “At least you appear to harbor no romantic
notions about loving me. Quite rightly, I suppose, for I am anything but lovable. I—I regret bringing you here, Jennifer. I am trying, however feebly, to apologize.”
Jennifer glanced up quickly, and he thought again how lovely and how very young she was. She did not belong here, with nothing but a crippled woman and a madman for her family. “Apologize?” she repeated. “You have naught to apologize for, sir.”
“For God’s sake, stop calling me sir,” Grey snapped, unaccountably irritated by the word. “You make me feel like your grandfather. Call me Grey. Everyone else does.”
Shying away from such familiarity, Jennifer repeated faintly, “There is no need for you to apologize.”
Grey scowled more blackly than before. “Ah, but there is. True, I’ve given you more opportunity to learn and grow than would ever have been yours had you remained in Princess Anne County. But there you did not know what you were missing. And by bringing you here I have trapped you in a parody of a marriage.”
He paused, as if hesitant to disclose something, then added with brutal frankness, “I have a mistress, you know.”
Jennifer did not break stride. “Yes, I know,” she said calmly. “What I don’t understand is why. I thought you were devoted to the memory of—” Suddenly appalled by what she had almost blurted out, she came to a halt and fell silent.
A bitter smile twisted Grey’s mouth. “In mind and soul, I am. In body—well, I am still a young man. I cannot live the life of a monk. But I assure you I shall not force my attentions on you. You deserve better than a man whose heart is in the grave.”
“And your mistress doesn’t?”
The words escaped her lips before she could stop them. She could have cursed herself for daring to speak so. Grey, however, did not seem angered. He considered her question calmly.
“She does not appear to object,” he said at last. “She is,
after all, married. Therefore, falling in love with me would be futile. I assure you, Jennifer, that she does not cherish any romantic notions regarding me. She knows all too well that I can never love again.”
Jennifer recovered herself and started down the path rapidly. She said nothing, but her thoughts were so clearly written upon the delicate planes of her face that Grey, who never explained his actions to anyone, felt oddly compelled to explain further. He said almost gently, “It isn’t so bad as all that, Jennifer. She is, quite frankly, a beautiful, amoral bitch. I have no admiration for her mind or her character—nothing but her body attracts me. And as crass as that sounds, I believe she feels much the same way about me. As long as we both understand that our relationship is based purely on physical pleasure, no one can possibly be hurt.”
“What of her husband?”
Grey shrugged with complete unconcern. “Either he was a fool to marry Melissa in the erroneous belief that she was a lady, or he cares nothing for her. Either way, he is no concern of mine.” He added a little anxiously, “I hope you do not care that I have a mistress because you are harboring any feelings for me?” He did not want the puppyish adoration of a child. He wanted sex and he wanted his memories, and more than anything he wanted to be left alone.
She turned, amber brows arched questioningly. “How could I have any feelings for you? Today is the first day we have ever had a conversation.”
Something—guilt, perhaps—flickered briefly in the granite depths of his eyes, but he covered it by drawling coolly, “I have really had no desire to speak to you until now. You must be aware, after all, that when I first brought you to Greyhaven you were a less than fascinating conversationalist.”
Aware that he was intentionally insulting her, Jennifer bit off the sharp retort that sprang to her lips and looked
away. She was still unable to express anger. Even knowing full well that no one would strike her for saying what she thought, she felt compelled to bury her emotions. Hence she said nothing at all, and the walk back to Greyhaven was completed in bitter silence.
J
ennifer sat in her chamber the next day, idly practicing writing her name upon parchment. Writing was not as easy as Catherine made it appear. Catherine’s handwriting was elegant and graceful, whereas Jennifer’s writing looked like spiders crawling across the page, their legs sprawling in all directions. Even worse, her quill kept blotting the ivory page, even though it was the feather of a heron, which Catherine had assured her made the best quill. The best quill did not seem to be good enough to compensate for her poor writing skills. At last, annoyed by her failure to print “Jennifer Wilton Greyson” successfully even once, she threw the quill down in exasperation.
As always, her active mind leaped forward to other thoughts. She found herself wondering if Diana had frequently used this desk. No doubt she had sat here and written notes in a graceful, ladylike hand. Doubtless she had never sat in this chair struggling to write her own name.
The thought only made Jennifer feel more like an interloper than ever. From the snatches of slaves’ gossip she had overheard, she had come to realize that Diana had been much admired. The only person who had not seemed to wholeheartedly idolize Diana was Catherine, and even Catherine had implied that Diana was a “model of feminine deportment.” Catherine had respected Diana, even if her jealousy had made it impossible for her to like the woman. Diana’s ghost seemed to hang over Greyhaven,
making it impossible for Jennifer to ever feel comfortable in these elegant surroundings.
