Only a Kiss by Mary Balogh
25
Imogen was in the conservatory, where she had taken refuge after seeing the familiar carriage approaching. She would not have had even that much warning if she had not been standing in the drawing room window at the time, rocking a sleeping Melody Emes in her arms and thinking that there could surely be no lovelier feeling in the world.
She was gazing out through the conservatory windows now at some daffodils blooming in the grass, though she was not really seeing them. She heard someone come—someone with a dog—but did not turn her head.
Vincent sat down beside her, first feeling for the seat. His dog settled by his knee.
“Imogen,” he said, and he reached out and patted the back of her hand. “Does he always behave badly?”
“Oh.” And strangely, bizarrely, she found herself smiling. “Did he behave badly?”
“There is a smile in your voice,” he said, and that sobered her. “He was bursting with belligerence. It would not have taken much provocation for him to take us all on at once with his bare fists. I could not see him, of course, but I could hear him. Is he a large man?”
“Yes,” she said. “Not huge, though.”
“Then Hugo alone could have knocked him down with one punch,” he said, “though I have the feeling he would had hopped right up again for more punishment. What does he look like?”
“Oh,” she said, frowning, “tall, dark, handsome—all the old clichés.”
“And is he a cliché?” he asked.
“No.” She was still frowning. “I thought he was at first, Vincent. But not now that I know him better. No one is less of a cliché. He is . . . oh, no matter. Did he go quietly?”
She felt as though there were a leaden weight at the bottom of her stomach as she imagined his carriage driving away from Penderris. Actually, it had been there since the night of his birthday ball, that cold, heavy weight. Would it never go away?
“He is in the salon with the other men,” he said. “He wants to see you. He demanded that one of us come and tell you so. But then he added a please.”
Her lips quirked into a smile again, though she felt nearer to tears than laughter.
“Tell him no,” she said. “And add thank you, if you will.”
“We all expected him to come, you know,” he said. “We were all agreed upon it the night before last after you went to bed. There was no point in laying wagers. We were all on the same side. And Sophie agreed with me, and the other ladies did too. We have all been expecting him to come.”
There was nothing to say into the pause that followed.
“He is terribly upset,” Vincent told her.
“I thought he was belligerent,” she said.
“Precisely,” he said. “But there was nothing to be belligerent about, you see, Imogen. George went outside to greet him like a courteous host, and we all behaved with the greatest civility.”
She could just imagine them all lined up in the hall, not realizing how formidable they could look when they were standing between someone and what that someone wanted.
Poor Percy! He had done nothing to deserve any of this.
“I will send him away if you wish,” Vincent said. “I believe he will go even though he told us he would not budge until he saw you. He is a gentleman and will not continue to pester you if your answer is no. But I think you ought to see him.”
“It is hopeless, Vincent,” she said.
“Then tell him so.”
She drew a deep, audible breath and let it out. Vincent, she noticed irrelevantly, needed a haircut. His fair, wavy hair almost touched his shoulders. But when had he ever not needed a haircut? And why should it be cut? It made him look like an angel. His wide blue eyes only enhanced that impression.
“Send him here,” she said.
He got to his feet, and his dog stood beside him. But he hesitated. “We never ever offer one another unsolicited advice, Imogen, do we?” he said.
“No, we do not,” she said firmly, and he turned away. “But consider your advice solicited. What do you wish to say?”
He turned back. “I believe,” he said gently, “we all have a perfect right to make ourselves unhappy if that is what we freely choose. But I am not sure we have the right to allow our own unhappiness to cause someone else’s. The trouble with life sometimes is that we are all in it together.”
And he left without another word. That was advice? She was not even sure what he had been trying to say. Except that it made perfect sense while she waited and pondered his words. Are we not all responsible just for our own selves? she thought. Why should we be responsible for anyone else? Would that not be just meddling interference?
The trouble with life sometimes is that we are all in it together.
And she remembered her relatively minor decision to dance again at the village assemblies.
She heard more footsteps. Firm, booted feet this time. Belligerent feet, perhaps. Again she did not turn her head. He stopped a short distance away. He did not sit down.
“Imogen,” he said softly.
She clasped her hands in her lap, lacing her fingers. She touched the tips of her thumbs together.
