Married to a Stranger (19 page)

He was a hero and even now he could not believe it. But he had forgiven himself, that she did believe. And he had spoken about Daniel and his feelings and perhaps now he would not dream that dream again. If he did, she was determined that she would be there. As she finally roused herself and sat brushing out her hair, it occurred to her that perhaps she had finally been able to repay something in return for Callum’s offer of marriage, his payment of their debts, his guarantee of security. And there was the money she had earned from her drawings, the money she had thought to use instead of her dress allowance—she could buy something for Callum.

What would he like? He wore jewellery sparingly and he had any number of good family pieces—links and pins and fobs. A horse? He seemed content with the gelding he hired, but perhaps he was just too busy to think about buying one. Sporting guns? They would all take quite a lot of money, she knew that. But she could save up and that would give her more time to find just the right gift.

More content than she had been since Callum had put his ring on her finger, Sophia went to work on another set of drawings for a memorandum book. She would prefer to draw Callum, or try her hand at imitating one of those wicked caricatures, but she was a professional artist now, and this was what Mr Ackermann wanted. If she sold these drawings, then she would tell Callum. He would see it was all harmless and safely anonymous and he would, she hoped, be proud of the standard of her work.

Chapter Nineteen

T
here were no fresh flowers on the breakfast table when Sophia came down the next morning after a night alone in her room. Nor was there any sign of her husband. Callum had sent a note from the office apologising for missing dinner and then had come in late and had gone to his own room, hours after she had retired to bed. Sophia told herself firmly that she could not read anything into it, that Callum was not regretting the intimacy of the night before and his frankness. He had simply been overwhelmed by work at the office, that must be it.

‘Has Mr Chatterton gone out early?’ she asked Andrew who was arranging plates on the buffet.

‘He said he would be back very shortly, ma’am. He’s gone to the market.’ The footman looked as confused by this as she felt.

‘The market?’

‘Shepherd’s Market, ma’am. It’s only just round the corner. It’s where I usually get the flowers every morning, ma’am. But the master said not to go today.’

‘I will wait breakfast until he returns,’ she said. ‘Please bring me a cup of coffee in the drawing room.’ What on earth had possessed Callum to go to a market of all places? If he wanted early morning exercise after a bad night, surely a walk in the park would be more usual?

The front door opened just before she reached the drawing room and Callum came through it, obscured behind a large bunch of flowers. Country flowers, late wild flowers and foliage, a riot of shapes and colours all mixed together as though a small child had plucked the contents of a hedgerow and thrust them into his arms.

‘Callum?’ Sophia parted the bunch and he smiled at her, petals on the brim of his tall hat.

‘I thought these would be a change from roses and give you something else to draw. I realised when I thought about it that there are hardly any wild flowers in Green Park—the park keepers’ scythes and the cows see to that.’

‘But they are lovely! Thank you—and you went to fetch them yourself.’ Not many gentlemen would battle through a crowded market to buy flowers and then carry them back through the streets just because they thought their wives would enjoy drawing them.

She dodged round the flowers as Callum handed them to Andrew. ‘That was so thoughtful, Callum.’ He turned his head so their lips met and, with his hands free now, pulled her against him. The kiss was slow, thorough and possessive, his lips open over hers, his tongue taking possession of her mouth until the heat flooded into her and she moaned, wanting him, wanting what he had not given her last night.

Then he set her back on her unsteady feet and smiled, quite as though nothing had happened. She stared at him, breathless. ‘I’ve kept you from your breakfast. I’m sorry. I had no idea the market would be so busy and colourful—I thought I was back in India! You must come with me one morning, I think you would find it amusing—it made me want to paint.’

‘I would love to come.’ Bemused, Sophia preceded Callum into the dining room. ‘I thought perhaps you had not had a good night last night and had gone out to take the air.’

‘Because I was so late back? I wanted to clear my desk for a day or two and there were things I needed to plan. There are meetings I must attend today, but I am going down to look at the ship again tomorrow—would you like to come?’

Time with Callum, entering into his world, sharing with him—and he wondered if she would enjoy it? ‘There is nothing I would like better,’ she admitted. ‘But don’t be late back tonight; it is your cousin Mrs Hickson’s party this evening.’

Callum’s parting kiss was lingering too, so much so that Sophia was in a considerable flutter by the time he left for Leadenhall Street. She tried to concentrate on sketching some of the flowers he had brought her, but she found she was drifting into happy daydreams. Was he coming to care for her? Might he, one day, come to love her?

