Chapter 12

When Lord Archibald Vinney rose immediately on the conclusion of the play and ushered Harriet from the box and down the stairs to the waiting carriage, she assumed that her employers were not far behind them. Yet they did not immediately follow into the carriage.

“I daresay Freddie saw the crush of bodies,” Lord Archibald said, closing the door, “and decided it would be wiser to wait with Mrs. Sullivan until the crowds thinned.”

“Perhaps I should go back upstairs,” Harriet said. “Perhaps Clara will need my assistance.”

But Lord Archibald set one long-fingered, well-manicured hand on her arm. “Swimming against the current can be an exhausting business,” he said. “They will be here in a few minutes, Miss Pope. I do not believe I have time to devour you between now and then. Though it must be confessed that you look quite delicious enough this evening.”

Harriet felt herself blush. She had never owned a dress as frivolous and magnificent as the one she now wore, the one Clara had paid for as a gift.

“You must be finding your duties as companion less arduous now that your employer is married,” he said.

“My duties never were arduous, my lord,” she said.

“Ah.” He smiled. “The voice of the truly dutiful and loyal employee. Pretty clothes become you. And being out in society animates you.”

Harriet said nothing. She was wondering if she should remove her arm, on which his hand still rested.

“Perhaps it is time you embraced such a life full time,” he said. “Instead of always being somewhat on the outside looking in and living for most of the time in extreme dullness.”

His silver eyes, Harriet saw when she darted a glance at him, were regarding her lazily. But keenly too. She felt a shiver of excitement despite her good sense and her ability always to keep her feet firmly on the ground. Was it possible? Did the Cinderella story sometimes become reality?

“I know of someone,” he said, “who could offer you a life of greater comfort and ease and greater wealth. You would have a home of your own and your own carriage and servants. You could go about as you pleased and be to all intents and purposes your own mistress.”

Harriet’s heart was beating right up into her throat. “There could not be any such employment,” she said. But in truth it was not employment she was thinking of. She looked up into his eyes again. “Who would offer me such an easy life, my lord?”

“Me, of course,” he said, taking her hand in his and raising it to his lips. “You could have all these things and more, Harriet. Clothes, jewels, outings. You have enslaved me, you see.” His eyes were smiling lazily at her.

“Oh,” she said. Her heart was fit to thump right out of her chest. She wanted to shout and jump for joy, but she held onto her dignity.

He leaned forward suddenly and kissed her on the mouth, a light kiss but with parted lips. Harriet had never been kissed before. After the first shock of contact, she jerked back her head. Spirals of excitement had whirled downward to her very toes.

“You may have whatever your heart desires while we are together,” he said. “And I will make a settlement on you and any children of our liaison before we begin it, so that you will know yourself secure for life. Now kiss me, my little blushing charmer, before we are interrupted. We will talk again tomorrow.”

Harriet’s feet had never been more firmly planted on the ground. Her heart was there too—beneath her feet. “No,” she said. “I mean no to everything, my lord. I have employment that I find pleasant and secure, I thank you.”

“Ah.” His silver eyes laughed at her. “A prim little charmer too. You will enjoy it, Harriet, I promise. I am reputed to have some little skill with women, I believe. You were made for a life of greater ease and more diverse pleasures than you can achieve as a lady’s companion.”

“I would rather be a lady’s companion than a gentleman’s, thank you, my lord,” she said. She had thought herself immune to foolishness. Well, she had fallen into it once now—painfully—but she would learn from the experience. One learned more in life from pain than from pleasure, her father had always said. She had thought she was listening to a marriage proposal. It was pathetically laughable. Perhaps tomorrow she would be able to laugh at her naivete.

He regarded her quietly for a few moments. “Think about it,” he said. “Perhaps the prospect of being my mistress will not seem so horrifying when you have done so. You would be able to live like a duchess, Harriet, both while we are together and afterward.”

She leaned away from the backs of two of his fingers, which were trying to caress her cheek, and drew breath to speak. But the carriage door opened from the outside and she closed her mouth again.

Clara began talking with great enthusiasm about the play even before she was set down on the seat opposite Harriet. She continued to do so most of the way home. Though to Harriet, who knew her, her voice sounded falsely bright and her remarks lacked the depth of intelligence that was more usual with her. And it was unlike Clara to prattle.