“You do not play fair,” he said.
“I am not involved in any game with you, Percy,” she said. “I cannot play either fairly or unfairly if I do not play at all.”
“You told me a story,” he said, “and left a hole in it so large and gaping that it would have made a crater in any highway wide enough to stretch right across the road. When I begged you to tell me the rest of it, you offered me a pebble with which to fill that great hole.”
“What I told you was a pebble?” She looked at him for the first time, anger sparking. She was shocked at what she saw. It was not quite a week since they’d last met, but his face looked drawn and pale with smudges beneath both eyes that suggested lack of sleep. The eyes themselves were fathomless.
The trouble with life sometimes is that we are all in it together.
“You shot him,” he said, “between the eyes, deliberately. I believe you. But why, Imogen? How did you get to him? Where did the gun come from? Why did you use it to kill him? Maybe I have done nothing to deserve answers except dare to love you, but tell me for that reason if not for any other. Help me to understand. Tell me the whole of it.”
She drew one breath and then another. “Over a number of days,” she said, “they were unable to break him. I have no idea how many days that was. They all ran together for me. They must have thought he carried information inside his head that was essential to them. Perhaps they were right—I do not even know. Finally they took me to him—four of them, all officers. There were two other men there too. He was chained upright to one wall. I scarcely recognized him.”
She lowered her head and touched the heels of her hands to her eyes for a moment.
“Oh, good God,” she thought he muttered.
“They told him what they were going to do,” she said. “They were going to take turns with me while he and the others watched. I have no idea why one of them set his pistol down on a table not far from where I stood. Contempt for a helpless woman, perhaps? Carelessness, perhaps? Or perhaps he was to go first and needed to divest himself of a few things. I picked it up and held them all at bay, their hands in the air. But the hopelessness of the situation was immediately apparent. If I shot one of them, the others would be upon me in an instant and nothing would have been accomplished. They would have raped me and he probably would have broken—maybe before it even started, maybe after one or two. He could not have lived with himself after, even if they had let him live, which is doubtful. If I forced one of them to free him, I could see that he would not be able to walk out of there. And even if I devised a way, there were dozens more soldiers in the building and hundreds, even thousands more outside. I do not believe it took me longer than a second to know what the only solution was. And Dicky knew it too. He was looking at me. Oh, God, he was smiling at me.”
She had to pause for a few moments to steady her breathing.
“And I knew what he was thinking and he knew what I was thinking—we could always do that. Yes, do it, he told me without speaking a word. Shoot me, Imogen. Do not waste your bullet on one of the French officers. And just before I did what he bade me do, his eyes said, Courage. And I did it. I shot him. I expected—he had expected—that I too would be dead moments later. It did not happen. Those very courteous . . . gentlemen, furious though they were, knew how to punish a woman, and it was not with rape. They let me go, even escorted me back to my own people. They left me to a living hell.”
She did not know how long the silence stretched.
“Leave now, Percy,” she said. “I am a bottomless well of darkness. And you are full of light, even if you do feel that you have wasted the past ten years of your life. Go and forget about me. Go and be happy.”
He muttered that word again. It really was getting to be a habit.
“He loved you, Imogen,” he said. “If his eyes could have spoken to you for a little longer, if he had known that they would let you live, what would he have told you?”
“Oh.” She gulped.
“Don’t evade the question,” he said. “What would he have told you to do?”
Somehow he compelled honesty—an honesty that penetrated the layer upon layer of guilt in which she had wrapped herself ever since that most dreadful of moments in that most dreadful of places.
“He would have t-t-told me to be h-h-happy,” she said, her voice thin and high again, as it had been the night before last.
“If he could somehow be aware of the past eight or more years,” he said, “and how you have lived them and how you intend to live the rest of your life, how would he feel, Imogen?”
She looked at him again. “Oh, this is unfair, Percy,” she cried. “No one else has dared ask this of me—not the physician, not any of my fellow Survivors. No one.”
“I am neither the physician nor any of those six men,” he said. “And I dare ask the question. How would he feel? You know the answer. You knew him to the depths of his being. You loved him.”
