The Devil's Web Page 10

  Her twin pulled a face. “I have been sitting in the carriage with Ellen and Charles, playing fond husband and father,” he said. “I have not even peeped into the hampers yet, Mad, to see if there are lobster patties or not.”

  Madeline relinquished James’s arm and took her brother’s. “Let’s look together, then,” she said. “I’m starved.”

  IN SOME WAYS IT FELT GOOD TO BE SIX AND twenty years of age and free, Madeline often thought. One was not burdened with a tyrannical or peevish or inattentive husband or with a brood of noisy and bad-tempered children. Neither was one hemmed in by all the restrictions on one’s behavior that being a very young lady imposed.

  Life had been good to her. She had taken well with the ton during her very first Season, and she had remained popular ever since. Younger ladies liked to be seen with her. They liked to copy her fashions. Younger men also seemed to feel that they gained in consequence if they were part of Lady Madeline’s court. And older men treated her with more deference than they showed the younger girls.

  There were definite advantages to being past the first blush of youth and still unattached. There were also, of course, disadvantages. One was not entirely free. When one’s family decided to disperse from London even before the Season was out, one had little choice but to attach oneself to some of them.

  She would have liked to stay in town. There she could lose herself in the whirl of social activities, and surround herself with admirers. There she could to a certain extent choose her companions. And there she could keep her mind off herself.

  It would have been possible to stay. The Carringtons were not quite ready yet to return home. Perhaps they would stay another week, Aunt Viola said. Perhaps two, Uncle William added, merely to watch his wife become cross and flustered. But one week or two would not help Madeline a great deal. Sooner or later she would have to remove herself elsewhere.

  Probably to Amberley Court. She did not want to go to Amberley.

  She thought perhaps she would go into Wiltshire with her twin. Until she talked to him about it, that was.

  He and Ellen were in a salon with Ellen’s father when she called one afternoon. Dominic was holding Olivia and entertaining her by waving a quizzing glass from its ribbon before her eyes, pendulum fashion. Lord Harrowby had Charles and was making him smile. Ellen was sitting beside her father.

  It was a disturbingly domesticated scene, Madeline thought. Sometimes it was becoming hard to realize that Dominic was her twin. He and Ellen seemed as reluctant as Edmund and Alexandra to leave their children in the nursery all day under the care of their nurse.

  “Come into the library,” Dominic said to Madeline, relinquishing his daughter to Ellen’s care. “There’s less chance there that you will have some baby dribbling all over your dress.”

  “But you know the babies are my only real reason for coming,” she protested, smiling.

  “On this occasion I think not,” he said as he closed the library door behind them. “I am conceited enough to think that I am the reason. What’s bothering you, Mad? I could see as soon as you were shown in that something is.”

  “Really, nothing,” she said, “except that you are leaving for Wiltshire the day after tomorrow, and Edmund is leaving for Amberley. And I won’t see you until goodness knows when, and we have always been close, haven’t we, Dom? And yet if I ask to come with you, I will be imposing my presence on a family group and Ellen may resent it, though she will be far too polite to say so. And if I go with Edmund I will be interfering in a family party. For Alexandra does not see her parents often, and of course she does not see her brother for years at a time. So I am caught between the devil and the deep blue sea.”

  “Am I the devil or the sea?” he asked, reclining back against a large oak desk and crossing his arms over his chest. “Since when have you dreamed up this nonsense of not being welcome either with Edmund or with me?”

  “Dom,” she said, “you cannot conceive of what it is like to be a woman and unmarried at my age. It did not strike me fully until recently, perhaps because you were not married either. But it is a terrible feeling to be a spinster and to not quite belong anywhere.”

  Dominic grinned.

  “Oh, you horrid man!” she cried, temper flaring. “I might have known you would have no sympathy at all. Now that you have Ellen and two babies all at once, you are wallowing in domestic bliss, and I may go hang for all you care.”

