Chapter 25 #2
They were wed in the pink-washed country villa of Lord Cathcart’s older brother, an Anglican bishop, strong-boned and gentle with narrow pale eyes. Devon allowed Merry to sit down for the ceremony, which was a mistake, because she fell asleep immediately.
Devon’s lips roused her in a lightly teasing passage over the soft flesh below her ear.
“Darling,” he murmured beguilingly, “wake just for a moment. You must say ‘I will.’ That’s all. Come, love. Two words only.”
But in another minute there were more words to repeat, and she mumbled them in a state of semiconsciousness.
She cried like an infant when he woke her one more time to sign a paper, and through a maze of tears she heard Lord Cathcart’s brother say grimly that for this night’s work unfrocking was no more than he deserved.
Morning was a bright obscenity when she was brought yet again from the carriage.
She had a quick impression of a playfully gabled roof line and warm, stone-embellished brick before she was carried inside and transferred to the custody of cooing, excited strangers—thankfully female—in fine linen aprons who called her “Your Grace” in loving tones and led her up a creaking oak staircase to a comfortable and elegant bedchamber hung in mint-green satin damask.
Here she was helped to bathe by Mrs. Bea, an elderly lady in gray-blue silk who had an immensely soothing way about her.
She had been, so one of the younger maidservants whispered to Merry, a nursery helper in the days of the duke’s own father, and head nurse to the duke himself.
Master Devon he was then (though he was born a marquess, his father didn’t hold with calling little children by high-sounding titles).
It was Mrs. Bea who had heard his first words—only nine months he’d been, fancy that!
Looked right at the lace cap Mrs. Bea was about to set upon his little head and said, “Silly hat!” Pulled it right off his head too, he did!
The soft night-robe with blue satin ties and diamond shapes quilted into the sleeves was Merry’s own, a stranger since the night she had been dragged unconscious from the Guinevere.
Reeling from the magic of that, she asked Mrs. Bea with some bemusement where Aunt April could be found and learned that she was spending this week in the London house with Devon’s mother, but without a doubt they would rush back to the country when they heard!
Giddy, competing imaginings attacked her mind, demanding attention and interpretation as her head nested at last on her pillow.
But the sweet scent of vanilla grass rose from the bed linen, and her senses flowed into one another slowly until no sensation was separate or comprehensible. And then, gratefully, she slept.
Merry woke to strong afternoon sunlight that made a bright, bold outline of the mullioned window upon the Hollie point curtains.
The bed was still dressed in light summer hangings.
Beyond the satinwood bedposts her drifting gaze picked out velvet flowers—blue, salmon, white, and pink—in a porcelain jug; muted sunbeams were glowing wetly in its underglaze-blue decoration.
The furnishings were graceful of line and prettily inlaid with stained tulipwood, ivory, and ebony to form floral patterns as lustrous as lantern glass under the many coats of polished lacquer.
A serving maid appeared soon, her manner friendly, perhaps a little awed, but practical rather than servile as she showed Merry to the adjoining dressing room, where Merry’s own clothing from the Guinevere was clean and waiting.
She ate rice soup on a tray, and a delicious turbot à la crème, with dressed cucumbers, stewed chestnuts, and a poor author’s pudding, which the maid told her laughingly was “a much lighter version of the publisher’s pudding—which could scarcely be made too rich! ”
Merry dressed in a cameo-pink satin dress, never worn, that Aunt April had bought for her in New York.
Crystal beads glimmered in the slashes of the Spanish sleeves.
The full-length glass showed her that the reeded back of the gown swayed interestingly over her hips as she moved, though it seemed like the sort of thing there was hardly any point of making note of on a day like today.
Watching her hair being dressed in pink ribbands, the vacant shock of the last two days began to recede like mist fading from a water meadow.
The first real emotion she could isolate and label was guilt.
It seemed grossly negligent not to be having hysterics.
There were a thousand reasons to be furious with Devon; probability contended that he had married her only to further another scheme against Michael Granville—whose name she had come to hate like poison.