“He would have been dreadfully upset,” she said. She drew her upper lip between her teeth and bit into it, but she could not prevent the hot tears from welling into her eyes and spilling over onto her cheeks. “But how can I let myself live on, Percy? To smile and laugh, to enjoy myself, to love again, to make love? I am afraid I will forget him. I am terrified that I will forget him.”
“Imogen,” he said, “someone would have to cut into your head and remove your brain and smash it to pieces. And even then your heart and your very bones would remember.”
She fumbled for a handkerchief, but he took a few steps closer and pressed his own large one into her hand. She held it to her eyes.
He was on his knees in front of her then, she realized, his hands on the bench on either side of her.
“Imogen,” he said, “I tremble at my presumption in trying to win your love for myself when you have loved such a man. But I do not expect to take his place. No one can ever take anyone else’s place. Everyone must carve out his own. I want you to love me for my sorry self, which I will try very hard for the rest of my life to make worthy of you—and worthy of me. I can do it. We can always do anything as long as we are alive. We can always change, grow, evolve into a far better version of ourselves. It is surely what life is for. Give me a chance. Let me love you. Let yourself love me. I will give you time if you need it. Just give me hope. If you can. And if you cannot, then so be it. I will leave you in peace. But please—try to give me a definite maybe if you possibly can.”
She lowered the handkerchief after drying her eyes. He looked like a poor, anxious schoolboy, hoping at least to avoid a caning. She reached out and cupped his face with her hands.
“I do not want to drain all your light, Percy,” she said.
Something sparked in his eyes.
“But there is never an end to light, Imogen,” he told her, “or to love. I’ll fill you so full of light that you will glow in the dark, and then when I want to love you in a very physical way I will be able to find you.”
Oh, absurd, absurd Percy. Yet so pale and anxious despite his ridiculous words.
“Do I dare?” she asked, but more of herself than of him.
He did not answer her. But someone else did, deep inside her in a voice she recognized—Courage. And for the first time in more than eight years her mind listened to the tone in which that silent word had been spoken. It was one of deep peace.
He had welcomed death—at her hands. It had released him from intolerable pain and the certain knowledge that there would be more of it before he died. And it had released her from the horrors of rape—he had believed that as he died, and he had been right, though not quite in the way he had expected.
He had been at peace when he died. She had been the instrument of his death, or of his release, depending upon how one looked at it.
She could live again. Surely she could. She owed it to him, and perhaps to herself. And perhaps to Percy. Oh, she could live again.
“I will wrap myself from head to toe in a thick blanket,” she said, “and you will have to search for me. It will be more sporting and more fun that way.”
She watched the smile grow in his eyes and gradually light up his whole tired face. And his arms closed about her like iron bands, and his forehead came to rest on her shoulder, and he wept.
* * *
It was the second week of May before Percy’s wedding day finally dawned. He thought it was the same calendar year as that in which he had become betrothed to Imogen, but it could easily be anything up to five years after. It seemed like forever.
He had wanted to get up from his knees there in the conservatory at Penderris and dash off in pursuit of the nearest special license, dash her back to Hardford Hall, and then dash her off to the church in Porthmare for the nuptials—all within one day if it had been humanly possible.
Alas, sanity had prevailed, though not necessarily his own.
Those friends of hers had all assured her that if she must leave their reunion early, then they quite understood and would be delighted for her—or words to that effect. The wives had assented too with hugs and kisses and sentimental tears. But they had all somehow managed to look collectively forlorn at the same time, and it was Percy himself who had declared that there was no way on this earth he was going to come between his newly betrothed and the dear friends he hoped would also be his dearest friends in the future—or foolish words to that effect.
He had stayed for a few days, during which time he almost lost the affections of Hector to a one-year-old toddler who chased him and mauled him and giggled over him and fell asleep on his doggie stomach and generally enslaved him.
Percy had written a whole library of letters—perish the memory—while Imogen did the same beside him in Stanbrook’s library, and sent them off. And then he had returned to London, where he saw to putting notices in the morning papers and arranging for banns to be read and—soon enough—being caught up in a ferocious tornado of wedding plans as his family gathered about him in force and his mother arrived from Derbyshire—I came to London from Cornwall via the scenic route through Derbyshire had become her joke of the moment.
