At Last Comes Love

13

A FEW minutes later they were out on the pavement, Margaret shivering slightly beneath her shawl. The air seemed loud with the silence.

Lord Sheringford offered his arm and she took it. "What are your thoughts?" he asked her after they had walked for a little while without talking. "I scarcely know," she said. "I feel as if my whole life has been turned upside down." "Would you rather," he said, "that I ceased courting you? Your reputation would recover very quickly and leave you quite unscathed.

Gossip soon dies when there is nothing to feed it." "I think," she said, "that what I /would/ rather, Lord Sheringford, is an explanation of why you are not sorry, or why you refuse to apologize to that poor man. Is it just stubbornness? Or is it really love? Was Mrs. Turner the great passion of your life, worth everything you gave up, including your character and honor? And worth your refusal to do the right thing and admit that you caused irreparable suffering to her husband?" She shivered again. Her shawl had slipped off her shoulders and exposed them to the cool air of late evening.

He stopped walking and lifted her shawl, wrapping it more closely about her and keeping one arm about her shoulders to hold it in place. He was looking very directly into her eyes, though she could scarcely see him in the darkness. She could smell the wine he had been drinking. "The great passion of my life?" he said. "It would be a terrible insult to you if I were to continue to woo you and allow you to believe that to be a possibility. I did not love Laura at all, Maggie – not in any romantic sense, anyway." She gazed at him, baffled. They were beneath a straight row of trees that had been planted along the edge of the pavement, she realized suddenly. That was why it was so dark despite the fact that the sky was bright with moon and stars. The street was deserted. There was not even a night watchman in sight. "Then it is only stubbornness?" she said. "An un willingness to admit that a fleeting passion ruined lives, including your own? And you think other people, including me, will respect you for your steadfast stubbornness? You believe it to be unmanly to admit that you did something so dreadfully wrong, its effects quite irreversible? Admitting you were wrong, asking pardon, is the only decent, manly course of action remaining to you – surely?" He sighed. "I ought to have apologized profusely to you when we collided in Lady Tindell's ballroom," he said, "and allowed you to hurry on your way to wherever it was you were going. I ought to have chosen someone with far less firm opinions to save me from penury. Maggie, there are many kinds of decency. Snatching a married lady from her husband and running off with her is sometimes the most decent thing a man can think of to do.

Even when he is forced to leave behind a bride of his own, almost literally waiting at the altar for him – though Caroline Turner was not treated quite as shabbily as that." "Then tell me what." She turned to face him fully and was forced to spread her hands across his chest when he did not take a step back. His one arm was still about her shoulders. "How can such a sin be /decent/?" She gazed up into his face, barely visible even at this distance.

And then she had a sudden inkling of the truth and wondered that it had not occurred to her before. "Randolph Turner is a coward," he said. "You may have noticed it a short while ago. Any other man in his position would have felt that he had no option but to slap a glove in my face, even if only a figurative one. He found a way of wriggling out of doing so and appearing rather heroic into the bargain – to the ladies, at least." "Perhaps," she said, "he abhors violence and understands that it is no solution to any problem." "And perhaps," he said, "any normal husband whose wife had run off with another man would scour heaven and earth to find her and punish her abductor – or else would publicly spurn and divorce her. He would at the very least take firm exception to her abductor's returning to society after her death and attending the same social functions as he, just as if he had every right to the forgiveness and respect of society." "Perhaps," she said again very distinctly, "he abhors violence and understands that it is no solution to any problem." He sighed. "And perhaps," he said, "he possesses that quality that so often goes hand in hand with cowardice." She searched his eyes in the darkness. She did not wait for him to explain. Her inkling had been right, then. "He was a bully?" She was whispering.