And yet, Harriet thought, none of the rest of them seemed eager for her to stop talking. No one else seemed wishful of making conversation. She wondered what had happened between Clara and Mr. Sullivan. She focused her mind on the question, trying to ignore the silent man at her side, trying not to think about the particular proposal he had just made to her, trying not to admit that she was tempted. Horrifyingly, sinfully tempted.

He was heavy on her and deep in her, moving with the slow rhythm that her body recognized and responded to. She had her arms wrapped about his waist, her head turned against his shoulder, and tried to concentrate on the pleasure he was undoubtedly arousing in her body, as he always did. She tried to anticipate the growing pleasure to come over the next several minutes, the near-frenzy that would seem more like pain than pleasure until it burst into glory. It never failed. Freddie was always good to her in bed.

He had come into her without kisses and caresses tonight, and was working longer at the slow part of the rhythm. It felt good. It undoubtedly felt good. Sometimes she wished that this part could last on and on and on, that the greater pleasure—and also the end—could be held back and savored in anticipation. Sometimes she thought that being close to him, being joined with him, was more pleasurable than sexual release. No, not more so, perhaps. But equally pleasurable in a totally different way.

But tonight her brain could not be stilled as it normally was so that her body was free to enjoy. Tonight she could not stop thinking. She closed her eyes tightly and concentrated on the hard thrust of his body.

She was pretty. Slender and lithe and very, very pretty. And in love with Freddie. It had been clear from the way she had not looked at him, from the almost tangible tension that had hung in the air between them. Clara did not know why she had married the Earl of Beaconswood. Perhaps just because he was an earl and could offer her status and wealth and security. She must know Freddie well, after all. She would have been well aware of the fact earlier in the summer that he was deeply in debt. She would have known that he was a habitual gamer and womanizer. And so she had done what was sensible.

But she loved Freddie. And he loved her. That fact had almost shouted itself aloud in the box at the theater. I asked her to marry me, but she chose Dan instead. Clara turned her head sharply inward and clipped off the sound of what might have been a moan or a sob.

Frederick lifted his head and looked down at her with dreamy, heavy-lidded eyes. “Am I hurting you?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“I am too heavy?”

She shook her head again.

He kissed her open-mouthed. Lingeringly. “Does it feel good, my love?” he whispered into her mouth.

“Yes.” Oh, God, he was calling her that again. She wondered if he was trying as hard as she to put the evening’s events from his mind. She wondered if he was pretending that he was making love to Julia.

He had talked about all his cousins and uncles and aunts during the week of their honeymoon. She had felt almost as if she knew them all. But not a whisper of Julia, though she had been there every summer when the family gathered at Primrose Park. She had lived there with the old earl, her step-grandfather. But not a mention of her in all the stories he had told. Because he loved her. Because he had asked her to marry him and she had rejected him and married his cousin instead. Because it would have been painful to talk about her.

“Mmm,” he said, unclasping her arms from about his waist, setting his palms against hers on the mattress, lacing his fingers with hers, and raising her hands above her head. He was licking into her mouth and increasing the pace of his loving.

He had come to Bath directly from Primose Park and his rejection. And he had seen Clara, discovered that she was wealthy, and begun his wooing with even greater cynicism than she had realized. He had married her when he must still have been bruised and aching from the loss of the woman he loved. The woman who loved him.

Her body was aching into response. She could feel the familiar building of tension and clenching of muscles. She clutched his hands tightly and buried her face against his shoulder again. Perhaps she had always been Julia to him in bed. A dream substitute. Whereas to her he had always, always been Freddie.

“Ahh,” she said. And blessedly she lost her thoughts while all the tension in her body and all the love in her soul shattered about him and he murmured something soothing into her ear and she called his name.

He turned her and held her close, drawing the blankets up about her, and stroked the fingers of one hand through her hair. He knew she was unhappy, wondering about Jule and why he had carefully omitted all mention of her from his stories about Primrose Park. I asked her to marry me, but she chose Dan instead. Had he really said those words? It was about the worst explanation he could possibly have given, though it was true. But then a small part of the truth could sometimes be worse than a complete lie. Goodness only knew what interpretation Clara had put on his words. And the trouble was, he could not give any further explanation without making the matter even worse.

