Mary Balogh - Web of Love

She laughed again. “Love!” she said. “I do not love you, my lord. You are a very attractive man. I have given in to the power of your attraction. And you do not love me. I am the woman who has nursed you during your recovery from injury. You have seen no other woman in three weeks, except for your sister. Did you not know that men always fall in love with the women who nurse them? This has not been love. This has been lust. And sordid. Oh, yes, very sordid.”

He was angry. He surged to his feet and grasped his side. The wind felt as if it had been knocked out of him for a moment. “So you would spoil it all,” he said, “because my own carelessness and the arrival of Madeline earlier embarrassed you. I am sorry about that, Ellen. But don’t make something ugly about what has happened here. It is not ugly. We love each other.”

“I love Charlie!” she cried. “I love him. I worship him. He is twice the man you are. And now what have I done to him? What have I done?”

“You have done nothing,” he said. He took a few steps toward her. “Charlie is dead, Ellen.”

She stared back at him, her mouth open. The color that had returned to her face with her anger fled again.

“He is dead,” he said dully. “Charlie is dead, Ellen. He died on the battlefield south of Waterloo. I was with him.”

She closed her eyes and swayed on her feet. But when he took another step toward her, she looked up and held a hand in front of her.

“Don’t come near me,” she said. “Don’t touch me.” She swallowed more than once and looked down at herself. “I am dressed in green. Green. The color he liked me to wear. Not in black. I have known for almost a month that he is dead, and I am not wearing black. And I have not gone out as other women have on the fruitless search for his body. I have allowed him to be buried in an anonymous grave. I have refused to open the doors of my mind to the truth. He is away with the army, I have persuaded myself. A month, and I am not in mourning.” She smiled.

“Ellen,” he said, “come and sit down.”

“You knew he was dead.” She looked up at him, the strange smile still on her face. “You knew he was dead, my lord. You were with him. You brought me the news. And yet this is what you have done to his memory?” She pointed to the bed behind him.

He shook his head slowly. “Don’t,” he said. “It has been with me as with you, Ellen. He was my closest friend. I watched him die. I told you-I did, didn’t I?-and then I let go of the knowledge.”

“So,” she said with a little laugh. “We are a pair of fools, my Lord Eden. And a pair of sinners.”

“No,” he said, “not that. We would not have done what we have done if Charlie were still alive. Both you and I are incapable of that. You know it. This has not been wrong, Ellen. Only very poorly timed. We should have waited-for a year, perhaps. But love will not always wait. And we have needed the comfort of each other.”

She held her hands palm-up before her and looked down at them. “Charlie is dead,” she said. “This time he is not coming back. I will never see him again. There will be no cottage in the country. No safe and secure times together. Only the past. Only memories. He’s gone.”

“Come over here, Ellen,” he said softly, reaching out a hand to her again. “Let me comfort you. Let us comfort each other.”

Her eyes were brimming with unshed tears when she looked up. “You cannot comfort me,” she said. “He was my husband. My life. I loved him.”

“I know,” he said. “I know you did. And he was my friend, Ellen. You are my friend. Let me hold you.”

“You are not my friend,” she said. “Not any longer. Not ever again. You are my guilt. For all during these months in Brussels I have wanted you. I have looked at you and touched you and wanted you. Even though I had the best man in the world as a husband. Even though I loved him more than I love life.”

He put his head down and rubbed at his eyes with the heels of his hands. “We each need some time alone,” he said. “The atmosphere is too charged at the moment for either of us to talk sense. Let us not say anything that we will forever regret, Ellen. Let’s talk later.”

When he looked up, she was staring down at her hands again, her expression stony. One tear had escaped and was trickling unchecked down her cheek.

“There is nothing to say,” she said.

“Only perhaps that I love you.”

She shook her head. “Not even that,” she said. “You will see that it is not true when you have had time to think. There is nothing to say, my lord. Nothing at all.”

She turned without looking at him and left the room.

He was sitting on the bed, his head in his hands, when he heard the outer door of her rooms open and close and knew himself to be quite alone.

SOMEWHAT LATER THE SAME EVENING Madeline was summoned downstairs in Colonel Potts’s home. She closed the book she had been reading aloud from, smiled cheerfully at Lieutenant Penworth, who was lying staring at the canopy over his bed with his one good eye, and promised that she would return in time to make him comfortable for the night. She ran lightly down the stairs.

And positively hurtled down the last ten, shrieking in a manner quite unbecoming a house in which there was sickness. Her arms wound themselves around the Earl of Amberley’s neck, and he lifted her from two stairs up and twirled her around twice before setting her on her feet.

“Edmund!” she cried. “I was never more happy to see you in my life. I thought you must have disappeared from the face of the earth. And Mama!” She shrieked again and threw herself into her mother’s arms, laughing and crying all at once.

“My darling girl,” her mother said, hugging her very tightly. “Looking creased and uncombed and quite hagged. And behaving like a hoyden. And more dear than you have ever looked in your life.”

“Have you just arrived?” Madeline asked eagerly. “Why did you not let me know you were coming? Why have you not answered any of my letters? Oh, do come into the salon.”

“Your first letter reached us the day before we left,” the earl said, taking his mother’s elbow and following his sister across the hallway to the salon, from which the wounded had long ago been moved. “We thought we could get here faster than the mail. Dominic?” His voice was tense.

“Oh!” Madeline said. “You have read only my first letter? How dreadful! Dom is well on the road to recovery, I do assure you, and has been for almost two weeks. He has totally defied the surgeon who was calling on him, and is eating like a horse and prowling around his room like a caged bear.”