He released his hold on her and took a few steps away to lean back against a tree trunk. He folded his arms over his chest, and Margaret grasped the ends of her shawl and drew it more closely about her. "I promised her that I would never tell a soul," he said, "and indeed the necessity for secrecy was dire. Her main reason, though, was that she felt guilty. She felt that she had failed as a wife, that she had drawn every bit of censure and violence upon herself. She thought people would blame her if they knew the truth and seemed to prefer being known simply as a faithless wife." "He beat her?" Margaret was gripping the ends of her shawl as if her life depended upon her hanging on. "Among other things," he said. "She really was in the wrong for running away from him, of course. A man has a right to beat his wife or to administer any form of correction he deems necessary to make her obedient and submissive. She is, after all, his possession. A man has a right to beat his dog too." "Oh, poor Mrs. Turner," Margaret said, looking quickly about. But there was still no one in sight. She had always thought that violence within a family was one of the worst afflictions that could be visited upon any person. One's family ought to be one's safest haven. "How did you come to know?" "Quite by accident, I suppose," he said. "I was newly betrothed to Caroline and so was a part of the family. I cannot for the life of me remember why Laura and I were so far separated from the rest of the company one evening that we were able to talk privately with each other for a few minutes. Turner kept her on a very short leash – especially after a beating. Which meant that she was almost always on a short leash. It looked like marital devotion to anyone who did not know differently. /I/ thought it was marital devotion at first – until that evening, in fact." Margaret stared at him in the near darkness. She forgot about the chilliness of the air, though she shivered anyway. Hooves clopped along the street to her left, but the horse and its rider must have turned into another street. The sound grew fainter and then disappeared altogether. "However it happened, we /were/ separated from the group," he said, "and she let her guard down sufficiently to afford me a glimpse of a dark bruise on her upper arm. The sleeves of her gown were somewhat longer than was fashionable, I remember. She appeared frightened when I mentioned it and then turned her head in such a way that her silk shawl fell away from her neck for a moment before she yanked it back in place.

The bruise on her jaw was fading but still unmistakable. It was, I realized, the 'indisposition' that had kept her in seclusion at home for the past week. There had been numerous such indispositions since I had known Caroline. Laura was known as a woman of delicate health. I can remember being shocked enough to speak bluntly. I believe I can even recall my exact words. 'Turner is a wife-beater,' I said, and with one darted glance in the direction of the rest of the company, all of whom were comfortably out of earshot, she settled a smile on her face and told me hurriedly all about it. It had been going on for two out of the three years of her marriage and was becoming both more frequent and more severe." "Oh," Margaret said. She could think of nothing else to say at the moment. She had always thought wife-beaters surely the most despicable of mortals. "And so you took her away?" "Not immediately," he said. "It was obvious that she had never told anyone before me and that she was extremely frightened as soon as she had unburdened herself. She blamed herself for everything – basically for being a bad wife who could not please her husband. When I offered to speak sternly to Turner on her behalf, I thought she would swoon quite away with terror. She would not speak to me for several weeks afterward – but then she did on the night before my wedding. She came to see me privately, an extremely indiscreet and dangerous thing to do, as you must know. But she was distraught and had no one else to turn to.

She spoke of taking her own life, and I believed her. I still believe she would have done it. And if she had not, sooner or later Turner would have done it for her. And so I did the only thing that seemed possible to do. I ran off with her – after promising that I would never disclose any part of her story to another soul. It is a promise that I am breaking tonight. You may never marry me, Maggie. Indeed, you would be well advised not to. I will have to trust to your discretion concerning what I have told you." Margaret was biting hard into her bottom lip, she realized. "People ought to know," she said. "They ought to be told that you are not the villain you are depicted as being." "But I am," he said. "A man has the power of life and death over his wife, Maggie. He has the right – some would say even the obligation – to correct and discipline her in any way he sees fit. No man who is /not/ her husband, even her father or brother, has any right to interfere.

Both church and state will tell you that. I am exactly the villain everyone thinks me – just a slightly different sort of villain, perhaps." Margaret drew a deep breath. "Why," she asked him, "did he not pursue you?" "Because he is a coward," he said, "as bullies usually are. And also perhaps because we hid very carefully indeed – for almost five years, until her death. He could have taken her back if he had found her. Both the law and the church would have been on his side. I could have done nothing to prevent it. He would have killed her, Maggie. I feel no doubt about that. Sadly, she did it for him. She did not literally take her own life, but she put up no fight for it either. He had taken away her belief in her own inherent goodness. And when one does not believe oneself in any way good, there is very little for which to live – and one feels unworthy of even what little there is. I will not apologize to a man who effectively murdered a woman whose only fault was a certain mental and emotional inability to fight back against cruelty and injustice." Margaret sighed and took a couple of steps forward until she stood against him. He uncrossed his arms, and she laid her forehead against one of his shoulders. She felt instant warmth.