* * *

Cal found he was in no danger of becoming so absorbed in his work that he did not leave in time. In fact, he was hard put to concentrate and kept drifting off into thoughts of Sophia.

He had a nagging suspicion that he had always placed rather too high a value on controlling his feelings, controlling everything around him, in the past. He was overdue an emotional storm, he supposed, and falling for Sophia had hit him so hard that he had no idea how to deal with it. How do you tell your wife you love her? Propose to a woman and if she turns you down, you can walk away and lick your wounds, get over it in privacy. Reveal your innermost vulnerability in marriage and then find she does not share your feelings—that would be hell.

He had entered this marriage confident that he could provide for his wife, his future family, and give them position and security. And he had suffered no doubts that he could make Sophia happy in bed. But he had not given a thought to love and now he knew that all his confidence, all his certainties, were nothing in the face of this emotion. He wanted the one thing he knew he could not demand: her love.

The ride home through the crowded streets gave him something else to think about, but when he walked into the house, looked in the drawing room and found his flowers all over the room and her drawings with them, he was shaken and disarmed all over again.

Charmed, he tucked a sprig of something he could not identify into his buttonhole and subsided on to the sofa to study the drawings.

‘Mr Chatterton has arrived, ma’am,’ Hawksley said. ‘Shall I send tea to the drawing room?’

With a murmured word of thanks Sophia ran downstairs. Callum looked up from the sheaf of flower drawings in his hand and smiled and her pulse stuttered. ‘These are very good,’ he said. ‘Very accomplished. You have made art, not simply a good representation of nature.’

‘I—thank you.’

‘Your work should be displayed,’ Callum said, his eyes still on the images. ‘Printed.’

‘Thank you,’ she said again, feeling slightly dizzy. Callum thought her work should be printed? She had been trying to summon up the courage to tell him what she had done and it seemed he would have approved in any case. But what he would not approve, she feared, was that she had done it without discussing it first. Admitting to that was going to take courage and the right moment, and just now, with the intimacy they seemed to be achieving so new and so fragile, she could not risk shattering it. Not yet.

Hawksley brought in the tea tray and she began to pour. ‘Tell me who to expect to meet at Mrs Hickson’s party,’ she said. ‘I am so looking forward to it.’

Three hours later Sophia recalled those words and winced. Mrs Hickson, it appeared, did not approve of Callum’s marriage to ‘some country nobody without even youth to commend her.’ Neither did her friends.

Sophia slid deeper into the cover of a display of potted palms and listened as one of Mrs Hickson’s cronies passed on this judgment to another matron.

‘It was deeply regrettable that young men so close to the earldom should have gone into trade in the first place,’ Mrs Dunbar opined.

‘Quite, although the East India Company is somewhat different—it has great influence and he will doubtless emerge a very rich man.’

‘The earl is betrothed, most suitably, to Lady Julia Gray, so there is probably no risk that the inheritance might go in that direction, my dear Lady Piercebridge. That is one mercy.’

‘Oh, quite. Not that I have anything against Callum Chatterton myself. And he does not mix with cits. The house is perfectly
au fait.
’

‘Such a pity your hopes that he would attach himself to your Daphne did not succeed. So very suitable for him; this gangling nobody can only pull him down.’

‘And I can see no excuse for it. He cannot even plead the momentary insanity of a love match, I believe. Georgia Hickson said he seems to have done it out of a sense of duty because she was betrothed to poor dear Daniel.’

Sophia got out of the other side of the palms, the jabs from their sharp fronds a perfect counterpoint to the unpleasant pecks from the sharp beaks of the gossips.

They thought she would pull Callum down, that she was unsuitable as the match for the heir presumptive to an earldom. Did he share those thoughts? Had he put them to one side because of his duty to Daniel’s betrothed?

‘There you are. I thought you had run off to flirt with one of my handsome young cousins.’

Sophia looked up to find Callum smiling down at her. No, he was not that good an actor, surely? If he had thought like that about her at first, she was certain he no longer did. ‘Are there any?’ she asked. ‘If there are gentlemen as handsome as my husband here I must have missed them.’

‘Now you
are
flirting,’ he said and his smile warmed and held promises of all kinds of things that almost banished the sting of what she had just overheard.

Almost. ‘Only with my husband.’

‘I would like to lurk here all evening to do just that, but duty calls. Can you bear some more introductions? Great-Uncle Sylvester has just arrived. He’s as mad as a trunk full of Barbary apes, but he’s an entertaining old devil.’

‘Yes, of course. An eccentric great-uncle sounds delightful.’

