Chapter 22 #2
“But obviously Halesworth put enough credence in that rumor to have a go.” For a moment she was quiet, her face shadowed with hurt.
“He was so engaging and solicitous, in the beginning,” she said with some bitterness.
“I thought, perhaps he would be different . . . But he wasn’t.
He expected me to pay nearly twenty thousand pounds in gaming debts.
He was . . . He didn’t take it well when I refused. ”
Richard had to will his breathing to stay regular.
He wished he had shot Halesworth, or at least cut him.
Evangeline stepped back and he let her go.
Belatedly he realized there was a desperate scratching at the door, which Evangeline opened.
Louis burst into the room, leaping and barking frantically.
She scooped up the dog and sat on the sofa, hugging him to her bosom while the Pomeranian licked her hand.
“I suppose I should tell you the rest,” Evangeline said, sounding self-conscious and resigned. “Perhaps it will give you a disgust of me, but you might as well hear it now.”
He sat beside her and gripped her free hand. “Never,” he vowed in a low voice.
“Well.” Flustered, she stroked Louis’s head until his eyes closed in satisfaction.
“I had a flirtation with Sir Elias Burton, but he turned out to be a man after Court’s heart, not mine.
Fortunately I discovered it before things had progressed too far.
He got his parlor maid with child and sacked the young woman when she began to increase.
I called him a lecherous goat and refused to see him ever again.
” She took a deep breath. “The poor girl. He’d turned her out without a reference, and I still suspect he coerced her.
He was very handsome and couldn’t believe any woman wouldn’t yield to him. ”
She sighed again. “And then there was Ramsdale, who decided he was in love with me and refused to take no for an answer. He persisted until he frightened me. I tried to persuade him kindly, and then firmly, but in the end my brother had to speak to him. I don’t know what George told him, but he finally went away.
” She looked at him. “And that’s all, the complete, wretched history of my unlucky love life. ”
“Until me.” He brought their clasped hands to his lips and kissed her knuckles. “I will never betray you like they did.”
Her fingers tightened in his. “No?”
He shook his head. “I swear it.”
She bit her lip and leaned against him. It felt so good, so right; his eyes burned, and he kissed the top of her head before he could stop himself.
“I admire this dress,” he said. “It suits you.”
Her expression grew a shade brighter. “Do you? Your Mr. Salvatore made it, with Mrs. Hutchins’s oversight.”
“The man is a genius,” he declared. “First waistcoats, and now gowns worthy of the most beautiful woman in London.”
She smiled a little. “Would you really have faced Halesworth over pistols?”
“I would. Gerhard stepped in. As he keeps telling you, he has saved me many times.”
She gripped his hand tighter. “You think Halesworth might have prevailed?”
“No. I would have shot him in the heart and been obliged to go abroad again. That is what Gerhard saved me from, not death.” He kissed her soft hair again. “I have no desire to go abroad. Not while you are here.”
She looked up at him, misty-eyed, and he kissed her mouth. It was all that needed to be said.
That night he stayed to dinner. He didn’t go home until after breakfast, and within days that became their pattern.
He walked to her house through the woods, and she beamed with joy when he arrived.
Sometimes she would walk over to Humberton Hall for tea, or they would share a picnic by the pond while the dogs splashed in the water.
Hercule loved the water, while Louis danced along the edge, barking in excitement and making them both laugh until their sides hurt.
It was more than enough for him, even if all of London called him a savage and a maniac.
Gerhard eventually took lodgings in London, explaining that he might as well be in town where there was more chance of finding company, and Richard hardly noticed his absence.
Don’t fall in love with me, whispered Evangeline’s voice in his memory.
Too late, my darling, was his silent reply.
Evangeline never told Richard about Marion’s visit.
She never told him what Fanny related in the days after, that wagers had been placed on their relationship, and that they were now fixtures in the gossip rags, with all manner of wickedness and indecency ascribed to both.
She never told him that she had chosen him over her family and society.
He had stood up for her. Not with a stern word in private, as George had done with Ramsdale, and not by countering ugly gossip, as Fanny tried to do.
Richard had pulled a foot-long knife on Stephen Halesworth, in a dining room at White’s, of all places, and told him—in front of Lord Allen and other men of consequence—to close his mouth about her, or Richard would make him.
And his friend had not talked him out of it, but had backed him up.
No one else had ever done that for her. Marion recoiled from anything scandalous, and pressed George to do the same.
Her own father had sold her into marriage to an old man and a rakehell, on the grounds of preventing scandal.
Her mother had offered nothing but empty expressions of the gratification she should find in doing her respectable duty, which had been the biggest load of tripe Evangeline had ever heard.
Richard chose her, publicly and unreservedly.
He was wrong to act as he had, of course—he’d all but told White’s entire membership, and by extension the entire ton, that they were lovers, and implicitly threatened anyone who spoke ill of her.
Sooner or later the proximity of their respective homes would become public knowledge, and the gossips would feast on it.
But she . . . did not care. She didn’t care if every living soul in London believed him to be her lover; he was her lover, and she had never felt a moment of anything other than satisfaction or delight at that fact.
She stopped going to London. Instead, they rode together and took long, rambling walks.
They took holidays to Cornwall instead of Brighton or Bath.
Solly, with some encouragement, created a theatrical group with the servants of both households.
Sometimes Richard’s nephews, on holiday from school, would participate, too, and send them all into gales of laughter.
They attended private parties and dinners hosted by friends, and occasionally an opera.
Neither ever mentioned it, but both knew and understood that theirs was an attachment that excluded all others. Evangeline had never been so happy in all her life.
She didn’t spend time pining over what could never be.
It hurt that Marion was willing to cut her off over something as unreliable and cruel as gossip.
She supposed she ought to be angry at George for allowing it, but she expected he had done like she had, and chosen his wife over all others.
She did miss seeing Joan, but every time she thought of her brother or her niece, the entertainments in London she had exiled herself from, she would catch sight of Richard and remember that she had made the right choice.
Until six years later, when a letter arrived in the hand of a Bennet footman. She tore it open to see a plea from her brother. Marion was ill—dangerously so. George was taking her to the seacoast immediately. He needed someone to chaperone Joan in their absence.
There is no one else I can trust so well as you to see that she is not sunk into melancholy or grief about her mother, he wrote. Please help me.
Included was a brief note from Marion herself: I would be forever in your debt, Evangeline.
It was forgiveness, acceptance, a chance to return to the embrace of her family—everything she had told herself she did not regret losing, but somehow still yearned for, deep in her heart.
Evangeline clutched the letter to her breast for a moment, before calling for Solly to pack her trunks as she wrote her reply: Of course I will come.
Then she went to tell Richard.