Though she was as yet unable to fully express her emotions, her ability to acknowledge her feelings to herself had improved. Staring absently at the burl walnut prospect door in the desk, she admitted to herself that she was frustrated, perhaps even envious. Everyone here—well, almost everyone—seemed to believe that Diana had been a perfect angel, a lady born and bred. Jennifer was acutely aware that
she
was neither a lady nor an angel, and she felt keenly unworthy.
Surely, she thought, Diana could not have been so perfect as she appeared. After long years of observing the inebriated and rowdy men who congregated at the ordinary, Jennifer had understandably developed a rather cynical view of human behavior. She had become certain that no one was perfect. Everyone had some flaws, and most people had a great many.
What had Diana really been like?
Catherine was the only person who had intimated that Diana was less than perfect, yet she had also admitted that she had been jealous of her. Perhaps, if the years had improved Grey’s memories of his first wife, they had also tarnished Catherine’s memories.
Jennifer could not be certain.
Her idle gaze fell upon the papers filed neatly in the pigeonholes of the desk. Perhaps, she mused, the answers were here. She reached a slender hand impulsively toward the desk, but pulled it back almost instantly.
The papers within the desk, she told herself firmly, were none of her business. It appeared that they had been undisturbed since Diana’s death. No doubt no one had thought to remove them from this chamber, since she had been unable to read when she had first arrived. Or perhaps Grey was not even aware of their existence. She knew that the door to this chamber had been closed since the day of Diana’s death, as though Grey had been unable to face the empty room. And when she had first come to Greyhaven,
the desk had been closed and thickly spread with dust. No one had read those papers for a long, long time.
Tentatively, glancing guiltily toward the closed door, though she knew full well that no one would enter without knocking—no one had done so since that first day, when Grey had burst in—she took out a pile of parchment.
The first sheet was written in a bold, masculine hand. Grey’s hand, she realized, her breath catching oddly in her throat. She read:
“My beloved—”
It was too personal. She had no business reading this. She knew it. And yet she stumbled on.
It was a love letter, written by Grey for the only woman he had ever loved. Though many of the words were incomprehensible to her untutored eyes, the tone was unmistakable—the tone of a man desperately, irrevocably in love. The sort of love that nothing, not even death, could shatter. Reading the letter, she felt another pang of envy toward Diana, who had been capable of inspiring such undying love. Jennifer longed for love and affection, and she was painfully aware that she could never obtain it. She struggled through the letter, yearning for a vicarious knowledge of the emotion that she herself would never know.
The letter was full of glowing descriptions of Diana’s youthful beauty and wondrous soul, as devoid of real content as love letters usually are, except for the last line. It was curiously wistful, almost sad, and it read:
“Please, darling, don’t ever leave me, for if you did I could not bear to live. My life without you would be empty.”
Jennifer studied this line curiously. Grey had known, even eight or nine years ago, what Diana had meant to him. He had foreseen how empty his life would be without her. He must have loved her very much, she thought, and wished hopelessly that she herself could experience that sort of love.
But it was a foolish wish, and she knew it.
Carefully placing the letter back in the desk, she stood and rubbed the back of her neck, grown stiff from sitting still overlong. Puzzling out the letter had taken a good hour. Plainly, if she was going to search through the letters in search of some knowledge about Diana, it would take a very long time.
“My dear Mistress Lancaster …”
The date indicated that this was the first letter Grey had ever written to Diana. Jennifer hoped the letter would give her some idea of how they had met, as well as a glimpse into Grey’s personality before he had become so embittered. It was odd to think that the curt, savagely temperamental man she knew had once been capable of writing such a formally courteous letter. She read on, “I cannot tell you how delighted I was to have the opportunity to speak with you at your uncle’s house. It is rare that one meets a young woman of your beauty and kindness.…”
Edward Greyson leaned against the split-rail fence and stared admiringly at the enormous black stallion that grazed in the field. “He’s gorgeous” he said enthusiastically.
Kayne O’Neill grinned at the young man’s enthusiasm. Like most young blades, it seemed, Grey was interested in two things—horses and women. Not necessarily in that order, he reminded himself. “He’s a descendant of my first horse, Crimson,” he said. “Crimson was the best horse my father ever bred. Hurricane there is the best horse I have ever bred.”
Grey nodded thoughtfully, studying the stallion as he lifted his finely shaped head to gaze at the onlookers, and then galloped across the field in an astonishing display of speed, almost as though showing off for his audience. The first thoroughbred to be imported to Virginia, a son of the Darley Arabian named Bulk Rock, had arrived in 1730, and almost since that very day the O’Neills had bred thoroughbreds. Hurricane, Grey knew, was the latest and finest in a
long and distinguished line. “God knows I need some good horses,” he said. His words were directed at Kayne, but his eyes did not leave the stallion. “When my father died three months ago, I decided that the first thing I should do with his money was to buy some better stock. The horses in our stables are appalling. Nags, every last one of them. I was told you breed the best horses in the colony.”