With This Kiss: Part One Page 5

He would not be that man.

  There was peacefulness in that realization. He let it sink in, watching the spider weave its spiral lines. Lily’s light gaiety would never work for him, and all the darkness he carried would drag her down to earth if he married her.

  He had been changed by the war, by the deaths he’d seen and the deaths he’d caused. There was no going back, not when rivers of blood ran through a man’s dreams.

  He folded the letter and put it on the floor at his side. It wasn’t Lily’s fault that her prose suffered so greatly in comparison to her sister’s. When one of Grace’s letters arrived, he could and did spend hours thinking about what she’d described.

  The spider retreated, curling into a ball so small that he hardly saw it. Candlelight gleamed along the gossamer threads, as the spider waited… waited. Colin snuffed the candle and lay there, unwilling to sleep, to risk the dreams that tormented him every night.

  If only the letter had come from Grace…

  It wasn’t Lily’s fault that she wasn’t as intelligent as her sister. Nor as witty and kind. That wasn’t fair: Lily was kind. But she was shallow compared to Grace.

  She was a waltz, and Grace was a hymn. He turned over in bed and went to sleep, thinking about it.

  Colin didn’t realize for another month that there would be no more letters from Grace. After all, sometimes weeks passed between dispatches from the Admiralty.

  He thought nothing of it at first, and not much the second week. But by a fortnight later, he was pacing the deck at night. The fourth week, the West Africa Squadron was still waiting for orders. And there was no escaping the fact that Grace’s letter should have reached him, perhaps two letters arriving at the same time, as they sometimes did.

  It was his own damned fault. He had gone to the house two mornings in a row, but they had told him she was ill. Perhaps there was something wrong with her. She would never have avoided him… not the warm, loving Grace of her letters. She was as dear to him as his own sister; surely she knew that?

  She must be dying, he thought, with a cold thump of his heart. Dying, and no one had told him. Scarlet fever, perhaps. Or her lungs—perhaps they were still weak.

  But then he remembered the way Lily’s eyes had shone during the ball, and the way she’d laughed when he took her for a ride in the park, and the way he grew infatuated with her, so much so that he lost his mind and actually told the duke that he would like to marry her. Lily would never have laughed like that if her sister were dying.

  He had felt a tremendous pulse of relief when the duke said no. He had been a fool, a damned fool.

  Lily, beautiful, laughing Lily, wasn’t the answer to his problems. He shouldn’t have thrown away his resolution to avoid marriage at the first sight of a pretty English lass.

  Of course, she was Lily. He was predisposed to love Lily, given the way she teased him and amused him since she was a young girl. He’d never forgotten that Lily had saved his life when she’d entered his bedroom, realized he was in a fever, and dumped a pitcher of water over his head.

  Now that he was older, he knew that a pitcher of water over the head wouldn’t save anyone’s life. But it was a funny story.

  The frogspawn was another.

  A package for him finally arrived well into the third month after he sailed from England. By then he had reread all the letters Grace had written him, starting with the ones where her handwriting was large and uncertain. He worked his way slowly through the years when she was learning Latin and tried to write him funny sentences in the language, and through her watercolors, which grew more and more intricate and assured. He reread her stories about their two households, looked for a long time at the portrait of his parents kissing under the mistletoe and at the picture of Fred covered with mud after falling off his horse, carefully replacing each one in the waterproof box in which he kept them.

  His whole life was caught up in those pages. Or rather, it was the life he missed because he was in the navy.

  That would have been the only life worth living, though he usually didn’t admit it to himself.

  The packet—for a packet did finally arrive—was larger than the usual letter. He didn’t let himself open it for two days. It had to be the final one.

  Of course, he had always known that the end would come. Grace would marry someone, and what would her husband think about her sending letters to another man?

  It was enough to make Colin consider marrying her himself, but it was stupid to marry a woman merely so that she would continue to write him letters.

  Even if those letters were the only thing standing between him and madness.

