The Survivors' Club: Only Beloved Part 9

"Oh, what foolish flattery," she said. "But I thank you. I shall now be able to feel considerably less guilt about leaving so abruptly-provided Mr. Madison likes what he hears this afternoon, of course. Will you be going out again? To your club, maybe?"

"I had rather hoped to spend the rest of the day with my wife," he said. "Do you not have time for me?"

"Of course I do." She was absurdly pleased. "I thought all men spent their days at one of the clubs or in Parliament or at some other exclusively male preserve."

"Not this man," he told her as they climbed the steps to their house. "Not all the time, at least, and certainly not on the first full day of my marriage after I have been separated from my wife all morning. Did you enjoy yourself?"

"I did," she a.s.sured him, but did not add what a wonderful feeling it had given her to be a wife among wives, a friend among friends-or how lovely it had been to know that she had a husband coming back to her. She would have been ashamed to say such things aloud. She was a bit ashamed even to think them. What had happened to her pride in her independence, her ability to stand alone without any man?

They did not stay in for the rest of the day. Instead they went walking in Hyde Park, though not in the area where the fas.h.i.+onable world strolled and rode during the afternoon.

"People may feel obliged to stop and inform us what the weather is like if we go there," he said by way of explanation. "I do not want to be stopped and spoken to today. Do you?"

Dora laughed. "No," she said. "I have all the company I desire for today."

"Ah." He chuckled. "I have had my compliment and will now hold my peace."

She had had no idea that marriage would feel so . . . comfortable, that it would involve light banter and teasing remarks and laughter.

They walked along narrow paths that wound and climbed and descended among trees and sometimes presented stones or tree roots to trip them if they were unwary. The paths were quiet and secluded in the main, with occasional glimpses of lawns and small groups of people, both riders and pedestrians. Two children's nurses sat on one expanse of gra.s.s talking while their young charges dashed about at play. A small dog chased after a stick its master threw for it, its tail whipping up what must be a minor hurricane. George told her about Percy's dog, a former stray of indeterminate breed and unprepossessing looks, which had forced itself upon him until he had had no choice but to keep it and love it.

"I do like Percy," Dora said, laughing at the story. "He seems quite perfect for Imogen."

"He has made her glow," he said, "and for that I will always hold him in the deepest esteem."

She wondered if now, when they were alone together and away from home, he would talk about yesterday and about the death of his first wife.

"It was rather sad to bid farewell to your father and your brother this morning," he said. "You must have wished there could be more time with them."

"I was very glad they came," she a.s.sured him. "But Oliver has a busy life and Louisa does not like to leave their children for any longer than necessary. My father does not like to leave home at all."

"But he did so for your sake," he said. "I am pleased about that."

His head remained turned toward her, and she could feel unspoken questions in the silence.

"He was never an openly warmhearted man," she told him, "though he was not unkind or neglectful either-not to us, his children, at least. Mrs. Brough was one of my mother's friends. I liked her, and after Mama left she continued to call upon me with words of advice and encouragement. But after Mr. Brough died a number of years later, it was clear that her interest lay with my father more than with me. Their marriage came as no great surprise. But soon after their wedding she made it clear to Agnes that it was high time she considered marriage-and Agnes married William Keeping, something that ought never to have happened. Then she made sure I understood that there was no room for two mistresses in our home, though I had been trying very hard to efface myself. It was a great relief to all of us, I suppose, except perhaps Agnes, when I moved away to Inglebrook. I have never been able to think of Mrs. Brough by any other name, but since I can no longer call her that, I do not call her anything, I am afraid. It is a little awkward. As far as my father is concerned, we do not have a close relations.h.i.+p, but neither are we estranged. I am happy that he came here and gave me away. He was happy about that too."

"You resented his marrying again?" he asked.

She hesitated as he used his free hand to hold back a low branch that would have caught her across the face if he had not noticed it. "I tried not to," she said. "There was no reason he should not marry, and they seemed-still seem-fond enough of each other. It would have been reprehensible to resent his marriage purely for my own selfish reasons."

"Selfish?" he said. "But had you not given up your dreams in order to keep home for your father and raise your sister?"

"But not at his request," she protested. "It was my choice to stay. I can hardly blame anyone else for what I freely decided to do."

"I might argue that point, Dora," he said. "You did not blame your father for your mother's desertion? Ah, forgive me. That question was quite out of line. Ignore it if you will and we will admire the beauty of the park."

"Oh, I have blamed him," she said with a sigh, "especially after hearing what my mother told Flavian last year. I a.s.sume you have heard about that. And of course I have blamed her too. Initially the fault was entirely his. I was there when he accused her very publicly in the middle of an a.s.sembly and would not be hushed though a number of people urged him not to say what he would live to regret. But . . . she did not need to go away and never come back. Or perhaps she did. How can I know how intolerable their marriage had become to her? One never can really know such things from the outside, can one?"

