At Last Comes Love

14

"DO you suppose, Smith," Duncan asked while his valet was helping him into his coat the following morning and ensuring that his shirt and waistcoat beneath it did not suffer so much as one crease as a consequence, "that when one has lived a lie for a number of years one is incapable of telling the truth ever again?" Smith, not satisfied with his handiwork, hauled the coat higher on the right shoulder and stood back to take a critical look. "When one has lived the truth most of one's life," he said, brushing the coat vigorously to remove the last stubborn spot of lint, "one is still capable of telling lies. I suppose the matter works both ways, m'lord." "Hmm," Duncan said. "Reassuring. You have finished with me?" "I have," Smith said. "She will take one look at you and swoon with delight." "Really?" Duncan said. "That would be a miracle. She has already informed me that I am neither handsome nor particularly good-looking." Smith looked at him sidelong as he put away the clothes Duncan had recently discarded. "It is no wonder you are worried about telling lies, then, m'lord," he said, "if you have found such an honest woman." Duncan was still chuckling as he closed the dressing room door behind him and made his way downstairs.

He was going to take Miss Huxtable to call upon his grandfather this afternoon. He had gone to bed with the intention of spending an hour at Jackson's Boxing Salon again this morning and another hour or two at White's. But sleep had refused to come to him all night until he had made a certain decision at dawn.

He had lain on his back staring at the canopy over his bed when he was not curled up on his left side, his forehead almost touching his knees, or on his right side, one arm burrowed beneath his pillow, or when he was not flat on his stomach trying to find a way to position his head that would allow him to breathe. It was no good. There was no such thing as a comfortable position.

It was a ghastly fate, he had thought eventually, on his back again, his fingers laced behind his head, his eyes on the rosebud at the center of the canopy, to have been born with a conscience. It played havoc with a man's chances of living comfortably in the real world and of enjoying a good night's sleep.

And here he was this morning, all dressed up as if he were on his way to make another marriage offer – which, in a sense he was. To the same lady and in the same place. He was on his way to Merton House to speak with Miss Huxtable. He hoped fervently that she was not at home. Did not ladies use their mornings for shopping and visiting and exchanging their books at the library and walking in the park and … She was at home.

Merton's butler did not even make any pretense of going to see if she was. Instead, he took Duncan's hat and gloves, preceded him up to the drawing room, which was empty, and told him that he would inform Miss Huxtable of his arrival.

Too late Duncan realized that the butler must have assumed this was a planned visit. A good butler ought not to make such an assumption.

There had been another letter from Mrs. Harris this morning, reminding Lord Sheringford that the rent was going to be due again soon.

As if he needed reminding.

She had enclosed a picture that Toby had made for him. They were all in it, spread across the bottom of the paper – Toby with a mop of curly hair and the Harrises, all modestly small, himself a great hulking giant filling the right half of the page, a round sun with beaming rays above his head.

The protector.

The one who filled a child's world and brought him the sun.

Duncan could almost see Toby drawing the picture, his little body hunched over the paper, the charcoal clutched in his left hand despite all Mrs. Harris's efforts to make him use the right, a frown of concentration on his brow, the tip of his tongue protruding from the right side of his mouth.

He could almost smell the baby smell of the child.

He felt such a swell of yearning that for a moment he closed his eyes and reminded himself of what he was about to do. The right thing?

How could one know what was right and what was wrong?

There was conscience – and then there was a child.

Miss Huxtable was obviously neither going out nor expecting visitors.

She came to the drawing room a mere two minutes after he arrived there, dressed in an off-white cotton morning dress that looked as if it must be an old favorite, her hair styled in a simple knot at her neck. It must not have occurred to her that she might have kept him waiting while she changed and did something with her hair.

Strangely, she looked even more lovely than usual.

She also looked flushed and bright-eyed. Like a young innocent who had been kissed the night before and had rather enjoyed the experience. "Lord Sheringford?" She came well into the room before stopping a few feet from him. She was smiling. "This is a pleasant surprise." She offered him her hand, which he took in his and squeezed. Belatedly, he realized that she had probably expected him to raise it to his lips.