And so Sylvester proved to be. And she liked the younger set she was introduced to and perhaps, if she had not overheard Mesdames Dunbar and Piercebridge she would not have noticed how haughty Mrs Hickson was to her and the pursed lips of some of the older women.

That sort of snobbery had never occurred to her when she’d agreed to marry Callum, perhaps because there were so many other objections to worry about. Sophia smiled and chatted, sipped Mr Hickson’s rather inferior champagne and fumed inwardly. She might be a country nobody, but her family was perfectly respectable. Her father had been a gentleman, she had connections to a number of noble families—distant, it was true. The wretched women had no business to speak as though Callum had married the scullery maid.

She recalled how the inquisitive ladies had reminded her of a flock of starlings at the dinner party when she had first met some of Callum’s family. These old witches were just the same, snapping at their prey with no concern whether it might be hurt by their spite. Sophia eyed Mrs Hickson’s profile across the room and thought of the prints she had bought. How satisfying to draw the whole flock of them as starlings, pecking some unfortunate creature to death.

‘Would you like to come into the City this morning?’ Cal stood at the foot of the stairs and watched Sophia coming down. She had the faint air of the cat who had stolen the cream and he rather suspected he was looking a trifle smug himself. He had stayed in her bed last night, dreamlessly, and when he had woken at dawn the candles had guttered out and Sophia was sleeping like the dead beside him.

But under the physical satisfaction that still warmed him from last night, and again early that morning, was the lurking knowledge that a marriage consisted of more than compatibility in bed. Shakespeare had written something about the marriage of true minds, hadn’t he? That was what he had to find with Sophia in order to make her happy.
A marriage of true minds.
He had to trust enough to let down his guard with her and pray that she would do the same with him.

‘I don’t want to come with you if you frown like that,’ she said, reaching the lowest step.

‘I was thinking about Shakespeare,’ Cal admitted and she shook her head in bafflement, dark ringlets quivering. ‘I could show you St Paul’s and the Mansion House and the Tower and then we can go down to the docks and you can see our ship.’

‘Ours?’
He liked the way her mouth curled, half-teasing, half, he was certain, genuine pleasure.

‘We will pretend it is all ours,’ he promised.

‘The post, sir.’ Hawksley came down the hall with a laden silver salver. ‘And breakfast is ready, ma’am.’

‘Thank you for enduring last night. At least it means you have met most of the relatives who come to town regularly,’ he said as they sat down.

He thought Sophia’s smile looked forced for a moment. Perhaps she was tired; he had certainly kept her awake last night. ‘And the day after tomorrow is our own reception,’ she said. ‘We have had a gratifying number of acceptances.’ Her smile became stronger. ‘I fear it will be a sad crush.’

‘Excellent. And you have a new gown?’ He knew she had, he had asked Chivers in secret and looked at the simple column of deep blue silk with its sweeping over-skirt of spangled gauze. The sapphires he had bought her to go with it were hidden in his room. Would she read the message in the heart-shaped gem that made a pendant to the necklace?

‘I have one I am very pleased with, if truth be told,’ she confided. ‘Callum, it will not hamper your career that I have no useful connections, that no one has ever heard of me?’

‘Good Lord, no.’ Cal grounded his coffee cup with a clatter. ‘Whatever put that nonsense into your head?’

Sophia would not meet his eyes. ‘I overheard someone last night saying what a pity it was that you did not marry Lady Piercebridge’s daughter.’

‘Daphne? She’s a pretty peahen and I never had the slightest interest in her.’ He reached across the corner of the table, put his fingers under her chin and tipped her face up so she was forced to look at him. ‘You, my love, are the only woman I have ever wanted to marry.’

Sophia’s face relaxed into a smile and Callum realised what he had said.
My love.
But she did not pick up on it. She would surely think it was just an endearment, not the honest truth. When this reception was over and she saw how well she was fitted to be his wife, how easily she was accepted as his hostess, then perhaps she would be confident enough to believe him when he told her he loved her. And he would have two more days to woo her first, two more nights to make love to her.

‘Well, Sophia? What is it to be first? Our ship or the horrors of the Tower of London?’

‘Oh, the Tower, definitely. And then we can be cheered by the sight of the ship.’

The warmth that crept through him as she laughed and spoke so happily of ‘we’ shook him. That moment all those months ago when she had roused herself from her shock over the news of the wreck and Dan’s loss and had touched his cheek with her fingertips, forgetting her own distress, murmuring her concern that he be warm again, came back to him. His destiny had been there, then, waiting for him.