The Arrangement by Mary Balogh
13
Traveling was a tedious business, especially when one could not watch the passing countryside. It was also uncomfortable, even when one owned a well-sprung carriage with thick, soft cushions. Even so, Vincent was in no hurry for the journey to end.
He was a coward.
Though part of him was excited too at the prospect of being home, of starting an entirely new life. And it would be new, partly because the circumstances of his life had changed, and partly because he was determined not merely to drift onward in the same vein as before.
They rode in silence much of the time. But it was not an awkward silence. They did talk too. She described features of particular interest that they passed, and once she held forth for what must have been close to half an hour on everything that was not of interest—a gray, cloudy sky; a whole copse of trees with black trunks and branches and no leaves; a fly-infested dung heap; cows too indolent to stand up in their meadow; a field full of dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of sheep, not a single one of which was black; a stretch of flat land without even a molehill to break the monotony—until he was helpless with laughter.
She had a marvelous eye for the ridiculous. And a gift of humor—quiet, dry, and irresistible. It was the sort of thing he might expect from Flavian—and it amazed him that his wife and that particular friend could have anything whatsoever in common.
“You have convinced me, Sophie,” he said. “Sight is not everything.”
“Not having it,” she assured him, “saves you from having to observe a whole lot of dullness.”
She told him more about her father when he asked—handsome, charming, charismatic, ever hopeful of winning his way to untold riches, always with the words, “One day my ship will come in, Mouse,” on his lips. And forever having to flee from unpaid landlords, unpaid merchants, and irate husbands. But, after his wife left him, he had fed and clothed and housed his daughter except when he was in particularly dire straits, and he had educated her at least to the degree that she could read and write and figure well enough to work out that their meager, precarious finances would never enable them to settle to a stable existence. And then, one day, he had not fled fast enough from a wronged husband and had had a glove slapped in his face—literally. In the ensuing duel he had been shot right between the eyes before he had even raised his own pistol to the firing position.
“Did you know about the duel beforehand?” Vincent asked her.
“Yes.”
There was a long silence, and he felt her bleakness.
“I was waiting,” she said. “And praying. And trying to think about other things. And waiting. And praying. Nobody came for a long time. Not until late in the afternoon, though the duel was at dawn. I suppose they forgot about me.”
That day must have seemed a month long. The feeling of abandonment and perhaps worthlessness must have seeped permanently into her bones.
“He had written three letters,” she said, “and Mr. Ratchett, his friend and his second at the duel, had been instructed to deliver them should he die. They were to his brother, Sir Terrence Fry, and to his sisters, Aunt Mary and Aunt Martha. Sir Terrence was out of the country, as he almost always is. Aunt Martha did not reply. Neither did Aunt Mary, but she lived in London and Mr. Ratchett took me to her and I stayed.”
“She took you in willingly once you were there?” he asked.
“She did not turn me away,” she said. “I do not know what I would have done if she had. But I rarely saw her. She told me I was hopeless as soon as she saw me. She bought me clothes when I needed them, and she gave me pin money from time to time, which I used mainly to buy paper and charcoal. She spent most of her time in her own sitting room or away from home with her friends.”
“There were no cousins?” he asked. “She had no children?”
There was a short pause.
“No,” she said. “She was childless.”
He had become sensitive to sound, or, sometimes, the absence of sound. And to atmosphere, to that slight charge of something inexplicable and indefinable that could hang in the silence or even occasionally in the noise.
Why that short pause when the answer was simply no?
He did not ask.
“And then she took a chill,” she said, “and died after three weeks. She left her money to charity.”
“And Lady March took you in.”
“She and Sir Clarence were at the funeral,” she said, “and a group of Aunt Mary’s friends commended her for coming to take that mousy girl home with her. They were influential ladies. All sorts of nasty gossip originated with them almost daily. They could slay a reputation with one word in the right ear.”
“And so she was obliged to take you,” he said. “Do you have a caricature of the gossips?”
