Virtue

20

Marcus strode up St. James's toward Curzon Street. It was a dark night but he'd have been unaware of his surroundings even in brightest moonlight. His mind was a seething witches' brew of anger, disappointment, and something that he vaguely recognized as sorrow. Sorrow for the savage, abrupt destruction of his budding belief that his marriage, founded on quicksand, could be reconstructed, grounded now in cement. He had begun to lay down the burden of mistrust, gradually to allow the warmth of his feelings for Judith to overcome the doubts, to be seduced by her in every respect as thoroughly as he'd been seduced simply by her body in Brussels. And now it was all gone, ashes on his tongue. She wanted what he could give her materially, and when he didn't satisfy those wants, she gave not a thought to his position, to her position, but simply took what she wanted, perpetrating her deceitful masquerade as shamelessly as ever. She had no interest in or intention of being his wife in the fullest sense, adapting her life-style to the obligations and duties of that position even as she enjoyed its advantages. She was using him, as she had used him from the start.

At the corner of Duke Street and Piccadilly, the sounds of uproar broke through his self-absorption. A group of young bloods of about Charlie's age were drunkenly weaving their way along the pavement, arm in arm, nourishing bottles of burgundy. One of them fired a flintlock pistol in the air, and their raucous hilarity brought an officer of the watch out of an alley, his lantern raised high, throwing a yellow circle of illumination over the disheveled band. It was an error. With a fox hunter's "view halloo," the group surged forward, surrounding the man, clearly intent on one of the favorite pastimes of inebriated, aristocratic youth: boxing the watch.

Marcus's anger, already in full flame, needed only this to create a conflagration. He strode into the middle of the group, wielding his cane to good purpose, until he reached the fallen watchman. One of the young men, his face red, his eyes bloodshot, swung an empty burgundy bottle at the cane-wielding spoiler of their fun. Slender fingers gripped his wrist and the pressure made the young man wince. The marquis stared at him in silence. His grip tightened and, with a sharply indrawn breath, the young man let the bottle crash to the pavement. He fell back under the piercing menace of those ebony eyes and his companions, infected by the unspoken threat embodied in this new arrival, melted away.

The officer of the watch scrambled up, retrieving his fallen lantern, straightening his coat, adjusting his wig that had slipped over one eye. He muttered about taking the young hooligans before the Justice, but the group had gone, and soon could be heard hooting and bellowing from the safety of a reasonable distance.

"Ruffians," Marcus stated disgustedly, kicking broken glass away from his gleaming Hessians. "Too much money and time and not enough to occupy them. Sometimes I think it would have been better if we hadn't beaten Bonaparte. A few years in the army would do them the world of good." The watchman agreed, but rather nervously. His rescuer seemed to be in as dangerous a mood as his assailants, judging by those intimidating eyes and the savage way his cane had thwacked across their shoulders. He ducked his head, mumbled his thanks, and took himself off on his rounds again, swinging his lantern.

The encounter had done nothing to quell the bright flame of rage as Marcus strode up the steps of the Herons' mansion on Curzon Street. Light poured from the windows, voices and the strains of dance music greeted him as he stepped into the hall. Instructing the butler curtly to summon Lady Carrington's chaise, Marcus strode up the stairs.

His hostess came fluttering over to him, all smiles, and Marcus forced himself to respond with due courtesy, but it was clear to Amanda Heron that the Most Honorable Marquis of Carrington's thoughts were elsewhere… and they weren't very pleasant thoughts, judging by the look in his eye. She was quite relieved when he excused himself and made straight for the card room, casting a quick glance into the drawing room, where the rug had been rolled up and a few couples still danced to the strains of a pianoforte.

Judith was not dancing. Neither was she in the main card room. Presumably the stakes at this insipid affair were not worthy of her skill, he thought savagely, turning aside to another, smaller salon.

He heard Judith's laughing voice as he stepped through the arched doorway. "For shame, Sally, you're looed. How could you have lost that trick?"

"Oh, it grows late," Sally protested. "And I haven't your powers of concentration, Judith."

The powers necessary to maintain a deceitful masquerade. Marcus stood for a minute in the shadow of a heavy curtain. Ten people sat in a cheerful circle around the loo table. They were playing limited loo, the penalty fixed at a shilling, but Judith had beside her a substantial pile of shillings, and as he watched, a man opposite pushed the pool across the table.

"Lady Carrington, you win again."

"How very surprising," Marcus murmured, crossing to the table.

Judith experienced a start of pleasure at the sound of his voice, and missed the tone at first. She turned, smiling, as he came up behind her shoulder. The smile faded as she saw his expression, a slowly creeping apprehension prickling between her shoulder blades. "Carrington, I wasn't expecting you."

