A Rogue's Downfall Read online

  “Your valentine?” she said.

  “My valentine, Amy,” he said. “Will you join me for breakfast in—half an hour?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Thank you.” For offering her breakfast in her own home? It felt strange to hear her name on his lips.

  “Dress for riding,” he said. “You do ride?”

  It was strange too that he did not know that about her. She rode for an hour or more every morning and always refused an escort, even though the elderly head groom constantly fussed over her and asked her rhetorically what she would do if she took a tumble when she was far from home.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Half an hour, my valentine,” he said, and she was very glad suddenly that she was lying down and had nowhere to fall. He leaned over her and kissed her full on the lips. His lips were firm and closed and tasted of bacon. He had eaten already. He was going to have a second breakfast with her. Or else he was going to embarrass her by watching her eat. He prolonged the kiss for a few seconds and then lifted his head and smiled at her. That was the moment when she knew the truth of what she had suspected as soon as his head had come down to hers. Her legs would not have supported her if she had been standing on them.

  “Yes,” she said.

  He straightened up and looked down at her for several silent moments, his smile gone. Then he turned and left the room. Amy closed her eyes and touched her fingertips to her lips. And swallowed against what felt like a lump in her throat. And fought tears.

  He had made a ghastly mistake, he thought, waiting for her to join him at the breakfast table. His hand played absently with a fork. She was not ready for a day of valentine’s romance with him of all people. He should have allowed her to go to Hester Dryden’s and have some fun with her friends there. He should have stayed far away from her on this, the worst possible anniversary. He had made an idiot of himself and had doubtless ruined her day even before she had got out of bed.

  God, she had looked inviting in bed—warm and flushed and rumpled. He put the thought ruthlessly from him.

  There had been no response. None whatsoever. Merely the blank stare that had suggested she thought him out of his mind. And the monosyllabic answers. Even when he had kissed her, her lips had remained still and quite passive. All very different from the last time he had kissed her, when her lips had pressed eagerly back against his and her mouth had opened under the insistence of his own, and her body had leaned invitingly into his. And she had been hot with the desire to be possessed. She had been quite, quite drunk.

  How had he thought it would be possible to woo her now?

  He could remember the scorn with which she had greeted him when she had been sent to him the morning after, his remarkably uncomfortable interview with her father at an end. Scorn and defiance.

  “You owe me nothing, my lord,” she had said with more bravado than truth. He had owed her his name. No one in the kingdom would have disputed that except her. “Certainly not marriage. I will not marry you.”

  She had remained adamant even when her parents had joined them after ten minutes. She had been on her way into the country before the day was out.

  He closed his eyes. And he remembered the icy hatred with which she had greeted him after he had been summoned back to her father’s house, wondering what awaited him there. Both her father and her mother had been in the room, but she had been the one to speak to him. She had been standing before the fire, her back to it.

  “If you can see fit to renew your offer of marriage, my lord,” she had said with no preamble, “I will accept it. There is to be a child.”

  He had renewed his offer in front of their silent audience. He had never felt more uncomfortable in his life. She had accepted. She had added something before her father took up the conversation with a discussion of the practical aspects of the wedding, which must take place with all haste.

  “I could bear the disgrace,” she had said very quietly. “But I would not have my child live his life as a bastard.”

  And he hoped less than one year later to make her his valentine, to woo her?

  He stood as she entered the room, looking pretty and elegant in a moss green velvet riding habit and black boots. The habit looked comfortable and well-worn, though by no means shabby. She must ride frequently, he thought, and realized again how little he knew of her. He seated her at the table and motioned to Morse to bring her coffee.

  “Oh,” she said, staring at the long-stemmed rosebud that lay across her plate. She darted him a glance. “They are in bud already?”

  “Gold,” he said, “for the start of the day. For sunshine and beauty.” He nodded to the butler to leave the room. Morse’s lips were pursed.

  “For me?” she said. “Did you cut it yourself?”

  “For you,” he said, noting the flush along her cheekbones. “I did. What may I fetch you from the sideboard?”

  She looked startled. “Toast,” she said. “And a glass of milk, please.”

  “For my son?” he asked, walking across to the sideboard, where sure enough a tall glass of milk had been prepared for her.

  “For James,” she said, and he winced at his faux pas.

  “For our son.” He set the glass down beside her coffee and set the toast rack on the table in front of her. She was holding the rose by the stem and had the bud against her mouth.

  “Thank you,” she said, but it was not clear whether she thanked him for the milk or the rose. “Are you not eating?”

  “Coffee only,” he said. “I ate earlier.”

  “Bacon,” she said.

  “And eggs, too,” he said. “How did you know? Has someone been telling on me? Cook fed me in the kitchen. At least twelve rashers of bacon and three eggs and four slices of toast. It was indecent.”

  “Cook fed you in the kitchen?” Her eyes widened. “She is a dragon. A benevolent dragon perhaps, but a dragon nonetheless. I do not know where she found this very large glass, but she fills it to the brim with milk three times a day, and if I do not drain it quite dry, she wants to know the reason when I go down next morning. I quake in my slippers. Sometimes I almost expect her to swat me with her wooden spoon.”

