Читать книгу Regency Surrender: Passion And Rebellion - Энни Берроуз, Louise Allen - Страница 43
ОглавлениеShock had taken her legs out from under her. She could no more have run after Nathan and begged him not to go than she could have flown to the moon.
One minute she’d thought all her dreams had come true. Next moment she’d descended into a hellish nightmare. She’d thought Nathan loved her just as she was, but then he’d said he’d never really known her. That he couldn’t marry her. That they weren’t the same people who’d fallen in love with each other in their youth.
Was he right? Was it too late?
She shut her eyes and bowed her head.
Had they only imagined they’d fallen in love again, in Paris, because they’d both been pretending to be something they were not?
No...no! It was real. She’d had all these long, lonely weeks to ponder it all and she knew it was real. Nathan hadn’t had time to think it through, that was all. She dashed a tear from her eye. He’d lashed out—the way she’d done when he’d shocked her with that confession about why they’d broken up the first time.
She leapt to her feet. He’d come after her when she’d lost her temper with him. When her habit of being suspicious had made her afraid to believe in their love. Now it was her turn to go after him and talk some sense into him.
She was halfway across the room to ring for a maid to fetch her coat and bonnet, when she decided she hadn’t the patience to wait that long. Far quicker to run upstairs and plunge her arms into her coat herself. Stuff her bonnet on her head as she hurried down the stairs and tie the ribbons as she trotted down the garden path.
She was in such a hurry to catch Nathan and tell him that he was wrong that she didn’t see Mrs Podmore coming up the front path until she almost barrelled into her.
‘Oh, good. I have just caught you,’ said Mrs Podmore, tilting her umbrella to one side to make room for Amethyst. ‘I can see you are in a hurry, but this won’t take a moment—’
‘I’m so sorry, but I haven’t time to stop and talk today.’
She tried to step round Mrs Podmore, but the path was narrow, and her visitor determined.
‘Wherever you are going, it cannot be so urgent that you have forgotten your umbrella.’
‘It is that urgent,’ she countered. ‘And I hadn’t even noticed it was snowing.’ Only tiny specks of it, but the first real snow of the winter, nevertheless.
As she looked up in wonder, she had a brilliant idea. She stopped trying to sidestep Mrs Podmore’s substantial bulk and looked her straight in the face with what she hoped was a confiding air.
‘You see, everything you have ever warned me about has come to pass.’
‘Oh?’ For once Mrs Podmore didn’t seen to know what to say.
‘You have been right to warn me, so many times, just how dangerous it is to be without adequate chaperonage.’
‘Was I? I mean, of course I was. But—’
‘Yes. You see, while Fenella was preoccupied with her own courtship, and there was nobody to make me behave...’ she lowered her voice ‘...I did something quite scandalous.’
Mrs Podmore instinctively leaned closer to hear the whispered confidence, her eyes wide with curiosity.
‘I went to Mr Brown’s studio, the one he had in Paris, quite alone, to have my portrait painted.’
‘No!’ Her eyebrows shot up and disappeared into the ruffles under her bonnet.
‘Oh, yes. We were alone in his studio for hours at a time. And worse, he persuaded me to pose for him...naked.’
‘Naked?’ Mrs Podmore screeched the word, her shock temporarily robbing her of discretion. The baker’s boy, who’d been walking past, jumped and dropped his tray of rolls, which went tumbling all over the street.
‘And, of course, you must know what inevitably followed.’
Mrs Podmore’s eyes grew rounder still. Amethyst could see her mind racing.
‘I cannot bring myself to say what I fear you are alluding to.’
‘Well, I can,’ said Amethyst cheerfully. ‘We embarked upon a wildly passionate affair.’
‘A what?’
The baker’s boy’s head popped up over the hedge, his eyes wide with glee.
‘And now he’s pursued me all the way to England. Don’t you think that’s romantic?’ She pressed one hand to her chest. ‘I do.’ She sighed theatrically. ‘And so I’ve decided to run off with him.’
‘Run off with Mr Brown?’
If he’d have her. And if not, she already had plans to move to Southampton, so nobody would know any different when she disappeared.
