Chapter 40

40

Though it was notionally a house of mourning, and the funeral of its late master had not yet taken place, there was no denying the fact that the atmosphere at Wyverne Hall became instantly much more cheerful once Lady Wyverne had taken her departure, with her personal maid, looking most unhappy at this fresh turn of events, at her side. The family coach was piled high with bandboxes and trunks, and set off in the early afternoon, trundling down the carriage drive and disappearing in the distance to the regret of precisely nobody.

Sophie had been walking by the lakes, only dimly aware of the beauty around her since she would soon be leaving it behind, as she surely must despite all that the Dowager had said. She climbed the steps slowly to see Rafe standing at the top, tracking the vehicle’s lumbering progress until it was out of sight.

‘Saying goodbye to your stepmother?’ she asked.

‘You might describe it rather as escorting her off the premises,’ countered the Marquess with a slight smile. ‘I thought I wouldn’t believe she was really gone until I saw it for myself.’ And then he said abruptly, ‘We must talk. Not here. Would you be amenable to a short walk, or are you tired?’

‘Of course I’m not. I’d sooner not go to the Gothic Tower, though,’ she added, aware that the conversation they were about to have could only be painful.

‘I’m in complete agreement that we should avoid it for a good while. And also the church – they’re digging a grave. May I suggest the Temple of Friendship?’

She assented, and they set off in that direction in silence, both lost in their own thoughts. ‘Has it fallen into ruin, or was it built that way?’ she asked a little awkwardly as they drew closer. The temple sat on a small rise and had a fine facade with a portico, but the building behind it appeared to be roofless, with trees pushing up where a large room might once have been.

‘It was complete once. But many years ago, before I was born, my father held one of his notorious parties here. A fire broke out – I have heard tales, possibly exaggerated, of drunken people, with their garments aflame, running down to plunge into the lake. Though I believe for a wonder no one was seriously injured. He escaped entirely unscathed, naturally.’

‘It must have been quite early in the evening, if his guests were still clothed,’ she responded drily.

‘That’s sadly true. Since then it has been left as a folly – just one among many.’ They’d reached the pretty, damaged temple now, and by common consent sat down on the broad steps. ‘I understand you’ve been having a tête-à-tête with my grandmother. She upbraided me for not making you a formal offer of marriage, and she is quite right, for I have not.’

‘It is impossible that you should. If you were so foolish as to do so, you know I must refuse you. Why should we give ourselves unnecessary distress?’ said Sophie with a little constraint.

‘The only thing that can distress me now is losing you, and so I refuse to hear talk of impossibility. I know you do not want me to speak, and I understand why, but Sophie, will you hear me out at last? I think you owe me that much.’

She looked down at her booted feet beneath the drab fabric of her gown. They were surrounded by a beautiful landscape of fine buildings, water and trees, all in perfect harmony of nature, design and execution, but neither of them had eyes for any of it just now. ‘Yes,’ she answered quietly. ‘I will, but I should tell you plainly that I must leave in a few days, as I always planned. I’ll stay until after the funeral, but then I must go. Your sister will be back soon enough, and I cannot be here when she returns. Her reputation and her future must not be endangered, and I will not allow them to be placed in jeopardy by any actions of mine. I’ve done enough damage to your family – I will do no more. I am sure your staff care enough for you to hold their tongues, and if Lady Wyverne talks I doubt anyone will listen to her – no one who matters, at any rate. You will be free to restore your family to its rightful place in the world.’

‘And if I said I don’t give a fig for any of that, because I need you as my wife, and cannot contemplate life without you?’

‘You must contemplate it. There is no other way.’

‘I won’t believe that. I love you, Sophie. To talk of freedom is nonsense, for what use is freedom without love? With you at my side, I can do anything – without you, nothing. And I know you love me. I know it in my heart and my bones. If you try to tell me you don’t, I won’t believe you, so don’t waste your breath on the attempt. None of this would be so hard for you if you didn’t love me just as much as I love you.’

She stood, and turned away from him, gazing blindly out across the peaceful sylvan scene. Why must he make this so damned difficult? ‘Very well,’ she said, rounding on him. ‘It’s true. I do love you, even though I don’t want to. But it doesn’t signify, because love is not enough. It isn’t. Your father married a woman with a scandalous past, but she was scandalous in an ordinary sort of way, really. Peers have married actresses before. I’m much worse – I’m a thief as well as a woman of ill repute, and anyone who knows I exist believes me to be Nate Smith’s mistress.’ She was very distressed, and her voice broke on a wild laugh as she said, ‘I’m supposed to be the mistress of your illegitimate uncle, the most notorious thief and master of thieves in England! He trained me to pick pockets, and do worse than that. Can’t you see why that might just possibly be a problem?’