  When he finally opened the package and saw that the enclosed note held only three sentences, he clenched his jaw so hard that it hurt for a day.

  Then he read it, the cool, precise letters that shaped her words, such unwelcome words, over and over. She always signed her letters, Your friend, Lady Grace. But this one just said, From London… Lady Grace. Finally, he unwrapped the portrait and looked at it, numbly.

  It was a portrait of Lily, which was nice. She was a pretty girl, Lily. She glowed like a naughty angel, and Grace had caught that quality perfectly.

  He put it to the side and read the letter again, along with the accompanying note from the duke. Her father thought it was inappropriate for them to correspond? Her father? The duke? The duke thought…

  He remembered, suddenly, the rash way that he had said to the duke that he would like to marry Lily someday, if she thought it was a good idea.

  Of course the duke didn’t want Grace to correspond with a man in love with her sister.

  He had been an ass, worse than an ass.

  A young midshipman skidded to a halt and snapped to attention before him. “Orders are in, Captain,” he said, managing not to pant.

  Colin nodded. He folded up the portrait and put it in his breast pocket. He would take it out later. He always looked at Grace’s work over and over, to see if he could distinguish all those tiny brushstrokes that came together into such clever portraits, and this was the best portrait she’d ever sent him.

  It wasn’t until they were well out to sea, the wind pushing them over the waves on the way to intercept another slaver ship, that he understood what that portrait meant.

  Grace had given him what she thought he most wanted.

  Lily.

  The thought made him almost lose his breakfast over the rail. It had all gone wrong, that visit. He didn’t want Lily. He didn’t even want to look at her portrait, no matter how fresh and pretty she was.

  Grace’s letters had kept him alive for these last few years: kept him from madness, even from suicide. He had friends like Philip who weathered battles with equanimity, who saluted without blinking an eye as their friends’ bodies were consigned to the ocean. He wasn’t like them. He didn’t sleep well for days after an engagement. The splash of a body being buried at sea echoed in his ears for hours after it happened.

  But he had had Grace’s letters, those lovely songs about life in a different place, in a different key, where blood and death weren’t the only reality.

  He should have told her that. Written more often. But so often when he took up his pen to write, all that came to him were images of men dying, and how could he tell her about something so horrible? So he wouldn’t write, and he told himself that, obviously, she didn’t care, because she kept writing.

  One problem was that he was an unmitigated idiot.

  The other was that he was sailing toward Freetown, in Sierra Leone, and they wouldn’t be back on English shores for nine months.

  A few days later he pulled out the portrait again, but when he looked at it he suddenly felt as if it were painted in tears. Lily smiled, but the brush of the artist had wept. He clung to the railing, a pain gripping his heart that made his vision black for a moment.

  There was love in that portrait.

  Real love, not the sort of love-of-a-brother affection he had for Grace.

  She
would get over him, of course. All that love and warmth and humor she offered… there were probably a hundred men at her feet every night.

  She could have accepted any number of proposals over the last years. She’d always written wryly of the London season, making it sound as if she hovered on the margins of ton.

  But she was irresistible on paper, and would be more so in person.

  Even so, in the grip of vanity, he decided that she had waited for him since she debuted. That she would still wait for him. He just had to make it home alive and whole.

  And then he would marry her. It was the least he could do to thank her for all the wonderful letters. He pushed away a small voice that spoke of selfishness. He wouldn’t propose in order to get more letters, but to thank her for those he had already received. And because he loved her; he really did.

  Months passed, the way they do at sea, the days carelessly thrown away in a billow of cannon smoke and men’s lives. One day he received papers indicating that he had been awarded yet another prize from the Royal Navy. The HMS Daedalus was to be commended for meritorious service in the line of duty. And they gave him, as its captain, a large amount of money.

  Philip, his first lieutenant, saluted him with a shot of their carefully rationed brandy. His parents wrote. The duchess sent an exquisitely written note, with a scrawl on the bottom from the duke. Grace did not write.

