He pressed kisses on her eyelids, so she closed them, wishing that she couldn’t smell him so well. Because he smelled better than the roses, better than the drifting scent of thyme and rosemary.
“True, nonetheless,” he said.
“Not so. Why, all three of the young ladies I’ve chaperoned have made happy marriages. Josie is the only one left.”
“And you. You have to find a spouse as well. For yourself.”
She didn’t want to think about that, so she leaned toward him again, and he took up her silent invitation.
19
From The Earl of Hellgate,
Chapter the Fifteenth
My Helena now wears another man’s ring, sleeps in another man’s bed, calls herself by another name. But may I venture to hope that some small part of her heart remains mine? Some small part of her heart remembers dancing free…until I caught her, of course. Even then the dance continued. She knew…she knew at the time, Dear Reader, that she was to be married.
Ah, dear Helena, should you chance to read my poor Memoirs, think of me!
Mayne finally found his fiancée tucked away in Lady Mucklowe’s study, chatting with a circle of young women who were sharing a plate full of small pasties and what looked like three bottles of champagne. They’d all taken off their masks and were laughing like hyenas when he walked into the room.
He was conscious of a feeling of acute annoyance. Why in the hell did he have to constantly search for Sylvie? Why couldn’t she stay in the ballroom? She was never in sight.
Though to be fair, she didn’t engage in any sort of impropriety. Not Sylvie. Her touch-me-not air was so strong that sometimes he found it incredible that she had agreed to marry him.
The thought brought a smile to his lips. It didn’t even waver when she looked up at him with an unmistakably displeased expression.
“Mayne,” she said.
“Darling,” he said, picking up her hand and kissing it. “I’ve been searching for you. I was hoping to take you into supper.” Little Polly Cooper, who was suffering through an infatuation for him, giggled madly.
Lady Gemima grinned up at him. “Are you taking her away, Mayne? Because we’re finding your fiancée absolutely delightful.” Mayne never knew quite what to think about Gemima. She was beautiful, of course. But she was so intelligent that it was rather disconcerting. She had a way of making a man aware of his own faults without even mentioning them.
Sylvie’s eyes were sparkling as they walked out of the room. “I am making some friends here in London. I am so happy about this!”
He glanced down at her. “That’s wonderful, Sylvie. Gemima—”
“Oh, do you know her?” Sylvie dropped his arm and clasped her hands before her. “I find her of all the most interesting. So original. And her gown was by a male modiste, can you imagine? His name is…”
She chattered on. Mayne’s mind wandered. He hadn’t seen Josie in a while. He’d seen his sister dance by with a fair man who looked faintly familiar, but he couldn’t place him with a mask. He’d rounded a corner and come across Annabel kissing her husband, Ardmore, which was just like her. And she’d given him her usual impudent grin.
He didn’t think it was a mistake to worry about Josie. He had a funny feeling that she might not avoid improprieties as she ought. After all, her sisters had found themselves extraordinarily happy marriages by behaving in less than proper ways. Josie had almost certainly registered that fact.
Then he noticed with a start that Sylvie had stopped talking and was looking up at him.
“I’m sorry, my dear,” he said. “My mind wandered for a moment.”
“Your mind often wanders when I speak to you of important things,” she said with a bit of a snap in her voice.
He was surprised. Had she been speaking of something important? “Please tell me again. I promise to give it all my attention.”
Sylvie pouted, but then gave in and smiled at him. “I was telling you of Mrs. Anglin’s indiscretion. A most important topic, as I’m sure you’ll agree.”
“Absolutely.”
“Everyone is saying that she appears in those memoirs that everyone is talking about! Apparently she is portrayed as a character called something odd, Mustardseed or the like. Perhaps I should read the memoirs, but I read so slowly in English.”
