Читать книгу Historical Romance June 2017 Books 1 - 4 - Энни Берроуз, Annie Burrows - Страница 26

Chapter Sixteen

Georgie couldn’t believe that yet another person had come into her room. She’d heard the knocker going she didn’t know how many times this morning, which meant the drawing room must be crowded with visitors. Surely, nobody had the leisure to come all the way up here to torment her? Couldn’t they leave her in peace, for one hour? They knew she couldn’t defend herself when she was laid this low. Besides, what more could she say? It wasn’t her fault Edmund had chased after Mr Eastman and knocked him down. It wasn’t her fault that half the people from the charity ball had taken it into their heads that Edmund must be on the verge of proposing to her.

Though, admittedly, it was her fault that he had done no such thing. There was nothing on earth that would make Edmund propose to her, not when the only reason he might ever contemplate marriage at all would be to produce heirs.

And Stepmama knew she felt guilty about something. Which was why she wouldn’t listen to her protestations that Edmund merely felt protective of her, because they’d been friends as children. Why, for the first time since her thirteenth birthday, Georgie had actually welcomed the monthly event that so frequently rendered her incapable of leaving her bed.

Although, whoever had just come in apparently had no sympathy for the wretchedness of her condition. For they were marching across to the windows and...

Drawing the curtains?

‘What,’ she protested feebly, ‘do you think you’re doing?’

‘I should have thought that was obvious,’ said the intruder.

In a voice she recognised. But couldn’t possibly. Because Edmund could not possibly be here.

Gingerly, she rolled over, and opened one eye. To see Edmund thrusting up the sash window.

‘I don’t know what ails you,’ he said, turning to her and making as if to approach her bed, ‘but you aren’t going to get better in a room shut up like this. You need fresh air, Georgie.’

She held up a hand, screwing her eyes shut against the dazzling light thrusting its way into her skull.

‘Shut the curtains,’ she begged. ‘Can’t stand the light.’ Even saying as little as that made her feel nauseous. With a whimper, she dragged a pillow over her head and gave a series of rapid, desperate swallows.

From the sound of curtain rings rattling along the rail, and the subsequent dimming of the light, she knew he’d done as she’d asked.

‘Sorry,’ he said. And then approached the bed. ‘Can’t abide the smell of a sickroom, you know.’

By the creak of the webbing she could tell he was sitting down on the chair beside it.

‘Comes of having been shut up so often as a lad,’ he said. ‘And I know how you love the outdoors. I thought...’

She felt a tug at the edge of the pillow. Presumably, he was trying to see her face. If she’d had the energy she would have snatched the pillow out of his inquisitive fingers and thwacked him with it.

‘Actually, no, I didn’t think,’ he said, his voice full of concern. ‘What is the matter with you, Georgie? Do you have a fever?’ He reached under the pillow and touched her forehead. His strong, yet gentle fingers felt wonderfully soothing. They’d probably feel even better if he would only stroke her there, where the pain in her head was so intense. ‘Sore throat? Is that why you aren’t yelling at me to get out?’

She shook her head. And winced.

‘Hurts my head to speak,’ she said.

‘And you cannot stand the light.’ He paused. ‘If you were a man I’d say you were suffering from a hangover.’

If she were a man, she reflected bitterly, she wouldn’t be going through this.

He shifted in his chair and leaned forward until his face was almost next to hers.

‘You shouldn’t be in here,’ she whispered, because at least, now that his face was only inches from hers, she didn’t need to speak at a volume that set her head ringing.

‘Of course I should,’ he murmured. ‘You are ill. And whenever I was ill, you used to sneak into my bedroom to try to cheer me up. And you never feared catching anything that I had, either.’

‘But we were children then, so it didn’t matter. This, now...it isn’t proper.’

‘Mrs Bulstrode didn’t think it was proper back then, either. Don’t you remember how shocked she was when she came in and caught us on my bed with the curtains drawn closed?’

The word trollop screamed at Georgie down through the years, making her shudder. ‘As if I could ever forget.’

‘I thought it was funny, at the time, but looking back, it must have been most unpleasant for you,’ he said, reaching out his hand to stroke her hair.

She flinched. She couldn’t help it. His gesture was so unexpected, but more than that, she craved his touch so much she was afraid if she didn’t retreat, she’d somehow give herself away.

