Barely a Lady (27 page)

From one moment to the next, the image disintegrated, but it had been enough. The pain sharpened in his head, and he clutched at a door handle to keep himself upright.

It was something straight out of a melodrama, he thought distractedly, still seeing the alarm in Livvie’s eyes, the stark whiteness of her skin.
If I had seen it presented at a theater, I would have done an injury to myself laughing.

But he didn’t feel like laughing. He felt old rage break loose, like a badly healed wound. He felt revulsion and shame and humiliation, their taste so well remembered he had no need to question them.

How could she lie so easily? How could she make him believe that she loved him? He’d thought she’d been keeping him in the dark to protect him from some terrible thing he’d done. She’d only been protecting herself. She’d been giving herself time to worm her way back into his affections before she was exposed.

He was just turning away, trying to decide where he could go, when he saw her. As pale as a specter, she stood tucked back in the shadowy library across the hall from the sitting room. As if drawn inexorably to him, she turned.

There were no tears this time. No sobbed pleas. Only, if he could believe it, a desolation so deep it should have scored her. Only, if he could trust it, resignation.

She looked at him for a long moment. Then, without another word, she simply turned into the library.

She must have known he would follow. He did, ready to slam the library door behind him until he realized that it would only alert the harpies across the hall.

“
This
is what you couldn’t tell me?” he demanded, shutting the door, thinking how badly the hard edge of his voice seemed to fit. “I’ve been killing myself with guilt, and all this time you were just protecting
yourself
?”

Standing very still, she frowned down at her hands, as if surprised to see them. He wasn’t even sure she knew he was in the room.

Suddenly furious, he stalked up and grabbed her by the arm. “Damn it, Olivia,
listen
to me.”

She startled, as if coming out of a sleep. “Oh. Jack. Yes, I was coming to talk to you.”

“I’m sure you were,” he sneered. “May I assume it’s to explain what I just heard?”

She blinked. “Explain?”

He saw red. “Don’t lie to me, Liv. I know what I just heard. In fact, I remember it. I remember catching you and Tristram making love in our cottage. I remember that you had no excuse—although I’m not exactly sure what would be sufficient reason for my wife to be disporting herself like a back-alley whore.” He shook her, the hot wash of betrayal choking him. “Try and explain it away, Liv. I dare you.”

She just looked at him. She didn’t apologize. She didn’t explain. Instead, astonishingly, every hint of warmth bled away from her expression. “Thank heavens those two shrews didn’t take any longer to get here with their rumors,” she said, actually sounding sad. “I’d almost begun to trust you again.”

“Me?” he retorted. “Trust
me
? Who are you to speak of trust? You’ve been with me for weeks now, pretending to be my loving wife, seducing me back into your bed, and all this time it was a lie.” He barely kept from shaking her again. “Well? Wasn’t it?
Are
we married, Livvie?”

She pulled her arm free, but she never retreated. She stood there like a man before a firing squad, her certain doom visible in her eyes. “No, Jack. We aren’t. But you knew that when you followed me in here. Now, what do you really want to know?”

“Why you didn’t tell me!”

She lifted her chin, as if bracing herself for injury. “We didn’t tell you because the doctor warned us that if we told you anything that distressed you, we could kill you.”

He was swamped with disgust. His stomach curled with it. His head pounded. “Ah, I see. Altruism. Not an attempt to get into my good graces.”

Good God, now he was the one who sounded as if he were in a bad melodrama. Why did he feel such an urge to apologize?

She was rubbing her eyes, as if too tired to go on. “I don’t suppose you could keep your voice down until the leaders of the
ton
get out the front door? All things being equal, I’d rather not be forced to meet them.”

He barely heard her. He wanted to demolish something. He wanted to
understand.
“At least tell me that I called the makebate out.”

She was so suddenly silent it forced him to look up. Her eyes were bright with unshed tears, her hands clenched by her sides, her posture unbearably rigid. “Yes, Jack,” she said, her voice as flat as her expression. “You called him out. You killed him.”

Jack felt that blow all the way to his gut. Had he really wanted Tristram Gordon dead, that insignificant failure of a poet?

“It is why you’ve been gone,” Olivia went relentlessly on. “You were forced to flee ahead of the law.”

