Chapter 18
When the Christmas guests arrived, The Ideal Gentleman returned.
On the first night of the yuletide house party, Louisa stood at the edge of a fully populated room and watched her husband with a pang in her chest. It unsettled her to realize that part of what she felt was nostalgia—for her spring and summer, for those days and months when his smiles would send her lurching from arousal to panic and back again.
When life had been so much simpler and easier, and she’d suspected him of nothing more than arrogance and sexual deviance.
Or so it felt. A glorious, lost era of being enthralled by his frank wickedness. Of not seeing that when he broke the rules, he broke all the rules. And of not yet knowing that when he schemed for her, he also schemed against her.
Could he tell, with his occasional glances at her, that she’d been second-guessing the wisdom of agreeing to the lessons?
Could he understand how it had shocked her to the core that it wasn’t just conventional sexual mores he eschewed, but fundamental principles of fairness and sportsmanship?
It would never have occurred to her to disparage another debutante for her own competitive advantage, not even with an epileptic sister as an excuse.
I love you, he’d said. Once upon a time there had been no words she wanted to hear more. Yet his action had made her feel stripped of all humanity and individuality—reduced to a trophy, something for him to hoist aloft in triumph.
She did not want to be loved like that, with her heart an objective to be captured for his satisfaction.
And yet she’d said yes to the lessons that would put them in close proximity day after day, allow him to dazzle her, and lead her to mistake the pleasure she derived from learning for pleasure she derived from his company.
Even with all her illusions gone, there was a part of her—a forceful, potent part of her—that longed to return to his side. To touch and kiss him, and make love endlessly. To let the delights of his bed tip her into forgetfulness, perhaps even oblivion.
He chose that moment to look again in her direction. Their gazes held. She looked away, flushing hotly.
Half an hour later, as the ladies bade good-bye to the gentlemen and made ready to retire, for the first time since she slapped him, he set his hand on her person and kissed her on her cheek.
“Good night, Lady Wrenworth.”
Her cheek tingled until well past midnight.
* * *
A week before Christmas Eve, a freezing rain fell. Louisa’s husband strongly cautioned all the guests to remain indoors, to minimize the risk of unpleasant spills.
With the usual shooting crowd and the usual walking crowd all stuck inside, Louisa couldn’t seem to take a step outside her own rooms without running into someone with whom she must make pleasant small talk.
Late in the morning she found herself climbing up to the schoolroom. At least there she could be sure of being alone. Or so she thought, only to see Felix standing before the window, his hands in the pockets of his trousers, looking down.
He turned around.
Several of the wall sconces had been lit, but it was the kind of overwhelmingly dreary day that seemed to sap all warmth and brightness from such minor flames. The room felt grey and anemic, and yet he…he seemed to be illuminated by mysterious sources, bright and vivid against a receding backdrop.
She should have uttered an apology and made herself scarce; instead, she entered and closed the door behind her.
“Anything I can do for you, my dear?” he asked.
She cast about for something to say that wouldn’t make it seem as if she had been drawn in despite her better judgment. “I understand Mr. Weston and Mr. Harris have gone out, against your advice.”
“And taken two of my best horses with them, those young hooligans.”
“Will they be all right?”
“I certainly hope so. It would be hazardous to send out a search party in this weather.” He moved to the desk and closed a notebook that had been lying open. “If you’d like to use the schoolroom, I will be glad to see myself out.”
She chose not to give a direct answer, but pointed her chin at the notebook. “Were you in the middle of something?”
“Trying to time a particular lesson.”
She noticed only then that the standing blackboard to the side of the desk was full of equations and that he held a watch in his hand—he seemed to have already devoted a monumental number of hours to these not-yet-begun lessons. The awful tug at her heart was one of both pain and painful pleasure.
“And does this particular lesson require you to study the weather?” she said, trying not to betray the more turbulent of her emotions.
“It might, when you are solving problems at the board.” He pointed to the bigger blackboard that hung on the wall.
She approached the newly repainted blackboard and examined its currently spotless surface. When she solved those future problems, would he be standing next to her, his scent of summer rain distracting her from what she needed to do?
