The Survivors' Club: Only Beloved Part 12

"Oh!" she exclaimed, and she withdrew her arm from George's and took a few hurried steps into the room before stopping again and swinging around to face him, her hands held prayer fas.h.i.+on against her lips.

He was smiling. "I hope," he said, "you were not congratulating yourself upon being rid of it at last."

She shook her head and bit her upper lip-and lost sight of him.

"Don't cry." He laughed softly, and she felt his hands clasp her shoulders. "Are you that unhappy to see it?"

"It is such an ugly old thing," she said, swiping at her tears with both hands. "I did not like to say anything about it. I said goodbye to it at the cottage and hoped whoever bought the place would have some use for it. What made you think of having it brought here?"

"Maybe a desire to please you," he said. "Or perhaps a memory of listening to you play it for a very short while the day after I asked you to marry me. Mainly a desire to please you-and myself. Are you pleased?"

"You know I am," she said. "Thank you, thank you, George. How very kind you are and how good to me."

"It is my pleasure to please you," he told her, his hands squeezing her shoulders. "Will you play it for me, Dora? After we have drunk our tea?"

"Of course I will," she said. "But before. I cannot wait."

She played for an hour. Neither of them spoke a word during that time, even between pieces. He did not applaud either or show any other sign of appreciation-or boredom. Dora played without looking at him even once, but she was aware of him at every moment. She played for him, because he had asked her to play, but even more because he had thought to have her pianoforte fetched from Inglebrook, because he had looked so pleased at her surprise, because he was there, listening. She felt more fully married during that hour than she had at any time before. She was consciously happy. Words, even looks, were unnecessary, and that was perhaps the happiest thought of all.

As they drank tea afterward and conversed comfortably on a variety of topics, Dora thought of how very, very sweet marriage was and how fortunate she was to be married at last.

"Time for bed?" he suggested after the tray had been removed.

"Yes," she agreed. "I am tired."

"Too tired?" he asked.

"Oh, no," she a.s.sured him. "Not too tired."

How could she ever be too tired for his lovemaking? Or for him? She was, of course, hopelessly, irrevocably in love with him. She had admitted that to herself long before now. It made no real difference to anything, however. They were just words-being in love, romantic love.

She did not need words when the reality was so very lovely.

13.

George spent most of the next morning at home, first with his secretary, then with his steward. He had some catching up to do since he had been gone for a while, first for Imogen's wedding and then for his own. Dora, looking neat and trim in one of her new dresses and with her hair simply styled, had informed him at breakfast that she would spend the morning with Mrs. Lerner, the housekeeper, and that she intended to visit the kitchens too and make the acquaintance of the chef and some of the indoor servants. She intended to have all their names memorized within a few days and hoped they would make allowances for her until she did. She would be careful not to tread upon any toes, however, for she understood that some chefs guarded their domain quite jealously and resented interference even from the mistress of the house.

George had listened fondly and wondered what the servants would make of her. She had made no attempt to look like a d.u.c.h.ess-she actually looked more like a provincial music teacher-or to behave like one. Nevertheless, she intended to be the d.u.c.h.ess and mistress of her new home. She would do it her way.

"Even Mrs. Henry, my housekeeper in Inglebrook, could get cross if she felt I was encroaching upon her duties," she had added.

George would wager that his servants would soon respect his wife and even come to love her. He doubted his first wife, Miriam, had known any but a very few of the servants by name. But he did not intend to be making comparisons.

He had planned to suggest a walk down on the beach during the afternoon, but the weather continued inclement. A cloudy, bl.u.s.tery morning gave way to a drizzly, windy afternoon, and he was forced to think of some indoor amus.e.m.e.nt instead. It was not difficult, for of course she had not yet seen a great deal of the house. He had learned during luncheon that her morning activities had taken her no farther than the morning room and the kitchens.

He took her on a tour of the rest.

First she wanted to see where everyone had stayed during the years when Penderris was a hospital. He showed her the rooms each of the Survivors had occupied, and time pa.s.sed quickly as he reminisced with some stories about each of them-at her instigation.

"It may seem strange to you that I think back fondly on those years," he said as they stood at the window of what had been Vincent's room. It faced the sea, though he had been unable to appreciate the view. He had liked to listen to the sea, though, after his hearing returned, and he had kept his window open even on the most inclement of days so that he could smell the salty air. "There was a great deal of suffering, and sometimes it was almost unbearable to watch when there was so little I could do to ease it. But in many ways those were the happiest years of my life."