She was an American patriot. What was she doing married to a British duke who spent the better part of his time on a pirate ship?
Logic rebelled. But then logic had been rebelling since the moment Michael Granville had told her in New York that she was to sail to England.
Obviously her logic could rebel until two Sundays came together for all anyone seemed to care.
All that seemed sure was that the trapped feeling that came from loving Devon had vanished.
She felt a change in her body, a weightlessness; an almost chirrupy frivolity that belied her uncertain situation.
The buoyant joy of her body belonged to an enchanted bride on her wedding morning; all it wanted was to go into Devon’s arms. What a poor helpless thing was her heart, captured in spite of all her effort to the contrary by this one man.
She felt a jittery shyness about facing him.
At the same time each moment that delayed her going to him was excruciatingly long.
By the time the last satin ribband was plaited into her curls, the back of her nose ached from the clustering pressure of suppressed tears, but her eyes looked splendidly stern and rather purposeful.
No doubt that illusion owed itself to the expensive New York modiste and the maid’s clever hands.
The mind behind the firm gaze was remarkable for nothing so much as its total want of purpose.
Determined to face Devon with the brave mask intact, she asked directions of the maid, who was touchingly misguided enough to smile thrillingly, as though there were some magical element of romance in a newlywed wife’s searching out her handsome, noble husband.
The corridors were long and twisted like the arteries in a badger’s lair.
Golden-brown floors hummed an old wood melody under her feet, and their subtly warped surfaces didn’t seem to belong in a duke’s palace.
There was nothing of a palace here, beyond what was certainly a priceless collection of European masterpieces grouped with uncalculated abandon on walls hung in buffed-yellow tabby.
This was an old and well-loved home; the owner had spent lavishly and cleverly on charming decoration and informal comfort and not a halfpenny on pomp.
If the house were not Devon’s, she would have been entranced.
Exquisite ornaments begged for her study, faces gazed warmly at her from their gilt frames, and passing windows revealed a waltz of flashing color from the gardens.
Happiness, Merry decided, could dwell here. It was a melancholy thought.
Rearming her nerves, she stepped into a wide, sunny apartment to find Devon alone, seated at a rosewood writing table, dumping blotting grit from a fresh letter back into an ornate silver sandbox.
Rested, combed, and clean, his complexion fresh as this morning’s biscuit, wearing the intricate white cravat and meticulously tailored trousers that were the costume of men of his class, he still looked to her like a pirate, and it amazed her that his cheerfully doting servants could see him only as a tot in a cap, though older.
“I don’t know why I married you,” she said aloud, from the doorway. “It’s been nothing but ho-hum since.”
His glowing gaze swung quickly to her. After a pause in which he seemed to examine her face, and then the skillful allurements of her gown and elaborate hair arrangement, he said pleasantly, “I don’t know why you married me either. Why did you?”
Because I love you. “Because there didn’t seem to be any other way to get some sleep.
” Merry stepped into the room. Her new perspective softened the flare of backlight from the windows, and she could see his face in better detail.
Rested he was, but not relaxed and not manufacturing any defenses to hide it either.
He set down the paper; his fingers formed a long curve beside the sheet. “If the reason you married me was to protect your brother, I want you to know that it wasn’t necessary. I wouldn’t have hurt him.”
“Heavens, I realized that last night the moment I learned you were a gentleman.” The emphasis on the last word was soft and bitter, more bitter, perhaps, than she intended.
He sat as he was, not moving, and she was not sure how she knew—though perhaps it was by some change in his expression perceptible only to a sense keener than eyesight—but she realized her words had stung him.
Such a thing had never happened before. Or at least if it had, he had never allowed her to detect it.
The other possibility was that it was not her words that had hurt, but her tone.
How much remorse did he bear (if any) for abuses past?
Plenty, she hoped, and that was the bitterness speaking again.
There were two ways of handling this. The first was for her to figure out in some rational, organized fashion just what it was that she wished from him.
The second was for her to stop thinking and obey each passing emotion until she had openly displayed every feeling to him.