Lucien's Fall Read online

  Restlessly his hand moved on her body. Quite erotic, actually, she thought, scooting over to touch him. She didn’t speak because he was so passionately engrossed, but she had a strong need to touch him. With light fingers she traced the lines of his ribs and the dip in his spine. Lucien scribbled, his pen scratching against the page, and his hand circled her belly. Again he wrote and his fingers stroked her breast.

  All at once, he put down his pen, shoved up her gown and put his mouth on her thigh, where he’d been stroking. The sensation was sharp and stabbing, and she cried out.

  "I am mad," he said raggedly. "I am mad."

  She pulled him to her and held his face. "I love you, Lucien," she said.

  He did not answer, only kissed her again, and again. Madeline tasted his desperation and gave herself to him fully, hoping to ease his sorrows. It was the last chance she would have.

  * * *

  Juliette was feverish by the time she reached the earl’s town house. Even she could feel it.

  The earl of Monthart received her in his study on the second floor. A fire burned in the grate. He stood nearby it, his hands clasped behind his back. A heavily powdered wig sat on his head, immaculately coiffed, as were his clothes. He was a grim-faced man and Juliette had no doubt he could be cruel. Gossip said he’d forcibly taken his bride from a party in Russia, so smitten he was with her beauty.

  Typical.

  As he turned to greet her, Juliette saw he looked ashen, his mouth a peculiar shade. He blotted his lips before he spoke, and she knew a pang of conscience— perhaps she ought return when he was not so plainly unwell. "Good afternoon, Lady Whitethorn," he said. "How may I be of service?"

  As if to remind her of her own precarious health, Juliette felt a wheezing sense of airlessness. "Your son has kidnapped my daughter," she said distinctly. "You must do something."

  "What can I do? He’s cut off. I sign the papers in the morning. As far as I am concerned, my son is dead." No emotion showed on his face. "It should have been done long ago."

  "Nothing else?" Juliette cried, coming forward. There was a fishwife sound to her voice she ordinarily tried to control. Tonight, she didn’t care. "He has ruined her, sir, and I will have compensation."

  "Greedy wench, aren’t you?"

  Juliette slapped him. He didn’t move, but she saw the flash of danger in his eye. Again he blotted his lips. "Go, now, my lady. I no longer wish your company."

  But as she turned, he made a strange choking noise, and when she turned back, he was crumpling to the floor, that blue in his lips more pronounced than ever.

  He was dead before he hit the floor. Juliette had seen enough death to recognize it. In horror, she stared at his lifeless form, her thoughts whirling dizzily.

  "No!" she cried, remembering what he’d said. In the morning, he would sign the papers cutting off Lucien Harrow.

  As of this moment, Lucien was the new earl of Monthart, and one of the richest men in England. Juliette’s revenge was in ashes.

  * * *

  Madeline awakened to find herself in a nest of pillows and blankets, curled tight against the damp chill in the room. From overhead came the sound of birds— the rain had stopped, then. She lifted her head.

  Lucien sat by the fire, his boots on already, his shirt on but not yet fastened. His hair was loose around the haggard lines of his face, and in his hands he held the sheaf of papers he’d written through the night. He stared longingly at the fire, holding the papers loosely in his elegant hands. Loosely.

  She sat up. "Lucien, please don’t burn them."

  Slowly, he looked up and met her gaze. "No." He stood and brought them to the bed, and put them in her lap. "It’s yours."

  From the table he took a rough blue dress, a servant’s dress and many times too large for Madeline, but he gave it to her. "I want to take you home before sunrise. It will be easier for both of us. I’ll wait outside."

  She washed and dressed, and her fingers were clumsy with emotion. Which emotion, she couldn’t quite say, for guilt and love and sorrow and regret were tangled as a basket of yarn. Her throat ached, and she knew it was not the weather but the force of unsaid words.

  And yet, because there were no choices, Madeline combed her hair and braided it, and put on the cloak he laid on the foot of the bed. She wrapped his music in the ruined silk-and-bead dress that she was supposed to wear to her wedding.

