Читать книгу Regency Society - Хелен Диксон, Ann Lethbridge, Хелен Диксон - Страница 67

Patrick announced her, and she entered the study more hesitantly than she had the last time she’d needed a favour from him. She was dressed differently as well. Where she had come to seduce before, today she was attired modestly: the low square neck of her bodice filled with a fichu, the skirt of the dress cut so that it revealed nothing of the changes already taking place in her body.

Tony was sitting at his desk, papers spread out in front of him, but he rose as she entered. She thought she detected a rush in the movements, as though he was caught off guard and took a moment to control his actions, before she noticed. ‘Your Grace?’

He gestured her to the chair in front of the desk and then seated himself again. ‘To what do I owe the pleasure?’ There was no trace of irony in his voice. There was no emotion of any kind.

‘Do I really need a reason to visit, after what we have known together?’

He looked at her. ‘In a word, yes. It has taken me several weeks to recover from our last discussion, and I have no wish to be unnecessarily reminded of it.’ He was staring at her body. ‘Unless…’

‘I have come to say that I am sorry.’ She hung her head.

He looked at her with concern. ‘Your Grace, you are white as a sheet. A drink, perhaps?’ He turned to the decanter on the desk and his glass next to it, and sighed. He finished the contents in a gulp. Then he wiped the rim and poured her a small brandy.

She found it an oddly fastidious gesture, from one who had known her so intimately. She took the glass, sniffed at the brandy, and felt her stomach roll. She set it down untasted. ‘I was wrong to leave you with the impression that I viewed your visits as unwelcome, or that I felt them to be a duty or an obligation, or anything that might be construed as a repayment of debt.’

‘Thank you,’ he said softly. ‘That is something, at least.’

‘It was just that, with the threats and the stress of the debts, and not knowing how to go on, I was not myself.’

His gaze was flat and sceptical.

‘I am normally a most proper and respectable person,’ she continued. ‘Although you would not know it by my behaviour when alone with you. Had it not been for circumstances, I am sure I would never have behaved as shamelessly as I had, or as abominably as I did in ending it.’

He rose. ‘And now you have quite undone any good you did before. If you wish to discount your behaviour with me as an aberration, then it is better we remain apart to avoid disappointment. If we are together again, either you will be horrified by your continued deviance, or I will be crushed by the lack of it. Please leave me, now. Unless…’ he stared at her ‘…there is any other reason for you coming here.’

She was afraid to meet his gaze. ‘There is another thing. I know that you made me promise to not trouble you on that account, but I cannot help it. While I am relieved to know that you do not steal for no reason, so much of your life is kept in secret. Have you never considered another career? I knew you would be angry, and that it is hardly a point of pride for me to intercede. But I have gone to my nephew, and enquired after a position for you. He needs a man of business to run his estates and prevent him from being as ninnyhammered as he was when he lost my house. And you are quite the smartest man I know.’ She laid the sheet of parchment in front of him.

He glared up at her. ‘You were enquiring after honest employment for me?’

‘Yes, Tony.’

‘Was there anything in our brief interaction that led you to believe that I might welcome a change of career?’

‘Well, no, Tony.’

‘And did I not specifically request that you never trouble me on the subject, and tell you that I had no intention to change for you or any other?’

She stared at the floor. She had promised. She had sworn to him that it would not matter, and, by asking, she was forswearing herself. She raised her chin to look into his eyes. ‘I understand. I am sorry. It was not my place.’

He stared back at her and she felt her lip begin to tremble. She wished she could turn and run, and not say the rest of the words she would have to say, before this could be over. ‘Tony.’ She tried a small sip of the brandy, but it did nothing to improve her nerves.

He held out a hand for the paperwork. ‘Do not look at me so. Give me the paper. I can at least read it, although I suspect you have heard my final answer on the subject.’

He took the papers away from her and sat back down at the desk, feet flat on the floor. Then he removed a pair of reading glasses from the pocket of his coat, brushed them absently against his lapel to clean them, and put them on. He leaned forward, resting his chin on his elbows, tossing his head to get the hair out of his eyes. ‘No, no. This will never do. You’ll have me counting sheep in the country for your half-witted nephew, so that you can have the comfort of knowing I lead a poor but honest life. It is not going to happen, no matter what your motives.’

And as she stared at him, the memory came flooding back to her. He had done the same in his house, and in hers, in chapel and in the library. She had always seen him thus, from the time he had learned to read, until she had left home and forgotten him. Anywhere that there was something to be read, she was liable to trip over him, polishing his spectacles and muttering over the paper. And some part of her mind assumed, should she go home, he would be there still, sitting under a tree in the garden, conjugating Latin and declaiming in Greek.

