Only Enchanting by Mary Balogh

7

She did everything with deliberate care, washing her brushes, drying them with a threadbare towel, covering her paints, emptying the water onto the grass, stuffing the balled-up sheets of paper into her bag, folding her easel, laying it flat, setting the bag on top of it. Then she stood and looked at him again.

He offered his arm, and she took it. He led her toward the cedar avenue, passing between the trunks of two trees and coming out halfway along the grassy walk. Cedars of Lebanon had none of the erect tidiness of limes or elms. The branches grew in all directions, some close to the ground, some almost meeting overhead. The avenue made one think of Gothic novels—not that he had read many of them. There was a summerhouse positioned centrally at the end of it.

He could smell soap again. Someone should bottle the scent of soap on her skin and make a fortune off it.

“Of what does dalliance consist?” she asked him.

He looked down at the poke of her bonnet and almost laughed. Of this, he almost said. Of precisely this.

“Risqué repartee, s-smoldering glances, kisses, touches,” he said.

“No more than that?”

“Only if the two p-people concerned wish for more,” he said.

“And do we?”

“I c-cannot answer for you, Mrs. Keeping.”

“Do you?”

He laughed softly.

“I suppose that means yes,” she said. “I do not know any risqué repartee. And I believe I would consider it silly if I did.”

He felt almost suffocated with wanting her. No courtesan could ever be half so clever. Except that this was not deliberate on her part.

They moved in and out of sunlight in the avenue. His eyes were slightly dazzled. So was the rest of him. He felt strangely out of his element.

“There are no r-rules, actually,” he said. “Or, if there are, I have not s-seen them.”

“What do you want of me, Lord Ponsonby?” she asked.

“What do you want of me, Mrs. Keeping?”

“No,” she said, “I asked first.”

So she had.

“Your company,” he said. He could not have come up with a lamer answer if he had had an hour to think of it.

“And that is all? You have the company of your friends, do you not?” she asked.

“I do.”

“Then what do you want of me that they cannot give?”

“Does there have to be an answer?” he asked. “Can we not just w-walk here and enjoy the afternoon?”

“Yes.” She sighed. “But I seem to be the last sort of woman a man like you would seek out for company.”

“A flirt?” he said. “A l-libertine?”

“Well.” There was a short silence. “Yes.” And then she laughed. “Are you?”

“I think, Mrs. K-Keeping,” he said, “you had better tell me what you mean by saying you are the last sort of woman I might seek out. And I think we had b-better sit inside the summerhouse while you do it. The air is rather chilly out here. Unless, that is, you are afraid I w-will p-pounce upon you in there and have my wicked way with you.”

“I daresay,” she said, “that if you intended to pounce, the outdoors would not deter you.”

“Quite so,” he agreed, opening the door so that she could precede him inside.

It was a pretty little structure, its walls almost entirely of glass. A leather-cushioned seat ran around the inside perimeter. Trees around the outside would offer shade from the hottest rays of the sun in summer but did not keep out the heat at any other season. It was pleasantly warm today.

“Tell m-me how you come to be living with your sister,” he said after they had seated themselves on opposite sides of the bench, though even so their knees were not far from touching.

“My husband’s entailed property passed to his younger brother,” she told him. “And while he was kind enough to assure me I might continue living there, I did not think it fair since he is unmarried himself and would have felt constrained to live elsewhere. My father remarried the year before I wed, and his wife’s mother and unmarried sister moved in after I left. I did not wish to return there. I went to stay with my brother in Shropshire for a while—he is a clergyman, but he has a family too, and I did not wish to stay forever. When Dora came to visit and suggested that I move here with her, I accepted gladly. She was in need of companionship, and I was in need of a home in which I did not feel I was intruding. And we have always been particularly fond of each other. The arrangement has worked well.”

He was very glad he was not a woman. There were so few options.

“Does your stammer result from your war wounds?” she asked him.