  Then she pulled up the hood and went outside to Lucien, who waited by his horse to take her home. But before he lifted her to the beast’s back, he took from below his own cloak a single rose, blooming pink, the same brilliant shade as the bud he’d plucked at Whitethorn. This rose, however, was newly opened, to show the gold center. Lucien brushed his lips over it and gave it to her.

  She blinked away her tears.

  In the predawn quiet, they rode into London, meeting only delivery men and servants and one old staggering drunk in an alley. Sunlight had just begun to gild the horizon when Lucien stopped before Juliette’s town house.

  Madeline looked at the house, its shutters tight, and took a breath. Lucien tipped up her chin and kissed her very, very gently. "Be well," he said, and his voice broke. He put her down.

  And quickly rode away.

  Madeline gathered the too-big clothes and walked up the short steps to the house. The door flung open before she could reach it, and Juliette stood there, looking like some evil spirit in an opera, her eyes dark and hollow in her powdered face, her mouth a red slash.

  "Mama—"

  Juliette slapped her, a blow that left her tasting blood. Stunned, Madeline put her hand over the stinging skin and stared without speaking.

  "Go to your room," Juliette said, pulling Madeline into the foyer that smelled of damp plaster. "And there you will be locked till your wedding day!" She slammed closed the heavy oak front door.

  "No," Madeline said, not loudly. She stood her ground, clasping Lucien’s symphony to her chest.

  "What no?" Juliette’s fever burned in her eye. "You’ll do as I say."

  "I cannot marry Charles, Mama." She shook her head. "I cannot betray him that way—he is too kind and good a man."

  "Oh. do you think your precious Lord Esher will marry you? The poor and pitiful Lord Esher who has been cut off?"

  "No." Again, she did not speak loudly. "I will marry no one."

  "And lose your gardens? You’ll toss away all my plans, all your plans, and your ancestral home for a roll in the hay with a man who’s had sex with most of the women in England?"

  Madeline’s face burned. "Stop it."

  "No, you stop it. Have a care, dear child. You’ll not find a better man than Charles Devon. And he worships you."

  "We will be friends always," Madeline replied, "but I will not marry him. I made him that promise."

  "What promise?"

  "That I would tell him if I came to the point where I believed my feelings for Lord Esher would interfere with my ability to be his wife."

  "Oh, Madeline, think!"

  "I am thinking. I am in love with him—and it doesn’t seem to matter whether that is right or wrong. I love him. I hold no hopes of building a life with him. I have no illusions that he loves me in return—or, rather, loves me enough to remain faithful. I am willing to accept I’ll not have a husband, only my gardens."

  "You won’t have gardens either, Madeline."

  Madeline smiled. "But there’s where you’re wrong. I am going to open a nursery."

  "Oh, dear God."

  Without waiting for more argument, disaster and melodrama, Madeline left Juliette in the foyer and went to her chamber.

  Where at last, holding his cloak against her mouth and nose so she could smell him, Madeline wept. And when she had wept, then fallen into deepest sleep, she awakened and set about making plans for her life.

  * * *

  Predictably, Charles was more understanding than Juliette had been. In fact, over the nightmarish weeks of gossip that followed, it was Charles Devon who pro
ved to be a most steadfast friend to Madeline. It was Charles who knew when to suggest a round of cards or a walk or a bite to eat and when she needed simply to retreat and lick her wounds.

  But not once in all those days did she wish she had married him. It almost seemed incestuous when she thought of it at leisure, as if he were her brother or a close cousin.

  She did not burden him with such insights. Though he never reproached her, and had in fact thanked her for her honesty when she spoke to him the horrible morning after the kidnapping, she knew he’d been wounded.

  When he left for more excavations at Pompeii, Madeline took Juliette home to Whitethorn, armed with a list of foods and herbal treatments. The doctors had confirmed consumption and advised them to retire to the less foul air of the countryside, where Juliette might maintain her health as long as possible.