Then the Penderris contingent had arrived in force, bringing Imogen with them—she was staying at Stanford House with the duke and had been joined there by her mother and the mother’s sister, who were somehow related to Stanbrook.
Lady Lavinia and Mrs. Ferby, Imogen’s brother and his wife, and numerous other people come for the wedding, had filled the Pulteney Hotel to the rafters.
There had been dinners and parties and soirees at the homes of various aunts and uncles of Percy’s; a betrothal ball for Meredith and Wenzel at Uncle Roderick’s, at which Percy’s engagement had been celebrated too; a ball at the Duke of Worthingham’s, at which there had been a betrothal cake in the center of the supper table; and another ball hosted jointly by Lady Trentham and her cousin, Viscountess Ravensberg, at which Percy found himself being congratulated by a rather large number of Bedwyns, including the formidable Duke of Bewcastle himself. Percy had heard him speak in the House of Lords a time or two, and for no apparent reason stood in awe of the man. Perhaps his intense light silver eyes had something to do with it, or his austere, haughty demeanor. It was something of a surprise to discover that he had a pretty though not ravishingly beautiful wife, whose smile seemed to light her up from the inside out and who seemed not one whit cowed by her husband.
It had all been enough, Percy decided as Watkins dressed him for his wedding all in silver and gray and white, to make him dashed sorry he had been forced to agree to marry the proper way—that had been Imogen’s way of putting it, anyway.
“Oh, Percy,” she had said with a sigh when he had still been making hopeful noises about going off in search of a special license. “I do so wish we could marry that way. But a wedding is not just about the bride and groom, is it? It is about their family and friends too. It is one of those rare celebratory events that punctuate a happy life. Let’s wait and marry in the proper way.”
He had not asked if marrying the other way would be improper. He would have given her the sun if she had asked for it, or the moon, or a proper wedding.
A proper bridegroom went to church—St. George’s on Hanover Square, of course—clad in silver, gray, and white, with yards of lace frothing at neck and cuffs and a diamond the size of a small egg winking in the linen and lace folds at his neck and rings and fobs and the Lord knew what other finery about his person.
And with unsteady knees. And two hands full of thumbs, any two or three of which were bound to drop the wedding ring at the key moment.
Cyril was no help, and Percy wondered if he should have chosen someone else to be his best man.
“What if I should drop the ring?” Cyril asked on the way to church.
Surely one of the functions of a best man—the principal function, in fact—was to calm the nerves of the bridegroom.
“Then you crawl around on the floor until you recover it,” Percy said. “It will not happen.”
“I have never done this before,” Cyril added.
“Neither have I,” Percy told him.
All the pews inside the church would surely have been filled just with family members and close friends. But of course, because this was a proper wedding, everyone who had a remote connection to the ton had been invited, and since the Season was just getting nicely launched and this was the very first fashionable wedding of the year—there would be others, since the Season was also the great marriage mart—everyone and his dog had accepted. Well, not dogs, actually. Hector’s nose was severely out of joint. When he had tried to trot unobtrusively out to the carriage, Percy had put his foot down, not an easy thing to do with an animal that sometimes had difficulty with the master/creature distinction.
The church was packed. There might even be a few people sitting up on the roof. There should be a few rows of chairs up there.
Cyril’s teeth were chattering almost audibly. Percy, seated with him at the front of the church, concentrated upon his ten thumbs and the necessity of converting eight of them back into fingers before they arrived at the ring part of the ceremony. He flexed them and did a mental check of his knees. He could not get married sitting down, could he?
And then it was starting—really starting. The clergyman, gorgeously vested, arrived at the front of the church, the buzz of conversation died to an expectant hush, the congregation got to its feet, and the organ struck up with something impressively proper.
Percy’s knees worked, and he turned to watch his bride approach along the nave, on the arm of her brother.
Lord, dear Lord.
She was all ice blue simplicity and elegance. Not a frill or a flounce or even half a yard of lace in sight. Not a curl or a wavy tendril of hair escaping from her plain straw bonnet trimmed only with a wide ribbon to match her dress. Not a jewel, except for something sparkling in her ears.
She passed elaborate splendor in the pews on both sides of her as she came. They paled into insignificance. She looked like a Nordic goddess or a Viking princess or some such thing.
