Mary Balogh - Slightly Wicked

He had a vivid memory of kneeling behind her on the bed at the Rum and Puncheon, brushing her hair before making love to her.

“She will miss you when you leave,” he said.

“She wants to sell some of her jewels and buy a cottage somewhere so that we can live together,” she said. “Though I do not know if it will really happen. Either way you must not feel guilty for having been the unwitting cause of all that is happening. I am glad it happened. It has brought me very much closer to my grandmother and to an understanding of my own life.”

She did not offer an explanation, but he remembered suddenly something that had been said just a short while ago.

“My grandmother says that you get your talent from Mrs. Law,” he said.

“Oh, so Lady Beamish does know?” she said. “And you too? My aunt and Julianne are so very worried that you may both discover the truth.”

“Your grandmother was an actress?” he asked, pushing away from the tree and seating himself beside her on the grass.

“In London.” She was smiling, he could see. “My grandfather fell in love with her when she was onstage, went to meet her in the green room of the Covent Garden Theater, and married her three months later, to the lasting horror of his family. She was a draper’s daughter. She had been very successful as an actress and much sought-after by all the fashionable gentlemen. She must have been very beautiful, I think, though she had red hair like me.”

It was hard to picture Mrs. Law young and beautiful and red-haired and much sought-after by the bucks and beaux of her time. But not impossible. Even now when she was old and plump and gray-haired, she possessed a certain charm, and her jewel-bedecked figure suggested a flamboyance of personality consistent with her past as an actress. She might well have been a fine-looking woman in her time.

“She kept her figure until my grandfather died,” Judith said. “Then she started eating to console her grief, she told me. And then it became a habit. It is sad, is it not, that she had such a happy marriage and yet both her children—my aunt and my father—are ashamed of both her and her past? I am not ashamed of her.”

He had possessed himself of one of her hands before he realized it.

“Why should you be,” he asked her, “when she is largely responsible for your beauty and your talent and the richness of your character?”

And yet, he thought even as he spoke, the Bedwyns would be in the forefront of those who shunned a woman of such blemished ancestry. He was surprised that his grandmother, knowing the truth about her friend, would consider Julianne Effingham an eligible bride for him even if the lineage on her father’s side was impeccable. Bewcastle might have vastly different ideas on the matter.

“Tell me something,” she said, her voice suddenly breathless and urgent. “And please tell me the truth.

Oh, please be truthful. Am I beautiful?”

He understood suddenly—why she had been taught to see her red hair with shame and embarrassment, why she had been encouraged to think of herself as ugly. Every time he looked at her, her father, the rector, must be reminded of the mother who could yet embarrass him before his flock and his peers if the truth were ever known. His second daughter must always have seemed a heavy cross to bear.

With his free hand Rannulf cupped her chin and turned her face to his. Her cheeks were flushed with embarrassment.

“I have known many women, Judith,” he said. “I have admired all the most lovely of them, worshipped a few of the unattainable from afar, pursued others with some diligence. It is what wealthy, idle, bored gentlemen of my type tend to do. I can truly say that I have never ever seen any woman whose beauty comes even close to matching yours.”

Was it true, that seemingly extravagant claim? Was she really that beautiful? Or was it partly that the lovely package contained Judith Law? It did not matter. There was much truth, after all, in that old cliché that beauty is more than skin deep.

“You are beautiful,” he told her, and he dipped his head and kissed her softly on the lips.

“Am I ?” Her green eyes were swimming with tears when he lifted his head. “Not vulgar? I do not look vulgar?‘

“How could beauty possibly be vulgar?” he asked her.

“When men look at me,” she said, “and really see me, they leer.”

“It is because feminine beauty is desirable to men,” he said. “And where there is no restraint and no gallantry— when a man is not also a gentleman—then there is leering. The beauty is no less beautiful because some men behave badly in its presence.”

“You did not leer,” she said.