  As the wet, dreary summer gave way to a sparkling autumn, there was one more thing Madeline knew she had to do. At the little desk in the corner of her greenhouse where she liked to keep her notes, Madeline sat one fine, clear autumn morning and took up her pen.

  Dear Jonathan,

  It is with urgency I write to ask you to reconsider your very hard stand against my mother. I know your feelings were deeply wounded, but I know also that you loved her. I’ll wager all I have that such a love is not so easily killed. Pride is a lonely man’s bedmate.

  You should know one more thing, too. The doctors have said she has consumption. Although she is much improved in health since we left the foul city, I feel a visit from you would cheer her more than anything I could do or say. Please consider it.

  Yrs sincerely,

  Lady Madeline Whitethorn.

  She posted the letter on Wednesday afternoon, and then was free in conscience to apply herself to the business of preparing to open a nursery in the spring. Her vivacious correspondence took an even more energetic turn as she flung herself into the task of funding, management, and stocking.

  She was going to be very good at it, and most of the time, she was able to shut down the voice in her mind that never stopped crying.

  LucienLucienLucien.

  Chapter Twenty One

  Never seek to tell thy love

  Love that never told can be;

  For the gentle wind does move

  Silently, invisibly.

  ~ William Blake

  Lucien rode back to Rosewood from his father’s funeral in a state of grief and shock. Not grief for his father, who’d been nothing but cruel to his child, but for Madeline and all the things he could not undo. And shock because he had not been disinherited after all, and if he’d not behaved like such an animal, there might have been hope for them.

  In mere days, he rode to the house at Monthart as the new earl.

  Over the weeks that followed, Lucien kept largely to himself. In letters and from the stray, curious visitor he heard news. Charles Devon, the marquess of Beauchamp, had departed for Pompeii. The incomparable Juliette was dying of consumption. Word of Jonathan was scant.

  No one seemed to know just what Madeline was doing. Three well-to-do suitors had been turned down and Madeline had retreated to the country. Three times Lucien sent notes to Juliette. Three times she returned them unopened. Lucien tried very hard to think of Madeline as little as possible—she deserved a man as honorable as she, though he had to admit he was glad she was not going to marry the marquess. They were not a good match.

  His life quickly took on a pattern. By day he learned the layout of the grounds and gardens at Monthart. He worked well into the darkest heart of fall on it, finding he enjoyed the passion for growing things Madeline had kindled in him.

  One more thing for which he had to thank her one day.

  But the biggest change in his life came in the evenings, as he sat by his fire in his study. Lucien wrote music. He wrote without thought or care, wrote ballads and sonatas and symphonies and concertos. He did not throw them in a fire, either, but tossed them in a box he kept for the purpose. It perplexed him a little that the notes tumbled from him so prolifically, without nudging or drink. It was, he thought, as if they had been building up behind some dam in his soul, and he’d finally, simply, set them free.

  Night after night he wrote, night after night he dreamed of Madeline. Night after night, he regained his lost self, the man he’d been going to become under his mother’s tutelage, before his father crushed his heart beneath his stern boot.

  He neither needed nor wished for spirits. He ate a hearty supper and sat down by the fire and wrote until he could write no more. Hundreds of images pressed in during those hours. He’d felt so odd as a child, so beyond the pale, not only for his Russianness, but for the way he always, always heard music, played music.

  He heard it in the leaves and the sound of birds, and tried to imitate the sound on stools or walls or windowpanes. He made sounds with silver at the table, and with rocks upon rocks and with rhythmic slapping on the water.

  He thought everyone did.

  It was his mother who had seen, and taken him from the world of English lords to the harsher, kinder world of passion in which she’d grown up. He was seven. When he came home, he could play by ear any instrument they put in his hands. He played the sound of the leaves and the tumble of water and the sound of rocks banging against each other.

  It made him very happy.

  And now, after so long, like a bird who has forgotten to fly and remembers, he soared and swooped into the sky of his music. He hummed under his breath. And clacked rocks in tumbles upon each other. And listened to his boots thump on the earth. And tapped his spoons against the china.