He looked at her and half smiled. She sat with a straight back and her hands arranged neatly in her lap. Her feet were side by side together on the floor between them. Prim virtue could sometimes look inexplicably enticing.

“I am sorry,” she said. “That was a very personal question. Please do not feel obliged to answer.”

“It was a h-head wound,” he told her. “Doubly so. I got shot through it and then f-fell off my horse on it before being r-ridden over. I should have been dead thrice over. For a long while I d-did not know where I was or who I was or w-what had happened. And when I did, I could not c-communicate with anyone outside my h-head. Sometimes everyone’s words were a j-jumble, or it t-took overlong to work out what they m-meant. And then the w-words to r-reply to them would not come out, and when they did, they were not always the w-words I was thinking. And I had forgotten about s-sentences.”

He did not mention the crashing headaches or the great memory gaps.

“Oh.” She frowned in concern.

“Sometimes when the w-words would not come out,” he said, “other things came out of me instead.”

She raised her eyebrows.

“I was d-dangerous, Mrs. Keeping,” he told her. “I did with my fists what I could not d-do with my mind or my voice. I was soon p-packed off to Cornwall and k-kept there for three years. Sometimes I still have what my family call t-tantrums.”

She opened her mouth to speak, thought better of it, and closed it again.

“You would be well advised to stay away from me.” He mocked her with his eyes, with his smile.

“Your friends do not fear you,” she said.

“But I do not w-wish to bed any of my friends,” he said. “Even Imogen.”

Her cheeks turned a deeper pink.

“Someone cannot be both a friend and a lover?” she asked.

“Only in a m-marital relationship where there is love,” he said.

“Is this why you warn me away from you, Lord Ponsonby?” she asked. “Not because you may turn violent but because you do not have either love or marriage in mind?”

“I w-will never have either of those to offer any woman,” he told her.

“Never?”

“Happy endings can t-turn without warning to v-very b-bad endings,” he said.

She paused at his words and looked steadily into his eyes, as if she saw something there. “Did you once believe in happy endings?” Her voice was very soft.

He felt suddenly as though he were looking at her down a long tunnel. Had he? It was strange that he could not remember. He must have believed in them, though, on that glittering night of the betrothal ball in London. He had abandoned his dying brother for it. For Velma.

His hands curled into tight fists on either side of him on the seat, and he saw her glance down at them.

“There is no such thing, Mrs. Keeping,” he said, spreading his fingers to curl lightly over the edge of the seat. “You know that as w-well as I.”

“I ought not to have married William, then,” she said, “because he would die? But we had five years of companionship. I do not regret marrying him.”

“Companionship.” He mocked her again. “But no p-passion.”

“I believe passion is much overrated,” she told him. “And perhaps companionship and contentment are much underrated by people who have not known them.”

“People l-like me?”

“I think,” she said, “you have known much unhappiness, Lord Ponsonby, and that it has made you cynical. Personal unhappiness unconnected with your injuries. And now you have persuaded yourself that passion is of greater importance than quiet contentment and committed love, because passion requires no real commitment but makes you feel alive when much has died in you since your life changed irrevocably.”

Good Lord! He sucked in air that did not seem to be there in any abundance and forced his hands to remain relaxed. But his temper was suddenly close to snapping.

“And I think, m-ma’am,” he retorted, “you are indulging in s-speculation upon s-something you know n-nothing of.”

“I have made you angry,” she said. “I am sorry. And you are quite right. I do not know you at all.”

It would not snap. It took a great deal to make him lose control these days. He did not enjoy watching that madman who was himself destroy his outer world because he could not sort out his inner world. It was strange how there was always an inner watcher when the madman burst into action. Who was that man?

“Well, Mrs. Keeping,” he said, looking lazily at her and lowering his voice, “we might set that r-right anytime you w-want.”

“By . . . being together?” she asked.

He folded his arms. “You have only to say the w-word.”

She looked down at the hands in her lap and took her time about answering. She laughed softly.