He felt deeply ashamed. He had set eyes on her and had wanted her and gone after her. His motive had been pure lust.

“Did I not?” he said.

She shook her head. “There was something else in your eyes,” he said, “despite your words and your actions. Some ... humor, perhaps? I do not know the exact word. You did not make me shudder. You made me ... joyful.”

God help him.

“You made me feel beautiful,” she said. She smiled slowly at him. “For the first time in my life. Thank you.”

He swallowed hard and awkwardly. He deserved to be horsewhipped for what he had done to her. But she was thanking him.

“We had better get back to the house,” she said, looking up as he withdrew his hand from beneath her chin. “I can feel rain.”

They got up and brushed themselves off, and she drew her bonnet carefully over her hair and tied the ribbons in a large bow to one side of her chin. She looked vividly pretty without a cap beneath it.

“I’ll go over the hill and you can go around it to the front again,” she said.

But he had had an idea, though he had neither thought it through nor wished to do so.

“Let’s go together,” he said. “There is no one here to see us.”

He offered his arm, which she took after a moment’s hesitation, and they climbed the hill together, an occasional spot of rain splashing down on them.

“I suppose,” she said, “you are very bored here in the country. Yet you have not joined in many of the activities of the house party this week.”

“I am learning about farming and estate management,” he said, “and enjoying myself enormously.”

She turned her head to look at him. “Enjoying yourself?” She laughed.

He chuckled too. “I have been taken by surprise,” he said. “Grandmaison will be mine in time, yet I have never been interested in its running. Now I am. Picture me in years to come trudging about my land with a shaggy dog at my heel, an ill-fitting coat on my back, and nothing but crops and drainage and livestock to enliven my conversation.”

“It is hard to imagine.” She laughed again. “Tell me about it. What have you learned? What have you seen? Do you plan to make any changes when the property is yours?”

At first he thought the questions merely polite, but it soon became clear to him that she was genuinely interested. And so he talked all the way back to the house on topics that would have had him yawning hugely just a week or two ago.

The two elderly ladies were still in the drawing room where Rannulf had left them. Judith would have withdrawn her arm from his before they entered the house and disappeared to her own room, but he would allow neither.

“It is just my grandmother and yours,” he said. “No one else has returned from town yet.”

He kept her arm through his when they entered the room, and both ladies looked up.

“I found Miss Law while I was outside walking,” he said, “and we have been enjoying each other’s company for the last hour.”

His grandmother’s eyes sharpened instantly, he noticed.

“Miss Law,” she said, “that is a very fetching bonnet. Why have I not seen it before? The fresh air has added a becoming flush of color to your cheeks. Come and sit beside me and tell me where you learned to act so well.”

Rannulf sat down too after pulling on the bell rope at Mrs. Law’s request so that she could ask for a fresh pot of tea to be brought up.

Judith was not at all sure she would attend the Harewood ball even though her grandmother told her that she simply must put in an appearance, if only to keep her company.

“Though I daresay all the young gentlemen will vie with each other to dance with you,” she said. “I have noticed how their attitude to you has changed during the week, my love, and so it ought. You are as much my grandchild as Julianne or Branwell.”

It was a tempting prospect, Judith had to admit—to attend a ball and to have dancing partners. She had always enjoyed the village assemblies at home immensely. She had never lacked for partners. At the time she had assumed they were being kind to dance with her, but a new possibility was beginning to present itself to her mind.

I have never ever seen any woman whose beauty comes even close to matching yours .

She was tempted to go to the ball, but she was dreadfully afraid that Lord Rannulf would choose that climactic event of the house party in which to have his betrothal to Julianne announced. She would not be able to bear being there to hear it, Judith thought, or to see the look of triumph on Julianne’s face and Aunt Effingham’s. She would not be able to bear to see the look of mocking resignation on his—she was sure that was how he would look.

She had almost decided not to attend until she met Branwell on the stairs when she was going up after an early breakfast and he was coming down.