Bedwyn: One Night For Love Part 25

He came a few paces closer to her. "You have not been in grave danger from him for some time, Lily," he said. "Kilbourne, I gather, has had a close watch put on you, and I have had a close watch put on Dorsey. I knew it was he, you see, but did not have proof of it until last evening. He will not be bothering you ever again."

Lily supposed that she had known last night why the duke and Neville left the party so early. But her mind had not been able to cope with the knowledge, or with anything else for that matter.

"He is dead?" she asked.

He inclined his head.

"You killed him?"

He hesitated. "I knocked him insensible," he said, "in a fist fight. Kilbourne and I had agreed with considerable regret that we could not reconcile it with our consciences to kill him in cold blood or even in a duel to the death, but we did agree that we would punish him severely before turning him over to a constable and a magistrate for trial. But we were careless. He s.n.a.t.c.hed up a gun before he could be taken away and would have killed me if Kilbourne had not first shot him."

Elizabeth had both hands to her mouth. Lily merely looked calmly into the duke's eyes and knew that she had heard everything that he was prepared to tell. She knew that although Mr. Dorsey had probably killed her mother and Mr. William Doyle, that although he had tried three separate times to kill her and had almost killed Neville, it might have been difficult to prove any one of those murders or attempted murders in a court of law. She was not sure if it was carelessness that had left a gun within Mr.

Dorsey's reach. Perhaps they had wanted him to have that gun. Perhaps they had wanted him to try to use it so that there would be a perfectly good excuse to shoot him in self-defense.

The duke himself would never say, of course. Neither would Neville. And she would never ask. She did not really wish to know.

"I am glad he is dead," she said, almost shocked to realize that she spoke the truth. "Thank you."

"And that is all we need say on the topic of Calvin Dorsey," he said. "You are safe, Lily. Free."

She nodded.

"Well," Elizabeth said briskly, "I am due to meet with my housekeeper. It is our day for going over the accounts. You will excuse me for half an hour, Lyndon? Lily?"

Lily nodded and the duke bowed.

He looked wary when he turned back from seeing Elizabeth out of the room, but Lily smiled at him.

"Will you have a seat, your grace?"she asked.

He took a chair quite close to hers and looked at her silently for several moments.

"I will understand," he said at last, sounding as if he were delivering a well-rehea.r.s.ed speech, "if you feel yourself unable to acknowledge the relations.h.i.+p, Lily. Kilbourne told me a good deal last night about Sergeant Thomas Doyle. I can understand your pride in him and your affection for him. But I beg you-please!-to allow me to settle a considerable portion of my fortune on you so that you may live in comfortable independence for the rest of your life. At the very least allow me to do that for you."

"What would you wish to do," she asked him, "if I said I was willing to accept more than the very least?"

He leaned back in his chair and drew a deep breath, looking at her consideringly as he did so. "I would acknowledge you publicly," he said. "I would take you home to Rutland Park in Warwicks.h.i.+re and spend every available minute of every day getting to know you and allowing you to get to know me. I would clothe you and deck you with jewels. I would encourage you to continue with your education. I would take you to Nuttall Grange in Leicesters.h.i.+re to meet your grandfather. I would ... What is left? I would try in every way available to me to make up for the lost years." He smiled slowly. "And I would have you tell me every single thing you can remember about Thomas and Beatrice Doyle and your growing years. That is what I would wish to do, Lily."

"You must do it, then, your grace," she said.

They stared at each other for a long time, it seemed, before he got to his feet, came closer to her, and extended a hand for hers. She stood up, gave him her hand, and watched as he raised it to his lips.

"Lily," he said. "Oh, my dear. My very, very dear."

She withdrew her hand, set her arms about his waist, and rested her cheek against his shoulder. "He will always be my papa," she said. "But from this day on you will be my father. Shall I call you that? Father?"

His arms were like iron bands about her. She was a little alarmed when she heard the first painful-sounding sob, but she closed her arms more tightly about him when he would have pulled away.

