With This Kiss Part 5

"So it's not fear," James said.

"No." Griffin shook his head. "He's the bravest man I know. It's easy to go to war again and again if it doesn't touch your heart."

"You must be wildly proud of him," James said. He walked over to the sideboard, poured a stiff drink of cognac, and handed it to Griffin. "Here."

There were white brackets by his cousin's mouth. "It's d.a.m.nable being a parent who can do nothing other than watch. And wait. He's led a charmed existence so far-never injured, sailing through storms as if the G.o.ds themselves were watching out for him. It'll give out some day. It must."

"No," James stated. "Not necessarily."

Griffin tossed back the cognac. "At any rate, Colin is not in love with Lily, and he can't marry a woman just because she's a soporific."

"It's a unique reaction. In general, men don't feel sleepy on meeting Lily," James said with some amus.e.m.e.nt. He adored his second child, but he was perfectly aware that she was both the sweetest and silliest of them all.

Griffin gave him a wry smile and poured another measure of cognac. "I will admit to being surprised when he mentioned Lily."

"Not as surprised as I was," James said, hearing a thread of steel in his voice. He couldn't stop himself. He felt fear for Colin-but at the same time he wanted to s.n.a.t.c.h the young man and shake him until his teeth rattled, if not hit him in the jaw so hard that he flew into the next parish.

Griffin nodded and sipped the whisky. "He told me once, years ago now, that Grace's voice made him think of a summer day. So I would have thought Grace would be the one."

James's whisky slid down his throat, burning a path to his gut. "So did Grace." His voice came out rough with anger.

Griffin began pulling billiards b.a.l.l.s from the bag hanging at the corner closest to him and rolling them onto the table. Three rolled, clanked together, then stopped. "Colin is a fool. But he's not the first man I've seen make the same mistake." The wry note in his voice made James's mouth curl up.

"I should claim that honor myself, I suppose," he said. "But I'll be d.a.m.ned if I let him disregard Grace the way I did Daisy."

"No more should you." Griffin began pulling b.a.l.l.s from the bag on the opposite corner. "I thought it would be Grace, because he always talked about her in a slightly different fashion from the others. And there were the letters, of course. Phoebe thinks that Grace is able to reach him when the rest of us can't. He won't listen to us."

James shook his head. "She doesn't speak to him. He didn't make more than a feeble effort to see her when he was on leave this last time."

"And then he asked for Lily's hand in marriage."

"He can't have it." James hesitated, but it had to be said. "He's overlooking Grace. Grace. She's brokenhearted."

Griffin put his gla.s.s down. "Just pray for him to come home safe and sound and you'll have given me everything I could ask you for."

The pain and fear in his cousin's eyes made James feel a bit dizzy. "Colin will be back. He'll be back, Griffin, and he'll heal once he's home."

"Someone told me once that having a child was like letting your heart walk around outside your body," Griffin said. "I laughed-but that was before one of my boys went off to war. Now . . ."

"Given that you're drowning in all this melodrama," James said, making his tone into a challenge, "I'll flatten you. Let's make it a decent stake. One hundred guineas."

Griffin froze for a second, but then shook himself. "You'll bankrupt me, fool. I'll play you for a bottle of this fine whisky. Smuggled, wasn't it?"

"Cost me a pretty penny," James said, "and I'll be d.a.m.ned if I give you any of it."

The b.a.l.l.s clanged together with the comforting sound that promised the world was still in place and one's children were safe, warm, and dry. The noise said that no child of his was weeping upstairs with a broken heart, and that no child of Griffin's was on board ship, battling the wind and the waves, not to mention cannonb.a.l.l.s.

"Right," Griffin said. "I'll go first, since you ruined my last play with that announcement." He bent over the table slowly, like a man whose bones were still looking for answers.

Nine.

Lily's letter arrived six weeks after Colin left London. At first he thought, happily, that it was a letter from Grace, and then felt ashamed on opening it. He had fallen in love with Lily; of course, he should welcome her letter above anyone else's.

Even now the memory of that ball-the pretty girls, the delicious food, the intoxicating champagne-made him grin. That was the England he longed for, and by marrying Lily he would be a part of it. She had always been such a sweet, laughing presence, even as a child.

Lily's letter was written in round, rather childlike script.

Dear Captain Barry, I went to three b.a.l.l.s last week and danced until well past midnight at each of them, but they weren't as much fun without a bosky captain at my side. Papa says that it is improper for me to write you, but I thought I would anyway. I like breaking his rules. I tell him that it keeps him young. This week we are looking forward to two b.a.l.l.s, a masquerade, and a musical breakfast. London is quite a whirl of gaiety. When I think how tedious you must find your life, it quite breaks my heart. If you found your way to Paris, I'm sure you would be happy. I think that the French court must be like heaven on earth. How I wish Papa would take us there! I do hope this letter finds you well. I'll probably stop here, as I'm not much of a writer-I prefer dancing.

Colin read the letter four times. It was manifestly the letter of a charming young lady. Of course her life was a whirl of gaiety. Of course it was.