Was the ground shifting? He rubbed at his eyes, fury and frustration battling with grief. Old injuries, older, festering emotions that seemed to batter at his head without relief.

“Are you going to tell me now where I’ve been?” he asked.

She sighed. “I told you. I don’t know.”

He glared at her, but it was plain she was finished. “Well, if you can’t tell me,” he finally said, “I’m sure my family can. If you will call one of the servants to help me, I’ll be gone within the hour.”

He expected her to plead for leniency. For forgiveness. Instead, she reached over to a pedestal desk and picked up a grimy, blood-spattered musette bag. “Not,” she said, “until you can explain this.”

At the sight of the filthy, foul thing that dangled from Livvie’s fingers, Jack’s head seemed to explode and his sight disappeared. He hit the floor like a falling tree.

Chapter 19

O
h, bloody hell,” Olivia muttered.

The thump of Jack’s falling body still reverberated through the room. She was sure that the brace of shrikes in Lady Kate’s salon had heard it and were even now wondering what new bit of salacious news they could carry away from Lady Kate’s.

Damn. She was going to have to meet them after all. She couldn’t take the chance that they’d feel compelled to investigate.

For a very long, searing moment, she was tempted to let them.
Here
.
Here is your darling Jack Wyndham, betrayed innocent and noble son. Would you like me to tell you just why he’s lying unconscious on the floor?

She wished, if only for that moment, that she’d felled him with her fists. She actually ached with the impulse. But she’d undoubtedly done enough damage by surprising him with that bag.

Dragging in a deep breath, she sought to calm herself. She imagined she should bend down and see if he lived. She should return the dispatch bag to Lady Kate’s safe and beg Jack’s pardon for startling him so badly.

Maybe he really hadn’t meant what he said. He could have simply been repeating remembered emotions, his reaction no more than an echo of that moment in the cottage. Maybe when he woke, he would apologize.

She almost laughed out loud. Even when he had come upon her with Tris, he’d never called her a whore.

Sod him. Let him apologize to her for believing—a second time—the lies he’d been fed about her. Let him think about the promises he’d made and how quickly he’d forgotten them. Again.

First things first. She had to protect Lady Kate. Her hands shaking, she carefully opened the door and peeked out. Finney stood in the hallway, one eye on her and one on the suspiciously silent parlor.

“C’n I help any?” he whispered.

“There’s a small problem in the library,” she murmured, her voice thin with strain. “One of Lady Kate’s paintings fell on the floor. I’ll tell her.” She saw Finney’s lifted eyebrow and flashed him a wry smile. “A very large painting.”

Finney grinned back and headed past her into the room. She didn’t wait for him. She refused to look back at Jack, where he lay sprawled on the floor. She was just too angry. Too bitterly disappointed. Too perilously close to shattering like dropped ice. Much easier to brave the lion’s den.

“Excuse me, Lady Kate,” she said as she stepped intothe salon with a quick curtsy. “I thought you should know that there has been a small accident in the library. I’m afraid that the landscape of Green Park is resting on the floor.”

Lady Kate’s smile was gracious. “No matter, Olivia. You know I detest the thing. It will give me an excuse to donate it to a jumble sale. Have I introduced you to my guests?”

Olivia stared at her. “There is no need, Your Grace.”

“There is every need, Olivia. Come in.”

The last thing Olivia wanted to do right then was face those two dragons. One was a plum pudding away from exploding out of her corset, a red-faced, suspiciously black-haired middle-aged woman in all-over pink. The other bore a striking resemblance to a ship of the line. The very self-important Mrs. Drummond-Burrell, if she had to guess. The woman already had the obligatory quizzing glass up to her eye.

Olivia clenched her hands against a sudden urge to grab the glass and grind it under her heel. She’d been on the wrong end of those things too many times in the last years, lifted in just that way, as if being used to assess a stinking pool of refuse.

Do it,
she heard in her head.
Just this once, pay them back.

It was as if Jack’s accusation had frayed the last tether on her control. Suddenly she wanted to strike out, to hurt others the way they’d hurt her. To destroy every person who thought it was their right to call her a whore.

“I see no reason,” Mrs. Drummond-Burrell objected icily.

