Page 20 of A Gentleman's Offer
‘I’m not marrying her; I can tell you so much. I know men don’t break off engagements, that they can’t. Well, I’m breaking this one off, no matter how much scandal it will cause.’
She gave a little hiccup of wild laughter, presumably at the thought of the new horrors his words called up, and rested her head on his shoulder. ‘My father might challenge you to a duel! Can you picture him calling you out?’
‘I cannot. Your half-brother might, I suppose, if he felt the family’s honour was at stake. But no, he wouldn’t, not if I explained all the circumstances to him. I’ve no intention of fighting him, or anybody else – matters are difficult enough as it is. Nobody can be expected to marry someone who runs away from them and hides and sets everyone in an uproar rather than simply talking. I’m not an ogre and I won’t be treated as though I am.’
‘No, you’re not. Of course you aren’t. You don’t deserve this either. But what I meant to say, Dominic, was that I feel I don’t know anything – not where I’ll be or even who I’ll be, Meg or Maria, by the end of the week – but I do know I want you to kiss me again. For much longer. And I think you want to kiss me too. In fact, I know you do.’
He drew her deeper into the shadows, his hands tight on her waist, and said, ‘I’d like to do a great deal more than kiss you. You must be aware of that.’
‘Of course I am. I’ve told you that I’m not entirely inexperienced. But there is no barn, no place we can be private, and perhaps it’s just as well. Life is complicated enough right now, don’t you agree? To be completely alone with you with no checks on our behaviour but the ones we can manage to put there is more temptation than I need tonight. I don’t trust myself to resist you. But I don’t believe kissing and taking some comfort from that will make things any worse – do you?’
He pulled her closer still, which was answer enough, and in the darkness their mouths found each other again, and there was no more talking. They held each other tight and lost themselves in each other, for a little while – a precious oblivion. His hands were under her coat, seeking her warm, soft skin and finding it, beneath waistcoat, shirt and chemise, and soon enough they had pushed the fine fabrics aside to cover and caress her breasts. Her nipples were hard buds of desire and she pressed herself into his hands, filling them, urging him on; God, this was so good, so wonderful, and more would be better, more would be everything.
But even as he kissed her and held her, took pleasure and comfort from her warm, responsive body in his arms, and gave pleasure in return, he wasn’t sure she was correct in what she said. He feared that every moment he spent with her, every caress he gave her or she gave him, every single smile or confidence they exchanged, drew him deeper into a place of sorry confusion, where his desires and even his hopes warred against what he knew to be right, and what the obligations of a gentleman must be.
Dominic had never considered himself to be a man ruled by sexual desire, certainly not to the extent of losing his senses over a woman; he’d seen others do it often enough, and failed each time to understand what had driven them to it. That was a temptation he’d never known and had, previously, struggled to imagine. A brief, intense infatuation with a bold-eyed young woman of the town when he’d been in his late teens, at Oxford, had been as close as he’d come to making any kind of fool of himself, and really, that had been nothing to speak of; he’d known even when he was enmeshed in it that it was bound to end soon, and not in marriage, despite his youthful posturing. There’d been embarrassing scenes with his parents over the whole business, but it had not been genuine deep feeling on either side, nor anything close to it.
He was experienced enough, but all that experience had been more a matter of physical release and physical sensation – of taking and, he hoped, giving pleasure with a willing partner who did not treat the matter any more seriously than he did. He’d always been careful, had taken no risks with his health, his reputation, or his heart. As a result, he knew he had the reputation in society of being a cold fish with little interest in women. In the past, he’d shrugged when his friends accused him of being heartless – why should he deny it? Excessive emotion was so tedious, and such bad ton, he’d drawled with languid affectation, almost convincing himself that it was true. Some of them had laughed, and some of them had shaken their heads and told him he was sadly mistaken.