He released it. "Perhaps not so pleasant," he said. "I have come to give you the chance to rescind your acceptance of my marriage offer before our betrothal has been made public." The color deepened in her cheeks. Her smile remained, but it became more guarded. "Mr. Turner has challenged you to a duel," she said. "No." "If it is what was written in the morning papers," she said, "you must not concern yourself. I have grown quite accustomed to such silliness being written about me – and about you. And Stephen was much affected by what I told him at breakfast. He was hoping to meet you at White's this morning and make his peace with you. I am sure my sisters and brothers-in-law will feel the same way. I have sent letters to them. I would have gone in person, but I feared that I would be exhausted by the time I returned home and not quite up to facing the Marquess of Claverbrook." "Miss Huxtable," he said, "I have not been quite frank with you. There is something I have not told you that will almost certainly cause you to reconsider your decision to marry me." Not that he could be perfectly frank even now. Certain details were not his to divulge.

Her smile had faded entirely, and she looked away from him. "We had better sit down," she said, and she took a chair beside the fireplace.

He sat on a love seat adjacent to it. "I would not be attempting to contract such a hasty marriage," he said, "just for the sake of retaining Woodbine Park, much as I love it. It will, in the normal course of things, be mine eventually anyway. Neither would the simple prospect of losing all my funds propel me into marriage with a virtual stranger. I will be wealthy enough eventually, I daresay, and in the meanwhile I am perfectly capable of earning enough money to keep body and soul together, unaccustomed though I am to earning my living. To be honest, I would not even be /thinking/ of marriage yet – or perhaps ever." He paused long enough for her to speak. "You have realized since last evening," she said, "that you really do not wish to marry me or anyone else, Lord Sheringford, that you would prefer to take employment until such time as you inherit from the Marquess of Claverbrook. I can understand why the reality of being betrothed has awoken you to what you really want to do with your life until then. I can even respect you for it – and for coming here this morning to be honest with me before any announcement has been made.

Better that than be abandoned at the altar." She smiled fleetingly. "You must not feel badly. I am not in love with you, and I do not /need/ to marry. After a few days I do not doubt I will realize that I have had a fortunate escape. It is /not/ comfortable to be notorious." Perhaps he should leave it at that. Perhaps she really would be thankful in a few days' time to have been released from all this madness. Perhaps he should simply get to his feet, make her a heartfelt apology, and take his leave. "Miss Huxtable," he said instead, "there is a /child/. Toby – Tobias. I love him, and I have promised him a home at Woodbine Park. A safe haven after all he has known in his life so far. Laura was constantly terrified of being found. We were constantly on the move, settling into one home only to be uprooted and having to start all over again – with new names, new identities each time. I have promised Toby Woodbine as a home." She was staring at him, her face expressionless. "A child," she said. "You and Mrs. Turner had a child." She bit her upper lip. "There is a couple looking after him," he said. "The Harrises. In Harrogate. They at least have been a constant in his life. Woodbine needs a new head gardener, and I offered the position to Harris before I heard from my grandfather and understood that the position was not mine to offer. Mrs. Harris has always been Toby's nurse. He was to pass as their orphaned grandson so that the neighborhood need not be scandalized and outraged at the presence of an illegitimate child in the nursery.

Since learning that I must marry in order to retain Woodbine, I have toyed with the idea of putting the three of them in one of the cottages on the estate, but I could not push Toby out of the house merely so that my wife could live there. I hoped somehow to keep you all under the one roof and hide the truth from you. But Toby has been accustomed to calling me /Papa/ even though we have been trying to train him to address me as /sir/ before the move to Woodbine. You would have found out soon enough, I do not doubt, but it would be too late then for you to refuse to marry me. And even if the secret could be kept from you forever, I realized last night, I could not do it. I cannot put you in the position of having to share your home with a – with a bastard child." Good Lord, he had never /ever/ used that word of Toby before now. "Thousands of fathers," he said, "/most/ fathers, in fact, house and feed and clothe their children on their earnings. I will do it too for as long as I must. Forgive me, Miss Huxtable. I ought not even to have come to London to plead with my grandfather. I certainly ought not to have been tempted by his ultimatum, which I goaded him into making. I ought to have apologized to you at the Tindell ball for colliding with you and let you go on your way. I ought not even to have /been/ at the ball." "You did not collide with me, Lord Sheringford," she said. "It was the other way around." He laughed – totally without humor. "How old is he?" she asked. "Four." "Does he look like you?" she asked. "Like Laura." He closed his eyes and then opened them to look down at his hands draped over his knees. "Blond and blue-eyed and delicately built – and the very devil. He suffers from anxiety and insecurities, but he has all the makings of a happy, mischievous hellion. He will be a perfectly normal little boy, given the chance. I have promised myself that he will have that chance. I am sorry, Miss Huxtable. He must come first in my life. He did not ask to be born. He did not ask for the difficulties of the first four years of his life. For better or worse, he is in my care, and care for him I will. I hope I have not caused undue embarrassment to you with your family. Though dash it, of course I have." "Lord Sheringford," she said softly, "will you marry me? Please?" He looked up at her, startled. "I understand," she said, "that you do not really want to marry at all.