He drew his hand back.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I did not mean to make you uncomfortable.’

‘You mean, more uncomfortable than I already am at having a man invade my bedroom?’

‘If you were really uncomfortable, you would be demanding I leave. Or screaming for help.’

‘I cannot scream,’ she retorted. ‘My head hurts far too much. The sound of my voice is like someone banging a mallet inside my skull.’

‘Poor Georgie,’ he said. ‘Is there anything I can do to help? Some medicine I can administer?’ He glanced at the bedside table, upon which lay the water bottle she’d discarded once it had cooled, and the posy of roses Betsy had just slapped down, spraying her pillow with a shower of pink petals.

‘Nothing helps. I just need peace and quiet and darkness. Until it passes.’

‘You get these headaches regularly, then?’

Not every month, fortunately. But even when her head didn’t feel as if it was about to split open, she could never go riding, sometimes not even out walking. And she always felt so unclean, so diminished at this time of the month. Not even Sukey could understand why she couldn’t manage her monthly indisposition with more grace. But then Sukey floated through it all so daintily. She hardly ever complained about experiencing anything more than the occasional twinge. Because she was far better at the business of being a woman.

She dragged the pillow from her face and scowled up at him.

‘Yes,’ was all she said.

‘I’m so sorry. I always thought...I mean, you always seem so healthy.’

She made an effort to peer at him more intently and saw that he was not as calm as she’d at first thought. But then, how could he be calm when the chances were he was going to be discovered, in her bedroom, at any moment?

‘Edmund, I don’t know why you came in here, but really, you shouldn’t have done.’

‘Yes, I should,’ he said with a glint of defiance in his eyes. ‘When I was ill, you always came to visit me. Nothing could keep you away.’

‘That was different. I didn’t know any better.’

‘Do you mean,’ he said slowly, ‘that you regret befriending me and offering me comfort?’

She sighed. ‘Sometimes, yes, I do,’ she admitted. She was sick of hiding the truth from Edmund. Sick of having to put on a brave face when he was about. Of having to pretend that she only thought of him as a friend. Only pride, stubborn pride had kept her going, through so much, for so long. But he was seeing her at her absolute worst today. And somehow, now he’d seen her reduced to this, there didn’t seem any point in hiding all her feelings from him, any longer.

‘It wouldn’t have been so awful when you went away, if we hadn’t grown so close. Or at least, if I hadn’t thought of you as my best friend. But what I meant about not knowing any better was that I honestly had no notion that it was wrong to make friends with a boy, or to be alone with a boy, or to go and play in a boy’s bedroom.’

‘Ah.’ He lowered his gaze to where she’d curled her fingers into the edge of her sheet. ‘Well, now there are two points that need addressing there. Firstly, your approach to your own gender. Which is understandable, since your father treated you as though you were a son. No concession was made to the fact that you were, in actuality, a girl. Which meant that it was perfectly natural for you to look for companionship from a boy of about your own age, rather than any of the local girls, whose habits and interests were limited to a strictly feminine sphere.’

‘That’s true.’ The other girls in the area had always seemed such silly, empty-headed little things. All too easily shocked at the notion of climbing trees, or wading through a pond to see how deep it was, or saddling their ponies and staying out all day, eating whatever they could find in the hedgerows.

Which had made it come as a terrible blow when her body began to demonstrate that it was capable of conceiving a child. She felt as if it had betrayed her. Along with Edmund and her father. Her whole life had undergone a series of drastic changes in such a short period of time that she’d sometimes thought she knew what it must be like to live through an earthquake. There had been no solid ground on which to stand. Nowhere to run, to escape from the huge great boulders that were raining down on her, threatening to crush the life out of her.

‘So you need not feel any guilt, whatsoever,’ he said firmly. ‘You acted in complete innocence.’

She felt a great rush of affection for him, so strong it was all she could do not to reach for his hand and clasp it. It was a good job she was hanging on to the sheet so hard, to preserve her modesty, or who knew how foolishly she might have behaved?

‘And now to move on to the second point,’ he said, his jaw firming, as though it was something he felt very strongly about. ‘From the emphasis you placed on the personal pronoun, I take it you were implying that I did not consider you my best friend.’

Golly. She wouldn’t have thought he would want to take issue over that.

