The Last Waltz Read online

  He must do better today, he decided, shivering in the morning chill but not bothering to ring for coals to be brought up or for his valet to shave him and help him dress. He was too restless to wait for anyone or anything or even to remain indoors. He dressed in riding clothes and went outside, stepping out into a frosty morning in which he could see his breath but very little else. But he was accustomed to being outdoors in inclement conditions.

  He tramped about the inner reaches of the park and noted that everything was kept neat, though the flower beds were now bare, of course. He walked through the trees to the lake at the east of the house. It was not completely frozen over, though the wide bands of ice extending outward from the banks almost met in the middle. If the weather continued cold, the ice would be solid in another week—by Christmas.

  He remembered being quite viciously caned once by his uncle for skating before permission had been granted. Gilbert or Rodney had reported him—probably Gilbert. Reporting wrongdoings had been very much in his line, and Gerard’s uncle had usually acted with unconsidered wrath on such slight information, just as he had frequently acted with unexpected bursts of generosity, taking his nephew shooting or fishing with him while leaving his sons behind, giving him money over and above his allowance. And then cuffing or caning him again at the slightest provocation—and roaring at and abusing him as the son of a whore. Life had never been tranquil—and never really happy—at Thornwood.

  But it was, the earl decided now, a beautiful place, even at this time of the morning at this time of the year. And it was all his. For perhaps the first time he found the thought somewhat exhilarating.

  It was a decidedly chilly morning and a brisk breeze cut through the heavy folds of the earl’s greatcoat. Nevertheless he stood close to the lake’s edge for several minutes, his shoulder propped against the trunk of a tree. The eastern horizon lightened as he stood there, and a gleam of light beamed weakly across the icy water. He had learned in a far-off land to see beauty in the starkness of winter.

  But he wanted to see more. He strode away from the lake, back through the trees, and across the long lawn below the house to the stables, where a surprised and rather sleepy groom saddled a horse for him. He rode out to the outer reaches of the park. He made no attempt to go farther, though he was eager now to see everything, to visit both the home farm and all the tenant farms.

  He well remembered the forests that surrounded the park on all sides. On the north side, on the hill, they had been cultivated. A scenic walk had been constructed. It was the loveliest part of the park, the part he had always most avoided. He had preferred the wilder reaches of the forest. He had peopled them with dragons and outlaws and smugglers and witches. He had climbed branches and made dens in the hollow trunks of old trees. He had dodged from cover to cover, the hero of every game. And the gamekeepers had been his friends—almost his only friends. Gilbert and Rodney certainly had not been. And though he had been his uncle’s unwilling favorite, there had been no real emotional closeness between them.

  The branches of most of the trees were bare now. He had never minded bare trees. He could see the sky through them. He had often lain along a stout branch, gazing upward, dreaming of worlds beyond the one he inhabited. He looked about him now as his horse picked its way along well-remembered paths in the gathering daylight. He could see a group of deer off to his left. They looked warily his way for a moment before bolting off out of sight.

  He wondered if any of the same gamekeepers were still at Thornwood. He must find out. He wondered if Pinky’s hut—Abe Pinkerton had been the gamekeeper’s name—was still on the slope above the river north of the lake. Pinky had preferred to make his home there rather than live in greater comfort in the servants’ quarters at the house. The boy Gerard had spent many happy hours in that hut, talking, listening, sometimes merely relaxing in a shared silence.

  He supposed eventually that he ought to return to the house. December mornings were dark. Since it was now full daylight, then, he must assume—he had not brought his watch with him—that the morning was well advanced. It must be close to breakfast time.

  He was reluctant to return despite the fact that he was both cold and hungry. Despite the fact that there were things to be done and he was not a man to shirk hard work. As he guided his horse out of the trees and headed back toward the stables, he realized, of course, why he did not want to return. His lip curled with self-derision when he realized that a mere woman was making him reluctant to enter his own home.

  He wondered for a moment what had happened to the girl he had known. But the answer was obvious. Time had happened to her. And Gilbert had happened to her—for nine years. And she had changed. She seemed now to have more ice in her veins than warm blood. She was like a marble statue. She was poised, elegant, beautiful. She was cold, humorless, unpleasant. Unattractive. But then deep down, perhaps she had always been those things. People did not really change, did they?

  He could not seem to shake his mind free of her even after the walk and the ride. He must do so. Or at least he must adjust his vision so that he could see her as Gilbert’s widow, the woman who must help him prepare for the house party. Wretched thought that he needed her for that! But he did. Well, he thought, she was his dependent now. He had all the power now. Not that he had ever wished to have power over her. But somehow, despite himself, the prospect of a little revenge was sweet.

  He dismounted in the stable yard and turned his mount over to the groom, who looked somewhat more wide awake than he had earlier. The earl strode off in the direction of the house. His house. He thought deliberately about Margaret. She was very lovely and lively and amiable. And it was not unheard-of for first cousins to marry.

  Late rising had always been considered a vice at Thornwood. Strangely, although Gilbert had been dead for almost a year and a half, they had kept quite rigidly to the daily routine he had insisted upon. It had become like second nature to them, perhaps.