“I keep expecting to wake up,” she said, “to find this is all a bizarre dream. I do not have conversations like this. I do not spend time alone with gentlemen. I do not listen to propositions so improper that I really ought to crumple to the floor in a dead swoon.”

“But it is all happening.”

“I am twenty-six years old,” she said, “and almost three years a widow. Perhaps at some time in the future, if too much time does not pass in the meanwhile, someone else will offer for me, though I do not know who in this neighborhood. Perhaps there is marriage, even motherhood, in my future. Or perhaps not. Perhaps my life will remain as it is now until I die. Perhaps I will never know . . . passion, as you call it. And perhaps I will regret that when I am older. Or perhaps, if I give in to temptation, I will regret that. We can never know, can we? We can never benefit today from the wisdom we will have gained tomorrow.”

What he ought to do was get to his feet and hurry off back to the house and never return. If he had imagined a pleasant, mindless sort of dalliance with her, even perhaps a brief affair, he was beginning to realize that nothing would be simple and straightforward with Mrs. Agnes Keeping. He did not want to be her one chance at passion, her one experiment at breaking free of the dull mold of her life. Heaven help him. He did not want to leave her with regret that she had given in to the temptation to explore passion. He did not want to break her heart—if he had the power to do that.

This . . . tryst was not developing at all as he had imagined when he devised a way of coming here to find her.

Suddenly, and quite unfairly, he resented her. And this place and the change of venue this year. Nothing like this ever happened at Penderris.

He got abruptly to his feet and stood by the door, gazing along the length of the cedar avenue.

“You will paint tomorrow?” he asked her.

“I do not know.”

And he did just what he had told himself he ought to do. He opened the door and stepped outside, stood undecided for a few moments, and then strode off down the avenue without her.

If he had turned back, he might have made love to her. And she would not have stopped him, idiot woman. At least he did not think she would.

Perhaps tomorrow . . .

And perhaps not.

He needed time to think.

*   *   *

Agnes worked at home for the next week. She painted the daffodils from memory, even though she really was almost sick of them, and she was pleased with her very first effort. Indeed she was quite sure it was the best work she had ever done. Surprisingly, she found herself painting them from above, as though she were the sun looking down on them. There was no sky in the painting, only grass and flowers.

Time crawled by when she was not painting, and sometimes even when she was. She could not see the Middlebury Park visitors leaving quickly enough. Perhaps her peace would be restored when they had gone away.

When he had gone away.

She was never again going to make the mistake of falling in love. It was an emotional state that was supposed to bring great happiness, even euphoria. She had felt almost none of either. Of course, poetry and literature in general were full of stories of tragic love lost or spurned. She ought to have taken more notice when she was reading. Except that caution would not have helped her. She had had no intention whatsoever of falling in love with Viscount Ponsonby, who was unsuitable and ineligible in almost every imaginable way. She missed William with a dull ache of longing for the plodding contentment of their life together.

WouldLord Ponsonby’s leaving bring her peace?

Once in, when did one fall out of love? It had taken several weeks back in October—though it seemed the feeling had merely lain dormant instead of going away altogether. How long would it take this time? And when would it be gone forever?

And why had he let a whole week—no, eight days—go by without seeking her out? Every time she heard a horse on the street or a knock on the door, she held her breath and waited, hoping it was not him. Hoping it was.

And then, on the morning of the eighth day, Sophia sent Agnes a note apologizing abjectly for so neglecting her friend and begging both Agnes and Miss Debbins to come and take tea with her and the other two wives.

I have a new story with new illustrations to show you,she had written. We told it to Thomas, and he gurgled. I showed him the pictures and he almost smiled.

Agnes did smile as she folded the note. Thomas was not even two months old.

“We are invited to Middlebury for tea with Sophia and two of the lady guests,” she told Dora when her sister had finished giving a music lesson to a twelve-year-old who had had the misfortune to be born with ten thumbs and an incurably prosaic soul—or so said Dora with growing exasperation almost every week. And with doting parents who were tone-deaf and determined to believe that their daughter was a prodigy.

