Laura Kinsale (42 page)

“Thank you!” he said bitterly.

“But if I marry you, I should have no authority to protect her from whatever you might do. Mr. Jocelyn admitted it. Even if you weren’t her guardian, even if you had no right to do anything, if I marry you, I cannot prevent you— because a wife cannot go to the law against her husband.” She stood up. “You said so to me yourself—that you could do anything you pleased with her, and I could not stop you.”

“I was angry when I said that!”

“Perhaps you will be angry when you take her away from me. Perhaps you were angry when you drowned the girl you were to marry.”

He turned as white as if she had slapped him. “It was an accident.”

“That is not what you told me.”

He stared at her rigidly, his jaw taut.

“You said that you did not want her.” Zenia had to force herself to stand still, to not step backwards. “That she was going to imprison you, and so you killed her.”

His lips parted. Almost imperceptibly, he shook his head.

“Why should I trust you?” Zenia cried. “I cannot!” She turned away, her skirt sweeping against the settee. She hated now having spoken of it; she could not bear to see the brutal expression on his face: it frightened her, squeezing her heart with remorse and dread.

In a low voice, he asked, “Why does any woman ever trust a man?”

“I do not know,” she said, swallowing. “I am sure I do not know.”

“Perhaps because he loves her,” he said, barely above the sound of the rain.

She turned. But he did not look at her; he was already walking toward the door, shoving a chair aside as if he hardly saw it. She heard his footsteps descending the stairs. A few moments later the front door slammed, a thud that echoed dully through the house. Zenia hurried to the window, but he did not pass below. She saw him ram his hat on his head and stride down the steps, careless of the rain, a tall shape that swung away at the iron baluster and vanished into the gray downpour.

Arden cursed the rain and cursed himself, falling back into the seat of the cab and shedding water over the cracked leather squab. He flung his dripping hat onto the opposite seat. He was breathing harder than he should have been, not so much from his effort to obtain a hackney as from the flush of emotion; the anger and the unnerving realization of what he had said.

He had meant to make a sane and logical statement of the situation, he had meant to see Beth, he had meant— anything but what had happened. He was the most maladroit blundering fool in nature; the more he cared for the outcome the more he butchered everything he did.

From a beginning worthy of a gawky schoolboy, he had found himself on the verge of his prepared declaration— and coward that he was, he’d shied off in the middle and made a cock of everything from there on. Every bloody thing. But he had the truth of what she thought of him now—what she feared—and in the black face of it he had heard himself say what laid him open and exposed, what he had known in his solitary heart, in his lonely heart, what he would not have betrayed for any prize on earth.

He was still breathing hard. He was nearly in a panic, because he had said that and she had not answered; he had not given her a chance to answer but run away.

He stared at his hat and the shabby hollows in the seat opposite him while cold water slid off his hair and down his neck. He had all his life been hunting, searching for some chimera that he did not know himself—he had thought it was anywhere but where he was. He had thought, usually, that it did not exist, and he was as much a fool as his father declared him. He had perceived, in a distant, disaffected way, that he was lonely, but there had been no other condition to know. He had always been that way, prowling the woods and the wastelands.

He rubbed both hands over his face, wet skin against wet skin, and opened his eyes, looking through his fingers like an animal looking out of a cage. He had discovered it, the thing he had never even known he was seeking—it was so close; for a breath of time he had possessed it: for a few months in the desert, for a week—a day—with his daughter. And the fear that it would vanish before he could reach it again made his muscles so tense that his head ached and his hands trembled in the seeping chill.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Zenia had never supposed, after that single call, that he would not come again. Elizabeth’s cold turned into a real fever, and Mr. Jocelyn’s physician had pronounced it the measles. At first Zenia had been frantic, blaming Lord Winter’s careless taking of her into the weather, but the doctor stated without question that the disease was certainly a contagion Elizabeth had caught from an infected young person. And indeed on the very afternoon that the physician left, a letter had arrived from Lady Belmaine with the information that the village children were full of measles, and it was now verified that the new second nursemaid, the young one dismissed just a fortnight ago for sluggishness and stupidity, had come out in spots not three days after she had left the house. Lady Belmaine thought Zenobia would be wise to stay alert for symptoms in Miss Elizabeth.

Elizabeth came through it with ease, a mild case, with hardly any serious rash and only a week of drowsy fussiness before she was struggling to leave her bed. It was a blessing in disguise, the doctor said. If he had his way, all children would be deliberately infected before the age of two, so that they achieved immunity when the disease was so nearly innocuous. Zenia was not quite so sanguine—she had not slept for worry, and only the brief course of it reassured her that Elizabeth’s first real illness would not at any moment turn deadly.

On the fourth night—the moderate crisis, as it turned out—she had even sent Lord Winter a note. She had not really thought Elizabeth in imminent danger, but she had thought that he would like to come. In her heart, she longed for him to come.

He had not. He had not even answered, although the boy had said he was still resident at the hotel.