  Christina breakfasted with Lady Hannah and Margaret. This morning they did not wait for the earl. Perhaps, Lady Hannah suggested by way of excuse, he was tired after his long journey the day before. He had still not joined them by the end of the meal. Margaret and her aunt went to the morning room to write letters. Christina, happy that after all her morning with her daughters was not to be entirely ruined, went up to the nursery.

  She had forgotten about the appointment in the library by the time the earl found her there almost an hour later. While the children’s nurse sat in a rocking chair close to the window, knitting them new scarves and mittens for the winter, Christina supervised their morning activities.

  Tess was standing before the easel, swathed from neck to ankles in a large apron, a brush almost as long as herself clutched in her right hand. She was dabbing bright paint onto a large sheet of paper. She was only three years old, a plump and pretty little girl, who favored her father rather than her mother. She was producing nothing that was recognizable, but Christina did not care about that. There would be time enough later to teach her to harness her imagination. For now it must be allowed to run free.

  Rachel was seated at the table, absorbed in working long columns of arithmetic problems. She never protested at having to do lessons, whatever the subject. The need to win approval by excelling at every task set her was fundamental to her nature. She was seven years old, a thin and serious child with her mother’s oval face and dark hair and eyes.

  They all looked up when the door opened.

  “Ah, here you are,” the Earl of Wanstead said. “Good morning.” He stepped into the room while Nurse got up from her chair and curtsied.

  Christina felt the absurd urge to set her arms protectively about both children. She had that helpless feeling again, the one that had had her tossing and turning all night, sleepless spells intermingled with troubled dreams. They were all dependent upon him—and he did not like her. She got to her feet and curtsied to him.

  “Good morning, my lord,” she said with calm cou
rtesy. And then she felt a wave of fear. She had always despised that feeling in herself, but she had never been able quite to control it—sometimes with good reason. She remembered now that she had had an appointment with him in the library and he had been forced to come and find her. But she could not bring herself to grovel or even simply to apologize. She did what had often brought her to grief and simply confronted him. “You were late for breakfast and I hated to wait idly in the library.”

  “Late?” His eyebrows shot up. “At what time is breakfast served, pray?”

  “At eight o’clock sharp,” she said.

  “Sharp. I see.” He strolled farther into the room, his hands at his back, and circled around the easel so that he could see what was displayed there. “And whose rule is that, my lady?”

  “Gil—” She did not complete the name or try to cover up her mistake. It had been Gilbert’s rule—the Earl of Wanstead’s. The former earl’s.

  The present Earl of Wanstead turned his head to look at her. He said nothing for a few moments—he did not need to. But she would not dip her head or look away from those cold eyes. She had not been mistaken last evening about his hostility toward her, she thought.

  “Perhaps,” he said, the courtesy in his voice at variance with that look, “you would present me to your daughters?”

  He commended Tess on her painting and her choice of bright colors. She beamed happily up at him. He looked down the columns of Rachel’s work and commented on its neatness and accuracy.

  “You have made only one mistake,” he said. “I wonder if you can find it for yourself. It is in the second column.”

  Far from being offended, Rachel bent her head over the page and began to check her figuring, a look of intense concentration on her face.

  Christina resented his interference—quite unreasonably so. He had not said or done anything that might be called high-handed. But she was very aware that though he had never been named the children’s guardian, but that everyone of her acquaintance accepted her in that role, nevertheless by law she could not as a woman be their sole guardian. That made him ...

  “Can they be left to their nurse’s care?” the earl asked now. “May we adjourn to the library?” He offered his arm.

  Christina turned away to give some unnecessary instructions to the girls and their nurse. Then she preceded him from the room, pretending that she had not noticed his arm. She could not bear the thought of touching him.

  How foolish! After longer than ten years—a lifetime, an eternity—she was afraid to touch him.

  She was still wearing black this morning, from her lacy cap on down to her slippers. He found the fact annoying, though he was not sure why. It seemed excessive, perhaps, to mourn so ostentatiously a man who had been dead for well over a year—even a husband. Yet there was no other sign of brokenhearted grief in her. She bore herself proudly, even arrogantly, with straight spine and lifted chin. But really, he decided as a footman opened the library doors and she preceded him inside the room, how she chose to mourn was none of his business. Nor was the depth of her feelings. She was just Gilbert’s widow. Nothing else.

  But he felt irritated.

  “Take a seat,” he said, directing her to one of the chairs beside the fire. He did not immediately take the other. He stood with one arm propped on the mantel, looking down at her.

  “Thank you,” she said and seated herself. Her spine, he noticed, did not touch the back of the chair. She had sat thus last evening too, both in the dining room and in the drawing room. It must be an uncomfortable posture, but that too was her business. She was looking at him with cool inquiry.

  “Well, my lady,” he could not resist saying, though he had not intended to do so, “there is a certain irony in this, is there not?”

  She did not pretend to misunderstand him. “I suppose you would consider it so,” she agreed.

