Tangled (7 page)

50 Mary Balogh
Rebecca called on Flora the morning after David's return home.

She had had to get out, away from the house, into the air. She had a headache, caused by all the crying she had done the night before—the first she had done for over a year—and by a largely sleepless night.

But it was a headache that needed to be willed away, not coddled. He was dead, she told herself quite deliberately as she arranged her wide-brimmed bonnet far back on her head, as was the fashion, and tied the ribbons beneath her chin.

Richard came running at her knock on the cottage door and immediately began prattling to her about a frog he had seen the day before at the edge of the pond while Flora came up behind him.

"Let Lady Cardwell at least come inside, sweetheart," she said, laughing. "Do come in, Rebecca."

He looked like David with his narrow face and dark hair, though his eyes were gray, not blue. It always angered Rebecca that the child must grow up to cope with the stigma of bastardy when he should be the acknowledged son of a viscount, grandson of an earl. He should be Richard Neville, not Richard Ellis. There was no reason at all why David should not have taken the consequences of his actions and married Flora. She was, after all, a gentlewoman, even if she was not of such exalted rank as one might expect the wife of a viscount to be.

That did not seem to matter as much as it had used to, anyway. One had only to consider the case of Louisa, for example. And there were all sorts of aristocrats who were marrying into the families of wealthy traders and industrialists.

Flora was personable enough. Beautiful even, with her very dark hair and eyes and her voluptuous figure. And intelligent and good-natured. Rebecca often wondered about the passion that must have flared between her and David for Richard to be conceived. Flora showed no bitterness over what had happened, or what had not happened. She rarely mentioned David, never in connection with herself.

"Oh," she said now, "you are wearing gray, Rebecca."

Rebecca looked down rather self-consciously at the plain,

full-skirted dress and jacket bodice she had had

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made a few months before but not had the will or the courage to wear until today. She had worn black for so long.

"It is very becoming," Flora said, "and fashionable. Come into the kitchen if you don't mind. I shall make some tea."

Richard told Rebecca again about the frog and how it had hopped away each time he had tried to pick it up, refusing to be caught.

"Frogs need to be free," she said, running her hand over his soft hair. "Just like little boys."

Her own elder child would have been just a few months younger than Richard, had it lived. Sometimes it seemed a strange irony that Flora's illegitimate child had survived to birth while her own much-wanted children, within matrimony, had not. But she never dwelled long on that thought. Life had altogether too much pain to drag one down—if one allowed it to. She had allowed pain to ruin almost two years of her life.

Besides, Richard was not unwanted, at least by his mother. She doted on him.

"David is home," Rebecca told Flora. She could not resist watching her friend rather closely as she spoke.

"Yes." Flora's hand paused for a moment as she set the kettle over the fire to boil. "I had heard. How is he?"

"Thinner," Rebecca said. "Older. His eyes are older. He has sold out."

"Yes," Flora said. "I had heard."

"He was with Julian when he died," Rebecca said. "He told me how it happened."

"Oh?" The cups and saucers that Flora was lifting down from a dresser rattled against one another.

"He was being foolish and reckless," Rebecca said. "He was leading a charge and got shot through the heart. He was dead by the time David reached him and turned him over. And then David was wounded. Strangers buried Julian. I suppose it didn't matter, did it?

He was dead."

"Yes." Flora arranged the cups slowly and deliberately on their saucers. "It must have happened so quickly, Rebecca. He would have felt no pain."

52 Mary Balogh

"That has been my consolation overnight," Rebecca said. "I have often had nightmares, wondering."

"Yes," Flora said. "Yes, I can understand that." The kettle was beginning to hum on the fire.

"And so I put him to rest," Rebecca said firmly, smiling down at Richard who was holding a book and looking up at her hopefully.

She lifted him to her lap. "Overnight I have put him to rest, Flora. I have to get on with my life—without him. I have indulged myself too long in mourning. Nothing can bring him back after all. And I shall always be able to remember that while he lived everything was perfect between us. I have had that in my life at least. So—I move on. And hence the gray dress. No more black. It is about time, isn't it?"

"Yes," Flora said, bending over the fire to test the heat of the kettle with her hand, though it was obvious that it was nowhere near boiling yet. "I am glad, Rebecca. Glad for you. You do not have to humor Richard, you know. He has had that very story read to him twice this morning already, haven't you, sweetheart?"

"But I like humoring him," Rebecca said, opening the book and feeling suddenly and unexpectedly light-hearted—and almost guilty at the feeling.

She wondered later, as she left the cottage and began the walk back to the house, if she should have said more about David. She wondered if Flora was starved for news of him or if hearing about him was painful to her. They had never discussed him. She wondered if David would call at the cottage. Surely he would want to see the three-year-old son he had fathered. The child had been little more than a baby when he left for Malta and the Crimea.

She resented him again and the fact that he had had a lovely woman he had refused to marry and a live son whom he had refused either to acknowledge or to make legitimate. And the fact that he had survived the war to return and continue to shirk his responsibilities.

While Julian . . . But no, she would not think about it anymore.

Bitterness would hurt only her in the end. It was time she started to live again. She had made that decision the night before as she had dried her tears. And she had committed herself to it this morning. No more gloom. No more self-pity. No more bitterness. She was going to

Tangled 53

find something to make life meaningful again. She deliberately put something like a spring into her step.

And then she saw David walking toward her along the path she was taking. There was no possibility of turning into another path to avoid him. He had seen her. All her newly made resolutions fled and she felt her spirits plummet. And yet it was David, she thought, walking determinedly on, who had been her salvation. He had brought her the truth and set her free. He had enabled her to set Julian finally to rest.

