Page 23 of To Claim the Long-Lost Lover
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The supper dance was a good choice. The first in the set was a line dance. If he chose a group with a long line, particularly if he positioned them well, they could spend a fair part of the time standing out, waiting for their turn in the patterns. The second was a waltz. He realised his hopes were setting him up for disappointment, but she had already softened to him. If she softened more after hearing what he had to say, he would be able to hold her in his arms again, even if it was on a dance floor, surrounded by half of the Polite World.
Lady Framington introduced him to a young lady as a suitable partner, so he took her out onto the floor. Then his father had one of his insipid maidens to present him to, a Miss Tremaway, daughter of a viscount. He escaped both her father and his by asking her for a dance, as well.
The next set was the one before the supper dance. He managed to avoid both his hostess and his father, prowling the end of the room where he was to meet Sarah. She was out on the floor, he noted, but Drew was in the corner where she’d told him to meet her, talking to a man who must be the Duke of Winshire. Yes, and the duke was sitting with the Duchess of Haverford, wife of his sworn enemy. He would have to ask Libby more about the relationship between the families.
Nothing, though, could long take his attention from Sarah, and he started for the corner when the musicians brought the current dance to a swirling end. He reached it before her, and Drew greeted him cheerfully. “Bentham! Have you seen Aldridge this evening?”
“Quite a haircut,” Nate agreed. The hair had been singed away on one side, though the burns where it had caught fire were minor. They’d put the flames out quickly, and his clothes had protected his shoulder and arm, though the coat was a loss. Nate had smothered his head with salve, and the man would be fine, but he had presented an odd appearance, with hair long enough to touch his collar on one side and nothing on the other.
Since then, he’d had the whole head all but shaved. Anyone else might have stayed at home, but Aldridge ignored any change in his appearance as if it didn’t exist. Except, perhaps, there was method in it.
Nate was familiar with the signs. The marquis had been pursuing Lady Charlotte, and she wanted nothing to do with him. But tonight, she was dancing with him. The action was unusual enough to have the ballroom buzzing.
Nate silently wished him luck, and tried to focus his attention as Drew presented him to the Duchess of Haverford and then to the Duke of Winshire. The older people exchanged a glance full of speculation. “You have a previous acquaintance with my niece,” the duke said.
I am her husband, Nate wanted to shout, but he wouldn’t make the claim until Sarah gave him leave. And until he was certain that the marriage stood, he supposed. In his heart, though, he was and always would be Sarah’s whether their union had been legal or not; whether it had been annulled or not; whether she would let him love her again or not.
There she was. Yes, and Charlotte with Aldridge, who sent him a smile from one sufferer to another.
Nate endured a few more pleasantries, and at last offered Sarah his arm. “Let us skip the dance and find somewhere quiet to talk,” Sarah said.
Nate looked at the doors to the terrace, tightly shut against the rain.
Sarah shook her head. “Not outside, and we can only talk at a shout in the ballroom, but the supper room should be quiet at the moment.”
She guided him down the length of the room, across to the far wall, and through double doors in the corner, giving a sigh of relief as they stepped out of the noise and the heat.
It was another massive room, with tables set up at the far end. Near them, a dozen or more people already occupied some of the arranged groups of sofas and chairs, conversing or just resting from the activity in the next room.
Sarah led him to chairs a short distance from everyone else. “We can talk in private, without risk to your reputation and mine,” she explained.
Again, Nate wanted to protest. His soul proclaimed he was her husband, and being private with her was no scandal, but rather the very definition of heaven! Not yet. First, he had an explanation to make, if he could only find the words to start.
“You left, Nate,” Sarah said, when he remained silent. The desolation in her tone had his story tumbling from his lips, his fear of saying the wrong thing submerged by his desperate need to save her pain.
“I was abducted. You know the corner where our lane branched off from the road to the village? They were waiting in the trees. They jumped me as I passed. Three great brutes and your brother Elfingham. He stood back to see that I was thoroughly beaten.” He hadn’t meant to tell her the details, but perhaps it was for the best.
Sarah put a gentle hand on his arm. “They beat you? Oh, Nate.”
He thrilled to her touch, every nerve under her hand suddenly at high alert. For a moment, he lost track of his story, but then he continued, “I tried to tell Elfingham that we were married; that you were my wife. He said it wasn’t true, and if it was, the marriage would be annulled. I was being sent on a long sea voyage, and your father had arranged a marriage for you. I think your father was there too. I remember someone saying you’d be married within the month. They kept punching me and kicking me, and I must have passed out.”
She slid her hand down to his and squeezed it, nibbling at her upper lip, her eyes brimming with tears. “Father came to our cottage. He told me that you had lied about our marriage, that you had taken money to leave me. I didn’t believe him, Nate. But weeks passed and then months, and you didn’t return.”
“I couldn’t. I woke up a week later, far out at sea.” No need to mention the occasional surfacing into pain and nausea during the trip to the coast and the early part of the voyage. “When I demanded to speak to the captain, explained I had to get back to my wife, they laughed. My father had signed me over to the navy. I was enrolled for ten years as a common seaman, and I would not be allowed off the ship for any reason for at least the duration of the war. Much use I was going to be, he said.” Even if he hadn’t had several broken ribs, a broken arm, and who knew what internal injuries, he was a total landlubber.
“But you got away. For here you are,” Sarah pointed out, “and, if gossip is true, you went to Edinburgh before the peace was signed.”
The power of theton’svast whispering chamber. “The ship’s surgeon, Lieutenant Macintosh, wasn’t that bad a sort. He took me on as a loblolly boy—a sort of assistant—as soon as I was well enough to be of use. When he found I knew a bit about rough first aid, he kept me on, and trained me as a ship’s surgeon. By the time we’d been two years away, I no longer did much crew work. And after three years, Macintosh said I was ready to move to another ship in the fleet as their surgeon, and they made me a ship’s surgeon, acting.”
That still left four years, but he wanted to know about Sarah. And he wanted to keep her thinking hard enough that she didn’t notice she still held his hand. “He didn’t make you marry? Your father?”
She shook her head. “I was—ill, after you left.”
Nate heard the hesitation. Had they beaten her, too? He looked over his shoulder to make sure the other occupants of the room could not see, and took her other hand in his free one. “I hate to think of you sick and in pain, and me not there to help.”
“When I was well enough, my father and my grandfather tried to browbeat me into marriage to one of my father’s friends, but Mama and Aunt Georgie stood up for me. I think, too, that by then they had spent my dowry, and I was harder to get rid of than they expected. And then Elfingham died and we were all in mourning.” She shrugged. “I just kept saying ‘no’, whomever they suggested.”
