To marry someone else. Lauren. She suddenly seemed like someone from another lifetime.
Lily was referring to divorce. For adultery. Because she had allowed herself to be raped as an alternative to torture and execution—if she had even been given the choice. Because she had set her face toward survival. And had survived.
Lily raped.
Lily an adulteress.
His sweet, lovely innocent.
"Lily." It was not his imagination that she was thinner. Her slender frame had used to have a lithe grace. Now it looked gaunt. "When did you last eat?"
It took her awhile to answer. "Yesterday," she said. "At noon. I have a little money. Perhaps I can buy a loaf of bread in the village."
"Come." He took her hand in his again. Hers was cold now and limp. "You need a warm bath and a change of clothes and a good meal and a long sleep. Do you have no belongings with you?"
"My bag," she said, looking down as if she expected it to appear suddenly in her empty hand. "I think I must have dropped it somewhere. I had it when I went into the village this morning. I was going to buy breakfast. And then they told me about—about your wedding."
"It will be found," he assured her. "It does not matter. I am going to take you home."
Into complications his mind could not even begin to contemplate.
***
"It is not that I think of you as a servant, Lily," Neville explained—the first words either of them had spoken since they left the beach, "but this way we may avoid the worst of the crowds."
The door through which they entered Newbury Abbey was not at the front. It was, Lily gathered, a servants' entrance. And the bare stone steps they ascended inside must be servants' stairs. They were deserted. The rest of the house certainly was not, if all the carriages that were before the stables and coach house and on the terrace were any indication. And there were people on the terrace too, standing together in small groups—some of those richly clad wedding guests who had been in the church.
Neville opened a door onto a wide corridor. It was carpeted and lined with paintings and sculptures and doors. They were in the main part of the house now, then. And there were three people there in conversation with one another, who stopped talking and gazed curiously at her and looked embarrassed and greeted Neville uncertainly. He nodded curtly to them but said not a word. Neither did Lily, whose hand was still in his firm clasp.
And then he opened one of the doors and released her hand in order to set his at the back of her waist to move her into the room beyond the door. It was a large, square, high-ceilinged room. There were gilded moldings all about the edges of the ceiling, she saw in one glance upward, and a painting on the ceiling that included fat, naked little babies with wings. Two long windows showed her that the room faced over the front of the house. It was a bedchamber, richly carpeted and sumptuously furnished. The bed was canopied and draped in heavy silk. The dusky pink and moss-green colors of the room's furnishings and draperies blended pleasingly together.
Lily had never seen anything half so grand in her life—except perhaps the great hall she had glimpsed the evening before.
"I shall have food and drink brought up immediately."
Neville said, striding across the room to pull on a tasseled strip of silk beside the bed, "and then I shall have hot water carried up to the dressing room for a bath. It should be possible to retrieve your bag, but for now I am sure a nightgown and a dressing gown can be found for you. You must sleep then, Lily. You look weary."
Yes, she was tired, she supposed. But weariness had been a condition of her life for so long that she hardly recognized it for what it was. She knew she was hungry, though she was not at all sure she would be able to eat. His tone was brisk and formal. It was not at all the joyful homecoming she had imagined—or the horrified rejection she had feared. He knew what had happened to her, yet he had brought her to the house, to this grand apartment.
"Is this your room?" she asked him. She did not know what to call him. "Neville" seemed too familiar, even though she was his wife. She would have felt comfortable calling him "sir," but he was no longer an officer and she was no longer a part of his regiment. She could not bring herself to call him "my lord." And so she called him nothing.
"It is the countess's room," he said. He nodded toward a door in the room she had not yet seen beyond. "You will find the dressing room through there."
The countess? The countess would be his wife or his mother. He would hardly have put her in his mother's room. That tall lady at the church was to have been his wife, his countess. But he had been unable to marry her because he was already married to herself, to Lily. That made her… the countess. Did it? She really had not thought of it before. She had been startled when her French captors had called her "my lady" and she had realized that she was Viscountess Newbury. But that had been a long, long time ago.
"It is to be my room?" she asked. "I am to stay, then?" She had never really thought beyond the end of the journey.
She had known deep down that an earl would surely rid himself of a sergeant's daughter at the slightest excuse—and the Earl of Kilbourne would have an excuse that was hardly slight. But she had tried to focus on the fact that the Earl of Kilbourne was also Major Lord Newbury. Her Major Newbury, the man she had always admired, trusted, adored. Neville. Her husband. Her lover. Her love. But she knew, standing in the countess's room, that she had never really expected a happily ever after. Only some sort of completion.
"Lily." He stepped toward her, and she could see that he was as uncertain and bewildered as she. More so, perhaps. He had had no warning of what was to happen to him this morning. "Let us not look beyond the moment. You are alive. You are here. And you are in the countess's room. To eat and to rest. Do both before we speak further."
"Yes. All right." Yes, she wanted oblivion more than anything else in this world. She did not know how to stay on her feet any longer, how to keep her eyes open, how to focus her mind on anything more than its need for sleep.
The door opened behind Lily and she turned to see a young girl in crisp black dress and white apron and mob cap, saucer-eyed and curtsying. Neville gave her instructions while Lily walked over to the window and gazed out with heavy-lidded eyes. He was ordering enough food to feed an army. And a hot bath—what an unbelievable luxury!
He came to stand behind her after the maid had left. "I will stay until the tray arrives," he said. "I shall leave you alone then while you eat. There will be water and night clothes awaiting you in the dressing room by the time you have finished. Then you must lie down and sleep. I shall come back for you later. We will talk then."
"Thank you, sir," she said, and immediately felt foolish.
She wondered suddenly if she had merely imagined that once upon a time, for one brief night, there had been a glorious flowering of love—strangely mingled with deep grief for her father. Both emotions had been shared with this man, this stranger who was her husband. Love—or what sometimes went by the name of love—had been so very ugly since that night that it was hard to believe it ever could be beautiful. But it had been. Once. Once in her life. With him—with Major Lord Newbury. With Neville.
It had been the most beautiful experience of her life. All the love she had stored secretly in her heart since she first knew him had culminated in that night of carnal passion. And she had believed—she had felt—that it was a shared love, though she had learned since that men were capable of passion without feeling one iota of love. They could even murmur endearments.