The Wager. Sally Cheney

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      “You can read and write, then?”

      She nodded again.

      “And work figures?”

      Her lips turned up unconsciously, and Desmond drew in his breath at the delightfully whimsical effect the slight change in her expression produced.

      “Some,” she said softly. Marianne’s introduction to, and practice with, numbers had been grueling, the difficulty compounded by any help her father tried to give.

      At the thought of her father, the glimmer of a smile left her lips, and Desmond exhaled in disappointment. “Well, that will make a difference, of course,” he said. “Do you wish to return to Miss Willmington’s school?”

      “I finished there,” she said softly. “It was for children.”

      “I see.” He swallowed heavily. The girl before him was still barely more than a child. “Very well. We must find another place then, but now I see I do not have to look for a classroom that offers the most elementary instruction, but can place you with girls your own age.”

      Marianne continued to stare at him wordlessly, with large, disconcerting eyes.

      “I shall set the works in motion then,” he said. “It may take a week or two, but I will take rooms in Reading until I find a place for you. You may make yourself at home here in Kingsbrook, and Mrs. River will help you with anything you need. Do you have any questions about your schooling?”

      He paused to give the girl a chance to speak, but she shook her head.

      “If you think of something, you may ask Mrs. River. I will leave complete instructions with her. If I do not see you again before you leave, Miss Trenton, once more allow me to express my regrets over our little misunderstanding.”

      He took a deep breath of relief. There. It was over. He had done all he could in redemption for bringing the girl here and behaving like an animal, and now, if he was lucky, he would never have to see her again and could put this episode behind him. In the future, he would be happy for the solitude of Kingsbrook, thankful for the privacy of his bed. He was even tempted to give up gambling, though he did not go so far as to make the personal pledge. His losses he could cover; it was his winnings that were so appalling.

      He pushed himself away from the pillar.

      Marianne had dropped her eyes, seeming to be fascinated by the fingers twisting in her lap. “Mr. Desmond, what if…” she began softly, timidly, unable to let him go without asking her most fearful question.

      “Yes?” he said, encouraging her as gently as he could when it appeared she would not finish her sentence.

      “What if I am pregnant?” she whispered.

      Desmond’s shoulders fell back heavily against the pillar. In fact, it was fortunate the solid pile of stones was there to catch him.

      “You are not pregnant, Marianne,” he said. There was a gruffness in his voice that suggested how touched he was by the child and her anguished question.

      “But after that night…”

      “Nothing happened that night.”

      “Nothing?” She looked up at him, her beautiful eyes opened wide in doubtful wonder. “But you—you…”

      “I behaved like a brute, but I assure you the act was not consummated that night. You are as pure and inviolate now as you were when you left Mr. Carstairs’s home in London. And you are safer here than you ever were there.”

      The girl’s eyes filled with tears of relief. “Really?” she asked uncertainly, hopefully.

      He wanted more than he had ever wanted anything in his life—more than he had wanted Galston’s Way to win the Derby that year when he might still have repaid his grandfather; more than he had wanted that ace of clubs that would have finished his straight flush and sent him home victorious at least once before his father threw him out of the house; more even than he wished, sometimes late at night as he lay in some narrow cot in a strange city, that good old Ronny Withers had sunk to the bottom of the English Channel before he ever came to Ketterling—to gather this trembling girl in his arms and smooth away the fear and distrust he had taught her. But he had promised he would stay where he was, and the finger of God could not have moved him from this place.

      “Really,” he replied earnestly.

      She gave a shuddering sigh and dropped her eyes again.

      She was not going to have a baby.

      Marianne had been terrified by the events of that night and totally confused. Her perception of the sexual act was based solely on the cheap novels she read. In them the man kissed the woman—very much as Mr. Desmond had kissed her—clothes were discarded and body parts exposed, and in the next chapter the woman was with child.

      Her fear had been practically paralyzing, and now her relief made her bones feel gelatinous. But she believed Mr. Desmond. Not only because he knew more than she did about what had happened that night and how much more was actually required to produce a baby, but because of the look on his face and the timbre of his voice when he spoke.

      “Good,” she whispered, but he did not answer, and when she looked up she was alone in the gazebo again.

      As she stared across the empty space, out into the deep green of the bower beyond the columns of stone, her mind was cleared of the dark pall of fear that had held her in its grip. But in its place, she heard Mr. Desmond’s words again and was free to contemplate their meaning.

      “I assure you the act was not consummated that evening,” he had said. Mr. Desmond, she knew, was very rich. And very wicked. He was sending her to a fine boarding school, but was he taking such action only to save her for himself another day?

      It was not the first time Marianne misunderstood the gentleman’s motives, nor would it be the last.

       Chapter Four

      It was not a week later that Mrs. River received news and instructions from Mr. Desmond informing her, and his ward, of an upstanding women’s institute of education that he had located near Farnham. A place had already been secured for Miss Trenton.

      During the interim, as he had promised, Mr. Desmond left Kingsbrook to allow Marianne privacy. Feeling curiously at home in the big house now, she spent the days flitting from room to room, most often coming to rest in the library, with its tall shelves packed with books, collected over decades.

      That the library was not the compilation of one person was evidenced by the varying topics of interest represented: birds, history, tropical plants, political essays, even a few slim volumes of poetry produced by obscure poets whose names Marianne had never heard before. There were books about rocks and books about etiquette, and a rather large selection about horses and horsemanship, horse equipage and shoeing, feeding, bedding and medicine. That last, the book on horse medicine, was a very old volume that included a chapter on demonic possession and another on the use of equine leeches.

      On a low shelf along СКАЧАТЬ