  And one morning, he awakened to the knowledge he must have Madeline. Not for a day or a week or an hour.

  Always.

  * * *

  After several weeks in the country and the relief of no entertaining obligations, Juliette felt much improved. On this bright Saturday morning, she sat on the veranda overlooking the back garden. Her cough had eased, and she’d even gained back a little of the lost weight.

  Now calmly making paper flowers after the fashion of Mrs. Delany, it seemed to Juliette there was more to life than love affairs and the passions of youth. When she looked back to the summer, it seemed to her that everything that had gone wrong had been only because of passion. One simply had to let one’s head rule one’s heart—a lesson she should have learned a long time before.

  A sharp gust of wind came up and blew pieces of red paper in her face and all over the stone veranda, and stole Juliette’s hat from her head. With a laugh, she stood to retrieve it—.

  And halted.

  For standing in the frame of the French doors leading to the salon stood a ghost. Jonathan, looking aged and tired, his hair drawn back.

  Juliette closed her eyes. A ghost only. She had learned to live without him, she had mended her shattered heart. To save her daughter, she would do it again.

  "Juliette." the ghost said, its voice raw.

  She opened her eyes. The ghost moved toward her, and she saw with a pang that his eyes were even more brilliantly green than she remembered. A wash of heat and wistful longing burst through her.

  A ghost. That was all. She couldn’t— He stopped before her. "How can you always be so beautiful?" he whispered, and touched her cheek. "How is it that nothing ever touches you?"

  Rigidly, she remained still, but she could not stop herself from looking up at him, drinking in his beautiful face, his wide mouth and the graceful cut of his nose. "What are you doing here?" she asked.

  He opened his mouth, closed it. To her eternal astonishment, he knelt on the stones before her and took her hand in supplication. "I have come to beg forgiveness, my lady."

  Juliette narrowed her eyes. "Did Madeline put you up to this?"

  "She wrote to me," he admitted, and seemed unable to stay kneeling, for he leaped to his feet. "Why didn’t you tell me you were so ill that day you came to my house? Why didn’t you let me help you?"

  Juliette pull
ed her hand from his. "I’d rather not suffer your pity. Please go."

  "Pity." The word hung in the air like a bad smell. "Is that what this feeling is? This ache in my heart that will not let me rest? That hounds me no matter how drunk I get or how many rounds of cards I play or how many other women I find to chase you from my mind?"

  Juliette closed her eyes, willing herself to keep her back turned, to keep hidden her need of him. Her knees trembled at the very sound of his voice, and a curiously thick sensation drugged her blood.

  "Is it pity, Juliette?" He seized her arms and turned her around to face him, naked hunger now on his face. "Is this?"

  He kissed her fiercely, and his hands pulled her close into his embrace. Juliette made a soft whimpering noise and let her hands come up around him. Such a dear presence—this back, these shoulders, these arms, these lips. Sweet heaven.

  Jonathan gasped, lifting his head. "God, I’ve missed you!" He kissed her face, all over, with that peculiarly gentle way he had, and Juliette tasted tears—his or her own, she didn’t know.

  Then she did know, because there was no pretending with him anymore. Relief and regret and the most pervasive need burst in her and she put her face against his chest and wept. "I’ve missed you," she said, clutching his coat.

  He made a low, agonized sound. "I’m sorry, my love, I’m sorry for all my idiocies, for my pride, for my judgments." He rocked her close. Juliette smelled the sweet notes that belonged to him alone. "I’ve been a fool."

  "As was I." She lifted her head.

  Slowly, reverently, he kissed her. "I love you, Juliette. I want to marry you. Please."

  Overcome, Juliette could only nod.

  Jonathan said, "There is one more thing."

  "What?"

  "Ask Lucien Harrow to visit your daughter. He is most desperately in love."

  Juliette pulled away. "Never."

  He took a breath, and unexpectedly, sighed. "He’s one of the richest men in England, my love. He adores your daughter with a passion only equaled by mine for you. He’s writing music and will likely be England’s next great composer." He took her hands. "What more can you ask of a man than that?"