  He got a note from Lily, a dashed-off letter sending him love from all. She made a list and then said something about each member of their two families. Fred was “sent down from Cambridge, for nakedness. Papa won’t say where but it must have been in public.” Cressida was “sick after eating too many gooseberries.” And Grace… “Grace is being wooed by a very nice man named Lord McIngle who says he’s met you several times. Grace laughs, and says she likes him because he has never flirted with me, which is true enough. He has eyes for no one but Grace.”

  For a moment he wondered if Lily meant to phrase her last sentences like that. If there was censure implied between her lines.

  But Lily wasn’t complex or thoughtful, the way Grace was. She was dazzling and rather shallow, while Grace was full of mystery. A man could spend a lifetime learning all there was to learn about Grace.

  He had kept every one of Grace’s letters, but he sent this one of Lily’s overboard with a curse at a man he’d never met, a Scottish lord who was winning—had apparently won—the only thing in the world that he wanted.

  But later that day, he found himself writing a reply to Lily, anyway. He had never written Grace more than a paragraph or two. But he didn’t feel that he could simply launch into the only questions that interested him: How is Grace? Is she happy? Does she miss writing to me? Who the hell is McIngle?

  His letter stretched to five pages, reaching the important part—the only thing he cared about—on page four. He watched the thick packet disappear into the diplomatic pouch, destined for the Duke of Ashbrook’s daughter. Not the right daughter, but a daughter.

  That night he lay awake, pulsing with rage at the idea of Grace marrying a man he dimly remembered as a pleasant fellow, but not one who could protect her if highwaymen stopped her coach…

  It occurred to him that brothers don’t feel this sort of wild panic and rage at the idea of their sister marrying a pleasant fellow.

  They didn’t lie awake, picturing a sister in peril…

  The crucial fact: she wasn’t his sister.

  And he didn’t feel brotherly toward her. Not at all.

  A couple of weeks later, the HMS Daedalus encountered the Loki, a Baltimore clipper slave ship.

  This time, when the smoke cleared, Captain Barry didn’t walk out unscathed. His second-in-command, Lieutenant Philip Drummond, assumed command of the vessel, and carried out plans that Sir Griffin Barry, with approval of the Royal Navy, had put in place long ago: If Captain Barry was injured, he wasn’t to be dropped off on shore to recover. Nor was he to wait about for a British naval ship to fetch him home.

  Captain Drummond put ashore at Casablanca, where he bought the fastest clipper he could find, hired a crew, and had the wounded captain carried aboard, accompanied by his personal batman, Ackerley. And then he and all his men lined up along the gunwale in a salute, and he was the only one who didn’t have tears in his eyes as they watched one of the golden twins being taken away on a stretcher.

  But when Drummond turned back to the deck, he was captain of the Daedalus.

  Nine

  January 1837

  The day that Colin’s letter arrived was not a happy one for Grace, especially when Lily asked her if she’d like to read it. Grace saw pages and pages covered with Colin’s spiky writing and shook her head.

  She went upstairs and sat down, refusing to cry. She was the daughter of a duke. She was not a dying swan who would spend the rest of her life mourning a man who didn’t love her.

  That afternoon she dressed with special care for a drive with Lord McIngle. She selected a new and especially flattering pelisse, made from violet cashmere, with black braided silk trim and a wide black velvet belt with a silver buckle.

  Just before His Lordship was due to arrive, she popped into her mother’s sitting room to show herself off.

  “You look exquisite, Grace,” the duchess exclaimed, getting up from her desk. “And even more important, you look happy.”

  “I am better,” Grace said stoutly. “I’m not the first to have suffered through a childhood infatuation. Colin never even kissed me, so I haven’t the excuse of saying I was misled.”

  Her mother gathered her into her arms. “I knew that Lily’s letter would feel hurtful.” And then: “But I am glad to hear that Colin didn’t give you reason to believe that his affections matched yours.”

