His At Night

Chapter Seventeen

Her bed was crimson Italian silk. Against this sumptuous backdrop, Angelica stretched, immodestly, deliciously. Part of Freddie still felt he should avert his eyes. The rest of him not only could not look away, but reached out a hand to caress the underside of her breast.

“Hmm, that was splendid,” she said.

His cheeks grew warm. He leaned in to kiss her again. “The pleasure was all mine.”

And how.

“Can I make a confession?” he asked.

“Hmm, you never have confessions to make. This I must hear.”

He cleared his throat, embarrassed now that he was about to volunteer the information. “I was not that interested in the provenance of the angel painting.”

Her jaw went slack. “You weren’t?”

“Your oldest friend asks you to paint her in the altogether. You are terribly tempted but not sure how to say yes. Wouldn’t you find a seemingly legitimate inquiry so that you may exchange favors?”

She sat up straight, a rich cascade of crimson silk held to her breasts. “Freddie! I never guessed you to be so sneaky.”

He flushed. “I’m not—not usually, in any case. I just wanted to be a little less transparent.”

She hit him lightly on the arm. “Oh, you were opaque enough for me. I had quite despaired of how I would ever make myself understood.”

“You could have just told me.”

“If I could, I would have done it ten years ago.” She kissed him where she’d hit him. “It was probably best I didn’t: You viewed me as completely lacking in feminine attributes.”

“That is not true. It was more the case that I never thought about your feminine attributes. I mean, you were—and are—my oldest friend. You didn’t need breasts and buttocks to matter to me.”

“That is a sweet thing to say, although my breasts and buttocks might dissent.”

He smiled.

She snuggled closer to him. “Did you ever think that I was too critical? Or had too many ideas about how you should do things?”

“No, never. My father was too critical: He put me down because he enjoyed it, and because I didn’t quite know how to fight back like Penny did. Your suggestions were always rooted in a sincere interest in me. And it was never a condition of our friendship that I must do as you said: You gave your advice and I was free to take it or not.”

“Good,” she said.

He hesitated.

She peered at him. “There is something else you want to say, isn’t there? Go ahead; I’d like to hear it.”

He kept forgetting how well she knew him. “I was thinking that there was a time when I felt you were too ambitious for me. You were constantly telling me that I needed to paint faster, and exhibit, and establish a large body of work.”

“Ah, that. That was when I was unbearably jealous of Lady Tremaine. I was trying to make you see that she didn’t know rose madder from crimson lake, while I was an expert in both art and the art world.”

He truly had been blind. It never occurred to him that her seemingly frantic drive to propel him toward artistic prominence had anything to do with hidden desires of the heart. He lifted a strand of her hair. It would seem he had not done it justice in his painting: There were shades of auburn too.

“Before Lady Tremaine left for America, she’d hoped I would find solace in your arms. But when you came to comfort me, I all but chased you away.”

“I don’t blame you. I was very rude about it.”

“When you married Canaletto out of the blue, I couldn’t help but worry that my conduct that day had something to do with it. Just know I’ve always regretted my abruptness.”

She shook her head. “My inability to handle my disappointment without doing something stupid was not your fault, but my own shortcoming. In fact, this time, I was determined that should you turn me down, I was absolutely not going to do anything foolish—like sleeping with Penny, for instance—to soothe my bruised vanity.”

“Penny would be traumatized. He still thinks of you as a sister.”

She chuckled. “I would be traumatized, too.”

She lifted her arm and set her hand down atop a small framed picture on her nightstand. Absently she twisted the frame this way and that, and he saw that the frame contained a pencil drawing of her face he had sketched many years ago and given her as a gift. The art critic in her should have found too many defects in the sketch, which lacked both technique and composition, and seemed to have only a great earnestness to recommend itself.

He’d always loved and cared about her, but now his heart was filled with tenderness, so much that it was almost painful. “I’m glad you came back,” he said, tracing his hand across her cheekbone.

“So am I,” she said, her gaze direct and clear. “So am I.”

It was very late at night, but her husband still had not returned from London.