Olivia came so close to slapping her, she actually clenched her hands to keep them still. She had to get away before she disgraced Lady Kate.

Lady Kate didn’t seem to notice. Never taking her eyes from her guests, she came to her feet with the kind of grace intrinsic to the daughters and wives of dukes. “Ah, but I do see a reason. I insist that all my friends meet. My dear Olivia, may I introduce you to Mrs. Drummond-Burrell and Lady Brightly. Ladies, my very dearest friend—except for Lady Bea, of course—Olivia Wyndham. Make your curtsies, my dear.”

There was no ignoring that kind of order. Battling a wild urge to run, Olivia dropped another quick curtsy. “My lady. Ma’am.”

“Well!” the puce-faced Lady Brightly huffed, jumping to her feet as if a mouse had scuttled beneath them. “I never!”

“Nor will you,” Lady Kate advised her softly, “if you do not sit back down. I’m afraid I would never be able to welcome into my home anyone who lacks the basic civilities.”

Any other time, Olivia might have enjoyed watching Kate wield her power. Not today. Today she could barely see past the rage that suddenly swamped her.

“I’ll just help Finney,” she said, and backed out the door.

She made it no farther than the hallway. Trembling so badly she couldn’t move, she found herself leaning against the wall not five feet from the open door, her eyes squeezed shut, her hands fisted against her mouth.

The other shoe had dropped. The truth was out, and what she should have felt was fear. She should have curled over with humiliation at the snub those women had tried to serve her.

She didn’t. She trembled with fury. Her chest was suddenly thick with it, a foul miasma of every betrayal and indignity and loss she’d ever suffered, every snide comment and closed door and gloating condemnation. Every mile walked and every day spent without her baby. Without a home. Without hope.

She had kept all that poison locked away for so long. She’d convinced herself that it didn’t matter. That she was bigger than that. That she would survive no matter what, just to spite them.

Suddenly she was afraid that her control was irretrievably lost. Like an ocean pushing at a faulty dam, all that venom she had locked inside for five long years threatened to spill out over everything around her.

Just in time, Finney peeked out the library door. Olivia knew she should speak to him, at least to warn him. She was suddenly sure, though, that if she opened her mouth, she would let loose a scream that would shake the chandeliers.

Finney, bless him, took one look at her and nodded. “She still keepin’ them gentry morts busy?”

Struggling to take slow breaths, she nodded.

Finney gave a sage nod. “This time o’ day, I’d try the garden,” he suggested. “Nobody there to hear you curse.”

She let loose an abrupt gurgle and smiled, not trusting herself to say more.

“But if you needs to throw summit, try and save the windows.”

She nodded. Finney disappeared for a moment and returned with Jack slung over his shoulder like a sack of grain.

“Harper ’n me’ll take care of ’im,” Finney whispered. Then, leaning close, he gave her a buss on the cheek. “Though truth to tell, I’d rather just dump ’im out the back window. As the sergeant’d say, the man’s a feckin’ eedjet to believe that pack o’ lies.”

Looking up at the hulking ex-prizefighter, Olivia felt her precarious control weaken. “Thank you, Finney,” she rasped. “And thank Harper.”

“So say we all, lass. Now go on. We’ll take care of ’im.”

She went. She hadn’t spent any time in the garden before, but the minute she stepped outside the library windows, she realized it was perfect, both pretty and too small to get lost in. Quiet, lush, and green, it looked as if someone had folded a cottage garden into a linen closet. And, bless Lady Kate, there were paths that wove through and around the beds of foxglove and oxeye daisies and delphinium in case someone needed to walk off strong emotion.

Olivia tried so hard to outrun her feelings. Arms wrapped around her waist, chest heaving with the effort to keep from shrieking like a banshee, she marched through those flowers like a fusilier, sending them waving after her as she fought against the shock and despair and rage. Especially the rage.

Those women. Those small-minded, self-righteous, hypocritical shrews. How dare they judge her? How dare Jack accuse her? How dare she let him?

She’d tried so hard. Five years ago, she’d walked away, just as they’d all demanded. She had disappeared as if she’d never been born and kept away, each rejection she’d faced another step in the descent toward oblivion. She’d carried the mantle of shame on her back when she’d done nothing shameful and had paid the price for crimes never committed.