The Earl of Amberley took his mother by the arm again. Her hands had gone up to cover her face. “Thank God!” he said, drawing her into his arms. His voice was shaking and his own eyes suspiciously bright. “Thank God.”

“What dreadful suspense you must have been living in!” Madeline said. “My first letter must have been dreadfully gloomy. And the second. He was gravely ill, you know. The surgeon told Mrs. Simpson that we must expect the worst.”

The dowager Lady Amberley pushed herself away from her son, searched in her reticule for a handkerchief, and blew her nose. “But Dominic would not give in,” she said. “He is positively the strongest and most stubborn boy I have known. I was not glad of it three years ago, but now I am. We were afraid to go to Mrs. Simpson’s first, Madeline. We did not know what we might find.”

Madeline smiled brightly. “I was there this afternoon,” she said, “and was taken quite by surprise. I am not at all sure that the scene would have been good for you, Mama. Dominic and Mrs. Simpson have fallen in love with each other and are to be married. Except that Dom has not asked her yet. But she is sure to say yes, he says. And I have never seen him so glowingly happy.”

Her mother looked inquiringly at the earl, who was frowning. “This is rather sudden, is it not?” he said. “I have the greatest liking and respect for Mrs. Simpson, but she lost her husband just a month ago. Can she be thinking of remarrying already?”

“It is just like Dominic to be so impulsive,” his mother said. “Will she suit, Edmund?”

“Oh, assuredly,” he said. “She is not at all Dominic’s usual type.”

“That sounds decidedly promising,” the dowager said with a smile.

“I shall fetch a shawl and bonnet,” Madeline said, “and walk there with you.”

Her brother held up a staying hand. “I think we must curb our impatience to see him,” he said, “especially since he is out of all danger. It is rather late in the day to be paying social calls. Besides, Mama and I have not even found a hotel yet. We shall take rooms at the Hotel d’Angleterre if there are any available and pay our call at the Rue de la Montagne in the morning.”

“Yes, I think it would be best,” his mother agreed. “As it is, we have disturbed Lady Andrea’s household.”

She kissed and hugged Madeline again, as did Lord Amberley, and they parted for the night. Madeline ran up the stairs again to share her good news with the lieutenant. She chattered brightly to him as she washed him with deft and gentle hands, straightened out his bedclothes, and turned and plumped his pillows.

She resisted the urge to kiss his forehead as she was leaving the room. She had not yet done so, and he might think it forward of her. He did not yet know that she was going to marry him and look after him for the rest of his life.

Neither did Mama and Edmund. She sobered somewhat as she reached her own room. It was going to be tricky. She hoped they would not voice some of the same silly notions that Dom had had. But she did not care anyway. She loved Lieutenant Penworth with a deep tenderness. And she would be able to pour out her love for him for the rest of their lives. He would always need her.

THE EARL OF AMBERLEY and his mother were surprised the following morning when they arrived at the Rue de la Montagne to find that Mrs. Simpson looked far from being a woman newly in love and planning a marriage. She was dressed in deepest mourning, her hair pulled severely back from her pale, drawn face. She looked as if she were close to collapse.

“Mrs. Simpson.” The earl held out both hands to her and took one of hers within their clasp.

“Good day, my lord,” she said. “You have come. Lord Eden will be glad.” Her voice was totally devoid of expression.

“My very deepest sympathies, ma’am,” he said. “Your husband was one of the kindest gentlemen of my acquaintance, and I know you were devoted to him.”

“Yes,” she said. “Thank you.”

“May I present my mother, the dowager Countess of Amberley?” he said. “Mrs. Simpson, Mama.”

Ellen curtsied.

“You have been wonderfully kind to my boy,” Lady Amberley said, stretching out both hands to her new acquaintance. “And oh, my dear, how you have been suffering on your own account.” She gathered the other woman into her arms when Ellen’s face crumpled. “Oh, my poor dear. My poor dear child.”

Lord Amberley walked quietly past them and on to the closed doors that must lead to the bedchambers. The second one he opened showed him his brother, standing at the window, his back to the room, looking somewhat thinner than he had looked five weeks before.

Lord Eden’s shoulders tensed when the door opened, and he turned slowly. His brother looked at him in shock. He had expected to see him looking somewhat less than his usual fit, ebullient self. But he had not expected to see the pale, haggard face, the haunted eyes.

“Edmund,” Lord Eden said. “God, Edmund!”

He took two steps forward, but his brother was across the room before he could move any farther, and had him in a close embrace. Lord Amberley felt a nasty lurching of his stomach when his brother leaned his head on his shoulder and broke into racking sobs.

“Dominic!” he said, aghast. “My God, is this what war does to a man? Well, you are with me now, and I am going to take you home with me no matter what ideas anyone else may have. I have never interfered with what you want of life, and have no right to do so now. But I will use all my influence on you, and set Alex to using hers, to persuade you to sell out of this infernal life.”

Lord Eden straightened up. “I never thought to make such a prize idiot of myself,” he said. “If you only knew how I have longed and longed this morning to see just your very person. I am so helpless here on my own, Edmund. As weak as an infant. I doubt I could get down the stairs to the street without assistance.”

“You are on your feet and standing straight,” his brother said, “when two weeks ago, by all accounts, it was just as likely you would not even live. Don’t rush things, Dominic. Let us be thankful for great mercies. Your strength and freedom of movement will return.”