Elissande lay awake in an unrelieved darkness, staring at a ceiling she could not see, thinking of the first time she laid eyes on him. She remembered every detail: the homburg he’d worn, the glimpse of blue waistcoat beneath his fawn jacket, the spark of sunlight on his cuff links, but most of all, the joyful buoyancy she’d experienced when he’d smiled at his brother.

If only they’d met a week later, when she no longer needed to entrap anyone. How different things would have been.

But she had entrapped him. And he was not happy with her. And if he would not talk to her—or make love to her—how would they ever be anything but strangers in this marriage?

Her door creaked slightly as it swung open. He was home. He had opened her door. He was on her threshold and had but to take one more step to enter her room.

Excitement shot through her, an excitement that was almost panic. Her heart pumped madly, like a steam-driven piston. She bit her lower lip to not breathe too heavily.

She must hold very quiet, and give the firm impression of being sound asleep. Then he might be more encouraged to approach her. To touch her. And from there, to forgive her, some day.

She willed him to come to her, to seek solace in her arms for his loneliness, his weariness.

But the door closed again and he sought his own bed instead.

The longcase clock gonged the hour, three brassy chimes that quavered in the dark, still air.

It was always three o’clock.

He ran. The pitch-black corridor would not end. Something slammed into his calf. He cried out in pain, stumbling. But he must keep running. He must reach his mother and warn her of the mortal danger.

There, the hall. At the distant end of its Olympic length, the staircase that would be her undoing. He’d almost made it. He would save her; he would not let her fall.

He stumbled again, pain lancing deep into his knees.

He hobbled on.

But she was already there when he at last reached the foot of the staircase. Blood pooled under her head, blood the same black-red as her gown and the rubies glittering on her chest.

He screamed. Why could he not save her? Why was he never in time to save her?

Someone called his name. Someone shook his shoulder. It must be the person responsible for his mother’s death. He threw the person down.

“Penny, are you all right?” she squeaked.

No, he was not all right. He would never be all right again.

“Penny, stop. Stop. You’ll hurt me.”

He very much wanted to hurt somebody.

“Penny, please!”

His eyes flew open. He was gasping, as if he’d been running from the hounds of hell. The room was pitch-dark, just like in his dream. He made a sound at the back of his throat, not yet free from the terror of the nightmare.

“It’s all right,” murmured the person in bed with him, someone warm and soft who smelled of honey and roses. “It was just a bad dream.”

She caressed his face and his hair. “It was just a bad dream,” she repeated. “Don’t be afraid.”

Ridiculous. He wasn’t afraid of anything.

She kissed him on his jaw. “I’m here. It’s all right. I won’t let anything happen to you.”

He was big, strong, and clever. He needed no one to protect him from something as flimsy as dreams.

She pulled him into her arms. “I have bad dreams too. Sometimes I dream I’m Prometheus, chained to the rock forever and ever. And then, of course, I can’t go back to sleep afterward, so I think of Capri, beautiful, faraway Capri.”

She had an exquisite voice. He’d never noticed before. But there in the dark, as she spoke, the sound of her words was as lovely as the sound of water to a desert tribe.

“I imagine that I have a boat of my own,” she whispered. “When it’s warm and breezy, I sail it into the open waters, sleep under the sun, and turn as brown as the fishermen. And when it’s stormy, I stand atop the cliffs and watch the sea rage, knowing that an angry sea keeps me isolated—and keeps me safe.”

His breaths no longer came in quite such huge gulps. He understood what she was doing. After the abrupt loss of their mother, he’d done the same for Freddie, his arm around Freddie’s shoulders, talking about netting trout and catching fireflies until Freddie fell asleep again.

But he’d never let anyone do it for him.

“It was unlikely, of course,” she continued. “I always knew that it was most unlikely. If ever I managed to get away from my uncle, I would need to work for a living, and nobody pays a woman much for anything. I’d have to scrimp to save for a rainy day, and count myself fortunate if I could someday spare the coin for a train ticket to Brighton.” Her fingers traced his cheekbone. “But Capri made it possible to go on. It was my flame in the dark, my escape when there was no escape.”