She was Imogen.
For a moment when she drew closer he thought she was the marble lady. Her face was pale and set, her eyes fixed upon him. And then—watch it, knees!—she smiled. And there was no need of candles or any other illumination in St. George’s. The church was flooded with light. Or perhaps it was only his heart. Or his soul.
He did a mental check of his facial muscles and discovered that he was smiling back at her.
It was really a dashed shame, he thought later, for a fellow to miss his own wedding. But he effectively did just that, so dazzled was he by the light she brought with her and the warmth that reached out from her to envelop him too. He thought he remembered someone saying Dearly beloved, in the tone only a clergyman ever used, and he did remember a moment’s anxiety as he saw Cyril’s hand shaking like a leaf in a strong breeze while it held a gold ring, and he certainly remembered hearing that he and Imogen were now man and wife together and no man should even dream of putting them asunder and those other things that all meant simply that one was married right and tight for all eternity.
But he missed everything else.
He came back to himself only when he and his bride were in the vestry signing the register and Imogen was signing her old name for the last time.
“Though it remains the same,” her brother remarked with a chuckle, “with the addition of Countess of Hardford.”
“No,” she said softly, “it changes. All of it. I am married to Percy now.”
Percy could have bawled, but—fortunately—did not.
And then they were walking back along the nave together—he remembered to imitate the speed of a turtle—while the organ played an anthem that seemed designed to lift the top right off one’s head so that one’s soul could soar straight to heaven, and Imogen’s mother and aunts and Mrs. Ferby and his own mother and assorted aunts wept shamelessly and everyone else smiled enough to cause wrinkles.
“For two pins,” he murmured to his bride, “I would start skipping like a boy.”
“For two pins,” she murmured back, smiling to both right and left, “I would join you.”
“But we are at a proper wedding,” he said.
“Alas.”
And then they were outside and the sun that had been at war with the clouds covering the sky earlier had won and a cheering multitude of gawkers and the merely curious greeted them as well as a small army of grinning Survivors and cousins and friends armed with the petals of a few thousand unfortunate flowers. The petals were soon raining down about them and quite ruining the lovely paleness of their wedding attire.
And Imogen was laughing.
He would never, ever grow tired of hearing—and seeing—her laugh. He was laughing too, of course, but that was less of a rarity. Indeed, perhaps she cherished the rare sight of him looking earnest.
“Oh, look,” she wailed, though it was a happy wail. “Look, Percy.”
He did not need to. He had fully expected it, having been involved in his fair share of weddings over the past ten years or so. Their open carriage, bedecked nicely with flowers, was also all set to drag what appeared to be half of London’s kitchen hardware behind it, and also an ancient boot or two, all the way to Stanbrook House, where the duke had insisted the wedding breakfast be held.
“After all,” Percy said as he handed her into the carriage and the congregation began to spill out of the church behind them, “there may be one or two people in town who have not heard that we are getting married today. They must be made to hear.”
“I think all the neighbors in Cornwall will hear too,” she said as she settled herself on the seat and he took his place beside her. “It would not surprise me if Annie Prewett at Stanbrook House could hear the din.”
Annie, the deaf-mute housemaid who had had the courage to pass on information about the whereabouts of Ratchett and Mawgan, had been promoted to the position of Imogen’s personal maid after she had demonstrated that she had some skill in the performance of the necessary duties. And in front of them now, up on the box of the wedding carriage, waiting for the signal to move off, sat Percy’s coachman and his new footman, Colin Bains, both of them resplendent in new livery.
“And since this is a proper wedding, Lady Hardford,” Percy said in the precious remaining moments before the carriage moved and the unholy din of moving, jostling metal drowned out the joyful pealing of the church bells, “we must do what is now proper.”
She turned a laughing face toward him as he set an arm about her shoulders and cupped her chin between the thumb and forefinger of his other hand.
“But of course we must,” she said. “My love.”
Cheers, laughter, the ringing bells, the snorting and stamping of the horses, the deafening din of hardware—none of it mattered as he kissed his bride and her hand came to his shoulder.
Percy was, at least for the moment, in another world. And Imogen was right there with him.