“Oh, that will be delightful,” Dora said, brightening. “And it will be good for you. You have been in the mopes lately.”

“Oh, I have not,” Agnes protested. She had been making a determined effort to appear cheerful.

Tea in the drawing room at Middlebury Park really was just for the three married ladies and their two guests. Lady Barclay had gone off somewhere with the other six members of the club, Sophia reported.

“I was afraid,” she said, “that coming here this year instead of going to Penderris Hall as usual, and having three wives here too this time, would spoil things for them, but I do not believe it has.”

“Ben told me last night when he finally came to bed,” Lady Harper said with her slight trace of a Welsh accent, “that this gathering with his friends has been the very best part of his honeymoon so far. And then he had the grace to do some smart verbal scrambling to assure me that it is entirely because I am with him this year.”

They all laughed.

Sophia read the new story aloud at the request of Lady Trentham, and the illustrations were passed from hand to hand so that they could all admire and chuckle over them.

“Bertha and Dan,” Agnes said, “are my very favorite literary characters.”

Sophia laughed gleefully. “You have very unsophisticated tastes, Agnes. Have you painted the daffodils yet? You said you were going to.”

“I have,” Agnes told her. “But they were very resistant to being captured in paint.”

“Agnes has been in the dismals for that very reason, I think,” Dora said. “But I have seen the finished painting and it is remarkably lovely.”

Agnes smiled fondly at her. “You say that about all my paintings, Dora. You are quite indiscriminately biased.”

“As all sisters ought to be,” Lady Harper said. “I always wanted a sister.”

And then, just when it was almost time to get up and take their leave, the others arrived home and came into the drawing room in a noisy body, bringing the outside world in with them, or so it seemed.

Tab, Sophia’s cat, who had been curled at Dora’s side, rose to his feet, arched his back, hissed at Lord Darleigh’s dog, and settled back to dozing; Lord Darleigh smiled about him, just as though he could see them all; Sir Benedict Harper commented on the fact that he would not have believed the new racetrack was five miles long if he had not just propelled himself along almost a third of the length of it in his chair; the Duke of Stanbrook bowed to the newcomers and bade them a good afternoon; Lady Barclay accepted a cup of tea from Sophia’s hands and sat down to converse with Dora; Lord Trentham set an arm briefly about his wife’s waist and pecked her on the lips before frowning ferociously as if he hoped no one had noticed; the Earl of Berwick helped himself to an iced cake from the tea tray and made sounds of appreciation as he bit into it; and Viscount Ponsonby stood just inside the door, looking sleepy.

And Agnes hated him. No, she hated herself. For she was aware of no one else even half as much as she was of him.

“I believe we have all walked our feet down to stumps,” the earl remarked. “We tried to bribe Ben out of his chair, but he was selfish and obstinate as always and would not budge.” He winked at Lady Harper.

“Is that your newest book, Lady Darleigh?” the duke asked. “May we be permitted to see it?”

“It is brilliant,” Lord Darleigh said as he felt the seat of his chair by the fireplace before lowering himself into it. “See for yourselves.”

“Author, violinist, harpist, pianist,” Lord Trentham said. “There will soon be no living with the lad.”

“But only Sophie is called upon to do it,” Lord Darleigh said, smiling sweetly.

“The illustrations are so very clever, Lady Darleigh,” Lady Barclay said as she looked at them over the duke’s shoulder. “I wonder who had the silly notion that children’s books are not also for adults.”

“There is a child in all of us, is there not, Imogen?” the earl asked.

“Yes, precisely, Ralph,” she said, glancing up at him with a look of such raw longing in her eyes that Agnes felt jolted.

Viscount Ponsonby was the only one of them who had said nothing.

After a few minutes Dora got to her feet, and Agnes followed her lead.

“We must take our leave, Lady Darleigh,” Dora said. “Thank you for inviting us. It has been delightful.”