"No, no," she said. "It is all right. It is quite all right."

He did not weep for long. Men did not. She knew that from experience. They saw it as a sign of horribly embarra.s.sing weakness, even if they had just watched a close friend smashed to a thousand pieces by a cannonball or had just had a limb sawn off by the surgeons-or had just discovered a daughter after almost twenty-one years. He drew away from her after a couple of minutes and moved off to the window, where he stood with his back to the room, blowing his nose in a large handkerchief.

"I am so very sorry to have subjected you to that," he said. "It will not happen again. You will find me strong and dependable, I believe, Lily-a good provider and a good protector."

"Yes, I know, Father," she said, smiling at his back.

She heard him draw an inward breath and hold it for a few moments. "I could, I suppose," he said, "have remarried any time during the past twenty years. I could have had a nurseryful of children and been called that a thousand times and more before now. I believe, Lily, it has been worth waiting to hear it first from your lips."

"When will we leave for Rutland Park?" she asked. "Is it a large house? Will I like it ... Father?"

He turned to look at her. "As soon as possible," he said. "It is larger than Newbury Abbey. You will love it. It has been waiting for you all these years. We had better see if Elizabeth will come with you. Today is Thursday. Shall we say Monday?"

Lily nodded.

He smiled at her and strode to the bell pull. He told the servant who answered the summons to ask Lady Elizabeth to return to the drawing room at her convenience. Then they both sat down again and gazed at each other.

It would be more accurate, Lily thought, to say that he was beaming at her. Despite the battered look of his face, he appeared very happy. She deliberately kept her own expression bright-not that it was all pretense. But a part of it was. She was stepping into the unknown again as she had done so many times, it seemed, during the past couple of years.

She remembered traveling down to Newbury Abbey from London and hoping that the long journey was almost ended. She remembered seeing Neville for the first time in almost a year and a half and experiencing, despite the difficulty of the circ.u.mstances, a feeling of final homecoming. But she had not been home. And she still was not. She wondered if she ever would be. Would the time ever come when she would feel at last that she had arrived, that she could settle in peace to live out the rest of her life?

Or was life always a journey along an unknown path?

"Kilbourne," the duke said to her just before Elizabeth came back into the room, "asked me to inform you of his intention to call this afternoon, Lily-if you are willing to receive him."

Killing another human being was not something one did with any relish, Neville thought during the night and the morning following the death of Calvin Dorsey. Certainly not in battle-one was too aware of the fact that the men one killed were no more evil or deserving of death than one was oneself. But not even when the man one killed was a murderer and had killed one's wife's mother and had tried on a number of occasions to kill her too. There had been a certain satisfaction, perhaps, in watching Dorsey take the bait of that carelessly abandoned pistol and in being given then little choice but to kill him-especially when Portfrey had won the argument about which of them was to punish Dorsey before he was turned over to the law. But certainly no relish.

Was there pleasure in having discovered the truth about Lily's birth? In having learned that she outranked him? That he had nothing to offer her that she did not now have in overabudance herself? And was that how he had hoped to win Lily-with his position and his wealth and the hope that her own near dest.i.tution would force her back to him? Surely not. He wanted her to be his equal, to feel his equal. The fact that she had felt herself to be by far his inferior had wrecked any chance they might have had for happiness when she had come to Newbury.

He should be rejoicing, then, in this turn of events. Why was he not? It was because of Lily herself, he concluded finally. Poor Lily had suffered so much turmoil in the past year and a half. How could she sustain the loss of her very roots? Would he find her all broken up when he called at Elizabeth's during the afternoon? Worse, would he find her still quite unlike her indomitable self, dazed and pa.s.sive as she had been last evening?

He approached Elizabeth's with a great deal of trepidation. He even found himself half hoping as he entered the house and asked if Miss Doyle would receive him that she would send down a refusal. But she did not. The butler showed him up to the drawing room. Both Lily and Elizabeth were there.