  “Mad!” he said, putting his head to one side and opening his arms. “Do you want to punch and pummel me? Come on, I won’t even defend myself.”

  “Stupid!” she said. “We are not children still to fight each other, Dom. Though sometimes I wish I could have those days back. They were so uncomplicated. May I come with you to Wiltshire?”

  “No,” he said.

  She looked at him as if he had just slapped her face. She flushed painfully.

  “You should not have come to me, you know,” he said. “You should have gone to Ellen. I know you altogether too well. I think you are thoroughly convinced by this unwanted-spinster-relative image of yourself you have dreamed up. I am not at all convinced. It’s Purnell, isn’t it?”

  She frowned. “What can James possibly have to do with all this?” she asked.

  “Only everything,” he said. “He is going to Amberley, so of course you must avoid it at all costs. Is it really very painful?”

  She stared at him for a few moments and then turned to walk away from him. She stood staring out through one of the windows. “I have to end it once and for all,” she said. “I don’t want to see him again, Dom. I can’t spend a month at Amberley with him. Please don’t say no. Let me come with you.”

  His voice came from just beyond her shoulder when he spoke next. “Last year when I returned from Brussels,” he said, “Ellen wanted nothing more to do with me. She did not want to see me. And the pain was so dreadful that I wanted to go away and forget. The fight for her seemed too impossible to win and too painful. I probably would have gone, too, if I had not discovered just in time that she was with child. We fought it through, Madeline. I dread to think what my life would be now if I had given up so easily.”

  “But that was different altogether from my case,” she said crossly.

  “Of course it was,” he said. “In details it was very different. In essentials I think it was much the same. You love Purnell. You want to cut off the pain now, when you can still feel somewhat in control of it. You are afraid that after another month the pain will be unbearable and will destroy you.”

  She rested her forehead against the window, “Can you promise me that it will not?” she said. “It is easy for you, Dom, to look back and see that following Ellen to Amberley last year was the best thing you could have done. But there is no hope for me. For even if by some strange chance he did make me an offer and I accepted, we would not be happy together. I am incapable of making him happy, because he does not like me. And I could not be happy with his morose nature. Let me come with you.”

  He took her by the shoulders and turned her to him. “Will you trust me?” he asked. “We have always known each other almost better than we have known ourselves, haven’t we, Mad? I can’t look into the future. I can’t make promises for you. It may well be that if you go to Amberley, you will have a broken heart at the end of a month. Perhaps it will throw a blight on the rest of your life. But if you don’t go, you will never be free of what has pursued you and haunted you for four years.”

  “Geoffrey will marry me,” she said.

  “North?” he said scornfully. “That is not even a good try, Mad. What has happened to Huxtable? Rejected already, at a guess. Now, having given my little sermon, I will say this. If you will do us the honor of spending the summer with us in Wiltshire, both Ellen and I will be delighted. I know I speak for her too. She thinks of you as a sister and is very fond of you. You may come with us the day after tomorrow. But for your sake, I hope you don’t.”

  “Oh, horrid!” she said, lea
ning forward to rest her forehead against his neckcloth. “You have turned into a horrid, very grown-up and wise man, Dom. You are quite as bad as Edmund. I far preferred it when we bit and scratched.”

  “I never did either,” he said. “I slapped and punched and swore. And what a beautiful compliment about my being like Edmund. I could do a great deal worse. Come and have tea now, and you shall let us know tomorrow what you have decided to do. There will be no reproaches, by the way, and no more sermons.”

  She lifted her head with a sigh. “I don’t really need until tomorrow,” she said. “Miss Cameron is traveling down to Amberley with Mama and me. It would be unmannerly to absent myself, would it not?”

  “No comment,” he said.

  “And our trunks are packed,” she said. “And some of my things are hopelessly mixed up with Mama’s. I suppose it would be easier for me to go with her.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “I don’t suppose Edmund and Alexandra will mind too much, will they?” she said. “I have been spending my summers at Amberley for so long that I must be hardly distinguishable from the furniture.”