"Isn't this rather tame sport for you, my dear?" he asked, gesturing to the cards and the mound of small coins. His voice was heavy with sarcasm, and the rage that he could barely contain flared in his eyes.

Two spots of color pricked her cheekbones and her scalp contracted as apprehension became absolute. She became aware of the uneasy shirtings around the table, the puzzled glances at Lord Carrington. "I've always liked party games," she offered, desperately trying to defuse whatever this was. "We've been enjoying ourselves famously." She appealed to the table at large.

"Oh, famously," Isobel agreed readily, gathering up

her cards, her eyes warm and encouraging as she smiled at Judith. "Won't you join us, Lord Carrington?"

He shook his head with brusque discourtesy. "I wait only for my wife to make her excuses."

Only immediate compliance would end this mortification. Judith's head pounded as she pushed back her chair, picking up her reticule.

"You've forgotten your winnings," her husband said pointedly.

"They can go back in the pool." Judith thrust the shiny mound of coins into the middle of the table. Bidding her companions good night, she tried to smile as if nothing out of the ordinary were happening, but she could feel the stiffness of her lips and read in every eye both discomfort and consternation.

"Such winnings are too insignificant to be worth keeping, I assume," Marcus muttered against her ear as he drew her arm through his. Judith stiffened and would have withdrawn her arm, except that he tightened his grip, squeezing the limb against his body, so that to pull free would look like a struggle.

She couldn't think of anything that could safely be said in public, so she painted the stiff smile on her lips as they progressed through the rooms, bowed, made her farewells like a marionette obeying the puppeteer, and allowed herself to be removed in short order from the Herons' mansion and handed into the chaise, waiting ready at the door.

"What is all this about, Marcus?" To her annoyance, her voice shook, and she tried to deny that it was as much fear that produced die quaver as her own anger at the embarrassment he'd caused her.

"We will not discuss it here," he declared with icy finality.

"But I demand-"

"You will demand nothing."

There was such ferocity, such purpose, investing the statement that Judith was silenced. She shrank into a corner of the carriage, trying desperately to marshall her forces, to look for some clue to whatever had happened… to whatever was about to happen. Something dreadful had occurred. But what?

The chaise drew up in Berkeley Square. The coachman let down the footstep. Marcus sprang down and assisted Judith to alight. In silence, they entered the house, and the night porter locked and bolted the door behind them, bidding them good night.

"We will deal with this in my book room." Marcus's hand closed over Judith's shoulder as she moved toward the staircase.

There would be no waiting servants there, she realized. No one to dismiss before he could unburden himself of whatever weight of rage lay on his shoulders. She moved away from his hand, in the first gesture of independence she had managed since this debacle had begun, and walked ahead of him down the passage to the square room at the back of the house.

"Now, perhaps you'll tell me what this is all about?" Her hands shook now as she drew off her long silk gloves, finger by finger, but her voice was once more steady.

The deep nighttime silence of the sleeping house enclosed them, and for a minute Marcus didn't reply. He tossed his cane and gloves onto the table and poured himself a glass of cognac, trying to master his fury. When he spoke, his voice was relatively calm and distant.

"I've been extraordinarily naive, I freely admit. For some inexplicable and doubtless foolish reason I had assumed that once you'd achieved your goal by this marriage, you'd see no need to pursue your career at the gaming tables."

So that was it. Her lips were bloodless as she said, "When you made it clear you resented paying my expenses, I saw no alternative to paying for them myself. I prefer to do that anyway. I don't care to be dependent on a whimsical generosity, my lord."

"At no point did I say I resented paying your expenses. I did however say that as your husband, I would control your expenditure. My fortune is not at your unlimited disposal, although I now understand that you'd expected it to be." Ice tipped every loaded, humiliating word.

Judith felt herself diminishing into a small, hot ball of shame under the power of his contempt, and she fought to hold on to herself, to the essence of her pride and her knowledge of how wrong he was. "I don't and never did expect unlimited access to your money," she denied in a low voice. "But as your wife, I assumed I would be granted the dignity of an appearance of freedom, instead of being reduced to the status of a poor relation, or a child in the schoolroom, begging for pin money."

"And so in retaliation you choose to take money from my friends, to supplement an allowance you consider meager?"

"I do not take money from your friends… I win it!" she cried. "And I win it because I have the greater skill."

"You win it because you're a gamester-an adventuress, and you'll never be anything else," he declared bitterly. "I thought… God help me… I thought we were finding some truth on which to stand. But there is only one truth, isn't there, Judith? You're a manipulator

and you will manipulate whoever comes your way, if they can be used to your advantage."

