Gilbert!
She laughed softly without humor. “Oh, the ironies of life, Gerard. They would be funny if they were not so very tragic. It was head over heart, you see. That is always the wise way, is it not? And so I walked with wide open eyes into a marriage that was even worse than my mother’s—at least there were moments of light for Mama.”
“Christina,” he said.
She laughed softly again and drew her head back from the pane. “My father charmed everyone as usual in London,” she said. “I can even remember someone saying in my hearing that he seemed more like my brother than my father and that he was as likely to make a dazzling marriage as I if he wished. But he lived his usual private life. He lost a fortune one night—or what was a fortune to him, at least. I knew nothing about it until the—-the Vauxhall night after I had returned home though it had happened a week before that. He was ruined—wewere ruined.”
And so they had tricked Gilbert into marrying her? Gilbert with all his wealth? But Gilbert had had his revenge. He had poisoned her mind, cut her off from her father, and then terrorized and beaten her.
“Gilbert had redeemed the debts,” she was saying—he almost missed hearing it. “To this day I have no idea how he discovered them. He told Papa—during that evening while you and I were at Vauxhall—that he had done so out of concern and respect for me. He did not ask for repayment.”
“Except in the form of your hand in marriage.” He closed his eyes and clenched his teeth. Yes, this sounded like Gilbert in action—like a wily serpent.
“He did not make it a condition.” She paused and drew a slow and audible breath. “And Papa did not try to insist either. He merely pointed out to me what a humiliation it would be to have to accept charity from a man who had no connection to us. He wept. When Gilbert came the following morning to make his offer to me, he insisted that I must not be swayed by Papa’s indebtedness to him. I was free to accept or reject his suit. But he did talk about you—with great restraint and sympathy as your cousin. He pointed out with seeming reluctance how unstable you were—how you had spent your boyhood years turning his father against him and his brother through lies and trickery, how you had then broken his father’s heart by leaving Thornwood and sowing your wild oats, how you had grandiose hopes of making your fortune in one toss of the dice when you might have settled to a respectable gentleman’s life with your modest competence or else have allowed him to buy you a pair of colors—and how you would doubtless lose what little you had before the summer was over. He pointed out how you loved to make merry with your friends—often at brothels. He did not say that word, but he made his meaning clear. He told me how you often had to be carried home drunk. He made me see the similarities between you and my father that I had been trying not to see.”
“No,” he said. “No, Christina. How could you have thought that? How could you have believed him?” But he knew how, of course. Gilbert had always been capable of projecting an image of quiet dependability—and he had been working on the weaknesses and fears of a very vulnerable girl.
“He seemed to be everything Papa was not,” she said. “Sober, steady as a rock, trustworthy. And everything he said seemed believable. I told myself I had been blinded by love. And then after I had asked for a few hours in which to consider my answer and Gilbert had left, I found Papa in tears again. He seemed so genuinely remorseful for everything. Yet he pleaded with me not to sacrifice myself. I—” She could not seem to continue.
“You were eighteen years old,” he said, “and easily manipulated by selfish and unscrupulous men. You had no one to whom to turn for solid, sensible advice. And I, God help me, was one-and-twenty and tasting the pleasures life had to offer. I was, moreover, restless and unsettled in life. But I was never reckless or depraved or vicious, Christina. Why did Gilbert twist the truth? Why did he go to such lengths to win you? Did he love you so much?”
She turned to look at him at last. “I believe,” she said, her voice trembling almost beyond her control, “he hatedyou, Gerard. He never talked about you after our marriage and forbade me to do so, but I have pieced together enough knowledge over the years to understand that you were his father’s favorite and that he hated you for it. He took me from you—it was as simple as that. He did not love me. I do not believe he even liked me. Sometimes I thought I actually repelled him. Whenever he punished me, I believe in his mind he was punishing you.”