  His lips twitched. “Quite,” he said.

  “And there are so many friends and neighbors to be visited,” she said, “that I can be away from home for most of every day.”

  “A good point,” he said.

  “And then, of course, Miss Cameron will be there, and she will be with him all the time. It is likely that I will scarce see him and never have to converse with him.”

  “You are being very sensible about the whole thing,” he said.

  She punched him suddenly with a hard jab to the stomach. “And you are being horrid,” she said. “Don’t you dare laugh at me, Dominic Raine. You know I can tolerate anything except being laughed at.”

  “Quite so,” he said soothingly.

  And so Madeline found herself less than a week later at Amberley, and wondering how she could have thought of going anywhere else. There was the gray stone mansion in the valley, which was surely one of the loveliest houses she had ever seen and which had always been home. And the valley was peaceful and green, and the cliffs wild and windblown, and the beach flat and golden when the tide was out.

  And there were the Courtneys glad to see her home, even Howard, the oldest son, now one of Edmund’s tenants in his own right, and for many years her faithful admirer. And the Mortons and the Cartwrights and the Lampmans and the Misses Stanhope and the rector and his wife. And Mr. Watson, who had recently married. And Uncle William and Aunt Viola would be back soon.

  It was good to be home. And if there were some visitors with whom she was less than comfortable, well then, it was easy enough to avoid them. The house was large enough and the countryside much larger.

  And she had to endure for only one month. The Adeona was to sail in August.

  • • •

  IF JEAN HAD BEEN EXCITED by London and delighted with Richmond Park, she was enraptured with Amberley Court. It seemed she could not have enough of walking and riding and even running out of doors. The state apartments of the house and the family portrait gallery enchanted her. She frequently spent an hour at a time in the nursery or out on one of the lawns, playing with Christopher and trying to coax smiles from Caroline. And she loved the neighbors and their friendliness. Jean had stood in awe of the English. She had not expected to be taken notice of by any of them. She had certainly not expected any to befriend her.

  Before Anna’s return one week after their own arrival, she spent much of her time with Madeline. And Madeline could not help but like the girl, whose sunny nature matched her own as it had used to be. They went visiting together when the dowager Lady Amberley was too busy entertaining Lady Beckworth or escaping for private walks with Sir Cedric.

  Jean loved to visit the rector and his wife, whose home was anything but the tidy, quiet haven one might expect of a rectory. Seven children had been given the freedom of the house, and used the privilege to its full advantage. The eighth would doubtless join them when he once learned either to crawl or to walk. And the rector’s wife sat amid the chaos, huge with the ninth addition to their family, beaming goodwill on all comers.

  And she loved to visit the Lampmans and their two quiet, well-behaved children, although Rose was not quite four and Paul not quite two. Lady Lampman took her into the flower garden and the rose arbor and the orchard, and Jean thought that she had never in her life seen anything more splendidly colorful. And Sir Perry teased her about her accent, which was not quite Scottish and not quite French and not quite anything else either.

  “But quite, quite charming,” he added, his eyes twinkling when he was not sure that she knew he was teasing.

  She liked the Courtneys, who lived in a large house and were clearly prosperous tenant farmers, but who were so friendly and so cozy that she felt quite unthreatened by their grandeur. Large, genial Mr. Courtney, creaking inside his stays, showed her his prize boars and a large number of their twenty-three cats. There would not be so many of the latter, he said with a rumble of a laugh and a creak, now that his Susan was from home. She was living in London with her brother-in-law, Lord Renfrew, and his good lady, preparing for her wedding to Viscount Agerton in St. George’s in the autumn.

  Her first husband, Jean understood, had been killed at Waterloo just as Lady Eden’s had been.

  Mrs. Courtney showed her her vegetable garden.

