Mary Balogh - Slightly Wicked

“I am sorry you were a witness to that violence,” he said. “I should have sent you back to the house first, but you would not wish to be seen like this and have everyone knowing or guessing what had happened.”

He came inside the summerhouse when she did not reply.

“You were putting up a fierce fight,” he said. “You have spirit.”

He took her hand from the sill then, prising her fingers gently away from it, took it on one of his, and chafed it with the other. His knuckles were reddened, she could see.

“It will not happen again,” he said. “I know men like Effingham. They are bullies with women who will not worship and adore them and cowards with men who call them to account. I do assure you he fears me and will heed my warning.”

“I did not invite any of that,” she said, her voice shaking quite beyond her control. “I did not come here with him.”

“I know,” he said. “I watched you go around the side of the house, and then I saw him go after you. It took me a few minutes to extricate myself from the company I was in and to disappear without notice. I beg your pardon that I came so late.”

She could see her hair—on both sides of her face. Her dress, she saw when she looked downward, had been pulled forward in the struggle so that its modest neckline now revealed the tops of her breasts. She lifted her free hand to pull it up and discovered that her hand was shaking so badly that she could not even grasp the fabric with it.

“Come.” He took that hand in his too and lowered her to sit on the bench. He sat beside her, still holding one of her hands, his arm pressing reassuringly against her shoulder. “Never mind your appearance for a few minutes. No one else will come here. Rest your head on my shoulder if you wish. Breathe in the peace of the surroundings.”

She did as he suggested, and they sat like that for five, perhaps even ten minutes, not speaking, not moving. How could two apparently similar men be so different? she wondered. Lord Rannulf had issued an invitation to her after the stagecoach accident, a most improper one, and had proceeded to act upon it. What made him different from Horace, then? But she had answered the question already. And she still believed her own answer, perhaps now more than ever. He would have ridden on alone that day if she had said no. He would have left her at the posting inn if she had said no to the move to the one by the market green. He would have allowed her to sleep on the settle in the private dining room there if she had said no. No, actually he would have given her the bed and slept on the settle himself. She knew he would have. Lord Rannulf Bedwyn was quite prepared to flirt with and even sleep with a willing woman, but he would never ever force himself upon an unwilling one.

And yet he would dishonor marriage vows by taking mistresses? It did not fit what her instinct told her of him. But she was—oh, of course she was—in love with him, and so it was natural that she would idealize him. She must not begin to believe that he was perfect.

She lifted her head and drew her hand from his and leaned away from the support of his shoulder. He did not turn his head, she noticed gratefully, while she adjusted the bodice of her dress and, in the absence of a brush, smoothed her hair back as best as she could, secured it to the back of her head with as many hairpins as she could find, and shoved the whole mess beneath her cap and then her bonnet.

“I am ready to go back now,” she said, getting to her feet. “Thank you, Lord Rannulf. I do not know how I am ever going to repay you. I seem always to be in your debt.” She held out her right hand to him.

It was quite steady, she was proud to see.

He took it in both his own again as he stood. “If you wish,” he said, “you may excuse yourself from dinner and the entertainment afterward by saying you are indisposed. I will see to it that you are sent home in my grandmother’s carriage and will even send a servant to stay with you if you fear you will be molested there. Just say the word.”

Ah, it was tempting. She did not know how she would be able to sit down to dinner and retain her composure and converse with whoever was seated to either side of her. She did not know how she would be able to bear seeing Lord Rannulf seated beside Julianne, as he surely would be, talking and laughing with her. But she was a lady, she reminded herself. And though she was only a lowly member of Uncle George’s family, she was a member nonetheless.

“Thank you,” she said, “but I will stay.”

He grinned suddenly. “I like that way you have of lifting your chin as if inviting the world to bring on its worst,” he said. “It is at such moments that the real Judith Law steps onto the stage, I believe.”

He lifted her hand to his lips, and for a moment she could have wept over the brief loveliness of the intimacy. Instead she smiled.