What had come had been a packet from the legal offices of King and King, outlining a new proposal, since Miss Zenobia Stanhope appeared to reject the former one.

She sat again in her father’s study while Mr. Jocelyn frowned over the papers, shaking his head. “I am afraid we have reason now for some concern,” he said. “I do not like the threat inherent in this, my dear—I do not like it at all. Fraud is a very, very serious matter.”

“I did not lie to anyone,” Zenia said. “When Lord Belmaine asked me if I had proof of a marriage, I said no.”

Her voice was weak. She felt almost ill, faced suddenly with the consequences of her indecision.
Unthinking, damned stupid, mulish obstinacy,
he had said, and she very nearly agreed with him. She was to be treated now as a criminal, or at best a case of charity, utterly dependent on the generosity of the Belmaines. She had her father’s promise still—but she had learned, from the rather oblique hints of Mr. Jocelyn, that the Bruces were not so comfortably provided for that the lifetime support of a daughter and grandchild would be a light thing.

“I could wish that we had never got to this point,” the lawyer said. “This is tragic, my dear. Tragic. I supposed, when I saw him—but if Lord Winter has lost patience, can he be blamed? From his point of view, if there is not to be a marriage, then that fact must be made evident immediately, so that he is free to wed elsewhere.” He shook his head again. “No doubt his counsel has advised him to act with vigor for a resolution.”

Zenia bowed her head. She had not described her interview with Lord Winter, only said that nothing had been settled. “Well,” she said, “Elizabeth and I will go to Switzerland. At least my father is there. And there is to be a house, and money for her.”

“Little enough of that,” Mr. Jocelyn said. “This is hardly as handsome an offer as the other was, even in its pecuniary terms. And they have left themselves several ways out, in particular by making things dependent on your character and conduct. However, we may negotiate upon those points. Lord Belmaine is a little nervous of his part in this alleged fraud—and you see that there is a clause dealing with him alone. And of course Lord Winter’s desire for access to Miss Elizabeth is a point of leverage.”

“Oh,” Zenia said, “this is horrible.”

“This sort of thing is seldom pretty, I fear.” He cleared his throat. “I am sorry to say that it will likely be even less pleasant before it is over.”

She sat with her hands clasped tightly in her lap. As Mr. Jocelyn studied the contract, she felt her lips press and tremble. A tear slid down her cheek. “I only want to keep Elizabeth,” she said in a painful voice. “Oh, God, will I be transported?”

“My dear!” He instantly produced a crisp handkerchief. “I am very, very sorry. I should not frighten you. Certainly you will not. If you must go to the Continent on these terms, you must, and well before any peril of such a thing. I am quite certain that the Belmaines have no real desire to bring an action for fraud—that is simply to apply pressure to you to release Lord Winter entirely. But no matter what sort of paper you sign, they must be concerned that you might come back in the future and make some claim to be his wife.” He gave her a perfunctory smile. “Indeed, if you could promptly move some fortunate young man to fall in love and marry you, we should have no concerns at all. I’m sure they would be perfectly delighted to drop these accusations, since your marriage to another man must remove any fears.”

“I have come to hate the very word marriage,” Zenia said. “And I am not fond of men, either.”

He sat looking at her for a moment, his pleasant face cocked a little to one side, his brown eyes thoughtful.

“I beg your pardon,” she said, realizing how she had spoken. “I didn’t mean you, of course! But I do not think another marriage will answer,” she said, rubbing her fingers on the smooth wood of the tabletop. “There is Elizabeth.”

“Yes, of course,” he said, as if she had started him out of a distant thought. “Miss Elizabeth. My dear, do you need to look in on her? I would like a little time to deliberate on a notion that has just come to me. I must leave for Edinburgh tomorrow, you know, so give me an hour now to ponder.”

“I hope you will stay to dinner,” Zenia said politely.

‘That is very kind; I will be happy to do so.”

She left him with his pen poised over a blank paper, glad enough to impart the burden to him. But even with Elizabeth, Zenia could not dispel the pall of worry. And pain. She could admit it, looking at Elizabeth’s serious face as she worked to fit a beanbag through the tight neck of a tin cup. If Lord Winter could see Zenia in Elizabeth’s laugh, she could see him with perfect clarity in his daughter’s intensity and determination.

She had grieved for him once, but this was a different loss—she had demanded it herself, and yet the moment she had her will she had known with her entire being what a devastating blow it was. She had not expected him to relent; she had in some absurd way trusted that he would not—that somehow if she refused him and refused him and refused him, he would not go away, but change.

As if by taunting and taunting it, she could exorcise the djinni that compelled him to be what he was. As if she could erase the unhappiness in his eyes and make him want to stay. Glad to stay.

But he would not change. And by her folly she had ruined her own future—and worse, far worse—Elizabeth’s.

Clare appeared at the door. “Mr. Jocelyn wishes to see you now, ma’am.”