“Oh, yes, indeed,” she said. “With long bodies and long necks and waving lorgnettes and quivering noses and Aunt Martha cowering on a level with their knees.”
“And the mouse in its corner?” he asked.
“With folded arms and glum expression,” she said. “I was eighteen. I ought to have looked for employment. I just—I had no idea how to go about it. I still do not. I ought to have gone to London last week. On the stagecoach, I mean. To look for work.”
“You do not like our arrangement, then?” he asked her—and wished immediately he had not used that particular word.
“It is passive at present,” she said. “It has been all take and no give. My clothes alone have cost you a fortune.”
“You were not altogether passive on our wedding night,” he reminded her. “Or last night.”
They had made love three separate times in their inn room, and though she had not been a particularly active partner, neither had she been unwilling. She had certainly given every indication of enjoying what they did.
“Oh, that,” she said dismissively—and perhaps a little sheepishly.
“Yes, that.” He frowned. “And do not tell me, Sophie, that you have not liked it. I would be forced to be quite ungentlemanly and call you a liar. And even apart from your own enjoyment or lack thereof, you have given me pleasure.”
“But that is not much,” she said.
If he had not been concerned about this further evidence of her lack of self-esteem, he might have grinned.
“Not much?” he repeated. “I suggest you know little about men, Sophie. You do not know how very central sex is to our lives? Pardon me for my blunt use of the word. I am twenty-three years old. Now at last I have a wife. I hope I will never come to think of you only as a convenient supplier of regular sex, but it will never ever be just oh, that, or but that is not much to me.”
He became aware that she was laughing softly, and he joined her.
“This is not the sort of conversation a gentleman imagines having with his bride two days after the wedding,” he said. “It is indelicate, to say the least. Forgive me.”
Several minutes of silence ensued, but he realized at the end of it that her thoughts had been continuing along the same path.
“What will you do,” she asked him, “after the year is over?”
He closed his eyes as though he could shut out thought as well as sight.
“Will you take a mistress?” she asked when he said nothing.
His eyes snapped open and he turned his head her way. “I am married to you.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “But if we are living apart from each other—”
“I am married to you,” he said again, feeling his temper rise.
But what would he do if she left? After one year. After five. After ten. Good Lord, he would be only thirty-four even then.
“Will you take a lover?” He had reached the point of fury, he realized.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I am married to you,” she said, her voice low and flat.
“Would you want to?” he asked.
“No. Would you?”
“I do not know,” he said brutally. “Perhaps so. Perhaps not.”
The ensuing silence bristled with tension.
Perhaps he would need to employ mistresses. He was no monk, after all. But the thought only infuriated him more.
A stormy silence ensued.
“Was that our first quarrel?” she asked softly.
“Yes, dash it all, it was,” he said.
He felt her hand creep into his, and he laughed ruefully.
“We will be home soon,” he said a short while later, “and you will no longer feel that our marriage is all give on my part and all take on yours. I am going to need you. In personal development I have made progress I can be proud of, but I have not done as well in my role as master of Middlebury Park. I have allowed others to look after me and to rule my world for me, and changing that will not be easy, because those others either love me or feel the benevolent wish to make my life easier. But changing the way things are will be done. I am determined on that. I will need your help, though.”
“To take over from those others?”
“No,” he said. “I do not intend to transfer dependence upon my mother and my steward to dependence upon you. I merely want you to help me reach that point at which I will not need—”
“Even me?” she asked when he stopped abruptly, having realized that those final words would probably sound insulting, though that was not what he had intended.
“I just do not want to be dependent upon you, Sophie,” he said. “Or upon anyone else.”
“And yet,” she said, “I am totally dependent upon you. Without you, I would be starving in the streets of London now.”
“It is the nature of marriage, Sophie,” he said with a sigh. “A wife is always dependent upon her husband for the material things in life. And he is dependent upon her for other things, some of them tangible, most not. But I hate that word dependence. It should be struck from the English language. I prefer to think of marriage as an equality of give and take.”