He’d never even fancied himself in love, not really, and a part of him had been glad of it, while a smaller, quieter part had been sorry, aware that he was missing something important, unsure what he could do about it. But it was foolish to harbour regrets, he’d told himself. He’d seen men – his own friends among them – take ruinously expensive mistresses and lavish fortunes on them that they didn’t have, he’d seen married men run away with other men’s wives and wreck the lives of dozens of people, including innocent children. His own father… Sir Thomas had whispered to him once nine years ago, very close to the end of his life, every word a perceptible effort, ‘I know you don’t understand the choices I’ve made, Dominic, in the name of love, and perhaps you judge me harshly for them. But you’re young. One day you’ll know. I pray for your sake, my dear boy, that you will know. Otherwise you won’t really be living.’ His father was long dead, his dangerous decisions and human inconsistencies buried with him as far as the world knew. How could this belief in overmastering love sit easily with Sir Thomas’s wish to arrange a marriage for him? He’d never know now, he supposed, for it was far too late to ask. But for himself, in his father’s terms he’d never truly lived in all these years; he’d never lost sleep over a woman, still less been tempted to throw all at hazard for the prospect of a joy he’d never experienced and had been unable even to imagine.
Until now. Now, when he was betrothed to her sister.
19
It was terribly late when Meg crept back into her father’s house again, and even then sleep was a long time coming. It was impossible to find rest when so much was uncertain. She was aware that, despite her brave words, her deeper entanglement with Sir Dominic was probably a reckless mistake. It wasn’t that she regretted it precisely – she remembered how happy and how safe she had felt in his arms and could not help but smile even as she sighed with frustrated desire and a wicked wish that he could be in her bed with her now – but there was no denying that it made an already tangled situation more complicated. What could possibly come of it? She had no idea, but suspected that the answer was: probably nothing but regret. She fell into an uneasy slumber just before dawn and rose late and heavy-eyed.
Mrs Treadwell told her that her aunt was feeling a little better, and wished to see her. Aunt Greystone was to be found reclining limply on a sofa in her bedchamber, still in her dressing gown, with handkerchief, smelling salts and hartshorn close at hand, in case of emergency, but not currently in use. Meg was sorry that she had no positive news to give her, apart from the fact that Mrs Greystone’s own former maid, Jenny Wood, had been interviewed and was of the strong opinion that Maria must have found shelter with one of her schoolfriends. If Meg allowed her aunt to assume that Jenny was still to be found under Lady Purslake’s respectable roof, she thought that was a forgivable deception, considering the alternative of telling the unvarnished truth, which would surely bring on a relapse – more spasms – and do no good to anyone.
Mrs Greystone was excessively grateful for all she was doing to help, which was agreeable, but ended the conversation with a renewed plea to keep the matter from her father at all costs, which was not. Meg might with justice have reminded her that the wedding was now little more than two weeks away, and gone on to reveal Sir Dominic’s fixed determination not to go ahead with it even if Maria did reappear – but that too would scarcely be helpful or constructive, she felt. Instead, she shared her intention to visit Lady Primrose that afternoon and talk to her in private, a plan which her aunt approved.
She had a more open and honest conversation with Hannah, who was glad to hear that Jenny was in good health and not under any duress. The old nurse shook her head when Meg told her that it was her opinion that Jenny, far from being an orphan, had grown up in her mother’s brothel from childhood, judging by her easy familiarity with the place and its inhabitants, and certainly did not need rescuing from it or from them; possibly, given Jenny’s forceful personality, the reverse was true. ‘I dare say her letters of recommendation were not as truthful as they should be,’ Hannah said, ‘which is very bad, I suppose, but she was a good maid and a hard worker, for all that. It’s hardly her fault, where and to who she was born, and she has her living to make, same as any poor girl.’
Meg assented whole-heartedly, adding a trifle tartly that she had enough to worry about without concerning herself with such peripheral issues, and that it was her further opinion that what Mrs Greystone didn’t know couldn’t hurt her. There was no need, surely, to cause her any further upset regarding a matter that could be of no possible significance to her in the greater scheme of things. It was hard to see, she said, how they were all to be extricated from this imbroglio without a great many much more shocking revelations and distressing scenes, in which her poor innocent aunt was almost bound to be involved, and Hannah was obliged to agree.