  “She slapped me this morning,” he said, “when I stole a rasher of bacon and ate it with my fingers. I would not be able to count all the slaps I have had from Cook in my twenty-eight years.”

  She looked at him, startled again, and then laughed. He laughed, too.

  “Imagine the humiliation,” he said, “of being the Earl of Reardon and being rapped over the knuckles by one’s own cook for eating one’s own food.”

  She laughed again. It sounded almost like a giggle. “Was that when you found out about Sally and Roger?” she asked.

  “She did not admit to the charge,” he said. “But if there is a brighter color than scarlet, her cheeks were it.”

  “I wonder,” she said, “if it will prove true for her. The superstition, I mean.”

  “I wonder,” he said, watching her face, afraid that he was making an idiot of himself again, “if it will prove true for us. No, don’t say the obvious. Play the game with me for today. Will you, Amy?”

  “What game?” Her voice was little more than a whisper.

  “The game of innocence,” he said. “The game of romance. Is it impossible? With me is it impossible?”

  “With you?” she said. “Romance?”

  “Can you pretend?” he asked. “Apart from the fact there there is my s—, that there is James, can you pretend that we are innocents and even strangers about to embark on a day of romance? We are nearly strangers, after all.”

  “Just for today?” She picked up her rose again and twirled it slowly by the stem. “And what about tomorrow?” But she answered her own question before he could. “Tomorrow does not matter. As a girl I always dreamed of having a beau for Valentine’s Day. I never had one. And never a Valentine’s party. The year before last, I was not allowed to go to the one in London that everyone else was attending b
ecause I had not yet been presented. Last year, Mama and Papa were obliged to go to a concert and did not think it important to find me some other chaperon so that I could go. So I persuaded Duncan to take me to the masquerade at the opera house. I thought the very fact that it was forbidden would make it wonderfully romantic.” Her eyes remained on the rose.

  He could just imagine the young, innocent, naive girl, she had been thinking to enjoy some forbidden but innocent pleasure to hug to herself in memory. The one valentine entertainment that she had attended in her life. He might have given her that pleasure without ruining her. Had he not drunk so much himself, perhaps he would have done so. He had been in love with her for a long time before that evening, after all. Perhaps he might have started a courtship pleasing to both of them. Despite his reputation, perhaps she would have accepted him as a suitor if he had treated her as a valentine last year instead of as a whore.

  “This year,” he said, “you have a beau. Will you accept me as such today and let tomorrow take care of itself?”

  She raised her eyes to his. “Why?” she asked. “Is it because you feel guilty? Do you?”

  He did not want these questions. He wanted his day of fantasy. He was greedy for it. “Yes or no?” he said, hearing with dismay that his tone was quite curt.

  She considered him in silence for a while. “Yes,” she said at last. “For today only. Tomorrow, life can return to normal.”

  The words chilled him. “When is James going to need you again?” he asked. “For how long can we ride?”

  “For well over an hour,” she said. “Two probably.”

  “Let’s not delay then,” he said, getting to his feet and drawing back her chair. She had eaten only half a slice of toast, he noticed, though she had averted Cook’s wrath by drinking the milk to the last drop. He did what he had resisted doing the evening before. He kissed the back of her neck before she turned. She hunched her shoulders slightly, but made no comment. She turned back to the table as she was about to move away and picked up her rose.

  “I’ll fetch my hat,” she said.

  He watched her lift the bud to her nose as she left the room.

  She led the way from the stables and took her usual route without really thinking about it. She rode along the mile of back lawn to the trees, through the trees to the meadow, and along the meadow. Then she followed the line of the trees to the lake, which could not be seen through the denser trees that grew about it, to circle back around the lake and the house at some distance, until the latter came into sight again when she had more than a mile of front lawn to canter across to reach it. James prevented her from ever going much farther from home, though he did not nurse quite as often now as he had done at first. She had always refused to have a wet nurse.

  Her husband looked quite splendid on horseback. But of course she had known that. She had used to watch him with covert admiration in Hyde Park, when he had not known of her existence. She wondered suddenly how he had known who she was so that he could call on Papa the next morning. Even though he had removed her mask and seen her face, it must have been a stranger’s face to him. How had he known that she was a lady and not a doxy—was that the right word?—like the other women at the opera house?

  “There is a meadow on the other side of the trees,” she said as they slowed their horses and moved carefully to avoid branches and twigs. “I like to gallop across it.”

  “The meadow has not been moved to another location then?” he said, making her feel thoroughly foolish. Sometimes it was hard to believe that this was his home, that he had grown up here. “It was the one place where galloping was strictly forbidden. It is a favorite burrowing place for the local rabbits, apparently. The only time I disobeyed, I was given a hearty walloping—by Davies, my father’s head groom as he is now mine. I have been much abused by my servants.”

  “The groom. The cook,” she said. “Did your father never object?”