He kissed her softly. He had tried to love her with some tenderness, having rejected the idea of going out again as soon as he had escorted her home from the theater. God, if she knew the full truth, she would turn away from him in disgust, more than she had done at the end of their honeymoon when she had objected to the deception of his endearments. He felt a tenderness for her too, an affection. It was not that he was failing in love with her, he thought. It was just that he was getting to know her and like her. He felt protective of her.

He cared.

She moved her head with sudden impatience so that his fingers became entangled in the thickness of her hair.

“I hate my hair!” she said with a vehemence that took him completely by surprise. He had thought her on the verge of sleep. “It is so dreadfully ugly. Just like the rest of me. I hate it.”

“Clara?” He drew back from her a little way so that he could look into her face in the darkness. “It is not ugly. It is thick and shining and healthy. And you are not ugly.”

“It is horrible,” she said, her voice shaking with emotion. “It looks always like a dark ugly turban on my head. Other women have pretty hair.”

“Short hair is fashionable,” he said. “Yours has a natural wave, I believe, Clara. Why don’t you try it short?”

“It would look ugly anyway,” she said. She sounded rather like a petulant child, but he did not smile. She was very obviously upset, and by more than her hair.

“I think it would look very pretty,” he said.

“You are just saying that,” she said. “I wish I had not spoken. I cannot imagine why I did. I did not mean to.”

“I shall have someone come to the house tomorrow to cut it for you in the latest style,” he said.

The burst of passion seemed to have left her. “Papa would never allow me to cut my hair,” she said.

If only he could have her father alive before him for half an hour, Frederick thought, he would cheerfully run him through with a sword. After first blackening both his eyes and ramming all his teeth down his throat.

“Your husband says that you must have it cut if you wish,” he said. “Do you?”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, please, Freddie. Will you arrange it?”

“Tomorrow at first light,” he said, drawing her close against him again. “Perhaps even sooner.”

She chuckled.

“Go to sleep,” he said. “I need my beauty rest.”

“Yes, Freddie,” she said.

If he had married Jule, he thought, he would never have met Clara. He would have missed something precious in his life.

Clara spent a busy morning. She had to keep busy so that she would not think. There was no point in thinking. She had known from the very start what she could expect, or not expect, from her marriage. It was certainly no worse than she had expected. Indeed, in many ways it was better. She had not really expected Freddie to be kind, but he was.

She almost decided to forgo her exercises since someone was coming to cut her hair before luncheon and she was tired from the night before. And of course she hated the exercises, which drained her of energy and often caused her pain and filled her with a daily dose of despair. But if she did not fill in those hours somehow, then she would brood. And she did not want to do that.

They did all the usual exercises, she and the faithful Harriet, and a few new ones. Harriet bent her legs so that her feet rested flat on the bed, and she tried pushing them down into the mattress. She even tried lifting her bottom from the bed. That, of course, proved an impossibility, but surely the mattress was depressed a little from the pressure of her feet.

“Maybe I should just swing my legs over the side of the bed,” she said, “and take off running. Perhaps I would take them so by surprise that they would bear me at a trot all about the room.”

It was the sort of daily silly remark that usually set them off laughing and gave a welcome break from the painful exercises.

“Yes,” Harriet said.

Clara looked at her closely, not for the first time, “What happened last night?” she asked. “You were alone with Lord Archibald for a while because Freddie was afraid to take me out into the crush. Did he try anything improper, Harriet?”

“He proposed to me,” Harriet said.

“Harriet!”

“He proposed to make me his mistress,” Harriet said. “He promised me a house, carriage, clothes, jewels, outings—anything my heart could desire. It was a very attractive offer.”

“Harriet!” Clara was horror-struck. “I shall have him forbidden the house. I shall tell Freddie that he is not be admitted here again.”

“It was a very attractive offer.” Harriet smiled bleakly. “I was very tempted. All night I lay awake, tempted.”

“Harriet!” Clara said again.

“Oh, don’t worry,” Harriet said. “I am too much my father’s daughter to give in to temptation. But I shall probably look back on this in twenty or thirty years’ time and be sorry that I did not. He is a wonderfully attractive man.” Her face was very pale.

“You will never be subjected to the pain of seeing him again,” Clara said. “We will cut the acquaintance.”

“No,” Harriet said. “It really is of little importance. He was not impolite. And it really was a flattering offer. I am sure he meant no disrespect. I am of a class of woman that must seem mistress material, after all. He did not cut up nasty when I said no.”

