Pride's Folly

  "DEIRDRE, PLEASE LOOK AT ME."

  I shook my head. He did not speak again, but I could hear his breathing, smell leather, horseflesh, and the clean, astringent odor of lime.

  Though we stood apart, I could feel the heat of his long, lean body and the heavy drumbeat of - his heart.

  We stood like two mesmerized people, each bewitched, each caught in that hypnotic fire.

  Then, without quite knowing how, I was in his arms again, his mouth claiming mine with a wild, uncontrolled passion. The kiss, those arms, those warm, hungry lips, blotted out my vaunted "common sense," my plans, my warnings, my wariness; it blotted out everything but the moment. As his mouth devoured my cheeks, my eyes, my throat, every nerve end became throbbingly alive.

  What did the next minute, the next hour, tomorrow matter?

  Another Fawcett Gold Medal title By Fiona Harrowe

  PASSION'S CHILD

  Fiona Harrowe

  PRIDE'S FOLLY

  FAWCETT GOLD MEDAL • NEW YORK

  A Fawcett Gold Medal Book

  Published by Ballantine Books

  Copyright © 1984 by Fiona Harrowe

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 83-91251

  ISBN 0-449-12489-4

  All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First Ballantine Books Edition: April 1984

  Table of Contents

  PRIDE'S FOLLY

  PART I Deidre 1867 Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  PART II Page 1878 Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  PART III Sabrina 1888 Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  PART I

  Deidre

  (1867)

  Chapter 1

  The barn was old, little used since the war, but the sweet intoxicating scent of hay still lingered. The only window, streaked with grime and spattered with raindrops, let in a feeble light, casting the interior in gloom, The dimness, the rain drumming hollowly on the roof, shut out the rest of the world, drawing us into a warm—and to me, dangerous— intimacy.

  “We can finish our rounds this afternoon, if it clears,” I said with strained casualness. I had been showing Ian around the family acres at Wildoak and the storm had caught us as we were crossing the far west field on horseback. “Tomorrow morning, perhaps.”

  “Yes—tomorrow.” His voice had a strange quality to it as if absently echoing my own.

  I turned. He had dismounted and removed his hat, and even in the shadows his eyes were luminous with desire. But there was something else there, something more than lust. There was a yearning, a magnetic, compelling longing that reaching out, touching hidden emotions I knew I ought to deny.

  “Mr. Montgomery ...”

  “Ian—please call me Ian.”

  “Mr. Montgomery,” I said firmly, quelling the tremor in my voice. “I beg of you, don’t look at me like that.”

  “I can’t help it. It’s like asking a man who has been blind all his life and suddenly can see to shut his eyes. You are so ravishingly beautiful, so—”

  I clapped my hands to my ears. “I don’t want to hear it!” I had listened to the same words of flattery before—another time, another place, another man—listened and succumbed. I couldn’t. Not again.

  “Deirdre . . .”

  He moved closer. I stared at his boots, not trusting myself to meet his eyes. But I was acutely aware of his presence, the same animal vitality and rampant virility beneath the smooth urbane exterior that had drawn me from the first.

  “Deirdre, please ...”

  “No!”

  “Deirdre, please look at me.”

  I shook my head. He did not speak again, but I could hear his breathing. Unspoken words hummed in a waiting stillness filled with the sound of falling rain. Though we stood apart, it seemed that I could feel the heat of his long, lean body, hear the heavy drumbeat of his heart. A pulse of lightning, and then thunder rumbled and rocked across the heavens, dying away in the distance. Then more silence, a silence tense with repressed emotion, growing, expanding, becoming unbearable.

  Slowly I raised my eyes and met his burning gaze. Though I wanted to turn away, I found I could not. A force stronger than will held me in an invisible grip. As the seconds ticked by, I felt myself taking flame, Ian’s passionate look reflected, given back, setting us both ablaze. We stood as if bewitched, each caught in that hypnotic fire.