“That’s an unlikely suggestion,” Mayne said. “Mrs. Anglin hasn’t the joie de vivre for that sort of high jinks.” Plus, though he didn’t want to say so to his fiancée, he was perfectly capable of recognizing his own life when it was written down in lamentably bad prose. To his memory, Mustardseed was Mrs. Thomasin Symonds.
Sylvie shuddered visibly. “I shall never touch her hand again ungloved, I assure you, after what I was just told. How she could lower herself!”
“There weren’t that many details, were there?” Mayne asked. He had thrown the book away unfinished, but all he could remember was a lot of talk about throbbing chests and hushed voices.
“Too many,” Sylvie said. “I found it all most distasteful, at least as Gemima was describing it.”
Mayne looked down at her and marveled once more at his fiancée’s perfection. She was like a white, white rose whom no one had touched, or soiled in any way. She rarely allowed herself to be touched without gloves. She would never treat him to a vulgar scene in which she burst into tearful protestations of love for another man. She would never allow a younger version of himself (or Hellgate) to lure her into a stranger’s bed.
She was his, and only his.
The very idea of it sent a bolt of passion through him.
“Shall we walk in the gardens?” he asked, hearing the huskiness in his own voice.
She glanced up at him, but appeared to see nothing amiss, because she nodded. “I am not in the least hungry,” she said. Like a bird, Sylvie appeared to eat only crumbs, and then only at the oddest times. He had never actually seen her eat a meal, for example. She tended to move things around her plate and then place her tableware on top, as if concealing the contents.
He strolled all the way to the far end of the garden. Most of the revelers had poured back into the house. It was at least two in the morning now, and the garden was dark and mysterious.
“I’m not sure I like it here,” Sylvie whispered.
“It’s quite safe.”
“I know I am safe with you,” she said, smiling at him. “It’s one of the things I like about you, Mayne.”
“Won’t you call me Garret?” he asked. “At least when we’re alone?”
But she shook her head. “Absolutely not. It would only lend itself to the impression that we share a degree of inadvisable intimacy. Why should we present that illusion, when it is not the case?”
A solid argument.
“Perhaps we might be slightly more intimate,” Mayne said, his mind sliding quickly away from the memory of kissing Josie. He hadn’t realized it at the time, but that was a deeply disloyal kiss. Sylvie would dislike it, if she knew.
She frowned at him and her tone was slightly—just slightly—frosty. “How do you mean, sir?”
“This,” he said softly, and bent to kiss her. She was really quite small. He took her delicate face in his hands. It felt like the face of a child. She spoke through his kiss, as if his lips weren’t on hers.
“I am not enjoying this.”
“Oh,” he said, straightening up.
There was a tiny frown between her brows. “I am not in favor of intimacies before marriage,” she told him. “I thought we were in agreement on this front.”
“But a kiss,” he said hopelessly.
She raised her chin. “I am not the kind of woman who takes pleasure in courting disgrace in a garden, Mayne.”
“You wouldn’t be—” But there was a look in her eye that made it adamantly clear that she meant what she said.
The truth was that she couldn’t be as inviolable, as untouchable, as goddesslike as she was, if she were a light-heeled wench who would collapse int
o his arms with a giggle, the way so many other women had done in the past.
And he didn’t want that. He hadn’t had an affaire in almost two years now. He felt as if slowly, slowly, he was regaining a sense of himself, a cleansing from the dozens of tawdry little evenings when he walked home with perfume on his coat and tears on his sleeve. He had come to a stage in his life after which he wanted to share his life with one woman, and one who would be his alone, as he would be hers alone.
They turned in silent agreement back to the house. “I’m thinking of putting my stables in order for the next racing season,” he said.
“Didn’t you tell me that you meant to do that a month ago?” Sylvie inquired, not unkindly. “Do you need to hire someone?”
He’d forgotten that he’d told her…of course, he’d been thinking constantly about it for months. “It’s not an easy decision. I’d have to be there.”