“I wish he were not Freddie’s friend,” Clara cried passionately. “I wish Freddie could challenge him to a duel. Nasty, horrid man.”

Harriet smiled, and then giggled rather bleakly. “Perhaps,” she said, “we can set your feet to the ground and you can run after him so that he will die of astonishment.”

“With my hair uncut and billowing out behind me like a heavy thundercloud,” Clara added.

“Both fists flailing,” Harriet said.

“And a rolling pin brandished in one.”

They both collapsed in laughter. Harriet briskly wiped away tears of mirth and grief when they were finally recovered. By then it was time to finish with the exercises and prepare for the haircut.

“About which I feel as nervous as if I were planning to have my head cut off,” Clara confided to Harriet. “Do you think I will suddenly be transformed into a beauty?”

She was not, she discovered well over an hour later, when Monsieur Paul finally allowed her to look at her image in a glass. Nothing could make her into a beauty. Her face was too thin, her features too plain. But even so she stared at herself in stupefied wonder.

“Oh,” she said, raising a hand and touching the wavy tendrils that trailed along her neck. Her hand was trembling. The rest of her hair, in soft short waves, hugged her head and curled around her temples and over her forehead.

“Madame is ’appy?” Monsieur Paul asked, brandishing his comb and waving his fingers elegantly a few inches from her head.

“Yes,” she said, raising her eyes from her own image to his. “Oh, yes. Thank you.” It was hard to believe that that was herself. She was no beauty, but she looked— normal. Like a normal woman.

“Monsieur Sullivan will be wanting to see madame,” Monsieur Paul said, moving to her dressing room door to open it.

Freddie? She had not known he was at home. What would he think? Would he think she looked even more dreadful? She peered anxiously into the looking glass at the doorway behind her.

He stood in the doorway for a while, gazing at her. Then he came across the room to set his hands on her shoulders and meet her eyes in the glass. She waited for his comment, trying to tell herself that it really did not matter a great deal what he thought. And then he came around in front of her, reached for her hands, and went down on his haunches in front of her. His dark, hooded eyes smiled at her, and the smile gradually spread to his mouth. She found herself smiling back.

“Well?” he said.

“I am bald,” she said.

“You are beautiful.” He raised one of her hands to his lips.

It was gross flattery. And as grossly untrue. It warmed her from her new short curls to her toenails. She laughed, and he leaned forward to kiss her briefly on the lips before straightening up and turning to talk to Monsieur Paul.

Frederick spent a few hours of the afternoon riding in the park with Lord Archibald Vinney. His mind was preoccupied. He had not used the right word, he thought, though he had not used it to flatter. He had called her beautiful. She was not. Nor was she pretty. But all the unbecoming weight had gone with the bulk of her hair, leaving it wavy and pretty and bringing out classical lines in her oval face with its now healthy coloring. The short waves made her eyes seem larger and more alluring.

Handsome was the word he should have used. His wife looked handsome.

“Winter furs,” Lord Archibald said, nodding in the direction of an approaching landau, in which a young lady, warmly wrapped in furs, was seated beside an older woman. “They ruin the view, don’t they, Freddie? Beddable or not, would you say?”

“Not,” Frederick said. “The dragon would not allow you within half a league, Archie.”

“Ah, but I have perfected the art of charming dragons,” Lord Archibald said, illustrating his point by bowing from his horse’s back as the landau passed and sweeping off his hat, staring almost reverently the whole while at the older lady. She inclined her head regally. “Beddable, Freddie. Definitely beddable if the face is any indication. Sweet and all of eighteen, at a guess. Not a day older.”

“I did not think you were interested in robbing cradles,” Frederick said.

Lord Archibald threw back his head and laughed. “Nor am I,” he said. “Only in ogling them and making them blush. I brought color to the cheeks of that delectable infant. She knew that I was looking at the dragon and seeing only her. Freddie, my lad, you become boring. Not so long ago you would have been in competition with me. I have to sharpen all my skills when competing against those eyes of yours. I have seen them slay women by the dozen.”

Frederick answered only with a chuckle. They indulged in a short gallop, the park being almost empty of either traffic or pedestrians.

“You see me with a broken heart today,” Lord Archibald said when they slowed their horses to a walk again. “I even contemplated setting a pistol to my temple and blowing my brains out last night. But I thought of that wretched dukedom passing to that pompous ass of a cousin of mine, Percival Weems, and decided to make the sacrifice of staying alive. I was rejected last night, Freddie, my lad. Did you have hysterics to contend with when you arrived home?”