"No," she whispered, the cramping ache in her belly intensifying as her muscles clenched against the hateful words. She pressed her hands to her cheeks. "No, it's not like that."

"Oh, really?" His eyebrows lifted, black question marks in his dark face. "When did you decide that I would be the most useful recipient of your inestimable virtue, Judith? When you first saw me? Or did you decide later… even as late as when we were on the way to Quatre Bras, perhaps?"

"What are you saying?" Her eyes, huge with distress, stared at the mask of his face. "I don't understand what you're saying."

"Oh, then let me explain, my perverse and obtuse wife." He swung away from her, his fists clenched at his sides as he fought for control. He wanted to hurt her as she had hurt him, and he knew the potential power of the violence in his soul if he ever let slip the leash of control.

"When a virtuous woman loses her maidenhead dishonorably to an honorable man, she has a claim on that man. How difficult it must have been for you, reining in that passionate nature of yours, my dear, until your most precious bargaining chip found the highest bidder. Only the bidder didn't know what he was bidding for, did he? The bidder was offered the masquerade of an experienced adventuress, and only when it was too late did he discover the virgin."

Judith felt sick. Her body was one tightly clenched muscle and the nausea rose in her throat. This had never occurred to her. All this time, he believed she had deliberately led him on, offering the wiles of a wanton, in order to trap him with her virtue.

"No," she said, her voice barely audible. "It's not true. I never thought of my virginity when I was with you. I thought only of you… you must remember how diat was… how it is now," she said in passionate appeal to the passion they shared. "How could you believe I could pretend to feel for you in that way? I don't know how one would pretend it." Tears clogged her throat and she forced them down.

Marcus barely heard her. He moved a hand in harsh dismissal. "You are a consummate actress," he said. "And I've watched you perform once too often. And what an amazing piece of good fortune, it must have been, when Francis and the others turned up so opportunely. It set the seal on the trap perfectly, didn't it?"

"No," she whispered again. "No, it wasn't like that." But her heart was leaden, and she was filled with tears of pain and bewilderment, and suddenly the fight went out of her. She bowed her head in defeat.

"You will now listen to me very carefully," Marcus was continuing. He articulated each word with a slow emphasis that served as much to keep a rein on his rage as it did to increase the force of his speech. "Since, for better or worse, you are my wife, you will begin to behave like my wife. You're not to be trusted, so I shall take responsibility for correcting your faults myself. From this moment on, outside this house, you will play only whist and limited loo. From now on, I shall watch you: every move you make." He began to count off on his fingers. "You will accept no engagement without my express permission; and you will enter a card room only in my company; and if I ever find you seated at any table other than a loo table or a whist table, then I shall oblige you to leave immediately, regardless of the embarrassment this will cause you. Do you understand?"

"Oh, yes," Judith said softly. He was going to make a prison of their marriage with himself as her jailer.

"Furthermore," he continued coldly, "you will ask for my approval before you buy anything. I shall want to know what you wish to purchase, why it's necessary, and its cost. I'll then rule on whether you may do so or not. You'll not take advantage of me ever again, Judith." There was a bleakness in his voice now, and he turned away from her, going to the long French door and pulling aside the curtain, gazing out into the starless night.

He heard the door close quietly and knew that Judith had left the room. He could hear his voice, the harsh, punitive statements, the bleakness of betrayal beneath the cold fury. They faced a lifetime together… a lifetime of misery for both of them. And now he wished more than he had ever wished for anything that he'd never set eyes on her. Because knowing her from now on could only bring intensified pain. He had begun to love her, but he'd been loving a chimera.

He refilled his brandy goblet and tossed the mellow golden liquid down his throat in one swallow, then he went up to his own apartment. A sleepy Cheveley jumped up from a chair beside the fire. "I trust you had a pleasant evening, my lord."

"I don't remember passing a worse," Marcus replied, wearily. The valet dosed his mouth and devoted his single-minded attention to the task of putting his lordship to bed.

Next door, Judith sat on the bed, waiting. She had sent Millie to bed as soon as she'd come up and had then locked the door behind the maid, before turning the key on the connecting door. Now she listened to the soft shufflings and footfalls from next door, waiting until she heard Cheveley bid his lordship good night and the door close on his departure.

She sat hunched over the woman's pain in her belly and the shank of despair driven deep into her soul. There was no future here. The life Marcus had just decreed couldn't be lived by either of them.

The line of yellow beneath the connecting door vanished as Marcus extinguished his bedside candle. Judith stood up, straightening her aching body with a low moan. She removed her evening dress and put on a riding habit, treading softly about the room, opening drawers and armoires with exaggerated care. Into a small valise, she packed her hairbrushes, nightclothes, tooth powder, and a change of clothes. It would do to be going on with, and anything else she needed, she would buy later.

