Chapter 30

30

Isabella stared at the door as Leo closed it with painful care behind him. She was in a state of shock. She'd never expected such a declaration; she didn't know what she had wanted to provoke when she'd needled at him tonight, but not that, never that. She'd thought, if she'd thought at all, that he might admit that he was contemplating marriage at some point in the future, and Miss Peters, Susannah , was a prospect he was seriously considering. He'd have been well within his rights to say such a thing, and how could she have reacted? Even as she'd been saying what she'd said, motivated by some impulse she was unable to control, she'd known it was none of her business. He was free to do as he pleased; she had no claim on him.

But she was deliberately distracting herself, dwelling on such thoughts. They were all nonsense. He said he loved her. It was the very last thing she wanted.

At first, she hadn't been sure if she believed him. The idea that he was hopelessly enamoured of Lady Irlam was so firmly fixed in her mind that she found it almost impossible to rearrange herself to accept this new fact. She wouldn't. He was just saying it, surely, because he knew his love for Cassandra was hopeless. It must be plain to the meanest intelligence that Lord and Lady Irlam adored each other and were excessively happy in their marriage. Here he was, witnessing their closeness with pain, and at the same time there was a woman at hand who was prepared to take him into her bed, to couple within him in ways – there was no denying the truth of this, at least – that touched something deep inside him and brought him a species of pleasure he claimed he'd never known before. Of course, he might easily want to love her, which was a long way along the road to persuading himself that he did. He wasn't a man on whom deception sat easily, she knew that too. Concealing their liaison made him uncomfortable. How much more convenient, then, if no concealment were necessary.

But this was nonsense too. She couldn't forget the naked agony on his face as he'd left her just now. It reminded her horribly of the haunted expression Ash's dear countenance had carried when he kissed her a last goodbye in Brussels, to go to what he feared was his death, and proved to be so. She ought to know love when she saw it, and she'd seen it again tonight.

She hadn't asked for this.

She struggled sometimes to accustom herself to great or even small changes in her life, when they came unexpectedly; her mother had said that she had always been so, even as a tiny child, and she had come to realise over the past months that this inflexibility in herself had been one of the causes of her illness. It was one of the reasons she'd tried to take control with her list, and she had thought that it was working. She felt better.

Had felt better.

She felt terrible now. It must be awful, beyond awful, to make love to someone you adored, all the while unable to tell them how you felt. A parody of intimacy. So nearly everything you had ever dreamed of, but so cruelly not quite that. Constantly checking yourself as words trembled on your lips that must never been spoken. A vision of happiness dangled in front of your eyes and constantly snatched away.

Her mind was fluttering from one disjointed thought to another, like a wild bird trapped in a cage. She wasn't a cruel person. She'd never have done this to anyone willingly, least of all to Leo, who was so good and kind and endlessly considerate. She had been angry with him at first, had accused him of deceiving her, but now that she had a moment to consider she could see that he had had little choice. If you loved someone, of course you wouldn't want them exposing themselves to hurt or danger. You'd have to be a plaster saint to deny yourself the prospect of making love to the woman you yearned for when it was offered to you, and when you could advance many unselfish and credible reasons for going ahead with it, and picture so many dreadful things that might happen to her if you didn't. And Leo, despite his many noble qualities, was no saint.

And besides, he must have thought – she could see that he had thought – that there was always a chance that she might change her mind, might come to love him after all. If you had somehow developed the strength to refuse all the other temptations, how could you deny yourself that last and most seductive one? Women and men had changed their minds before. History was full of examples of it. Look at Gabriel, her own brother-in-law, who'd been famous throughout Yorkshire, and London society too, for his fixed intention never to marry, and yet was now the most loving and devoted of husbands. Leo hadn't tried to persuade her – he had never said a single word – because he would have thought that dishonest, and a betrayal of the spirit of their agreement. But he had hoped in secret. He had made that sufficiently and painfully clear tonight.

And there was no hope for him. She wished there could have been. If she had known the slightest sliver of a desire to love again, to replace Ash with another, she'd have chosen Leo as the man to make that dangerous attempt with. She couldn't imagine anybody better. She cared for him, more deeply than she'd known and certainly more deeply than she'd imagined caring for the man her fancy had lighted on when she'd been looking about her for suitable candidates to be her lover. But it was not enough.

Not enough for her, and not enough for him either. Not to sustain a whole life together. She would wager that he thought now that he'd accept her as his wife on any terms, and that his love for her would be enough. But it couldn't be. Love had to be mutual to survive, and she could never love anyone the way she had loved Ash. She wished that she could tell Leo so, explain, make him see that the pain she'd unwittingly inflicted on him now would be as nothing to the bone-deep hurt of a lifetime of living with someone who could never care for him as he deserved.

And that wasn't by any means all. He had a fortune and an estate and a family name to hand down. He'd want children, need them, all men in his situation did, from princes of the blood to yeoman farmers. And she was horribly sure she could not give them to him. After all, she hadn't just been told so in the cruellest of terms by distinguished gentlemen with letters after their names. It was undeniably true that she and Ash had come together daily, more than that, over the course of their marriage, almost a year, and yet every month with weary, tedious regularity – she was like a clock that never needed to be wound – her courses would appear. She'd never been as much as a day late in all that time, and even when Ash had died, even in the depths of her illness, her unwelcome guest had arrived with cruel punctuality every month to mock her desperate wish that he'd put a child in her as a final act of love before he was irrevocably lost to her. She'd not wanted to believe the truth, had refused for a long time to do so, but the evidence had always been there.

So she was, in crude words, a terrible bargain. A cull ewe, to use the brutally honest farming term of her childhood. If he'd been a friend of hers, with whom she'd been able to share the word with no bark on it in the bluntest way possible, she'd have felt obliged to describe this woman he'd so unfortunately bound himself to as the very worst of choices: a woman who could never love him as much as he loved her, and who was barren besides. That would surely be how his family, his mother above all, would see her, if they knew everything. It was how she must see herself.

He'd had a lucky escape, though she supposed it would be a while before he realised it. There were, at any rate, as had been made crystal clear this evening, many, many young women who would be more than delighted to console him. Susannah Peters, for one.

So he'd live. She'd hurt him badly without ever intending to, and she was desperately sorry and wished she could take it back, but he would. One did not expire of love, or she would be dead and in her grave many months since. She would survive this too, though she was sad and tired and full of regret just now. She'd go home soon, to her parents, and for the first time, she looked forward to it. She had a sudden yearning for her mother's comfortable, comforting embrace. She couldn't rush away – it would be rude to her hosts and raise questions she'd much rather not have anyone contemplate – but in a few days, a week, she'd speak to them about how her removal might be managed. Perhaps Lady Carston and Lady Louisa were going back to Town and she could go with them. She had money and needed no chaperon; something could be contrived.

She tried to compose a letter in her head: Dear Mama…

No, she couldn't do it. Couldn't dissimulate, describe the assembly and pretend the evening had been ordinary, and nor could she collect herself enough to talk of her plans to return home in a calm and rational manner. It was all far too raw to be set down as if it mattered little.

She turned her hot pillow over and punched it ruthlessly into shape, closing her eyes tightly and begging for blessed oblivion, but it was a long time before it was granted to her.