  Suddenly a crash of thunder jolted me from my trance. Making a hasty movement away from the window, I tripped over my skirt. As Ian reached out to steady me, his hand on my arm seared through the sleeve of my blouse like a brand.

  “Ian . . .”

  For a long moment he held me by the aim, and then he slowly pulled me to his chest. I closed my eyes as his mouth came down on mine, his eloquent lips sending the blood rushing through my veins, I had wanted this, wanted the feel of his taut body trembling with excitement, the—

  He pushed me away. “No. I must not,” he said, his low voice tight with feeling. “I am behaving unspeakably!”

  “Ian,” I breathed.

  Another flash of lightning illuminated the barn in a sudden white glare. Ian’s face was stark, his hands fisted at his sides. Darkness again and the wind-driven rain gusting at the window.

  Neither of us spoke, neither moved. We stood only inches apart, as if bound hand and foot. Then, without quite knowing how, I was in his arms once more, and his mouth claimed mine with a wild, uncontrolled passion. That kiss, those arms, those warm, hungry lips blotted out my much vaunted “common sense,” my plans, my warnings, my wariness, blotted out everything but the moment. As his mouth ravished my lips, my eyes, my throat, every nerve end came throbbingly alive. I belonged to him, to the now, to the present, to a host of sensations I had long forgotten and thought never to feel again. What did the next minute, the next hour, the next day matter?

  He rested his head on my breast, breathing hard. Then, bringing his lips to my hair, he murmured, “We mustn’t, we mustn’t!”

  But my arms around his neck pressed him closer. Had I thought myself in love once? How puerile, how childish, that raging seemed in retrospect! And yet how strange that this man holding me now seemed like one I had known for years, a lover who had returned to me after a long absence.

  He pulled me to him, finding my mouth again, his hungry lips bruising, almost brutal, as if a lifelong restraint had suddenly burst free. Far from making me recoil, his savagery kindled a wildness in my breast and I gripped the cloth of his jacket, arching my body into his bulging manhood. With a groan he swept me into his arms and carried me to the far corner of the barn, throwing me down on a pile of sweet hay. A momentary alarm, a warning, flashed thro
ugh my mind and was gone.

  My boots, skirt, and petticoats came away in his hands. The blouse opened, and his lips pressed into the soft mound of my breasts. Teeth and tongue worried my nipples until they swelled like pink buds. Shivering, I turned my head away and heard myself moan. And then he was on his knees, divesting himself swiftly of his clothes, and the aristocratic son, the conventional Englishman, was gone, replaced by a storming Viking. Throb after throb of lightning angling in from the window played on his strong arms, the smooth muscled torso, the narrow hips. With a jerk of his hands he tore my pantaloons down. Splaying my legs, he leaned over and entered me.

  When I felt his thrusting hardness, it seemed as though the whole of my life was rushing up to meet him. Deirdre Falconer Morse—all of me bound up in this man who was taking me away from familiar landmarks into an exciting world of erotic love. And I went without reluctance, giving myself to him with an abandon that matched his own, our movements growing more frenzied with the storm outside, until a mounting, breathless explosion sent me hurtling into space and I felt his own convulsive embrace.

  We lay tangled, naked, in the intimacy of consummated love, silent in wordless fulfillment. Then he shifted onto his back, placing my head on his shoulder, holding my hand in his, and a sweet, happy languor cooled my heated body.

  Chapter 2

  Ian Ramsey Montgomery and I had met less than a month earlier.

  I had come up from Wildoak to Richmond to stay with the Bainbridges for one of those indefinite sojourns so dear to the hearts of postbellum Virginia. Jane Bainbridge was a distant, elderly cousin (exactly how she was connected to my dead father I could never work out), dumpy of figure, unfashionably dressed, yet a fixture of Richmond society. I think she suspected, and rightly so, that the impetus for my visit had not been boredom with country life but a desire to meet an eligible man, one of good family and preferably one with means. Widowed with a small child, penniless, dependent on my rich uncle, Miles Falconer, who now owned Wildoak, I felt the only way to regain the plantation for my son. Page, was to marry a wealthy man who would do it for me.