  The Misses Stanhope showed her their treasures of lace and displayed a great deal of interest in her Scottish ancestry on her father’s side and her English ancestry on her mother’s. Both Mrs. Morton and Mrs. Cartwright plied her with cream cakes and tea and kindly questions. And Mrs. Colin Courtney wanted to know all about Montreal and thought it must be wonderful to have been all the way to the new world, while Colin and his older brother, Howard, talked with Madeline and smiled at Jean occasionally and talked with her when Mrs. Colin paused for breath.

  Jean was very happy, and she told James so whenever they were together. They frequently were together, always in company with some other people, usually the earl and his countess or Anna and Walter Carrington after they had come home. They usually walked with their arms linked.

  “If I lived in this part of the world,” she said to him on one occasion when they were walking inland along the valley, the river on one side, trees on the other, “I don’t think I would ever leave, not even to go to London for a Season. Would you, James?”

  “I have heard Edmund say,” he said, “that he likes going away merely for the pleasure of loving his home even more when he returns to it.”

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “I am sure that is true. Have you ever known such friendly people, James? They have not made me feel a stranger at all.”

  “How could they?” he said with a smile. “You are so very friendly yourself, Jean. It is enough to make one smile just to look at you.”

  She laughed. “I think it is my accent they smile at,” she said. “While to me it seems funny that everyone here talks as you do. James, I am so very, very happy.” She laid the side of her head very briefly against his arm.

  James was rather glad at that moment that his sister and brother-in-law were coming along behind them. He would have taken her into his arms and kissed her and asked her if she would take him into her own happiness—though he would not have used those exact words. He would have asked her to marry him. And he was not quite sure yet. Either for her sake or his own.

  MRS. MORTON PAID A CALL personally at Amberley Court only two days after the earl resumed residence there, in order to invite all family and guests to a dinner and evening party. She had come as soon as she decently could, she explained quite candidly, in the hope of extending her invitation before the Courtneys had completed their own plans. It was usually the Courtneys who won such races. Though, of course, this year they were somewhat preoccupied by the coming nuptials of Susan. Mrs. Courtney would be leaving for London soon, and even Mr. Courtney would exert himself on this one occasion
to go to town for a few weeks.

  But the Courtneys were not to be outdone. Their own dinner and informal dance was set for two evenings after the Morton party.

  “It is going to be a busy month,” the earl told his wife with a sigh and a smile combined. “We had to miss giving the annual summer ball last year. I am sure no one will let us get away with such a thing this year, Alex. We might as well hold it early so that we can make it a celebration for your brother too.”

  “I will begin to associate the ball with his leaving,” she said. “The last time he left it was in the middle of the ball. But it should not be quite as bad this time. I think he really must be fond of Miss Cameron after all, don’t you, Edmund? I think perhaps they will be happy together.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I just wish Madeline were not quite so determinedly gay. It makes me tired just to look at her.”

  “And I sometimes think that James is so attentive to Miss Cameron as a defense against stronger feelings for Madeline,” his countess said with a sigh. “Oh, dear, Edmund, why do people have to be so foolish? I don’t think the two of them have exchanged a dozen words since they have been here.”

  The earl had no answer or comfort to offer.

  But what Alexandra had said was true, or almost so. They had probably exchanged more than a dozen words, since just a bare “good morning” and “good night” used up four in a day. But they had certainly not spoken more words than were necessary or looked more looks than they could decently avoid during the first week at Amberley.

  It was a nasty surprise to both when they realized one morning that Jean had asked each of them to ride down onto the beach with her. And both had accepted without realizing that the other had been invited.

  Madeline was very relieved to see Howard Courtney at the house. He had just finished some business with Edmund. Howard had been a playmate all through their childhood and had declared undying love for her when he was eighteen and she seventeen. He had remained faithful for years after that, and watched her with adoring eyes whenever she was at home. He had never asked her to marry him, realizing that the social gap between the daughter of an earl and the son of a tenant farmer was insurmountable.