“It has,” Agnes agreed. “Thank you, Sophia.”

Lord Ponsonby was still standing squarely in the doorway, she noticed.

“I will give myself the pleasure of escorting you home, if I may,” the Duke of Stanbrook said.

Dora looked at him in some surprise. “After your long walk, Your Grace?”

“It will be like dessert to a banquet,” he assured her. “And the dessert is always the best part.”

But he spoke with a twinkle in his eye and no suggestion of flirtatiousness. Dora, who was terrified of his titled magnificence, actually laughed.

“I’ll come with you, George,” Viscount Ponsonby announced in that languid way he had, almost as if he spoke on a sigh.

Inevitably, when they set off, they divided into two couples, and since the duke had offered Dora his arm even before they left the house, Agnes had little choice but to take Lord Ponsonby’s.

“This was unnecessary,” she said after a minute or so of silence. Dora and the duke, striding along and deep in conversation, had already outdistanced them.

“You are being ungracious, Mrs. K-Keeping,” he said.

She was. Though she would have been happy not to have to endure this.

“Have you been b-back?” he asked her.

She did not need to ask what he meant or, rather, where he meant.

“No,” she said. “I have painted at home. The weather has been chilly.”

Had he? Gone back, that was. But she would not ask him.

They proceeded on their way in silence. She would not break it, and neither, it seemed, would he—until, that was, they came within sight of the gates. The duke and Dora had already turned onto the village street.

Viscount Ponsonby came to a sudden halt, and Agnes of necessity stopped beside him. He stared broodingly at the ground a little way ahead of them before turning his head and looking at her.

“I think, Mrs. Keeping,” he said abruptly, “you had better marry me.”

She was so shocked that her mind stopped functioning. She stared back at him, and thought began to return only as she watched the unusual openness of his countenance revert to the heavy-lidded, mocking-mouthed expression with which she was more familiar. Almost as if he had pulled a mask back into place.

“That was p-poorly done of me, by Jove,” he said. “I ought at least to have g-gone down on one knee. And I ought to have l-looked s-soulful. Did I look soulful?”

“Lord Ponsonby,” she asked foolishly, “did you just make me a marriage proposal?”

“It was poorly done,” he said, wincing theatrically. “I did not even m-make myself clear. F-Forgive me. Yes, I asked you to m-marry me. Or, rather, I told you, which w-was not at all the thing. A man of my age ought to know better than to b-behave with such g-gaucherie. Will you m-marry me, Mrs. Keeping?”

He was stammering rather more than usual.

She slid her hand free of his arm and noticed for the first time the pallor of his face, the dark shadows beneath his eyes as though he had had a sleepless night or two.

“But why?” she asked.

“Why would you m-marry me?” He lifted one eyebrow. “Because I am h-handsome and charming and titled and w-wealthy and you have conceived a t-tendre for me, perhaps?”

She tutted. “Why do you wish to marry me?”

He pursed his lips, and his eyes mocked her.

“Because you are a virtuous woman, Mrs. Keeping,” he said, “and marrying you may be the only w-way I can b-bed you.”

She felt her cheeks grow hot.

“How absolutely absurd,” she said.

“That you are virtuous?” he asked. “Or that I want to t-take you to bed?”

She clasped her hands, raised them to her mouth, and stared at the ground before her feet.

“What is this all about?” She looked up at him then and kept her eyes steady on him. “And, no, you will not get away with looking at me like that. Or with making a foolish reply, like saying you wish to . . . to bed me. Or with making me a marriage offer as though it were some sort of jest and then scurrying away to hide behind your mask of mockery and cynicism. That is insulting. Did you intend to insult me? Do you intend it?”

He had grown paler.

“I did not mean to offer you an insult,” he said stiffly. “I b-beg your p-pardon, m-ma’am, if it is insulting to b-be offered the p-position of V-Viscountess P-Ponsonby. I b-beg your p-p-pardon.”