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David had come to a decision overnight. He supposed it was one that had been hovering at the back of his mind for a long, long time, though he had never until now made it a conscious plan. After all, he had not seen Rebecca and did not know either how she was taking Julian's death or how she was coping with life without him.

He only knew that he realized her predicament. Her mother was living with a sister. Her brother had a wife and at least five children that David knew about. Rebecca was living at Craybourne with his father, who was not even in reality her father-in-law. And his father had a new wife, a woman only a few years older than Rebecca— and a woman who most awkwardly had been Rebecca's paid companion before the marriage. She could not live alone—Julian had not been a particularly wealthy man, and his estate had passed to another relative since Rebecca had no sons.

She must feel that she belonged nowhere.

Of course she was young. And extraordinarily beautiful. Perhaps she had recovered from Julian's death and was already engaged in an active social life again. Perhaps she had suitors or would have soon.

Perhaps she would be married again soon. Those were the thoughts that had revolved in his head for the last several months.

Perhaps he had no responsibility to her at all.

But he had seen the truth last night. He had seen that she still mourned deeply, that she still had not adjusted. He had seen that she had not yet learned to cope with life after Julian. And he had seen that she was living in a house where she must feel out of place, especially under the particular circumstances of his father's remar-

54 Mary Balogh
riage. And clearly Louisa was very much mistress of Craybourne, a position Rebecca herself must have held when she first came there from Southampton.

Rebecca's life must seem empty and useless. Yet as a woman there was very little she could do to change matters. She had been brought up to expect life as a married lady and mother and as mistress of her husband's home.

Through a sleepless night David had felt the weight of his responsibility toward her. He had made a certain decision a few months before her marriage and thereby ensured that she did marry Julian. He was responsible for the fact that she had married a man who was unfaithful to her, who, had he lived, would probably have brought her ultimate unhappiness. But he had not lived. David had killed her husband and destroyed the whole fabric of her life.

And of course there was the fact that he loved her, had always loved her even when he was a boy and she was just a quiet, happy little girl, golden-ringleted and hazel-eyed, gazing worshipfully at him and smilingly at Julian. The worship had died as he had got more and more into trouble over the years, like the time when he had taken the blame for locking the head gardener's two daughters in a toolshed on a hot day and forgetting them there until they had been discovered all of six hours later. Rebecca had wept over those little girls and had gazed at him reproachfully when he had confessed to having been the masked bandit who had committed the crime. She had dropped her gaze when his father had led him away for a thrashing.

Her smiles for Julian had never stopped.

His love for Rebecca complicated matters. There was always the chance that what he felt and was deciding to do was more self-indulgence than duty. And perhaps, he thought, he would not have killed Julian if he had not loved Rebecca. Perhaps he would not have been so outraged at the affair Julian had been involved in.

Perhaps it was that outrage that had caused him to aim for the heart rather than for an arm or a leg.

It was a ridiculous thought, of course. He had acted with the instinct of an officer during that moment of time.
He knew that he ought not to let guilt distort his memories of what had happened.

However it was, he came to a decision overnight.

He discovered in the morning that Rebecca had had a light breakfast in her room, as she often did, and had gone out.

"'She must have gone into the village," the countess vaid. "Or more likely to Flora Ellis's. She usually asks me if I want to go with her when she goes to the village. Do you know where Flora lives?" And then she flushed, and he knew that she had just remembered what Flora Ellis was supposed to be to him.

"Yes," he said. "I'll go to meet her."

He came upon her about halfway to the cottage. He noticed the gray of her clothing immediately and the elegance. Her hair shone gold in the sun, exposed by the bonnet worn fashionably far back on her head. He wished suddenly that he could turn back, change his mind, give himself more time to think.

"Good morning, Rebecca," he said.

"Good morning, David." She did not smile.

"You have been visiting Flora Ellis?" he asked. A poor beginning.

Her lips tightened.

"Yes," she said. "And Richard. Is that where you are going?"

"No," he said. "I came to meet you. Would you care for a stroll?"

He offered her his arm.

"I suppose so," she said, taking it.

"Is this the first time you have worn gray?" he asked.

"Yes." She looked up at him fleetingly. "I owe you an apology, David, for rushing away last evening. It was such a relief, you know, to discover that you were there, that you saw it happen, that it was quick and painless, that he died instantly." Her smile was strained.

"That he really was a hero. I needed to be alone for a while."

"Yes," he said. "I understood that, Rebecca."

"He died," she said, "almost two years ago. It is time I put him to rest. My maid is taking all my black clothes away this morning."

It was a little better than he had expected. She had given him the opening he needed.

56Mary Balogh

"What will you do?" he asked. "Have you thought of your future?''

She stared ahead of herself for a while. "Women have so little control over their future, David," she said. "I hate living here though it seems very ungrateful to say so. Your father is as kind to me as if Julian had really been his son, and Louisa has continued steadfastly to be my friend. But you cannot imagine how out of place I feel."

"Yes, I can," he said.

"Can you?" She glanced up at him again. "I could go to Horace's I suppose. At least he is my real brother. I don't believe they v/ould turn me away, though they are rarely at home. But they have never invited me, you see. I don't think Denise likes me particularly. I can't go there. I really can't."

"No," he said. "I think it would be unwise."

"I could live very modestly on the settlement Julian made on me at our marriage," she said. "Many people manage to live quite comfortably on less. But when I mentioned it, your father became quite angry. I have never had him angry at me before. I am reluctant to broach the subject again."

"He sees you as a daughter," he said. "Julian was with us from the age of five, you know. He was as much a son of the house as I was."