They lapsed into silence again.
Her shoulder touched his after a while and he could hear from her breathing that she was almost asleep. He turned, wrapped one arm about her shoulders, and slid the other beneath her knees. He lifted her across his lap and braced his feet against the seat opposite.
She sighed again and nestled her head on his shoulder, and he dipped his head and kissed her. She kissed him back with warm, languid mouth—mouth, not just lips. And he would refuse to believe, even if someone with perfect vision told him so, that she did not have the loveliest woman’s mouth ever created. He was not aroused, nor did he want to be. Not here. But his mouth lingered on hers, and his tongue lazily explored her lips and the smooth flesh behind them. Her free hand was on his shoulder and then behind his neck.
“I have never done anything with my life,” she said. “I have merely endured and observed and dreamed—and laughed at the foolishness I see around me. I have always lived on the outer fringes. Now I am to be mistress of Middlebury Park. No, not to be. I am.”
“Frightened?” he asked.
He felt her nodding against his shoulder. It would be strange if she was not.
She yawned and he tucked her head beneath his chin and settled her more comfortably on his lap. He closed his eyes and drifted toward sleep.
It was not even a major rut in the road. They had jarred through far worse in the past day and a half. But it happened just when he was hovering between wakefulness and sleep, and he jolted awake, completely disoriented, and opened his eyes to see what was the matter.
And was assaulted with a massive dose of panic.
He could not see.
He could not breathe.
He could not see.
“What is the matter?” a voice was whispering in his ear.
Could she not speak louder? Louder? LOUDER!
He thrust her from him and leaned forward until he could paw at the front panel behind the seat. He felt sideways until he found the window and then the leather strap hanging beside him. He grasped it and clung to it and gasped for air. There was not enough air.
There was not enough air.
“Vincent? What is the matter?” She sounded alarmed. Horribly alarmed.
Could she not speak up?
She touched his arm, and he flung her hand away. He clawed at the seat opposite, clung to the edge of it, bowed his head over it.
There was no air.
He could not see.
“Vincent? Oh, dear God, Vincent? Shall I stop the carriage and call Mr. Fisk?”
Martin would set one arm across his chest and beneath his chin and pat his back firmly with the other hand. And he would tell him bluntly and calmly that he was blind. That was all. He was blind.
There was a certain magic in Martin’s treatment. He might even go so far as to tell Vincent that he was being a silly clod. All that was the matter was that he was blind.
But it was humiliating, after all this time, still to have to have Martin to calm him down.
“No,” he gasped. “No.”
And he found his breath and concentrated his whole attention upon it lest he misplace it again. He could hear the air rasping in through his nose, shuddering out through his mouth.
In. Out.
“I am sorry,” he said.
He felt the tentative touch of her hand on his back. When he did not shrug it away, she moved it in light, soothing circles. She did not speak—or make any move to stop the carriage.
In. Out.
There was plenty of air. Of course there was.
The reason he had not heard her voice clearly was that she had spoken softly, even whispered the first time, and the horses and the carriage wheels were making enough racket to drown her out. But he had heard the racket. All that was wrong, as Martin would have told him, was that he was blind.
It was a manageable affliction.
Life was still worth living, still rich with meaning and possibility.
He was no longer concentrating upon his breathing, he realized. He was breathing by instinct.
Had he hurt her? Either physically or emotionally? Had he frightened her?
“I am sorry,” he said again, still hanging his head over his hands clenched on the edge of the seat opposite. “Did I hurt you, Sophie?”
“No.” But her voice sounded a little thin.
He sat back in his seat. He could feel his heart pounding in his chest, but it was slowing.
“I am sorry,” he said once more. “For a few months—” Ah, he never spoke of it. For a moment, his breath threatened to go again. “For a few months I was deaf as well as blind. And there never seemed to be enough air. Ahhh. I am sorry. I cannot—”
She had one of his hands in both of hers and was holding it against one cheek.