“Oh,” she cried, “you are impossible. You have deliberately misunderstood me.”

But he was standing as straight as the military officer he had once been, his booted feet slightly apart, his hands clasped behind his back, his eyes hooded, his mouth in a straight line. He looked like a stranger.

“I am not insulted that you wish to marry me,” she said, “only that you will not tell me why. Why should you wish to marry me? I am a twenty-six-year-old widow with neither noble birth nor fortune to recommend me and no extraordinary beauty either. You scarcely know me or I you. The last time we met, you assured me that you would never offer marriage to any woman. Yet today, suddenly, after making no attempt to see me for a week, you blurt out a proposal, or what I take to be a proposal—I think you had better marry me.”

His posture relaxed slightly.

“I ought to have written a s-speech and m-memorized it,” he said and smiled at her with such dazzling charm that she almost took a step back. “Though my m-memory has been lamentable since I was knocked on the h-head. I might have forgotten it. I m-might even have forgotten that I meant to propose.”

She stood her ground.

“What you will surely remember tonight, Lord Ponsonby,” she said, “is that you escaped a nasty fate this afternoon.”

He tipped his head slightly to one side.

“You would be a n-nasty fate, Mrs. Keeping?”

Oh, she would not succumb to his charm.

“My sister and His Grace will be wondering where on earth we are,” she said.

Lord Ponsonby offered his arm and, after a small hesitation, she took it.

“I am curious,” she said as they turned onto the street. “When exactly did you conceive the idea of marrying me?”

All the mockery was firmly back in his face.

“Perhaps when I was born,” he said. “P-Perhaps the idea of you, the p-possibility of you, was there with my v-very first intake of breath.”

Despite herself, she laughed.

“You think I exaggerate,” he said.

“I do.”

“I shall go back to M-Middlebury,” he said, “and write that s-speech—if I remember. I may even compose it in blank verse. You will p-permit me, if you will, to call on you in the m-morning. If I remember.”

Dora and the Duke of Stanbrook were standing outside the garden gate, looking their way. Although the street was deserted, Agnes guessed that more than one neighbor lurked behind more than one window curtain, watching. And she could not feel any indignation against them, for that was exactly what she and her sister had done on the day the guests arrived at Middlebury Park.

“Very well,” she said, and there really was no time to say more.

The gentlemen bowed and took their leave, and Dora preceded Agnes into the cottage.

“How very kind it was of them to escort us home,” Dora said as she removed her bonnet and handed it with a smile to the housekeeper, who offered to bring them tea. “No, thank you, Mrs. Henry. We have just had some. Unless Agnes wants more, that is.”

Agnes shook her head and led the way into the sitting room.

“His Grace talked to me all the way home,” Dora said, “just as if I were a person worth conversing with.”

“You have recovered from your terror of him, then?” Agnes asked.

“Well, I suppose I have,” Dora said, “though I am still in awe. I feel as dazzled as if I had met the king himself. I hope the viscount was as polite with you. I never quite trust that young man. I believe him to be a rogue—a handsome, charming rogue.”

“The secret is not to take him at all seriously,” Agnes said lightly, “and to let him know that one does not.”

“Are not all the ladies delightful?” Dora said. “I did enjoy myself, Agnes. Did you?”

“I did,” Agnes assured her. “And I think Sophia’s illustrations get better and better.”

“And the stories funnier,” Dora agreed.

They chattered on aimlessly about their visit, while Agnes held a cushion to her bosom and wished she could escape to her room without her having done so being remarked upon by her sister.

What on earth had that been all about? He could not possibly want to marry her. Why had he asked her, then? And she could not possibly want to marry him. Not really, not beyond the realm of fantasy.

But how could she live on now, after he was gone, knowing that she might have married him even though it had been perfectly obvious that he had blurted out his proposal without any forethought whatsoever?

What had possessed him?

Would he come tomorrow, as he had said he would—if he remembered? What would he say? What would she say?

Oh, how was she to stop her heart from breaking?