  “You chose to marry money,” he said. “Yet you find yourself at the end of the day dependent upon the very man you rejected for money—the one who now possesses it all.”

  If he had intended to disconcert her, he had failed. Her face registered nothing but disdain. “A gentleman,” she said, “would not remind a lady of her dependency, my lord.”

  No, he would not. It was unpardonable of him to have said what he just had. He had not intended to say it. Indeed, he had resolved to treat her differently today. But the desire somehow to hurt her, or at least to gloat over her, was alarmingly difficult to quell.

  “A gentleman.” He laughed softly. “But the general consensus of opinion at Thornwood has always been that that is something I am not.” His father, besotted with an opera dancer, had first taken her for his mistress and then married her less than eight months before he, their only child, had been born. “I am sure you were informed of that even before my subsequent, ah, career confirmed the fact.”

  “Gilbert would not have your name mentioned here,” she told him coldly.

  He smiled and turned his head to gaze into the coals. She was not without her own desire to hurt, then. Why? Did she regret her decision? Or did she merely resent the way it had turned out? “Was it worth it, Christina?” he asked her. “Marrying for money?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, it was.”

  Well. What had he expected her to say? And what had he wanted her to say? That she had made a mistake? That she should have put love first? He would have despised her even more than he already did if she had said that. Besides, he had not brought her here in order to vent a bitterness he had not known he felt so rawly or to rake up a past that should have been long forgotten.

  “Your younger child is a mere baby,” he said. “How old is the elder?”

  “Seven,” she replied.

  “They have a nurse,” he said. “Do they also have a governess?”

  “No,” she told him. “I teach my children myself. It is the way I spend my mornings.”

  “And I am interrupting this one,” he said. “Why have you chosen not to hire a governess?”

  She compressed her lips and looked down at the hands she had set in her lap, the back of one resting on the palm of the other. “Governesses cost money, my lord,” she said.

  “And the estate cannot bear the cost?” he asked her.

  She looked up at him with her dark, unreadable eyes. But he read what was in them nonetheless. He understood her though she had said nothing. And he was angry.

  “You would not ask?” he said, frowning. “Pride, my lady? Monck would surely not even have questioned the expense.”

  “Mr. Monck,” she said, “has no authority to act on his own. He is merely the steward here.”

  “And you were afraid,” he said, frowning, “that if he had asked me, I would have said no? You must think I have petty notions of revenge, my lady. Or perhaps you enjoy the image of yourself as martyr, your needs spurned by the man you spurned years ago. I have recently given Monck far wider powers than he once enjoyed—I understand that Gilbert kept a very tight rein on him. It would be inconvenient for me to do so, when the Atlantic Ocean will soon separate us. You might have asked him for all sorts of things and been granted them. Chances are that I would never even have known.”

  She did not answer him.

  “After Christmas,” he said, “you will employ a governess of your own choosing. In future years you will employ drawing teachers, music and dancing teachers, whoever is needed for the education of your children. I shall give instructions to Monck. I daresay the expense will not beggar me.”

  “Thank you,” she said so coolly that he could read no gratitude in the words. But he did not want her gratitude.

  He had a sudden thought. It was something he had not noticed in the account books Monck had brought to London, although he had studied them in some depth. But then it was not something he had been looking for.

  “What allowance did Gilbert make you?” he asked. “Is it still being paid you?” By God, she would not lay any charge of that sort of spitefulness at his door.r />
  She studied the hands in her lap again, though her chin was still up. “Gilbert paid all my bills for me,” she said.

  He realized the significance of her words, appalled. It was not that her allowance had been cut off after Gilbert’s death and she had been too proud to ask for its restoration. Monck, it seemed, was not the only one who had been kept on a tight rein.

  “I see,” he said. “Perhaps that would work admirably in a close marital relationship, but I would find such an arrangement distasteful. I have no intention of feeding your hostility by having you run to me—or not run to me—with every need. I shall arrange that you have a quarterly allowance sufficient to your needs and those of your children. Do the same conditions apply to Margaret and my aunt?”

  “Aunt Hannah was left a small legacy by her husband, I believe, my lord,” she said. “I have no idea if it is adequate to her needs. If it is not, she does not complain.”

  “Tell me,” he asked her, changing the subject. “Why has Margaret never had a Season? She is twenty years old. Most young ladies of her age can expect to be already married. Gilbert died when she was nineteen—in the summer. Why had she not made her come-out during the spring? Or the year before, when she was eighteen? Did you not think it important to persuade your husband to take her to town?”

  She looked up at him with a strange half-smile on her lips.

  “You preferred to stay selfishly at home in the country with your children?” He frowned down at her. “Did she not try to persuade her brother?”

  “If she did,” she said, “she was not successful, was she?”

  “Too expensive?” he said, suddenly suspicious. Had Gilbert really been such a nip-farthing? After being a sneak thief in his boyhood? There was some amusement in the thought.

  “That was part of it,” she said.

  “And the other part?”

  “Life in town,” she said, “is too frivolous, too—ungodly.”

  “Was that Gilbert’s description of it?” he asked her, frowning. “Or yours?”