‘I don’t care. As long as you and I both know who we are, we need not heed the opinion of any other person alive. And it is just as well, for all the world believes that I took my stepmother as my mistress, remember, Sophie. What could be more shocking than that?’

‘It doesn’t matter. You are a man, and so eventually you will be forgiven. I will not. It’s not even the world I fear, not really. It’s you. You will change your mind, and blame me – it might take twenty years, but you will. I’ve been here before, remember. Bart would have hated me for giving myself to him, I saw signs of it already creeping upon him after only a year, and one day so will you, who wasn’t even my first lover.’

He took her hands in his and said, ‘I won’t, you know. I understand why you think I will, but you are mistaken. Will you let me explain? You said you would hear me out. I promise if I cannot convince you I will not try to prevent you from leaving, even if it tears me in two.’

She knew she should pull her hands away, but did not quite have the strength to do so. ‘Go on,’ she said very low. ‘Please say your piece, then I can go.’ Her heart was breaking at the thought of leaving him, and she felt she could endure only a little more before she must flee.

‘Sophie, my dearest love, my heart, I know that you fear I want you to be respectable – Grand-mère told me as much, and I had realised that for myself in any case. But it’s not true. If that were all I wanted – to restore the tarnished good name of the Wyvernes, so that not a breath of scandal touches it forevermore, or some such nonsense – I am sure I could go to London, to the Season now in full swing, and, despite my undeserved bad reputation, despite my father’s deserved one, find any number of good, dull girls willing to marry me forthwith. I could choose one of them in a perfectly cold-blooded way and set about making my life completely miserable. And her life, Sophie. I think that’s important too.

‘I don’t want to be boring and respectable. Perhaps you think I do, because I have not explained myself properly to you yet. It’s true that I’ve lived a staid life compared to that of my ancestors, but that’s only partly because I was reacting against my father and trying to keep everyone safe. It’s more complicated than that. I’m not like him in many important ways – I have no taste for libertinage, nor for burning down buildings or destroying innocent people’s lives. He was a wrecker and I am not. I’d certainly rather not be proverbial throughout the land for wickedness and cruelty. But I don’t look forward to leading family prayers and growing big, bushy whiskers either.’ She could not help but laugh through her tears at the picture he presented her with, and when she did so he gripped her hand more tightly. ‘I want to be wild and wicked, Sophie, but with just one woman – the woman I love. You, my dearest.

‘So I’m not asking you to change. I promise I won’t ever reproach you for being who you are, or for who you have been, because I love you for it all. It’s you I want, not some other woman I don’t care two pins for, and not the woman you might have been if your life had turned out differently. I’m not asking you to be Clemence again, even if that is what your public identity must be if you marry me. You’re Sophie. Or you can choose to be some other person, some other name, if you wish, if being Sophie has bad memories for you.’

‘It has bad memories, and good ones,’ she said. It was true. How badly she wanted to believe him.

He kissed her hand, and held it to his cheek. ‘If some of those good memories had me in them, I would be very honoured, and glad. I’m sorry I announced our engagement in front of Rosanna and Charlie, my love. Please believe that I wasn’t trying to force your hand. I would never do that. I want you to choose me freely more than anything in the world. It was just that in that moment I couldn’t see another way of saving the situation.’

‘I know. I don’t blame you for it. And that’s the point, I think, Rafe. If I marry you, there may be other such moments when you can’t rescue matters half so easily. You do know that? I fear you are deluding yourself about the path that lies ahead if I accept you. I want you to be clear exactly how terrible a risk you would be taking.’

‘My eyes are open. I’m not expecting miracles. I plan to be very grand and face the world down, if that proves necessary. And if you choose you can be the same, when people whisper behind their hands about my supposed past, as they surely will. My grandmother can give you lessons in magnificent unconcern. Or you can just shrug and smile. What a wicked pair they must be, people will say, each as bad as the other. Would you make me the happiest man alive and consent to marry me, Sophie?’

‘I had a nightmare the other night. A nightmare about our future together, I suppose, if I married you. I was being presented to Queen Charlotte, and the knife in my garter sheath slipped out, and clattered across the floor to her feet. There was a huge uproar.’

‘I can see that there might have been,’ he said, smiling. ‘I am sorry you have been troubled by bad dreams, but after all there’s a simple solution.’

‘What might that be?’

