doing as he wished, ‘and the whole world will soon know that we are bankrupt. So far I have been successful in staving off ruin, but my creditors are growing weary of waiting for pay day.
‘As for her lack of interest in your idle life, what has that to do with not wishing to marry her? Get her with an heir or two and you and she may go your own separate ways. No need to wish to play Romeo and Juliet together. After all, I am the heir to my cousin, Viscount Bulcote, and since, unfortunately, he is as poor as a church mouse, too, we have no salvation there. On the other hand, Mrs Wardour might care to be called Lady Bulcote—if Russell Hadleigh hasn’t snapped her up first.’
Russell Hadleigh wasn’t snapping anyone up, least of all Mary Wardour. In fact, he wasn’t sure exactly what he was about. He had told himself to avoid her, that he had nothing more to say to her, nor could she have anything to say to him, and yet, when dinner was over, the mere sight of her had set him mooning after her as though he had been twenty again!
Once they were out of the room and in the vast Entrance Hall, one door of which led to the picture gallery, Mary turned to him and said in the frostiest tones she could summon up. ‘You can really have little wish to spend the next half-hour in my company inspecting paintings about which you must care little. May I suggest that we part—possibly to return to our suites and then, after a decent interval, to the drawing room.’
‘Indeed not,’ was his answer to that. ‘Not only do I have no wish to return to the drawing room, other than in your company, but I do wish to see the General’s paintings. I missed the Grand Tour because of the war, my Oxford education was ended prematurely for a reason of which you are well aware, and, as I grow older, I have become determined to fix my interest on other pursuits than gambling, drinking and attending race meetings and boxing mills. An idle life is beginning to tire me.’
Whatever could he mean by speaking of his education ending prematurely for a reason which she well knew? Had he not ended it himself when he had abandoned her so cruelly?
She was about to tell him that in no uncertain terms when something about him stopped her. The empathy for her which Russell had experienced a little while ago—that memory of their lost happy time together—now overcame her. Whatever else, she knew that he was not lying to her. After all these years he wanted her company. Not only that, his interest in the paintings was genuine, not a trick to enable him to begin deceiving her all over again.
‘Very well, since you put it so movingly, Lord Hadleigh, I will do as you ask. You must, however, remember your request that we meet as strangers and practise a self-denying ordinance, as the saying has it. Refer to the past again—however remotely—and I will leave you at once.’
‘So noted,’ he replied in a comic parody of a clerk registering the commands of his superior, and again it was as though the years had rolled back and he was teasing her as he had done then. ‘Lead on, Mrs Wardour. You may begin my education.’
He had not been lying to her when he had said that he wished to see the contents of the picture gallery, or else he was a superb actor. He showed a keen interest in the paintings, which ranged from a fourteenth-century panel of the Madonna and Child by a pupil of Duccio to the latest works of the English masters. Lawrence had painted the General himself and they debated briefly whether he deserved to stand alongside the great masters of the past.
‘Reynolds, perhaps, or Gainsborough at his best may merit such an honour,’ was Russell’s verdict, ‘but Lawrence is an extremely competent journeyman, no more.’
‘I think that you know more about painting, Lord Hadleigh, than you suggested earlier.’
‘That is my brother Ritchie’s influence,’ he confessed. ‘He is a gifted water-colourist—but then he is a gifted everything, unlike his slightly older brother.’
There was no bitterness in Russell’s words, nor in his voice, but there was something there which told Mary not of envy or of jealousy, but of a certain wistfulness, of something missed and lost.
‘I have not had the good fortune to meet your brother,’ Mary said, surprised at how easy talking to Russell had become. ‘I remember that he went to Oxford a few years before you when I was still little more than a child.
‘Oh, few people have met him. He resigned from the Army after Waterloo in order to restore the estate which had been left him while he was still a serving officer. He spends most of his time in the country and visits London rarely. As for Oxford, he was excessively precocious and was only fifteen when he matriculated. My father also thought it best that we did not attend there at the same time.’
Again there was that odd note when he referred to his brother. A mixture of pride and something else, hard to judge.
By now they had completed their tour. Russell motioned to a long sofa which stood in front of one of the glories of the collection: a Tintoretto showing the god Jupiter in the shape of a bull abducting Io. The sky above them was a miracle of colour.
Once seated, Russell stared at the painting and a thought which was difficult to resist popped into his head. I ought to have behaved like Jupiter all those years ago and carried Mary off before she had time to change her mind about me. Had I done so, we should not now be sitting primly side by side—and like Ritchie I might be starting a little family of my own.
What would happen if I tried to kiss her now—which would be much less than Jupiter did to Io, of course—but it would serve for a new beginning with her. Merely to sit by her has my unrepentant body behaving as though I am twenty again.
No, I must not! I promised to behave myself, and behave myself I will.
Mary, seated beside him, her hands in her lap, and her mind a whirl of conflicting sensations, was also affected by the painting’s subject. She tried to drive both memory and desire from her. In an effort to banish the unwanted feelings which were beginning to overwhelm her, she turned towards Russell in order to say something banal to him which would return her wandering senses to their proper condition of calm self-control.
She began to speak.
Only to discover that Russell was also turning to her and also beginning to speak.
What they were about to say was never to be known.
As many times before in their lost past when they had found themselves similarly afflicted, they began to laugh. Laughter released them from the unnatural state in which they had been living since they had found one another again.
Russell gave a little cry, something between a moan and an exclamation of exaltation, and put one arm around her. With the other he tipped her face towards him and began to kiss her on the lips. Mary responded by kissing him ardently back. The kiss, which had, at first, been a gentle one, began to change its nature and ascend into passion. That, and their sudden unwanted recollection that they were in a public room where they might be discovered by their fellow guests at any moment, ended the kiss abruptly and left them staring into each other’s eyes aghast.
Laughter and passion had alike flown away.
‘Forgive me,’ said Russell hoarsely.
‘I cannot forgive myself, let alone you,’ Mary said breathlessly. ‘Whatever possessed me to make me start kissing you back? No, do not speak of the past,’ she went on, ‘I see by your expression that you are about to.’
Well, that was true enough, particularly since the present had become unbearable. It was a long time since merely the presence of a woman had roused