‘Yes. I enjoyed travelling so much that I can’t wait to set off again. We might return to Paris, where we were so happy. Or we might go and see what Italy is like. He’s always wanted to go to Italy. And,’ she put in before Mrs Podmore could accuse Nathan of latching on to her because of her money, ‘I can afford to take him there.’
‘No! You must not. Only think what people will say...’
That was exactly what she was doing. Between her and the baker’s boy, the news would be all over town within minutes.
‘I don’t care what anyone says,’ she declared. ‘I cannot live without him.’
She beamed at Mrs Podmore, who was opening and closing her mouth like a landed trout.
‘Good day,’ said Amethyst and managed to nip past Mrs Podmore while she was trying to untangle her umbrella from the overhanging branches of her cherry trees. Past the gaping baker’s boy, who’d abandoned any pretence at retrieving the spoiled rolls. Up the hill and through the market square she sincerely hoped she’d never have to set eyes on again, before much longer, and along the lane that led to the Murdoch place.
* * *
It wasn’t long before she caught sight of Nathan in the lane ahead of her, because he was walking really slowly, his head bowed. Impervious to the snow, which was settling on his shoulders and the crown of his hat.
Hope surged. He couldn’t look so sad if he didn’t still love her. Didn’t regret having left her the way he had.
‘I have just one thing to say,’ she said as he reached his front door.
He spun round. For a moment she caught a glimpse of the carefree young man who’d argued with her about the Rights of Man over a bottle of beer in a Parisian dance hall. But then his face changed. And the cynical, embittered, disgraced politician stood in his place.
‘I have nothing further to say to you, madam,’ he said coldly.
‘Well, you can just listen then,’ she said, pushing past him into the house as an unsuspecting butler opened the door.
‘I have had longer to think about...us. Knowing all about the discrepancy in our wealth. And do you know what I have realised?’
‘You clearly mean to tell me,’ he said wearily. ‘You had better come in here.’ He pushed open the door to a sparsely furnished parlour and ushered her in.
‘Well, let’s start with why I’ve been afraid, for so many years, that no man could ever love me.’
He flinched and walked away from her to stare out of the window.
‘Exactly. You hurt me so badly that I lost my ability to trust men. Well, actually, it wasn’t all your fault. My father’s attitude played a large part in it, too. And then my aunt fostered that suspicion. Because she really, really hated men. She said I’d had a lucky escape anyway, because marriage was nothing but a trap for women. A cage in which some despotic male would lock her. I could understand why she thought like that, but I never wanted to end up like her. She was so...so miserable! She had so much money, but it never did her any good. It didn’t make her happy. It didn’t compensate for whatever it was that had set her off on her quest for revenge on the entire male sex.
‘When she died, I almost slid into the trap of becoming like her. Partly because I had to fight the men around me to hang on to what she’d left me. And I enjoyed winning. I won’t deny that I liked it a lot. I liked seeing bullies having to back down, rendering them powerless and sending them away with a flea in their ear.
‘But it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough to sit here like—well, you said it—like a spider in my web, holding all the threads together. I didn’t want to shrivel up inside, like she had, just because things hadn’t turned out the way I wanted.
‘Which was why I went to Paris in the first place. I needed to...break out. Find out what I wanted to do with my life. And then I met you.’
She walked across the room to stand behind him. Tentatively she placed one hand on his shoulder.
‘I thought you were a penniless artist. And believing that of you was what gave me the courage to take you as a lover. If I’d known you were still comfortably off and only taking a sort of...holiday, I would never have been able to open up to you the way I did. Your privileged background had come between us before. It would have felt like an unbreachable barrier if you’d been swanning about Paris, trading on your right to be treated with the deference due to the son of an English earl. When you started making advances I would have been afraid you were only toying with me, the way I believed you’d toyed with me in the past.’
He made a sort of growling noise and, though he didn’t turn round, she could see his cheeks flush. He might accuse her of lying, but he hadn’t been completely honest with her either.
‘And you wouldn’t have pursued me at all, had you known the extent of my wealth, would you?’
‘I thought I’d just made that perfectly clear.’