That night he lay in his berth staring up at the wood planks above his head. A small spider had found its way on board, and it was building a web, hoping to catch flies. There were no flies on board ship that Colin had seen.

He watched as the spider carefully, carefully dropped a slender, elegant line of silk from the ceiling to the wooden wall against which his berth was fixed. It was very busy, quickly running back to its origin point, adding more radial lines, then, beginning at the center, a spiral of connecting threads.

After a while, he read the letter once again, squinting in the candlelight. Lily's gaiety shone from every word. She would make some man, a man with dancing feet and a dancing soul to match, a beautiful wife.

He would not be that man.

There was peacefulness in that realization. He let it sink in, watching the spider weave its spiral lines. Lily's light gaiety would never work for him, and all the darkness he carried would drag her down to earth if he married her.

He had been changed by the war, by the deaths he'd seen and the deaths he'd caused. There was no going back, not when rivers of blood ran through a man's dreams.

He folded the letter and put it on the floor at his side. It wasn't Lily's fault that her prose suffered so greatly in comparison to her sister's. When one of Grace's letters arrived, he could and did spend hours thinking about what she'd described.

The spider retreated, curling into a ball so small that he hardly saw it. Candlelight gleamed along the gossamer threads, as the spider waited . . . waited. Colin snuffed the candle and lay there, unwilling to sleep, to risk the dreams that tormented him every night.

If only the letter had come from Grace . . .

It wasn't Lily's fault that she wasn't as intelligent as her sister. Nor as witty and kind. That wasn't fair: Lily was kind. But she was shallow compared to Grace.

She was a waltz, and Grace was a hymn. He turned over in bed and went to sleep, thinking about it.

Colin didn't realize for another month that there would be no more letters from Grace. After all, sometimes weeks pa.s.sed between dispatches from the Admiralty.

He thought nothing of it at first, and not much the second week. But by a fortnight later, he was pacing the deck at night. The fourth week, the West Africa Squadron was still waiting for orders. And there was no escaping the fact that Grace's letter should have reached him, perhaps two letters arriving at the same time, as they sometimes did.

It was his own d.a.m.ned fault. He had gone to the house two mornings in a row, but they had told him she was ill. Perhaps there was something wrong with her. She would never have avoided him . . . not the warm, loving Grace of her letters. She was as dear to him as his own sister; surely she knew that?

She must be dying, he thought, with a cold thump of his heart. Dying, and no one had told him. Scarlet fever, perhaps. Or her lungs-perhaps they were still weak.

But then he remembered the way Lily's eyes had shone during the ball, and the way she'd laughed when he took her for a ride in the park, and the way he grew infatuated with her, so much so that he lost his mind and actually told the duke that he would like to marry her. Lily would never have laughed like that if her sister were dying.

He had felt a tremendous pulse of relief when the duke said no. He had been a fool, a d.a.m.ned fool.

Lily, beautiful, laughing Lily, wasn't the answer to his problems. He shouldn't have thrown away his resolution to avoid marriage at the first sight of a pretty English la.s.s.

Of course, she was Lily. He was predisposed to love Lily, given the way she teased him and amused him since she was a young girl. He'd never forgotten that Lily had saved his life when she'd entered his bedroom, realized he was in a fever, and dumped a pitcher of water over his head.

Now that he was older, he knew that a pitcher of water over the head wouldn't save anyone's life. But it was a funny story.

The frogsp.a.w.n was another.

A package for him finally arrived well into the third month after he sailed from England. By then he had reread all the letters Grace had written him, starting with the ones where her handwriting was large and uncertain. He worked his way slowly through the years when she was learning Latin and tried to write him funny sentences in the language, and through her watercolors, which grew more and more intricate and a.s.sured. He reread her stories about their two households, looked for a long time at the portrait of his parents kissing under the mistletoe and at the picture of Fred covered with mud after falling off his horse, carefully replacing each one in the waterproof box in which he kept them.

His whole life was caught up in those pages. Or rather, it was the life he missed because he was in the navy.

That would have been the only life worth living, though he usually didn't admit it to himself.

The packet-for a packet did finally arrive-was larger than the usual letter. He didn't let himself open it for two days. It had to be the final one.

Of course, he had always known that the end would come. Grace would marry someone, and what would her husband think about her sending letters to another man?

It was enough to make Colin consider marrying her himself, but it was stupid to marry a woman merely so that she would continue to write him letters.

Even if those letters were the only thing standing between him and madness.

When he finally opened the package and saw that the enclosed note held only three sentences, he clenched his jaw so hard that it hurt for a day.

Then he read it, the cool, precise letters that shaped her words, such unwelcome words, over and over. She always signed her letters, Your friend, Lady Grace. But this one just said, From London . . . Lady Grace. Finally, he unwrapped the portrait and looked at it, numbly.

It was a portrait of Lily, which was nice. She was a pretty girl, Lily. She glowed like a naughty angel, and Grace had caught that quality perfectly.

He put it to the side and read the letter again, along with the accompanying note from the duke. Her father thought it was inappropriate for them to correspond? Her father? The duke? The duke thought . . .