And she had acted purely from instinct, she realized too late to act with greater propriety. She had felt the overwhelming need to seek out his human warmth and had acted upon that need – just as Laura Turner had done five years ago. "Now I understand," she said, "why I could not spurn you even when all the evidence and the opinion of everyone I know said that I ought.

Sometimes one's intuition is to be trusted above all else. I could not convince myself that you were an evil man." "But I am," he told her. "There is no law, either temporal or ecclesiastical – or moral – that would support what I did, Maggie. A woman is her husband's property, to be dealt with as he sees fit." "That is utter nonsense," she said, still without lifting her head. "The law often is," he said. "But it is the only glue that holds society together and prevents utter chaos. We can only hope, I suppose, to reform the law gradually until it represents true morality and the rights of all – including women and the poor and even animals. I will not hold my breath waiting for that day, though. It could be a long time coming – if it ever does. What I did was wrong, Maggie. Evil." "Then thank heaven," she said, lifting her head, "for a little bit of evil in the world. Morality is not a black-and-white thing, is it? And what a profound statement /that/ is. As if no one had ever noticed before." He could not be totally absolved of /all/ he had done, though, she remembered suddenly. "But what about Miss Turner?" she said. "She was left behind on her wedding day, an innocent victim of both humiliation and heartbreak." "She was the only one to whom I confided some of what I had been told," he said, "before I promised not to do so, that was. I can remember feeling afraid that perhaps Caroline had suffered similar treatment at her brother's hands. I was quite prepared to pummel him within an inch of his life if she had. But she had not. She knew about Laura, though, and defended Turner quite vigorously. If Laura did not push him to it, she told me, he would not be forced to punish her. It was all Laura's fault. The day after that Laura went into seclusion again and remained out of public sight for well over a week, even longer than usual. I believe I caused her one of the worst beatings of her life by speaking with Caroline. She had good reason to swear me to secrecy." "Miss Turner /told/ him?" Margaret asked unnecessarily. "Do you wonder," he asked in return, "that I fell rather hastily out of love with her, Maggie?" No, she did not.

She kept her forehead against his shoulder and closed her eyes as a carriage drawn by four horses made its rather noisy way past them and continued on. "I think," she said when they were alone again, "I had better marry you." His hands came to rest lightly on her hips. "Because you find me pathetic?" he asked. "Because I find you anything /but/," she said. "You need some peace in your life, Lord Sheringford. So do I." /"Peace,"/ he said. "That is a word from a long-ago past. And you think marriage to you will bring me that, Maggie?" "Life at Woodbine Park will," she said. "And unfortunately for you, that can be achieved only at the expense of marriage to me – or to someone else you may be able to find in the next week or so. I would be better for you than anyone else, though. I know the truth about you and can respect you, even admire you." His arms circled her waist as he sighed. "Don't make the mistake of believing that you know me now any more fully than you did before," he said. "You merely know a few more facts." "Oh, there you are wrong," she told him, sliding her own arms as far about him as the tree at his back would allow. "I know more than facts now. I know /you/. Or at least I am on the way to knowing you." "And you believe I can bring you /peace/?" For a moment she felt his cheek against the top of her head. "Or that Woodbine can?" "I have no real way of knowing," she said. "We can never know the future. We can only take calculated risks." She lifted her forehead from his shoulder and looked into his eyes. "/Very/ risky," he said. "The world will always despise me, Maggie – and you too if you marry me." She smiled at him. "You have been desperate to persuade me to marry you," she said. "Are you now trying to persuade me /not/ to?" He set his head back against the tree and closed his eyes. "Reality creeps up on one, does it not?" he said. "For a few days – is it two or three or more? I have lost count already. For a few days, anyway, I have been desperate to do whatever I must do to prevent the loss of Woodbine. And yet now, when it seems that what I want is within my grasp, the reality comes home to me that I can do it only at the expense of the happiness of another innocent." "You believe," she said, "that I will be unhappy as your wife, then?" "How can you not be?" he said without opening his eyes. "We have known each other for two or three or four days – which /is/ it? For a very brief time, anyway. I have only mercenary reasons for wishing to marry you. I believe I like you, though it is only this evening that I have come to that opinion. I do not love you. How could I? I do not /know/ you and I have become an incurable cynic where romantic love is concerned. And you do not know me. You have lived an ordered, decorous life with a close, affectionate family. You have always been very well respected. It is possible that you still love a man who has angered you. You would be stepping into a yawning unknown with a social pariah if you married me." He was right about everything – except Crispin. So very right. She did not know quite why retaining possession of Woodbine Park /now/ was so important to him since it would be his eventually anyway, along with a great deal more, and in the meanwhile he was young and fit and surely capable of earning a perfectly decent living. But however it was – perhaps it was just his reaction to a long exile, now over – Woodbine /was/ important. Yet she sensed that if she said no now, he would walk away from it. If he could not bring himself in all conscience to marry her purely for his own convenience, then he would not be able to do it with anyone else.

