A Dangerous Collaboration (Veronica Speedwell #4)(56)

I darted him a look and he broke into a smile, raising his glass. “Hoist with my own petard.”

“Well, what did you expect?” I asked, smoothing my dressing gown. “Of course you are the obvious choice for any woman of spirit and verve. But Malcolm is safe, and for many women, there is no greater attraction than security.”

“How dull you make it sound!” he observed.

“It is not dull to want to know that one will always be fed and clothed and have a roof over one’s head. Only someone who has never faced the specter of the workhouse could think security to be dull. Rosamund was forced to earn her way in the world. That means the greatest luxury imaginable to her must have been Malcolm’s stability. His predictability would have consoled her, would have made her feel safe as nothing else in the world possibly could.”

“You would never do that,” he said suddenly. “You would choose the lightning.”

I turned to look at the fire. “We are discussing Rosamund,” I reminded him. “And she chose Malcolm. I presume you did give her a choice. You offered her marriage?”

“I did,” he told me promptly. “Or at least I tried. She wouldn’t let me finish. We were sitting on the little shingle beach overlooking the Sisters. Her hair had come loose, masses of dark hair, tossing in the wind. She sat there, plucking the petals off a flower, offering each one up to the breezes. ‘He loves me, he loves me not,’ she teased me. And that is when I took her hard by the shoulders and told her of course I loved her. By way of response, she broke the flower in half, throwing the pieces of it to the beach. ‘Then you’re a fool,’ she said, with such maddening coolness you would have thought we were strangers. And only the previous night she had been in my bed, clawing at me like a wild thing.”

His hand tightened again around the glass and for an instant I thought he meant to throw it. Instead, he put it with great care onto the table at his elbow. “She told me that she intended to marry Malcolm and that was the end of it. Nothing I could say would dissuade her. I am sorry to say I was ungentlemanly enough to threaten to reveal our dalliance. The previous night was not the first time we had been together. Four, five times over that month. It was like a game to her at the beginning. She was reserved and cool, as untouchable as a Renaissance Madonna during the day, when others were around. But when we could steal a few moments alone, she was unleashed, like nothing I had ever known, demanding and violent in her passions.”

I said nothing. He went on, talking almost more to the fire than to me. “When I threatened to go to Malcolm with the truth, she laughed. She said it was my word against hers and who would believe a libertine like me? The next morning, they announced their engagement at breakfast. I shall never forget the air of triumph about her as she clung to him. He was so damnably proud of it, making everyone look at the Romilly betrothal ring on her finger. I could not bear the sight of them. I left that same day. I told Malcolm that my father required me to accompany him on a trip to Russia and that I had left it too long. He pleaded with me to stay, to stand up at his wedding as his supporter, but I told him Father insisted, and I went. I never saw her again.”

“When did you give her the harpsichord?”

A cruel smile touched his lips. “I found it in London, just before I left for Russia. It had already been decorated with the mythological scenes and I thought it would be a grand joke if I had my own face painted onto the image of Jupiter and the striped roses added to garland Leda’s head. It took the artist only a day to make the changes, and I had it sent on to her, a sort of secret engagement present. Only she would know what it was meant to represent. She practiced every day, you know. I loved to think of her playing and looking down at the image of us together in a way that only we would understand.”

“And so you went to Russia?”

“I did. My father had been increasingly insistent that I travel with him on an extended tour of Russia, where he was bound by his diplomatic interests. He was noticeably pleased when I finally agreed. I could tell he was delighted because he unbent enough to smile at me. Whilst we were abroad, I consented to another of his schemes. I permitted him to arrange a marriage with the daughter of an English duke who had taken a diplomatic posting at the court of the tsar.” He paused, then pushed on, unburdening himself of the last. “I loved Rosamund with every atom of my existence, and still I married another woman, a plain and unlovely woman I loathed and whom I punished with silence and unloving attempts to get an heir until she died from sheer disillusionment. There was not a moment of our marriage that I did not make her feel the weight of my disappointment that she wasn’t someone else.” He went on, cataloguing his sins for me in a quiet voice limned with self-loathing. “I thought to make a decent husband, at least I meant to try. I went along with Father’s arrangements for my marriage. I played the dutiful husband, whatever the cost. I gritted my teeth and made love to my wife. Until the telegram arrived.”

“What telegram?”

“The one Rosamund sent on the eve of her wedding to Malcolm,” he said. “I didn’t receive it, you see, not for a month. My wife and I took a wedding trip.” His lips twisted as he said the word “wife.” “Her family had a villa on the Black Sea and we went there for some weeks. Our communications with the outside world were spotty. Few letters and no telegrams were forwarded. We collected all of it when we returned to St. Petersburg, a pile of correspondence that had been accumulating for four weeks. Four weeks during which Rosamund believed I received her wire and did not care enough to respond.”