‘But you didn’t, did you? I didn’t realise at the time, because I was such a silly little goose. But later on I realised you simply tolerated me, because you were bored and your parents wouldn’t let you have anything to do with any other child—’

His hand shot out, but the touch of his finger to her lips to silence her was very gentle.

‘That was not how it was,’ he said sternly. ‘You were my best friend, Georgie. My only friend.’

He seemed to mean it. But it couldn’t be true.

‘You soon forgot me, though, didn’t you?’

‘No. Far from it.’

‘Oh, come on—’

‘The memory of that last day we spent together, the day you brought me the butterflies—’ He shook his head and blinked, as though attempting to rearrange his thoughts. ‘No, that was not the last time I saw you, in point of fact. It was the day they sent me away. I caught a glimpse of you, through the carriage window. You were waving.’

‘You didn’t wave back.’

‘I did. But clearly you didn’t see.’

‘No.’

‘You looked as though you were crying. But then I thought, no, not Georgie. Nothing makes her cry. She’s too brave. But funnily enough, it helped me to think you might almost be on the verge of tears. Because it meant that you were going to miss me as much as I was going to miss you.’

She shook her head in disbelief. ‘But you didn’t miss me. You forgot all about me the moment you left Bartlesham.’

‘You are wrong. I missed you very much indeed. And I was hurt, very hurt, when you appeared to break your promise to me.’

‘What promise?’

‘To write to me.’

‘What? But I did! That is, I didn’t!’ She groaned inwardly at her clumsiness of speech. ‘Why are you trying to twist everything round?’ she hissed furiously. ‘I kept my promise. You were the one who didn’t write to me.’

‘Oh, I wrote to you,’ he said. ‘Every week. Even when I received no reply I kept on, in the hope that your letters were delayed by...bad weather, or something.’

‘What?’

He carried on speaking though his mouth twisted with bitterness. ‘Then I began to think you must just be too busy out riding, or swimming, or fishing, to want to sit down and write. I struggled to forgive you. I reminded myself you’d never been much of a one for sitting down and applying yourself to anything of the sort. Surely, I kept telling myself, she will at least send me greetings for Christmas. But Christmas came and went, and there was nothing from you, and I ate my solitary Christmas dinner, far from everything I’d known, wondering how you could be so...’ he drew in a sharp, pained breath ‘...so cruel.’

‘But I wasn’t. Edmund, I did write.’

‘And then it was my birthday.’ He carried on as though she hadn’t spoken. ‘And still no word from you. And I was halfway through my weekly letter to you, when I saw that it was more or less an inventory of the wildlife I was discovering on the island and it struck me that it was probably so boring, that all my letters had been so boring, that it was no wonder you hadn’t written back. That you probably didn’t know how to reply without revealing what a bore I was. Not when you’d never had it in you to dissemble.’

‘No,’ she grated, horror struck. ‘I would never have found any letter from you boring, Edmund. And I had never found you a bore. Surely you must have known that? Why, you were so clever. Noticing things that nobody else did. Like the differences between all the beetles we found in the woods, which everyone else just...crushed, if they bothered to think about them at all. And I did write. More than once a week. At first...’

He nodded, grimly. ‘Yes. I expect you did. At first. But then you gave up, didn’t you?’

‘Well, yes, because I thought you’d forgotten all about me. And I started thinking that perhaps, before, you’d only tolerated me hanging around you when you’d been so ill, because you were so bored.’

‘No,’ he said vehemently. ‘That was not how it was between us.’

‘But then what—?’ It felt as though she was experiencing yet another earthquake. ‘If you wrote to me—’ When his face tensed up, she hastily amended her statement. ‘I mean, where did your letters go? And what of mine to you? If you didn’t receive them...oh! I gave my letters to my father to post. Are you trying to tell me he...he didn’t send them? Any of them?’ It felt as if someone had just punched her in the stomach, to think Papa might have started betraying her as far back as that.

‘That I cannot say. What I do know is that my tutor used to collect all the mail that arrived at St Mary’s. To begin with. And I gave my letters to him to post.’

‘So it was him. It must have been him.’ She heaved a sigh of relief. It had been bad enough that Papa had married a woman who’d imposed such a strict new regime upon their household. When he’d turned a blind eye every time his new wife had beaten her. For things that had never been crimes before.

‘But...why would he have done it?’

‘Obviously because he had instructions to that effect.’

‘What? Why? Why would anyone want to make you so miserable? And me? It doesn’t make sense.’