I understand too that if you did want to and had the time to look about you at some leisure, you would very probably not choose me. But your child does need the home and the life you have promised him. He needs a father who is always close by to soothe his insecurities and anxieties.

And I daresay he needs a mother, though no one will ever be able to replace his real mother, of course." "Laura," he was startled enough to say, "had very little to do with him.

She was depressed after his birth. She never got over her depression. Or her fears. She spent most of her time alone." In a darkened room. Usually in bed. She could not bear to look at Toby. "Poor lady." She frowned. "And poor little boy. Then he needs a mother, Lord Sheringford. Let me be a mother to him." "You cannot mean it," he said. "Just think, Maggie. The very thought of it should scandalize you. You would be sharing your home with m-my bastard." She looked steadily at him. "I notice your hesitation," she said. "Is that a word with which you are accustomed to describe your son, Lord Sheringford?" "No," he said. "I have never used it before today." "Then never use it again," she said, "either in my hearing or out of it.

As you said a short while ago, your son did not choose to be born of a married lady and her rescuer and lover. He is a child, as valuable as a king's child. In the future when you refer to him, call him your son." He was surprised into smiling at her. "The neighbors would be scandalized," he said. "It would have to be our secret." She clucked her tongue. "Will you never learn your lesson?" she asked him. "Your neighbors doubtless know of the scandal. And so they will be very suspicious of you when you return, perhaps even hostile for a while. You might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, then. We will make open reference to the fact that the child who is coming to Woodbine Park to live with us is your son. We will both show without any artifice at all that we love him as if he were ours. Your neighbors may react as they wish, but if I know anything about neighbors in a country setting – and I /do/ – I can feel perfectly confident that almost everyone will soon forgive you and accept your son and get on with their lives." He sat back in his seat and regarded her in silence for a while.

She was formidable indeed. He wondered if after all he would come to dislike her intensely after he had lived with her for a while. Or if he would come to love her.

If the latter were the case, he suspected that he might love her with a passion to end passions.

Though where /that/ thought had come from he did not know. "Are you quite sure?" he asked.

She stared back at him. "I think," she said, "I must believe in fate. I have never thought much about it before now, but I think I must believe in it. The last few days have been bizarre. Ten days ago I was still at Warren Hall – I left there late in the morning to come to town. Four days ago I was planning to attend Lady Tindell's ball and hoping to meet the Marquess of Allingham there and rekindle our friendship. Four days ago I had not even met you.

And then a whole series of strange things happened at the ball that led up to my colliding with you – and a string of events had happened to you that had brought you there in search of a bride. So much has happened since then that sometimes I think I have crammed a whole year's worth of living into a few days. All this cannot possibly have happened just by chance or for nothing. If I send you on your way this morning and return to my former life, I will forever suspect that I missed the whole point of my life. This /has/ to be the point, or why has it all happened?

There have been so many coincidences that I cannot escape the conclusion that it has not been coincidence at all. Perhaps fate intends that I be a mother to your little boy, Lord Sheringford." "And a wife to me?" he said.

She hesitated and then nodded. "Yes," she said. "Strange, is it not? I hope I am not wrong. I hope we do not all end up living unhappily ever after." He got to his feet and extended a hand for hers. She set her own in it and rose to stand before him. "I will do my very best," he said, "to see that you do not regret your decision but that rather you will rejoice in it. I said that Toby must come first in my life. But you will not be second, Maggie. I do not believe life and relationships work that way." He raised her hand to his lips and turned it to kiss her palm.

His heart was aching. She had persuaded him to bring the secret out into the open when they returned to Woodbine – and he had capitulated because he knew she was right. Toby had been hidden in the shadows for too long.

But he was well aware that what he had really agreed to was the opening of a Pandora's box. It had started last evening, in fact, when he had told her about some of the events surrounding his elopement with Laura Turner. It would not end at Woodbine, though. Woodbine was not a world unto itself. Word of its doings sometimes spread beyond its boundaries – especially if they were unusual and interesting doings.