  Prospects for encountering such a suitor at Wildoak had been bleak. Social life among my Pamunkey River neighbors had fallen to a low ebb, and unattached males were in woefully short supply. In Richmond the situation was only slightly more encouraging, for there too the War Between the States had killed off an alarming number of young men, potential suitors. Those left, I soon discovered, seemed to be poor, old, lamed, or impossibly obnoxious. There were plenty of Yankee bachelors, of course, officers who had been stationed in the city as part of the military force and were now carrying out the so-called Reconstruction in Virginia, which had been designated as District Number One. But Aunt Jane would sooner have received a baboon in her parlor than a Yankee.

  I had scarcely settled little Page and myself before Aunt Jane—bless her!—began arranging a get-together for my benefit.

  “I know just the person you ought to meet,” she said on my third day in Richmond. “Aaron Sadler, Holden’s son. He’s visiting from Norfolk—thirtyish, a bachelor. He’s in cotton, I understand. We’ll have him to supper. Now, let’s see. ...”

  Sitting at the breakfast table, she ticked off the rest of the guest list: the Caldwells, Amy and Doctor Alex Harkness, an old family friend who had lost a leg in the war; the Harrisons, father and daughter.

  “Agnes is being squired by a titled Englishman,” Aunt Jane said, “so we must include him.”

  Morton Bainbridge, overhearing his wife, shifted his newspaper. “Title indeed! Some fuddy-duddy, most likely, who’ll look down his long nose at us crass Americans.”

  “Now, Morton,” chided Jane, who rarely found it in her heart to criticize.

  As it happened, Aaron Sadler turned out to be one of the obnoxious kind and the Englishman neither titled nor a fuddy-duddy.

  I had dressed with care that evening, choosing a silk gown designed by Worth (a gift from Uncle Miles and Aunt Carmella) of Nile green, a color that brought out the green flecks in my hazel eyes and heightened the burnished glow of my chestnut hair. I remember debating a moment or two over a jar of lip rouge before deciding against it. My mouth, the only doubtful feature in an otherwise praiseworthy (if I must say so myself) oval-shaped face, was rather wide and not at all like the dainty rosebuds currently in fashion.

  Satisfied with my appearance, I stepped across the hall to little Page’s room. Asleep, he lay on his back, one arm outflung, his crumpled blankets shoved forward in a heap under his bare feet. Quietly I untangled them and brought the covers up, tucking them gently under his chin. He stirred and mumbled, but did not open his eyes. I stood watching him—my four-year-old sweet darling—unable to tear myself away. His sleeping face filled me with a melting tenderness. How like his father he looked, the towhead, the blond lashes resting on rosy, curved cheeks, the mouth pursed as if in a silent whistle. It brought back memories of Harry Page and that bittersweet time when I believed myself so passionately and irrevocably in love.

  As I looked back, it all seemed to have happened a century ago. War had turned the world upside down. The gracious life I’d once known was gone. The open-handed hospitality, the extravagant spending sprees, the parties and barbecues, the laughter and the tinkling piano music in the parlor—these all had vanished. Yet war meant more to me than the austerity that had come to Wildoak, more than the deprivation of a young girl’s dream of balls and beaux, more than the mended gowns and the dull, tedious days waiting on tenterhooks for an uncertain future. It meant Papa’s going away and Mama’s dissolving into hand-wringing tears and the restlessness that would grip me suddenly, a nervous energy that set me to pacing to and fro, I didn’t know why. I had no one to talk to. My younger sisters had taken their cue from Mama, wailing like banshees whenever she did, shrinking into themselves like scared ghosts whenever she locked herself in her room, which was something Mama was quick to do at the first sign of any crisis.

