Only a Kiss by Mary Balogh

24

Percy was convinced that going back to the ballroom—smiling, mingling, talking, dancing—was the hardest thing he had done in his life. And it was not made easier when his mother and then Lady Lavinia and Miss Wenzel and several other people asked what had happened to Imogen and he had to tell them that she was tired and had gone to bed. He was not sure if any of them believed him. Probably not. Doubtless not, in fact.

“Oh, Percival!” was all his mother said, but her facial expression spoke volumes of reproach. And she only ever called him by his full name when she was exasperated with him.

Getting up the next morning to be cheerful and hospitable all over again with his family and friends and the few neighbors from more distant parts who had stayed for the night was further torture, especially after a largely sleepless night. He had stood outside Imogen’s room for perhaps fifteen minutes at some wee hour of the morning, his hand an inch from the knob of the door, which may or may not have been locked. He had returned to his own room without putting the matter to the test.

She did not come down for breakfast. He wondered if she would come down at all. Perhaps she was watching from her window, waiting for him to leave the house before putting in an appearance herself. He obliged her after he had seen all the overnight guests on their way. He went riding with Sidney and Arnold and a group of cousins. And no, he told Beth when she asked, he had not seen Cousin Imogen today. She was probably tired after last night.

It was only when luncheon was announced much later that Lady Lavinia decided she should go up and see if Imogen was perhaps indisposed. It was unlike her not to be up early in the morning even after a late night—and she had gone to bed before the end of the ball.

She was not there. A note was, however, pinned to her pillow and addressed to her aunt—who read it aloud when she returned to the dining room.

Do not be concerned about me,she had written after the opening greeting. I have decided to leave early for Penderris Hall. I shall write when I arrive there. Please convey my apologies to Lord Hardford and his family for not taking a proper leave of them. It has been a pleasure to make their acquaintance.

An hour later they were all—with the exception of Percy—still buzzing over the strangeness of Cousin Imogen’s sudden departure, two days earlier than planned. A search of her room had convinced her aunt that she had taken almost nothing with her—only, perhaps, a small valise and whatever it would have held. All the carriages and horses were accounted for in the carriage house and stables. How had she left Hardford? On foot?

That was exactly how she had left, as it turned out. No sooner had they all finished luncheon than Wenzel and his sister were announced.

“We have just returned from a short journey,” Wenzel explained after some opening greetings and a smile for his betrothed, “and thought it best to come straight here. Tilly and I arrived home from the ball last night to discover Lady Barclay sitting on our doorstep—she did not want to wake the servants by knocking on the door. She had hoped to wait at the inn for the stagecoach, but all the doors there were locked for the night. She asked if she might stay with us until the early coach was due. I did not think it appropriate for her to travel on the common stage, and Tilly backed me up when I told her so.”

“We offered to take her to Penderris Hall,” Miss Wenzel said, “or at least to send her in our carriage, but she would not hear of putting us to so much inconvenience. The best we could do was to persuade her to travel post and then take her to the posting house in Meirion. We did that this morning and have just returned from seeing her on her way. She will be quite safe, Lady Lavinia, though she flatly refused to take my maid with her. And she has only one small bag of belongings.”

“I will see that a trunk is sent after her,” Percy said, and found Miss Wenzel’s eyes resting thoughtfully upon him.

“I daresay,” she said, “you may know what this is all about, my lord. Imogen was not saying.”

It was what everyone was thinking, of course, and had been thinking ever since he walked back into that infernal ballroom alone last night. Everyone’s attention was suddenly riveted upon him. The air fairly pulsed with expectant silence.

But it was not the time for charm or easy social converse. Or lies. Or the truth.

Percy turned and left the room, shutting the door firmly behind him.

I killed him! Do you understand now? I killed my husband. I took a gun and I shot him between the eyes. It was quite deliberate.

And the devil of it was, he believed her.

And in doing so, he had plunged deep into the very heart of darkness with her—a place he had been at great pains all his life to avoid.

I killed him.

*   *   *

Imogen arrived two days early at Penderris, and she had come by post chaise, alone, with only one small bag. Nevertheless, George, Duke of Stanbrook, did not bat an eyelash. He must have seen the chaise coming and was out on the terrace waiting to hand her down.

“Imogen, my dear,” he said. “How delightful!”

But then he took a penetrating look at her and drew her all the way into his arms and held her tightly.