"No," he agreed softly, "one cannot."

"But there was a child," she said. "There was Agnes. Surely-oh, I may be very wrong, but surely she ought to have put her child before any personal unhappiness with her marriage. Agnes was five years old."

"Her children, perhaps," he said. "There was you as well as Agnes. And your brother."

"I was old enough to look after myself," she said. "Goodness, you married when you were seventeen."

"I was a child and at the mercy of forces beyond myself," he said, "just as you were."

"Yes." She waited but he did not explain his words about himself. "Oh, I do try not to hate her, not to judge her, but I do not always succeed. We cannot know what another person's life is like, can we, unless we can live their lives from the inside, and that is impossible. I can judge my mother only from the pain she caused Agnes and me-and Oliver. And that is perhaps unfair especially when it was my father who started it all-or apparently started it."

They had left the trees behind them and were walking in suns.h.i.+ne. Dora lifted her chin so that she could feel the summerlike heat against her face beneath the brim of her bonnet. He stopped walking and turned them to face full into the sun.

"She had as much right to be with me yesterday as he had," she said, and realized too late that she had spoken aloud.

"You are sorry we did not invite her?" he asked.

"No." She closed her eyes briefly. "It would have been intolerable. You must have realized that after you made the suggestion a month ago."

"But possible," he said. "Most things are when one is a duke."

She looked at him. He was smiling in that gentle, kindly way of his.

"I found myself yesterday morning, you know, wondering if she knew about my wedding, wondering if she cared," she told him.

"You know, Dora," he said, and the kindness that shone from his eyes seemed to wrap itself about her like a warm blanket, "we do not have to set out for Cornwall tomorrow or even the next day."

They were planning to leave tomorrow. They were to go to Penderris, and she wanted with a pa.s.sionate yearning to be on the way there with him. On the way home. She did not want to delay by even a day.

They stepped off the path to allow two young girls trailed by a maid to pa.s.s by. Dora waited until they were out of earshot.

"I cannot go to visit her," she said.

"As you wish." His smile warmed her even as the sun was obscured by a small cloud.

"I do not know where she lives," she said.

"Flavian does," he reminded her.

She moistened her lips with her tongue. "Do you think I ought to go?"

"I think," he said, "that I ought to allow you to decide that for yourself, Dora. But if you wish to stay another day or two, then we will. And if you wish to call upon your mother, I will accompany you-or not."

She tipped her head to one side and regarded him closely. "Now I know," she said, "what Flavian and Agnes mean when they speak of you."

He raised his eyebrows.

"That you are a gifted listener," she said. "That you give comfort and strength and support without in any way trying to impose your will upon anyone or attempting to control anyone's actions."

"It does not take a great deal of talent to listen," he said, "when one loves the speaker."

Loves?

"And you love everyone," she said.

"Ah," he said, "not so, Dora. You will not be able to make any sort of a saint of me, I am afraid."

"Your fellow Survivors do," she told him.

He laughed softly. "I was able to comfort them when they were at their lowest ebb," he said. "It was easy to be a hero when I was unhurt myself."

"Were you?" She frowned.

Something came down behind his eyes almost like a curtain.

"Shall we walk?" He gestured to the long stretch of gra.s.s before them, and they left the path and struck off in what Dora guessed to be the direction of the Serpentine. Perhaps he thought it was time for crowds again.

"You will come with me?" she asked after a silent minute or two.

"Yes."

"Tomorrow?"

"Yes."

But she did not want to go. Or did she? She was not looking for any kind of reconciliation. She never would be. She tried not to judge her mother's actions or hate her or blame her for the damage she had done to Agnes and herself-and probably to Oliver, but she could not . . . forgive her, just as could not really forgive her father. Yet she had invited him to her wedding-and to give her away. Ought her mother not to have equal consideration? The thought made her feel a bit light-headed.

"How strange!" she said. "If my mother had stayed, if my life had proceeded according to plan, I would almost without any doubt not be walking here with you now. And I would have hated that. Though I would not have known what I was missing, would I?"

She turned her head toward him, and they both laughed.

"I would have hated it too," he told her.

11.

The years during which Penderris Hall had been a hospital for wounded officers had saved George's sanity. He was convinced of that. And it was not just because the house had been full and life busy enough to keep his mind off himself. It was more that he had been needed. That fact had surprised him at first, for he had a.s.sumed that the success of his scheme would depend almost entirely upon the marvelous skills of Joseph Connor, the physician he had hired. All he would do, he had thought, was provide the s.p.a.ce and the funding. He had found, however, that he had a function almost as important as Connor's, for he had discovered in himself a vast ability to empathize, to put himself in the place of the sufferer, to listen, to find just the right words to say in reply. He had discovered that he was a patient man, that he could spend as much time with each wounded man as was needed. He had spent many hours, for instance, simply holding Vincent during the ghastly months when the boy was both deaf and blind. During those years he had discovered in himself a capacity to love that reached out to anyone who needed it.