"I daresay you saw human suffering at its worst and human endurance and resilience at its best," she said. "I do not know all the wounded who spent time here, of course, only the six who became your friends. But they are extraordinary human beings, and I believe they must be such strong, vital, loving people at least partly because of all their suffering rather than despite it."

"I have been privileged to know them," he said as he led her to the room in which Imogen had stayed for three years. It overlooked the kitchen gardens at the back of the house.

"I believe you have," she said. "And they have been enormously privileged to know you."

She was perhaps a little biased.

"Why did you do it?" she asked.

"Open my home as a hospital?" he said as she gazed down upon the regimented beds of multicolored blooms in the back garden with which the urns and vases in the house were kept filled. "I really do not know where the idea originated. I have heard it said that some artists and writers do not know where their ideas come from. I do not put myself on a par with them, but I do understand what they mean. The house felt empty and oppressive. I felt empty and oppressed. My life was empty and meaningless, my future empty and unappealing. There was nothing but emptiness all about me and within, in fact. Why did it suddenly occur to me to fill my home and my life with horribly wounded soldiers? It might well have been seen as exactly the wrong solution for what ailed me. But sometimes, I believe, when one asks a question from one's deepest need and waits for an answer without straining too desperately to invent it, the answer comes, seemingly from nowhere. It is not so, of course. Everything comes from somewhere, even if that somewhere is beyond our conscious awareness. But I am getting tangled up in thought. I ought to have stopped after 'I really do not know' as an answer to your question."

"Perhaps," she said softly without turning from the window, "the idea came to you at least partly because your son was an officer and died. And because your wife could not bear her grief and shattered your already broken heart."

He felt as though she had planted a very heavy fist low to his abdomen. He felt robbed of breath and raw with sudden pain.

"Who knows?" he said abruptly after a silence it seemed neither of them would break. "Let me show you the room where Ben learned to walk again and Flavian learned to deal with his rages."

"I am sorry," she said, frowning as she turned from the window and took his offered arm.

"Don't be," he told her. He heard the curtness of his tone and made an effort to correct it. "You need not apologize for anything you choose to say to me, Dora. You are my wife." Now his voice sounded merely chilly. Not to mention stilted.

The room to which he took her next had been converted back into a salon that was rarely used since he never entertained on a large scale. At one time, though, there had been st.u.r.dy bars along the full length of it, one set fixed to the wall, the other a short distance from it and parallel to it, both at just the right height for Ben to hold on to on either side of his body as he forced weight onto his crushed legs and feet and learned to move them in a semblance of a walk. It had been a painful sight to behold. And very inspiring.

"I have never seen anyone more determined to do something that was apparently impossible," he told Dora after describing the contraption. "His face would pour sweat, the air was often blue with his language, and it is a wonder he did not grind his teeth to powder when he was not using his mouth for cursing. He was going to walk even if he had to traverse the coals of h.e.l.l to do it."

"And indeed he does walk now with his two canes," she said.

"Out of sheer h.e.l.lish stubbornness," he said with a smile. "We were all very happy when he finally convinced himself that using a wheeled chair was not an admission of defeat but actually just the opposite. That did not happen, though, until after he had met Samantha and gone to Wales. He also rides and swims."

"And Flavian?" she asked him.

"We had a stuffed leather bag suspended from the ceiling for the use of your brother-in-law," he said, "and leather gloves for him to wear while he pounded the stuffing out of it. He learned to come here when his thoughts were so hopelessly jumbled that he could not get any words out, even allowing for his stammer. His frustration had a way of releasing itself in violence and scared a number of people half to death. It was why I brought him here. His family did not know how to cope with him."

"Whose idea was the pounding bag?" she asked.

"The physician's?" he said. "Mine? I cannot remember."

"I think it was probably yours," she said.

"You are turning me into a hero, are you?" he asked her.

"Oh, no," she told him. "You are a hero. You do not need me to proclaim what already is so."

He laughed and bore her off to the family portrait gallery, which ran the whole width of the house on the west side of the upper floor, where the sun was less of a problem than it would have been on the east.

He might have taken her back to the drawing room instead, he thought later, when it was too late. They had already spent a good portion of the afternoon in the hospital rooms, and it was not too early for tea, especially when he had a surprise awaiting her afterward. But he was enjoying showing her their home and watching her genuine interest. He was loving her company and the knowledge that she belonged here now, that she was not a mere visitor who would leave sooner or later.

So he took her to the gallery.

The Crabbe family could be traced back in an unbroken line to the early thirteenth century, when the first of their recorded ancestors had been awarded a barony for some military exploit that had brought him to the attention of the king. The t.i.tle had mutated to viscount and earl and eventually to duke. George was the fourth Duke of Stanbrook. There were portraits reaching back to the beginning, with very few omissions.

