Victoria and the Nightingale (15 page)

“And what about me?” Victoria asked, so quietly that it was almost a whisper in the warmth of the afternoon. “What about me? Or didn’t I really count at all?”

He dropped her hand and put his fingers under her chin, lifting it. He looked deep into the harebell blue eyes.

“What about you? Well, the only thing happened that could happen. I succeeded in freeing myself, and now I’m going to marry you!”

“Instead of Miss Islesworth?”

“Well, obviously, I don’t intend to marry both of you.”

“But you’re not free!” She spoke insistently. “You can’t say that just having a quarrel and walking out instead of staying to dinner is being released from an engagement! For one thing, she hasn’t officially released you, has she?”

“I told you it was she who flounced out on me, and then I left. She said some very unpleasant things about you ... and I left!”

She was looking up at him very earnestly, and although her pulses were behaving most eccentrically and her heart was hammering away like a wild thing seeking to burst forth from a cage, the obstinate streak in her nature would not allow her to accept the easy way out and acknowledge that he really was free. How could he be free, unless Georgina Islesworth didn’t want to marry him after all?

“But she doesn’t,” he assured her, stroking one side of her cheek in a somewhat unsteady manner. His eyes were pleading with her, eager but a little apprehensive at the same time. “She actually told me I could go to you in some sort of love-nest, and that the whole district was talking. I told her I didn’t care how much it talked, and that even if she didn’t realize it I had long since admitted the fact to myself that she and I were not suited to one another. I said that if she had serious suspicions about you—which I declined to refute—she was as free as air to marry someone else, and she took my ring off and flung it on the floor at my feet, and said that she would be very happy indeed to be released.

“This morning I sent her back the ring with a note urging her to keep it, but I told her quite plainly that I considered myself to be absolved from all obligation to marry her. In

fact, I told her that I was going to marry you ... if you would have me!” with sudden humbleness.

But still Victoria could not reach out and clasp the golden ball of happiness that was dangling so close to her eyes. For one thing, she was not entirely sure she was awake and not dreaming; and for another, Georgina Islesworth couldn’t possibly have wanted to release him. She was so sure of that that it was like an insurmountable barrier she could neither get round nor climb over.

She felt him relax his hold a little, and he spoke jerkily: “Perhaps I made a mistake. Did I make a mistake? Is it Johnny’s interests you’ve been considering all this time, and did you never once think of me as anything other than Johnny’s guardian?”

“No.” She could hardly believe it, but this was the truth. From the very beginning he had affected her as no other man had affected her ... Even while she was still fuzzy from the accident she had been aware of him, in some strange way, as a being apart from all other beings. She had been so unhappy when she thought she had to go away from him and take Johnny with her that her unhappiness had been a solid burden she had had to carry around with her.

So she looked up frankly directly into his eyes, and made her admission:

“Oh, no, no! The happiest day of my life was that other day we spent here beside the river, and when I thought it all had to end very soon ... that, in actual fact, it had ended—” “You were unhappy?”

Her transparent blue eyes filled with amazement. “Unhappy? I wonder whether you know the meaning of the word?”

“Then you’re a remarkably good actress! ”

“So are you! I thought that the idea of settling down with

Miss Islesworth filled you with a sort of contentment. I don’t think I ever thought you were madly in love with her—”

“And now that you know I’m not?”

“I—I”

All at once he kissed her—full on the lips. It was a novel experience for her, because she had never been kissed by a man like that before, and something about the contact shook her to her foundations. And then he kissed her again, more gently and more lingeringly, and this time his arms closed round her.

She found that she simply hadn’t the power to resist him, and there in the heart of the little wood, with the sunlight gilding the river as it flowed murmurously not many feet away, kingfishers sporting among the reeds, and Johnny—or so they imagined—still hunting for frogs, they melted into one another’s arms and the man who had been willing to marry without love trembled at the thought of what he had so nearly lost, and Victoria felt bemused by what she had apparently gained.

Until Johnny came bursting in on their sanctuary and announced that he had captured a grass snake.

“Do you think we could find a box to put it in?” He was holding it up by its tail. “Or perhaps we might make it a nest in the picnic hamper—”

He stood still, staring at them, as if he honestly couldn’t believe the evidence of his eyes. And then he gave one of his short, triumphant whoops.

“I read in a book that if a gentleman kisses a lady he’s got to marry her,” he cried. “So now you’ve got to marry him, Victoria, and he won’t have to marry Miss Islesworth after all! Isn’t it fun? Because I don’t like Miss Islesworth and I do love you, Victoria ... and I like Sir Peter, too.”

“Thanks,” Sir Peter returned, with a certain amount of dry appreciation.

CHAPTER TWELVE

The homeward drive was a revelation to Victoria. She had never known that one could feel so happy and so entirely delighted with life that there was no longer a single cloud on her horizon.

Sir Peter had talked her out of even the smallest tinge of conscience where Georgina Islesworth was concerned. If she really had thrown her ring at his feet and told him he could marry her, Victoria, then he was entirely within his rights if he took her at her word. After all, it was a serious insult in itself when a woman flung her engagement ring at the feet of the man who had given it to her, and one could hardly expect a man of Sir Peter’s background and upbringing to relish being humiliated in that fashion. And if he had never been in love with Georgina, and she had never been in love with him, then the chances of their being really happy together were remote ... so the fact that they had parted was a happy escape for them both.

And as Victoria, after an afternoon beside the river with the man she herself loved, could no longer doubt that he loved her quite as much as she loved him, then she would have been wilfully destroying her own happiness and his if she had persisted in championing the cause of Georgina.