“You do not need to,” she told him.
“After an eternity,” he said, “there were arms. The same arms all the time. They held me and fed me and gave me air.”
“Your mother’s?”
“George’s,” he told her. “The Duke of Stanbrook’s. He held me to life and sanity, though that would surely have gone anyway if my hearing had not returned. But it did, at first faintly and fuzzily and then fully. I am blind. That is all. I can live with that. But sometimes—”
“You have attacks of panic,” she said. “Do you need to be held when it happens, Vincent, or left alone?”
She would need to know. She was his wife. It would surely happen again when he was with her. And he could never predict exactly when.
“A human touch usually helps me back after the first few moments,” he said. “Beware of getting hurt in those first moments, though. Oh, Sophie!”
She kissed the back of his hand.
“I am glad I am not the only needy one in our marriage,” she said. “I do not mean I am glad you are blind or glad that you have these attacks. But I am glad you are not some sort of superhuman pillar of strength. I would not be able to prevail against it. I am too weak, too fragile. In each other’s weaknesses, perhaps we can both find strength.”
He was feeling too tired to comprehend what she was saying to him. But he felt soothed, wondrously comforted. At the same time he felt he could weep.
“Come back on my lap,” he said. “If you trust me not to fling you off again, that is.”
She scrambled across him and snuggled against him, one arm about his neck. He braced his feet against the seat opposite again, twined his fingers in her curls, and felt safe. And somehow cherished.
He slept.
Sophia was warm and comfortable despite the jolting of the carriage. She was curled up in Vincent’s arms, her head nestled in the hollow between his shoulder and neck, her arm about him. She did not sleep even though he did. She pictured him as he had been the first few times she saw him. Not that he had changed in the week since. Only her perception of him had.
Elegant, beautiful, courtly. A viscount. Someone to admire from afar. Someone from a different world than her own. Someone quite untouchable. She remembered her consternation when he had offered his arm outside the assembly rooms and she had touched him for the first time.
It had felt like touching a god.
Now she was his wife. She knew him intimately—very intimately. And though he was beautiful almost beyond belief, he was just a man. Just a person. Like her, he was vulnerable. Like her, he had been living a life that was in many ways passive. Like her, he felt the need, the intense desire, to live. To prevail against life rather than merely to endure. To be free and independent…
They were not as unequal as she had thought.
And now they were on their way home. She savored the word. She had lived in numerous rooms and houses during her first fifteen years, some of them grand, most of them shabby. And then there had been Aunt Mary’s house in London and then Barton Hall. But there had never been rooms or a house that she had called home.
Home had always been a place to dream of.
But would Middlebury Park be home? Or would it be just another house in which she lived for a while before moving on? But she would not think of that—moving on, that was. He had been right on their wedding day. They were married now. Middlebury Park was to be her home now. She wished—oh, she wished she had not told him her dream at the assembly, for it had been based entirely upon her belief that she would never marry, that no one would even want to marry her. And it had always been one of those impossible dreams anyway, apparently harmless for that very reason.
They would be arriving anytime now. She had heard Mr. Handry say the last time they stopped for a change of horses that that would probably be the final time.
She was terrified.
So what was she going to do about that? Hide in a corner somewhere where it was safe?
Or pretend that she was not afraid at all?
She was about to discover who she was, she realized, and what she was made of.
She had a sudden mental image of the next picture in her sketch pad—a huge mouse, almost filling the page, blank terror in its eyes as though a giant cat were bearing down upon it, a silly, sick grin on its face. And a series of straight lines leading from it to converge on the bottom corner, where the exact same mouse, hugely reduced in size, cowered in cowardly safety.
She smiled and felt her body shake against Vincent’s as she quelled the bubble of laughter that threatened to erupt in sound.
“Mmm,” he said. “Was I snoring?”
“No.”
“Something was funny.”
“Oh,” she said. “Not really.”