She did not know how long they stood like that or what happened to the chaise. The tension gradually eased out of her body as she breathed in the scent of him and of home—or what had been a safe haven of a home for three years and was still her refuge and strength.

He took her hand on his arm when she finally stepped back and led her inside, talking easily to her just as if her early arrival and the manner of it were not quite untoward. He talked to her in a similar manner for the rest of the day and all of the next, until Hugo and Lady Trentham arrived halfway through the afternoon, also early. They had set off from home a day before they needed to, Gwen, Lady Trentham, explained, all smiles and cheerfulness, because they thought perhaps they would need to travel by easier stages than usual with the baby. They had been wrong, however, and here they were.

Hugo, large and imposing and as severe looking as ever with his close-cropped hair and tendency to frown, slapped George on the shoulder and pumped his hand while declaring that he was now the slave of two females. “A more than willing slave, though, I make haste to add,” he said as he turned. “You have arrived even earlier than us, Imogen? That makes me feel better.”

And he beamed at her and opened his arms and then stopped and frowned and tilted his head to one side. “Come and be hugged, then, lass,” he said more gently, and once more she was enfolded in safety.

But there was Gwen to be hugged too and Baby Melody Emes to be admired—her nurse was just carrying her inside and Hugo was taking her between his huge hands, fairly bursting with pride.

The others arrived the following day. Ben and Samantha, Lady Harper, came first, from Wales. Ben walked into the house and up the stairs with his two canes, but he propelled himself about much of the time after that in a wheeled chair, having decided that it was not an admission of defeat but rather a moving forward into a new, differently active phase of his life.

Ralph arrived next with his very red-haired duchess, whom Imogen had not met before and who begged to be called Chloe. Imogen had not seen Ralph either since he inherited the dukedom on the death of his grandfather last year. His face was still badly scarred from a war wound, but there was a new serenity in his face.

Vincent came with Sophia, Lady Darleigh, and their son, and as usual it was hard to remember he could not see, he moved about so easily, especially with the help of his dog. Flavian came last with Agnes, Lady Ponsonby, and the announcement almost as soon as they stepped through the door that he was expecting to be a father within the next six or seven months and they must be very gentle with him because it was all a strain upon his nerves. And he spoke, Imogen was interested to note, with very little of the stammer that had stubbornly stayed with him even after he had recovered most of his faculties after his head injuries healed.

“In that case, Flave,” Ralph said, “then I need gentle handling too. Never mind Chloe. She is made of sterner stuff.”

And they exchanged shoulder slaps and grinned at each other in a male, self-satisfied, slightly sheepish way.

All of them—except Vincent—looked with narrow-eyed closeness at Imogen before hugging her. All of them hugged her more tightly than usual and looked into her eyes again before being caught up in the general hubbub of greetings. And even Vincent, after he had hugged her, gazed into her eyes—he had an uncanny knack of doing that—and spoke softly.

“Imogen?”

But she merely kissed his cheek and turned to hug Sophia and exclaim over how much Thomas, their one-year-old, had grown.

Two days passed and two nights, during which the seven of them sat up late, as they invariably did during these weeks, talking more deeply from the heart than they had all day.

On the first night Vincent reported that his panic attacks came far less frequently as time went on. Just sometimes it came over him, the realization that his blindness was not a temporary thing from which he would eventually recover, but a life sentence.

“I will never see again,” he said. “I will never see my wife or Thomas. I will never see the new babe when it arrives—ah, I was not supposed to mention that there is another on the way because it is not quite certain yet. I shall have to confess to Sophie when I go up to bed. But why is it that though I accepted my condition long ago and have a marvelously blessed life and rarely even think about being blind, it can suddenly hit me like a giant club as though I were only just noticing?”

“The trouble is, Vince,” Hugo said, reaching across Imogen on the sofa the three of them shared to pat his knee, “that most of the time we do not notice either.”

“Vince is blind?” Flavian said. “Is that why he walks into d-doors from time to time?”

On the second night, George admitted that he still had the dreams in which he thought of just the right words to speak to his wife to stop her jumping off the cliff and was close enough to catch her hand in his and pull her back from the edge—but always the words and the hand were just too late. In reality, though he had seen it happen, he had been too far away to save her.