  “Quite the opposite. All those years, he never wrote me back more than a line or two. He didn’t seek me out when he was on leave… not to mention the fact that he fell in love with Lily. I feel like such a fool, Mother!” It burst out of her.

  The duchess leaned back, her hands on Grace’s shoulders. “You are not a fool, darling. It is never foolish to love a good man. I’m just sorry that he didn’t reciprocate your feelings—and even sorrier that your father and I didn’t cut off the correspondence years ago.”

  “I do believe my letters were healing. So I’m not sorry I wrote them.”

  The duchess looked at her searchingly. “You are such a good person, Grace. I don’t know how your father and I managed to produce such a generous, wonderful young woman.”

  “Don’t forget fanciful. I made up a whole romance in my mind. When Colin didn’t answer a letter, I would make up the answer he should have sent me. Before I knew it, I was in love.”

  “I do wish I could have spared you that lesson,” her mother said. “Especially your pain in seeing that letter he wrote to Lily.”

  Grace shrugged. “It forced me to realize that I can’t hide from the truth. There’s a glaring contrast between the four-line letters Colin wrote me, and the five-page letter he sent Lily. He must truly love her.”

  “I’m not so sure that I agree about Colin’s feelings for your sister. Your father and I are agreed that he is not the person with whom Lily should spend her life. But the more important thing, darling, is that you find someone who will realize precisely how precious you are. It’s obvious to everyone, for example, that Lord McIngle is wildly in love with you.”

  “He is, isn’t he?” It was quite nice to see John’s eyes light up when she entered a room. “I know this is petty, Mother, but I so appreciate the fact that John has never even looked in Lily’s direction.”

  “John, is it?” her mother said teasingly. “Your father and I like your John very much. We would be very happy to have him join our family.”

  Lord McIngle arrived so promptly to take Grace for a drive that one might think his carriage had been lurking around the corner.

  But no, Grace thought, John McIngle would always be on time. She could count on him. He was steady, and warm, a
nd unfailingly respectful.

  John had been wooing Grace for quite a while now, so she knew the pattern of their afternoon excursions: John would tool his curricle to Hyde Park, where they would make a circuit, stopping to greet friends.

  Grace’s shyness had prevented her from forming many intimate friendships, but John was so convivial that all of London adored him, or so it seemed. She found herself chatting and laughing with his friends as if they were her own—and, indeed, some of them were becoming so. It felt wonderful.

  After driving once around the park, they would retire to Gunter’s Tea Shop for an ice. But this time, John handed Grace into the curricle and asked, “Do you mind if I take you on a short excursion to one of my favorite places in London, Lady Grace? It is entirely respectable, I assure you.”

  Grace smiled at him with genuine pleasure. He was such a nice man. No woman in the world could be offended by a question asked by a man with such adoring eyes. “I would be most happy, Lord McIngle.”

  “John,” he reminded her.

  “John,” she repeated.

  He didn’t drive terribly far, and then stopped the curricle in front of a small church called Grosvenor Chapel. His tiger took the reins, and John helped Grace from the carriage. They walked silently through the nave and out a side door, into a pretty little walled graveyard. There was no sense of grief here, just the buzzing of honeybees, happy to have found so many rosebushes in the heart of London. A narrow brick path wound its way between the gravestones.

  “How beautiful!” Grace exclaimed, her fingers twitching because she was so sorry not to have her sketchpad and a pencil. She looked up at John. “How on earth did you find this exquisite secret?”

  “My mother is buried here.” His expression was not at all tragic, but boyishly wistful. “I always visit her when I am in London; I have the feeling she is happy here.”

  “What a lovely thought,” Grace exclaimed, thinking how adorable his matched set of dimples were.

  Then he took both her hands in his. She looked up with a start. The sun was shining on his hair, playing on his thick curls. His voice was as earnest as his eyes were yearning.