“Did you sleep?” he asked her. “I believe I did.”
“I was too busy feeling comfortable,” she said. “There is one advantage to being small. I can snuggle up to you on your lap.”
This was one thing she had discovered about herself. She could relax with him and talk with him. She was not quite paralyzed in his presence as she had been a week ago.
“You may do so anytime you choose,” he said. “Well, within reason, I suppose. My steward might be a trifle disconcerted if you were to snuggle up when I was in consultation with him in his office. But touch is important to me, Sophie, perhaps more important than it is to most men. Never be afraid to touch me.”
She had not thought of his need in quite that way. For a moment she thought she might well weep. But she was distracted when she realized the carriage was slowing and then turning.
“Oh.” She sat up and her stomach lurched.
“We must be there,” he said. “Describe it to me, Sophie.”
“Tall stone gateposts,” she said, her eyes widening, “with wrought iron gates. They are open so we do not have to stop. A stone wall stretching to either side, though it is half hidden beneath moss and ivy. A shaded driveway with woods on either side. I see oaks and chestnuts and other trees whose names I do not know. I am hopeless on the names of plants.”
“Which does not matter,” he said, “since plants do not name themselves. Or so you informed me once upon a time.”
The grounds must be huge. There was no sign yet of the house or of any cultivated park. They seemed to be in the depths of the countryside.
“I can see water,” she said then, clambering off his lap and sitting beside him, the better to see through both windows. “There must be a lake, is there? Oh, yes, there it is. A big one. There is even an island in the middle of it with a little temple or something on it. How picturesque! And a boathouse. And reeds. And trees.”
“I have been out in one of the boats,” he told her. “I have to have someone with me, of course, or I am inclined to row into banks and marshes and islands and other assorted obstacles that insist upon getting in my way.”
“You need to learn to look where you are going,” she said. “Better yet, take me with you and I will look where you are going. I shall scream when you are about to collide with something. Oh. Oh, Vincent.”
Wonder and terror clutched at her in equal measure.
The house had come into view. House—ha! It was a mansion. It was a palace. It was … It was Middlebury Park. It was her new home. She was mistress of it.
“Oh, Vincent.”
“Struck dumb by my charms, are you?” he asked her. “Or are you seeing something else that has tied your tongue in knots?”
“The latter,” she said. “I can see the house. The driveway straightens here on a direct axis with the front doors, and there are lawns on either side with some small topiary trees on either side. And up ahead I can see parterres with more little trees and flowers and statuary. And the house. Oh, how can I describe it?”
“It has a high, imposing central block,” he said, “with twelve steps leading up to massive double doors. There are long wings to either side and round towers at the four corners. The stable block is off to the left. We will turn to the right very soon and drive between the lawn and the parterres and so approach the house from the east side. Behind the house the park rises into hills, and there are many more trees covering them and descending almost to the kitchen gardens. It is a bit of a wilderness back there. Each side of the park is two miles long—eight miles all told. It would take two and a half hours to walk around the outside of the wall at a fair pace. I have done it in three and a half. The farms are beyond the walls.”
“You peeped when no one was looking,” she said.
“My secret is out.” He took her hand in his. “Are you impressed with your husband’s great consequence, Sophie?”
Impressed?That did not nearly describe how she felt, but no other word in her vocabulary did either.
“Oh, Vincent,” was all she could say. The carriage had indeed turned right and then left and left again until it drew to a halt at the foot of a flight of marble steps. She would take his word for it that there were twelve.
“Do I take that to be yes?” he asked her.
“I am impressed at my consequence,” she told him, desperately trying to convert terror to humor. “I am mistress of all this, am I not?”
The great front doors, she could see now that they were close, had opened, and a lady had appeared in the doorway. She moved to the top of the steps as Sophia watched.
Vincent’s mother?
Mr. Handry had jumped down from his perch and was opening the carriage door and lowering the steps.
Sophia raised her chin—what else was there to do?