He tightened his arm about her—he hadn’t even realized he had his arm about her.

“I know everything there is to know about Capri. Or at least everything people thought worth writing down in travelogues: its history, its topography, the etymology of its name. I know what grows in its interior and what swims in its waters. I know the winds that come with each season.”

Her hand rubbed his back as she spoke. Her words were quiet, almost hypnotic. She might have successfully lulled him back to sleep were it not for the fact that her body was directly pressed into his.

“So tell me,” he said.

She must have felt it, the physiological change on his part. But she did not pull away. If anything, she fitted herself more snugly to him.

“It is probably quite overrun these days. One book mentioned that there is a colony of writers and artists from England, France, and Germany.”

He could not stop himself anymore. He kissed her throat, his fingers unhooking her nightdress. Her skin, the smoothness of it, made his heart lose its beat.

“Of course,” she went on, her voice increasingly unsteady, “I ignore their presence entirely so I may preserve my illusion of a sparsely populated paradise, empty except for the sea and the sky and me.”

“Of course,” he said.

He peeled her nightdress from her, pulled his own nightshirt over his head, and turned them so that she was on top of him.

“What do you think about when you wake up from nightmares?” she asked, her words barely audible.

He tugged off the ribbon at the end of her plait and loosened her hair. It fell, like a cloud, about his face and shoulders.

“This,” he said. “This is what I think about.”

Not the sexual act per se, but the presence of another. A closeness that would cocoon and shield him.

He had thought of her the last time he had the nightmare, at Highgate Court. As she ignored the presence of foreigners crowding the rugged shores of Capri, he had selectively forgotten her antagonism toward him—and his resentment toward her—and remembered only her sweetest smiles.

One did what one must to get through the night.

But now she was pliant and willing above him. Now she not only permitted, but conspired for him to penetrate deep inside her. Now she whimpered and sighed with pleasure, her lips against his ear, her breaths invoking waves of almost violent desire.

And when his release came, it was heat, fury, and a powerful, almost rapturous, oblivion.

Her breaths fluttered his hair. Her heart beat against his chest. Her hands sought his in the dark and laced their fingers.

A closeness that cocooned and shielded him.

Yet perfect peace eluded him in that drowsy warmth. Something was wrong. Perhaps everything was wrong. He did not want to think.

Night was now his refuge. Beyond dawn, chaos reigned. But in the dark there was only her embrace.

He murmured a thank-you, and let sleep overtake him.

It dawned like any other morning in the country: birdsong, the lowing of dairy cows in the pasture behind the house, the snipping shears of his gardeners, already at work.

Even the sounds he himself made were peaceful and domestic. Water falling and splashing in a washbasin, drawers opening and closing softly, curtains pulling back, and shutters released for the day.

She was still comfortably ensconced in his bed. Her breaths were slow and even. Her hair, the color of sunrise, fanned out on the pillow. One of her arms was outside the bedspread; it was slung across the bed, as if reaching for him.

In her sleep she seemed entirely harmless, almost angelic, the kind of woman who inspired uncomplicated devotion. He lifted her exposed arm and tucked it back under the cover. She snuggled deeper into the bedding, her lips curving in contentment.

He turned away.

With his back to her, he snapped his braces into place over his shoulders and donned his waistcoat. He rummaged in the tray atop his chest of drawers and selected a pair of cuff links. Then, abruptly, he was aware that she was awake and that she was watching him.

“Good morning,” he said, without turning around, his fingers busy with the fastening of his cuff links.

“Morning,” she mumbled, her voice still thick with sleep.

He said nothing else for a while, but continued to dress. Behind him the bed shifted and creaked: She must be getting into her nightdress, which he’d found under his person this morning, along with her hair ribbon—a slender pastel reminder of what had transpired in the night.

“I’m going for a walk,” he said, shrugging into a tweed coat—still without looking at her. “You are welcome to join me if you’d like.”

What he was about to say to her he wanted said far from his home.

“Yes, of course,” she answered. “I’d be delighted.”

The barely suppressed excitement in her voice was a whiplash across his conscience. “I’ll wait for you below.”