“One should never allow a secondary to hire important staff,” Sylvie said rather vaguely, waving to a friend who was also going into supper. “Shall we sit with Miss Tarn, Mayne? She speaks French so divinely. She tells me that she’s had a private tutor for three years. I can’t think why more English people don’t bother to learn French properly.”
But Mayne was on the edge of an important decision. He was the type of man who would never bring himself to say such a thing, but he felt it might—would—change his life. Certainly, it would change Sylvie’s future life.
“No,” he said rather brusquely. “We need to talk, Sylvie. I never seem to find you alone.”
“That would be quite inappropriate,” Sylvie said, waving at Miss Tarn and mouthing no. He glanced to the side and saw she was wiggling her eyebrows to indicate some sort of silent disapproval of himself. Or was it mockery?
“We will be man and wife someday,” he observed.
“It sounds so horridly Puritanical when you say ‘man and wife.’ I’ll never be a wife, not in that pedestrian kind of way. I’m a lady first. And you’re a gentleman, not a man.”
He sighed. “A small table, please,” he told the footman bowing before him. “No, we will not be joining anyone.”
A moment later they were seated in such a way that Sylvie could see the entire room, and her reticule, shawl, and fan were arranged to her satisfaction. Then she turned her eyes to him. “Mayne,” she said, “what on earth is the matter?”
He felt a little of the uncertain clutch on his heart lessen. “I’ve made a mess of my life, Sylvie.” He said it flatly, without any drama.
“In what sense?” she asked, an enchanting little wrinkle appearing between her brows. “Have you lost your estate?” She put a hand over his. “I have a great deal of dowry, Mayne. It is yours.”
It almost made him feel teary. It must be because he’d been alone so long, and finally he had someone to talk over these issues. And she was so generous.
“Don’t worry!” she said. “My father, also, he has much funds, as you say in England. He will not allow a daughter of his to go without these funds.”
“It’s not money. I almost wish it were.”
“What then?”
“My life has slipped away in a series of tawdry little affaires and meaningless friendships. I haven’t done anything. I never took up my seat in Lords. I’m hugely wealthy, to be honest, Sylvie, but I had little to do with that either. My friend Felton advises my man. I scarcely know what I own, anymore.”
“Is that Lucius Felton?” Sylvie asked. And, at his nod: “A very wise thing to do, on your part. Mr. Felton is a genius in such things, is he not?”
“My estate runs itself,” Mayne said, out of the quiet desperation he’d felt for more than a year. “I haven’t taken up my seat in Lords because, frankly, I’d be a flat loss on the floor. I’ve no interest in enclosure acts or sending pickpockets to the Antipodes.”
“But what is wrong with this life?” Sylvie asked, looking at him with frank, curious eyes.
“What life?”
“This life,” she said. “It’s hard to put in English. But the life of a galant.”
“The life of a gentleman with nothing to do but enjoy himself,” Mayne translated. “I’ll tell you what such gentlemen do, Sylvie. They flirt with other men’s wives, and sometimes they bed them. They involve themselves in foolish bets over carriage rides and boxing matches.”
Sylvie nodded. “Yes, those things. And they manage their estate, and are kind to those beneath them.” (Sylvie’s father, after all, had supported the revolution, at least at the beginning.) “They have children and make certain those children are raised to be intelligent members of society, who know their place and what they should do in life.”
“That must be my problem,” Mayne said. “I don’t know my place. Nor yet what I should do in life.”
Sylvie’s little brow knit. “You should do…what you’re doing now. You are a good man, Mayne, with friends and substance. What more do you want?”
“I want to make something,” Mayne said helplessly. “Construct something.”
She stared at him, and then her mouth fell open. “You mean like that very odd marquis, the one who constructed a windmill on his estate to catch the wind?”
“No. Although if I had an inventing bend of mind, I would be happy to retire to the country and make windmills.”