Toby needed freedom. But what might be the cost of that freedom? "I had better take my leave," he said. "I may return this afternoon as planned, then, may I, and we will go to face the lion in his den?" "We will," she said. "I look forward to meeting the Marquess of Claverbrook. No one ought to be allowed to inspire as much fear as he appears to do." "I worshipped him as a child," he said. "He used to frown and harrumph and look ferocious whenever I saw him, and then he would invariably feel around in his pockets until he came out with a shilling. He would always look surprised and comment that /that/ was what had been digging into him before tossing it my way and telling me to spend it wisely on sweets." She laughed.

He bowed to her and took his leave.

And wondered if she was right.

Was this all fate?

Had the whole of his life been leading him to that strange meeting with Maggie Huxtable?

It was a dizzying thought.

He had a /son/. Margaret did not know why she had been taken so much by surprise. He and Mrs. Turner had been together for almost five years before her death, after all. In a sense, it was surprising there had not been more than one child.

He had told her on a previous occasion that he had never loved Mrs.

Turner – not in any romantic sense. All this was very reminiscent of Crispin. Was love impossible for men? Or /romantic/ love, anyway? It was a depressing thought.

It was a good thing she was no longer looking for romantic love.

Vanessa arrived soon after Lord Sheringford had left. She had come to rejoice with her sister over the fact that he was not after all the villain everyone thought him to be. But she did not stay long. She had promised the children an outing – indeed they were outside with their nurse in the carriage waiting for her – and would not disappoint them.

Half an hour after Margaret had waved them on their way, Katherine came.

She had been at the library when Margaret's note had been delivered, but she had read it with such delight even before taking off her bonnet that she had come without delay to hug her sister and even shed a few tears over her. But Jasper was expected home at any moment, and she wanted to be there to share the good news with him. "Oh, Meg," she said when she was leaving, her eyes shining with tears, "your marriage is going to turn into a love match. Just wait and see." Margaret did not say a word to either of them about the child.

Tobias – Toby. She wondered what last name he bore.

They would know soon enough, though, she supposed. She was determined that the little boy would not be hidden away in some dark corner with an assumed identity, as if there were something shameful about him.

Everyone in the neighborhood of Woodbine Park would know who he was.

There were scores of gentlemen, she was well aware, who had illegitimate children, most of them hidden discreetly from the view of wives and polite society with their mothers or at some private orphanage or school.

It was not going to happen with the Earl of Sheringford's son. And let anyone try to sympathize with her at having to endure such an indignity.

She would give that person an earful!

Margaret dressed with care for the visit to the Marquess of Claverbrook.

It was important that he approve of her, though he would surely have no reason /not/ to unless he was playing games with his grandson and intended to disapprove of anyone who was presented to him. Well, she would give /him/ an earful too if that were the case.

She left her room as soon as she heard the door knocker. She was feeling quite martial, perhaps because inside she was quaking with nervousness.

She paused at the top of the stairs when she saw that Stephen was in the hall with her betrothed. He was shaking his hand. "I will not apologize," he was saying, "for the manner in which I have received you during the past few days, Sheringford. My primary responsibility is to my sisters, especially Meg, who lives under my roof and to whom I owe more than I can ever repay. I would do anything in my power to protect her from harm or lasting unhappiness – and all the available evidence suggested that you might well bring her both. But she told me something this morning, in strictest confidence, that has convinced me I have misjudged you. I do hope that if I were ever called upon to make a decision as excruciatingly difficult as the one you faced five years ago, I would have the courage to make the same choice you made – and to keep it a secret too, according to the lady's wishes.

Indeed, I honor you." "Nothing has changed, you know," the earl said. "Miss Huxtable will still be marrying a social pariah. I am still guilty of jilting one woman and stealing another from her lawful husband. I take it your sister also informed you that she has accepted my offer?" "She has," Stephen said, "and I must confess that I still felt it my duty to caution her, as marriage to you will /not/ be easy. I respect her decision, though. Meg is nothing if not courageous." "I will do my utmost – " the earl began, but Margaret cleared her throat at that point and made her descent.

Lord Sheringford bowed to her. "Maggie," he said. "Lord Sheringford." /"Maggie/?" Stephen said with a laugh. "That is a new one." "A new name for a new life," she said, "as Lord Sheringford pointed out a few evenings ago. I believe I rather like it. It makes me seem less dull and staid. I am ready." "/Dull/?" Stephen said, laughing. "/Staid/? You, Meg?" He kissed her cheek and waited to see them on their way. It still seemed strange to realize that he was all grown up, that he was the one now who felt responsible for /her/.

She felt a rush of love for him.