So the drive back to Alder Cottage was an experience for Victoria that she knew she would never forget.

Johnny sat in the back of the car and was sufficiently diplomatic to make no complaints about being relegated once more to a seat he despised. His fingers itched to get at the controls of the big car, and he loved to watch Sir Peter manipulating the gears, but he understood with a lucidity that was extraordinary in one so young that Victoria’s place was now—and until she got tired of it, anyway, or was prepared to make an occasional sacrifice—beside the man she intended to marry.

And the fact that she was going to marry him had delighted Johnny so much that he, in his turn, was a trifle bemused by the turn of events, and the rightness of everything that was happening to him.

So he sat in the back and wondered, in his childish fashion, why life that could be so unexpectedly cruel and deprive him of his rightful parent could also, a very short while afterward, unbend to such an extent that his cup of sheer childish bliss was full. It was something to marvel at, and as they sped through the lanes and the warmth of the afternoon persisted he found his head nodding from time to time, and the effort to explain matters satisfactorily to himself was so great in such a temperature that he finally fell fast asleep. And when Victoria glanced back at him she smiled because there was a look of supreme contentment on his face.

She knew that she would never experience another drive like this. There would be others—perhaps far more wonderful ones—but this one represented a gateway of promise, a door to delights hitherto undreamed of simply because she hadn’t dared to dream of them.

But now Peter allowed one of his hands to desert the wheel occasionally, and it felt for hers and gripped them so strongly that she knew she was not dreaming. And sometimes he turned his eyes toward her and they just looked at one another, and she felt as if her breathing was interfered with, and every pulse in her body throbbed with happiness and wonder.

The fields and the woods sped past. They didn’t actually discuss what had happened to them, and they made no plans for the future, but with past and future suspended and

merged into the present it didn’t matter.

In a way, Victoria realized, they were floating on unreal clouds of bliss ... but at least it was bliss, and that was all that mattered.

When they arrived back at the cottage it was close upon six o’clock, and Victoria wakened Johnny, and he entered the cottage rubbing his eyes and feeling slightly bewildered. Something had happened which merited a celebration—Sir Peter was staying to supper—but he couldn’t quite recall what it was at the moment.

Victoria had no need to recall anything. She trod air as she walked the length of the garden path, and she knew Peter did the same thing as he followed her.

He absolutely refused to go back to Wycherley Park for dinner, and that meant she had to provide him with an eatable meal. This wasn’t such a problem, for she had well stocked her larder, and every time she glanced at Peter she felt convinced that he was no more hungry than she was. And but for the fact that Johnny had to be provided with something to eat they would probably have wandered into the garden and sat there and forgotten everything but the fact that the two of them were together.

As soon as supper was over and Johnny was in bed they did wander into the garden, and for once Victoria consented to stack the dishes and leave them for Mrs. Wavertree when she arrived the following day.

“There’s one think I must make clear to you,” Peter said, when they sat side by side on the white-painted garden seat and he toyed with her ringless hand. “It’s absolutely true that I’ve never been in love before ... and I’d like to be assured that you’ve never been in love, either.”

Victoria felt amused by his craving for assurance. If only she could make him see, with her eyes, the kind of life she had led up till now! She had changed, before supper, into her light blue dress, and as the moon rose it once more acquired that quality of delicacy and entire lack of substance that it had had the night before. Unfortunately there were a few clouds tonight, and the moon was occasionally obscured by them, but even in the soft scented dark there was a sort of shimmer about her, and it wasn’t confined to her hair and her dress.

“Do you want me to tell you the truth?” she asked, looking upward through the boughs above her head. “That I’d never even been kissed—properly, that is,” blushing under cover of the dark—“until this afternoon. I am what you could describe as a positive amateur.”

“Thank goodness for that,” Peter breathed at her side.

She turned and looked at him a little critically.

“At least we can’t say the same thing about you,” she reminded him, astounded by the feeling of jealousy that possessed her when she thought of him with Miss Islesworth in his arms. “For even if you were never in love with Georgina you must have kissed her many times!”

“Duty kisses,” he responded, freeing one of his hands in order to light himself a cigarette.

She frowned.

“And was Georgina content with them?”

He shrugged.

“If she wasn’t content she never reproached me. I think we both accepted that passionate lovemaking was out— where we two were concerned, at any rate. Naturally, as I’ve said before, I admire her, and it wasn’t exactly unpleasant making a form of light love to her. . . .”

Victoria bit her lip.

“Could you do it again?” she demanded. “After-after kissing me?”

“Making violent love to you, you mean.” He reached out and snatched her into his arms, and for one moment she forgot everything while his mouth covered hers and his arms held her. The knowledge that she could turn her head toward him and nestle it into his shoulder was sheer bliss ... and even while discussing with him the relative merits of lovemaking that was inspired by nothing more than a desire to be cooperative and lovemaking that was purely and simply the result of deep compulsion, she was only too happy to avail herself of the advantages bestowed upon her by her new status.

Sir Peter stroked her hair a little reproachfully. “No, I couldn’t kiss her again.”

“And you’re quite—quite sure about—us?”

He put his fingers beneath her chin and lifted it, and the moonlight poured into her eyes as it broke free from a cloud.

She felt his long fingers gently massaging her throat.

“If I was not sure,” he demanded huskily, “would I be here with you now?”

The hours passed, and the moon climbed high in the sky. The nightingale inhabiting the nearby thicket started tuning up about eleven o’clock, and a quarter of an hour later was distilling magic and scattering it on the otherwise absolute stillness and quiet of the night, as if it was some sort of commodity reserved for the delectation of those fortunates dwelling in such a place.