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“One hundred eighty feet,” he said, his eye returning to the page. “You seem to have an exaggerated view of the size of Athcourt.”
“I’ll get used to it,” she said. “I managed not to gape and gawk too much when introduced to the cathedral village otherwise known as Her Ladyship’s Apartments.”
He was still staring at the page where his birth had been recorded. His sardonic expression hadn’t changed, but there was turmoil in his dark eyes. Jessica wondered whether it was the entry directly below that troubled him. It had saddened her, and she had grieved for him.
“I lost my parents in the year after you lost your mother,” she said. “They were killed in a carriage accident.”
“Fever,” he said. “She died of fever. He entered that event, too.” Dain sounded surprised.
“Who entered your father’s death?” she asked. “That isn’t your hand.”
He shrugged. “His secretary, I suppose. Or the vicar. Or some officious busybody.” He pushed her hand away and slammed the ancient Bible shut. “If you want family history, we’ve volumes of it on the shelves at the far end of this room. It’s recorded in tedious detail, going back to the Roman conquest, I daresay.”
She opened the Bible again. “You are the head of the family and you must put me in it now,” she said gently. “You’ve acquired a wife, and you must write it down.”
“Must I, indeed, this very minute?” He lifted an eyebrow. “And suppose I decide not to keep you after all? Then I should have to go back and blot out your name.”
She left the bookstand, crossed to a study table, took up a pen and inkwell, and returned to him. “I should like to see you try to get rid of me,” she said.
“I could get an annulment,” he said. “On grounds that I was of unsound mind when the marriage was contracted. Lord Portsmouth’s marriage was annulled on those grounds, only the day before yesterday.”
He took the pen from her all the same, and made a grand ceremony of recording their marriage in his bold script, with a few flourishes to heighten the effect.
“Ah, handsomely done,” she said, leaning over his arm to look at the entry. “Thank you, Dain. Now I shall be part of the Ballisters’ history.” She was aware that her breasts were resting on his arm.
So was he. He jerked away as though they’d been a pair of hot coals.
“Yes, you have been immortalized in the Bible,” he said. “I expect you’ll be demanding a portrait next, and I shall have to move a famous ancestor into storage to make room for you.”
Jessica had hoped that a bath, dinner, and a glass or two of port would calm him down, but he was as skittish now as he’d been when they’d entered Athcourt’s gates.
“Is Athcourt haunted?” she asked, strolling with studied casualness to a tall set of bookshelves. “Should I be prepared for clanking chains or hideous wails at midnight or quaintly attired ladies and gentlemen wandering the corridors?”
“Gad, no. Who put such an idea into your head?”
“You.” She stood on tiptoe to examine a shelf of poetic works. “I cannot tell whether you’re bracing yourself to tell me something ghastly, or you’re in expectation of something ghastly. I thought the something might be Ballister ghosts popping out of the woodwork.”
“I’m not bracing myself for anything.” He stalked to the fireplace. “I am not braced. I am perfectly at ease. As I should be, in my own damned house.”
Where he’d learned his family’s history from a tutor, instead of his father, she thought. Where his mother had died when he was ten years old…a loss that still seemed to hurt him deeply. Where there was an immense, ancient family Bible he’d never looked into.
She wondered if he’d known his dead half-siblings’ names, or whether he’d read them this day, as she had, for the first time.
She took out a handsome, very expensively bound volume of Don Juan.
“This must have been your purchase,” she said. “The last cantos of Don Juan were published scarcely four years ago. I didn’t know you had a taste for Byron’s work.”
He had wandered to the fireplace. “I don’t. I met him during a trip to Italy. I bought the thing because its author was a wicked fellow and its contents were reputedly indecent.”
“Which is to say, you haven’t read it.” She opened the book and selected a stanza from the first canto. “‘Wedded she was, some years, and to a man / of fifty, and such husbands are in plenty; / And yet, I think, instead of such a ONE / ’T were better to have TWO of five and twenty.’”
Dain’s hard mouth quirked up. Jessica flipped through the pages. “‘A little she strove, and much repented, / And whispering “I will ne’er consent”—consented.’”
A stifled chuckle. But she had him, Jessica knew. She settled down onto the sofa and skipped ahead to the second canto, where she’d left off reading the night before.
The sixteen-year-old Don Juan, she explained, was being sent away because of his affair with the beautiful Donna Julia, wife of the fifty-year-old gentleman.
Then Jessica began to read aloud.
At Stanza III, Dain left the fireplace.
By the eighth stanza, he was sitting beside her. By the fourteenth, he had arranged himself into an indolent sprawl, with a sofa pillow under his head and a padded footstool under his feet. In the process, his crippled left hand had in some mysterious manner managed to land on her right knee. Jessica pretended not to notice, but read on—about Don Juan’s grief as his ship sailed from his native land, and of his resolve to reform, and of his undying love for Julia, and how he would never forget her or think of anything but her.
“‘“A mind diseased no remedy can physic—” / Here the ship gave a lurch, and he grew sea-sick.”’”
Dain snickered.
“‘“Sooner shall Heaven kiss earth—”(here he fell sicker) / “Oh Julia! What is every other woe?—(For God’s sake let me have a glass of liquor; Pedro, Battista, help me down below.)”’”
If she’d been reading alone, Jessica would have giggled, as she’d done last night. But for Dain’s benefit, she spouted Don Juan’s loves
ick declarations with a melodramatic anguish that grew increasingly distracted as the hero’s mal de mer got the better of undying love.
She pretended not to notice the large body shaking with silent laughter, so close to hers, or the occasional half-smothered chuckle that sent a tickling breeze over her scalp.
“‘“Beloved Julia, hear me still beseeching!” / (Here he grew inarticulate with retching.)’”
The breeze tickled the top of her ear, and she did not have to look up to be aware of her husband leaning nearer, looking over her shoulder at the page. She read on into the next stanza, conscious of his warm breath on her ear and of the vibrations his low, rumbling chuckle set off inside her.
“‘No doubt he would have been more pathetic,—’”
“‘But the sea acted as a strong emetic,’” he gravely finished the stanza. Then she let herself look up, but his gaze slipped away in the same instant and the expression on his harshly handsome face was inscrutable.
“I can’t believe you bought it and never read it,” she said. “You had no idea what you were missing, did you?”
“I’m sure it was more amusing hearing it read in a ladylike voice,” he said. “Certainly it’s less work.”
“Then I’ll read to you regularly,” she said. “I shall make a romantic of you yet.”
He drew back, and his inert hand slid to the sofa. “You call that romantic? Byron’s a complete cynic.”
“In my dictionary, romance is not maudlin, treacly sentiment,” she said. “It is a curry, spiced with excitement and humor and a healthy dollop of cynicism.” She lowered her lashes. “I think you will eventually make a fine curry, Dain—with a few minor seasoning adjustments.”
“Adjustments?” he echoed, stiffening. “Adjust me?”
“Certainly.” She patted the hand lying beside her. “Marriage requires adjustments, on both sides.”
“Not this marriage, madam. I paid—and through the nose—for blind obedience, and that is precisely—”