It was a pleasant surprise to discover that he was after all a man of tender conscience. Perhaps more than usually so. He had pitted his conscience against the whole of his world five years ago. "I will marry you if you still wish to marry," she said. "But only /if/.

You must not now feel that you are obliged to wed me only because you made me an offer which I have accepted. /If/ you wish to marry, then I will marry you. I will take a chance on the future." He had opened his eyes though he had not moved his head. He was looking steadily back into her own eyes. His looked very black. His face looked very severe and angular in the darkness. A few days ago she might have been frightened. "I wish to marry you," he said. "I would ask only one thing," she said, "and this I beg of you as a great favor. Allow me to tell my family what you have told me tonight – Stephen, Vanessa and Elliott, Katherine and Jasper. I would stake my life on their honor and discretion, on the fact that not one of them will say a word to anyone else without your express permission. But I really cannot bear to have them believe that I am marrying an unconscionable villain. I cannot bear their puzzlement and pity. And I cannot bear that they will dislike and despise and avoid you for the rest of our lives." He sighed. "They will think just as badly of me, Maggie," he said. "Moreland will, at least. And Merton. Probably your sisters too." "No, they will not," she said. "No, /they will not/." He lifted one hand and set his knuckles lightly against one of her cheeks. "It must be wonderful," he said, "to be so innocent, still to have such faith in the world." She leaned her cheek into his hand. "If I were to lose faith in my own family," she said, "I might as well be dead." He dipped his head toward hers and kissed her. His lips were warm, soft, moist, and moved over her own, parting and deepening the pressure as one arm came about her shoulders and the other tightened about her waist.

Oh, she liked kisses without ferocity, she thought – just as he raised his head. "You wish to marry me, then, Maggie?" he asked. "And by the same token bed with me nightly?" He was, she realized, waiting for an answer. It was a good thing he could not see the color of her cheeks. "Yes," she said. And an aching weakness between her thighs assured her that she was not lying. Yes, she wanted to bed with him. Nightly. She did not love him any more than he loved her, but … Oh, but she wanted to be /married/ to him. She found him strangely attractive. She wanted to go to bed with him.

She verbalized the admission in her mind and felt breathlessly wicked.

But it was not wicked. She was going to be his wife. "Kiss me, then," he said. "I just /was/ kissing you," she protested. "No, you were not," he said. "You were holding your mouth relaxed for my pleasure, just as you did yesterday afternoon in the park. I do not want a passive, submissive woman. There are too many of those in the world, forced to it by the demands of their menfolk. /My/ wife will not be one of them. If you wish to marry me, if you wish to bed with me on our wedding night and every night thereafter when we are both in the mood for sex, then kiss me now as if you mean it." And the thing was that he was neither joking nor teasing. His face and his voice both attested to that fact.

Just as he had not been joking or teasing at the Tindell ball when he had offered her marriage within a minute or two of colliding with her.

He was not someone, then, who took kisses as if it were his right to do so. "Kiss me," he said softly. "We are on the /street/," she reminded him. "And everyone in the neighborhood is either asleep or still out carousing," he said. "There is not a single light in a single window.