“I won’t be long,” she promised. “I just need to dress and have a word with the nurse.”

He paused at the door and glanced at her at last. After today, he would not see her again thus, glad and hopeful.

“Take your time,” he said.

Elissande dressed in record speed, looked in on her still sleeping aunt, and spoke to Mrs. Green, the nurse she’d hired on Mrs. Dilwyn’s recommendation after coming to Devon. Mrs. Green assured her that she would see to Mrs. Douglas’s breakfast and bath, and then have her take a turn in the garden for exercise and fresh air.

Mrs. Green was a very kind woman, but firmer than Elissande. Under her supervision, Aunt Rachel could already walk a short distance unsupported, a feat that was nothing less than miraculous.

Now, to complete Elissande’s happiness, her husband had made love to her. And he’d invited her to come with him on his walk.

They didn’t speak. But they did not need to. His company was enough. That she was by his side was enough. This was their new beginning.

They crossed the River Dart at the market town of Totnes, where they had tea and a quick breakfast, then continued north, walking along country lanes that were entirely new to her, past rolling fields and several tiny hamlets, into a dense copse, and emerged from the trees onto the grounds of a ruined castle.

It must have been a good five miles. She would have thought herself exhausted, but she was only exultant.

“Do you ever talk?” she asked finally, panting a little from the climb up to the castle.

“I believe the general consensus is that I talk and talk and talk.”

She took off her hat and fanned herself. “I mean, when you are not playing your role.”

He didn’t answer, but looked east toward the sea—the castle was situated on a sharp rise of land that gave a panoramic view. She again wondered why he led this double life. But she’d had her reasons, and she assumed his reasons must be equally strong and compelling.

“Tell me something,” he said.

She was terribly flattered. He so seldom asked her anything. “What would you like to know?”

“You inquired into Capri when you met Mrs. Canaletto. You mentioned Capri again when you wanted all of us to leave England and hide somewhere. And from what you said last night”—he thrust one hand into his pocket—“obviously you’ve thought a great deal about Capri your entire life.”

“That is true.”

“But I don’t see you making any plans to visit Capri, now that you can. Why is that?”

She had never thought of it before. But the answer seemed so obvious that she was surprised he had to ask.

“Because what I’ve loved all along is not Capri the physical entity—it could have been any beautiful, faraway place. What mattered was the hope and solace it gave me when I was a prisoner in my uncle’s house.”

He looked at her, his eyes very severe. Perhaps he did not understand her entirely.

She tried again. “Think of a raft, if you will. When a river is too wide and swift to cross by swimming, we need the raft. But once we have reached the farther shore, we leave the raft at the water’s edge.”

“And you have reached the farther shore.”

She trailed her fingertips over the silk flowers ornamenting her hat. “I have crossed the river. As fond as I always shall be of my raft, I don’t need it anymore.”

He walked a few steps away. “So you are happy with your life and need no further bolstering?”

She bit the inside of her cheek. “Perhaps I could use just a little more bolstering.”

“What would that be?” he said without inflection.

She’d thought she’d require more fortitude to confess her attachment. But when he’d kissed and held her at night, when he’d walked five miles beside her this morning, he’d made it easy to speak the word. “You,” she said, her voice not at all hesitant or wobbly.

“How will I accomplish this admirable deed?”

“By doing what you have done already: walking with me and making love to me.” She flushed only a little as she said those last few words.

He walked farther away. Skittish, her man.

She followed him into the keep. A mansion had once stood in the bailey but now only stone walls, archways, and empty window frames remained. The morning sun streamed through the breaks in the walls; the interior of the ruins was cool but not gloomy.

She laid her hand on his arm, the Harris tweed of his coat pleasantly woolly against her palm. When he did not remove her hand, she grew bolder and pressed a kiss on his cheek, and then another on his lips. There she lingered, until she coaxed him into parting his lips.

All of a sudden he kissed her back, hard, making her head spin.

And just as abruptly, he pushed her away.

Never in his life had Vere botched anything so thoroughly as he had his should-have-been marriage in name only.