It was some time before she realized that she had put her hand on the blackboard to feel its texture, in a motion that might be termed a caress. In the silence, there was only the pitter-patter of the rain and his irregular intakes of breath.
She pressed her lips together and dropped her hand.
Without turning around, she asked the question that had troubled her for days.
“When we spoke in the gallery some time ago, you said something about your mother. That she did not quite understand that, in her wrath, she was punishing herself as well.”
A beat of silence. “What of it?”
“She was punishing herself as well, you said. So whom else did she punish?”
A longer stretch of silence. “She would have preferred to punish her father, I believe, for forcing her into a marriage she did not want. But he died almost before her honeymoon ended, so it was my father who bore the brunt of her anger, for his mistake of taking his suit to her father when she’d already refused him. ”
She picked up a piece of chalk from the trough beneath the blackboard. “What did she do? Ignore him?”
He sighed. “Has anyone ever told you that you are an immensely good person, my love? That your idea of punishment amounts to no more than a pointed spurning? My father’s punishment was the belief my mother instilled in him that I was most likely not his flesh and blood—an idea made plausible by the fact that I resembled him not at all. ”
She clutched the chalk in her hand. She could not accept cruelty of such magnitude, of deploying one’s own child as an instrument of vengeance.
And him, caught in the middle of his mother’s rage and his father’s misery.
As she turned around to face him, someone rapped at the door, startling them both.
“My lord!” came Mr. Sturgess’s urgent voice. “Mr. Harris’s horse has returned to the stables without him, sir.”
* * *
Harris was stuck in a ditch, with a broken rib and a fractured elbow. Weston wasn’t so lucky: He and his horse were both found at the bottom of a ravine.
And Felix, after shooting one of his favorite horses, descended into the ravine with a rope tied around his waist. When he reached the stoutly built Weston, he had to secure the latter—about two stone heavier than himself—on his back and climb up.
It was pitch dark when the rescue party finally arrived back at the house. Louisa came running out of the front door, and it was worth the entire day of blistering cold to see the anxiety in her eyes.
She went right past him. And then, almost comically, she stopped and pivoted on her heels. “There is a bath waiting for you. Go. The surgeon and I will see to Weston.”
He saw his reflection as he crossed the entry hall mirror. No wonder she hadn’t recognized him immediately: He’d lost his hat, his hair was plastered to his head, and his face was dirty, his riding coat and trousers torn, drenched, and coated with mud.
The bath had been drawn in her tub—the best one in the house. He sat down, wincing at the pins-and-needles sensation in his lower extremities, still numb from the cold.
His valet left with his ruined clothes. He closed his eyes and leaned his head back. The water was heavenly, though it did sting the myriad scratches on his person, and the steam called notice to minor lacerations on his face, nicks that he had barely felt earlier, because he’d been so cold.
The door opened.
“I won’t need anything for at least another quarter hour,” he said. “You may see to your other duties.”
“I have already seen to my other duties.”
Louisa.
He opened his eyes. She carried a pot of tea and a plate of fresh buttered buns.
“Would you like anything?” she asked.
Yes, you.
And not even for lovemaking, but just to hold, for safety and comfort.
“Or should I ring the kitchen for something else?”
“No, thank you. I ate plenty on the way back.”
When he’d arrived at the waiting wagonette with Weston, who had turned unconscious from the pain of being maneuvered down a bumpy slope to the designated meeting place, there had been food and drink waiting: mulled ale, whiskey-spiked coffee, and curried pastries, all carefully packed to preserve their heat in the weather.
“The pair of grooms who were with you told me all about your heroics. I hope you didn’t do it just to polish The Ideal Gentleman’s halo. You could’ve killed yourself,” she said, her tone unusually harsh, as she set down the tray on a footstool within his reach.
“I was quite ready to let someone else undertake the heroics, but the two grooms with me were both afraid of heights.”
Ten grooms and stable hands had fanned out in five teams in the search for Weston’s whereabouts. It was sheer chance that the team Felix had joined had stumbled across him.
She lowered herself to one knee and examined his badly scratched right hand. “Why didn’t you have anyone see to it?”
“You said there was a bath, so I came.”
If she’d said he had to go back out and dig a ditch, he would have, too.
“What happened?”