And now those women had come to chase her away again. And Jack had listened to them.

How could he have sneered at her? How could he have taken the malicious word of two bored society matrons at face value? Had she really begun to believe that just because she’d saved him and cared for him and loved him he would change enough to turn to her for the truth?

She laughed, the sound harsh and abrupt. Yes. She had. And how bloody stupid of her. It was, she thought, pressing her hands against her burning chest, the last straw.

She would have to find somewhere else to go. No matter how kind Lady Kate was, it was unfair to expect her to bear the burden of Olivia’s infamy. She would have to hide as well as she had the last time so Gervaise couldn’t find her. So no one could recognize her and cost her another position. She would have to find another way to survive.

Oh, God, she couldn’t bear it.

As if hitting a wall, she skidded to an abrupt stop.

No.
She
could
bear it.

Jack wasn’t coming back to her. After this afternoon, she wasn’t sure she’d let him. But damn him if she let him shatter her again. Damn them all.

“Olivia? Is there anything I can do?”

Olivia jumped at the sound of Grace’s voice. She looked up to see her friend standing at the library windows. “I wouldn’t be seen talking to me, Grace. I’m afraid my alias has been exploded, and I am once more persona non grata.”

Grace tilted her head, as if giving grave consideration. “You know, Olivia, I have spent my entire life assiduously avoiding such notoriety. I’m beginning to believe that I’ve missed out on quite a lot. If you don’t mind, I’d like to stay.”

Olivia walked up to her friend and folded her into a tight hug. “I should be noble enough to tell you no,” she said. “But I have had only one friend as good as you and Lady Kate, and I know what I’d say if she tried to send me away for my own good.”

“Excellent. Lady Kate wanted me to tell you that there are some particularly ugly bibelots in the morning room that have just been begging to be destroyed. She believes they would make a most satisfying noise against the fireplace.”

Finally, Olivia smiled. “I’m afraid Lady Kate’s bibelots will live to appall another visitor. I’m not a thrower.”

Grace patted her on the back. “What are you going to do?”

Staring off into the late afternoon shadows, Olivia shook her head. “Is Jack awake?”

“And very quiet. I think he’s trying to understand.”

At that, Olivia’s head came up. She considered Grace’s words for a very long moment. With a grim nod, she pulled back her shoulders as she’d seen the Highlanders do before they’d marched down the Rue Royale on the way to war. “Well, Grace, I think it’s about time he did.”

Grace nodded. “His head was aching abominably, so we gave him a tisane. Finney said you had the dispatch bag.”

Olivia rubbed at her eyes. “Yes. When I heard Lady Kate’s guests, it occurred to me that we had run out of time. I would need to present it to Jack. I just didn’t realize I would be using it quite that way.” She shrugged. “It was the only thing I could think to do to stop him from leaving.”

“Are you sure this is the time to confront him?”

She shook her head. “He already thinks he knows the worst about me. I don’t believe we have the time to let him come to the correct conclusions on his own.”

“What are you going to do?”

Olivia instinctively looked up to Jack’s window. “You might as well mix him some more headache powders. It’s time the Earl of Gracechurch found out what really happened five years ago.”

And quiet, loyal Grace, smiled. “Oh, good. May I watch?”

Olivia strode past her into the house. “If you stand out of the way. Unlike me, Jack
is
a thrower.”

Now that she’d made her decision, she thought she would have felt relief. After all, she would finally be given her say. But it seemed that one decision didn’t have the power to defuse the emotions that had been waiting so long for release. Like thick, hot purulence, they pressed against her chest, up her throat, in her ears. She seethed with them, astonished that such a force had been contained inside her for so long.

Grace followed her up the stairs, and Olivia thought she heard staff scuttle out of sight as she passed. She gave them no thought. She marched into Jack’s bedroom and faced Harper.

“Have we done any damage?” she asked.

“Ah, no. Sure, isn’t he stronger than he looks?”

“In that case,” she said, amazed at how controlled her voice sounded, “he won’t need you for a bit. But you might advise Mrs. Harper to prepare some tisanes, just in case.”