“Rejected?” Frederick looked closely at his friend. “Miss Pope? You offered her marriage, Archie?”

“Marriage?” Lord Archibald’s eyebrows shot up and he reached for his quizzing glass, which he was not wearing. “Do you have marriage on the brain, Freddie? Like some strange tropical fever? I shall marry when it becomes imperative that I set up my nursery. I have three or four years of living to enjoy yet before I have to contemplate that particular horror. And when the time comes, I shall doubtless feel obliged to choose some young thing with ice flowing in her veins along with very blue blood. I was rejected as a lover, my boy, with a very pretty, ‘No, thank you, my lord.’ ”

“I could have told you what she would say,” Frederick said. ‘‘Miss Pope has a great deal of good sense.”

“Good sense?” Lord Archibald said. “To choose a life of single dreariness and drudgery—with no offense meant to your wife, old chap—when she might have one of excitement and luxury and security?”

“And daily and nightly mounts without benefit of clergy,” Frederick said. “There is a certain type of female who considers it too high a price, Archie.”

His friend laughed. “You missed your calling, Freddie,” he said. “You should have been one of the aforementioned clergy. Is this what marriage does to you? One shudders at the very idea. Dinner at White’s? A visit to Annette’s later? And perhaps find out a game somewhere after that? If Annette’s girls do not prove too thorough, that is.”

It was tempting. The thought of dinner at White’s anyway. The thought of not returning home to face his own memories and secrets and inferiority. But if he dined with Archie, he might feel obliged to accompany him to Annette’s and then find it too embarrassing to sit downstairs awaiting his return. Unless Lizzie had talked and Annette kicked him out, he might find himself upstairs with one of the girls, doing to her what he had done with his wife the night before with some tenderness. And if that happened—or even if it did not, perhaps—self-hatred would send him in search of a game with high stakes to see him through the rest of the night.

And if he won, would he buy Clara another jewel with which to salve his conscience? And if he lost?

“I am taking Clara out for some air at five,” he said. “Some other time, Archie. I’ll not invite you. I don’t imagine that Miss Pope would be overdelighted.”

“I would not wager on it,” Lord Archibald said with a grin. “Behind the simple no, thank you, I distinctly heard the words, ‘But I wish I had the courage to say yes and perhaps will if you persist, my lord.’ But I shall not come with you this afternoon, Freddie. The little blusher must be left to languish for a few days. She must be led to believe that I have accepted her rejection.”

“I rather believe you will have nothing but rejection from the lady, Archie,” Frederick said.

“A wager,” Lord Archibald said, brightening. “Fifty guineas say she will be mine before Christmas, Freddie, my boy. Better still, a hundred. Not only an acceptance but on the mount already.”

“Done,” Frederick said. “One hundred guineas.”

They shook hands on it before parting, the one to ride to White’s, the other to return home.

There were visitors in the house, Frederick sensed as soon as he entered it, though there was no evidence of their presence in the hallway.

“Visitors?” he asked his butler.

“Her ladyship, the Countess of Beaconswood, and the Honorable Miss Wilkes to call upon Mrs. Sullivan sir,” the butler said with obvious relish, bowing to his master.

Frederick grimaced. He had known that last night was not the end of it, of course. They were in London for a wedding just before Christmas. He had known that he would be forced to make a courtesy call on his aunt now that he knew she was in town. He had not expected Jule and Camilla to come calling on his wife, though. Not so soon, anyway.

He considered leaving the house again. Or going up to his room, tiptoeing past the drawing room. But there was no point in avoiding the issue. He supposed he had realized all along that the summer’s embarrassment— masterly euphemism—would have to be faced sooner or later. They were family, after all, he and Dan and Jule, and they had always been a close family. He drew a deep breath and climbed the stairs with measured tread.

“Ah,” he said, opening the drawing room door and stepping inside. “How pleasant. Hello, Camilla. Jule.” He nodded to Harriet and crossed the room to Clara’s side. He set a hand on her shoulder and squeezed it. He raised two knuckles to brush against her jaw. “Hello, my love.”

Julia was watching his hand, he noticed. Clara’s shoulder had stiffened. He wished profoundly that he could change those last words he had spoken.