‘It wasn’t just my wealth that would have kept you away, Nathan. You didn’t know I was a virgin, either. You jumped to the conclusion that because I was with a man, I must be his mistress. You most definitely wouldn’t have got so jealous of poor Monsieur Le Brun if you’d known I was innocent of everything they told you about me. I suppose you might have still wanted to paint my portrait, perhaps as a memento of the girl you once loved, before I broke your heart and shattered your dreams, but not the rest.’
‘I—’
‘No, Nathan. Don’t you see? If we hadn’t both been trying to conceal some aspect of our lives, we would never have got together at all. There were too many obstacles. Too much hurt and suspicion on both sides. The way we got together was the only way it could have happened.’
‘But—’
‘But none of the things that would have kept us apart mattered one jot when we became lovers, Nathan, and don’t you dare try to say they did! We were just a man and a woman, rekindling a love we’d both mourned as lost. And it was a deeper, more meaningful love than the naïve, tentative relationship we started the first time round. Because we were both free to spend every moment with each other, untramelled by chaperons, or restrictions imposed by class. You cannot give up on it, just because you’ve found out I’m wealthy. It’s...stupid. And I know exactly how stupid because I did it first. I rebuffed you in just such a welter of suspicion that you are suffering from now. And I’ve spent the last few weeks working out that I’d been wrong to cast you as the villain of the tragedy I endured as a girl. You were as much a victim as I was.’
‘That was then,’ he growled. ‘This is different,’ he said harshly, spinning round so abruptly that it knocked her hand from his shoulder.
‘No, it isn’t,’ she said firmly. ‘We fell in love with each other in Paris and that hasn’t gone away. It cannot. Ten years and gallons of suspicion weren’t able to drown it. The moment we set eyes on each other again, neither of us could rest until we’d come together, in the fullest sense possible.’
‘It is no use, though,’ he said. ‘It cannot work.’
‘Of course it can work. It worked in Paris, didn’t it? So we can make it work again. If I can forgive you for believing the worst of me, if I can believe that you never proposed to me because you secretly wanted to gain control of my money, if I can stop fearing the loss of my independence, then surely you can see that I am not going to try to control you either? I know I wasn’t completely frank with you when we first met in Paris, but surely you can see I’m nothing like Lucasta? I want to marry you because I love you. You, Nathan. The man you are. I don’t want you to become something else. I don’t want to mould you, or push you, or treat you like a puppet by pulling your strings. I just want to make you happy.’
‘And what of all your money? What of that?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Doesn’t matter!’ He made an angry, impatient gesture. ‘I have my pride, you know. In fact, it’s about damn near all I do have left.’
‘No, it isn’t. You have my heart, too. It’s yours whether you want it or not. And there’s nothing else of any value at all. Without your love, my life is completely empty. Hollow. Money cannot fulfil me.’
She stepped right up to him and grabbed his lapels. ‘I made a mistake leaving you behind in Paris. As soon as I got back here, I saw that without you, I will only ever just...exist. I have been so lonely without you. I need you to be...my companion. My soulmate. Nathan, marry me. Make my life worth living again.’
‘I am not the man to make any woman’s life worth living,’ he said bitterly. ‘All my life, people have been telling me that. And I’ve proved it. My first marriage failed—’
‘Because you didn’t love each other. You married for all the wrong reasons. Marry for the right ones this time. Because you want a companion and a soulmate. Someone to complete you and make your life worth living.’
He took a breath as though about to say something. Closed his mouth. Shook his head. ‘It’s no use. I was just chasing a dream. Paris was—’
‘Paris was a taste of what we could have, if we both trust in the love we found there. When you learned that I hadn’t been an unmarried mother, that I hadn’t tried to deceive you, I saw the pain etched into your features fade away. And I became a better person when I was with you, too. The anger I’d carried around for so long, like a shield, melted away. I thought that lowering it would make me vulnerable. Instead, it freed me to be myself. And that was the person you loved. The real Amethyst. The one I’d never suspected I could be. It wasn’t the girl you knew all those years ago. It was someone I’d become as a result of all I’ve been through. Just as you’d changed from the boy who swept me off my feet, then broke my heart. You’d grown into a man. A man who’d suffered, and sinned, then finally found a path you could walk with your head held high.