  Aunt Carmella, upon whom the running of Wildoak fell, was no help to me either. Although only some seven or eight years older than myself, she went about with a furrowed brow, trying to keep things together, too harried to take much notice of me. Besides, she was not a blood relative but an aunt by marriage, Uncle Miles’s wife, an outsider.

  So was Harry Page. But he was a man—a strong, appealing male who listened to me with sympathy as Papa had once done. A Confederate soldier recuperating from a head wound at Wildoak, Harry had struck up a friendship with me and it had quickly flowered into love. When he held out his arms I went to them as naturally as a bird to its nest. His kisses banished the war, his embraces shut out the irksome world, and his passionate lovemaking found an answering surge in my blood. We talked of marriage, of a future that would unite us happily forever and ever. But it was a foolish fantasy, for even if my parents had accepted Harry’s suit—a possibility as remote as a far-flung star—I would have been miserable as Harry’s wife, the helpmeet of a poor Georgian farmer.

  But I couldn’t see that then. And when Aunt Carmella found us together one evening and ordered Harry from Wildoak, I wept and raged by turns, helpless to prevent his leaving. I was not even permitted to say good-bye. And later, when I found myself pregnant, the desperate letter I Sent to the address he had given me in Georgia came back stamped: UNKNOWN. Perhaps he had been killed by the Yankees, perhaps his family had moved, or perhaps Harry’s sweet words had been nothing but lies. Still, he had given me little Page, and for that I would be eternally grateful. Bending over my sleeping child four years later, I kissed his forehead. And then, with one last twitch of his blanket, I went to join the guests below.

  A man I had never seen before was standing near the window talking to Alex Harkness when I entered the crowded parlor. Some instinct made him turn his head, and his eyes flared with admiration, telling me that my efforts upstairs had not been in vain. Tall and broad-shouldered, he had hair the color of ripe wheat which contrasted dramatically with his black formal attir
e. He was by far the handsomest man in the room.

  “Here you are!” Aunt Jane exclaimed, linking her arm through mine. “Mr. Sadler has been waiting impatiently to meet you.”

  Mr. Sadler was not the stranger at the window.

  “Delighted, Mrs. Morse,” Aaron Sadler said, taking my hand in his hot, moist one. Obese, with a round face, feathered sidewhiskers, and eyes that fastened lustfully on my bosom, he reminded me of a roly-poly lead-bottomed doll, the kind that springs back when one tries to topple it over. “Such a pleasure.”

  “Thank you,” I said, extricating my hand. “But would you excuse me while I say hello to the others?”

  He was still at the window, in deep discussion with Alex Harkness.

  “Who is that man?” I asked Aunt Jane.

  She lowered her voice. “He’s the Englishman, dear, not titled but in line for one, the eldest son of the eighth baronet of Marksbury.”

  “Is he spoken for?”

  “I don’t believe so.”

  “Rich?” I queried.

  “My dear!”

  “Sorry.” It had been vulgar to ask, but it was important— not so much for me, but for little Page’s future.

  The Englishman’s eyes were his most arresting feature. A deep blue, they flashed another look of approval as he bent over my hand and murmured, “Charmed, Mrs. Morse.”

  That look, the sudden blaze that lit up his eyes, was at odds with his precise diction, his polished manner, the careful, sometimes nonchalant pose of an English gentleman. It was as if another man stood behind the facade, proud and virile, a conqueror among the vanquished. And it struck me as we chatted, Alex Harkness, Ian Ramsey Montgomery, and I, about inconsequentials, that Montgomery reminded me of an illustration of a Viking I had once seen in a world history book. The pictured warrior, long dead, had gazed out at me with fierce challenge, a scowl between his eyes, the tawny hair crowned with a battle headdress of curving tusks. Perhaps somewhere in the dim past a marauding Viking had joined the Marksbury clan, his bloodline evident now in Ian Montgomery, the polite aristocrat holding the savage in check.