Imogen had hardly spoken since her arrival except in purely sociable platitudes. Indeed, she had talked more with the wives than with her friends. But on the third night no one had much to say. It happened that way sometimes. Their lives were not always brimming over with problems and difficulties. Indeed, five of them at least seemed remarkably contented with their lives, even happy. And three of them—oh, goodness, three—were expectant fathers. Their future reunions were going to be very different. Even this year there was Thomas toddling about and jabbering in a language even his mother and father did not understand, though Hugo offered some marvelous interpretations as he tickled his daughter under the chin to see her wide, toothless smile.

Now on the third night, Imogen drew an audible breath during a longish, companionable silence and closed her eyes. “I told him,” she blurted out.

The silence took on an element of incomprehension.

But of course, they knew nothing. She had told them nothing. It seemed incredible to her that they did not know all that had been so central to her life for longer than a month.

“The Earl of Hardford,” she explained. “He came to Hardford early last month. He— I— We—”

Hugo, seated next to her again, took her hand and drew it firmly through his arm before covering it with his own. Vincent on her other side patted her thigh and then gripped it.

“I told him my story,” she said. “But he was not satisfied. He knew there was something missing and he asked again. It was the night before I came here. It was impossible not to tell him. So I did.”

She tipped back her head, her eyes still closed—and the back of her head bumped against Flavian’s chest. He had come up behind her, and his hands came to rest on her shoulders. Her free hand was suddenly in a strong grip. Ralph was down on his haunches in front of her.

And she realized she was wailing, a high, keening sound that did not seem to be issuing from her but must be.

George’s voice was calm and soft—ah, what memories it evoked!

“What did you tell him, Imogen?” he asked.

“That I k-k-killed Dicky,” she wailed.

“And what else?”

“What else is there to tell?” She hardly recognized her own voice. “There is nothing else. In the whole wide world, there is only that. I killed him.”

“Imogen.” It was Ben’s voice this time. “There is a great deal more than just that.”

“No, there is n-n-not,” she said, shaking her head from side to side. “There is only that.”

From behind her, Flavian cupped her jaw in his hands.

“One must ask,” he said with his sighing, rather bored voice—it was deliberate, she thought, to try to soothe her with normality. “Does this Hardford fellow love you, perchance, Imogen? Or does he merely like to play heavy-handed lord of the manor?”

She opened her eyes and lifted her head. “It does not matter,” she said. “Oh, but he is not heavy-handed or dictatorial or obnoxious, though I thought he was at first.”

“And do you perchance love him?” Flavian asked.

“I cannot,” she said, drawing her hands free of Ralph’s and Hugo’s arms and setting the heels of them against her eyes. “I will not. You all know that.”

Ralph and Flavian resumed their seats. Hugo set an arm about her shoulders and drew her head down onto his shoulder.

“Why are you so upset?” he asked. “I mean, why are you so upset?”

“Someone else betrayed him,” she said. “Dicky, I mean. He was never meant to come home alive from the Peninsula. Someone betrayed him to the French.”

And she poured out the story of the smugglers and Mr. Ratchett and James Mawgan and her husband’s valet and how Percy had confronted them all when no one else would since Dicky’s time and had pursued the matter recklessly and relentlessly until he had exposed the truth and the two men had been arrested and were awaiting trial. She had no idea if her story made sense.

Vincent was still patting her thigh when she had finished.

“I came here early,” she said, lowering her hands to her lap. “I needed to feel safe. I needed to— I needed—”

“Us,” Flavian said. “We all need us too, Imogen. You can rest here. We all can.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “But it must be horribly late. I should let you all go to bed. I am exhausted if you are not. Thank you. I do love you all.”

George, smiling gently, was holding out a hand for hers.

“Come,” he said. “I’ll see you to your door. You know you can always come here, Imogen.”

“I also know,” she said, getting to her feet, “that I must live my own life. And I will. This is just a brief setback, like Vincent’s panic attacks. Good night.”

She squared her shoulders and looked at them each in turn. She did not even notice that none of them was making a move to follow her from the room.

*   *   *

Percy did not know why he was angry, but he was. No, not angry exactly. Disgruntled. All out of sorts. In as bad a mood as he could possibly be without actually snapping at everyone who came in his path.

Jealous.

But that was preposterous. Why would he be jealous of a collection of men he did not even know? Men who called themselves by the pretentious name of Survivors—with a capital S, if you please? Wasn’t everyone a survivor? Wasn’t he? What gave them exclusive right to the word? And how much could they love her when a number of them—he could not remember if it was all—had gone off and married other women.