‘Yes, it does, Georgie, think about it.’ He leaned forward. ‘Don’t you recall Mrs Bulstrode’s reaction that day she found us in my bed with the hangings closed?’

Georgie winced. ‘She called me a trollop. I didn’t even know what a trollop was. Not until much later.’ When Wilkins had got Liza into trouble. And then, from the names flung about during Liza’s dismissal, she had worked out that a trollop was a girl who spread her legs in the stables so that a man could use her like a brute beast.

‘I heard her berating you all the way downstairs. I’ve already told you that, at the time, I just found it amusing. But recently, I discovered,’ he said, looking uncomfortable, ‘that she carried tales of that escapade to my mother. And that my mother subsequently took action to...separate us from one another.’

‘But why? Why go to the lengths of...sending you so far away and stopping us from keeping in touch at all?’ She pressed her hand to her head, which was throbbing at the struggle to make sense of what Edmund was telling her. ‘Why didn’t someone just explain to us that it was improper? And why it was improper?’

‘Because Mrs Bulstrode believed that we were past the stage of needing explanations.’

‘What? What do you mean?’

‘Georgie, think about it. She drew back the curtains to see your skirts hitched up round your waist, while you have to admit I was wearing only my nightshirt.’

‘But I only drew the bed hangings round because I wanted to fill the air with colour for you. Like...like putting flowers in a vase, rather than strewing them all over your room. Which would have happened if I’d just let the butterflies out to fly where they wanted.’

‘I suspect they would all have headed for the window, and arranged themselves decoratively across the panes,’ he said pedantically. ‘Not that it wasn’t a splendid idea of yours,’ he added, reaching out his hand to pat hers. ‘I never forgot it. Even when I had persuaded myself I hated you, I remembered the joy you brought me that day and couldn’t turn my back on you entirely.’

‘You hated me?’ Her stomach lurched. ‘What had I ever done to make you hate me?’

‘You broke my heart,’ he said.

‘I...what?’

‘You weren’t just my friend, Georgie. You were my sunshine. My joy. You were too young, probably, to feel the same about me, but...the truth is, I loved you. When you didn’t write—or to be more precise, when they made me believe you hadn’t written—I was devastated.’

‘Oh, Edmund. Oh, no!’ She turned her hand over and gripped his as hard as she could. He returned the pressure, his face working.

‘The only way to survive the devastation,’ he grated, ‘was to twist what I felt for you and turn it around into hatred. When I returned to Bartlesham, for that short spell before I went up to Oxford, all I wanted to do was hurt you. So when you tried to greet me as though nothing was wrong, I...’

‘Looked down your nose at me. I thought it was because you’d become the Earl. I thought that you were ashamed of letting me dog your heels when you were just a boy and were doing your utmost to put me in my place, the way your mother puts people she considers encroaching in their place.’

He shook his head. ‘There was an element of that, in my behaviour, I dare say. But it was because I couldn’t bear to look at you, thinking you’d forgotten all about me, that you hadn’t cared how badly you’d hurt me. It was like a nest of snakes writhing inside me every time I caught a glimpse of you.’

Oh, how cleverly he described things. That was exactly how she’d felt. All those emotions, swirling through her, making her want to strike out, the way snakes struck out and spat venom.

‘I acted as badly, when you came back. Because, even though I never received any letters from you all that time you were away, I went to the gatepost, hoping...’ She couldn’t say more.

‘You looked for a message from me? Even after what you believed I’d done?’

She nodded. ‘I sneaked out and went to the trout stream, too, hoping you might go there, the way you used to. I thought if I could catch you there, I could make you tell me why we couldn’t be friends any more. But—’

‘Georgie,’ he gasped. ‘Even after everything you thought I’d done, you still hoped... God.’ He bowed his head over their clasped hands. ‘You had more faith in me than I had in you. I believed,’ he said, raising his head and looking into her eyes, ‘I really believed that you thought so little of what we had that you found it easy to toss aside the promises we’d made.’

‘Oh, Edmund. All these years...’ She felt her lower lip quiver. And her vision blurred.

‘Don’t cry Georgie. Just be glad we’ve found each other again,’ he said. And then leaned forward to press his lips gently to her forehead.

She sucked in a short, shocked breath.

Just as the air was rent by the sound of a scream of outrage.