"I failed a history test on the Civil War when I was eight or thereabouts," George told Dora. "I could not muster up any enthusiasm for Cavaliers and Roundheads and would not have got a single answer right if I had not been gruesomely fascinated by the fact that King Charles I had had his head chopped off. My father punished me by sending me up here to learn the history of my own family. It was the dead of winter and my poor tutor was sent with me, perhaps as punishment for not having ignited my interest. On a test the very next day, set by my father, I got every answer correct and even exasperated my tutor by writing an essay for each when a single sentence would have sufficed. I have loved the gallery ever since when I suppose I might have come to see it as a sort of torture chamber."

She laughed. "Am I to be given the test tomorrow?" she asked him.

"I doubt you would have incentive enough to do well," he said. "It is not winter, and I do not keep a cane at the ready in my library as my father did, though to be fair he never actually used it on me-or my brother."

They moved slowly along the gallery while he identified the people in each portrait. He kept his commentary brief so as not to bore her, but she asked numerous questions and saw likenesses to him in several of the family members dating back to the last century or so despite elaborate powdered wigs and black facial patches and vast quant.i.ties of velvet and lace.

"Ah," she said with evident pleasure as they came to the large family portrait that had been painted not long before his mother's death when he was fourteen. He had thought himself very grown-up while it was being painted, he recalled, because neither the painter nor his father had had to tell him even once to sit still-unlike his brother, who had squirmed and yawned and scratched and complained through almost the whole tedious process. "You look very like your father, George. Your brother looks more like your mother-and Julian looks like him. Do you miss your brother dreadfully? And he was younger than you."

"Yes, I miss him," he admitted. "Unfortunately, he got himself into the clutches of alcohol and gambling when he was a very young man and never could seem to pull himself free even when most of his contemporaries had finished sowing their wild oats and were settling down to sober adulthood. If he had not died when he did, there would have been virtually nothing left of his property for my nephew to inherit. It seemed for a while that Julian would follow in his footsteps, but he was fortunate enough to meet Philippa, a mere schoolroom miss at the time. He waited for her to grow up, though her father very rightly sent him packing and he did not set eyes on her for a number of years. He used the time to make himself worthy of her and acceptable to her father. I was and am very proud of him-as well as very fond."

Dora had turned to look at him. "I could see when I met him in London that you love him dearly," she said, "and that he returns your regard. He will be a worthy successor to the t.i.tle."

"But not too soon, I hope," he said.

"Oh." She laughed. "I hope not either. I rather like you right here with me."

"Do you?" He lowered his head and kissed her briefly on the lips.

She turned back to the wall, and for the first time it struck him that he ought not to have brought her. For she was looking at the blank wall beyond that family portrait and then glancing over her shoulder at him, her eyebrows raised.

"But that is the last one?" she asked him. "There are no more?"

"No," he said. "Not yet."

He had been fourteen when that picture was painted, three years before his father's death. He was forty-eight now. That made for a gap of thirty-four years. He had never had a family portrait done with Miriam and Brendan. And no official one of either of them alone.

He had not thought soon enough of how that blank wall would look to Dora.

"Perhaps," he said, his voice a little overhearty, "we will make it a project for next winter, Dora. It is a long and tedious business, I recall, sitting for a portrait, but it ought to be done. I would like to have it done. I will find a reputable portrait painter and bring him out here to stay. He can paint us on days when it is too cold and dreary to venture outdoors."

But she had turned to face him fully now, and her eyes were on his, a puzzled frown between her brows.

"There is no painting of you with your wife and your son?" she asked him. "You did not have it removed out of deference to my feelings, by any chance, did you? You really did not need to do that, George. You must have it put back. I do not resent the marriage you had for almost twenty years long before I even knew of your existence. I am not jealous. Did you think I would be? Besides, they are a part of all this family history you have displayed here."

Instead of answering, he turned on his heel and took several long strides along the gallery, his boots ringing on the polished wood floor. He stopped as abruptly as he had started, but he did not turn back to her.

"There is no portrait, Dora," he said. "There ought to have been, perhaps, but I never got around to arranging it. Nothing has been hidden away from your sight. They were a part of my life for many years, Miriam and Brendan, and then they died. Much has happened since-at Penderris, in my life. Now you are here, the wife of my present and of as much of the future as we will be granted. I prefer not to look back, not to talk about the past, not even to think about it. I want what I have with you. I want our friends.h.i.+p, our . . . marriage. I have been happy with it, and I have felt that you are happy too."