The brandy glass slipped from her hand and shattered on the desk. ‘Eustace Smith.’

Without looking up he said, ‘Connie, if you must insist on breaking the glassware, I’ll leave you to explain it to Patrick. And I can assure you that I do not need menial employment, so you can take your offer with you. Or better yet, leave it and I will pass it on to my niece’s new husband. Much more in his line, I think. He has a fine head on his shoulders, unlike your nephew the duke, and will soon have the estate put to right.’

‘Eustace? It is you, isn’t it?’ She stood and planted her hands on the desk in front of him. ‘Little Eustace Smith who used to live next door to me?’

When he looked up into her eyes, he was smiling, the smile of her lover, Tony Smythe. ‘There was nothing little about me, even then.’

She swallowed hard at the memory of him.

‘I have always been six months older than you, although you never noticed the fact. You were too busy dangling after my brothers, or the neighbours, or the duke.’

The words wounded her, for it made her feel like a fortune hunter, or, worse yet, the foolish young girl she had been.

‘You were most interested in anyone else but me, as I remember it,’ he reminded her.

Although the smile hid it, she could hear the pain in his voice, as though the wound was fresh. And perhaps it was, for she had been intimate with him, had loved him, and still not seen him for who he was.

‘Oh, Eustace…’ the name stuck on her tongue and she forced it out ‘…I am so sorry. So very sorry, not to have known it was you.’

He looked at her sharply. ‘I have never favoured the name Eustace, nor has it favoured me.’

‘But…but it is you, isn’t it? To see you sitting there with your head in your hands, you are just as I remember you. Why didn’t you say something?’

‘So that I could listen to you dismiss me as “little Eustace”? Not a memory I needed to renew. Perhaps if you had recognised me. But there seemed to be no risk of that.’

She stared into his face as he peered at her from over his glasses and wondered how she could not have seen it. He looked very like his handsome older brothers. She blushed to remember that she had been quite taken with the older Smiths. ‘You do not wear your glasses any more?’

‘I only ever needed them to read, and that was all I ever did, when you knew me last. Now I do so much of my work in the dark, glasses are really quite useless. It is easier to operate by touch.’

She blushed, remembering how good he was in the dark, when operating by touch. ‘It was a very long time ago. And you are most different than you were.’

He sighed. ‘And you are very much the same as I remember. Every bit as beautiful as when you left home. And still in search of a title. How goes the husband hunt?’

‘Better than it had been, now that Barton is out of the way.’ Her voice was a little tart. ‘I have you to thank, for clearing the way for more honourable men.’

He looked tired. ‘I would have removed Barton, in any case. But it pleases me you benefited from it.’

‘So when you took the deed for me?’

‘I was helping out an old friend.’

‘And I am just an old friend to you?’

He looked at her long and hard. ‘If that is what you wish. But I suspect that you came here for a matter more personal than friendship. Enough nonsense, Connie. I was right in my surmise, was I not? You were not to blame for the barren union at all.’

She shook her head.

‘Have you come to torment me with the knowledge that by removing Barton, I have helped clear the path for some other man? Or do you need me, again? Have you come as you promised to? Come, out with it. What is the truth?’

She nodded. She needed him again, to fix yet another problem. He must be terribly tired of women in distress to look after and change one’s plans for. He had just got free of his sisters, and now he would be saddled with her. And when she opened her mouth to speak, she sobbed.

He rose from behind the desk quickly and caught her in his arms. ‘I am sorry that I spoiled your plans to catch another peer. I know you do not want me, and that I am not nearly good enough for you.’ His voice was rough. ‘But if you are carrying my child, I really must insist.’ He swallowed, and when he spoke his tone was strong and confident again. ‘Let me take care of you.’

‘No.’

He stiffened against her.

‘I am honoured that you will have me. But I am so sorry, Tony. So very, very sorry. I do not want you to have to take care of me, yet again. It is not fair to you, to never have what you want, but to have your future forced upon you by a foolish woman. Once you have married me, you need hardly take care of me at all. I will not be a bother. And I will do my best to take care of you.’ She erupted in a fresh bout of tears.

‘There now, do not cry.’

‘I cannot help it. I cry at every little thing, I am sick in the morning, tired during the day, restless at night.’ She sobbed into the wool of his coat. ‘And I was afraid to come here, but afraid to stay away.’

‘You have nothing to be afraid of, any more.’ He was stroking her hair and holding her tight against him. ‘Everything will be all right, if you will just say yes to me. Everything. I promise.’