The reward of it all-ah, the biblical aptness of it!-was that in giving of himself he had also received in abundance. Every one of the officers who had been at Penderris and survived still wrote regularly to him. And the six who had formed the Survivors' Club with him loved him, he knew, as dearly as he loved them. It was a rich reward.

He could empathize with Dora. She had sacrificed her own prospects of a happy life as a young wife and mother so that her sister could grow up feeling secure and cherished. And then, when it had seemed that no one needed her any longer, she had made a new life for herself that had been admirable in its dignity and usefulness. But the wounds went deep-probably far deeper than she realized herself. She could forgive her father more easily than she could her mother because he had never been central to her life and because the bond of affection between them had always been lukewarm at best. But her mother had been all in all to her when she was a growing girl, and the woman's desertion and subsequent silence had devastated her. There was, he knew, a great black hole in his wife's life where her mother had been-no, worse than a hole. An empty hole did not feel pain. Pain had been pushed deep inside Dora, but it was there nonetheless, probably as raw as it had ever been.

He would do anything to put things right for her, though he knew from experience that no one could ever put someone else's life to rights. One could only listen and encourage and love. And hold when holding was appropriate.

He did not make love to his wife that night. He knew that he had caused her pain on their wedding night, though he knew too that she had welcomed it, that the physical side of their marriage would be important to her. Good Lord, what must half a lifetime lived in celibacy be like? And let no one try to tell him that women did not feel s.e.xual yearnings and frustrations as men did. But now he would give her body a chance to heal. He would and did simply hold her. She had been quiet since their walk in the park, and he knew that her mind was on tomorrow and her decision to see her mother.

He slid an arm about her shoulders and snuggled her against him. With his other hand he cupped her chin and kissed her.

She was eminently kissable. She had a warm, soft, sweet mouth, and when he traced the line of her lips with his tongue she parted them and he was able to reach his tongue in to touch hers. There was heat and moisture there and a welcome. She turned onto her side to move closer to him and sighed deep in her throat.

There was something surprisingly lovely about cuddling a woman when one had no intention of having full s.e.x with her. It was an entirely new experience for him, in fact. He kissed her forehead, her temple, her ear, her chin, her throat. And his hand moved over her, skimming the side of one breast, tracing the line of a hip, the flatness of her abdomen, circling the roundness of a b.u.t.tock. She was warm and fragrant and sweet and . . . his.

That was the greatest marvel of all, the greatest miracle-that she was his. His wife, till death parted them. And not just his wife-ah, no, not just that. She was his companion, his bedfellow, his friend. And yes, they would be friends. They already were, though there was much still to know about each other and would doubtless be many adjustments to make. He liked her . . . oh, more than he liked anyone else in this world.

Her hand was light against his back.

"May we dispense with the nightgown?" he asked, his mouth against hers. "But only if you are comfortable with being skin to skin with me."

"I suppose it is what is done between married people, is it not?" she said, sounding so much like Miss Debbins of Inglebrook that he smiled in the darkness.

"We need do nothing that 'married people' do," he told her. "We will do only what we want to do."

"Very well," she said, and would have sat up if he had not held her in place with his arm about her shoulders.

He slid her nightgown slowly up her body, brus.h.i.+ng the backs of his fingers over her thighs as he did so and then over her stomach.

"Raise your arms for me," he said at last, and removed the gown completely and dropped it over the side of the bed. "You are very, very beautiful, Dora."

"That is because the room is in darkness," she said.

"Ah, but my hands and fingers and mouth do not require light," he told her.

She did not feel like a girl, for which fact he was thankful. She had a woman's body, not voluptuous, but very feminine nonetheless. She was warm and soft-skinned and silky, and if he was not careful he was going to become more aroused than he wanted to be.

She was perfection.

He fondled her b.r.e.a.s.t.s with featherlight fingers and kissed her mouth and stroked the moist flesh within with his tongue.

"You may touch me too if you wish," he told her.

"I am touching-" she began, but he deepened his kiss.

"Wherever you wish," he said. "I am your husband. I am yours. I am for your pleasure as well as for everything else."

"Oh." She breathed softly into his mouth.

"I hope this will always be a pleasure for you as well as for me," he said.

"Will be?" She was Miss Debbins again. "Oh, George, it already is. You have no idea."

Yes. Yes, he did.