“That would not do, so I am pleased to hear that you are not one of those. I would prefer to have nothing to do with inventors. They are extremely strange people, by all accounts. Of course, sometimes it is a useful trait. My father’s blacksmith was excellent at making pipes with strange bends in them.”
Mayne looked at his hands.
“Perhaps when we have children you will feel differently,” Sylvie said. Her voice was so sympathetic and yet nonplussed that Mayne couldn’t help but smile at her. He leaned over and dropped a kiss on her nose, even though she strongly disapproved of public displays.
“You’re very dear, do you know that?”
“No, I am not. I am very fortunate. I like being precisely what I am: a lady. I like to go to balls, and talk to my close friends.”
“That’s true enough,” Mayne said, taking her hand. “I can never find you because most of the time you are ensconced in the ladies’ retiring rooms, chattering away.”
She smiled at him. “That is where all interesting things happen at a ball.”
“Would you ever be happy spending a great deal of the year on my estate?” he asked, knowing the answer.
Her smile did not falter. “Never. But Mayne, if you decide that living in the country will make you contented, I am perfectly able to take care of myself. Your house here in London is in an excellent location. Once I have renovated it to the French style, it will be very comfortable. And then I have so many friends. I believe I shall be quite happy at—how do you call them in England?—house parties. Yes, that’s it. I would much dislike to think of myself as a shackle on your ankle.”
“A poetic simile,” Mayne said wryly. “I should miss you.”
“But we face a great many years together. I am certain that we shall like to live in different places for periods of time. I have often observed that the best marriages are so. I would much dislike it if either of us were unhappy, Mayne.”
“Where will the children be?”
She raised an eyebrow. “Why, where children are supposed to be. In the country, in town, wherever they wish to be.”
Mayne laughed. “They won’t express wishes for some time.”
“I dare say,” Sylvie said. “I know nothing of children, you understand, Mayne. But our children will be perfectly amiable, I am sure.”
She was so cheerful, so genial, so courteously willing to live apart from him for their entire lives. And from their children too, he had no doubt. And yet: he looked at her again. Sylvie was no ogre. There was the beautiful little pointed chin, and wide, friendly eyes with an inquisitive, intelligent gleam to them.
“Don’t you wish there was more to life than this?”
he asked again, rather desperately.
And saw those beautiful eyes fill with concern. “I do not.” She said it with certainty. “May I speak frankly?”
“Of course!” He took both her hands.
“I come from a country where many people, young women of my mother’s age, were brutally killed for nothing more than being who they are. They were born to rule, not to work. Born to a life of pleasure, rather than toil. I was lucky enough that my father became a friend to Napoleon rather than an enemy—at least until he saw the truth of that regime—and yet I see the horror of it, in my mind, you understand? I know what happened in the Bastille: the cruelties, the loss, the terrible loss of it.”
Inside his palms, her hands curled into fists. “How can you ask me if I want more than this life? I am so lucky to have this life! I sit here, dressed with such elegance as my friends and relatives once enjoyed, eating exquisite food, in no danger of my life, and in no fear, and you ask me if this is enough?”
There was a moment’s silence between them.
“Oh God,” he said, “I’m so sorry, Sylvie. I’m a bastard to have even asked.”
But she caught herself up. The fierceness faded from her eyes, replaced with her inimitable self-possession. She slipped her hands from his and smiled at him, that intelligent, assured smile that had first attracted him. “I am very happy. It would be unthinkable for me to be otherwise.”
“I see that. I expect you are the best possible person for me to talk to on this matter.”
“It is often so with friends. I find that when I talk to a friend, and learn her perspective, my view of the world shifts.”
“Friends,” he said. “But surely we are more than friends, Sylvie?”
There was nothing in her smile that was more—or less—than friendly. “To be friends is the greatest love of all between people. This lovers business—pah! It goes in the night. I have seen it so. You, Mayne, of all people, know that this emotion does not last. I decided long ago to have nothing to do with it, and I have found it a wise decision.”