She armed herself with another of Maria’s fashionable muslin gowns and a corded blue and white pelisse to cover it, tied a modish blue silk bonnet with a great many feathers securely over her short curls, and set off resolutely for Lady Primrose’s house in her father’s carriage. She could only hope that the Duke’s daughter would be at home, and willing to see her. It would be a dreadful anticlimax if she were not, obliging her to come home directly.
The Duchess of Fernsby, who was now sadly deceased, had presented her husband with a great many pledges of her affection before expiring, presumably from exhaustion, which could not be wondered at. There were twelve or more Fernsby siblings, Sir Dominic had told her, mostly daughters. Luckily the Duke could not be said to be short of space to accommodate his large family, living as he did in an enormous, decaying family mansion of great antiquity in a most unfashionable part of town hard by the less than fragrant River Thames. It wasn’t, in terms of mere distance, so very far from Covent Garden, where she’d been last night.
Meg was admitted to the ancient building without delay, through a sort of turreted gatehouse, and conducted along dusty, damp-smelling corridors to what the butler described to her as the Young Ladies’ Parlour. This proved to be a panelled chamber of Tudor date or earlier, which contained to her relief a great deal of rather shabby old furniture but only one young lady at the present moment – Lady Primrose, pretending to leaf through a journal.
The door closed behind her, and the two women regarded each other in silence. Meg had suddenly had more than enough of beating about the bush and said, ‘Lady Primrose, I do not wish to be discourteous, but you know perfectly well I’m not Maria. I’m assured by one who knows her well – and clearly better than I do – that you’d have realised that the moment you set eyes on me, even if you don’t actually know where my sister is. But I’m hoping you do, and that you’ll be so good as to tell me. You’re my last hope, in fact, unless I want to go around London revealing my masquerade to every person Maria is even vaguely acquainted with, and probably causing a huge scandal that will ruin her reputation forever.’
Lady Primrose didn’t appear to be in the least surprised by this bald statement. ‘Of course I knew instantly who you must be. Maria had told me that your aunt was bound to summon you and beg you to take her place, and that you would certainly agree. I was very glad to see, when I met you, that her plan was working to perfection.’
‘Has she been staying with you?’ Meg asked a little unsteadily. ‘I think, if you know so much, she must have been. Is she here now – will you let me see her?’
Lady Primrose had no chance to supply any answer. A section of the worm-eaten linenfold panelling that lined the stuffy little room creaked as it swung open, resolving into a door that had previously been concealed, and behind it – after five long years of painful separation and all the recent fear and anxiety – Maria.
It was so very strange. Meg knew with her conscious mind that Maria must have changed and grown during their years apart, just as she had, and she knew too that they were still identical, or nearly so – similar enough, at any rate, that they could be mistaken for each other by one who did not know them well, or did not care enough to look closely. And yet the face she saw in her thoughts and dreams each night was not the face in the mirror, the face (more or less) she saw before her now, but the thirteen-year-old Maria she’d last seen sobbing piteously, being held and comforted by Hannah Treadwell on the steps of Lord Nightingale’s house as they’d been torn apart by their mother’s desperate need to claw her way to freedom and their father’s intractable refusal to let her take both her beloved children with her.
Meg wasn’t conscious of crossing the space between them, but she must have done so in a couple of long strides, because her sister had scarcely moved, but a second later they were embracing, clinging to each other, both weeping copiously. Lady Primrose, without uttering another word, left the room in a more conventional manner and closed the door securely behind her. Meg was only dimly aware of her departure.
‘Maria, Maria, where have you been?’ she sobbed.
20
‘I’m so sorry,’ Maria managed at last, when they had both ceased weeping quite so hard and clinging to each other as though they might be torn apart by violence once more. She took off her spectacles and cleaned them rather ineffectually on her handkerchief, then set them aside on a table, smiling anxiously and myopically at her sister. ‘I realised – when it was too late to stop it – that I must be causing you, and my aunt, and Hannah, a great deal of anxiety. But then it also struck me that, even if I’d wanted to come back, it was impossible for me simply to reappear at home, since you were taking my place.’