They gazed at each other across the space that divided them. It was a space vaster than a mere few yards. It was a space of years and the experiences that had matured them over those years in different ways. Had they married ten years before, their minds and hearts and aspirations might have twined together; they might have grown together as couples in particularly good marriages sometimes did. But they had been robbed of those years. And now perhaps there was no way of closing the distance between them.
He could only shift the focus of the conversation somehow. It had become too unbearably painful.
“And after all this, Christina,” he said, “you are willing to go back to your father? To live? Your children with you?”
“Not to become his victim,” she said. “Not of his violence, not of his tears. Not even of his pleas for money, though my first instinct on reading his letter was to ask for an advance on my allowance so that I could send what he says he needs to avert ruin. But to see him again. To somehow free myself of the past completely. And perhaps to nurse him if he is as ill as I suspect he is. To love him. He is my father. He is my children’s grandfather.”
If he had a father, the earl thought, or a mother, he would perhaps be willing to forgive almost anything for the mere sake of the bond. Yes, he would give anything in the world to be able to see his father again.
“You will go to him, then,” he said. “And you will do what is best, Christina—best for him, for yourself, for your daughters. I know you will do what is best. I will not try to interfere from any male conviction that you cannot manage without a man’s help. But if there is anything I can do, I am at your service.”
“Thank you.” She visibly straightened her spine and raised her chin. “Thank you, my lord. But I will not impose upon you further. You have a home and a business in Canada that I know you are eager to return to. I will be happy when you are gone, knowing that I did not ruin your life, knowing you are back where you belong. And I will be happy with my freedom. You have given me that gift and I am going to use it. You cannot understand, perhaps, how it feels to be a woman of eight-and-twenty, knowing suddenly that for the first time in your life you are free to shape your own destiny. A man could never understand. But I am grateful to you because you have made it possible for me to be independent, and you have helped release me from the feelings of guilt and fear that have kept me bound even since Gilbert’s death. Thank you.” She smiled at him.
Ah.
There was nothing left to say. He had helped her find freedom and now he was the last person in the world to try to persuade her to give it up again.
“Gerard,” she said, walking closer until she stood a few feet from him, “I married for a number of reasons. One was that it seemed the sensible, the wise thing to do. I was proud of myself for giving you up. I thought I was proving my own good sense and maturity. I heard nothing of you until after Gilbert’s death, but I hoped that your dreams had failed you. I hoped that all my fears had been well founded. I hoped I had not given you up in vain. I—I was wrong. Forgive me. Please forgive me.” Her dark eyes gazed directly into his.
“And I hoped,” he said, “that you were unhappy, that you regretted your decision. I have been suitably punished. I have to live with the knowledge that all the time I was wishing for your unhappiness he was beating you instead of me and making your life a hell. Forgive me.”
“I am glad you succeeded so magnificently,” she said. “I am glad you have been happy.” She held out her right hand to him.
He took it in his, held it in a firm clasp for a moment, and then raised it to his lips. If he tried to say anything more, he thought, smiling at her, he would surely disgrace himself by weeping, heaping an emotional burden on her as her father was clearly adept at doing. He released her hand.
“Shall we go and enjoy the rest of Christmas?” he suggested.
“Yes.” Her smile was suddenly brightly amused, reminding him of the girl he had once known and loved. “I understand there has been some friction between the kitchen servants and the extra hands hired for the occasion. Cook’s feathers have been ruffled, never a comfortable omen for all around her. I had better go belowstairs to find out if anyone has come to fisticuffs with anyone else yet.”
“Kitchen disputes,” he said firmly while grinning at her, “are entirely your domain, my lady.”
“Perhaps,” she agreed, sweeping past him on her way to the door. “But the leader of the orchestra,my lord, was behaving on his arrival earlier suspiciously as if he thought he outranked Billings—-and Billings was anything but pleased. I left the ballroom in a hurry, before anyone could conceive the notion of appealing to me as adjudicator.”
“Sometimes,” he said, following her, “I wish I had never allowed myself to be lured even one mile east of Montreal.” She laughed.