‘You warned me this would happen. But I wanted you, and I wanted a baby as well, no matter the consequences. And then I forgot all about the risks and wanted to feel what I felt whenever I was with you. I did not think what it might be like for the poor baby to have such a fool for a mother, or care that you would not want to marry.’

‘When did I ever say that?’

‘You said you loved elsewhere. And you would marry me for the sake of the child. I have been in such a marriage, Tony, and do not want another.’

‘Were you so unhappy with the duke?’ His voice was strange in her ear, shaky and hoarse. ‘I always told myself that you were happy, and had what was best for you. And that I needn’t concern myself.’

‘After a fashion. I was fond of him, and he of me. We did comfortably together. And I did not love him, so it did not hurt so very much when he grew bored with me and visited with other women.’

‘My poor darling.’ He stroked her hair again.

‘Now you will marry me, because you promised to. And I will be happy. I have always wanted children. Always. I will be very happy. And I will be a good mother, and a good wife to you.

‘But some day you will say you are going to your club, but you will not come home. And I will lie alone in my bed, knowing that you have gone to her, and because I love you, but you can love only one woman, I fear it will break my heart.’ She let loose with a fresh batch of tears.

He wrapped his arms even tighter around her, and waited for the sobbing to abate, passing her his handkerchief. ‘You love me that much, do you?’

‘Mnnnhmmm.’

‘And you sent me away because…’

‘It was foolish of me to fall in love with you. I could not keep you, and I could not control myself when you held me in your arms. I only ever felt alive when I was with you. The longer I kept you, the more I wanted you, and the more disgracefully I would behave to keep you with me, and the harder it would be to let you go. And it was already too late.’

The tears were ready to start again, but before they could, he kissed her and, for a moment, she forgot what it was that she was crying about.

‘There, now. No more tears. Lay your head on my other shoulder where it is dry and comfortable, for the coat on the right is cried through to the shirt front.’ He kissed her temple. ‘Better?’

She nodded.

‘Then I have a riddle. If I loved one woman my whole life, which is as long as I’ve known you, but she would look right through me if she saw me on the street, and she is as lovely and as far above me and unattainable as you are yourself, and I have kept myself apart from matrimony, until now, hoping for a miracle, can you not guess the identity of my great undying passion, the love of my life, the woman I would brave oceans and fight lions, and crawl in and out of three-storey windows to steal deeds for?’

She held very still, hoping he would just tell her what she wanted to hear. It couldn’t be. But it must be, for he would never tease her so, if it weren’t.

‘And yet I was terrified to tell you the truth. I could not speak to you when we were children, and I could not speak to you now. There was only ever room in my heart for you, Constance. But if fate had not forced my hand, I might have been fool enough to let you marry someone else.’

She laid her hand on his arm and whispered. ‘Do not think of it, again. Now that I have found you, there can be no other man for me, Anthony Smythe.’ She furrowed her brow. It was not his true name, though she would always think of him thus. She tried again. ‘I mean, Eu—’

He winced and covered her mouth with his fingers. ‘Connie? Before you speak, let me warn you that it will spoil a lifetime of fantasy if you ever again call me by my given name. I did not take you to bed wishing to make you cry “oh, Eustace” loudly enough for the neighbours to hear.’

He had called her Connie. No one called her Connie any more. Not even Robert. But to her true friends she had always been Connie. She snuggled into the warmth of his shoulder, feeling safe, and it made her smile.

‘If we have a boy, I’ll hear no nonsense of naming him after his father. My mother fought to defend my brothers from that fate, but when it came to me, she no longer cared to be bothered, and let my father christen me Eustace Anthony after himself.’

‘We will name him Anthony,’ she murmured. ‘After his father. It is a wonderful name. I am quite fond of it.’

‘Very good.’ He reached behind her knees and scooped her up into his arms. ‘And now we will adjourn to the bedroom, where you can tell me that bit again, about how losing me would break your heart. Not that you ever will, of course.

‘And perhaps later, we might go to Bond Street and choose a ring fitting worthy of a former duchess.’

‘You needn’t, really,’ she whispered. ‘Money is not important. If you truly love me.’

He laughed. ‘I know, darling. And I would be only too happy to live on love, if I have you. But what shall I do with the great stacks of money that I got off Barton? The safe did not contain what I was looking for, but it was full to the top with hundred-pound notes. Why did the fool want to print his own money, when he had a safe full of the stuff?’ He shrugged. ‘If he did not appreciate his wealth, I saw no reason to let him keep it.’

‘You thief,’ she said. But she was laughing.

And she raised her face to his, and let him steal another kiss.