And if there is a Peeping Tom behind one of the darkened ones, he is having lean pickings tonight. We must be almost totally invisible beneath this tree. Maggie, you are either a coward or you do not wish to kiss me. And if it is the latter, then you do not wish to bed with me either and therefore do not wish to marry me." She laughed. "Which is it?" he asked.

She gripped his upper arms, leaned forward, and set her lips firmly to his. She was instantly more fully aware of the hardness of his thighs against her own, of his broad chest pressed to her bosom, of the wine flavor of his mouth and the warmth of his breath.

His lips remained still and passive against hers, and after a few moments she was at a loss. She drew back her head. "Oh, dear," she said, "I suppose you are demonstrating the way /I/ was kissing /you/. I am so sorry. It is just, you see – " His mouth covered hers again, and she leaned deliberately into him and burrowed the fingers of one hand into the back of his hair beneath his tall silk hat, angling her head slightly as she did so and parting her lips, moving them over his, touching his lips with her tongue and then venturing within them until his arms tightened about her and he sucked her tongue into his mouth while his hands slid downward to spread over her buttocks and half lift her against him.

He was ready for her. Oh, dear God, he was … She drew firmly away from him. "Frightened?" he murmured. "Yes," she said. "And also aware that we are on the street even if we /are/ invisible to Peeping Toms." "The voice of reason," he said, brushing his hands over his clothes and stepping away from the tree trunk. "But you need not be afraid, Maggie.

We may be marrying for all the wrong reasons – though I am no longer sure what /right/ reasons there can be for matrimony – but we can still expect pleasure from our union. It is obvious that pleasure is within our grasp." "Yes," she said, and she saw the flash of his teeth in the darkness. "Are we going to remain here forever? Soon we will be sending down roots to join the trees." He offered his arm, and they resumed their walk home to Berkeley Square. "Tomorrow," he said, "I shall take you to meet my grandfather, if I may.

It may be rather like ushering Daniel into the lions' den, I am afraid, though he will have no reason to turn his wrath upon /you/. The day after I will have an announcement of our betrothal appear in the morning papers." It was all very real indeed now. "Yes," she said. "That will be satisfactory." "And then," he said as they came to a stop outside the doors of Merton House, "I shall purchase a special license and we will decide upon a suitable day for the nuptials. I believe there will be ten or so among which to choose." "Yes," she said. "I am not sure you answered my question. /May/ I tell my family what you told me tonight?" He hesitated. "Yes," he said, and leaned forward to kiss her briefly on the lips before raising the door knocker and allowing it to fall back against the brass plate. "At least after the announcement is made you will be able to thumb your nose at the likes of Dew and Allingham." "A marvelously mature thing to do," she said. "And marvelously satisfying too," he said. "/If/, that is, you wish to do so. Be very sure." "I am," she said. "I /did/ love him, you know, and there is still pain where he once occupied my heart. But the pain is caused by the realization that he was never the man I thought him to be and that he has not grown into the man with whom I could be happy spending the rest of my life." "But I am?" he said softly. "With you I have no illusions," she said. "You will not allow me to have any. You do not pretend to be what you are not, and you do not pretend to tender feelings you do not feel. On that foundation we can build a friendship, even an affection. That is my hope, anyway. It is what I will attempt to make of our marriage." The door opened before he could reply, and under the eagle gaze of Stephen's butler he raised her hand to his lips and bade her a good night.

And so she was betrothed, Margaret thought as she stepped inside the house and made her way toward the staircase with a firm stride quite at variance with her feelings. To a man for whom conscience and personal honor meant more than reputation or law or church or peace of mind.

She could love such a man.

Certainly she admired him – perhaps more than she had admired anyone else in her life.

Was /that/ why she had made the abrupt decision to marry him when she had promised herself to take all the time she was allowed?

Or was it as she had said to him outside a couple of minutes ago? Was it that with no promises, no illusions, no veil of romance, she could dream of an honest relationship that could be shaped into something meaningful and satisfying?

She felt rather like weeping by the time she reached her room. She dismissed her maid and threw herself across her bed fully clothed and did just that.

For no reason that she could fathom.