But it was to them she had gone running—in the middle of the night without a word to him. Even her note had been addressed to her aunt.

And now he was playing messenger boy and deliveryman combined. In the carriage with him were letters from Lady Lavinia, Mrs. Ferby, his mother, Beth, Lady Quentin, and Miss Wenzel. It was ridiculous. If many more people had written, he would have needed a wagon to pull behind. And there was a large trunk of her belongings in the boot of the carriage, leaving hardly any room for his own luggage.

And here he was arriving at Penderris Hall, which was just as large and imposing as he had expected and considerably closer to the ever-present cliffs than Hardford Hall was, and he was having second—or was it forty-second—thoughts about the wisdom of coming here but it was too late to turn back because his arrival seemed to have been noticed and the main doors had opened and a tall man with elegantly graying hair—damn him!—was stepping outside to see who the devil was arriving when he had not been invited and Percy could see that he was the Duke of Stanbrook. He had seen the man a few times at the House of Lords.

He felt stupid and belligerent, and if the man stood in his way, he would first flatten his nose and then take him apart with his bare hands and maybe his teeth too. He was going to see her—he must see her—and that was that. She had had no business running off that night without giving him a chance to collect his thoughts and respond to what she had told him. He was going to talk to her—now. She owed him that much, by Jove.

Stanbrook was holding out his right hand as Percy stepped down from the carriage and closed the door on Hector.

“Hardford, I believe,” Stanbrook said, and Percy shook his hand.

“I have brought Lady Barclay’s trunk,” he said, “and some letters for her. And I will see her.”

The ducal eyebrows went up. “Come inside,” he said, “and have some refreshments. Your man may proceed to the stables after unloading the trunk. Someone will see to him there.” And he turned to lead the way inside.

There was an army lined up in the hall, of course. Well, there were only four of them in addition to Stanbrook, but they looked like an army. Or an impregnable fortress. But let them just try to stand in his way. Percy almost hoped they would. He was spoiling for a fight.

Stanbrook introduced him with perfectly mild courtesy—damn him again. The great big bruiser with the closely cropped hair was Trentham; the one with the nasty slash across his face was the Duke of Worthingham; the blond one who looked as though the whole world had been created for his amusement was Ponsonby; and the slight, blue-eyed boy was Darleigh. Percy looked at him, looked away, and then looked again. Was he not the blind one? And then he saw that the eyes that had appeared to be looking directly at him were actually missing his face by a few inches. It was a bit eerie.

Civil enough greetings were exchanged, and then another man appeared on the stairs, tottering slowly down them with the aid of two canes that encased his lower arms.

“Sir Benedict Harper,” Stanbrook said.

Six of them. The seventh was missing.

“I will see Lady Barclay,” Percy said curtly. Good manners might have served him better, but to hell with good manners. He was in a bad mood.

“There may be a slight problem,” the blond one said on a sigh, as though even speaking those few words was a trial to him. “For you see, Hardford, Lady Barclay will perhaps not see you.”

“And frankly,” scar-face added, “I would not blame her.”

The big tough one folded his arms and looked tougher.

“Then ask her,” Percy said, “and find out. And tell her I am not budging from here until she does see me.”

He felt as though he were standing back from himself and observing his bad behavior with a slightly incredulous shake of the head. Where had all his famed charm fled?

“Say please,” he added, glaring at the lot of them.

“Perhaps you will step into the visitors’ salon,” Stanbrook suggested, “and have a drink while you wait. The others will go with you while I go talk to Lady Barclay. I warn you, though, that she may refuse to speak to you. She saw you come and was less than delighted.”

Percy felt a bit like a hot air balloon that had sprung a leak.

“Let me go, George,” Darleigh said. “Let me talk to her. And I will remember to say please, Hardford.” He smiled with great sweetness. “Go and have some refreshments. You are upset.”

And there went the rest of the hot air, leaving Percy feeling limp and deflated.

Good God and a thousand devils, what if she would not see him? He could hardly camp out beneath her window—even if he knew which one it was—forever and ever, could he? Not with the army on the prowl. He particularly did not like the look of the giant.

He turned in the direction of the room Stanbrook was indicating, while the blind Darleigh set off in the opposite direction, led by a dog Percy was just noticing for the first time. He remembered that he had left Hector in the carriage. The wretched hound had flatly refused to be left at home.