‘Money didn’t come into it. Reputation didn’t matter either. It was who we were when we were together that was important. The fact that we made each other happy.’
‘You are right,’ he said slowly, ‘in that we did make each other happy. But...this is all wrong. A woman doesn’t propose to a man.’
‘Well, perhaps a woman should, especially if she’s been silly enough to turn down a man’s proposal so many times it’s made him give up hope. Should we both suffer for the rest of our lives because I was too scared to dare believe you really felt something for me? Or because you let my wealth stand between us?’
His hands went to her hips.
‘Amy, you are so wealthy you could have any man you wanted. You can’t possibly want to throw yourself away on a wretch like me...’
‘I don’t want any other man. I’ve never wanted any other man. For some reason, you are the only one who makes me think of kissing and being held, and taking my clothes off and wrapping myself around you.’
‘Amy...’ He groaned. ‘What am I going to do with you?’
‘Love me, Nathan. That’s all I want from you.’
‘I do love you,’ he said. ‘You’re right. It is you...you as you are now that I love, but...’
She didn’t let him continue with his protests. She stood on tiptoe, plunged her fingers into his hair and kissed him.
With a groan, he surrendered. He returned the kiss with interest, holding her so tightly that breathing soon became difficult.
Eventually, she had to tear her lips away, just to breathe.
But when she looked into his face, it was to see doubt and misery lingering beneath the passion.
‘Very well,’ she said. ‘I can see that marriage is too big a step for you to take. So I will just have to be content with living with you, as your mistress.’
‘No! I won’t demean you by making you sink that low. You’ve already suffered enough on my account. The last thing I want is to embroil you in a scandal.’
‘It might be a bit too late to avoid it,’ she admitted. ‘On the way here I informed the most determined gossip in the county that I’m going to run away with you. If you don’t want to ruin my reputation beyond all hope of redemption, you’re going to have to marry me. And if,’ she said, lifting her chin defiantly, ‘you really can’t stomach the prospect of having another wealthy wife, then I can give it all away.’
‘What? No—I’d never ask you to do that. It wouldn’t be right.’
‘I would gladly give it away if it would mean winning you. Nathan, can’t you see that it doesn’t matter? Any more than your reputation matters?’
‘You are really ready to give everything away and ally yourself to a man whose reputation is just about as sordid as it can be?’
She nodded, her eyes solemn. ‘That’s why I’ve just destroyed my own reputation. So that it makes us even.’
He grabbed her shoulders and shook her. ‘Amy, telling one woman, in a small market town in the middle of nowhere, that you’re going to run off with what she thinks is a penniless artist hardly compares with the stink I created in society.’
‘I will put that picture of me naked up for sale in the auction rooms, then,’ she declared defiantly. ‘In my father’s parish.’
He shook his head ruefully. ‘Amy, Amy, how can you want to throw everything away like this? On me of all people? I don’t know how you can be so sure I won’t break faith with you...’
‘I know because your whole life went sour when you thought you’d lost me the first time. When you thought I wasn’t the girl you’d fallen in love with, but some mirage conjured up from your fevered imagination. I know because I went through exactly the same process. I know because I’ve never been so happy as I was in Paris, with you. Even though doubt and fear lingered, I had to take what I could have of you. Just as you snatched at what you thought you could have of me. Even when you still believed I was Monsieur Le Brun’s mistress, you came and begged me to leave him and take up with you. You’d been starved of love for so long you were prepared to drink the dregs.
‘But, Nathan, you don’t have to scrape the dregs of life any longer. We can have the finest vintage. We love each other. What else matters?’
‘A great many things,’ he said sadly. ‘Though you are right about a good deal.’ He drew her against his chest, and buried his face in her hair.
‘I didn’t ever really stop loving you. Even when I thought you the worst kind of woman, when I saw you again, I couldn’t prevent myself from wanting you. My body recognised its one true mate.’
She pushed herself away just enough that she could look up into his face.
‘It was exactly the same for me. Every time I read some new story about you in the papers, I told myself I was well rid of you. But the moment I saw you again...it was as though there was nobody else in the room. I didn’t care what you’d done.’