"Neville," Elizabeth said, coming across the room toward him after he had made his bow and exchanged greetings with them. She kissed his cheek. "I will allow you a private word with Lily." And she left the room without further ado.

Lily was not looking crushed-or dazed. Indeed, she looked remarkably vibrant in a fas.h.i.+onable sprigged muslin dress with her hair softly curling about her face.

"You killed Mr. Dorsey," she said. "My father told me this morning. I am not sorry that he is dead though I have never before wished for anyone's death. But I am sorry you were forced to do it. I know it is not easy to kill."

Yes, Lily would know that, having grown up with an army whose business it was to kill.

But-my father?

"This one," he said, "was almost easy."

"We will say no more of it," she said firmly. She had risen from her chair and came across the room toward him. "Neville, I am going to go to Rutland Park on Monday with my father and Elizabeth. There is to be a notice in the papers tomorrow. I am going to spend some time with him, learning to be his daughter, letting him learn to be my father. I am going to see my grandfather and my mother's grave. I am going to ... go."

"Yes." His heart felt as if it somersaulted and then sank all the way to the soles of his boots-even as he told himself that he was glad for her.

She half smiled at him. "I was Lily Doyle," she said. "Then I was Lily Wyatt-and then not. Now I am Lily Montague. I have to discover who I really am. I thought I was discovering the answer after I came here to London, but today it feels as far away as ever."

"You are Lily." He tried to smile back at her.

She nodded and her eyes brightened with tears.

"How long?" he asked her.

She shook her head.

He could not press her on the point, he realized. She did not need one more burden to carry. And he knew the question to be unanswerable.

He had begun to believe that there was a future for them after all. He had been on the brink of putting the matter to the test at Vauxhall. He hated to remember that night, which had started with such magical promise. Now he would have to wait an indefinite length of time again with no certainties to make the wait easy.

He reached out both hands for hers, and she set her own in them.

"You will like him, Lily," he said. "You will even love him, I daresay. He is a good man and he is your father. Go then and find yourself. And be happy. Promise me?"

She was biting on her upper lip, he could see.

He squeezed her hands and raised them one at a time to his lips. "I am not overfond of London," he said. "I shall be glad to return to Newbury for the summer. I daresay I will go tomorrow or the next day. Perhaps, if you think it appropriate, you will write me a letter there?"

"I cannot ... write well enough," she said.

"But you will." He smiled at her. "And you will be able to read my reply too."

"Will I?" she asked him. "Sometimes I wish-oh, how I wish I were Lily Doyle again and you were Major Lord Newbury and Papa ..."

"But we are not," he said sadly. "I want you to know something, though, Lily. Not so that you will have one more burden to shoulder, but so that you will know that some things are unchanged and unchangeable. I loved you when I married you. I love you today. I will love you with my dying breath. I have loved you and will love you during every moment between those time spans."

"Oh. But it is not the right moment," she said, her eyes clouding with some emotion he was unable to enter into. Poor Lily. So much had happened to her recently and she had borne it all with dignity and integrity.

"I will not prolong this visit," he told her. "I will take my leave, Lily. Make my excuses to Elizabeth?"

She nodded.

They clung to each other's hands for a few moments longer. But she was correct. It was not the right time. If she came back to him-when she came back to him-there must be no other need in her except to be with him for the rest of their lives.

He withdrew his hands gently, keeping the smile in his eyes, and left her without another word.

He was halfway back to Kilbourne House, striding unseeing along the streets, before he remembered that he had driven his curricle to Elizabeth's.

PART V.

A Wedding.

25.

Lily gazed eagerly from the carriage window, not even trying to appear properly genteel. The village of Upper Newbury looked so very familiar. There was the inn, where she had descended from the stagecoach, and the steep lane leading down to the lower village. And there- "Oh, may the carriage be stopped?" she asked.