  “I never reported them, and they never reported me,” he said. “Shall we dismount and lead the horses down to the lake? I believe we were all agreed that my parents would not have been much interested anyway. And so I pestered the servants, and they disciplined me and spoiled me and loved me, I do believe. Many of them are still with me. I think of them almost as family.”

  She had not known that about him. Until their conversation at dinner last night, she had not even thought of him as a child. A whole person. A man who had come to the present moment after twenty-eight years of living and experience. There must be so much to know. She felt a sudden pang of loneliness. He was her husband, and she knew almost nothing about him. He knew almost nothing about her. They were strangers.

  But she was his valentine. During the day, perhaps, they could do something about the situation. Unless he meant the day to be romantic in a strictly physical way. Perhaps he planned to touch her and kiss her, and leave her lonelier than ever tomorrow. Physical intimacy without any sort of knowledge of the other person, without any sort of friendship could only make one achingly aware of one’s essential aloneness. She knew that from bitter experience.

  “I always vowed,” he said, “that if and when I had children of my own, I would not neglect them. No, this will not do, will it? The trees have grown thicker, and the slope will get steeper soon. I’ll tether the horses here, and we’ll go down without them.”

  The lake was not ornamental or man-made. It was surrounded by trees and was at the foot of steeply sloping banks. It was a place where Amy had come frequently the summer before as she grew heavier with child and heavier too with despair. She had used to sit on the bank, staring into the deep water, trying to make sense out of the turn her life had taken.

  “It is easy to slip here,” he said, taking her hand in a firm clasp. “I would hate to see you hurtling down the slope and plunging into the water.”

  She laughed. “I came here often last year,” she said, “when I had an ungainly bulk to carry about with me.”

  “Did you?” His hand tightened on hers for a moment. “I spent many days here as a boy, swimming— another forbidden activity—or climbing trees or merely sitting, weaving dreams. Ah, look at that.”

  It was not just a stray clump of primroses but a whole bank of them, all in glorious bloom as they faced the unobstructed rays of the sun across the lake.

  “Oh, springtime!” she said, and the unexpected ache of an unnameable longing brought tears to her eyes. “There is no time like it, is there? What would we do if spring did not come each year? I have longed and longed for it this year.”

  “Have you?” He spoke quietly, and lifted his free hand to blot one spilled tear with his thumb. “Was your heart really set on going to Hester Dryden’s party?”

  She closed her eyes. No, it was not that. It was just that spring always brought with it new hope, a promise of something new, some reason for living. Her son was her reason for living. But even so there was so much surrounding emptiness. So much loneliness. She remembered suddenly, and for no apparent reason, the day her husband had returned to London, two days after their child’s christening. There had been no warning. Merely the formal visit to her sitting room late in the morning to take his leave. A stranger going away again, taking everything with him, though she had not known that there was anything else to be taken.

  She remembered the unwilling, self-pitying tears. The knowledge that she was alone again—though he had spent no time with her even before he left. All hope went with him.

  He felt the ground, found it to be dry, and drew her to sit beside him and beside the primrose bank. He still held her hand.

  “You were there,” she said. “So soon after. Before there was time to wash him properly and wrap him. Husbands are not usually summoned until everything has been made pretty, are they? Were you waiting outside the door?”

  She had had the confused impression that he had been there very soon. Too soon.

  “Inside the door,” he said. “Did you not know that I was with you for the last two
hours? Did you not know who it was who sponged your face with cool water?”

  Perhaps she had known. But it had always been too dreadfully embarrassing a truth to admit. She hoped she had been wrong. And it was too puzzling a truth. Men did not witness such scenes. Why had he?

  “It is not surprising you did not know,” he said. “You had a far worse time of it than most women. The doctor thought you were going to die.” His hand tightened painfully about hers.

  “You came because you thought I was going to die?” she asked.

  “I came,” he said, and he inhaled slowly, “to see— to see what I had done to you. If you were going to die, I was going to witness the death I had given you. I could not share it. That was the damnable thing. But I could punish myself with it. It would have been something I could never have erased from my memory.”

  She stared at him, dumbfounded.

  “Instead,” he said, “I witnessed the terrifying miracle of birth. And I heard you laugh. You laughed at me when you were holding my son all blood-streaked on your stomach. You looked up at me and said, ‘Look.’ And then you cried. Do you remember?”

  She remembered it clearly. It was the one clear memory in a foggy recollection of pain and exhaustion. She had wanted him to bend over her, to touch the baby, to kiss her. She had not realized until that moment how much she had hoped that the birth of their child would bind them together as nothing else had. She had yearned for a sense of family. Instead, he had looked down at the baby, his face stony. She withdrew her hand from his in order to clasp her arms about her knees and rest her forehead on them.

  “Yes,” she said.

  His fingers touched the back of her neck as his lips had done at the breakfast table. She no longer wanted the romance she had yearned for then. He was incapable of tenderness. She had learned that in the past year. She did not want the mockery of a valentine’s romance with him. How would she bear his going away again?