‘I did a great many things of which I’m heartily ashamed now.’
‘I know.’ Her eyes filled with tears. ‘And I also know that if you were as bad as they all say you are, then you wouldn’t be ashamed. You wouldn’t care.’
‘Amy,’ he whispered, before lowering his head and kissing her as if she was necessary to his very existence.
She flowed into him, relief rushing through her in a flood.
‘They said I was too young to know what I wanted,’ he said, breaking off to frame her face with his hands and gaze at her intently. So intently that she knew he was speaking of her.
‘Too naïve to know what was good for me. They persuaded me to follow a path that led me to utter misery.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘They tried to tell me I was too silly to know truth from wishful thinking, too. But we weren’t too young. We knew we’d found the road to happiness. And now we’ve found it again.’
‘Then,’ he said and swallowed, ‘I will take it.’ Then uncertainty clouded his features. ‘If you’re sure?’
‘Oh, yes, Nathan, I’m completely sure. And I promise you,’ she said earnestly, ‘that this time, marriage won’t feel like a prison sentence.’
‘I’m not the only one who might think of it like a trap, though, am I? You’ve been so used to running not only your own life, but also that of hundreds of others, through your manufactories, that it’s going to be hard for you to give it all up. Especially when I don’t really want any of it.’
‘Give it all up? I thought you said you didn’t want me to give it all away?’
‘Yes, but once we marry, it will all belong to me.’
‘Yes, but, Nathan, you don’t want to change me, any more than I want you to become something you’re not, do you?’
‘Of course not. I want you to be happy, too.’
‘Well, then, if you don’t want me to give it all away and you don’t want to be chained to a desk yourself, why don’t we do something that nobody would expect? Why don’t we just snap our fingers at convention?’
He looked at her with a frown for a few seconds, then his expression cleared.
‘We can make our marriage anything we want, you’re right. We don’t need to let society mould us into being anything we don’t want to be. Not either of us.’ He drew a deep breath. ‘If you want to carry on running your business empire, then I won’t try to stop you. I don’t want to be the one to clip your wings.’
She beamed at him. ‘Any more than I would try to stop you painting. Or...or anything you want to do.’
‘I should never have walked out on you, earlier. I just...I got so angry when I heard you had so much money. And that you’d concealed so much from me. It all felt...’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘It all got tangled up in memories of your first marriage. Of getting into it before you really knew what Lucasta was like.’
‘You are nothing like her,’ he said fervently. ‘I’m so sorry for implying that you are.’
‘I forgive you. You didn’t mean it. I’ve sometimes said things, when I’ve been angry, that I’ve regretted later, haven’t I? And you didn’t listen to the words I said, but judged what was beneath the surface. The emotions that had made me lash out at you. And then you came after me.’
‘Just as you came after me.’
‘I feel so sorry for Lucasta,’ she said, wrinkling her brow. ‘Not only because she had you, and didn’t appreciate what she had, but also because she had so many frustrated ambitions. If she wanted to have a voice in Parliament, why shouldn’t she?’
‘Amy,’ he gasped. ‘That’s...revolutionary talk.’
She grinned up at him impishly. ‘And even in France, they don’t let women into government, do they?’
‘Not legally, no, but behind the scenes...’
‘Never mind what goes on behind the scenes in France, Nathan. I’m far more concerned with what is going to go on behind closed doors in Stanton Basset.’
As she spoke, she pulled the pin from his neckcloth, then started to work on the complicated knot with determined, if rather unskilled fingers. When he saw she was getting nowhere, he pushed her hands away and loosed it himself.
‘Never let it be said that I disappointed a lady,’ he said with a lazy smile.
He led her to the rug before the fire, lowered her down on to it and began to undo her gown, with a great deal more expertise than she’d shown with his neckcloth.
‘You won’t, Nathan. You couldn’t.’
He buried his face in her neck, breathing in as though he was intent on inhaling her.
‘I will do my utmost not to, my clever darling. My only love.’
And he didn’t disappoint her. Right there on the hearthrug.
* * * * *