The Duke of Portfrey, from his seat opposite, rapped on the front panel, and the carriage drew to an abrupt halt. Lily had the window down in a trice despite the coolness of the day and leaned her head through it.

"Mrs. Fundy," she called. "How are you? And how are the children? Oh, the baby has grown."

While the duke and Elizabeth exchanged glances of silent amus.e.m.e.nt, Mrs. Fundy, who had been gawking at the grand carriage with its ducal crest, smiled broadly, looked suddenly fl.u.s.tered, and bobbed a curtsy.

"We are all very well, thank you, my lady," she said. "It is good to see you back again."

"Oh, and it is good to be back again," Lily said. "I shall call on you one day if I may."

She beamed at Mrs. Fundy while the carriage lurched into motion again. She was not coming home, she reminded herself. Newbury Abbey was not home. Oh, but she felt as if it were. She had come to love Rutland Park, as her father had predicted she would. She had come to love him too, as she had been determined to do, though it had not proved difficult at all. She had even enjoyed their extended visit to Nuttall Grange, where she had won the affection of her bedridden grandpapa and of her two aunts who were not really aunts at all-Bessie Doyle and her mama's sister. She had even come to feel happy and settled and at peace with herself and the world. She had not once, since leaving London, dreamed the nightmare.

But Newbury Abbey, though she had not seen either the park or the house yet, felt like home.

"Oh, look!" she exclaimed in awe after the carriage had turned through the gates and was proceeding along the driveway through the forest. The trees were all glorious shades of reds and yellows and browns. A few of the leaves had fallen already and lay in a colorful carpet along the drive. "Have you ever seen anything more splendid than England in autumn, Father? Have you, Elizabeth?"

"No," her father said.

"Only England in the springtime," Elizabeth said. "And that is not more splendid, I declare, only as splendid."

It had been springtime when Lily had come here first. It was autumn now-October. How much had happened in the months between, Lily thought. She could remember trudging along this driveway at night, her bag clutched in her hand ...

She had written to him at the beginning of September, as he had asked her to do. She had asked Elizabeth if it was unexceptionable to do so-for her to write to a single gentleman. Elizabeth had answered, with a twinkle in her eye, that it was really not the thing at all. But Father, who had also been present at the time, had reminded them all that she was Lily and was quite adept at stretching every rule almost to the breaking point without ever doing anything shockingly improper-that was her chief charm, he had added with the smiling indulgence that had surprised her about him at first. And so she had written-with laborious care and round, childish handwriting. She was working on her penmans.h.i.+p but it was going to take time.

She was happy with her father, she had written. She was happy with Elizabeth's company. She had been to Nuttall Grange and met her grandfather. She had put flowers on her mother's grave. She hoped Lady Kilbourne was well and Lauren and Gwendoline too. She hoped he was well. She was his obedient servant.

He had written back to invite her and her father to come as guests to Newbury Abbey for the celebration of his mother's fiftieth birthday in October. Elizabeth had already made arrangements to attend.

And so here they were. They were merely guests. But it felt like a homecoming. And Lily, looking suddenly with s.h.i.+ning eyes at her father as the house came into view, saw that he understood and was a little saddened, though he smiled at her.

"Father." She leaned forward impulsively and took his hand. "Thank you for agreeing that we might come. I do love you so."

He patted her hand with his free one. "Lily," he said, "you are one-and-twenty, my dear. Shockingly old to be still at home with your father. I do not expect to have you all to myself for much longer."

But that was far too explicit a thing to say. She sat back, her smile fading a little. She would take nothing for granted. Several months had pa.s.sed. A great deal had changed in her life and might have changed in his also. He had invited them out of courtesy. Doubtless there were to be many other guests too. She would not set great store by the fact that he had invited her.

If she told herself those foolish things often enough, perhaps she would come to believe them in the end.

Their carriage had been spotted. The great double doors opened as it approached, and people spilled out of the house-Gwendoline, Joseph, the countess, and ... him.