He didn’t know what was wrong with him.

Or perhaps he did and simply couldn’t bear to acknowledge it.

She was not the companion he wanted—hadn’t the issue already been settled again and again? What he wanted was as different from her as the Isle of Capri was from Australia. He wanted milk and honey; nourishing, sweet, wholesome. She was laudanum; potent, addictive, occasionally helpful in forgetting his troubles, but dangerous in large dosages.

She was also a liar and a manipulator—he still had the note she’d written Freddie that night, a physical manifestation of her intent to lure Freddie into her clutches, to deprive him of his happiness with Angelica for her own gains.

And yet here, out in the open, where at any moment an omnibus of tourists could pull up, he had nearly lost control once more. And this time without any excuses of tears, alcohol, or nightmares. It was a bright, brisk day, she was cheerful, and he’d thought himself grimly determined to speak the ugly but necessary truth.

He took several steps away from her.

If he didn’t say it now, he would not be able to do it ever: She radiated such gladness he was on the verge of forgetting that she was the last thing from the sunny simplicity he needed to drive the darkness from his own soul.

He forced out the words. “Once your uncle has been sentenced, I would like an annulment.”

She had been smoothing her sleeve and peering at him, her expression puzzled but still hopeful. She stilled; the color on her cheeks drained. She turned her gaze more squarely toward him.

“I’ll make a generous settlement on you. You will have enough to live wherever you like in ease and luxury. On Capri itself, if you should desire.”

“But an annulment is not possible,” she said. His conscience contorted at the complete, almost naïve confusion in her voice. “Once the marriage has been consummated, it is not possible.”

“With enough money and enough lawyers, it is not only possible, but has been achieved repeatedly.”

“But…but we will have to lie.”

She was so disproportionately bewildered that he considered for the very first time the likelihood that she was not as worldly as he’d thought. That she’d truly believed they were married for good.

“Both of us lie brilliantly. I don’t see any problems at all.”

She looked up into the rectangle of blue sky above them, framed by the manse’s dilapidated walls. “Has this always been your intention?”

“Yes.”

Her hand dug into her skirts. Her shoulders bunched tight. The ache in his heart turned into a sharp pain.

“I would like my own freedom,” he said, intentionally heartless. “You should understand that.”

Equating their marriage and her virtual imprisonment had the desired effect. A grim anger replaced the heartbroken bafflement in her eyes. Her gaze turned hard.

“So this is a straightforward transaction,” she said. “You give me money for your freedom.”

“Yes.”

“Am I correct in assuming that because of what happened last night, your freedom costs more today than it did yesterday?”

“Perhaps.”

“So I’m a whore in my own marriage.”

Her words were a kick to his stomach.

“I’m paying for my lack of control.”

“Oh, my, Lord Vere, why didn’t you say so sooner?” she said bitingly. “Had I understood earlier that making you lose control more frequently was going to net me a larger fortune, I’d have devoted my days to your seduction.”

“Be thankful that I have enough scruples to compensate you for the use of your body. And that I will keep silent on how you entrapped me—and how you meant to entrap Freddie.”

She flinched. His callousness took his own breath away; he was using her one great act of desperation as justification for his utter selfishness.

She took a deep breath and slowly let it out. “I’ve always known that I’m no prize, but I thought you were,” she said. “I thought the man behind the idiot would be fascinating. I thought he would understand what it is like to act a part all the time. And I thought he would have some sympathy for me, because it is not an easy life. I was wrong: You were a better man as the idiot you played. He was sweet, kind, and decent. I’m sorry I didn’t properly appreciate him when I had the chance.”

See, he thought. This was precisely why he needed a milk-and-honey companion, one who would never grasp that he was not sweet, not kind, and not always dependably decent, but only love him tenderly, blindly, unquestioningly.

It was as much a castle in the sky as her whimsy of a wild and empty Capri. Like her, he had held on to it through his darkest days, this unlikely vision of domestic haven. But unlike her, he was not ready to abandon something that had sustained him this many years, for a woman he did not want to love, except when he was drunk, lonely, or otherwise unable to control himself.