She knew only that she could no longer stay under the same roof as Marcus. Leaving him so precipitately would ruin everything with Gracemere, but she could see no option. Sebastian would understand and they'd come up with an alternative plan.

But never had she felt so desolate, or so at a loss. She couldn't stay with him, but why then was leaving him as agonizing as peeling away a layer of skin?

Delicately she turned the key and let herself out of the room; In the corridor, where a dim light came from a single candle in a wall sconce, she paused, listening. The only sounds were the creaks and rustles of the sleeping house. She crept down the stairs, still hunched over the dragging pain in her belly, and turned down the passage leading to the book room. This was not an exit to be made through the front door.

She opened the French doors and stepped into the garden, closing them quietly at her back. The gate in the wall led into the mews. Horses whickered, hooves shuffled on straw as she moved in the shadows across the swept cobbles of the yard. The stablehands wouldn't start

work for another hour and Judith had the sense of being the only human awake in the whole of London town. It occurred to her that it was perhaps foolhardy to walk the streets alone in the dark hour before dawn, and her hand closed over her pistol.

It was less than a ten-minute walk, however, to Al-bemarle Street, and she saw no one. Sebastian's rooms were on the ground floor, and she stood on tiptoe to tap at the window. If she had to use the knocker the landlord would answer the summons and it would be hard to explain herself at such an hour. She raised her hand to tap again, when the front door opened. "Come in, Ju," Sebastian whispered. "How did you know it was me?" She slipped past him into the dark passageway.

"Somehow I was expecting you," he replied, picking up her valise and gesturing to the sitting room. "I didn't wake you, then."

"No, I was waiting for you." He set down her valise and examined her carefully. "You look the very devil. Brandy?"

"Please." She threw off her cloak and drew off her gloves. "Thank you." Cradling the glass in her hands, she went to the hearth, where the ashy glow of the embers of the dying fire put out a modicum of heat.

Her brother took kindling from the basket beside the grate and tossed it onto the embers. A reassuring hiss and spurt of flame resulted. He straightened, regarding his sister with sharp-eyed concern. She sipped her brandy, stroking her stomach in an unconscious gesture he recognized as the fiery spirit warmed her cramping muscles. "You're not feeling too well," he stated.

She gave him a wan smile of agreement. "To add insult to injury."

"So, what did he do?"

"How did you know…? Oh, did you tell him?"

"He wanted to repay me for your turn-out. I told him you'd paid for it yourself. He made the correct deduction. Carrington's no fool, Ju."

"I never took him for one," she said. Bleakly she recounted the scene in the book room, leaving nothing out. Sebastian listened in grim silence. It occurred to him that his brother-in-law had shown about as much sensibility as a herd of rogue elephants.

"So where do you want to go?" he asked, when she'd fallen silent.

"Some small hotel, perhaps."

"In London?"

"Yes, but in an unfashionable part; somewhere where I won't run the risk of meeting anyone I know on the street."

"Kensington… Bloomsbury?"

"Either… look, I know this ruins everything, but-"

"Not necessarily," her brother said. "We'll work out something. But at the moment, you've got to sort yourself out. We'll find somewhere for you to stay first thing in the morning." He put down his glass. "You can have the bedroom, I'll sleep on the sofa."

"No, I don't mind sleeping in here."

"Oh, Ju, don't be a bore." He picked up her valise. "Apart from the fact that you've got the bellyache, there's no need to be so tiresomely independent with me. You'll sleep in the bed and I'll be perfectly happy on the sofa. We've both slept in many more uncomfortable places in our time."

Judith gave him a ruefully apologetic smile. "Sorry. I seem to have lost the power of cool thought tonight."

He smiled and kissed her cheek. "Hardly surprising."

Judith followed him into the bedroom. "I suppose it's possible Marcus might knock on your door at some point."

"Highly likely, I would have thought," her brother agreed with a dry smile. "He can hardly pretend you never existed."

"No, but I expect he wishes he could."

Sebastian shook his head. "1 admit it looks bad at the moment, but things change with time and distance."

"I can't go back," she said, pulling back the coverlet.

"No," he said neutrally. "I suppose not." He took her hands. "You're worn to a frazzle, love. We'll work something out."

"Of course we will. We always do," she assented, with a conviction she didn't truly feel. She reached up to kiss him. "Thank you."

"Sleep well."

Judith crept into bed and, despite unhappiness and uncertainty, fell instantly into the deep sleep of total, emotional exhaustion.