“If I could throttle young Darleigh,” he said, “without actually committing murder, I would.”
Gwen laughed again.
And silence descended once more.
“Lord Trentham,” she said, “you really do not need to bear me company here, you know. You came to Penderris to enjoy the companionship of the Duke of Stanbrook and your fellow guests. I daresay your suffering together here for so long established a special bond among you, and I have now intruded upon that intimacy. Everyone has been most kind and courteous to me, but I am quite determined to be as little of a nuisance while I must remain here as I possibly can be. Please feel free to join the others in the dining room.”
He still stood looking down at her, his hands clasped behind his back.
“You would have me thwart the will of my host, then?” he asked her. “I will not do it, ma’am. I will remain here.”
Lord Trentham. He could be anything from a baron on up to a marquess, Gwen thought, though she had never heard of him before today. And if what Viscount Ponsonby had said was correct, he was also extremely wealthy. Yet he did not have the manners of a thick plank.
She inclined her head to him and resolved not to utter another word before he did, though she would thereby be lowering her manners to the level of his. So be it.
But before the silence could become uncomfortable again, the door opened to admit two servants, who proceeded to move a table closer to the sofa and set it for one diner. Before those servants had time to leave the room, two others entered bearing laden trays. One was set across Gwen’s lap while the other was carried to the table, where the various dishes were set out for Lord Trentham’s dinner.
The servants left as silently as they had come. Gwen looked down at her soup and picked up her spoon as Lord Trentham took his place at the table.
“I beg your pardon,” Lord Trentham said, “for the embarrassment a seemingly harmless joke has caused you, Lady Muir. It is one thing to be teased by friends. It is another to be humiliated by strangers.”
She looked at him in surprise.
“I daresay,” she said, “I will survive the ordeal.”
He returned her look, saw that she was smiling, and nodded curtly before addressing himself to his dinner.
The Duke of Stanbrook had an excellent chef, Gwen thought, if the oxtail soup was anything to judge by.
“You are in search of a wife, Lord Trentham?” she said. “Do you have any particular lady in mind?”
“No,” he said. “But I want someone of my own sort. A practical, capable woman.”
She looked up at him. Someone of my own sort.
“I was not born a gentleman,” he explained. “My title was awarded to me during the wars, as a result of something I did. My father was probably one of the wealthiest men in England. He was a very successful businessman. But he was not a gentleman, and he had no desire to be one. He had no social ambitions for his children either. He despised the upper classes as idle wastrels, if the truth were told. He wanted us to fit in where we belonged. I have not always honored his wishes, but in that particular one I concur with him. It would suit me best to find a wife of my own class.”
Much had been explained, Gwen thought.
“What did you do?” she asked as she pushed back her empty soup bowl and drew forward her plate of roast beef and vegetables.
He looked back at her, his eyebrows raised.
“It must have been something extraordinary,” she said, “if the reward was a title.”
He shrugged.
“I led a Forlorn Hope,” he said.
“A Forlorn Hope?” Her knife and fork remained suspended above her plate. “And you survived it?”
“As you see,” he said.
She gazed at him in wonder and admiration. A Forlorn Hope was almost always suicidal and almost always a failure. He could not have failed if he had been so rewarded. And good heavens, he was not even a gentleman. There were not many officers who were not.
“I do not talk about it,” he said, cutting into his meat. “Ever.”
Gwen continued to stare for a few moments before resuming her meal. Were the memories so painful, then, that they were not even tempered by the reward? Was it there that he had been so horribly wounded that he had spent a long time here recovering his health?
But his title, she realized, sat uneasily upon his shoulders.
“How long have you been widowed?” he asked her in what, she guessed, was a determined effort to change the subject.
“Seven years,” she said.
“You have never wished to marry again?” he asked.
“Never,” she said—and thought of that strange, crashing loneliness she had felt down on the beach.
“You loved him, then?” he asked.
“Yes.” It was true. Despite everything, she had loved Vernon. “Yes, I loved him.”
“How did he die?” he asked.
A gentleman would not have asked such a question.
“He fell,” she told him, “over the balustrade of the gallery above the marble hall in our home. He landed on his head and died instantly.”
Too late it occurred to her that she might have answered with some truth, as he had done a short while ago—I do not talk about it. Ever.
He swallowed the food that was in his mouth. But she knew what he was about to ask even before he spoke again.
“How long was this,” he asked, “after you fell off your horse and lost your unborn child?”
Well, she was committed now.
“A year,” she said. “A little less.”
“You had a marriage unusually punctuated with violence,” he said.
Her answer had not needed comment. Or, rather, not such a comment. She set her knife and fork down across her half-empty plate with a little clatter.
“You are impertinent, Lord Trentham,” she said.
Oh, but this was her own fault. His very first question had been impertinent. She ought to have told him so then.
“I am,” he said. “It is not how a gentleman behaves, is it? Or a man who is not a gentleman when he is talking to a lady. I have never freed myself of the habit, when I wish to know something, of simply asking. It is not always the polite thing to do, I have learned.”
She finished the food on her plate, moved the plate to the back of the tray, and drew forward her pudding dish. She picked up her wineglass and sipped from it. She set it down and sighed.
“My closest family members,” she said, “have always chosen to believe quite steadfastly that Vernon and I had a blissful love relationship that was blighted by accident and tragedy. Other people are notably silent upon the subject of my marriage and my husband’s death, but I can often almost hear them thinking and assuming that it was a marriage filled with violence and abuse.”
“And was it?” he asked.
She closed her eyes briefly.
“Sometimes,” she said, “life is too complicated for there to be a simple answer to a simple question. I did indeed love him, and he loved me. Often our love was blissful. But … Well, sometimes it seemed to me that Vernon was two different people. Often—most of the time, in fact—he was cheerful and charming and witty and intelligent and affectionate and a whole host of other things that made him very dear to me. But occasionally, although he remained in many ways much the same, there was something almost … oh, desperate about his high spirits. And I always felt at such times that there was the finest of fine lines between happiness and despair, and he trod that line. The trouble was that he never came out of it on the side of happiness. He always tumbled the other way. And then for days, occasionally even for a few weeks, he was plunged into the blackest of black moods and nothing I could say or do would pull him free—until one day, without any warning at all, he would be back to his usual self. I learned to recognize the moment when his mood was turning to the overe-xuberant. I learned to dread such moments because there was no coaxing him back from the brink. Though for the last year his moods hovered most of the time between black and blacker. And you are the only person, Lord Trentham, to whom I have spoken of such things. I have no idea why I have broken my silence with a near stranger.”