“I suppose,” she said, “there is a little of Claire Campbell in Judith Law.”

She would not take his arm, though he offered it. The occasion had drawn them close, but there was no more to their amity than that. He had saved her and comforted her because he was a gentleman. She must not refine on his behavior more than that. She must not cling to him. She clasped the sides of her skirt and plodded up the slope toward the stables.

“I will go back the way I came,” she said when they reached the top. “You must go a different way, Lord Rannulf.”

“Yes,” he agreed. And he strode off toward the front of the stables, leaving her feeling unreasonably bereft. Had she expected him to argue?

She hastened past the paddock and the kitchen gardens, shuddering at the realization that she could be returning under vastly different circumstances if he had not noticed Horace following her. It did not bear thinking of.

But why had he noticed? She had been convinced that she had slipped away without anyone’s seeing her. Yet Horace had seen and Lord Rannulf had seen. Perhaps after all she was not quite as invisible as she had begun to believe.

Rannulf was seated between Lady Effingham and Mrs. Hardinge at dinner, his grandmother having been more discreet in her table arrangements than Lady Effingham was at Harewood. It was a relief to him, even though the one lady talked about nothing but the travails of having six daughters to bring out when one would like nothing better than to remain on one’s own country estate all year long, and the other tittered and commiserated with him over the fact that he had to keep two matrons company when he would doubtless far prefer to be seated by someone younger and prettier.

“Might I even say,” she suggested, arching him a sidelong glance, “a particular someone? ”

Miss Effingham, farther down the table, on the same side as Rannulf, talked animatedly with Roy-Hill and Law, her table companions. A few times Lady Effingham leaned forward and wanted to know the cause of a particular burst of laughter.

“Lord Rannulf and I and everyone else feel very isolated from the merriment, dearest,” she said on one of those occasions.

Judith Law sat on the other side of the table and conversed quietly with her uncle on one side and Richard Warren on the other. Looking at her now, one would never guess that she had endured such a terrifying experience just a few hours ago. She was far more the lady than her aunt, despite the latter’s elegance and surface sophistication. Like the other ladies from Harewood, she had changed in a room allotted to her upstairs. She was wearing the same cream and gold silk dress she had worn at the Rum and Puncheon on the second evening. He remembered it for its simple elegance, which at the time he had thought deliberately understated, like the rest of her garments. It now had panels of a well-coordinated darker cream fabric set into the sides, a band of the same material lining the neckline so that far less of her bosom was visible, and an almost nonexistent waistline. She wore a fine, lace-trimmed cap, which, quite predictably, covered her hair.

How many of those seated about the table, he wondered, though they had been acquainted with her for a week, realized that she was below thirty years of age? Or knew the color of her hair—or of her eyes for that matter?

One thing had become distressingly clear to him in the course of the day. He could not—he really could not—marry the Effingham chit. He would be insane within a week of their marriage. It was not just that she was silly and empty-headed. It was more that she was vain and totally self-absorbed. And her only reason for trying to attach his interest was that he was the son of a duke and a wealthy man. She had made no attempt whatsoever to get to know him as a person. She probably never would. He might spend fifty years married to a woman who would never know—or care—that he had spent the last ten years denying the guilt he felt over not doing his duty and entering upon a career in the church as his father had planned for him and instead had lived a life of aimlessness and occasional dissipation. Or that very recently he had decided to give his life direction and meaning by becoming a knowledgeable, involved, responsible, perhaps even progressive and compassionate landlord.

The dinner table conversation did not demand much of his brain. He was able to do a great deal of thinking at the same time.

He could not marry Miss Effingham.

Neither could he disappoint his grandmother. Was he the only one who could see the rigidity of her bearing and the deep lines on either side of her mouth, both indications of suppressed pain? Or the brightness of her eyes that masked bone-weariness? And yet this garden party extending into a dinner and entertainment for the Harewood guests had been her idea. Rannulf glanced several times at her with fond exasperation.