He remembered, suddenly, the rash way that he had said to the duke that he would like to marry Lily someday, if she thought it was a good idea.

Of course the duke didn't want Grace to correspond with a man in love with her sister.

He had been an a.s.s, worse than an a.s.s.

A young midshipman skidded to a halt and snapped to attention before him. "Orders are in, Captain," he said, managing not to pant.

Colin nodded. He folded up the portrait and put it in his breast pocket. He would take it out later. He always looked at Grace's work over and over, to see if he could distinguish all those tiny brushstrokes that came together into such clever portraits, and this was the best portrait she'd ever sent him.

It wasn't until they were well out to sea, the wind pushing them over the waves on the way to intercept another slaver ship, that he understood what that portrait meant.

Grace had given him what she thought he most wanted.

Lily.

The thought made him almost lose his breakfast over the rail. It had all gone wrong, that visit. He didn't want Lily. He didn't even want to look at her portrait, no matter how fresh and pretty she was.

Grace's letters had kept him alive for these last few years: kept him from madness, even from suicide. He had friends like Philip who weathered battles with equanimity, who saluted without blinking an eye as their friends' bodies were consigned to the ocean. He wasn't like them. He didn't sleep well for days after an engagement. The splash of a body being buried at sea echoed in his ears for hours after it happened.

But he had had Grace's letters, those lovely songs about life in a different place, in a different key, where blood and death weren't the only reality.

He should have told her that. Written more often. But so often when he took up his pen to write, all that came to him were images of men dying, and how could he tell her about something so horrible? So he wouldn't write, and he told himself that, obviously, she didn't care, because she kept writing.

One problem was that he was an unmitigated idiot.

The other was that he was sailing toward Freetown, in Sierra Leone, and they wouldn't be back on English sh.o.r.es for nine months.

A few days later he pulled out the portrait again, but when he looked at it he suddenly felt as if it were painted in tears. Lily smiled, but the brush of the artist had wept. He clung to the railing, a pain gripping his heart that made his vision black for a moment.

There was love in that portrait.

Real love, not the sort of love-of-a-brother affection he had for Grace.

She would get over him, of course. All that love and warmth and humor she offered . . . there were probably a hundred men at her feet every night.

She could have accepted any number of proposals over the last years. She'd always written wryly of the London season, making it sound as if she hovered on the margins of ton.

But she was irresistible on paper, and would be more so in person.

Even so, in the grip of vanity, he decided that she had waited for him since she debuted. That she would still wait for him. He just had to make it home alive and whole.

And then he would marry her. It was the least he could do to thank her for all the wonderful letters. He pushed away a small voice that spoke of selfishness. He wouldn't propose in order to get more letters, but to thank her for those he had already received. And because he loved her; he really did.

Months pa.s.sed, the way they do at sea, the days carelessly thrown away in a billow of cannon smoke and men's lives. One day he received papers indicating that he had been awarded yet another prize from the Royal Navy. The HMS Daedalus was to be commended for meritorious service in the line of duty. And they gave him, as its captain, a large amount of money.

Philip, his first lieutenant, saluted him with a shot of their carefully rationed brandy. His parents wrote. The d.u.c.h.ess sent an exquisitely written note, with a scrawl on the bottom from the duke. Grace did not write.

He got a note from Lily, a dashed-off letter sending him love from all. She made a list and then said something about each member of their two families. Fred was "sent down from Cambridge, for nakedness. Papa won't say where but it must have been in public." Cressida was "sick after eating too many gooseberries." And Grace . . . "Grace is being wooed by a very nice man named Lord McIngle who says he's met you several times. Grace laughs, and says she likes him because he has never flirted with me, which is true enough. He has eyes for no one but Grace."

For a moment he wondered if Lily meant to phrase her last sentences like that. If there was censure implied between her lines.

But Lily wasn't complex or thoughtful, the way Grace was. She was dazzling and rather shallow, while Grace was full of mystery. A man could spend a lifetime learning all there was to learn about Grace.

He had kept every one of Grace's letters, but he sent this one of Lily's overboard with a curse at a man he'd never met, a Scottish lord who was winning-had apparently won-the only thing in the world that he wanted.

But later that day, he found himself writing a reply to Lily, anyway. He had never written Grace more than a paragraph or two. But he didn't feel that he could simply launch into the only questions that interested him: How is Grace? Is she happy? Does she miss writing to me? Who the h.e.l.l is McIngle?

His letter stretched to five pages, reaching the important part-the only thing he cared about-on page four. He watched the thick packet disappear into the diplomatic pouch, destined for the Duke of Ashbrook's daughter. Not the right daughter, but a daughter.

That night he lay awake, pulsing with rage at the idea of Grace marrying a man he dimly remembered as a pleasant fellow, but not one who could protect her if highwaymen stopped her coach . . .

It occurred to him that brothers don't feel this sort of wild panic and rage at the idea of their sister marrying a pleasant fellow.

They didn't lie awake, picturing a sister in peril . . .

The crucial fact: she wasn't his sister.