He had not heard her come up behind him. His arm jerked and then stiffened when she set a hand on it.

"I am sorry," she said.

He swung about. "Don't keep saying you are sorry."

Her hand went straight up, as though she had scalded it, and remained suspended above the level of her shoulder, palm out, fingers spread. For a moment there was a look of alarm on her face.

"I am sorry," she said again.

His shoulders sagged. He could not even remember the last time he had lost his temper. And now he had lost it with Dora.

"No," he said, "I am the one who needs to be sorry, Dora. I do indeed beg your pardon. Please forgive me. When I married you, I very much wanted life to be new and good for both of us, unenc.u.mbered by memories of the past. The past has no real existence, after all. It is gone. The present is the reality we have, and for that fact I am grateful. I like the present. Do you? Do you have any regrets?"

It bothered him that a moment pa.s.sed before she shook her head and lowered her arm to her side.

"I have always dreamed of being married to a man I could like," she said, "even though I did not waste my life waiting for him to put in an appearance."

"And can you like me?" he asked. He found that he was holding his breath "I can," she said gravely. And then she smiled, an expression that began in her eyes and spread to her mouth. "And I do."

"I think," he said, clasping his hands behind his back, "we ought to go down for tea."

Despite a certain amount of nervousness, Dora had quite enjoyed the morning. She had established a working relations.h.i.+p with both Mrs. Lerner and Mr. Humble, the chef, though she believed the latter must be grossly misnamed. She felt she had won their cautious approval. She had met several of the kitchen staff after Mr. Humble had lined them up for her inspection and scolded one bootboy for slouching and one maid for having a stain on her ap.r.o.n even though it was still only morning. Dora was confident that she would remember each servant and even be able to attach the correct name to the correct person.

She had fully enjoyed the afternoon despite the fact that the rain had prevented the walk down on the beach to which she had been looking forward. But there was so much to discover in the house itself that she was not greatly disappointed. And it was lovely indeed to be shown about by George himself, who so clearly loved the house and loved talking about it. She had thoroughly enjoyed his reminiscences about his fellow Survivors and the years when they had all stayed here. And she had loved the visit to the gallery and listening to him identify his ancestors in their portraits and describe a little of their histories. He was not normally a talkative man, she knew. He preferred to listen, and he was very skilled at drawing others, including her, into talking about themselves. He had become absorbed in his family history there in the gallery, though, and he had looked relaxed and contented.

But now she wished they had not gone there at all.

There was something horribly wrong.

Any stranger who knew nothing about the family would a.s.sume after being in the gallery that George had been a bachelor until now, though even then the stranger might expect that he would have had a portrait of himself painted at some time during the past thirty years. But in reality he had married a mere three years after that family painting. His son had been born the year after that. And though both the wife and the son were now gone, they had lived as a family for many years. Almost twenty. Right here. At Penderris Hall.

The truly puzzling part was that George loved his family history. That had been obvious this afternoon, as well as the fact that he was proud of those portraits, reaching back in an unbroken line for several centuries. Why, then, had he broken the chain by neglecting to commission a portrait of his own family?

They walked in silence to the drawing room, her hands clasped at her waist, his behind his back. Dora s.h.i.+vered inwardly when she thought of his reaction to her question about the absent portrait. He had turned on his heel and hurried away. Even though he had stopped almost immediately, he had not turned back toward her. And then his temper had snapped and he had blazed at her. For a moment he had seemed like a rather frightening stranger. Oh, he had recovered very quickly and apologized to her. But she had been left with the feeling that she had been told in no uncertain terms that his past was off limits to her. And to everyone else too. There did not seem to be any record of it, any sign, any trace of it.

He had, in so many words, told her that everything that had happened in his life between the ages of seventeen and thirty-five or thirty-six was none of her business. A huge, dark gap of years. And he was right, of course. His former marriage was none of her business. Except that he was her husband and there was supposed to be openness between marriage partners, was there not?

And except that he had somehow induced her to spill out her own life history with all its skeletons and demons before they even left London.

Dora walked beside her husband and realized that she knew him scarcely at all and perhaps never would. For how could one know a man if one experienced only the present with him and knew nothing of the past that had shaped him into the person he was? He had done almost forty-eight years of living before she married him.

Her mind touched unwillingly upon that episode in the church, when the first d.u.c.h.ess's half brother had accused George of murdering his wife. Dora did not believe it, not even for a single moment. And yet . . . And yet something had provoked the Earl of Eastham into coming to their wedding to make such a public scene.

What had happened? What had really happened?