‘We must design you a more secure sheath for your weapon, one that does not so embarrass you. This is going to involve a great deal of effort and study on my part, but it’s a sacrifice I’m prepared to make.’ As he spoke, he pulled up her gown and smoothed it back over her legs, shamelessly exposing her stockings, her bare skin and her garter to the spring air. ‘Now let me see…’ he mused, laying his big hands either side of her thigh and scrutinising it intently.

‘Rafe!’ she said, conscious of the liquid heat pooling between her legs as her body responded immediately to his touch and the intensity of his dark gaze. ‘You presume too much! You make a joke of it, and behave as though the difficulties were small and easily overcome, when they are not. You have most conveniently not mentioned your sister, and the importance of respectability for her.’

He shook his head. ‘Look around you – at the house, the land, everything and everyone in it. All the things you can see and all the things and people you can’t. The servants and the tenants, my grandmother, my brother and my sister. It is a great responsibility, you are right, and one I take on gladly, because it is in my blood, as my siblings are. I love Amelia and Charlie, and I will always do my best for them. But they are Wyvernes. We all are. That is a legacy that they can never escape, any more than I can. Do not frame my life in such a way, as though if I should be mad enough to give you up, some magic wand can be waved and we will emerge with an unstained name, in a week or a month or a year. I believed that once, even recently, but it was a ridiculous, childish delusion. The past cannot be changed, and we must live with what we have. And I am glad of it now, because none of this means a single thing to me if you cannot be mine.’

She did not speak, her certainty shaking in the face of his desperate eloquence, and he said urgently, ‘You must see that I am right. We are not living in a fairy tale, a world of black and white, where my choice is between respectability and love, and I nobly choose love and pay the price. The Wyverne name is already tarnished through no fault of mine or yours, no matter what I do. In a hundred years, in two hundred, when we are all long dead, I dare say a whisper of scandal will still cling to the family. People enjoy being outraged too much to set it aside easily. And knowing that, to choose anything but love would be insanity. Marry me, Sophie, and we will face whatever comes together. Do not make me face it without you. I don’t think I can.’

She paused for a moment, but she knew that there was only one answer she could give him. It was hard to believe him after all she’d been through, but her heart told her she must, or she would regret it forever. She’d prided herself on her strength and boldness – now she must take this last and greatest risk. ‘I will not ask you if you are sure, for I can see that you are. That being so… Yes! Yes, of course I will!’

‘Oh, my love… Thank God! That’s… I don’t have words to say how much your trust means to me. I promise I will never betray it as long as we live.’ He dropped a lingering kiss where the sheath of her knife would be if she were wearing it, then stood and held out his hand to her.

His voice was ragged with emotion, but he was smiling as he said, ‘To celebrate our engagement and to seal the unbreakable bond between us, my dearest, I’m going to take you up the steps under the portico and make love to you right here and now. Make love to you properly, as I have not yet, if you do indeed consent to that, my love.’

‘You’d like to put a child in me?’ she asked bluntly, taking his hand. It seemed to be important to know his intentions completely.

‘It’s not the main thing on my mind at the moment, but yes, Sophie, I would. It doesn’t have to be now, if you don’t want that. I have many, many other ideas. What do you think?’

‘You are quite wild and wicked. I hadn’t realised.’

‘I’m hoping to be. But would you like a child, Sophie? One day, if not soon?’

‘I believe I would,’ she said, considering. It was hard to take in the entirely new direction her future had taken. A great sense of excitement was bubbling up inside her like a spring of water that could no longer be suppressed. ‘In my life as Clemence I’d always assumed I would have children, and then later, of course, it was vital that I should not, so I determined to put the idea from my mind. I think I’d like one day to have a son and name him in memory of my poor little brother Louis, who barely had a chance at life. But just now I’d like to leave it up to fate. Perhaps I am done with trying to control every aspect of my existence.’

‘I promise I won’t try to control it either,’ he said seriously. ‘Apart from anything else, you have a knife.’

She put her arms about his neck. ‘You’re safe for now. I’ll let you know if that changes. So, we go where life takes us, Rafe? No regrets?’

‘Yes, as long as we go together. One day I’d like to travel the world with you, if these cursed wars ever come to an end. But just now, my desire is to journey just a few paces up these steps and have you wrap yourself around me.’

‘Carry me!’ she whispered in his ear. He slid his hands down her back and lifted up her skirts so that she could wrap her legs securely about his waist. She pulled down his head to kiss him, and he fixed his hands firmly on her naked bottom, taking her up the steps without the least apparent effort.

Once there, he set her down on a shallow window ledge that was at just the right height, and while she kissed him with greedy urgency he unfastened his breeches fall and freed himself. ‘Are you ready for me, my love?’ he asked against her mouth.

‘Yes,’ she said again. ‘Yes, Rafe, I am.’